“And the Americans,” Jim asked. “Where are they?”
“Waiting for you,” Sarpa said. “Come. We will celebrate your arrival.”
Hauck and Dickerson were in a good overwatch position just out of the range of the direct-fire weapons guarding the Montagnard position. Jerry traced Captain Carmichael’s path through the minefield using battered Zeiss binoculars that had once belonged to an SS captain, liberated shortly after D-Day by Corporal Daniel Hauck of the 101st Airborne Division and passed down to his son as Dan Hauck’s only worthwhile possession when he died of alcoholism.
He counted paces and estimated azimuths as the group made its complicated way through the minefield, providing a running commentary to Dickerson, who wrote it all down. He hoped they’d never have to use the information to try to infiltrate the camp—the minefield was one of the least of their worries—but you used anything you got and left nothing to some dreamy hoped-for outcome.
“He’s in,” Jerry said. “And I think the guy coming to meet him is Sarpa.”
“You see any of the roundeyes?”
Jerry swept the area through the still crystal-clear lenses. He had, over the years, tried all sorts of other types of binoculars, both issued and purchased, and had found none that matched the Zeiss. Germans might be assholes, he said to anyone who asked why he still carried the scarred and outdated piece of equipment, but they sure as hell know how to make good stuff.
“Not a sign of them,” he finally said. “Place is thoroughly bunkered in, they could be in any one of them. It was me, I’d have ’em hid out and separated. Maybe not even in this position at all. Keep some smart guys, like us, from comin’ in, tryin’ a rescue.”
Dickerson grunted, thinking that he wouldn’t particularly like to be on a team that tried to get into this particular target. It looked like a tough nut to crack.
“I’ll get an antenna up,” he said. “Let the SFOB know we made contact, and that Sarpa is here.”
Jerry agreed. “And after that,” he said, “you want to go on a little scout?”
Back in Nakhon Phanom the radio operator heard the keyed code that indicated message traffic was on the way, quickly tapped out Send, and was rewarded with a stream of code transmitted so fast it sounded like a short Blurrrrt! He tapped out the receipt code, and the radio went silent.
The burst transmission had been automatically recorded. Now it was slowed down sufficiently for the operator to recognize the code. He quickly noted the corresponding letters in five-letter groups, then turned to his one-time pad. The first group would have noted the correct page on the corresponding pad of the sender, and the group of random letters that would have been used to start the text. X then became C, B turned into O, V into N, and so forth until the word Contact was spelled out, then made, then with. The entire decoded message was written contactmadewithsarpacoordinatesKX706245nosignofamericanhostagesstandingby. It was up to the radio operator to separate out the words into a coherent message—not too difficult in this case, but in long and detailed messages a complicated task.
He tore the used page out of the one-time pad, unlocked the burn bag, put it in, locked the bag back up. The bag would be under constant visual surveillance until its contents were thrust into a burn barrel and set afire. The burn barrel was just that, a fifty-five-gallon drum with air holes drilled into it, the entire rig set up on a spit and equipped with a turning handle. You constantly turned it as the contents burned, making sure combustion was complete as well as mixing the ashes so thoroughly nothing could be used to reconstitute the contents. All the procedures were observed and documented by at least one other person, and the resulting log kept in a classified safe. It might not have been a perfect system, but it was as close as you could get in a field situation.
Besides, even if someone got hold of the used page from the one-time pad, it would be all they had. Yes, they could decode that particular message, but no other. The pad’s code groups had been randomly generated in a giant computer somewhere in the state of Maryland, and no page remotely resembled any other. It was as nearly unbreakable as any system had ever been, the only danger being that the enemy might somehow get a copy of one of the pads and be able to decipher any message that used the same pad. That was why the radio operators protected the pads with their lives, and also why there were procedures to signal the receiver that the sender was operating under duress.
The final safeguard was the fact that each radio operator had a unique characteristic in keying code. His “hand.” It was as identifiable to someone who was used to it as was handwriting. It couldn’t be faked.
Using the computer to generate random code eliminated one of the early faults of one-time pads. The first ones had to actually be written by hand, using great numbers of specially trained experts. It worked okay until, as in the case of the Soviets just before the outbreak of World War II, you just had too much demand for pages. The Soviets had thought that, as long as the pages were inserted randomly into various codebooks, they could get away with using duplicate pages.
They were wrong. Codebreakers from Army Intelligence cracked the code in a project that came to be known as Venona. The result was the pinpointing of various Soviet espionage agents infesting the U.S. government, academia, and industry. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair still unaware that their own side had tripped them up with faulty tradecraft.
All this was unknown to the radio operator, who had a certain set of procedures to follow and by God was going to follow them, no matter what.
He signed out of the code room, leaving his assistant in charge of the radios until his return, and carried the deciphered message to Lieutenant Colonel Petrillo. The colonel breathed a sigh of relief.
“Wait one,” he told the operator. “We’ll need to send this to CINCPAC. Reformat and send.”
