Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6)

by James W. Hall

  Bean's smile withered. A dark crease appeared in his forehead. When he spoke, his voice was as dull and rigid as iron.

  "To answer your question, Thorn, yes, unfortunately we've lost some volunteers, but all of them were fully aware of the risks of the experiment and each of them accepted those risks willingly. I even have signed documents, witnessed and notarized, if that matters to you. They all knew exactly what the dangers were and they all clamored for the chance to be next."

  "And Greta Masterson? Did she clamor?"

  Bean chuckled and had another sip of champagne and studied Thorn above the rim of his glass.

  "You've been a busy little do-bee, haven't you? Sticking your nose into every crevice you could find."

  "Is Greta dead?"

  "Oh, quite the contrary. Greta Masterson is in excellent health, doing very fine indeed. In fact, Greta is the cause for our celebration tonight. Because as you correctly surmised, the drug is working. Her pain has been totally and completely neutralized. She's clear-headed, blood pressure normal, heart rate at 62. She's sleeping under a nurse's care right now and doing fine. Just fine."

  "Pepper is her nurse?"

  "That's right. Pepper Tremaine."

  "Where are they?"

  "Now, that I can't tell you. It might create something of a problem if you were inclined to contact the police or something of that sort."

  "You're going to take me to see her, Bean."

  A sputter of laughter broke from his lips.

  "I am! And why the hell would I do that?"

  "Because I'm the one you want to prove this to."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  Bean wiped his hands on his pants legs and sat back against the couch. He swallowed, drew in a long breath through his nose. As close to fidgeting as this controlled man would allow.

  Thorn said, "You're dying to let the world know what you've discovered. But you can't do that yet. You need more time to get everything all in place, make sure you can stand up to the public scrutiny. But the yearning is still there. You want to go up on the rooftop and scream the news. But I'm the best you've got, Bean. I'm the one you want to impress, anyway. Next to your dad, I'm the one who counts the most."

  "You arrogant asshole. Fuck you, Thorn."

  "Come on, Bean. Admit it. You're dying to show me what you've done. How smart you are. Rub my face in your triumph."

  Bean finished off his glass and poured another. He held up the bottle to Thorn but Thorn waved it off.

  "You and me alone, is that what you're saying?"

  "Just the two of us, yes."

  "You think I'm half-witted, Thorn? What's to keep you from calling the police, the DEA, having them follow us? Why should I trust you?"

  "You know who I am, Bean. You more than anybody. If I say this is between you and me alone, then that's what it is."

  Bean's eyes relaxed, a sly smile rose to the surface of his lips.

  On some rare angling expeditions, there was a moment right after a powerful fish smacked the bait, a second or two into the first sizzling run, when Thorn could tell with utter certainty that the hook was set deep and true and all the knots would hold and the line was strong enough. Most fishing was filled with uncertainty. Even after a long fight, with the fish floundering helplessly at the boat, the angler reaching down with the net or a hand, there was always a tremor of anxiety that the fish would at that last possible second explode, shake the hook, snap the frayed line, run free. That uncertainty, the fragile, flitting link between hunter and prey, was one of the agonizing pleasures of fishing.

  But with those deeply hooked catches there was something almost sad and tragic about the act, too effortless, an unseemly conquest. He cranked the reel, brought the fish close, scooped him up. A mechanical exercise. And that's how it felt with Bean. So easy. Appealing to his vanity. Watching him gulp down the morsel, the hook cutting deep into his gullet. A man so starved for any trifle of praise, he was willing to risk his kingdom for a handful of fool's gold.

  Bean sat forward on the couch, the smile maturing into a self-satisfied smirk.

  "All right. I'll tell you what, old friend. I'll carry you out there. I'll let you see the results of my labors, let you draw your own conclusions. You deserve that much, all the trouble you've gone to investigating me so diligently. I suppose I should be honored, really, you spending your valuable time looking into my affairs.

