“Hey Otto! Maybe the doctor was wrong. You should tell her to get a second opinion.” Warner tried cheering up his teammate.
“Sure … maybe.” Koski dropped off the roof and disappeared into the shadows.
It was quiet on the bunker roof for the rest of the first shift. Warner slipped back down inside to wake up Sanchez and to get his gear for their shift. Koski still hadn’t returned back to the bunker and Arnason was beginning to worry.
Woods read his mind. “He’s probably over at one of the other bunkers talking to another Pole from Detroit.”
“Hamtramck!” Koski’s voice came from behind the bunker as he approached carrying two large sandwiches he had scrounged up at the mess hall.
“You’ve got the last shift by yourself tonight.” Arnason smiled and slipped down through the trap door. Koski had to be feeling a little better to eat that much food.
Koski unwrapped the last sandwich and started eating it just as the first rays of light appeared in the east. A slight chill had come with the ground mist and he sat in the guard seat with his camouflaged poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders. The sound of a chopper arriving broke through the peace of the morning. Even the guards on the other bunkers hadn’t started moving around yet. Koski couldn’t remember a helicopter arriving at An Khe so early in the morning.
Sergeant Cutter didn’t like getting up so early either, but he had to hurry just in case Shaw’s personal possessions were claimed by someone else. He could use his authority as the chief investigator to claim the items and check to make sure that Shaw hadn’t kept a black book on the operation. Paranoia was really beginning to set in, causing a lot of undue nervousness in the key black-market operators.
Cutter had reappraised his position and had decided that after checking Shaw’s death out, he would be in an excellent posture. LeMoine was the one who had cut the boy’s throat, and he was dead. Shaw and his friend Simpson were dead, and that left only Captain Rankin and Doc McPeters. The captain would be smart enough to disappear, and the doc had only six weeks left in-country; he was going to be discharged from the Army as soon as he arrived back in the States. There was only one loose end for Cutter to secure in the investigation, and that was to find out who else was on the supply truck with Shaw and Simpson. The military police report that he had received had stated that Shaw and Simpson had been killed by VC in the village of An Khe along with another soldier, named Kirkpatrick. There had been another NCO with them named David Woods, and he was the problem. Cutter had to find out just how much this sergeant knew about Shaw’s operation.
Captain Youngbloode had eaten early as usual and was leaving the mess hall when he saw his first sergeant waving for him to hurry over to the orderly room. He could see a stranger wearing a civilian walking suit standing under one of the open shutters. Youngbloode cursed under his breath. He had eaten a second helping of shit-on-a-shingle, knowing that it would not sit right with him for the rest of the day, but at the same time he was unable to resist one of his favorite military breakfasts. SOS could be prepared two ways: with greasy hamburger or with dried beef. The mess sergeant had found a case of dried beef and had surprised Youngbloode with a very passable version of chipped beef on toast, or shit-on-a-shingle as the soldiers called it.
As soon as Youngbloode got in range the first sergeant called out, “Sir, Sergeant Cutter from the CID would like to talk with you.”
Youngbloode nodded. That explained the silly civilian suit in the middle of a fire base.
“Can I help you, Sergeant?”
Cutter was a little nervous, especially when he was addressed by his military rank. The CID enlisted men liked being called agents.
“Yes, Captain—” Cutter tried gaining a position of superiority by addressing the officer by his rank rather than calling him “sir.”
Youngbloode was an expert at the one-upmanship game and picked up the agent’s nervousness. “And how is that?” He cut the agent off in mid-sentence.
“I’d like to interview one of your men concerning a recent murder.” Cutter spoke the last word like an ace being played in a high stakes five-stud poker game.
“Murder? My, my.” Youngbloode played down the issue.
“Yes sir, murder. A master sergeant was murdered yesterday in Qui Nhon and we think one of your sergeants might have some information we could use.”
“I don’t think Sergeant David Woods has anything that you can use, Sergeant.” Youngbloode played an ace of his own by mentioning Woods’s name first.
“He was in Qui Nhon yesterday?”
“Yes, and so were a lot of other people. You are running a supply depot, aren’t you?” Youngbloode was maneuvering from a position of power. Woods had briefed him on what he had suspected when Daryl Masters had reported the black-market scam to the CID and then was mysteriously found floating in the bay without a head.
Cutter hooded his eyes. He sensed that something was going on and he was being outmaneuvered at his own game. He decided to withdraw and regroup. “I’d like to take Sergeant Woods back with me to Qui Nhon for questioning.”
“I’m afraid that will be impossible.”
“Captain, I have the authority to detain anyone I deem necessary in this murder investigation.” Cutter drew out his CID badge and showed it to Youngbloode.
“I’m impressed, but Sergeant Woods is scheduled to meet with the South Vietnamese Army Commander for this military zone this morning, and after that we are due to fly up to our division headquarters for a meeting with our commanding general.”
Cutter saw that he had been completely outmaneuvered. “I would like for him to be delivered to my office as soon after that as you can.”
“I assure you, he’ll be there accompanied by an armed guard.” Youngbloode smiled. He knew that the CID sergeant would be surprised when he returned and was greeted by an MACV special investigation team.
