KIA

by Thomas Holland

  Until he called.

  The strange man.

  Thinking back on it, Penny wondered why she hadn’t been surprised. It was as if she knew he’d call, or knew he’d come. She’d had that feeling before. Somehow she knew it was the red-haired soldier; the one at Patrick’s funeral; the one she’d hated for getting injured and coming home.

  Saturday afternoon. Her son, Michael, and his boys were visiting from New York, and Richard had taken them to a South Carolina Gamecocks football game. Penny had wanted to go with them, not so much for the football as for time with her grandsons, but she also knew they’d have more fun without her. Instead she’d occupied herself with baking a couple of Karo nut pies for the boys. She’d just taken the first one out of the oven when the phone rang.

  “Hello, Kegin residence,” she’d answered.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kegin,” the voice had replied. “I’m trying to reach the former Mrs. Patrick Kendrick. First Lieutenant Patrick Kendrick. I realize this is awkward, but am I calling the right address?”

  Penny had felt her face flush. She knew. “I’m sorry. I think you have the wrong—”

  “Mrs. Kendrick, please, give me just a moment of your time.”

  “It’s Mrs. Kegin now, and I don’t understand what you could possibly want with me. I haven’t been Mrs. Kendrick since…”

  “Since June 22, 1970…yes, ma’am, I know,” the voice quietly said.

  “You do? Did you know Patrick?

  There was a hesitation on the other end of the phone. “Not really. No, ma’am.”

  “Then I don’t understand.” Her heart began to race. “If you’ll excuse me, I have—”

  “I attended his funeral,” the man said quickly. Quietly. “In a way, I knew your husband quite well. And his men. All of them.”

  Now it was Penny Kegin’s turn to hesitate. “That’s right. You were at the funeral, weren’t you?” Penny didn’t know how she knew, but the image flashed back with a brightness undimmed by thirty-eight years. She could picture him clearly, standing by the casket, hat held strangely in his hand, looking down into the gaping hole in the ground. His red hair and gray eyes. She could picture him more clearly than she could Patrick. She shuddered at the realization.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Penny sat down on a bar stool in her kitchen. She was quiet for a long time. “Why? Why? Why were you there? I’ve always wondered.”

  The voice on the phone hesitated again. When he responded it was quiet and dry and very far away. “Because it could have been me; it should have been me.”

  “You were the one who’d gotten himself injured; the careless one; the one Patrick had to replace,” Penny stated it as much as asked it. She swallowed hard at the knot that had reappeared in her throat. “You’re Paul Fick, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know, Lieutenant Fick, Patrick wasn’t supposed to go to Vietnam. We were going to Germany. Heidelberg. Did you know that? They say it’s beautiful there, especially in the spring. Patrick had promised me we’d both learn to ski. Did you know that?”

  “Mrs. Kegin…”

  “I’ve spent the last thirty-eight years hating you, Lieutenant Fick. Do you know that? I don’t even know you, and yet I hate you with every cord and fiber of my being. Do you know that, Lieutenant?”

  Fick didn’t respond, and for a moment Penny thought that he’d hung up. Then she heard him sigh and swallow awkwardly and loudly.

  “What can I possibly do for you, Lieutenant?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me you’re calling for forgiveness. Is that what you want? Is it? Tell me, Lieutenant, what can I possibly help you with?”

  “I…I was…I’m not sure you can.”

  Penny was sitting very straight, her body rigid. She closed her eyes and steadied her breath.

  “Mrs. Kend…Mrs. Kegin, you’ve probably got good reason to hate me, and if it’s any consolation, there isn’t anything that you could think about me that I haven’t thought about myself already. Those were my men who were ambushed and killed. I knew them. I could tell you the names of the wives and girlfriends, the type of cars they drove, the names of their dogs. I knew their dreams and hopes for the future. I trained them. There hasn’t been a day gone by since that June morning that I haven’t thought about what might have been. About how things might have been different. About how maybe I could have changed things, seen things in time, reacted.”