  "Tomorrow morning, first thing. How's that? And afterward, if you think I should be punished, if you think I should serve the rest of my life in jail, face the electric chair, then okay, do what you have to do. But before you decide, you need to talk to Greta. You need to hear from her how she felt a day ago, what her pain was like, and you need to hear how she feels now, and then you'll have to ask yourself if the man who found the cure for her pain and the pain of millions of others should be punished for the methods he used in reaching that goal."

  "Why don't we go right now?"

  "Oh, no, she needs her rest. And I need mine. It's been a long and difficult day."

  "You had those dolphins killed, didn't you? Echeverria is working for you, and he killed them."

  "My, my, such an impressive demonstration of ratiocination. If I ever need to hire a private eye, I'll certainly know where to go."

  Thorn rolled his wheelchair across the room, picked up the bottle of champagne, and rolled back to his place by the window. He poured himself another glass and gulped half of it down.

  "Tell me something, Thorn. Are you familiar with the smell of burning shit?"

  Thorn looked over at him.

  "I haven't smelled any lately."

  "No, I guess you wouldn't have. Because, you see, the smell of shit burning in diesel oil, that's the smell of Vietnam. The smell of that particular holocaust. Those were our latrines, you see, fifty-gallon drums partially filled with fuel oil. Set ablaze every morning to purify them, the fire tended by some unlucky grunt. But then, you're not interested in war stories, are you? That's not what you're after."

  "If it explains anything, I'm listening."

  Bean scowled. He finished the champagne in his glass and settled back into the couch and stared across at one of the photographs on the wall. Thorn and he were racing on a white strand of beach up in the panhandle. Their feet splashed through the sheen of an incoming tide and a shower of sparkles flashed at their ankles. Bean was leading the race, pumping his elbows, his mouth set, neck straining. Thorn was trying hard too, his hair was long and streamed back. One of them was always winning, the other always losing. And Doc Wilson was the official record keeper, peering at them through the viewfinder of that old Kodak. Thorn's memory told him that Bean had won far more than his share of those contests, but it was clear now that those were not the triumphs Bean had longed for, and winning those races had done nothing to satisfy the hunger that burned in his eyes back then and was burning even now.

  Thorn had heard others' war stories in midnight bars. Men his age who had scarred some vital muscle that would never heal. Men who were still lost in nightmare jungles on the other side of the planet, unable to distinguish friend from foe, savior from killer. Men who still heard shards of lead whizzing by their faces like insane bees. He'd listened to their stories, watched their eyes turn inward as the room where they sat dissolved around them and re-formed dense with vines and thickets and the steady drizzle of equatorial rain.

  And all the war stories he'd heard sounded the same. The Ancient Mariner determined to tell his tale to any stranger he could snag. Stories recited with mechanical precision, as if it were some school assignment the old soldier had composed long ago and committed to memory and now was retrieving, phrase by well-honed phrase. They always had the feel of narratives told too easily and too often, so that long before that night's telling they'd lost their hold on the teller, lost their power to mend the wounds they described.

  But Bean's story was nothing like those.

  It was clear that his had never been recou
nted before. Rendered in ungainly sentences and halting cadence, the story had been lying dormant for thirty years in the sludge of memory, and now, as he drew it to light in all its squalor, he seemed surprised by how raw and unpolished it sounded aloud. The crude power of catharsis. But he slogged ahead anyway, his eyes feasting on Thorn, as though this crippled man who sat across from him, this man who was Bean's oldest friend and most despised enemy, was precisely the audience he'd been waiting for all these years.

  CHAPTER 26

  At nineteen Bean knew he was going to be drafted. Convinced he could cut a better deal if he enlisted, he put himself in the hands of a Miami recruiter who assured him that with test scores as high as his, Bean would train for intelligence work, which meant any assignment he got would place him well outside the war zone.

  After basic training and a stint in language school, where he picked up some rudimentary Vietnamese, he was assigned to the 404th Radio Research Detachment, attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the U.S. Army. He was stationed with this brigade throughout the war, but his mission was covert, so he reported directly to the larger Radio Research Group in Nha Trang.

  The recruiter was a stooge, a paid liar, for he had to know that in Vietnam there was no place beyond the reach of the war. Bean was assigned to Landing Zone English just outside the small town of Bong Son in the province of Binh Dinh, about five kilometers from the coast.

