Deveroux was now very much awake. “They ever hear of email? Why didn’t we get a sheet? They solve it? I never heard mention of it at all. Did you? Who’s workin’ it?”
“Nope. Still open. We got something on it—like you ever read any of that shit anyhow. I think some big nut-busters out of Bragg caught the hook-end of the chain on that one. However, unlike you, my grits-eating friend, they were smart enough to pawn it off on the local cops P-D-fuckin’-Q—at least as much of it as they can. It’s still a CID case, obviously, but they’re letting the local Gomers do all the legwork for them. It was some civilian yokel from off post, Louisville maybe. They think he came on to use the commissary or something and got whacked for his pocket change. Wrong place, wrong time, that’s for damn sure. They’re still carrying it as an open case, but they don’t have any leads. I think they’re hoping it will solve itself or go away, one or the other. To hear them talk, they aren’t pursuing it very hard…I mean, where’d you go with it? Kinda like your case here. No witnesses, no real physical evidence. You can’t polygraph the whole First Armor Training Brigade—and even if you could, how many other people are on and off that post every day? But what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is this,” Schuck replied as he frisbeed a stack of photographs across the desk into Pagano’s lap. “Take a look. That’s yesterday’s victim. A middle-aged Vietnamese man from Nashville who’s somehow gone and gotten hisself detached from his scalp. The whole top of this fella’s head’s plum gone—as in scalped. Blood every which where.”
“Shit,” Pagano said as he leafed through the photos. “Man oh man.” He looked up and shook his head. “Where’s General Custer when you need him?”
“You said it. Look, Dave, this guy at Knox.” Deveroux spoke very slowly. “The victim—the local guy—what was he? White? Black? What?”
Dave Pagano creased his brow again and looked down at the photos as he thought. It hadn’t been a major topic of discussion, and now he was trying to retrieve the threads of the conversation he’d had with the MPs at Fort Knox. Finally he looked up and cocked his head. “Come to think of it…I think they said he was Vietnamese.”
CHAPTER 18
Saigon, Republic of Vietnam
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1970
Captain Paul Fick had already served two back-to-back tours in Vietnam. As a young lieutenant with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, he had already bested the odds and survived. Now he was back for a third spin of the revolver’s chamber, and he wondered if the bullet would be under the hammer this time.
But this time was different. This time he wasn’t a ground-pounder. He was a special agent for the Criminal Investigation Division. Special orders.
He’d gotten to Fort Benning in the gray winter of 1969, after spending almost two months rehabilitating in the hospital, and was assigned as an instructor in advance infantry tactics. Life there had been miserable, but religiously predictable. His battle injury didn’t leave many options open to him and at least teaching allowed him to stay in the military and maybe save some lives. Atone. When not in the classroom he was kept busy, which was what he needed to keep the angry ghosts at bay. Well-connected majors and light colonels, whose combat experience in Vietnam—the few who had any at all—consisted of time spent in strip clubs and poorly lit bars, had him fetching coffee and sharpening pencils. Not what he’d signed up for; not what he’d done a back-to-back in the Republic of Shitland for; certainly not what he’d stayed in for. But predictability was what he needed after the previous year and a half of living on the cusp. Order. Structure. Stability. Predictability.
And then unpredictability called.
It came in the form of a late-night phone call from a gravel-voiced full bird colonel at the Pentagon. A problem—what the voice on the phone was careful to call a “situation”—was developing in Vietnam. Check that—had developed. The always-robust South Vietnamese black market had gone malignant. Large amounts of medical supplies and armament were finding their way into the hands of Viet Cong and even North Vietnamese Regulars. A small trickle had always done so, the collateral cost of running tens of thousands of tons of supplies through a country grounded in colonial crumble and corruption, but recently the spigot had been opened full, and people were dying as a result. The wrong people. And what was worse, the evidence suggested that the organizational structure was centered on a small cabal of ARVN and VNAF officers—trusted allies—the army and air force of the Republic of Vietnam. But what was really concerning to the late-night voices in the Pentagon was the unprecedented volume of matériel that was finding its way into enemy hands. It was too much, and that quantity could only have been supplied by an American contact—a U.S. soldier whose loyalty alone was insufficient to fill his pockets.
