The Line

CHAPTER 5

“Sergeant Major Skibicki,” Falk said, raising his voice so the man heard him, “take charge of the formation!”

Boomer looked at the senior NCO who walked to the front of the gray-clad phalanx of soldiers. Skibicki was a short man with a barrel chest and gray hair. His face had the leathery look of a man who spent most of his waking hours in the elements. Boomer noticed that one side of Skibicki’s skull was slightly concave, and a nasty scar lay there under his thinning hair. The name sounded vaguely familiar to Boomer, and he tried to recall if he’d served with the sergeant major sometime in the past.

Skibicki immediately began barking commands, moving people about until they had enough room between each soldier to do the exercises. Then they began: pushups, situps, crunches — a whole regimen of muscle-numbing work.

Boomer had thought he was in shape, but the older man put them through exercises Boomer hadn’t done since he’d gone to scuba school several years ago. He noted Sergeant Vasquez at the front of the PT formation.

She was quite an impressive figure in shorts and T-shirt as she pumped out pushups, the muscles in her arms rippling from the exertion.

In twenty minutes, they were done. Skibicki reformed the unit and returned it to Colonel Falk. The XO gave instructions for the various ability group runs and dismissed the soldiers to finish the physical training on their own. He waved for Boomer to come over as the groups dispersed.

“I’d like you to meet our sergeant major,” Falk said, indicating Skibicki.

“This is Major Boomer Watson. Major, Sergeant Major Skibicki.”

“Sir,” Skibicki extended a callused hand. Boomer met the hard grip and they stared at each other for a second before the sergeant major let go.

“Skibicki’s the man you need if there’s anything you want,” Falk said.

He pushed a button on his watch.

“Well, I’ve got to get running.” With that, the Colonel took off, his skinny legs carrying him rapidly away.

“Where are you in from, if you don’t mind me asking?” Skibicki said.

“I’d prefer not to say,” Boomer replied.

Skibicki nodded to himself, accepting the sentence as a fact rather than a rebuke. Boomer figured Skibicki could find out more about him with one phone call using the NCO old boy network than he himself could tell him.

Skibicki cocked his head like an old dog trying to remember a scent.

“Was your father in the service?” he asked.

Boomer nodded. “Yes.”

“Mike Watson? Special Forces?”

“Yes.”

Skibicki nodded.

“I thought so. I served with him in Vietnam. He was a good man. He saved my life.”

Boomer stiffened. He’d never met anyone who’d known his dad in Vietnam. He’d read the official notification of death and pored over the Medal of Honor citation numerous times, but the pieces of paper gave him little information.

“Were you with him when he was killed?”

Skibicki grimaced and tapped the left side of his head where Boomer had noticed the slight depression in the skull.

“I got hit in the head during that mission. Damn near killed me. Now I got a steel plate. I was a young E-Five, full of piss and vinegar on my first tour with Special Forces.

Your dad got me out of there still breathing.”

Boomer leaned forward.

“I’d like to talk with you about my dad. I never really knew him or what happened.”

Skibicki nodded.

“You were what — nine, ten? — when he died?”

“Ten.”

“I remember him having pictures of his wife and son in the team house at the launch site. He was a good man.”

Skibicki idly rubbed the side of his head.

“Are you sure you want to know what happened?”

“Of course I want to know,” Boomer said.

The sergeant major looked at him hard.

“You know the saying’let sleeping dogs sleep?” or something like that.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you don’t want to know what happened to your dad.”

Boomer returned the sergeant major’s look, his body stiffening.

“I want to know.”

Skibicki nodded “OK.

“You’re going to be here a while, right? We’ll talk. Right now, we need to finish PT.”

“Sir, there’s an encrypted message for the commander in here,” Boomer held out the one-inch binder that he’d picked up from the Fort Shafter Secure Communication/ Intelligence Facility (SCIF). The binder contained all the classified messages for the TASOSC received during the past twenty-four hours.

“All the rest is routine traffic decoded by the SCIF and I’ve Xeroxed copies and put them in the appropriate boxes.”

