Behold a Pale Horse

by Franklin Allen Leib

  The crazy thing to Julia, who had learned about security in the Justice Tolliver campaigns, was that these men, doing deals and trading secrets that were certainly unethical and perhaps illegal, liked to do it in front of Julia and any other pretty woman they hoped to impress. Influence and power paid off in money and sex; the equation ran both ways. Julia heard a story about a presidential adviser who had let his prostitute girlfriend listen in to his conversations with his boss, and had no trouble believing it.

  She met a number of men she liked, but avoided serious entanglements. It was too much fun playing as many games as she could. One man who seemed less predatory than the others, less determined to impress rather than charm, was Charles Taylor, a man about ten years older than Julia who had had articles published in a number of second-rank news magazines and the Washington Times. He implied he reported for the Times, but Julia soon learned he was freelance. Charles approached her one Friday evening in early March in a function room at the Mayflower Hotel, a cocktail given by the American Trial Lawyers’ Association Julia was attending with a junior counsel to the Food and Drug Administration. “Congratulations,” Charles said. “You must be pleased.”

  She was puzzled. “I’m sorry; did I miss something?”

  “You’re from Texas, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Your Governor Tolliver declared his candidacy for the president. Hours ago.”

  “Governor Tolliver!” she yelped. “I worked on his gubernatorial campaigns.”

  “Maybe you’ll have to go back,” Charles said, suddenly looking very interested in the pretty but clueless banker-trainee. “Though I’d miss you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’d ask me back. I was a pretty low-level volunteer.”

  “But you do know the man,” Charles said. “Few do.” He looked around to see if anyone more important was open for chat. Julia recognized the move; it was so Washington. Charles turned back to her with a big smile. “Would you like to blow this pop stand and have a little dinner?”

  5

  1965

  COBRA, NOW CALLING HIMSELF Jack Chance, the name he had given the marine recruiters, shipped out to Vietnam in early September.

  He had distinguished himself in basic training, especially in marksmanship, something far more highly regarded in the Corps than in the army. He had considered taking a little off his shooting, not drawing attention to himself while the FBI was still looking for leads to the assassination of President Kennedy, but in the end his pride wouldn’t let him. Marines shot the M-14 to qualify at three hundred and five hundred yards, iron sights, no scope. The tenring was as big as a basketball. Cobra failed one drill because he had fired so accurately that after five rounds only a single slightly jagged hole appeared in the center of the bull’s-eye. After that he always made a neat little ring about two inches in diameter until the drill instructors told him to stop.

  After boot camp and Advanced Infantry Training, Cobra was sent to the Second Battalion, 26th Marines, at Camp Pendleton, California. In a rare example of the armed forces assigning someone a specialty for which he had aptitude, Cobra was trained as a sniper, qualified on scope-mounted accuritized M-14s and Remington 700 bolt-action rifles, and assigned to the battalion’s Reconnaissance Platoon.

  Three months after Cobra joined the battalion, it lashed up and shipped out to Okinawa, and after training there with other units destined to join the growing Marine Amphibious Force, shipped out again to Da Nang, the northern seaport in what the South Vietnamese army called its First Military Region. The marines called it simply I Corps.

  Da Nang was a place of utter confusion. The port was being completely reconstructed to accommodate the American buildup, as were several airstrips. There were marines everywhere, along with all their supplies and equipment, much of it just dumped by the docks or runways, unclaimed and unguarded. The proud line infantry troops of the 2/26 were pressed into service as stevedores and construction laborers. Many men, tough enough in the dry California desert, suffered from hard work in the humid heat of the tropical jungles and steaming rice paddies that surrounded the red knee-high mud of the marine bases sprouting outside the city. Cobra was used to working all day in the wet heat of the forest-choked river valleys of North Matabeleland, and Vietnam felt almost like home.

