by Tom Clancy
The Bay boat cut power, trapped between two cutters. Warrant Officer English kept station a few hundred yards out while Oreza drove in close.
“Howdy,” the quartermaster said over his loud-hailer. “This is the U.S. Coast Guard, and we are exercising our right to board and conduct a safety inspection. Let’s everybody stay where we can see you, please.”
It was remarkably like watching people who’d just lost a pro-football game. They knew they couldn’t change anything no matter what they did. They knew that resistance was futile, and so they just stood there in dejection and acceptance of their fate. Oreza wondered how long that would last. How long before somebody would be dumb enough to fight it out?
Two of his sailors jumped aboard, covered by two more on the forty-one’s fantail. Mr. English brought his boat in closer. A good boat-handler, Oreza saw, like a warrant was supposed to be, and he had his people out to offer cover, too, just in case the bad guys got a crazy idea. While the three men stood in plain view, mostly looking down at the deck and hoping that it might really be a safety inspection, Oreza’s two men went into the forward cabin. Both came out in less than a minute. One tipped the bill of his cap, signaling all-clear, then patted his belly. Yes, there were drugs aboard. Five pats—a lot of drugs aboard.
“We have a bust, sir,” Oreza observed calmly.
Lieutenant Mark Charon of the Narcotics Division, Baltimore City Police Department, leaned against the door-frame—hatch, whatever these sailors called the thing—and smiled. He was dressed in casual clothes, and might have easily been mistaken for a coastie with the required orange life jacket.
“You handle it, then. How does it go in the books?”
“Routine safety inspection, and, golly, they had drugs aboard,” Oreza said in mock surprise.
“Exactly right, Mr. Oreza.”
“Thank you. sir.”
“My pleasure, Captain.”
He’d already explained the procedure to Oreza and English. In order to protect his informants, credit for the arrest would go to the coasties, which didn’t exactly displease the quartermaster or the warrant officer. Oreza would get to paint a victory symbol on his mast, or whatever they called the thing the radar was attached to, a representation of the five-leafed marijuana plant, and the crewmen would have something to brag about. They might even have the adventure of testifying before a federal district court—probably not, since these small-timers would undoubtedly cop to the smallest offense their attorney could negotiate. They would get word out that the people to whom they were making the delivery had probably informed on them. With luck those people might even disappear, and that would really make his task easy. There would be an opening in the drug ecostructure—another new buzzword Charon had picked up on. At the very least, a potential rival in that ecostructure was now out of business for good. Lieutenant Charon would get a pat on the back from his captain, probably a flowery thank-you letter from the United States Coast Guard and the U.S. Attorney’s office, not to mention congratulations for running such a quiet and effective operation that had not compromised his informants. One of our best men, his captain would affirm again. How do you get informants like that? Cap’n, you know how that works, I have to protect these people. Sure, Mark, I understand. You just keep up the good work.
I’ll do my best, sir, Charon thought to himself, staring off at the setting sun. He didn’t even watch the coasties cuffing the suspects, reading them their constitutional rights from the plastic-coated card, smiling as they did so. since for them this was a very entertaining game. But then, that’s what it was for Charon, too.
Where were the damned helicopters? Kelly asked himself.
Everything about the damned mission had been wrong from the first moment. Pickett, his usual companion, had come down with violent dysentery, too bad for him to go out, and Kelly had gone out alone. Not a good thing, but the mission was too important, and they had to cover every little hamlet or ville. So he’d come in alone, very, very carefully moving up the stinking water of this—well, the map called it a river, but it wasn’t quite large enough for Kelly to think of it that way.
And, of course, this is the ville they’d come to, the fuckers.
PLASTIC FLOWER. he thought, watching and listening. Who the hell came up with that name?
PLASTIC FLOWER was the code name for an NVA political-action team or whatever they called it. His team had several other names, none of them complimentary. Certainly they weren’t the precinct workers he’d seen on election day in Indianapolis. Not these people, schooled in Hanoi on how to win hearts and minds.
