by Dale A. Dye
Hamhock was right, of course. Willy shoved his binoculars back into their case and swept his gaze over the other team members who were staring back, waiting for orders. To set up an effective ambush they’d have to run hard and fast ahead of the gooks, pick the perfect site along the trail, kill all or most of them, and then hump two dead bodies five or six klicks back to the border to their designated extract point. If something—anything at all—went wrong odds against surviving fell to zip-point-shit.
Willy closed his eyes for a moment and tried to bank the anger. All he could see was two self-righteous bastards leading a parade through long rows of U.S. government grave markers. Not on my watch. Not while I’ve still got a round in my weapon and one good eye to hold a sight picture.
“Benjamin stays here with the film, a radio, and one other man. If something goes wrong, they split for the border and get that film back to the rear. Shit-can anything you don’t really need and move out.”
Willy Pud didn’t like putting his people on the man-made trail just 100 meters above the NVA’s track, but there was no other way to buy time. Hard telling how long the gooks would linger over tea and bulling bush was too slow and noisy. He signaled for a halt and then signed his intentions to Hamhock up on point. L-shaped ambush. Just around the hard curve in the trail about 50 meters ahead. Go.
As Hamhock took off in a running crouch, Willy Pud moved up behind him where he’d be in position to quickly slot his men into the ambush pattern. That’s when Hamhock’s right boot snagged the tripwire. There was a blinding flash and the jungle tilted violently; Willy Pud saw Hamhock’s body slam into a tree and slump to the ground but it looked as if the man was falling up rather than down. So death rescinds the laws of gravity…
j
Willy Pud concentrated hard and felt his facial muscles begin to cooperate. When his left eyelid finally lifted, it felt like someone was drawing sandpaper across the eyeball. Still, he couldn’t blink. Not while Salt and Pepper stood glaring down at him. The bass hum in his ears changed pitch and Willy began to distinguish sounds, but he couldn’t move. His ears and his eyes would have to suffice for what was left of his life. No other parts of his body seemed willing to obey commands no matter how hard he tried to move. Somewhere in the distance to his left he heard the staccato rattle of a running firefight. That was likely his team scrambling for the border.
“They all gonna die, honky motherfucker—just like you gonna do.” Pepper reached inside a pocket of his flak jacket. The TT-33 Tokarev pistol looked like a toy in his huge hand. He crouched over Willy Pud and pressed the muzzle of the weapon into a blood-dotted nostril. “Take a deep breath, white boy. It’s gonna be your last.”
Willy Pud’s right eye cracked open as Pepper thumbed the hammer back and started to squeeze on the trigger. A white hand crossed into his field of vision and pushed the pistol away from his nose. He could feel fresh blood begin to trickle toward his lips. Salt crouched next to Pepper and peered into his face.
“Recon dude…a real bush-beast. He looks like a survivor, doesn’t he?”
Pepper moved the pistol back into view. “Not for long, he don’t...”
“Think it over, man.” There was a pleading note in Salt’s voice, and he inhaled deeply like a man about to deliver a speech. When he spoke, his voice had a wheedling tenor like an elementary school teacher dealing with a backward student. “He’s no oppressor, man. He’s a goddamn slave, a puppet just like we are.”
Pepper’s nostrils flared. He seemed to forget about Willy Pud for the moment as he casually turned the pistol toward Salt. “I ain’t no slave, asshole. Not no more. White man got his last licks in on me. Now it’s my turn.”
The muzzle of the pistol swung back toward Willy’s nose. Willy Pud wondered briefly if his old man would be sober when he went to the White House to collect a posthumous Medal of Honor. Probably not...and that would mean tears.
“Listen, man…” The white guy gently but firmly pushed the pistol away from Willy’s face. “It’s better to let the dude live. He might make it back. And if he does, he can’t keep it quiet. Think of a moral victory, think of the propaganda value. Dudes serving over here will know they’ve got other choices. They can walk off like we did, join the peoples’ revolution. We could wind up heroes, man—on both sides of the world.”
