Pale Blue

by Mike Jenne

  “No. I figure that he won’t be found until daybreak, assuming that he survives through the night. By that time, we’ll either be eating breakfast chow on a Navy ship or we’ll be dead.”

  As he sorted through his ponderous medical bag, culling those items that he considered less essential, Henson quietly replied, “Nestor, I trust your judgment, but it’s still a huge gamble. We could make him comfortable and leave him here. There’s nothing for you to feel guilty about. It’s not like you would be…”

  Glades closed his eyes, wishing that there was a simple way out of this mess. “Look, I can’t explain why, but I can’t leave him here,” he answered. “Hell, Matt, I can’t even explain it to myself. It’s damned sure not the sensible thing to do. It’s one of those gut things. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

  “I trust you.” Henson held out a soda-sized gray metal can. “I’m packing a few extra units of serum albumin,” he explained. “While we’re waiting for the sun to go down, I can load him up. The increased volume should keep him from lapsing into shock, at least for a while.”

  “Do that,” replied Glades. Each of the six men carried a can of the blood expander taped to their web gear, so there should still be plenty available if someone was wounded.

  As Henson opened the can with a metal key, not unlike opening a sardine can, he added, “I’m going to lay off giving him any more morphine until nightfall. Hopefully, we can keep him quiet without it, and then I can give him a large enough dose to knock him out for a few hours.”

  6:35 p.m.

  Glades reviewed the plan in his mind. He, Henson, and Quan would carry Bao Trung to the trail. They would leave him there, then return here to pick up their gear before heading south to the pick-up site. He adjusted his damp chest webbing, turned towards Henson and asked, “Ready?”

  “I suppose,” answered Henson, stooping down to collect their prisoner.

  “Wait,” muttered Bao Trung.

  Startled, the two men looked toward him in disbelief.

  “What?” hissed Glades, kneeling down.

  “Wait,” said Bao Trung weakly. “I have something to tell you.”

  Frantic, Finn blurted, “Oh, great. He speaks English and he’s overheard every damned thing we’ve said. That’s just groovy. Now we have to kill him. We don’t have an option.”

  Unsheathing his Gerber knife, Quan fervently concurred. “He’s right. We have no choice. We cannot carry him and we cannot leave him here alive.”

  “You speak English?” asked Glades, furious at himself for putting the men in such danger.

  “I do,” answered Bao Trung. He grasped his shoulder and grimaced. “Before I went to officer school, I was in Signals Intelligence. I was a voice interceptor.”

  “But you never told us you could speak English,” growled Finn.

  “You never asked.”

  “This is really not a good time to be funny,” interjected Glades. “Since you’re likely to be dead soon. Now, what is it that you have to tell me?”

  “A warning,” replied the NVA officer. “Do not go to the south.”

  “Why?” asked Glades.

  “If you go to the south, they will be waiting on you. There’s at least a battalion of special troops waiting in an ambush. Their orders are to take you alive. These are not men to be trifled with. They track and kill agents and commando teams who sneak in from the South.”

  “And they’re going to all this trouble for a single pilot?” asked Glades.

  “They were never interested in the pilot,” explained Bao Trung. “They could care less about him. We have prisons full of American pilots, so much so that they’re getting to be a nuisance. As I said, they were never interested in him. They want you. They knew in advance that you were coming and they knew that once the pilot was dead, then you would leave. To the south.”

  “But why me?” asked Glades.

  “You killed a regimental commander and his staff a few years ago. Remember?”

  “I’ve killed a mess of folks,” answered Glades. “Excuse me for not remembering specifics, but it’s hard to keep track. Was there something special about this one?”

  “He was General Giap’s nephew. He was also very well respected in his own right.”

  “And why are you telling me this?” asked Glades.

  “As we left to go on this operation, they warned us how fearsome you were, and that you would give no quarter.” Bao Trung coughed weakly and spat out blood. “But I have seen that you are not just a fearsome warrior, but you are also an honorable man. You have shown me great mercy, so I cannot allow you to walk into a trap.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  “Simple,” answered Bao Trung. “There are many points on a compass. I am not telling you where to go. I am only telling you where not to go.”

