RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  Pierre trailed me by a half staircase. Every time I slowed the bastard growled at me to keep going, and if I picked up my pace he kept right with me. It was damn annoying.

  The one thing I was able to do was reach into my pocket and lock the transmit button on the backup radio as we rounded the final turn. I could at least give Doc the play-by-play.

  “At the landing, go through the door,” Pierre told me as we reached the last set of steps. “Then climb the ladder.”

  “You got to be kidding me. You’re not going to make me climb that way are you? Can’t we take the elevator or something?”

  “You’re getting old, Dickie. Very old.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  Whining had no effect. Pierre had read the books, or at least enough of them to know that if we were locked in a close space together he wouldn’t stand a chance. I opened the door and started climbing—and climbing, and climbing. The ladder was in an access tunnel that rose through the core of the narrow building, probably between the elevators, though from where I was I couldn’t tell. Battery-powered backup lights lit the space every twenty or thirty feet, but they were dimming and in several cases already out. After a few minutes of climbing, my arms started to feel tired and my shins threatened to cramp. I don’t want to compare it to the training I went through during my UDT days—that was rigorous bullshit in every dimension, not pansy-ass climbing up to the sky with handy rungs for your hands and feet. But I was younger then and completely crazy. Getting older and being only half insane takes a little adrenaline out of you.

  I kept going, hoping to put enough distance between Pierre and me to grab my hideaway and pop a few caps through his crown. I couldn’t get my second Glock while I was moving, not easily anyway. I figured I would sprint ahead, feign fatigue—hell, I didn’t have to act—hunch over, and pretend to rest while I fished out the gun. But Pierre must’ve eaten his Wheaties that day; he stayed practically on my boots the whole way.

  The Space Needle was 1,473 feet tall—supposedly designed to top the Stratosphere Tower farther down the Strip by more than 10 percent. There was some local debate over whether the needle at the very top above the observation deck should be counted in the official measurement, but, either way, that’s a ridiculous height, even if you don’t get aboard the starship ride that whips around the outer shell near the top.

  That wasn’t our destination. We weren’t going to the restaurant, either. Frenchie had me climb all the way to the very top of the tower. Finally a shaft of light caught me as I climbed, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Someone leaned over the side and laughed. The sound echoed weirdly.

  The sister, obviously. Shadow herself.

  Good-looking woman, the kind who looks prettier at thirty-five than she did at fifteen. Asian features like her brother, short dark hair, trim body, and sarcastic sneer.

  Plus she had an assault rifle in her hand. Gotta love a woman who knows how to accessorize.

  I paused, leaning toward the ladder to see if I might be able to take a chance and get the gun. But Pierre was too close.

  “You guys aren’t going to tell me I’m your father, right?”

  “You wish. Keep moving, Dickie.”

  “What’d you do, work together? Play kind of a tag team to make sure you were always where I was?”

  “I’ll plug you right here, Dick. All the same to me.”

  “You shoot me I’m going to fall on you and you’ll go down, too.”

  “Keep moving.”

  “I get to find out what the story is, right? How come you guys want to blow up Las Vegas.”

  “Don’t you think it deserves to be blown up?” asked the girl above.

  “Hell, no. I like Vegas.”

  “Cox did,” she said.

  “That why you killed him?”

  “Keep moving, Dickie,” said Pierre.

  The girl laughed at the top of the ladder. “We don’t give a shit about Vegas, Dick. Or Cox. He started to get in the way at the end, and so we took care of him. If it had been up to him, you wouldn’t be here. We don’t even care about the Muslim ragheads who set this all up. It took them years, Dickie. Years. But as far as we’re concerned, this is just a convenient place for you to die.”

  “The way you were arranging it, I would have thought you’d lure me all the way over to Nam,” I told her. “What’s that about?”

  This struck Pierre as being funnier than shit and he started laughing and repeating it as I climbed the last twelve or so feet to the roof. His words started echoing in the small space the way ideas bounce around in your head when you have a fever.