  LZ English was in a valley with mountains of dense rain forest to the north and west and rice paddies and plains to the south and east, toward the South China Sea. The LZ was strategically placed a few hundred yards from VN 1, the major north-south highway that ran the entire length of the country. While most of the land was lush with palms and rain forest vegetation, there were many defoliated areas—bald patches of red clay.

  English was a landing zone for helicopters, and the constant takeoffs and arrivals whipped up that red clay, coating everything he owned. The fine dust permeated his clothes, glued his eyes shut at night. Seeped into his nostrils, his asshole, and his pores. Hueys and Cobras and Chinooks, the whap-whap of their rotors every hour of the day and night. And the other noises, bursts of automatic arms fire or the distant rumbling of Phantom jets working out on nearby hillsides. And there was the constant music from the 8-track cartridge players. Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Eric Burden, the Last Poets.

  "Imagine it, Thorn. Imagine that unremitting noise. The hellish hullabaloo. While you spent those same hours in Key Largo beside the quiet bay, stalking bonefish in the shallows. I thought of you a great deal back then, imagining your life. I used to wonder if I ever passed through your thoughts, if you had any idea what I was suffering on the other side of the world. But no, you didn't, did you? You don't need to answer. I can see it. I know. I was nothing to you."

  Just ten kilometers south of LZ English and in plain view of the highway was a singular, very high peak, three thousand feet or so, with a bald top. It was called the Hawk's Nest. That's where Bean was airlifted every few weeks to serve his time on the barren crest. Only a few bunkers dug into the top, eight-by-eight holes with timbers to support the flat roof of tin and sandbags four feet thick for walls. With a one-foot-high opening around the top for light and viewing. Inside the bunkers it was dark and dank with a dirt floor and four cots.

  Below the perimeter of the peak there was about a hundred yards of barren ground defoliated by Agent Orange, then about four hundred yards of dead trees, timbers, and earth parched from napalm. This area was crisscrossed with row after row of concertina barbed wire, and interspersed through the fallen trees were small land mines, grenades with trip wires, and claymores. All for protection against the Viet Cong sappers who would try to crawl into the camps at night and do their murderous work.

  The peak was circular and about 150 feet in diameter. Ten to fifteen American soldiers and a half dozen South Vietnamese were camped there as well for security, part of the 173rd. Those soldiers were assigned to protect Bean Wilson.

  For Bean was a Vietnamese interpreter, a voice intercept operator and code breaker. On his sojourns on the mountaintop he would set up his ground-plane antennas and listen to radio signals, scanning the frequencies all night and day for tactical Vietnamese voice traffic. He used a PRC 25 radio, a precursor to modern CB's; or for longer range communication, the VR 744.

  When he stumbled onto voice traffic, he would tape-record it and also try to transcribe it by hand. Usually the traffic he was looking for was a series of binary numbers: 43 17, 54 19, 65 27. Each group of two would indicate a certain cell on a 10-by-10 matrix, with a word, letter, or phrase in that cell. The matrix was the crude encoding device used in the field by the VC and NVA. Because the Americans had acquired all the matrices, it was a fairly easy process to break the code and translate the message into English.

  Normally he received messages about rice, stating when and where rich harvests or shipments would be picked up. Rice pickups were the VC's form of taxation. Occasionally Bean would intercept a message indicating the location of a machine-gun emplacement set up for an ambush. Then he would contact his major at the 173rd by scrambled radio message and give a tactical report. The major would authorize the necessary troop movement to avoid the ambush or eradicate the machine gun. All very mechanical and distant.

  Except that's not how Bean was experiencing it. He never mastered the skill that so many of his fellow soldiers had, disconnecting from their grim assignments. Dick Scherer, Larry Mowrey, Allen Chambers, A1 Carrs, Stony Castanias, Rick Burke. The men he remembered from that time. Men who returned from their murderous expeditions with dead eyes and a deep thirst for booze and ganja. Men whose brushes with combat gave weight to their words, purpose to their sprees of inebriation. But Bean was not one of them. An outsider, uninitiated in the violence that was occurring all around him.