  He did have a point, thought Glades.

  “What do we do, Nestor?” asked Henson.

  Gazing up into the night sky through the trees, Glades was silent for a moment. Then he answered, “We drive on with the plan. We don’t have time to waste. Finn, we’ll be back here in about thirty minutes.”

  “You’re still going to leave him alive?” asked Finn.

  “Yep.”

  “Listen,” said Bao Trung, gesturing for Glades to come closer. As Glades bent over him, the NVA officer whispered in his ear.

  “Okay. If you insist,” replied Glades. He stood up, and then clobbered Bao Trung with the wooden butt of his AK-47, and then walloped him again for good measure.

  “I think you busted his jaw,” noted Henson, kneeling down to feel the side of Bao Trung’s face. “I guess we don’t have to worry about him talking to anyone anytime soon.”

  “Which is exactly what he wanted,” noted Glades. “Squirt enough morphine into him to keep him unconscious for a while. Then we’ll haul him to the trail, drop him, and be on our way. Finn, while we’re gone, I want you to script a message for Da Nang. We’ll transmit it on the move tonight. I want you to confirm that we are headed south to the pick-up site. Also, I want you to tell them that we captured a prisoner, interrogated him briefly, but he escaped.”

  7:16 p.m.

  Half an hour later, after depositing Bao Trung at trailside, they returned to the hide site. “Nestor,” whispered Finn. “I thought about it while you were gone. I think the gook was right. We shouldn’t go south. It’s too dangerous. We should go west, back towards where we dropped, and call for extraction by helicopter.”

  Hoisting his rucksack onto his shoulders, Glades answered, “No. That’s way too risky. All it would accomplish would be to get more guys killed.”

  “So you’re just going to blindly head south?” demanded Finn.

  “I didn’t say that, Finn. We’ll tell Da Nang that we’re headed south. That doesn’t mean we’re actually doing it.”

  “So what will we do?” asked Finn.

  “Trung si Hieu knows where a boat is cached,” interjected Quan. “It’s a rubber raft, big enough to carry seven men. It’s hidden about ten kilometers from here, to the east, on the coast near a village called Tam Po.”

  “How does he know that?” asked Glades. They were as deep into North Vietnam as it was possible to go without venturing into China. While the boat sounded promising at this point, he wasn’t overly predisposed to venture off on a wild goose chase. On the other hand, they weren’t exactly overwhelmed with other options.

  Quan explained, “He was on a mission six months ago and buried it there himself so that an agent could escape if necessary. He’s sure that it’s still there, because the agent was killed. And if it isn’t, he is sure that we could steal a boat from one of the villages on the coast.”

  Glades considered it. If they had a boat, they could make it out to sea and then radio Gull Wing directly to be picked up by helicopter. They wouldn’t have to inform Da Nang, and if Bao Trung had told the truth—and Glades was confident that he had—they would be long gone before the NVA special t
roops had an opportunity to re-set their forces. He looked at the faint luminous markings on his compass. “We’re going east,” he declared quietly.

  24

  TO BE MADE OVER

  In a world fraught with uncertainty, certainty still remains. The earth will heave and change, floodwaters will rise and scour the land, dictators will climb to power and tumble into obscurity, but the soul-crushing gears of bureaucracies will grind and grind and incessantly grind.

  Because of the considerable intelligence collected in the aftermath of his shoot-down and the subsequent rescue attempt, Carson was presumed dead. While a formal declaration could not yet be issued, the US government assumed that the intercepted radio transmissions were entirely valid, and that Carson had been killed when NVA forces closed in to capture him.

  Administratively, as the years passed and until his case was finalized, he would continue to be promoted with his peers and his monthly pay would accrue in his bank account. Of course, since he had no living relatives, there was no one clamoring for access to the funds or his insurance money, nor were there any irate family members to dispute the military’s findings.