  The mission of the marines was to secure and guard the American facilities that were being put in place to assist the South Vietnamese forces, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. The ARVNs were supposed to do the actual fighting against the Vietcong, from bases beyond the American enclaves and throughout the country. In practice, the ARVNs tended to camp as close to the American bases as possible, often so close that the VC could lob mortar shells and rockets right over the ARVN positions and into the Americans’. Shelling occurred almost every night, and some nights enemy sappers would slip past the ARVNs and the American outposts and drop satchel charges in fuel and ammo dumps, vehicle parks, and personnel tents. Given this reality, it was no surprise to the marines that as soon as their numbers in Da Nang were great enough, they were sent out on their own patrols to hunt the enemy’s supplies by day and to disrupt his movements, find and kill him at night.

  Cobra was a twenty-one-year-old lance corporal when he first killed a man legally. He found the kill oddly satisfying because this, of all of his victims, was firing back at Cobra and his squad. The VC was in a cave serving a heavy Russian-made 14.5mm KPV machine gun; Cobra easily recognized the sound. The gunner killed two marines with his first burst, and pinned the squad down next to a heavily forested, weed-choked stream with single rounds that rained down splinters and bits of leaves on the frightened men who were trying to screw themselves into the mud.

  The terrain was flooded paddy on one side of the strip of high forest that followed the stream, and rugged jungle-covered hills on the other. The gunner was somewhere in the limestone cliffs. Nobody could see him, or even the smoke from his weapon. Cobra knew from sniper school that VC snipers fired their weapons dry, with virtually no lubricant in the barrels. That shortened barrel life but prevented the telltale brown smoke of burning gun oil. VC ambushers did not fire tracer rounds to avoid giving away their positions.

  None in the squad had ever been shot at before that evening, not even the sergeant. The lieutenant, the platoon leader, was with them, and he wanted to call for artillery. They were close enough to the firebases inside the Da Nang perimeter, but the line wasn’t good: the VC gunner was between them and the big guns.

  Cobra crawled over to the fallen tree trunk that sheltered the LT and the sergeant. “I can get him, sir,” he whispered.

  Both men jumped. Lance Corporal Chance was known in the platoon for his ability to approach unseen and unheard, but the random flat cracks of the big Russian gun had them both on edge. “How, Jack?” the sergeant asked. “We can’t see him.”

  “I can track him by the sound until I get a picture. I need to move up and to the right, I expect.”

  The sergeant and the wild-eyed LT looked at him uncomprehending. Cobra knew that a weapon made two sounds when it was fired, the first the bang of the shot going off, the noise of the cartridge exploding, expelling the bullet from the chamber. The second sound, much louder, was made by the bullet breaking the sound barrier after it left the barrel. The sonic boom was directionless, but the first sound could lead a trained ear to the weapon. They taught that in sniper school but Cobra had learned it years earlier. “All right,” the LT said. “Sergeant Perez, send one man with Chance for security.”

  “I’d just as soon go alone, sir,” Jack Chance said.

  “No. The gunner out there is unlikely to be alone, and neither should you. Sergeant?”

  “I’ll go myself, sir.”

  The lieutenant shouldn’t have allowed that, but he did, and Sergeant Hernando Perez followed Cobra as he climbed the riverbank, listening intently to each single round. The sergeant carried his M-14 and seemed to Cobra to make as much noise as a buffalo dragging tin
cans over rocks. Cobra knew the LT was following the book, sending a rifleman to cover the sniper’s back, but Lance Corporal Chance was used to operating alone and undetected. He carried his heavy Remington Model 700 with the big Redfield variable power scope and moved in silent concentration, timing the reports of his opponent’s machine gun. If that gunner was alone he wouldn’t be for long, and the pinned-down platoon was a sitting duck for a few rounds from a light mortar.

  Cobra stopped, raising his hand to halt the sergeant, who was much too close behind him. He pulled his rifle in front of him and rested it on a fallen branch. A muzzle flash had preceded the last boom, a light no brighter than a firefly rising in an African early evening. “I see him, sergeant,” Cobra whispered. The machine gun cracked, another single shot. “A muzzle flash, in the cave, there.”

  “Where?” the sergeant puffed. “I don’t even see a fucking cave.”