  Penny sat quietly, her eyes remaining closed. Finally she spoke. “What can I do for you Mr. Fick?”

  “Do you still have your husband’s things? Lieutenant Kendrick’s things? The effects returned from Vietnam?”

  She hesitated. In her mind she pictured the box, its sides now broken down from a dozen moves. “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Kegin, I know you’ve got every reason in the world to say no, but…would you…can I look through them?” he asked.

  A piercing staccato beep had made Penny Kegin jump. It was the smoke detector. She’d burned her second pie.

  CHAPTER 24

  U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii

  TUESDAY, APRIL 15, 2008

  Kel sat at his desk looking at his telephone, steeling himself as if he was preparing to walk on a bed of hot coals. It was bordering on something clinical. Phobia? Dysfunction? Whatever it was, he approached making telephone calls with the same degree of reflexive dread that he reserved for answering them. His palms had actually started to moisten.

  At seven o’clock in the morning, the office was still quiet. The sharp rumble and throb of the day’s events were still at least a half hour away. A few early arrivals were filtering in to their desks, still busy checking emails and messages and slurping coffee, but the critical mass necessary to set off the chain reaction of the morning’s first crisis hadn’t been reached. Kel knew that if he was to get this phone call made before someone set his hair on fire, he needed to get after it quickly. He rubbed his palms on his thighs, picked up the receiver, and dialed the number. The phone rang twice.

  “Sergeant Gonzalez, CID. How may I help you, sir or madam?” answered the voice on the other end. It was officious but neutral in tone, and rattled its words off so quickly as to be almost unintelligible.

  “Good mornin’, Sergeant. This is Dr. McKelvey at the U.S. Army Central ID Lab in Hawaii. How you doin’ this mornin’?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “Good, good. Hey, Sergeant, I’m tryin’ to reach a Chief Deveroux. Any chance this might be the right number?”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask the nature of your call?”

  “Great. Ahh, well, you sure can, but it’s a bit round-about really. How ’bout just connectin’ me up with Chief Deveroux, if he’s available. Can you do that?”

  “Sir. Hold on.”

  There was a faint hiss on the phone and Kel knew he was being transferred. He listened patiently to a soft background hiss for almost two minutes before the phone clicked loudly.

  “Chief Warrant Deveroux here. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Hey, Chief. This is Kel McKelvey from CILHI.”

  “Hey yourself,” Deveroux replied, recognizing the voice on the other end. “Sorry. Sergeant Gonzalez musta not gotten your name. He told me it was some doc from the CID lab at Fort Gilliam. I’m waitin’ on some test results from them.”

  “My fault. Shouldn’t have said the Central ID Lab—it always confuses folks.” In the acronymic world of the military, the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii—the USACILHI—was always being confused with the U.S. Army Central Investigation Laboratory, the USACIL.

  “Not a problem, Kel. Long time,” Deveroux said. “What’s shakin’ with you these days?” Five years earlier, Deveroux had been leading an investigation of a particularly gruesome murder that had occurred at Fort Bliss, Texas. The dismembered head and torso of a young female soldier had been buried on one of the isolated firing ranges, and it was only after a CILHI recovery team had spent two weeks at the site tha
t it had been found. Kel and Deveroux, discovering that they both hailed from Arkansas, had gotten to know each other, though they’d had no contact since the resulting trial a year later.

  “What isn’t? How ’bout on your end of the rope?”

  Deveroux laughed. “Nothin’ you got time to hear, Doc. Real mess is what’s on my plate. Anyhow, what can I do for the Central ID Lab—or is this purely social?”

  Now it was Kel’s turn to laugh. “I wish it were social, but doesn’t sound like either one of us has time for that anymore. Actually, Shuck, this is kinda…umm…well, sir, you’re gonna think this is kinda strange. Probably the last thing you got time to mess with, but I didn’t know who else to contact. I figured you could point me in the right direction.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, I’m workin’ a case right now. Vietnam-era case. We’re tryin’ to identify a young guy that we’re carryin’ as KIA—name of Tenkiller. Master Sergeant Jimmy Tenkiller. We had a team over there recently, in Vietnam that is. Actually it was Caroline Thompson—remember her from that case at Bliss?”