Lieutenant Colonel Falk looked up from the mound of paperwork that always covered his desk. He turned around and pulled open the drawer of a secure file cabinet behind him. Falk removed a small pad and tossed it to Boomer.

“Break out the message and give me a hard copy to put in the CO’s reading file.” He noted Boomer’s surprise.

“I know that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done, but Colonel Coulder’s time is too important — or at least that’s what he thinks — to be wasted on breaking out messages, and he delegated it to me, and I’m delegating it to you.

Like you said yesterday, you do have a TS Q clearance.

He’s got a briefing at 0900 in the conference room and I don’t have time right now.”

“Yes, sir,” Boomer said, taking the onetime pad with him to his desk in the next tunnel. Sergeant major Skibicki wasn’t in from PT, and Boomer was anxious to talk to him.

Boomer sat down and matched up the page number on the pad to the indicator at the start of the message. A onetime pad consists of sheets of six-letter groups. Boomer took the unintelligible six-letter groups on the actual message, matched them with the randomly generated groups on the onetime pad and, using a tri graph which had standard three-letter combinations, he was able to decipher the message.

Despite all the advances in technology, a onetime pad was still the most secure way to send a message because there were only two copies of the pads in existence-the sender had one and the receiver had one.

Because the pad letters were randomly generated by a computer, there was no “code” involved that could eventually be broken down.

The only problem, thus Boomer’s surprise, was that the owner of the onetime pad was supposed to be the one decoding the message. Having someone else do it was a breach of security. Boomer knew that on A teams, detachment commanders sometimes gave the team pads to their communications sergeants to make message sending and receiving easier because commo men had the three letter groups on the tri graph memorized, but he’d never agreed with that policy. He also wondered why the TASOSC commander was even using a onetime pad given the sophisticated transmitting and receiving machinery available at the Fort Shafter SCIF. An A Team used the pads because they only had a limited capability to carry encrypting machinery — thus the code itself had to be unbreakable. At fixed stations like Fort Shafter, the encryption usually was in the sending and receiving technology.

The letters flowed out under Boomer’s pencil and the message slowly took form. He was surprised to see a Javis report appear — a format for a water drop zone report used by Special Forces.

Boomer took the deciphered six letter groups and made sense of them on another sheet of paper:

As Boomer finished, a shadow appeared over his desk.

He looked up into the cold gray eyes of the full-bird colonel he’d glimpsed at a distance during PT. Boomer glanced down at the nametag on the man’s starched fatigues and confirmed the identification: coulder “What are you doing, major?” The voice was the same high-pitched one he’d heard coming from Coulder’s office the previous day.

Boomer snapped to his feet, holding out the piece of paper on which he had just written the formatted message.

“Breaking out a message received this morning, sir.”

Colonel Coulder snatched the message out of Boomer’s hand and looked at it, then his eyes swiveled back up.

“Who told you to decrypt a message addressed to me?”

“Colonel Falk, sir. He said to—”

“When my name is on a damn message, major, I want to see it immediately. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who the hell are you anyway?” Coulder demanded, slipping the message into a file folder under his left arm.

Boomer was very glad he had gotten his hair cut yesterday afternoon and shined his boots right after physical training.

“Major Watson, sir. I’m here TDY.”

Coulder searched his mind.

“Are you the fellow Falk told me about yesterday?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“From Bragg?”

“Yes, sir,”

“Why are you here?” Coulder demanded.

“Area orientation, sir,” Boomer answered.

Coulder stared at him for a few seconds, then held out his hand. At first Boomer thought he was offering to shake hands, but his next words corrected that assumption.

“Give me the pad,” Coulder ordered.

Boomer passed over the onetime pad. Coulder glanced at it, then turned and walked away, going into the glassed off conference room at the end of the tunnel. Boomer sank into his chair. The original copy of the message he had transcribed with its six-letter groups was still on the pad of paper.

He now understood Wilkerson’s anger and frustration yesterday. The last person he’d want to talk to after getting relieved of command was Coulder. Boomer hurriedly tore the top page off and stuffed it into his fatigue pocket, not wanting to risk another encounter with Colonel Coulder over the message.