  “There,” Cobra said as the machine gun cracked again. He cranked the telescopic sight up to nine power and looked through it at the tiny cave he guessed was at least four hundred yards away. Through the scope he could see two shapes in the shadows; he thought a gunner and a loader but knew he was guessing. He worked the bolt, chambering a round. The Remington fired the same ammo as the M-14 but Cobra, like his opponent, never loaded tracers. He centered the vague shape he thought was the gunner in the crosshairs and waited, gradually increasing finger pressure on the trigger. When the VC fired, the big KPV would buck. When the gunner settled in again, Cobra would take him. The only sound in the clearing except the incessant buzz of insects and the shrieks of birds was the heavy, labored breathing of the frightened sergeant. Cobra blotted out all sound.

  The machine gun fired and a second later Cobra did. His blurry target disappeared and Cobra saw the other man, his face turned toward him in the telescopic sight. Cobra worked the bolt, chambering another round without ever losing the sight picture, and drilled the face right through the center. The man fell on the tripod-mounted machine gun and Cobra saw it tilt forward and slide out of the cave. “Let’s go, Sergeant.”

  “Jesus, you hit anything?”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Cobra said, slinging his rifle and turning back down the slope toward the squad. He went carefully, crouched over, but not crawling as he had on the way up.

  The KPV machine gun did not speak again.

  6

  1966

  RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER leaned over the table in the political science building at Houston Christian University. His dark-complected face was twisted with anguish as he looked at the old professor of political science who was his faculty adviser. “I got a draft notice, Professor Johns,” Rupert said. “Two weeks before graduation, I got a draft notice.”

  The professor stiffened. He respected young Tolliver’s drive and ambition, but disliked the boy because of his excessive drive and ambition. “Couple years in the army won’t hurt you, Rupert. I was in for War Two and I always felt the experience aided my understanding of God in the real world.”

  “I don’t want to do it, sir,” Rupert said, shaking his head. “No, sir, I do not. Can’t see dying in some Asian swamp because Kennedy and Johnson couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

  Professor Johns had admired President Kennedy, an uncommon view in south Texas. The Hill Country where Tolliver came from was Lyndon Johnson country. Johns wondered idly whether this big, strong-looking senior was a coward, and whether he ought to help him at all. Benefit of the doubt, he thought ruefully. Always benefit of the doubt. “You talk to your local draft board?”

  “Yeah.” Tolliver shook his head again. “Get me a wife and a baby real quick, or get into graduate school. They got deferments for graduate school because they have so few applicants down the Hill Country, but I have no money and haven’t even applied anywhere.”

  “What do you want to do with your life, young Rupert?”

  “Politics, sir. I want to change Texas and the nation.”

  Johns smiled. “You’ve done well enough with me, although I doubt either one of us has demonstrated politics is a science. You could apply to law school; most legislators are lawyers.”

  “With no money and no time? I gotta go take a physical in four weeks.”

  “Maybe University of Texas at Austin might take you as a master’s candidate in political science; they have that program.”

  Tolliver fidgeted. “Is there anything here? Anything I could get done quick?”

  He is a coward, Johns thought. “Only graduate program here at Houston Christian is the divinity school. You got a calling, young Rupert?”

  The professor’s question had a barb on it but Tolliver swallowed it without notice. “Perhaps I do,” he said slowly. Then he jumped to his feet, his tanned face splitting with a slow grin. “I surely and purely do believe I hear the Lord calling!”

  Professor Johns shook his head and swallowed the taste of disgust. “I’ll make some calls for you.”

  Tolliver thanked his adviser profusely and left. Two weeks later he had his admission to divinity school, and his draft deferment, and three months after that he began his studies for the ministry.

  How bad could it be? He asked himself. Johnson’s damn war couldn’t go on forever.

  AT FIRST IT WAS bad, deadly boring. The curriculum was the Bible, and little else except writings about the Bible. The rantings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the commentaries of the great monks of the middle ages who protected the church. And the church’s implacable enemies, the heresies. The Cathar, or Albiguensian Heresy of the Middle Ages. The sins of venal popes and priests, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the black Inquisition.