Pepper blinked once, twice, and then cut a wary glance around the jungle. Willy Pud had visions of the man as a juvenile delinquent on a street corner watching for cops. There was a guilty, furtive tic in the black man’s eyes as Pepper leaned over him and poked a finger into his chest.
“You get a pass this time, motherfucker. One time, that’s all. You make it back to The World, you pass the word…we out here…and we fighting the fuckin’ oppressors. Plenty of room for any black man wants to get out from under the white man’s yoke.” Pepper’s dark eyes wandered as he spoke in a low, angry growl. It was like listening to an overgrown kid trying to parrot a lesson he couldn’t remember very well.
Pepper rocked back on his heels, uncoiled, and pocketed the pistol. Willy Pud tried to watch him depart, but Salt filled the narrowing frame of his vision. “You’re lucky, man. Once he gets into that head trip, be doesn’t normally come out of it—until he kills somebody.”
Salt seemed to be pondering something as be glanced away up the trail toward his partner who was striding toward the distant sounds of gunfire. He worried his lower lip and twisted a gold ring on the third finger of his right band. When he pointed that hand at Willy Pud, the ring jumped into focus. A word? Name? Initials? CHE or C.H.E molded and carved into a heavy gold band.
The ring hand disappeared as Salt picked up his rifle and stood. He smiled to reveal straight white teeth and nudged Willy Pud’s ribcage with a muddy jungle boot. “Check out what’s happening back in the States, my man. Find out why you get used like a simple tool. This revolution is almost over—and your side lost.”
DANANG
“And they both just disappeared into the jungle? Nothing else was said?”
Willy Pud shook his head at the MACV colonel who had resumed his pacing. “That’s all I remember, sir. I passed out again pretty quick after the white guy walked off. Figured I was gonna die. Probably would have, but my team diverted the main body of gooks and then circled back to pick me up. They still wound up humping dead weight back across the border.”
The colonel scanned his notebook and then snapped it closed. “Let’s get back to that ring for a moment. You said the letters were C-H-E?”
“Yessir. I figure maybe those are the guy’s initials.”
“Do you recognize the name Ernesto Guevara?”
“Yessir. One of Castro’s boys, ain’t he?”
“Yes. He’s a violent communist revolutionary who’s become a sort of folk hero in Third World revolutionary circles. He goes by the name of Che, C-H-E.”
“Hard telling, Colonel. Maybe that’s what it meant. Both those guys talked like they were, you know…brainwashed or something. Lots of political crapola in the stuff they said.”
“Uh-huh. Lots of that going around these days.”
“Yessir. Most of the time it don’t mean nothing. Just guys who don’t know no better running off at the mouth, I figure.”
“You think it’s different with Salt and Pepper?”
“Yessir. Gotta be. I mean, a guy born in our country…he don’t say shit and do shit like they done unless he really believes it.”
“That sounds a lot like an apology, Staff Sergeant Pudarski.”
“No way, sir. I don’t owe those two assholes nothing, even if they did let me live. I’ll be the first sonofabitch to volunteer for the firing squad after the court-martial.”
“Hmmm, yes. Well, that about wraps it up here.” The MACV colonel seemed tense as he pocketed his notebook and extended his hand. “Thanks very much, Sergeant Pudarski. I’m damn glad you made it back.” Willy Pud looked up at the gleaming smile. If the man had a tail, it wou
ld have been wagging furiously. He reached for the proffered hand and asked the question that had been plaguing him ever since he discovered that he’d somehow survived a close encounter with Salt and Pepper.
“Colonel, who are those guys? Somebody must know.”
The colonel shoved the tape recorder into a map case and turned to leave the tent. “We’re checking the AWOL and deserter lists now, Pudarski. Given the photos, we should be able to put a name to the faces soon.”
“What happens when you know who they are, sir?”
“That depends on lots of things. It’s hard to say.”
“It ain’t hard to say what ought to happen to the bastards.”