Sergeant Major Skibicki had walked in while Coulder was addressing Boomer. The old NCO slowly sank down into his squeaking desk chair after the colonel departed and kicked his feet up on the scarred desktop.

“Finally met the boss, I see.”

“Is he always so friendly?” Boomer asked.

“You caught him on one of his good days,” Skibicki said.

“Normally he would have locked your heels.”

“I’m getting a little too old for that kind of crap,” Boomer said.

“I am too old for that crap,” the sergeant major said.

“He tried to do it to me once, right after he cacae here and took over.

Right in front of the troops at an inspection formation.

Talk about unprofessional. I told him he could shove that shit up his ass. We haven’t had too many discussions since then.”

“What did he do?” Boomer asked.

“He tried to get me relieved, but SO COM told him he could shove that.

I was the only Special Forces sergeant major on the island and they were damned if they were going to PCS another one here just because he couldn’t get along with me.” Skibicki grinned.

“Besides, the sergeant major at SO COM Billy Lucius, owes me one, and I want to retire here. Don’t need to be getting shipped back to the states and turn right around.”

“How many years do you have in sergeant major?”

“Twenty-nine.” Skibicki gestured around the tunnel.

“I came on active duty in’ sixty-four; then had a two-year break in service after coming back from my third tour in’nam in 72. Back on active duty in‘74, so I seen it all.

“This assignment is my last hurrah. Baby-sitting a bunch of headquarters pukes and making sure the police call outside the tunnel is done property. I’ve got more time in uniform than any other person on this entire island. I’ve got more time in grade than Sergeant Major Finley up at the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield. Yet here I am.”

“How did you—” Boomer halted as Sergeant Vasquez walked in and handed a folder to Skibicki.

“Here’s the duty roster, sergeant major.” She gave Boomer a smile as she exited the tunnel.

The gesture hadn’t been lost on Skibicki.

“Damn Army sure has changed. You saw her at PT?”

“Yeah. Made me feel out of shape,” Boomer said.

“Well, be careful of her,” Skibicki warned.

“We get a lot of people through here TDY, and Vasquez likes playing with’em. Don’t matter if it’s officer or enlisted as long as it has a hard dick. Get your head between her thighs and she’ll crush it like a melon.”

“I’ll keep that in—” Boomer froze, his eyes locked on a figure that had just walked out of the middle side tunnel and was heading for the glassed-in conference room.

Boomer slid his seat back until he was hidden from view by the bank of classified filing cabinets.

“What’s the matter?” Skibicki asked, his eyes following Boomer’s.

“You know that guy?”

“Yeah, I know him,” Boomer answered. The door to the conference swung shut and through the glass. Boomer could see the backs of the people attending the meeting, all facing Colonel Coulder who stood at a podium, a map of the island of Oahu pinned to the easel to his left rear. Sergeant Vasquez walked in, handed a folder to Coulder and left the conference room. She gave Skibicki and Boomer another smile as she exited the tunnel.

Boomer, still hiding himself from direct view of the people in the room, watched as Coulder started talking, wishing he could read lips.

“What are they talking about in there?”

Boomer asked.

The sergeant major shrugged.

“Don’t know. I’m the senior enlisted man in the tunnel and no one tells me shit.”

“Who are they?”

Skibicki looked and checked off people with a glance.

“As you know, the full bull at the podium is our exalted leader.

Colonel Coulder. The guy with the thinning blond hair works in J-3, Operations, up at USPACOM. I don’t recognize the major or the other colonel who”—Skibicki threw a questioning glance at Boomer—“you apparently know, but I don’t.”

“That colonel is from the JCS. He’s the Special Operations liaison.

His name is Decker,” Boomer said.

Coulder was slapping his pointer on the blue marking ocean, off to the west of the island. Suddenly Coulder stopped and looked straight through the glass at the sergeant major. He snapped something and the major stood up and drew the curtains on the far side of the glass, blocking off the view.

“Assholes,” Skibicki said angrily.

“That’s fucking insulting.

I’ve served in this man’s Army since Christ was a corporal, and they’re hiding things from me like they don’t trust me.” He rubbed his grizzled chin.

“Special Ops liaison from the JCS, eh? There’s some weird shit going on around here lately.”