  Then back to the Bible, to see the clear message of Jesus, and the errors of everyone who had come after, injecting alien creeds and even gods and saints, intermediaries to salvation the Lord had never spoken of.

  Rupert couldn’t help himself. The message was powerful, and it began to soften his shell of cynicism. Perhaps he had been called.

  7

  March 2000

  JUSTICE TOLLIVER TOOK a sip of water and looked out over the crowd standing in a cold rain in the Louisiana State Fair Grounds outside Baton Rouge. His throat burned from nonstop speechifying; his booming voice sometimes reduced to a tortured croak. His eyes itched from lack of sleep and the blue cigarette smoke drifting up to him from the crowd. It would be a very long day, beginning here at ten A.M. and ending in Texas at ten at night after speaking in Florida, Tennessee and Missouri. Tolliver had been crisscrossing the South for a week since his disastrous showing in New York that had the pundits branding his campaign a failed joke despite his surprising come-from-nowhere win in South Carolina a week before. Tomorrow was Super Tuesday, primaries in Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas. Tolliver gave himself no chance in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Senator Joseph Fucking Donahue of Connecticut had taken the Liberal Northeast: Vermont and Delaware in addition to New Hampshire. Donahue had even taken Arizona and South Dakota, conservative states that should have gone for Tolliver if he had had any money or organization in either one. Donahue had 110 delegates to the 37 Justice Tolliver had won in South Carolina amid dark murmurs in the press of intimidation and vote-buying in rural districts. But then on the same day Donahue had won Colorado and Minnesota, Tolliver had won in Maryland and Georgia, and Justice had 111 delegates to Donahue’s 169.

  Two days later, Donahue won New York when the Republican establishment, in the firm grip of Senator Armand Cresta, had frozen Tolliver right off the ballot. Going into Super Tuesday with a total of 408 delegates at stake, Donahue led Tolliver by over a hundred delegates.

  Most of Super Tuesday was in the South. Tolliver knew he had to win in the South.

  He took another sip of water and put down the glass. He rounded into the big finish of his stump speech. Whatever topic he focused on in any given speech in any state, he varied the finale very little. It came from his preaching, and he be
lieved it came from the heart. “My fellow Americans,” he rasped through inflamed vocal cords, “my fellow patriots, my fellow Southerners, my neighbors of Louisiana. Hear me.”

  The crowd began to call out and applaud. A lot of faithful were gathered here in the piney woods country of central Louisiana. This was redneck country, or as they said hereabouts, peckerwood country. Joseph Donahue was that very morning chasing votes in the Frenchified Catholic south, corrupt New Orleans and the Cajun swamp parishes. Tolliver doubted he’d get many to listen, but Justice knew the majority Baptists, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals were his.

  He’d selected this spot, this crowd along with all the others he would address on this crucial day, because their size and enthusiasm would make good television, good for the evening news shows throughout the South, where the voters would send him onward to triumph or back to Austin in shame.

  “We’re here not just running for political office, even though it is the highest office in the land and the most powerful on earth under God. We’re here as cleansers of a failed, corrupt, loose-moralled government, an administration polluted by dirty money, a government of broken promises. A government whose highest officials are under investigation by more independent counsels than I can remember, a government for sale to the rich and godless interests, from Asian banking cartels with ties to dictators to the tobacco lobby that seduces your children, to the self-enriching trial lawyers to the sleek, well-paid officials of teachers’ and public workers’ unions who want to do everything other than teach your kids right and wrong and letters and figures, and clean and police the streets of your towns and cities. Hear me!”

  “We hear!” the crowd boomed. Great television.

  “Now Ronald Reagan, a great man and a great Republican, said speak no evil of a fellow Republican, and maybe in his time that was right. But now, and sad to say, my friends, our party has fallen from President Reagan’s vision of a stronger, more prosperous America, an America of hardworking, God-fearing people. Our Republican Party is back to making deals, going along to get along, porking up the budget, raising your taxes and congressmen’s and senators’ pay. Who sits at the center of that web of Republican corruption but the sly, slick senator from Connecticut, Joseph Donahue? Do I speak ill of him? I do not, but he is not my friend or yours.