  Although they were strongly rebuked for allowing Carson to fly in Vietnam, Wolcott and Tarbox didn’t suffer any severe consequences for their complicity. While they both thought Carson’s death was tragic, they genuinely felt that they had only acted in earnest to fulfill his oft-stated desire to fly in combat. To a large degree, although they would never admit it, they were also tremendously relieved that Carson had been killed and not captured.

  With the exception of the Nestor Glades, the Special Forces sergeant who led the rescue mission, everyone was entirely comfortable with the notion that Carson was deceased. Although he had no credible evidence on which to anchor his claims, Glades tenaciously insisted that Carson was likely captured alive, and that the NVA’s report of his death was merely a ruse to lure the rescue team into an ambush. But no one lent any credence to that outlandish theory; even Glades admitted that it was based more on a “gut feeling” than anything truly substantial.

  Although everyone wanted to wipe the slate clean and move on, Carson’s presumed death resulted in a pesky accounting discrepancy at an annoyingly inconvenient time. In theory, he was still a Naval aviator, but except for a trumped-up dossier buried in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in the personnel office aboard an aircraft carrier, there was no official evidence of Lieutenant Commander Andrew C. Scott, United States Navy. But despite his participation in the secretive Project, the US military possessed an abundance of official evidence pertinent to the life and career of Major Andrew M. Carson, United States Air Force.

  Why was this inconsistency such a pressing issue? The long-fought war between the United States of America and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was all but over. At the Paris negotiating table, the US emissaries insisted on a thorough resolution of all matters concerning prisoners of war and missing personnel.

  As a condition of the treaty, the North Vietnamese were expected to account for and return all US personnel held as prisoners, as well as the remains of those who had died in captivity, combat or other circumstances. For their part, the United States would furnish a comprehensive list of the missing and otherwise unaccounted for, and the North Vietnamese—to the best of their ability—would reconcile the list against their records.

  US intelligence agencies had long suspected that the North Vietnamese maintained a warehouse-sized morgue filled with the remains and personal effects of deceased US personnel. As the war creaked to a halt, specialized teams of medical investigators and forensic sleuths prepared to scrutinize a virtual onslaught of human remains, anticipated to range from skeletal fragments recovered from aircraft crash sites all the way to intact bodies disinterred from hastily dug graves. With the fates of almost two thousand men still in question, and only a small portion of those known or believed to be POWs, hundreds of families anxiously awaited some closure concerning their loved ones lost in the cruel fog of war.

  As the reconciliation list was still being drawn up, a handful of high-level planners were painfully aware that the physical remains of Lieutenant Commander Andrew C. Scott—if the North Vietnamese were eventually forthcoming with his body—would not match the medical or dental records of anyone on the list. As these men agonized over this problem, they also knew that it was entirely possible that the North Vietnamese would surrender a set of remains that would correspond to the medical and dental records of Major Andrew M. Carson.

  After grappling with the issue, they decided that it was best that Carson be correctly identified, especially since it was a rudimentary clerical matter, readily solved. Besides, since Carson was almost certainly dead, what harm could possibly come of it? So, with a simple stroke of a pen, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Scott ceased to exist—officially or otherwise—and the name of Major Andrew Carson was quietly appended to the reconciliation list.

  Reeducation Camp # 4

  Lang Hien, Quang Ninh Province, Democratic Republic of Vietnam

  8:25 a.m., Tuesday, January 23, 1973

  Kneeling in a shallow trough filled with pea gravel, with his hands and ankles tightly bound with coarse sisal rope, Carson was in abject misery. Of course, he had no inkling that his official identity had been abruptly altered yet again. There was no way for him to know that he was no longer Lieutenant Commander Andrew Scott, having been officially reverted to his previous identity. After all, he wasn’t even cognizant of his recent demise at the hands of the NVA. If he had known any of these things, his life would probably be much simpler, both now and in the coming weeks.