  What’s that about? What’s that about?

  One piece of slang I vowed never to use again in my life. Unfortunately, at that particular moment, it looked like a very easy promise to keep; my life expectancy could be measured by an egg timer.

  “So this is the part where you tell me what’s going on, right?” I asked as I climbed up into the light at the top.

  French girl laughed. Pierre—

  Pierre screamed. Because as I stepped into the light I stumbled slightly, and my boot caught the side of his hand. I’d aimed for his face, but at that point I wasn’t in a position to be particularly choosey. I stomped and he tried to shoot me with the MAC-10. A fatal mistake—it made it too easy to kick at his hand again. He slipped and rebounded two or three times as he fell; I heard the clatter and the thuds. The gun stop firing as I rolled to the ground, fishing out my mini-Glock and rolling to my feet on the roof.

  French girl was standing there, smiling, holding an AK-47 on me. If you’re a connoisseur, you might want to note that it was a model with a folding stock, and that stock had been folded down—an AKMS—which I do not recall being a very popular model in Vietnam, though I’ll leave it to others to judge French girl’s devotion to period accuracy.

  We stood across from each other, separated by maybe twenty feet. It was impossible for me to miss. From everything I had seen so far, I doubted she would, either. The helicopters that had been patrolling were nearby. I hoped there was a sharpshooter aboard at least one of them—and that they realized I was the tall one.

  “Just you and me now, huh, Dick?” said Shadow.

  “Sorry about your brother.”

  “It’s all right. We’re blowing up the hotel, anyway. He wouldn’t have lived much longer.” Still holding the gun in one hand braced against her side, she reached to her belt and held up a PDA. I gathered it was the other device Shunt had mentioned earlier. And contrary to what he had said, my bet was that it would detonate the bomb.

  “Why are you going to kill yourself?” I asked.

  “Because once you’re dead, the game’s over. You’re the only reason my brother and I are still alive, Dick Marcinko. I should call you Rick; that’s how my father knew you.”

  “Your father North Vietnamese?”

  I wouldn’t give a dog the look she gave me at that.

  “He was an American.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  She raised the hand with the small computer.

  “You go through all this trouble and then you kill me without savoring my look of bitter realization when you tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Fuck you, Marcinko,” she said, moving her thumb to the PDA’s touch screen.

  I had one shot, and I took it—aiming squarely at the PDA.

  I fucking missed. The bitch had stepped back and jumped off the building.

  Fortunately, I only missed by a half inch. My shot carried through her hand before she could touch the screen.

  Shadow dropped the PDA as she fell. The PDA fell onto the deck’s patio below, smashing into a dozen pieces as she plunged toward the ground.

  Excuse me if I don’t shed a tear.

  Chapter

  24

  The girl’s name was Yi Chi du Boc, and her brother’s name was Luc. They were Vietnamese refugees who’d managed to get to France with their mother roughly twenty y
ears before—boat people who’d gotten out by spending several weeks on the deck of an overloaded fishing boat, tossed by the waves. It’s not clear exactly how they managed to get to France, or how their mother swung the paperwork. She claimed that her father was French, and that the French colonial authorities had recognized her citizenship. It was an extraordinary claim—but her papers proved it. She was granted admission to the country and recognized as a citizen, as were the kids.

  The mother was named Lili. She was the daughter of a Frenchman, and he had acknowledged her, but he’d left with no papers to prove it. The Vietcong had killed him when Lili was ten or eleven; she liked to think that he would have formalized the paperwork if he’d the time.

  Lili had managed to get legitimate-looking papers because of another Westerner she met, this one an American. The Westerner was her lover and the father of the two children she brought to France with in her in the late Seventies. His name was Horace. He did know me back in Vietnam. And I suppose, in a strange way, I did have something to do with his death.

