“I said that I’ll walk.”
The NCO knew he would be laughed out of the club if the master sergeant walked to the Tactical Operations Center. “Sorry, but this is a top-secret area. You have to be escorted.”
“I have a TS, Special Intelligence clearance, with a ‘need-to-know’ about everything going on here at CCN. I’ll walk where I damn well please…. You can join me if you like.” McDonald knew the layout of the compound better than the new NCO driver. He started walking down the sand road.
The sergeant slapped his steering wheel and then pulled the jeep over to the side of the road before running to catch up to McDonald. He could always tell his buddies that the jeep had broken down.
The CCN commander and his deputy watched through the Plexiglas window of his office. They saw McDonald cutting across the sand compound with the NCO running to catch up.
“Didn’t anyone tell him about Mac?” The lieutenant colonel addressed his major.
“I guess not!” The major started laughing. “Dumb shit! I can’t believe he tried that hot-seat shit on Mac!”
“Get McDonald over to the mission prep area as soon as you brief him.” The lieutenant colonel left his office through the back door and walked swiftly on the cement sidewalk to the TOC.
McDonald’s mind was filled with a lot of memories as he walked down the familiar sidewalks. A few new buildings had been erected in the compound, but the basic layout was the same. He looked over and saw the row of 100-kw generators that old Felix had scrounged up from the Navy Seabee detachment for a few NVA souvenirs and a couple of trucks. The Seabees had been transferred to Quang Tri and couldn’t take the huge electric-making machines with them. McDonald passed the corner of a building and could look back at the row of small hooches where the recon teams were housed, and a flood of mixed memories rushed through him. He stopped walking and the NCO caught up to him.
“Are the Snake Teams still down by the sea?” McDonald didn’t look at the sergeant when he asked the question. He kept his eyes glued on the row of buildings and remembered.
The NCO realized that the master sergeant knew too much about CCN to be a staffer. “Sorry about the hot seat, Sarge.”
“I didn’t like it when they pulled that shit when I was assigned here, and I like it even less now.” The look McDonald gave the NCO would keep the man humble for months.
McDonald looked at the camp for a couple of minutes more without saying anything and then abruptly strode off toward the cement TOC.
The major was waiting inside the air-conditioned building and smiled when McDonald entered through the heavy steel door. “Good seeing you again, Mac!”
The NCO escorting the master sergeant felt like hiding in a hole. It was obvious that the NCO Master Sergeant was well known at CCN.
“What happened to your jeep?” The major addressed McDonald.
“It broke down as soon as we started leaving the main gate. You’d better check your mechanics out for VC…. It looks like a case of sabotage to me!” McDonald smiled.
“We’ve been having a lot of mechanical problems lately in camp.” The major went along with the master sergeant. “Let’s go in the back room and I’ll brief you on what we already know.”
McDonald nodded his head and followed the major.
When they were gone, the NCO escort turned and spoke to one of the Area Studies team NCOs. “Who the fuck is he?”
The sergeant looked up from the AO map he was posting with information. “You don’t know McDonald? Shit… he’s a legend in his own time. He’s only the best Project Cherry man CCN ever had—or will have, for that matter.”
The escort sergeant’s face turned white, and a soft sigh slipped out from between his lips. He had fucked up big-time, and when the story got out he’d be teased until the day he left CCN.
The major took a seat next to McDonald in front of the large briefing map and turned down the room lights so that the map lights would stand out. The briefing was short and to the point. A message had come from Saigon that confirmed a POW camp near the village of A Rum in Laos, and satellite photographs confirmed the village had grown considerably during the past six months. The NVA had camouflaged the area well, but the intelligence people had figured out where the POWs were being held, down to a ten-meter guess.
“The boss wants to show you something over in the isolation area; it’s too hot to be discussed even in here.” The major was impressed; even he hadn’t been briefed on what the lieutenant colonel was going to tell McDonald.
“Fine. When?” McDonald felt very tired and wanted a few minutes alone.
“Right now.”
“Let’s go and get it over with. I’m tired.”
The isolation area was set aside from the rest of the buildings and surrounded by a solid wooden fence so that no one could see in or out. A team would be sent into the isolation area a couple of days before its members were inserted in their operations area, and during that time they weren’t allowed to talk with anyone outside of their own Area Studies Team and senior officers. Everyone entering and leaving the isolation area was searched, with their name and purpose for being there logged in. The whole procedure had been established to protect the teams from double agents and informers. CCN had gone through a really bad period when they had lost seventy percent of their teams after they had been inserted in their AOs, and that didn’t include all of the helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft lost in support. The NVA spy network was uncovered after a great deal of difficulty, and CCN had been shut down for three months. All of the double agents and supporters of the spy network were found in a thousand-meter area of North Vietnam. In their escape attempt from South Vietnam, none of their parachutes had opened.
McDonald took a deep breath before stepping through the gate and leaned against the wooden wall that had been erected for that purpose. He was searched and everything was emptied from his pockets and placed into a large manila envelope that would be held for him until he left the high-security area. The hallway and rooms were painfully familiar, and McDonald felt an old fear returning, in the form of a claustrophobic reaction. He had never entered the isolation building without leaving directly from it on a mission. This would be his first time to enter the building and walk back out the front door.
