Black Market

9

Using a tine of his fork, Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky punctured each of the three sunny-side-up eggs staring at him from his breakfast platter that Sunday morning. He lathered on a thick wave of ketchup, then buttered and spread strawberry preserves on a row of four hot toasted bialy halves. He was ready to rock and roll.

The superb greasy-spoon meal was his usual breakfast: corned beef hash, eggs, and bialys. The place was the Dream Doughnut Coffee at Twenty-third Street and Tenth Avenue. The meal arrived at the table approximately three hours into his day shift. Stemkowsky had been looking forward to the food all through his first dreary hours on the road.

Harry Stemkowsky almost always went through the same exact thought process while he was devouring breakfast at the Dream…

It was so unbelievably good to be out of that Erie VA hospital, that piss-and-shitting hole. It was just so goddamn tremendous to be alive again. He had a valid reason to keep going now, to get really psyched about his life.

And it was all thanks to Colonel David Hudson. Who happened to be the best soldier, the best friend, one of the best men Stemkowsky had ever met. Colonel Hudson had given all the Vets another chance. He'd given them the Green Band mission to get even.

Later that same morning, as he slalomed through the deep slush of Jane Street in the West Village, Colonel David Hudson thought he might be seeing apparitions. He leaned his head out of the half-rolled window of the Vets taxi. His green eyes sparkled intensely against the street's murky gray.

He shouted ahead into the cold driving rain, the dripping winds ripping and grabbing at his face. “You're going to rust out there, Sergeant. Get your pitiful ass inside.”

Harry Stemkowsky was perched solidly on his familiar, battered aluminum wheelchair. He was huddled zombielike in the drowning rain, right in front of the entrance of the Vets garage.

It was an incredibly moving sight, probably more sad than weird, Hudson thought. A true retrospective on what was ultimately accomplished in Vietnam. There was Harry Stemkowsky, as poignant as any journalist's picture taken of the wounded in the Southeast Asia combat zone. Hudson could feel his jaw muscles tighten and the beginnings of an old rage. He fought against it successfully. This wasn't the time to allow himself the luxury of personal feelings. This wasn't the time to wallow in old, pointless anger.

Stemkowsky was grinning broadly by the time David Hudson jogged to the weathered door of the Vets garage. “You're section eight for life, Sergeant. You're out of your mind,” Hudson said firmly. “No explanations accepted.”

But he was beginning to smile. He knew why Stemkowsky was waiting outside, knew all the Vets' sad sack stories by heart now. He was betting everything on knowing the Vets at least as well as he knew their military histories.

“I-I wha-wanted to be ri-right he-here. When, when you got in. That-that-that's all it was, Cah-Cah-Colonel.”

Hudson 's voice softened. “Yeah, I know, I know. It's real good to see you again, Sergeant. You're still an asshole, though.” With an audible sigh, Colonel David Hudson bent low and easily scooped up the hundred-and-thirty-seven-pound bundle of Harry Stemkowsky with his powerful right arm.

Since the spring offensive of 1971, Stemkowsky had been a helpless cripple. He had also been a violent, totally incurable stutterer ever since he'd been splattered with seventeen rounds from a Soviet SKS automatic rifle. A pitiful wreck, right up until a few months ago, anyway.

As he pushed his way to the top of the cramped, musty stairway inside Vets, Hudson decided not to think about Vietnam anymore. This was supposed to be an R &R party. Green Band was a rousing operational success so far. George Thorogood and the Destroyers' “Bad to the Bone” blared loudly from the room above. Good tune. Good choice.

“It's the colonel himself!”

As he stalked inside a large, drab yellow room on the second floor, David Hudson heard shrill hollers and shouts all around him. For a moment he was embarrassed by the clamor. Then he thought about the fact that he'd given these twenty-six veterans another lease on their lives, a purpose that transcended the bitterness they had brought back from Vietnam.

“The colonel's here! Colonel Hudson's here. Hide the girls.”

“Well, shit. Hide the good Johnnie Walker booze, too… Just kidding, sir.”

“How the hell are you, Bonanno? Hale? Scully?”

“Sir… we goddamn did it, didn't we!”