CID needed Fick, the voice said. They needed someone undaunted and untempted by the chaos and slack-jawed opportunitism that was the Republic of South Vietnam in 1970. The barbarians were not only at the gate; they were inside the wall as well, and men with backbone were getting harder and harder to find. Fick’s record was unsoiled, the voice said. He’d been tested in the crucible and emerged tempered and hardened by the experience, with character and honor intact and unwithered. He was their man, the voice said. A man beyond temptation, the voice said. A man whose moral fiber had not frayed, the voice said.
The country needed him.
The voice told him it was to be a short assignment. Temporary duty. Couple months. Not anticipated to exceed ninety days. He would be loosely detailed to the CID on special assignment and sent to South Vietnam with a blank check and a free hand. A special agent in the truest sense of the word. Get the problem fixed—no questions asked. Get it fixed quietly—no questions asked. Get if fixed permanently—no questions asked. But be expeditious—no one would look over his shoulder; no one would second-guess.
That had been almost eight months ago, and he’d accomplished little since then. Whoever was behind the operation was good, real good, or ruthless—real ruthless. Or both. There were no footprints in the sand. The few leads that Fick had tried to run to ground had faded when his informants disappeared, one after another, never to be seen by their families and coworkers again.
What he had determined was that the voice in Washington was likely correct in its assessment; the core of the organization appeared to be made up of South Vietnamese officers—ARVN or VNAF or both—maybe even high-ranking ones. Maybe even some government officials stewed in the same pot; the line between military and civilian officials in South Vietnam had never been drawn with too dark an ink. But that was all he’d been able to sniff out, and he’d known that much before he left Benning. What he really needed to sniff out was the source—the American on the inside. Graft and corruption in the South Vietnamese government and military were requisite traits for promotion. It reminded Fick of the fable of the crocodile and the rabbit. The crocodile smiles and convinces the rabbit to ride across the stream on the crocodile’s back. He promises no harm, but midway across, the crocodile eats the rabbit, but not before saying, “What did you expect, I’m a crocodile.” The South Vietnamese were crocodiles, even if U.S. policy makers couldn’t always see the rows of sharp teeth lining their mouths. You accepted the corruption and worked around it as best you could. It was the cost of conducting a political war. But for an American, a fellow soldier, to be a crocodile—that was harder to comprehend, or to tolerate.
The bachelor officers’ quarters at the Rex Hotel were a short distance from the American embassy. For more reasons than one, the Powers at the Pentagon were anxious to keep the profile on this case as close to the ground as possible, and they’d instructed Fick to work as independently of the embassy staff as possible and to keep his footprint small. That was what they’d instructed him to do, but then they’d gone and booked him into the Rex where every western reporter in the city gathered for the Five o’clock Follies.
It was two-oh-seven in the afternoon. Fick had set up the appointment for one-thirty.
He’d walked the short four blocks to the Caravel Hotel in less than ten minutes. The cyclo drivers had hawked him the entire way, as had the feral children begging for handouts. They were crowded around the windows watching him, their fingers and noses pressed to the cool glass. He’d now been waiting in the bar for almost three-quarters of an hour and had started a mental egg-timer ticking. He was giving this meeting another two minutes. He was down to thirty seconds when a shadow slid across his table.
“Cigarette?” A bony man with a poor excuse for facial hair sat down opposite Fick. He was dressed in soiled tropical white—flat-tailed cotton shirt, loose pleated pants, and open-toed woven-leather sandals—and despite his thinness he sat down heavily and dramatically. He smelled of cigarette smoke and smug perspiration and soured clothing that hadn’t properly dried in the tropical heat. He held a package of unfiltered Pall Malls in his right hand and a sweating bottle of 33 beer in the left. He tossed his heavy, moist hair back from his forehead with a jerk of his head.