  And because he'd witnessed no fighting directly, he found himself picturing everything. As the weeks passed and he grew more and more isolated from the men in his group, his imagination grew wild, winging him away to machine-gun emplacements he had exposed, to the bodies blown to bloody fragments because of Bean's decoded message. He saw the slaughter in his nervous sleep, or in the long, hallucinatory visions he suffered through the endless weeks of monsoons.

  Every distant burst of machine-gun fire was linked to him, the result of some fragmentary message he'd stolen from the sky. Each jet rumbling off to the north was on a mission of death directed to its target by Bean's eavesdropping. On his peak he began to feel like a deranged god, with the power of life and death over his subjects below. Throwing thunderbolts at whoever he pleased. He hated it. Hiding himself in his hooch, he wept for hours. He trembled from a cold that was not there. At night, beneath his blankets, he would scratch the edge of a razor blade across his wrist, not cutting deep, but taking practice swipes for that moment when he summoned sufficient courage. In the meantime, he continued to do his job, his madness growing deeper with every passing day. Night after night intercepting the radio signals, listening in on the traffic of human affairs. Decoding the numbers, deciding who should die, who might be granted a reprieve. An unbearable weight.

  Then late in the spring of his first year, Bean Wilson intercepted a message that sappers had been deployed to attack the Hawk's Nest at midnight. For a while Bean sat at his post and stared at his handwritten notes. It was suppertime, only a few hours before the scheduled assault. There was plenty of time to call in artillery support, have his security force aim their mortars downhill, enough time to dispatch Puff the Magic Dragon, one of the Huey gunships, a Duster from a neighboring fire base. But Bean simply ate his supper with the other men, chatted, joked, walked among them like a ghost among his brethren. And he felt an almost religious liberation, released from the guilty burden that had been growing heavier in his bones for those last months.

  At eleven that night, filled with his terrible, secret joy, Bean Wilson ambled down the hill, snuck past the watch post, crossing over into th
e barren patch of earth. He waited there, looking up at the sky, saying his final prayers. Liberated from his grief and turmoil, he wept and fell to his knees. Bowing his head, he presented himself to the savage gods of that devastated country. An offering.

  "You dropped out, Thorn, and I took your place. That should have been you on that hillside. It was your ticket I was riding."

  But the sappers didn't get him. Instead, precisely at midnight flares lit up the sky, a Huey gunship roared over the peak behind him. Mortar shells began to pound the hillside. Evidently, on another hill like his, one of his fellow decoders had intercepted the same message and had called in the artillery.

  But Bean did not flee his position.

  And soon, only a few feet from where he stood, a shell landed, debris spraying into the night sky. Incredibly, Bean was unhurt, but only a few feet away from his position, several sappers screamed. And almost immediately, more fire was directed toward their wailing.

  He did not move. It hardly mattered anymore if he was cut down by friendly fire or the Viet Cong. Climbing to his feet, Bean watched as another set of flares reddened the sky, the air shimmering with rosy phosphorescence, as if God himself had awakened from his ten-thousand-year sleep and his angry breath was pulsing through the dark.

  And in that eerie incandescence, Bean Wilson squinted out to see, five feet before him, a small Asian boy about thirteen years old. The child hesitated a moment, his arms and face bloodied by the concertina wire, his mouth a terrified slash, then the boy lifted his rifle and aimed it unsteadily at this interloper on a hillside of his native land. And Bean did not cringe, did not duck or try to flee. With perfect calm, he stood before his executioner. The boy lay his cheek against the stock, curled his finger against the trigger, but instead of the rifle shell hammering into Bean's chest, there was an awesome thunderclap and Bean was blinded by a crimson flash, and a few feet before him the earth erupted in a great geyser of dust, sending him tumbling backward through the air, clutching in his arms the warm flesh of what he took to be the boy. Bean flew backward through a dark endless sky, embracing that boy, flying and flying until long impossible moments later he crashed in the tangled brush, opened his eyes briefly and saw his arms locked around one of his own severed legs.