“Yes, we did. So far, anyway.”

“Sir! It's great to see you. Went just like you said it would.”

“Yeah. The easy part did.”

The twenty-six men continued to cheer. Hudson shielded his eyes as he stared around at the dingy room where they'd been plotting together for almost a year and a half. He scanned the rows of familiar faces, the scraggly, home-cut beards, the unfashionably long hairstyles, the drab green khaki jackets, of the Vets. He was home. He was home, and he was obviously welcome. He could feel the vibrations of unadulterated warmth that these men felt toward him. And for one brief moment Colonel David Hudson almost lost control. There was a tightening in his throat, a feeling of moisture in his eyes.

Finally he offered a wry, conspiratorial smile. “It's good to see you all again. Carry on with your party. That's an order.”

He ambled on, gripping hands, greeting the rest of the Vets group: Jimmy Cassio, Harold Freedman, Mahoney, Keresty, McMahon, Martinez -all men who hadn't been able to fit back into American society after Vietnam, all men he'd recruited for Green Band during the past sixteen months.

As he walked, he thought deeply about his men, his final combat command-the final mission.

The twenty-six Vets were antisocial, chronically unemployable; they were dramatic losers by the standard American measurements of success and accomplishments. At least half of them still suffered some form of PTSD, the post traumatic stress disorder so common among war veterans, an illness that, startlingly, had tripled after Vietnam. PTSD involved constantly reexperiencing combat trauma in an endless series of flashbacks, nightmares, extremely intrusive memories. Among other things, PTSD seemed to cause emotional numbing, a kind of paranoid-schizy withdrawal, from the external environment, sometimes compounded with the guilt of having survived.

David Hudson knew this from personal experience: he still suffered from PTSD himself. He suffered more pain than anyone would ever be permitted to know.

The twenty-six men packed into the cabdrivers' locker room had performed spectacularly in Vietnam and Cambodia. Every one of them had served under Hudson at one time or another. Each man was a highly trained technical specialist; each had a unique skill no one other than Hudson seemed to want or need in civilian society. Steve “the Horse” Glick-man and Paul “Mr. Blue” Melindez were the finest rifleman-sniper team Hudson had ever commanded in the field.

Michael Demunn and Rich Scully were experts at ordnance, at assembling and creating complex plastique explosives in particular.

Manning Rubin could have been making a thousand a week for either Ford or GM. If his skill at fixing automobiles had been matched by patience, just a little ability to handle suburban bullshit…

Davey Hale had an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything, including the Wall Street Stock Market.

Campbell, Bowen, Kamerer, and Generalli were high-caliber professional soldiers and mercenaries. Since Vietnam they'd soldiered for pay in Angola, in San Salvador, even in the streets of Miami. The combat group was particularly lethal at close-quarter, hand-to-hand urban street fighting. That single fact would be their key advantage entering the second stage of the Green Band mission.

“All right, gentlemen. We have to do some homework now,” Hudson said. “This is the last time we'll have the chance to review these details and any of our final operating schedules. If this sounds like a formal military briefing, that's because it damn well is.”

David Hudson paused and methodically took in the circle of assembled faces. Each was turned toward him with intense concentration. There was a bond in this intimate war room, he knew, that went beyond Green Band. It was a bond of blood and hopefulness, forged out of a shared, tragic history.

“Personal anecdote, gentlemen… At the highly-thought of JFK Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, they repeatedly told us that ‘genius is in the details.’ When the truth of that finally sank in, it held like nothing I've ever learned before or since.

“So I want to go over the final details one last time. Maybe two last times with all of you. Details, gentlemen… if we master the details, we win. If the details master us, we lose. Just like in ' Nam.”

Vets I had purposely modeled his presentation after the concise and always very technical Special Forces field briefings. He wanted these men to vividly remember Vietnam now. He wanted them to remember precisely how they'd acted-with daring and courage, with dedication to the United States, with honor at all times.

Hudson could feel his body pulsing and tingling lightly He spoke to the men without any written notes-everything was committed to memory.