“No thanks,” Fick replied to the offer. He’d been raised by his Mennonite aunt and uncle in northern Ohio and retained a deep-bred aversion to self-indulgence.
The thin man smiled, shrugged, and then shook the cigarette package twice until one worked itself free of the rest. He took it with his lips, American style, and tossed the package onto the table should Fick change his mind. As he felt in his pants pocket for a lighter, he said, “You are Captain Fick, are you not?”
Fick narrowed his eyes to better focus on the man’s face. It was angular and soft at the same time and it radiated self-absorption and moral bankruptcy. They had communicated several times through intermediate sources over the last month but had never directly met. All Fick knew about him was that he was a freelance journalist who wrote frequently for one of the leftist newspapers in France—Le Rouge something-or-other—and that he was rumored to have high-level contacts within the National Liberation Army. Fick nodded just enough to convey an answer.
“Fick. It is an interesting name in English. Very…colorful. I suspect, Captain, that you were made a joke of frequently when you were a child…No?” He dipped his head as he lit his cigarette and tilted back to exhale upward. His eyes never broke contact with Fick’s. “I suspect I am correct about this.”
“And I suspect, Monsieur, that you had the snot beat out of you frequently as a child…Yes? I suspect I am right about this.”
A small, dismissive smile broke across the man’s face and then melted away. He took another drag of smoke deep into his lungs and let it dribble out of his nose like blue-gray water. Finally he introduced himself. “Martin Bullet,” he said as he bobbed his head in a quick movement. Only he pronounced it Mar-TEEN BOO-Lay.
Fick checked his watch again. Two-ten. “Nice of you to make our one-thirty meeting, Mr. Bullet.” He pronounced it BULL-It.
Bullet smiled dismissively again. It was an expression that seemed to come easily. He waved his hand, the one with the cigarette, in a sweeping motion meant to encompass the room—if not the entire city. “Colonial time, Capitaine, you must learn to adapt. I am afraid that it is a weakness with you Americans. I believe this is so, yes.”
“So I’ve been told, Monsieur, so I’ve been told.” He took a steadying breath. He didn’t break eye contact with Bullet. “I was led to believe that you may have some information for me. Am I correct or is this simply going to be a lesson in Old World metaphysics?”
Bullet nodded slowly. “Ahh, yes. Business. May I buy you a beer?”
“No, you can give me information. Do you have some? It is really very simple.”
“I may. Indeed, yes. I have…ahh…let us say, I have contacts…that perhaps you do not have access to.”
“Yes, no doubt you do. And these contacts, they have names?”
Bullet smiled in a way that confirmed in Fick’s mind that he had gotten the snot beaten out of him regularly as a child. In fact, Fick was about ready to kick his ass right now. “Names? But of course they have names, Captain Fick, do not all people? Indeed, yes, names. But these individuals, they wish for you to not learn their identities.”
“I see.” Fick took another deep, steadying breath before continuing. “Mr. Bullet, maybe the crowd that you run in appreciates your continental charm, but I find it tiresome. Your dick is longer than mine, okay? That what you wish to hear? You win, no contest, so you can reel it back in. Now, if you have information for me, please let’s get on with it. Otherwise I have much more entertaining dead ends than you to talk to.”
Martin Bullet had been called a great many things in his fifty-four years, but never tiresome. It stung his Gallic pride. “As you wish, Capitaine Fick. My contacts say that the gentlemen you seek are well-placed within the Vietnamese army—the South Vietnamese army.” He paused and smiled, but there was no humor in his eyes. “Trustworthy allies, no?”
“Unfortunately, not all of our allies can be as honorable as the French, Mr. Bullet,” Fick said in a flat voice. So far he had heard nothing he hadn’t already known.