The ville’s headman, chief, mayor, whatever the hell he was, was just a little too courageous to be called anything but a fool. He was paying for that foolishness before the distant eyes of Bosun’s Mate 1/c J. T. Kelly. The team had arrived at oh-one-thirty, and in a very orderly and almost civilized way, entered every little hooch, awakening the whole population of farmers, bringing them into the common area to see the misguided hero, and his wife, and his three daughters, all waiting for them, sitting in the dirt, their arms cruelly tied behind their backs. The NVA major who led PLASTIC FLOWER invited them all to sit in a mannerly voice that reached Kelly’s observation point, less than two hundred meters away. The ville needed a lesson in the foolishness of resistance to the people’s liberation movement. It was not that they were bad people, just misguided, and he hoped that this simple lesson would make clear to them the error of their ways.
They started with the man’s wife. That took twenty minutes.
I have to do something! he told himself.
There’s eleven of them, idiot. And while the Major might be a sadistic motherfucker, the ten soldiers with him had not been selected exclusively for their political correctness. They would be reliable, experienced, and dedicated soldiers. How a man could be dedicated to such things as this, Kelly didn’t have the imagination to understand. That they were was a fact that he could not afford to ignore.
Where was the fucking reaction team? He’d called in forty minutes earlier, and the support base was only twenty minutes off by chopper. They wanted this Major. His team might also be useful, but they wanted the Major alive. He knew the location of the local political leaders, those the Marines hadn’t swept up in a superb raid six weeks earlier. This mission was probably a reaction to that, a deliberate response so close to the American base, to say that, no, you haven’t gotten us all yet, and you never will.
And they were probably right, Kelly thought, but that question went far beyond the mission for tonight.
The oldest daughter was maybe fifteen. It was hard to tell with the small, deceptively delicate Vietnamese women. She’d lasted all of twenty-five minutes and was not yet dead. Her screams carried clearly across the flat, open ground to Kelly’s watery post, and his hands squeezed the plastic of his CAR-15 so hard that had he thought or noticed, he might have worried about breaking something.
The ten soldiers with the Major were deployed as they should be. Two men were with the Major, and they rotated duty with the perimeter guards so that all of them could partake in the evening’s festivities. One of them finished the girl with a knife. The next daughter was perhaps twelve.
Kelly’s ears scanned the cloudy sky, praying to hear the distinctive mutter of a Huey’s two-bladed rotor. There were other sounds. The rumble of 155s from the marine fire base to the east. Some jets screaming overhead. None were loud enough to mask the high-pitched screech of a child, but there were still eleven of them, and only one of him. and even if Pickett had been here, the odds would not have been remotely close enough to try a play. Kelly had his CAR-15 carbine, a thirty-round magazine securely fixed in its place, another taped, inverted, to the end of that one, and two more similar sets. He had four fragmentation grenades, two willie-petes, and two smokes. His deadliest appliance was his radio, but he’d already called out twice and gotten an acknowledgment both times, along with orders to sit tight.
Easy thing to say back at t
he base, wasn’t it?
Twelve years old, maybe. Too young for this. There was no age for this, he told himself, but he’d never be able to change things alone, and there was no good for anyone in adding his death to those of this family.
How could they do it? Were they not men, soldiers, professional warriors like himself? Could anything be so important that they could cast aside their humanity? What he saw was impossible. It could not be. But it was. The rumbles of the distant artillery continued, dropping planned fire-missions on a suspected supply route. A continuous stream of aircraft overhead, maybe Marine intruders doing a Mini-Arc Light strike at something or other, probably empty woods, because most of those targets were just that. Not here, where the enemy was, but that wouldn’t help anything, would it? These villagers had bet their lives and their families on something that wasn’t working, and maybe that Major thought he was being merciful in just eliminating one family in the most graphic method possible instead of ending all their lives in a more efficient way. Besides, dead men told no tales, and this was a tale he would want repeated. Terror was something they could use, and use well.