Boomer relaxed slightly now that he couldn’t be spotted, but he was anxious to be out of the tunnel before the meeting broke up and Decker came out. He was absolutely the last person Boomer had expected to run into here.

Boomer turned his attention to more personal matters.

“Hey, sergeant major, is there someplace on post where we can go get a cup of coffee and a donut?” Boomer asked, wanting to get the story about his father out of the old man as much as he wanted to avoid Decker.

“Yeah.” Skibicki stood and grabbed his green beret, squashing it down on his iron-gray hair.

“Let’s go talk. It stinks in here.”

The snack bar Skibicki took Boomer to was an old World War II structure. One of thousands of “temporary” buildings, constructed during the war at dozens of Army posts and then used for the next fifty years by the military, another curious example of the spending practices of the defense establishment. Billions could be spent on a new airplane, but purchasing a new boot or better living quarters for the actual soldier was usually very low on the priority list. Boomer figured it was more a question of contractor and politician than soldier needs.

Inside the building. Boomer grabbed a couple of cups of coffee and a plateful of donuts and joined Skibicki who was joshing with the little old woman who worked the register.

“Boomer, meet Maggie Skibicki, my mom,” the sergeant major said.

“Mom, this young fellow is Boomer Watson.

I served with his dad.”

“Well, you are getting old, aren’t you. Ski? I don’t want to think what that says about me,” she joked.

“Pleased to meet you. Boomer,” Maggie said as she took his money.

Her face was wrinkled with the years, but her eyes were a piercing blue that had lost nothing over time. They gazed at Boomer, and he felt that look cut into him.

“Nice to meet you,” Boomer replied.

Skibicki led the way to a corner table where he sat down, his back square in the corner, facing the empty room.

“Mom’s been here at Shafter for over twenty years. She used to work up at Schofield Barracks.

“My dad was retired Navy. Mom’s what they call a Pearl Harbor survivor. She was living out by Pearl back in’fortyone.

Dad was on board the Enterprise, so it’s one of those strange twists of fate that she was here for the attack on Pearl Harbor and he wasn’t.

They used to joke about that all the time. He spent thirty years in the Navy. He died about four years back. Mom’s past mandatory retirement age, but she’s got a special exception from the post commander to work. She likes to get out and be around people.

You ever need to know anything about this island, you ask her.”

Boomer glanced across the room at the old woman with slightly different eyes. All he knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor were news clips and boring lectures at West Point.

“You need to go out there to Pearl,” Skibicki continued.

“It’s very interesting. Ask Maggie about it if you get the chance.”

“You said you served with my dad?” Boomer prompted.

Skibicki nodded. He reached into the breast pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a piece of cardboard and carefully unfolded it, revealing a faded picture inside.

“You ever heard of Projects B-50 or B-57?”

Boomer nodded.

“We used their after-action reports when I was in 10th Group to help write our team SOPS. B-50 and B-57 were the cross border operations 5th Group ran during the war to gather intelligence.”

Skibicki laid a photograph on the table top. A very young-looking Skibicki wearing tiger-stripe fatigues and sporting a CAR-15 stood next to another American, also wearing the distinctive fatigues and holding a short-barreled grenade launcher in one hand and an AK-47 in the other.

Four indigenous soldiers, dressed in fatigues and carrying AK-47s stood in front of the taller Americans. Boomer instantly recognized the second American as his father.

“There weren’t that many of us in S-F at any one time, although this was in’ sixty-nine when they were taking any Tom, Dick, and Harry and giving them a beret and shooting them across the borders because we were taking such high casualties,” the sergeant major explained.

“I was in the 173rd Airborne during my first tour, and when I went back for my second, they were hurting for bodies so they were taking even non-S-F people into the recon teams. Any idiot that was dumb enough to volunteer and had combat experience was accepted. So that’s how I became Special Forces-qualified in’ sixty-eight.”

He tapped the photo.”

“This was recon team Kansas.

Each team was named after a state. This picture was taken a week before we went on our last mission.”

Skibicki took a sip of coffee, then continued.

“Let me give you some background so you understand what happened.