“No, that’s not hard to say, Staff Sergeant Pudarski.” His smile faded and he pulled a small card out of his pocket. Warm and fuzzy time was apparently at an end. The colonel began to read in a fine baritone that carried the ring of ultimate authority.
“You are hereby advised that your mission, all the details thereunto pertaining, and the entire content of this debriefing session are classified Top Secret. You are to talk about this incident with no one unless you receive written orders to the contrary from competent authority in the MACV chain of command. Any violation of these direct orders will result in your prosecution under applicable provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and applicable laws of the United States. Do you understand?”
“Yessir.”
“Very well, Staff Sergeant Pudarski. Good night and please accept my sincere congratulations on your Medal of Honor. It’s well-deserved, I’m sure.” And that was the last Willy Pud saw of the MACV Colonel.
He spent his last night in Vietnam wishing he understood but he didn’t, not by a long stretch. He woke up in the morning washed by welcome waves of pain. Understanding might come later, or it might not. It was enough to be hurting, which meant he was alive.
NEW YORK
“God help me, it would have been different if his mother had lived. She had such a wonderful sense of values. She never lost that…even when I started making enough money to spoil them both rotten.”
The MACV colonel ran a finger between his button-down collar and a freshly shaved neck while trying to sense the mood of the man who’d just been told his only son was a traitor. There was not much the colonel could say to mitigate the hurtful facts, but he tried.
“It’s this rebellious streak that’s running through the country, Cleve. Goddammit, kids burning draft cards—even flags, for Christ’s sake! Some units in Vietnam are refusing to carry out lawful orders. And these are the same little shits who grew up starry-eyed over Kennedy.”
Cleveland Herbert Emory, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Emory Technology, turned away from the skyline view of the city provided by the glass panorama of his office windows and arched a shaggy eyebrow at his visitor. That look, flashed across the polished surface of boardroom tables, had disemboweled multimillion-dollar deal-makers.
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Let’s all join hands and dance around the Maypole. It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.”
“That didn’t stop a lot of kids from falling for it.” The MACV colonel took a deep breath and tried to ignore a nagging hot spot on his instep. The custom-made wingtips fashioned by his Chinese tailor in Cholon were giving him fits. And the jet lag he’d dragged across the International Date Line from Southeast Asia was making him more irritable than be should be in such delicate negotiations.
He reached over to unplug the cassette tape recorder that had occupied their undivided attention for the past hour, then shuffled a sheaf of eight-by-ten photographs and stuffed them back into a manila envelope.
Cleveland Emory had conducted enough negotiations in his life to recognize the symbolism. There was still a deal to be struck here. He left the window and walked over to sprawl in a leather chair at the elbow of the man whose phone call from Saigon had caused him to clear a very busy calendar. This was not the kind of business that could be conducted from behind his battleship of a desk or in a secluded alcove at The Four Seasons. Conspiracy was always dangerous. It required intense personal contact between conspirators, eyeball-to-eyeball and knee-to-knee where the stakes were on the table and the threat lines clearly drawn.
“I should have taken a hand when he started that radical crap in college, you know. It was SDS and all that lunacy. Hell, at first I thought it was some kind of fraternity. And then he volunteered to go to Vietnam—enlisted and in the infantry, for Christ’s sake! I thought sure he’d turned around, you know? Seen the error of his ways and cleared up some of his ridiculous ideas. I had the news placed in all the papers. My son…gonna fight the war with the tools his old man provides. What the hell happened?”
The MACV colonel consulted the notebook on his knee. “Records indicate he turned up missing less than sixty days after arrival in-country, Cleve. He was listed at AWOL but CID was looking for him along with a few others around Saigon. He apparently nosed around a few dives that were known VC fronts and then just disappeared. My professional opinion is that he enlisted and got himself sent to Vietnam intending to do just what he did.”
Emory arched both eyebrows for full effect and glared into the colonel’s florid face. “There’s no error here? No chance of mistaken identity?”