“Well, while I’m here I might as well check through Sergeant Shaw’s personal items for a long-shot clue.” Cutter tried acting casual, but the ends of his long mustache twitched nervously.
Youngbloode took a step toward his orderly room door and paused on the top step. “Sorry again, Agent Cutter, but a special investigations team from MACV Headquarters in Saigon has already been here and have taken everything that belonged to the three men killed in An Khe.”
Cutter felt the muscles in his throat tighten and his vocal cords become dry. “Thank you.” He had lost all of his cockiness, and walked away toward the helipad where the depot commander’s helicopter waited for him.
Captain Youngbloode watched the CID agent leave and noticed that the man’s shoulders had slumped slightly under his short-sleeved walking-suit jacket.
Cutter was the only passenger on the chopper. He had borrowed it from the commander at Qui Nhon to impress the infantry hicks out at the fire support base and it had failed to impress even the guards at the helipad. He flew back to Qui Nhon in a very bad mood. The captain at the recon company obviously knew a great deal more about what was going on than he had let on. Cutter frowned, putting deep creases across his forehead. He had to figure out a way to protect the black-market operation from being exposed and at the same time design a plan to protect himself if it was discovered.
The helicopter had barely touched down on the depot commander’s private helipad behind the headquarters building when a young soldier ran up to the open side door and leaned inside.
“Sergeant Cutter?”
“What in the hell do you want, Teddy?” Cutter caught himself too late to correct calling the obvious homosexual by a nickname and glared at the smiling door-gunner.
“It’s important! I’ve been waiting for you to get back here from An Khe!” The excitement in the young spec five’s voice made him sound even more effeminate and brought both of the door-gunners around the shut-down aircraft, laughing at him. Teddy ignored the two soldiers and continued talking to the CID agent. “There are all kinds of investigators from MACV, checking out ev
erything!” He slapped his hand on his hip and shifted his body weight to one leg.
Cutter felt his face turning red and grabbed the clerk by his arm. He spoke in a loud voice so the chopper crew could hear him clearly. “This is a classified investigation, Specialist! If you want to give a statement, wait until we get back to my office!” He tried to make it look as if his relationship with the soldier was purely professional.
One of the door-gunners called after the disappearing agent and clerk, ‘Teddy! Would you stop by my hooch tonight and give me a statement too?”
Cutter felt like putting a bullet through the soldier’s head but decided against making a scene and escorted the clerk over to his office. As soon as they had entered the building, Cutter grabbed Teddy’s arm and swung him around.
“What in the fuck is so damn important that you have to meet me at the helipad!”
“Let go of me—you’re hurting my arm!” the clerk whined, and tried feebly to break free from the fat sergeant’s grip.
“You dumb faggot!” Cutter squeezed harder and brought tears to the skinny soldier’s eyes. He was very angry over being humiliated in front of the door-gunners and pilots. So far, his day had started out bad and was getting worse by the hour. “What in the fuck do you have to tell me!”
Teddy started crying.
Cutter shook him and curled his lip before letting him go. “Sit down and tell me what’s so damn important!”
The clerk dropped down in a chair and started sobbing. “No! If you’re going to treat me like this … I can just as well be beaten up by the guys in the barracks!” Teddy tried getting back at the agent for hurting him. “Find out yourself!”
Cutter felt the rage that had been building up all day break loose. He backhanded the clerk, bringing blood from the corner of the young man’s mouth. “Listen faggot! You had better tell me what’s going on, or I’m going to pound your ass!”
“You’re like all the rest of them.” The clerk rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “You act so damn nice when you’re horny … but in front of other people you have to play all that macho shit!”
Cutter raised his hand again.
“You want to know … fine! There’s a special investigating team here from MACV and they’ve been asking some very direct questions!”
Cutter’s whole attitude changed. “Like what, Teddy?”
The clerk grinned, showing the blood that had filled the spaces between his perfect set of teeth. He was a homosexual, not a fool. Cutter had his chance and had blown it. If the agent would have treated him decently in front of the helicopter crew, he might have cooperated now; getting hit was no big thing to him, but being rejected in front of people really hurt him. “They asked me to extract some data from the computer…”
Cutter’s face showed the worry he was feeling inside. “What kind of data?”
“Nothing very important … Stuff like how much meat had been declared unfit for human consumption, dates and ship names … Like I said, it was nothing important, like who drew those five starlight scopes from the warehouse without any paperwork.”
Cutter realized that the game was up for him in the black-market meat operation, but he knew that if the investigators could tie in the starlight scopes and a lot of other new special equipment disappearances from the warehouses to him, he would go to prison for treason. The NVA had hooked him on young Eurasian and Amerasian boys and then had put the squeeze on him for small items of equipment, until the list grew into almost anything in the depot.
“Listen, Teddy … I need you to do a favor for me … a big favor.” Cutter gently patted the clerk’s cheek and smiled at him.
Teddy smiled back.
“I want you to go right over to the computer center and erase some data for me…”
Teddy kept on smiling.