  Horace—his full name was Horace S. Alston—worked liaison with the CIA. He was ex-military, not a career agent, one of the people the CIA hired as “contract agents” when they need someone who understood the meaning of “tactical intelligence”—and when the Agency purebreds didn’t want to get their white collars bloody.

  Horace was the contact agent for operational units in Vietnam working the Phoenix Program and Provincial Reconnaissance Units, which were called “PRUs” back in the day. He personally delivered payroll to these units and collected intel reports throughout his region. Horace’s territory was the Delta—my area of interest during Vietnam as well. I guess we had run into each other a time or so.

  Maybe a little more than that.

  Horace had a pretty steady little milk route, going out of Saigon, west to Cambodia, and all along the river there, making contact with the local PRUs and keeping tabs on a program called “Coyote Walks.” A bit of Coyote Walks came out to the public as the Phoenix Program; to this day, I believe the orders forbidding me to talk about its details remain in force.

  So we’ll skip the details. The general idea was that the locals would collect information, take out bad guys, and everything would work out in the end. Horace had helped oil the machine. Besides the regular payments he delivered, Horace paid extra for weapons captured and especially valuable intel collected. Not coincidentally, the information tended to be collected off DEAD targets of opportunity.

  I was not happy with American intelligence in Vietnam; you can check out the whys and wherefores in Rogue Warrior, which lays out as much as I legally can say about what happened in the lovely Southeast Asian jungles. So, after I while, I began collecting my own intelligence. I ran my own nets and placed my own people in PRU units; eventually I got my people assigned to Coyote Walks. The advantages were that I got “real” intel from the bad guys’ mouths. It was a two-way street; the program and PRUs got U.S. firepower from my patrols and “on call” artillery and TAC Air when I was with them.

  Horace and I weren’t enemies. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies. Among the things I didn’t like about Horace was the fact that he always stuck to his same stinking schedule for his milk runs. He went to village A on Monday, village B on Tuesday, and on and on. Now, if he’d been a milkman, that would have been commendable. But out in the jungle, dealing with people who were damn good at picking up on patterns, it was foolish. I’d yelled at him a time or two about it and even changed scheduled meets at the last minute when my intelligence or gut warned me away.

  A few weeks before I was supposed to go home, Horace and I scheduled a little exchange that featured something a little special—a live North Vietnamese POW. Horace came north on his usual run, flying in an Air America helo. (Air America was the CIA’s own private airline.) But I had gotten hung up with my prisoner due to some other action a little farther down the Delta and never made the meet. Horace showed, spent a little time taking my name in vain, then took off to make his next appointment. That was the last time anyone ever saw Horace S. Alston alive.

  The CIA suspected that Horace took off with the dough. That wasn’t quite true. The wreckage of the helo was found a few weeks later. Both the pilot and Horace were dead; the money was gone. Had he been killed because of the payroll he was carrying, which was never recovered? Because of the NVA POW? Because of simple stupidity called PATTERN?

  Probably all three.

  It’s even possible his kids were right. He might have been killed because of me, in a way. There was a price on my head, and the local Vietcong and North Vietnamese were extremely interested in collecting it. My POW had been extremely talkative and not too hard to capture. Was he part of a setup?

  It never occurred to me to ask, and I wouldn’t have had the chance if it did. A day after the pickup didn’t come off, the POW tried to blow me up with a hand grenade. He took himself out instead.

  Horace’s mama-san had a one-year-old girl at home and a boy in the oven. The mama-san was Lili. You’ve already met her progeny.

  I found this all out, or most of it, when I went to France right after we got Las Vegas straightened out. I went over partly to tell the French in person what had happened so they could turn their security apparatus upside down—and kick the asshole in the butt who’d put my would-be assassin on his payroll. But I also wanted to talk to Lili, who’d been tracked down by one of the Frenchmen working on Doc’s tips. I wanted to know why the pair hated somebody they’d never met and never had any reason to hate. Hating somebody so bad you want to kill him is one thing. Hating him badly enough to want to kill yourself in the process—that’s something else again. So I went to see her.