  “Yeah, sure do. Tell her hey for me.”

  “Will do. Anyhow, she excavated a grave, recovered a skeleton, nice job, we bring it back, analyze it, so on, so on. We’re still waiting on the DNA results, but the bottom line is that it may not be the guy we’re lookin’ for. There are some dental inconsistencies. Okay, that happens, not a problem. But where it gets interestin’ is the fact that the Vietnamese were actin’ all funny ’bout it. I mean seriously funny. So I had the defense attaché in Vietnam ask around, and well, like I say, that’s when it gets interestin’.”

  “How so?” Deveroux looked at his watch. He wanted to be cordial but felt he needed to be pursuing his own case, and the sand was draining out of his hourglass.

  “Turns out this KIA we’re lookin’ for may have been involved in a big black market ring that was operatin’ durin’ the war. Late sixties, early seventies. Our government—and by that I mean you boys at the CID—could never prove it, but apparently they investigated it pretty vigorously at the time. What’s more, this soldier, this KIA, was part of a group of five local shitbags, including an ARVN general, that ran the show. They called themselves the Brotherhood of the Five—or some such damn name.”

  “Back up. We talkin’ Vietnam War, right? As in thirty-some years ago.”

  “Yup. Closer to forty, actually.”

  “Hmm. And this guy’s black market activities, they have anythin’ to do with his gettin’ hisself killed?”

  “The KIA fella, you mean? Yeah, maybe, probably. Who knows? Truth is, we don’t know anythin’ for sure. Actually, that’s where I need the assistance.”

  “The Brotherhood of Five, huh? So how can I help?” Deveroux asked. His interest was starting to pique despite his own problems.

  “Don’t know that you can, but it’d be very useful to us if we could track down his former Vietnamese partners in crime—the Brotherhood, that is. I’m hopin’ they might have some information that we don’t, like, you know, like maybe what happened to Sergeant Tenkiller? Where was he last seen? That sort of thing. I’m afraid the U.S. records don’t help us much, and I’m admittedly graspin’ at straws.”

  “You really think they’d talk? Assumin’ you can find them, that is.”

  “Who knows? Certainly, I’m not expectin’ them to admit to anythin’ illegal. But maybe they can shed some light into where we might look for this guy. At this point, any information would be better than what we’re workin’ off of—which is zero.”

  “Okay. But you still haven’t told me how can I help.”

  “Well, like I said, I’m not so sure you can, but I thought you might know who could. Name. Telephone number. Point me in the right direction if nothin’ else. What I need is someone who can track these Five Bubbas down.”

  “You mean the Vietnamese? You think they’re here in the U.S., or are you lookin’ for them elsewhere?”

  “Here or Canada, I’d guess. Maybe France, but I’m bettin’ here. Most high-rankin’ Vietnamese officers didn’t stay on to see how the new regime was goin’ to treat them. Go figure, right? So most came here; at least a lot of ’em did. Especially the more senior ones. One of these guys we’re lookin’ for was a general; the others probably carried his nuts around on a pillow—colonels or majors, I’d suspect.”

  “Hmm. You checked with INS?”

  “Nope. No connections with them. I was thinkin’ CID since y’all have files on these guys.”

  Deveroux laughed. “Had. Past tense. If we ever did.”

  Kel laughed. “Shit, son, I work for Uncle Sam as well. If you had a file, you have a file. How ’bout it?”

  “I’d like to help, Kel.” Deveroux sighed loudly into the phone. “Just how hot is this tater? I’m really under the gun with a double killin’ that I somehow got myself assigned to—check that—I mean that I’ve been given the opportunity of a career to pursue; I doubt I could shake a leg free for—oh, I don’t know…maybe sixty or seventy years at the rate I’m goin’.”

  “Sounds like the career opportunities I usually draw. Does your job come with a parkin’ space?”

  Deveroux laughed. “Realistically, it’ll probably be two, three months before I can tend to it. And I’m not promisin’ anythin’.”