The lieutenant colonel smiled when McDonald walked into the brightly lit room. “It’s really good to have you back.” He held out his hand and shook the senior NCO’s with sincere vigor. McDonald had been the best recon team leader CCN had ever produced, and he was missed.
“I don’t know if I can say the same thing, sir.” McDonald’s eyes flashed around the room, absorbing every old detail.
“I can’t say that you don’t have cause… but things have changed here.… We’ve… ahhh… broken up the NVA spy operation.”
“I heard about that, sir. What really puzzles me is how they could have done everything they did after they were neutralized: breaking into a parachute riggers’ shed at Da Nang Air Base; stealing a C-130 and flying it to North Vietnam; parachuting out when they could have landed the aircraft and really become national heros over there.”
“Yeah… that was weird… real weird.” The lieutenant colonel shook his head in wonder. “But that’s what war is all about…. Sometimes stupid mistakes can cost you.”
McDonald took a seat. “So tell me, Colonel… what have you found out?”
“A lot. I don’t think that we’ve ever had better intelligence on a POW camp location.” The officer opened a medium-brown Army-issue leather courier’s briefcase. The handcuff that the lieutenant colonel had removed earlier from his wrist bumped against the tabletop. McDonald watched the officer unbuckle one of the brass fasteners and then the other one. Something was going on that was extremely important, more important than a normal POW snatch. The officer removed a standard brown envelope and opened it. “Here; but before you look at it, I’ve got to warn you that the material is very emotional.”
McDonald took the eight-by-te
n black-and-white photograph and looked at it. A few seconds passed as he oriented the people in the photo. The person wearing only black pajama bottoms was hanging upside down from a bamboo pole and tied up in a bundle. The man wielding the bamboo cat-o’-nine-tails was black.
The CCN commander watched for a reaction from the sergeant, but was still taken by surprise when it came.
“James!” McDonald hissed between his teeth. “James!” He turned the photograph around until it was upside down and stared hard at the pain-twisted face of the soldier being tortured. “My God… oh my God… it’s Barnett.…”
“Do you know these men?” The officer was shocked. He had not expected that McDonald would be personally familiar with the men in the secret photograph.
McDonald dropped the photo down on the table and stared across the room.
“Do you know these men?” The lieutenant colonel was becoming angry.
“Yes… I know both of them. They were students of mine at the Recondo School….” McDonald felt tears oozing out of his eyes and getting trapped in the wrinkles. He didn’t give a damn if the lieutenant colonel was angry or if he saw him crying. He didn’t give a damn! “It’s really ironic… fucking ironic!”
The CCN commander sensed that there was a lot more to McDonald’s coming up to Command and Control North than met the eye. “What’s so ironic?”
“Barnett rescued three American POWs when he was on patrol in the Ia Drang. He actually disobeyed orders to do it and risked his ass…. Now he’s a POW in an NVA camp….” McDonald picked the photograph back up and stared at Spencer’s face. The old sergeant could almost hear the scream coming out of the soldier’s mouth. “Do you know he’s only seventeen years old? Seventeen!” McDonald kept staring at the picture. “He’s a baby! And we have senior NCOs stacked up in supply rooms throughout this whole damn country, who are on medical profiles and can’t fight or hump the jungle…. We send seventeen-year-olds out there instead.”
McDonald’s comment struck home with the field-grade officer. He had twin eighteen-year-old boys in college, and secretly he was glad that they had a college deferment and were protected from the draft. There was no way he wanted his boys fighting in this jungle. “What about this guy named James?”
McDonald snapped his head around and faced the officer. “He is a fucking traitor! And a murderer.” The sergeant shifted his eyes from the officer back down to the picture. “There was an incident during the recondo class. Barnett, Woods, and James were all trainees. One night I went to the latrine and on the back of a freshly painted shitter door was written I KILL HONKIES. We thought someone was playing games, but I matched the handwriting against their bedding cards and reduced the suspects down to two men: James and a kid named Billy-Bob Fillmore. Billy-Bob was a southern white, and James came from Detroit—a black ghetto in Detroit. I almost got James to admit that he killed white soldiers on patrol, and there was an incident during the Recondo School’s seven-day patrol where we ran into some NVA and I lost a man…. He was killed by an M-16, and James was the only one who had fired an M-16 during the firefight; Barnett had an M-60 and a couple of the others used M-79s, but no one but James had fired an M-16. James claimed that he saw a couple NVA carrying M-16s running through the jungle. I’m sure he shot the kid in the back. I reported the incident to the commandant, and he said that he would handle it because the implication was so awesome—blacks killing white Americans on patrol!” McDonald stopped talking and looked at the pleasure written on James’s face in the photograph. There was no way the photo could have been staged. James had turned coat and was helping the NVA!
“That’s a really unbelievable story, Sergeant McDonald, and if anyone but you had told it to me, I would have called him a liar.”