CINCPAC, the acronym for Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, was the intermediate command between operations in Southeast Asia and the Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Ordinarily the command was run by a Navy admiral, and most of the staff was Navy as well, reflecting the fact that the Pacific was regarded as a U.S. Navy lake. It had been thus during the war in Vietnam and the decisionmakers found little reason to change it. After all, the command was still fully staffed, the channels were open, the procedures in place. Reorganizing would take a lot of time and money, and there was little of the latter to be had now that the administration and Congress had decided that America didn’t need the large military establishment that had grown up during the war.
Transmission to CINCPAC was an entirely different matter. There was simply too much traffic to use the one-time pads that were so useful in the field. Some of the reports that had come in from Tan Son Nhut, the headquarters of the commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, had run to the hundreds of pages, and there were hundreds of other messages coming in from various commands throughout Southeast Asia.
These messages were sent via coded teletype machines, which generated their own random code for each letter or number. It was a system similar to that used by the Germans in their Enigma machine, but incredibly more sophisticated. It was a simple, albeit elegant system. You typed in the message, the machine did all the work, it was sent to a similar machine somewhere else, and that machine translated the code back into the original message. These machines could only talk to each other, using a coded key system that unlocked a particular routine. That way if someone captured a system, as the British did with an Enigma, all you had to do was change the coded key and that particular system was useless.
Thus the radio operator was secure in the knowledge that while he tapped the message into his teletype the team’s information was as secure as the resources of the most powerful nation on earth could make it.
“They’ve made contact,” Petrillo told the assembled group in the operations room.
There were no cheers; just a few grunted expressions of satisfaction at the news that at least one of the hurdles had been passed. After a moment the S-4 s
ergeant went back to planning with the air liaison officer the details of the first air drop of supplies, the weather officer continued to consult his meteorological charts, and the operations sergeant, once again, went over alternate courses of action for a hundred different scenarios.
Petrillo handed the report to Sloane, who read it quickly and then cocked an eyebrow in question.
“Pretty sketchy, isn’t it?” he said after Petrillo showed no sign of responding to his unasked question.
“Short and sweet,” Petrillo said. “Just like the book says.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better to wait, get more details before transmitting?”
“You havin’ a little trouble making up your mind, Captain? First you wanted them to transmit every stop, now you want ’em to wait. Which is it?”
Sloane flushed in embarrassment. Petrillo was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any less irritating.
Petrillo decided to take pity on the young captain. After all, this was probably his first experience at matters of this sort, where Mark had been doing it in one assignment or another for over ten years. Problem was, you always had the tendency to second-guess everyone, including yourself. Wasn’t exactly as if there was a Field Manual on it. Let’s see, FM 2742 dash 14, Subject: Trying to Run an SFOB when you have troops in the field and they don’t damned well want to talk to you. Maybe he should write one.
“We’ve got the first supply drop ready to go,” he said, changing the subject slightly and letting the matter pass. “Soon as we get the word from Carmichael, we’ll get it going.”
Grateful to talk of matters far less nebulous than the actions of a team in the field, a team moreover that was run by a man notorious for his independence of action, Sloane asked what the bundles would contain.
“Sustainment stuff,” Petrillo replied. “Medicine, some rations, radio equipment and batteries, both ground-ground and air-ground. Some light weapons, all Chicom manufacture. Got an agent in Hong Kong, gets all that kind of stuff we need from the Reds. Becoming regular little capitalists, they are.”
“SAM-7s?” asked Sloane. The SAM-7, code named Grail by the Soviets, was a hand-held antiaircraft missile system. Introduced late in the war in Vietnam, it had made life even more interesting for American and South Vietnamese pilots. Its heat-seeking guidance system homed in on the exhaust of the aircraft and the five pounds of high explosive set off when it impacted would shred an engine. It wasn’t terribly effective against the fast movers, but could be devastating when used against helicopters.
“Yep,” Petrillo replied. “Though so far the communications from Sarpa haven’t indicated too much problem with NVA air assets. Suspect that’s more because they can’t find his people than it is unwillingness to use them. After all, by now they have the biggest air force in Southeast Asia. All those choppers and planes we left sitting on the runways? We’re gonna see them again.”
So, Sloane thought. We wait, once again. It was driving him crazy. If this was what intelligence work was going to be like he wasn’t sure he was cut out for it.
“I’m going to go for a run,” he announced. There was still a pretty decent dirt track left over from when the Air Force had maintained this base, and right now physical exertion seemed to be the best way to work off his frustration. It had taken a long time to recover enough from his wounds to be able to run again, and he wasn’t going to let that ability get away from him.
“Good idea,” Petrillo said. “But by the way, you might want to watch for the cobras. They like to get out there and sun themselves early in the morning. Ran over three of them yesterday.”
Shit! Sloane thought as he changed into his running shorts a little later. Problem was, he didn’t know if Petrillo was jacking with him, or actually warning of danger. Either way he was screwed. If he didn’t run the story was sure to get out of how well and thoroughly he’d been spooked.
And if he did, he was going to have to do it very carefully. Just in case he tucked a little Browning .25 semiautomatic into his waistband.
A little later he almost had a heart attack when a crooked stick lying at the side of the trail suddenly moved into the grass.
