by Peter Gilboy
They reached the ferns and the palms. T.R. collapsed, but she yanked him to his feet and pulled him into the square. Colorful cottages were in ruins; broken roofs and walls. Scattered shards of glittering tile everywhere. Shards cut her bare feet like glass as she ran. The jeep was still fifty yards distant. She knew there was no weapon there.
They reached the village gate. She heard staccato bursts ahead of them as a line of tracers flashed by. Patricia and T.R. dove to the side of the jeep. She opened her eyes and saw a straight gash on the side of T.R.’s forehead. He was staring at her through one eye and using his yellow hat to push blood out of the other.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. But she collected herself and wiped the blood and sand from T.R.’s eye. He sat there, breathing heavily, staring at her. She spun on her knees and crouched at the side of the jeep. A squad of men stepped boldly into the clearing just twenty yards away. She ducked down next to T.R.
It was no use. It was no use.
***
Captain Brian Pavlik lay on his side in the dirt road; around him were desperate shouts for help. After a full minute he uncoiled himself and looked around. Plumes of smoke drifted skyward. Buildings were wilting in flames. Men were running. He tried to push himself up. Shooting pains from his snapped collarbone racked through his shoulders and chest. He collapsed back and stifled the urge to cry out. He examined his legs and found no additional injuries. He had made it. He had survived.
***
Patricia was about to stand with her hands over her head when she heard another automatic burst, this from the beach behind them. Through the thick greenery, she could just make out the little man’s form, the Marine. He was crouched and firing past them at the Viet Cong. He caught them by surprise, popping a round in the chest of the closest man, slamming him backward as the middle of his body caved and then disintegrated. He caught another VC in the side, spinning him around. Between bursts Patricia heard a gasping sound and saw a man stumbling toward them, the side of his face missing; only his momentum kept him upright until he landed against the front of the jeep and slid to the ground beside her.
Fifteen yards away was a ditch where they might be able to hide and slip away into the tall reeds. She pulled at T.R. He tried to stand. She pointed to the ditch and yanked him to his feet. They ran as the little Marine’s weapon covered them. Then his firing stopped; either he was out of rounds or dead, or both. Or maybe he was fleeing now too.
They reached the ditch and dove headfirst. She wiped the mud from T.R.’s face and flicked it aside, then the mud from her face. She heard voices calling back and forth above them. Then, through the reeds above the ditch she saw the muzzle of an automatic carbine, followed by the face of the young soldier who carried it. He raised the gun to his shoulder. He fixed on them and called out to the others.
***
Brian Pavlik finally pushed himself to his feet. He had to get to his wife, Patricia. Holding his arm, he moved in a wavering half-run past the bodies and the burning metal to the supply house. Some of the wounded were as voiceless as the dead, able only to wave an arm or leg in the air for help. Some coughed desperately, their faces blackened in ashes. Others simply cried.
The supply house was unrecognizable; a heap of smoldering rubble. An untouched vehicle—his wife’s jeep—was still in front. He touched its fender with his hand. Stunned, he walked to where the office door had been and waded through the rubble, pushing past scalding sheets of metal and flattened debris. He turned over posts with his good arm. He lifted boards.
“Patricia! Where are you? Patricia! Honey, are you okay? Are you here?”
***
She heard reeds being trampled as others approach. A dozen in all, standing above them in black pajamas, smug and smiling. One of them jumped into the ditch with them. He grabbed T.R.’s arms, spun him around, and tied his elbows behind him. In a high-pitched voice he chattered triumphantly to the others. Then he spun Patricia around and tied her the same way. He grinned as he reached around her, pressing his hands flat against her breasts. Patricia stared down in horror at his groping fingers. He laughed and looked up at the others, his hands still on her chest.
***
Brian Pavlik ignored the searing heat and burning ashes. He uncovered a melted stapler, a hundred blackened cans of field rations, the smashed head of a male soldier and then his torso.
“Jesus Christ, where are you?” he screamed.
He came upon a heel detached from its foot. He found a boot that he would not look into. He shoved a crushed desk to the side and found a charred arm muscle with skin hugging its side. Beside a toppled filing cabinet, he found a gold earring. It was hers.
“Patricia!” he shouted. “Patricia!”
Captain Pavlik later learned that the first hit had centered on the supply house. There had been no escape. In all, three Americans and one Vietnamese worker were killed in that building alone. Two bodies were found intact. The others, unrecognizable.
The next day Graves Registration arrived and scratched through the burned-out wreckage for skin fragments and internal parts. They carefully collected and identified them.
Two days later Captain Brian Pavlik was on a military plane heading back to the world, accompanying a casket he believed held the only remains of his wife, Patricia.
PART II
The truth is rarely pure
And never simple.
–Oscar Wilde
9
JANUARY 15, 2006
WASHINGTON, DC, 10:15 P.M.
WE ALL FOUGHT DIFFERENT wars. Three million went over there, and there are three million stories; three million different Nams. Each story is fact. Each story is fiction. Each story lingers. My story is locked away upstairs—the three days in the ditch, and Colome and Bump and Williams going one at a time, and Wilcox saying “Peace brothers,” and then flapping away on the ground, and Eddie’s wide eyes and crooked teeth in the dark. Ready? The fighting never stops.