“There was a little doubt back during Recondo School, but I don’t have any doubt now.” McDonald’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t have any time to screw around. I need a team formed, and we had better start training tonight! If the NVA move Barnett before I can get there, I’ll never forgive myself… never. This is one boy I’m not going to fail!” McDonald tapped the photograph hard with his index finger. “You tell your men that I don’t need any candy-asses on this mission…. A prisoner snatch is difficult under the best of conditions, and this is going to be one nasty mess.” McDonald stood up, signaling that he was done talking. He paused in the doorway and looked back over his shoulder at the commander. “When you pick your men, I don’t want any married men with kids on this team… only lean, mean killers… killers all. I’m going to turn that camp into a meat market before a single NVA soldier can lift a finger.” McDonald’s voice lowered to a gravel rattle. “There aren’t going to be any throats cut this time!”
The lieutenant colonel watched Master Sergeant McDonald leave the isolation building and jog over to the TOC. He was glad that the man was on his side. He didn’t know why the old sergeant cared so much about this Barnett kid, but he knew that the young soldier couldn’t have a better man to plan his rescue.
Sergeant Shaw slowed the vehicle down in front of his supply room. A military police jeep with an M-60 machine gun mounted in the back of it was parked next to the tent. Simpson started scrambling for the back of the truck over the wooden divider that separated the cab from the bed. Shaw reached up and pulled the black soldier back down on the seat.
“Don’t fucking panic!” The supply sergeant’s heart was pounding its way up his throat. He knew the load of supplies he was hauling was supported by bogus paperwork that wouldn’t stand a cursory inspection, but what really worried him was the duffel bag full of heroin and marijuana that Simpson had picked up on their way back from his Vietnamese suppliers.
David Woods sat on the pallet of sundry packs and smiled; it was about time Shaw and Simpson paid their dues. A tall MP sergeant stepped out of the front screen door of the framed tent at the sound of the truck engine. He waved for the truck to pull over and park.
“I’m going to waste the motherfucker if he mentions a search!” Simpson flipped the safety switch off his M-16.
Woods directed the barrel of his CAR-15 around until it pointed at Simpson’s back, which was separated from him only by a canvas divider. There would be no killing of any military policemen while he was on the truck.
“Is Specialist Woods on this truck?” the sergeant called up to Shaw.
The supply sergeant took a deep breath and released it before answering. “Yeah…” He pointed with his thumb to the rider in back.
The MP sergeant beckoned for Woods to hop down off the truck. Simpson pushed his safety back on and smiled over at Shaw. The MPs had been waiting for Woods and not them.
“You’re wanted up at Brigade HQ… ASAP!” The sergeant led the way over to the jeep.
As soon as the MP jeep pulled away, Shaw fell against the steering wheel of the truck and closed his eyes. “Man! That was fucking close!”
“Shit! That wasn’t nothing! When I worked for a gang in Detroit called Young Boys Incorporated, we used to deal right next door to a police precinct headquarters!” Simpson sighed. He had been scared too; he wasn’t a teenager anymore, and getting busted would put him in jail. He was too rich for that kind of harassment.
* * *
Brigadier General Seacourt waited in the First Brigade commander’s office. He had been briefed on Woods and Arnason by the senior brigade staff and had ordered that five members of the brigade’s recon company be assigned to him for a special mission. They were waiting for Woods to return from his supply detail before leaving for Da Nang. The brigade commander was getting very nervous having the high-powered general waiting for a low-ranking enlisted man and had ordered the MPs to the tent to pick him up as soon as he arrived back from Da Nang. Seacourt had enjoyed the wait, talking to Sergeant Arnason about Barnett, James, and Woods. The general felt as if he already knew Specialist Woods when the young soldier walked into the operations bunker.
Woods looked around the crowded planning area and saw Arnason talking to
a man who had his back facing the door. David went over to sec what was going on from his sergeant and noticed that everyone in the bunker started staring at him. He reached down to feel if his fly was open.
“David!” Arnason looked over and saw him approaching. He waited until Woods stopped next to the officer before introducing him. “General, this is Specialist Woods.”
David saw the black stars on the officer’s collar at the exact instant Arnason had said the word general. Woods saluted.
“I’ve been waiting to meet you, Specialist.” Seacourt returned the soldier’s salute, even though they were indoors, and then held out his hand. David took it and shook, awkwardly. He felt very uncomfortable talking to a general.
Seacourt understood, and eased Woods out of his predicament. “Now that we’re all here, let’s load up.”
Woods looked to Arnason for an explanation and received only a puzzled look.
“Don’t worry about your gear. You’ll be issued whatever you need when we get there, including weapons.” Seacourt nodded to the captain who had accompanied him from Saigon.
Woods pressed his CAR-15 against his back using his elbow. The weapon hung upside down over his right shoulder. He wasn’t going to part with it, even for a brigadier general.
Seacourt caught the gesture and smiled. “Of course, you can bring your weapons if you like.”
“Where are we going, sir?” Sergeant Amason asked the question as soon as the group had cleared the bunker.
“Da Nang… I’ll brief you and your men when we get there as to what’s going on. This mission will be voluntary, but once you’re briefed, you’ll have to stay in isolation until the rest of the men return—that is, if you decide not to go.”
P. O. W. Page 9