  The old lady lived in an apartment out near the Catacombs. The Catacombs lie on the southern edge of Paris; they’re old quarries lined with bones removed from the French cemeteries and stacked there for people to gawk at. If you’re over sixty, they let you in for free. The French have that kind of sense of humor.

  Lili didn’t recognize me, of course, but she knew who I was when I told her. She let me in, made some tea, and outlined her life, and theirs.

  They’d heard a lot about me. I was a ridiculously trivial part of the story of their father’s life, but every time his death was mentioned, I was there. As the story was told over and over, I got stuck with being the bad guy—if it weren’t for me, their father would have taken them to America. If it weren’t for me and my reports about the lousy intelligence Coyote Walks provided, the CIA might have called him a hero. They wouldn’t have had to scrape by near the Catacombs of France. They wouldn’t have had to live in poverty. They wouldn’t have had to shiver at night, or eat a half cup of noodles every day of the week. It wouldn’t have rained; their shit would never have stunk. I became everything that was wrong in the world by the time they were teenagers.

  Somewhere along the way, the fact that it was the VC who popped Horace got lost. But I guess you could be philosophical about it and say it wasn’t me they hated. It was fate, or Mr. Murphy, or whatever fancy word you want to use. I was just a stand-in.

  Had Lili done it? Was she the one who transferred the need for vengeance to her kids? That would have made sense, right? The viper poisoning her young. But no venom came through in her voice or her eyes when we spoke. And if she hated me—if she felt anything toward me, it didn’t come through. As a matter of fact, if she felt concern for her children, remorse for their deaths, sadness, anything—it wasn’t evident that afternoon, or in the apartment. She had two small photos of them on the television, old pictures that hadn’t been dusted in months.

  On the other side of the room, she had a small altar honoring the dead of her family. Her children hadn’t made it to the altar yet; you have to be dead for a certain period of time before you get your own sacred tokens and offerings.

  The altar thing is a Buddhist tradition throughout Asia; families make offerings to the souls of their ancestors who have gone on. Exactly
what the offerings are depends on the tradition, but the idea is that you feed the dead and they help you. If you don’t, they become hungry ghosts, haunting humans, seeking vengeance. Some of the ghosts haunt specific people who have wronged them in life or even in death; their family usually, though not necessarily. Others just haunt whoever happens to be handy.

  The French were clueless when I told them about Pierre. They’d checked the kid out nine ways to Sunday and couldn’t find a flaw. I’m not totally sure they believed what I told them, either. At one point, one of the Frenchmen asked if I thought Pierre and his sister were secretly Muslims, as if you had to be Islamic to be crazy enough to want to kill people.

  Asshole.

  But thinking back, maybe he wasn’t that far wrong. For Pierre and Yi, killing me was a religion. It gave them all the meaning they needed.

  I think they probably deliberately helped the Muslim terrorists make their connections in America because that’s where I was. One group of crazies helping another. There was no proof, though. There seldom is.

  “Oh,” said Trace when I told her the story. “Now I see.”

  “See what?”

  “I thought the coyotes were a metaphor. But the image was literal.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The coyotes in my dream. The brother and sister—the CIA project Horace was involved in was called Coyote Walks.”

  Don’t ask me how she knew, because the damn program is still under wraps, but I have it on reliable authority that she’s right.

  I knew some of what Cox had done by then, though it took an FBI investigation for the rest of the details to come out. Cox hated Las Vegas for the reasons mostly articulated by the newspaper story. Not that you should think his father’s only flaw was gambling. His interest in commercial fishing exposed him to the opportunities of fair market trading on the high seas. Buried in one of the police reports that wasn’t released about his death is a line about “at-sea transfers of contraband and/or drugs” that may have provided some seed money for the older Cox to subsequently lose in his Las Vegas investment program. Only the gambling was documented as the culprit in the family. Can’t blame them, I guess, even if it did skew their view of the world.