That’s why wars never stop.
It’s late now, and the streets have a heavy coating of white. Our taxi slowly makes its way to our apartment. My mind is on the corporal’s ribbon. Bright green with yellow stripes. And those letters on the jungle floor.
I know what Alec is telling me. But he’s wrong. I know that he’s wrong. He has to be.
Inside the door of our apartment, Julia doesn’t take off her coat. She closes the shades and crosses the room to turn on a light. She stands in front of the couch, her arms crossed. Our neighbor is playing some current-day techno crap. I can hear him or her pounding around in some sort of late-night exercise.
Julia ignores the music.
“Moment of truth,” she announces, her arms still folded.
“Okay,” I say.
“So, tell me.”
Eddie heads to a corner and pretends not to be eavesdropping. He doesn’t fool me.
On the plane, Julia was quieter than usual. More intense, as if considering everything. She held my hand most of the way, smiled like she usually does, pointed at the Grand Canyon far below. But I know her, and I knew what was coming. It would have come sooner or later.
“Tell me,” she says again. “I want to know. I have to know, Quintyn. Who did I marry?”
“Please sit,” I say.
“Thank you. I’ll stand.”
The music is still pounding. Her eyes are on me.
“You’re no satellite weather researcher, Quintyn. I don’t know what you are. But you’re not that.”
She’s right. It’s a bullshit cover. They trained me in weather to make my job plausible to others. I can go on all day about polar vortexes, temperature inversion, and quasi-biennial oscillation. I can tell you the latest IPPC guidelines for greenhouse gases and how the variability of solar irradiance doesn’t explain our recent warming. If someone wants details, I’ll bore him to tears. Make his eyes gloss over. He’ll never ask again, won’t even bring up the topic in my presence; he’ll probably nudge others when I
come into a room and say—Don’t ask that guy what he does.
But what can I tell Julia? It’s not like I’m a banker or a plumber who goes to work, makes some money, and comes home for dinner and TV. Even if I told her who I worked for, the name wouldn’t mean anything to her. Most of the departments don’t even have names. Even I don’t know some of them. But there are rules. And being my wife doesn’t entitle her. If I told her what I did, I’d be out of a job because I’m polygraphed every three months for security reasons.
I’m not a spy like you see in the movies, or any other kind of spook. I don’t know tradecraft. I don’t pack a serious 9-millimeter or have exploding pens. I don’t even do surveillance, at least not the kind you do on the street. And I wouldn’t know a dead drop from a dead horse. I’m just a cog in that enormous government wheel; a low-level worker bee—almost literally a worker bee, now that I think about it—as I zoom over rivers and streets with a trigger grip in my hand. With my NROL-74, I can focus on an intersection in Ramadi, follow a car in Beirut or a shrouded woman in a crowded Damascus market. Most recently one of my subjects was Deniz Boran, an up-and-coming official in the Turkish Communist Party. Before that I tracked Pakistan’s foreign secretary each morning to the corner of Agha Khan and Ataturk where he’d buy his day’s ration of cocaine. I know that he has a mistress called Alim, a barber named Bayram. I know that his tailor is at 8 Madni Plaza and that he buys books at a place called Albalagh on Sawan Road. I also know that on Tuesdays and Fridays his wife has a lively time in the pantry with the butler.
“Julia,” I say, “I can’t tell you everything. Please, please understand. I really need you to understand.”
She starts toward the door. She’s had enough. She’s leaving.
“Wait,” I say.
“What?”
“Just sit, please.”
“I’ll stand. Tell me.”
There’s a long silence.
“I follow traders,” I say.
“Traitors? From a satellite?”
“No, inside traders. Stocks and bonds. That sort of thing.”
“Go on.”
“The usual electronic monitoring of insider traders isn’t sufficient. So my job is to follow them from the sky. That’s how I use the satellites, Julia. See where they go, see who they meet. It’s all according to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. I report to the SEC.”
It’s another bullshit cover. A cover-within-a-cover. Rule number one is you never give up your cover. Ever. Rule number two is that sometimes you have to resort to your cover-within-a-cover. It’s a second line of defense—a different explanation for what you do, a sensible one that’s a little classified, which explains why it couldn’t be revealed before. It’s something a little off-beat yet vague, maybe slightly illegal, but still wholly plausible; and—this is important—it is uninteresting.
“So you work for the SEC,” she says.
“Not directly, Julia. We’re an adjunct company that does side work for them.”
“What’s it called?”
“Julia—”
“What’s it called, Quintyn?”
“It doesn’t matter what it’s called.”
“It does to me.”
“Okay, it’s called Direct Resources,” I say. “Now you know. You can check it out. It’s in the Yellow Pages. But what we do is classified. You can’t tell anyone, Julia. You really can’t. You can’t talk about it at all, do you understand? If we’re out in public and someone asks what I do, you tell them I’m a weather researcher. I’m sorry but it has to be like that. It has to be.”
“So what’s the big secret, then? I don’t understand.”
“That’s the thing.”
“What?”