Time crept on, slowly and rapidly, and presently the twelve-year-old stopped making noise and was cast aside. The third and final daughter was eight, he saw through his binoculars. The arrogance of the fuckers, building a large fire. They couldn’t have anyone miss this, could they?
Eight years old, not even old enough, not a throat large enough for a proper scream. He watched the changing of the guard. Two more men moved from the perimeter into the center of the ville. R&R for the political-action group, who couldn’t go to Taiwan as Kelly had. The man nearest to Kelly hadn’t had his chance yet, probably wouldn’t. The headman didn’t have enough daughters, or maybe this one was on the Major’s shit list. Whatever the real reason, he wasn’t getting any, and it must have frustrated him. The soldier’s eyes were looking in now, watching his squadmates partake in something that he would miss tonight. Maybe next time . . . but at least he could watch . . . and he did, Kelly saw, forgetting his duty for the first time tonight.
Kelly was halfway there before his mind remarked on the fact, crawling as rapidly as he could in silence, helped by the moist ground. A low crawl, his body as flat as he could manage, closer, closer, both driven and drawn by the whine that emanated from near the fire.
Should have done it sooner, Johnnie-boy.
It wasn’t possible then.
Well, fuck, it isn’t possible now!
It was then that fate intervened in the sound of a Huey, probably more than one, off to the southeast. Kelly heard it first, rising carefully behind the soldier, his knife drawn. They still hadn’t heard it when he struck, driving his knife into the base of the man’s skull, where the spinal cord meets the base of the brain—the medulla, someone had told him in a lecture. He twisted it, almost like a screwdriver, his other hand across the soldier’s mouth, and, sure enough, it worked. The body went instantly limp, and he lowered it gently, not from any feelings of humanity, but to limit noise.
But there was noise. The choppers were too close now. The Major’s head went up, turning southeast, recognizing the danger. He shouted an order for his men to assemble, then turned and shot the child in the head just as soon as one of his privates moved off of her and out of the way.
It only took a few seconds for the squad to assemble. The Major did a quick and automatic head count, coming up one short, and he looked in Kelly’s direction, but his eyes and his vision had been long since compromised by the fire, and the only thing he did see was some spectral movement in the air.
“One, two, three,” Kelly whispered to himself after pulling the cotter pin out of one of his frags. The boys in 3rd SOG cut their own fuses. You never knew what the little old lady in the factory might do. Theirs burned for exactly five seconds, and on “three,” the grenade left his hand. It was just metallic enough to glint with the orange firelight. A nearly perfect toss, it landed in the exact center of the ring of soldiers. Kelly was already prone in the dirt when it landed. He heard the shout of alarm that was just a second too late to help anyone.
The grenade killed or wounded seven of the ten men. He stood with his carbine and dropped the first one with three rounds to the head. His eyes didn’t even pause to see the flying red cloud, for this was his profession, and not a hobby. The Major was still alive, lying on the ground but trying to aim his pistol until his chest took five more. His death made the night a success. Now all Kelly had to do was survive. He had committed himself to a foolish act, and caution was his enemy.
Kelly ran to the right, his carbine held high. There were at least two NVA moving, armed and angry and confused enough that they weren’t running away as they should. The first chopper overhead was an illum bird, dropping flares that Kelly cursed, because the darkness was his best friend right now. He spotted and hosed down one of the NVA, emptying his magazine into the running figure. Moving right still, he switched magazines, circling around, hoping to find the other one, but his eyes lingered on the center of the ville. People scurrying around, some of them probably hurt by his grenade, but he couldn’t worry himself about that. His eyes froze on the victims—worse, they stayed too long on the fire, and when he turned away, the shape of it stayed in his eyes, alternating between orange and blue ghost images that wrecked his night vision. He could hear the roar of a Huey flared for landing close to the ville, and that was loud enough to mask even the screams of the villagers. Kelly hid behind the wall of a hooch. eyes looking outward, away from the fire as he tried to blink them clear. At least one more unhurt NVA was moving, and he wouldn’t be running towards the sound of the chopper. Kelly kept heading right, more slowly now. There was a ten-meter gap from this hooch to the next, like a corridor of light in the glow of the fire. He looked around the corner before making the run, then took off fast, his head low for once. His eyes caught a moving shadow, and when he turned to look, he stumbled over something and went down.