His personal grasp of minutiae and military theory was riveting that afternoon in early December. For nearly two and a half hours Colonel David Hudson painstakingly reviewed every foreseeable scenario, every likely and even unlikely change that might occur up to, and including, the end of the Green Band mission. He used combat-proven memory aids: reconnaissance topographical maps, mnemonics of memorizing, army-style organizational charts.

A deep graveled voice sounded from the shadowy rear of the Vets locker room. One of the combat mercenaries, a southern black named Clint Hurdle, had taken the floor.

“Why you so sure there won't be no attacks of conscience? This going to heat up now, Colonel. Who says nobody going to fuck up and run?”

There was a startled hush around the small room.

Hudson considered the question very carefully before answering. He had, in fact, posed almost the same question hundreds of times in his own head. He always assumed the worst, then created a number of alternative ways to effectively deal with, and avoid, disaster.

“Nobody, not a single one of you men, broke during combat… Not even in a war none of you wanted or believed in. Nobody broke in POW camps! Not one of you!… None of you will break now, either. I'm fully prepared to bet everything we've worked for on that.”

There was an uncomfortable silence after the difficult question and emotional answer. David Hudson's intense green eyes slowly surveyed the Vets' dressing room one more time. He wanted them to feel in their guts that he was sure about everything he'd just said. The way he was sure. Even though it might not look it, every man in the room had been carefully hand-picked from hundreds of possible vets. Every soldier in the room was special.

“If any one of you wants to leave, though, this is the time… Right now, gentlemen. This afternoon… Anybody?… Anybody who wants to leave us?…”

One Vet slowly started to clap. Then the rest of them. Finally all the Vets were solemnly clapping their hands. Whatever was going to happen, they were in it together now.

Colonel Hudson slowly nodded; the cocksure military commander once again took control.

“I've saved the foreign travel assignments, the specific assignments, until last. I'm not going to entertain any discussion, any disagreement at all, over these assignments. The operational environment is already confused. We will not be confused. That's another reason we're going to win this war.”

Hudson walked to a long wooden table, from which he began to pass out thick, official-looking portfolios. Each one had a white tag pasted carefully on the front. Inside the envelopes were counterfeit U.S. passports and visas, first-class airplane tickets, extremely generous expense monies, and copies of elaborate topographical maps from the briefing. The genius was in the details.

“Cassio will go to Zurich,” Hudson began to announce.

“Stemkowsky and Cohen have Israel and Iran… Scully will go to Paris. Harold Freedman to London, then on to Toronto. Jimmy Holm to Tokyo. Vic Fahey to Belfast. The rest of us stay put right here in New York.”

A schoolboy's groan went up. Hudson silenced it instantly with a short, chopping hand motion.

“Gentlemen. I'll say this one time only, so you have to remember it… While you're in Europe, in Asia, in South America, it is absolutely essential that you act, that you groom and dress yourselves, in the particular style we've laid out for you. Remember the catch phrase: Nothing succeeds like excess…

“All of your air travel arrangements are first class. All of your clothing and restaurant expense money is meant to be spent. Spend that money. Throw it around. Be more extravagant than you've ever been in your lives. Have fun, if you can under the circumstances. That's an order!”

Hudson eased up. “For the next few days you have to be self-assured, successful American business types. You have to be like the people we've been studying on Wall Street for the past year. Think like a Wall Street man, look like one, act like a high-powered Wall Street executive.

“At oh-four-thirty, you'll be given self-respecting corporate haircuts, shaves, and-believe it or not-manicures. Your wardrobes have been carefully selected for you, too. They're Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart-your favorite shops, gentlemen. Your shirts and ties are Turnbull & Asser. Your billfolds are from Dunhill. They contain credit cards and plenty of cash in the appropriate denominations you'll need in your respective countries.”

He paused, and his eyes roamed slowly across the room. “I think that's all I have to say… except one important thing. I wish you all the very best luck possible. I wish you the best, in the future after this mission… I believe in you. Believe in yourselves.”

Colonel David Hudson shut his eyes briefly, then opened them. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. His face gave nothing away. It was a blank mask staring at the handful of men gathered in the dressing room.

He raised his arm, and in a tone that sounded almost religious, he said, “Now, our rendezvous with destiny.”