“Cleve, I’ve been on this thing exclusively since you called me and asked me to look into his status. As a senior intelligence officer, I’m not without power and influence. You’ve seen the pictures. You’ve heard the tape. And the ring clinches it. The one they call Salt is Cleveland Herbert Emory, Junior.”
The signet ring he’d worn for so long—the one he’d bad duplicated for his youngest son on the boy’s eighteenth birthday—felt like an ice cube on his finger. Emory rubbed it distractedly and pondered the stakes. There was just so much to lose, so much that had nothing to do with business or finance or efficiency or who builds the better mousetrap. The boy had made a stand. Totally, inconceivably, and irrevocably wrong—but he’d committed to his beliefs and taken a very stupid action. Hardheadedness seemed to be an Emory family trait. So now what?
“Is there a chance that he’ll survive?”
“Hard to say, Cleve...” Reaching down to unlace the troublesome shoe, the MACV colonel considered favors done and favors returned. His position seemed secure. “Survival in combat sometimes depends on nothing but dumb luck. He’s made it so far against the odds. My suspicion is that the North Vietnamese Army will likely order him and his cohort out of the field before too 1ong. The rumors are rampant among the troops over there, and they’ll likely continue as he’s done what they wanted him to do, which is embarrass the United States and give the anti-war people more ammunition. Assuming he survives, he’ll be more valuable to the Hanoi regime doing other things.”
“Such as becoming a propaganda tool…like that goddamned Jane Fonda and her ilk.”
“That’s a good bet, Cleve, given the way they do things over there. The question before us is what you intend to do about it.”
Emory winced visibly at the images running through his imagination. His only son a traitor and stumping for the goddamn communists? No amount of money, no proven track record of patriotism, no power on earth would ever erase the stain or restore the value of his good name in the world’s powerful business circles where breeding and background were the cornerstones of every transaction. If he sat on his hands and let the chips fall as they may, he’d have to resign, lose everything he’d fought so hard to create and slither into the shadows. That was simply unacceptable. The boy had called the dance, and as much as it might hurt to pay the piper, he would have to do it. The son of Cleveland Herbert Emory, Senior could not be allowed to surface in Hanoi as a goddamn communist puppet! There had to be a work-around here. Cleveland Herbert Emory, Senior, shifted mental gears and turned on the juice that had made him one of the most powerful businessmen in the world.
“
Who’s the colored guy?”
“Uncertain at this stage. Best guess is a draftee from St. Louis. Disappeared at about the same time your son did. A dimwit according to the record…part of McNamara’s One Hundred Thousand who couldn’t pass the qualifying exam in other circumstances. Black Power advocate. If he is the guy I think he is, he killed a white NCO before he went missing.”
“And this Polack who made the sighting?”
“Not a problem. Typical Marine NCO. Does as he’s told, and he’s under orders not to talk. He’s due to get the Medal of Honor at the White House at the end of the week. He’ll be too choked up to think about anything else.”
“How about the rest of the men who were with him?”
“Cleve, look…these rumors about two American turncoats have been circulating for months now. Nobody can believe—hell, nobody wants to believe—they might be true. If these Marines try to make an issue of what they saw, they’ll be laughed at, maybe even held in-country while some sort of investigation is conducted. They’ll let it drop and get out while they can. Meanwhile, the Army—for obvious reasons—has got this thing classified tighter than a popcorn fart. We are denying everything and putting it all down to bush rumors. There’s really not a problem here if we do the right thing. Without proof, it’s all smoke and mirrors, Cleve. And I’ve got the only proof: photos, negatives, and the only copy of the debriefing tape. Nobody in the official chain of command even knows I went to Danang to conduct that debriefing.”
“Loose ends, Justin…they can bite you in the ass. Your story includes a Navy doctor and Pudarski’s commanding officer.”
“The doctor heard nothing, Cleve. He’s on his way home with a gong for patching up the hero of the hour. Leave the Marine captain to me.”
Emory looked into the colonel’s cold eyes and knew instantly he was on solid ground. The man understood the deal and all its ramifications.
“How long have we been doing business with each other, Justin?”