“What we do, well, technically it’s not legal.”
“You mean it’s illegal.”
“It’s a gray area. But it’s necessary. Inside traders know that we’ll tap their phones—”
The techno music stops. I put up my hand to have Julia wait. The music starts again.
“They all know we tap phones,” I repeat, “but they don’t know we follow them from the sky. There’s some law that says we’re not allowed to, not domestically anyway.”
“So the government is breaking the law?”
“I don’t work for the government. I work for Direct Resources. It’s a private company.”
“So that’s how you get around it? That’s how you break the law.”
“Look, what we do is important. We have to do it.”
She isn’t having any of it. “No, Quintyn. What do you really do?”
“Come on, Julia.”
“I’m your wife!”
I can see her mind working. Her eyes are now on the door. Maybe she’s deciding whether it’s over. Whether it’s time to go.
“Honey, I’m only trying to understand,” she says. Hair has fallen over one eye. She brushes it back. It’s a standoff as she waits for me to speak. I can’t see Eddie in the dark corner, but I’m sure he’s enjoying this. Probably chuckling his head off.
She says, “What does Direct Resources really do. Don’t lie to me, Quintyn.”
“Just like I said, Julia. Really.”
She looks away from my lie. Then back to me.
“Give me a for instance,” she says.
“Julia.”
“Give me an example!”
“Okay. You know, Reebok?” I ask.
“It’s a shoe.”
“It’s a shoe company. It’s publicly traded. The SEC wanted to know how these two guys—Plotkin and his buddy—knew to make the perfect investment a day before Reebok announced a merger with Adidas.”
I continue on about how Plotkin made tons of money along with his friends, even his girlfriend, back in Croatia. I tell her how, from the sky, I followed him to a park where he met a Russian who was also an analyst from Merrill Lynch.
Like my first cover, this cover-within-a-cover is boring as hell. I’m waiting for her eyes to gloss over. I wrap it up by saying that together—Direct Resources and the SEC—we connect the dots and make a case. “Then the bad guys all plead guilty. A victory for the good guys.”
She stares, as if I’d answered nothing. Or maybe she’s believing it.
“And what does that have to do with that soldier?”
“What soldier?”
“You know what soldier! The one at the restaurant!”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Alec sent him.”
“What’s so damn important, Quintyn? What can possibly be so important that we can’t have our honeymoon? Tell me.”
“There’s a problem with a new satellite we have,” I say.
She’s stares at me. “That’s it? That’s why we left?”
“There’s a three-hundred-million-dollar piece of equipment that costs twice that to put in its exact position in space. And there’s a glitch. That’s why they need me.”
“You?”
“They need all hands on deck to make it right.”
She shakes her head.
“Julia, please try to understand.”
“Quintyn, we’re partners. I have to be able to trust you, and trust what you say.”
“And now you know, all right? It’s the truth.”
“So, why’d you pass out?”
“The food, I guess.”
“Quintyn!”
“And I’m okay. You can see that I’m okay. Look at me. But I’ll get a physical, Julia. Right away. I promise.”
“Then why’d you drive to the airport and then just leave me there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight after passing out. I barely remember anything until I got on the plane.”
She stares down at the floor, sullen and angry. The music changes. The Bee Gees now. “You Should Be Dancing.” Sounds like bongos to me. Julia doesn’t seem to hear it. Maybe she’ll point to the door and kick me out. Maybe she’ll lead me to bed and perform her miracles.
But there�
�s only more silence from Julia, her arms folded as she thinks.
“Fuck,” she says. “And that’s all the truth? Everything you’ve said.”
“Honest,” I say. “And I’m sorry.”
“Fuck,” she says again.
I wait in her silence again. The music stops, then starts. Now someone is “staying alive, staying alive.”
“As long as it’s not dangerous, Quintyn,” she says again, “and you keep telling me the truth. That’s all I want. We’re partners.”
“Partners,” I say. “You got it, honey.”
“Okay,” she finally says. “I guess.”
She thinks another moment and finally nods to me. “Okay,” she says again, with more certainty this time. She smiles at me, that warm, Julia smile.
She takes off her coat and tosses it on a chair, then slips out of her slacks and leaves them on the floor. She crosses the room with those glorious brown thighs. She curls a finger at me. “Come here, spy man Quincy.”
“Spy man Quintyn,” I say with a short laugh.
“Yeah.” She heads toward the bedroom. “Pretend it’s still our wedding night, okay?”
I don’t have to turn to see Eddie’s crooked teeth gleaming from the corner. He’s enjoying it all. I close the bedroom door to keep him out.
The music doesn’t bother me after that.
10
A VILLAGE IN SOUTH VIETNAM
DAY 1
LIEUTENANT PAVLIK DID NOT open her eyes, but she knew she was awake. She was huddled in a ball, her hands tied behind her. She knew she would have to open her eyes, but she dared not. Even before she moved, she could feel the pain in her shoulders, the bruises on her legs, her cut feet. She lay there trying not to fully awaken, but still remembering the preceding day, like a nightmare that jolts one awake, but then recedes until it’s not even a vague recollection.
But this nightmare does not recede.