“Jesus Christ!” Jerry Hauck exclaimed. “I do believe that’s Willie Korhonen.” He made a minute adjustment to the Zeiss binoculars.
“Yep,” he said. “It’s him, all right. I’d know that square-headed motherfucker anywhere.” He passed the glasses to Dickerson.
Dick focused the lenses for his own eyes, pointed them toward where Jerry had been looking. Captain Carmichael was talking to a Caucasian male, and from the looks of it, the talk wasn’t going very well. That it was Korhonen he had no doubt. He had only passing acquaintance with the officer, but the block-built Finn was unmistakable.
Only thing Dickerson couldn’t figure was, why were Carmichael and Korhonen yelling at each other?
“You’d think he’d be grateful, us coming in to get him like this,” he said as he passed the glasses back to Hauck.
“Or maybe pissed off because it took so long?” Jerry offered.
“Well, hell, that ain’t our fault.”
“Maybe not. Alls I know is, I’d spent a few years in a bamboo cage, I might be a little perturbed too. Especially if it took a bunch of ’Yard renegades to get me out, instead of my own people.”
Dickerson was silent for a moment. Then, making up his mind, said, “Well, fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”
Carmichael and Korhonen were indeed screaming at each other, and it had nothing to do with what the two NCOs were thinking.
It had started when Sarpa had led him to a bunker and had told him that Korhonen was inside. Then he had left.
Jim had braced himself for what he might find. It was likely that the man inside would look nothing like his memories. Seven years a POW, in the worst possible conditions a man could endure? What would that do to you?
The guys who had finally come home from their stay in the Hanoi Hilton had looked bad enough. Had undergone torture of the type most people would think medieval. Had starved and suffered from injuries and diseases, and had, worst of all, been horribly, terribly alone. At least until as a result of the Son Tay raid the NVA had gotten spooked and had brought them all together out of the outlying POW camps where conditions were even worse that those at the Hilton.
But in the scheme of things these men had it easy, compared to the ones being held in the South, and in Laos and Cambodia. Nick Rowe, held in such conditions for five years until finally escaping, had written a book describing his experiences, and in reading it Jim had once again vowed never to be taken alive. There were some things worse than dying.
Thus he was quite taken by surprise when Korhonen himself walked out of the bunker, and to Jim’s eyes looked little different than he had the last time Carmichael had seen him at Fort Bragg, nearly ten years ago. The hair that he always kept cut short was a little more gray, and there was less of it. He had another scar on his face, this one starting just beneath the left eye and continuing up into the eyebrow, the puckered flesh making it look like he always had one eye cocked in question. That and the old one, where he had taken a Russian bayonet slash across one cheek, down across the corner of his mouth and into his chin, and that turned that side of his mouth into a permanent frown, made for quite a picture.
“I know you, I think,” he said, his accent after all these years still heavy with the intonations of his native Finland.
“We’ve met,” Carmichael confirmed. “Back at Bragg.”
“You volunteer for this, gonna be some kind of big hero?”
Jim bristled. He sure as hell hadn’t come all this way to be insulted. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, fought his anger down.
“You look well enough to walk,” he said. “Let’s talk about how we’re gonna get you out of here.”
Korhonen grinned. “I’m not fuckin’ gonna go nowhere.”
And that was when the argument started.
�
�I’ve got orders to get you out of here,” he said, aware that his voice was rising but unable to do anything about it.
“Your orders ain’t my orders,” Korhonen replied.
“Last I heard, you were an officer in the United States Army,” Jim replied. “And I’m in charge of this mission, hence, rank or not, you’re to follow my lead. Now, if you want me to get hold of the people back in Thailand to give you specific orders, I will.”
“Yah, and where were you and the fucking people behind you when I was waiting for you to come get me, huh? You weren’t too worried about it then. Why now?”
“Because everyone thought you were dead. Nobody had heard anything from you or about you since the crash. You were declared Missing in Action, and after the proper time, Killed in Action—Body Not Recovered. You know the drill. How the hell were we supposed to know they’d captured you? Hell, Glenn is bound to have told you that—he was in the JPRC. Where is he, anyway?”
“Sick,” Korhonen replied. “I’ll take you to him in a moment. And as for not knowing I was alive, bullshit! The Viets told me they’d notified the Red Cross they had me. They also told me that, after all the rest of the POWs were returned in ’73, it was obvious the Americans didn’t want me. So, they said, we can keep you forever. What you know about that, hah?”
“And you believed them?”
“I never believed a goddamn thing they said. But I also know you got radio intercepts, agents, chieu hois that tell you all about the prisoner of war camps. Makes me not believe you either.”
Jim didn’t have an answer, and it infuriated him the more. He’d had his own experiences with treachery at higher levels, and couldn’t for sure tell Korhonen he was wrong.
He decided to change tack. He and Korhonen had gotten so close in shouting at each other that their noses were almost touching. The Finn’s breath was foul from rotten teeth and God knew what other ailments. He took a step back.
“I don’t know about all that,” he said. “What I do know is that we can get you back. Don’t you want to go home?”
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