Dust flew up around him, but he couldn’t find the source of the noise quickly enough. Kelly rolled left to avoid the shots, but that took him towards the light. He half stood and pushed himself backwards, hitting the wall of a hooch, eyes scanning frantically for the muzzle flashes. There! He brought his CAR-15 to bear and fired just as two 7.62 rounds caught him in the chest. The impact spun him around, and two more hits destroyed the carbine in his hands. When next he looked up he was on his back, and it was quiet in the ville. His first attempt to move achieved nothing but pain. Then the muzzle of a rifle pressed to his chest.
“Over here, Lieutenant!” Followed by: “Medic!”
The world moved as they dragged him closer to the fire. Kelly’s head hung limply to the left, watching the soldiers sweep through the ville, two of them disarming and examining the NVA.
“This fucker’s alive,” one of them said.
“Oh, yeah?” The other walked over from the body of the eight-year-old, touched his muzzle to the NVA’s forehead, and fired once.
“Fuck, Harry!”
“Knock that shit off!” the Lieutenant screamed.
“Look at what they done, sir!” Harry screamed back, falling to his knees to vomit.
“What’s your problem?” the medical corpsman asked Kelly, who was quite unable to reply. “Oh, shit,” he observed further. “Ell-Tee, this must be the guy who called in!”
One more face appeared, probably the Lieutenant commanding the Blue Team, and the oversized patch on his shoulder was that of the 1st Cavalry Division.
“Lieutenant, looks all clear, sweeping the perimeter again now!” an older voice called.
“All dead?”
“That’s affirm, sir!”
“Who the hell are you?” the Lieutenant said, looking back down. “Crazy fucking Marines!”
“Navy!” Kelly gasped, spraying a little blood on the medic.
“What?” Nurse O’Toole asked.
Kelly’s eyes opened wide. His right arm moved rapidly across his ch
est as his head swiveled to survey the room. Sandy O’Toole was in the corner, reading a book under a single light.
“What are you doing here?”
“Listening to your nightmare,” she answered. “Second time. You know, you really ought to—”
“Yeah, I know.”
10
Pathology
“Your gun’s in the back of the car,” Sergeant Douglas told him. “Unloaded. Keep it that way from now on.”
“What about Pam?” Kelly asked from his wheelchair.
“We’ve got some leads,” Douglas replied, not troubling himself to conceal the lie.
And that said it all, Kelly thought. Someone had leaked it to the papers that Pam had an arrest record for prostitution, and with that revelation, the case had lost its immediacy.
Sam brought the Scout up to the Wolfe Street entrance himself. The bodywork was all fixed, and there was a new window on the driver’s side. Kelly got out of the wheelchair and gave the Scout a long look. The doorframe and adjacent pillar had broken up the incoming shot column and saved his life. Bad aim on someone’s part, really, after a careful and effective stalk—helped by the fact that he hadn’t troubled himself to check his mirrors, Kelly told himself behind a blank expression. How had he managed to forget that? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Such a simple thing, something he’d stressed for every new arrival in 3rd SOG: always check your back, because there might be somebody hunting you. Simple thing to remember, wasn’t it?
But that was history. And history could not be changed.
“Back to your island, John?” Rosen asked.
Kelly nodded. “Yeah. I have work waiting, and I have to get myself back into shape.”