  By his estimate, he had been kneeling in the gravel for over eighteen hours. The tiny pebbles dug deeply into his knees; he felt sure that they would leave permanent indentations. If he spoke or attempted to move to relieve the pain, a guard seated behind him swatted his head with a large stick.

  His muscles burned and hunger pangs gnawed at his empty stomach. Throbbing veins pounded in his aching temples. He was so parched that he imagined that his blood was as thick as gravy. Gorging themselves on trickles of blood, several black flies buzzed around the open wounds where the rope fetters gouged into his flesh. His hands and feet were numb from the lack of circulation. He hadn’t even been allowed to get up to relieve himself, so his pajama-like trousers were caked with reeking wet filth.

  Reflecting on the circumstances of his capture, framed in the harrowing reality of his present suffering, he desperately wished that he could have died that day. In the heat of the moment, he just couldn’t compel himself to shoot the kid soldier who confronted him in the heart of the bamboo thicket. After witnessing the death of the VPAF pilot he had defeated in combat, he had lost all interest in killing yet another human being. Nor did he have the fortitude or presence of mind to turn the Browning on himself.

  Instead, he had bashed the kid’s head with the pistol’s butt before awkwardly fleeing through the dense obstacle of intertwined cane. As he emerged from the maze, he was pursued by over a dozen NVA soldiers shooting wildly in his wake. He was eventually tackled by several NVA soldiers. They all floundered in gooey black muck for several minutes, but eventually they wrestled him to the ground and subdued him. Instead of the dramatic shoot-out climax of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid he had envisioned only moments beforehand, his last moment of freedom was more like a slapstick scramble reminiscent of the Keystone Kops.

  In slow motion, he subtly shifted his weight to alleviate the pressure on his right knee and was immediately rewarded with a painful rap to the back of his skull. Although he wasn’t sure if he could bear any more pain, he was acutely aware that this was only the warm-up session for yet another excruciating marathon of interrogations. Hearing the door open, he watched four men enter the room and realized that the long-dreaded quiz session was about to commence.

  Carson immediately recognized the interrogator, a thin Vietnamese officer who appeared to be in his early thirties. Two other men were app
arently the inquisitor’s trusted minions; they devised and meted out the physical unpleasantries while he focused on the questioning. Carson suspected that only the interrogator spoke English. The fourth man, whom he didn’t recognize, took a seat in a corner and opened a writing tablet, apparently preparing to take notes.

  The scribe looked like he had been in a terrible accident. His face was badly swollen and his left arm, encased in a white plaster cast, was suspended in a gray muslin sling. His mouth was tightly clinched, almost like he was terribly angry, but he said nothing; Carson suspected that his jaw was temporarily wired shut.

  At this point, having undergone several similar rites, he knew that the pain of the coming hours would far surpass his present agony. Watching as they arrayed the instruments of their profession, he was morbidly curious concerning what today’s torture would entail. In the last iteration, they had flayed his legs and back with pliable strips of wet bamboo. The bamboo flails had left stripe-like welts that took several days to heal. Before that, they had almost drowned him by forcefully and repeatedly dunking his head in a metal pail filled with filthy water.

  The nefarious tormenters went straightaway to their labors. They wrapped his wrists with yet another length of sisal rope, although much thicker than the lashings that currently encompassed his wrists, and then threaded the rope through an iron eye-bolt anchored in a wooden beam in the ceiling. Then the duo hoisted Carson until his body was wrenched completely free of the gravel-filled trough. His wrists had been tightly bound in such a manner that he could not bend his elbows, so his full weight was suspended by his arms, awkwardly outstretched behind him. In moments, hanging at the end of the taut rope, he was delirious with pain.

  Satisfied with their handiwork, the pair cinched off the rope and stepped to the side. They stood there, absolutely impassive, watching him for several minutes as he struggled in anguish. The Vietnamese were nothing if not patiently methodical. Carson felt like a live bug pinned to the wax-filled bottom of a dissection pan, squirming, waiting to be sliced open.