  “Understood.”

  “In that case, gimme the names of your Vietnamese, and I’ll get to it as soon as I can. If I can’t, I’ll hunt up someone in the business who can. Good enough?”

  “Good enough. Thanks.”

  ”Don’t sweat it. I still owe all y’all for Bliss.”

  “You don’t owe us anythin’, but thanks nonetheless. You got a pencil?”

  “Go.”

  “Well, I don’t know how accurate some of this is, but this is what I’ve got. There’s three of ’em, countin’ the ARVN general I mentioned. The big dog is General Ngo Van Thu; the other two were field grades, from what I can gather. Don’t know if both of them were ARVN or if they might have been Vietnamese air force. All I know is that they were South Vietnamese military.”

  “Names?”

  “Yeah. Okay, one was…let’s see,” Kel held the phone receiver against his shoulder with his chin as he searched his desk for the piece of paper he’d written the names on. “Ready? Here we go, I mentioned the general, the other two were a Mr. Linh and a Mr. Doan.”

  “You want to spell any of those out for me? I am, after all, a product of the Arkansas state school system.”

  “Tell me about it. Sure. Let’s start with the general. Name is NG-O, as in Bingo-was-his-name-o, space, then V-A-N, another space, then T-H-U.”

  “Whoa. Back the car up. I got the N-G-O, then Vee? Or d’you say Bee?”

  “Vee as in Vinegar. Victor, Alpha, November, then a space, then Tango, Hotel, Uniform.”

  “…Hotel, Uniform. Got it. Next?”

  “Next is Mr. Linh—spelled Lima, India, November, Hotel. Surnames, Nhu—November, Hotel, Uniform—space, then N-G-O-N. I’m not even goin’ to guess at the accent marks.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Okay, the last one is a Mr. Doan, spelled D-OA-N. Minh Tuyen, spelled M-I-N-H then a space, and then T-U-Y-EN.”

  “Okay, got it. So, as soon as I get some time, you’d like me to try and track down this…Mr. Ngo, Mr. Linh, and Mr. Doan? Is that right?” “Almost. Actually, I don’t know if they’d be usin’ the Vietnamese form of their names or whether they’ve Americanized them, but yeah, I’d like you to locate them if possible.”

  “What do you mean usin’ their American names? They got other names?”

  “No. You know, same names, just different order. Kinda like three-card-monte. In Vietnamese, the first name is actually the family name. So, the one you called Mr. Ngo—the general—he may be going by either Ngo or Thu; Linh Ngon may be callin’ himself either Mr. Linh or Mr. Ngon, and Mr. Doan might be Mr. Tuyen. But whether they’re usin’ the traditional order or not is anybody�
��s guess…”

  “Wait a second,” Deveroux said. He placed the receiver down on his desk and began shuffling the files about hurriedly. Hearing the names rearranged had set a bell to ringing in his head. He finally found the folder on the Fort Knox murder. The ME’s report was near the top. He looked at the top line.

  Decedent: Ngon, Linh Nhu.

  He picked up the phone. “Doc? You still there?”

  “Yeah. Catch a sudden itch?”

  “Sort of. Say that again.”

  “Catch a…”

  “Yeah, funny, no, I mean that part about the names. You sayin’ last names are first and firsts are lasts?”

  “Sometimes. Depends on what they did when they arrived here. You know, it’s like when all the Polish and Russians landed at Ellis Island and came away with Smith and Jones instead of Smithovich and Jonesivich. Same thing, sort of. Names get changed around. In this case, might be last to first, first to last.”

  “So Linh Nhu Ngon wouldn’t be Mr. Ngon? He’d really be Mr. Linh?” Deveroux’s thick Arkansas tongue had a hard time striking the right pronunciation, and it came out closer to EN-goon, but Kel understood the intent.

  “Traditionally, in Vietnam anyhow, he’d be Mr. Linh, but he might be known to his American neighbors as Ngon. Depends on how much he wanted to assimilate. Why, does it make a difference?”