“Indeed,” Bullet replied. “And there is an American too.” He paused and canted his head to the side as he evaluated Fick’s response. When he saw none, he continued, “Ahh, yes. But you are not surprised? No? I see. And the matériel, these they come from a depot in Long Binh. But this too, you know?”
That was news. Finally. Fick had known that an American was involved, that was precisely why he was back in Vietnam in the first place, and he’d known that the Vietnamese were well connected within their own military—they had to be for the organization to work on the scale that it seemingly was operating on—but it was the origin of the supplies that had been eluding him for months. Was it Long Binh? Or Cam Ranh Bay? Given the types and amounts of supplies, it had to be either one of the big depots or several people operating in several smaller supply companies. Fick was hoping it was the former. One person, one depot. The problem was that every time he felt like he was closing in on that piece of the puzzle, his informant would disappear, and after a while, the truncated life expectancy of his sources had had a dampening effect on new volunteers. But if Bullet was correct, if it were the army’s Long Binh supply depot, that was progress at last.
“Names, Mr. Bullet. Do you have names?” Fick asked again.
Bullet pursed his lips and paused as if the information were sour on his tongue. “Indeed. They are known only by a…what is the word?…by a…ahhh…it is like a code word, you see.”
“What code word?”
“Les Cinq Fréres,” Bullet smiled again. “The Five Brothers.”
CHAPTER 19
U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2008
“CILHI,” Kel answered his phone. He hated answering telephones with a degree of passion that bordered on the absolutely pathological. Sometimes his staff would huddle around the phone on the lab floor and call him just to hear the profanity that would erupt from his office. At this stage of his career, the telephone ringing was like the flash of lights that foretells a skull-cracking migraine. Best thing to do when it happened was to go lie down in a dark room and hope it passed. All too frequently calls meant problems to be solved. He looked at his watch. Not even 9:00 A.M.—still mid-afternoon in Washington, D.C.—plenty of time for the professional problem-mongers to gin up a crisis. Increasingly the job was becoming a burn-out waltz: one step forward two steps back.
There was a hiss of static and then two sharp metallic clicks as the long-distance connection was made.
“Well, don’t I feel honored. Doctor Robert McKelvey actually answered his phone, and without any cuss words. I was sure I’d be talking to your voicemail.” It was the unruffled, smooth-edged Midwest accent of Andy Baker.
Kel recognized the voice immediately and breathed a sigh. A few days earlier, his curiosity had finally gotten the better of him, and he’d called Andy to look into Dr. Dang’s unusual behavior at the last Joint Forensic Review.
Colonel An
drew Baker was a tall man with large knobby joints that gave people the impression that he had been constructed out of a sack of mixed plumbing parts. People halfway expected him to clank when he moved. Before his posting as the U.S. military defense attaché in Hanoi, he’d been assigned to the Pacific Command staff in Hawaii for three years as a junior policy officer. It had been a good tour. Admittedly, the job left something to be desired at times, but the location was good. His children were active in sports and school activities, as were he and his wife, Judy. They’d intentionally opted for off-post housing, the better to fully take in the experience of living in Hawaii, and had chosen the same little bedroom community as the McKelveys. Andy and Kel had found themselves frequently on opposite sides of their children’s soccer field, and over the three years had become good friends. Good enough anyway that they’d been able to maintain an easy friendship through emails and Kel’s occasional visits to Hanoi on CILHI business.
Kel knew that although Andy didn’t have any direct dealings with Dr. Dang, he did have some close ties to junior members of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons. And when you want answers, hungry junior bureaucrats looking for ladder rungs to grasp hold of are the ones to ask.
“If I’d known it was the likes of you, I wouldn’t have answered. I was sure it was one of those publisher’s sweepstakes fellers. Felt my time is ripe. What can I do for you, partner? What the hell time is it in Hanoi anyhow? Must be…” He looked at his watch again and started adding. There was a bank of clocks on the wall of the lab with the current time in every major hellhole on earth, but his eyes had reached a point where it was easier to look at his watch and calculate.
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