Captain Youngbloode stood to the side of the small parade field and felt as if he was going to burst with pride as the Vietnamese general slipped his nation’s second highest award for valor over Sergeant Woods’s neck. The Vietnamese had never given one of the awards to an American before, and the major general had had to go all the way to the President of South Vietnam for a telephonic approval. Normally, that award was given for exceptional valor on the battlefield, but the general had convinced the political chain of command that an example had to be made to all of the American commanders against killing innocent civilians on their search-and-destroy missions.
The brief ceremony was conducted in front of a gathering composed mostly of American war correspondents. Woods looked sheepishly over at his team before saluting the South Vietnamese major general. The Vietnamese band played their national anthem, followed by a very good rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. Woods felt a chill traverse his spine and tickle his neck.
Warner was the first one to reach Woods after the ceremony had finished and reached out to shake his hand. “Congratulations! Man! That is a pretty medal!”
Sergeant Arnason nodded his head in approval. The high award was worn around one’s neck like the American Medal of Honor, and it looked very good. Woods would have to wait until the Department of the Army had officially approved his winning of the award before he could wear it back in the States, but the medal was his regardless of what the Pentagon decided.
“Come on, Hero! We’ve got a chopper to catch and some business to attend to in Qui Nhon before the day’s over!” Captain Youngbloode shook Woods’s hand, then leaned forward and whispered something in his ear that only Woods could hear. The sergeant’s face turned red.
Arnason and his whole team accompanied the captain and Woods to the depot. Youngbloode wasn’t going to take any chances with the young sergeant’s life. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that Daryl Masters had been murdered because he had tried to report a black-market operation to the CID at Qui Nhon, and that meant CID agents were involved.
The clerk operated the computer with a vengeance. His fingers hit the keyboard so hard that the tips were turning white and numb. Teddy was sick of being toyed with and then beaten up because some damn pervert used him and then felt guilty over what he had done. He knew what his problem was, but most of those men who would sneak to see him at night wouldn’t even recognize him during the day. Sergeant Cutter had hit him for the last time.
Teddy hit the PRINT button and leaned back in his chair to watch the computer output the data. A small smile spread wider over his teeth as each line appeared. Cutter would never get out of jail when the authorities read the list of items the agent had drawn from the warehouses. The black-market operation was nothing compared to what the list of missing special equipment would do to him.
Cutter and LeMoine had made a couple of major errors in their operation, but the biggest was to use Teddy and then ignore him. He had followed them down to the docks one night when they had been with a young soldier. Teddy had thought that they were going to have sex with the soldier and he was jealous. He saw them get into the boat and leave for one of the ships in the bay, but when they had returned the soldier wasn’t with them. He had waited for hours on the dock for the soldier to return but he never did, and even after he had called all the ships in the harbor, none of them had heard of the missing man until the body washed up on shore and then he knew.
Teddy folded the computer printout neatly and slipped it into an envelope. He had to be careful because the package was so thick it made his side pocket bulge out. The MACV investigators were using the colonel’s conference room for their operations center. Teddy figured that there would always be someone there who could take the printout as evidence.
The walk from the nonperishable warehouse to the administrative buildings was shortest if you cut across the open quadrangle, and Teddy was in a hurry to deliver his data to the team before he got cold feet. He failed to see the door to the CID office open slightly and Cutter look out. Teddy’s short-stepped fast walk brought a smile to the face of the agent even though the man had nothing to smile about. He frowned and sm
iled at the same time. There was no reason why the clerk should be hurrying over to the depot commander’s office, especially in the middle of the afternoon. Cutter’s intuition was fully operative and was being augmented by his paranoia.
Cutter stepped out of his office. “HEY! TED!”
The clerk stopped walking and turned in the middle of his step, nearly falling down.
Cutter’s instincts sensed that the clerk was scared silly and was trying to hide something. “Come here.”
“Sorry, Sergeant … I’ve got some important papers the Colonel wants, right now!” Teddy tried leaving but Cutter took the couple of steps that separated them faster than an attacking tiger.
“Now what could be so important?” Cutter sneered. “Let me have a little look.”
“Let me go!”
“Get your ass over to my office—now!”
The clerk tried escaping from the fat agent, but Cutter saw the bulge in his pocket and removed the thick envelope before he could get away. “Give that back to me!” The tone in Teddy’s voice gave him away.
“Oh, you want this back?” Cutter sensed that he had something that concerned him. “Teddy … you weren’t going to screw me over, were you?”
The fear in the clerk’s eyes answered the agent.
“Well, Teddy. You and I are going to have to go for a little boat ride…”
“Hi, Ted.” The voice came from behind the agent.
The warehouse clerk looked over the agent’s shoulder and recognized the sergeant who had been in the warehouse and had asked about the starlight scopes. There was a black captain standing behind the sergeant and a couple more very mean-looking soldiers carrying rifles.
“Sergeant Cutter!” Captain Youngbloode smiled. “I’ve brought Sergeant Woods over so that you can question him.”
Cutter shook his head. “Later … wait in my office … I’m busy right now.”
Teddy looked at Woods and shook his head. “Don’t leave—”
Cutter gave the skinny clerk a hate-filled look. “Shut up!”
“Don’t leave me with him…”
Black Market Page 15