“Sixty-eight and’sixty-nine were bad-ass years in the war. It was after Tet, and, despite what those pissant reporters said, we were kicking ass. The fucking NVA had run for the hills and was licking its wounds across the borders in Laos and Cambodia. The only time they showed up to fight was when they were sure they could hit us by surprise.

So in order not be surprised, in October of sixty eight the Blackboard Collection Plan was instigated by some Intelligence clink in Saigon.

The idea was to coordinate all surveillance and reconnaissance assets running operations near or over the borders.

“Project Gamma, of which project B-57 was a part, was the Special Forces’ contribution to the Blackboard effort.

And even though we only supplied six percent of the total flow of information to MACV, our stuff turned out to be over half the good intel. That was’cause we went in on the ground and put our beady little eyeballs right on the shit. We didn’t fly over at thirty thousand feet and guesstimate or drop in sensors that fucking deer could set off and the Air Force would waste a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of bombs “on making venison. When we said something was there, it was there right in front of us.

“Anyway, we would work off of humint — human intelligence — about possible enemy locations. We’d get some info, then go in and verify.

Well, in early’sixty-nine our sources started drying up. And the info we were getting was tainted. We lost several teams. They just went out, and it was like they disappeared into a black hole. We later found out what was happening: there was a double-agent at Nha Trang turning the teams.” Skibicki waved his hand.

“I’ll get back to that.”

“In May of’sixty-nine we got information about an NVA regiment staging right across the border from an A Camp at Long Le Chon so we were ordered to go in and check it out. Your dad was the team commander, I was the man with the radio, and we had four’little people’—Montagnard natives — along for security.”

Skibicki’s eyes were unfocused as he remembered.

“It was supposed to be a quick in and out, just to check to see if the bad guys were preparing to attack. It wasn’t straightforward though.

They moved us out of the normal launch site to another place. It was somewhere I’d never seen before and it sure wasn’t S-F run. We got a briefing from some CIA dude assigned to CCN — Combat Control North — and they gave us a spook straphanger. Your dad didn’t like that one bit, but that’s the bitch of being in the green machine; our’s is but to do and die, right?”

Skibicki didn’t wait for an answer.

“So we went in on one slick. We had two Cobras flying cover — two Cobras painted black. Air America at work. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff the CIA had working over there. Just the little I saw at that camp hinted at an operation beyond anything that’s ever been written or talked about.

“Everything went to shit from the word go. We didn’t go in where we were supposed to. I had no idea where the fuck we were but it certainly wasn’t across the border from Long Le Chon. Your dad was arguing with the spook. Right there on the fucking landing zone they’re having a Goddamn argument. Talk about giving you the shits.

Your dad wanted us out. The spook overruled him. Your dad had me come up on the guard net and call for extraction. CCN denied it and told us to continue mission. Except now we didn’t know what the fuck the mission was, other than go with this spook and watch his ass. And that guy was none too happy about us coming up on the radio trying to get out of there.”

Skibicki shook his head.

“If I’d have known then what I know now, I would have greased the spook right then and there and called in a’prairie fire’—that was our code word for emergency extraction. We had our own air assets and we could have gotten out, although there would have been hell to pay later. But we still had that good Army training: follow orders, even if you don’t know where the fuck they’re coming from. I’ll tell you one thing I learned from that: if you ever get in the position where you got to kill someone to keep the shit from hitting the fan, kill’em, drive on, and don’t say a fucking word about it. That’s what we should have done.

“But I hadn’t learned that yet. So, there we were over the border, moving west and north along this ridgeline to some mysterious fucking rendezvous when we got hit. We had one of the little people at point and he got his shit blown away.” Skibicki looked Boomer in the eyes.

“You ever been on the receiving end in an ambush?”

Boomer shook his head, remembering the screams of the wounded near the bus.

“But you been shot at right?”

“Yeah, I’ve been shot at.”

“Well,” Skibicki continued, “you know it isn’t like in the movies. It was confusing as crap. Your dad was screaming for us to break contact and move down ridge Not the preferred direction, but we didn’t have much choice since they already had the high ground. Of course the spook didn’t know our immediate actions drills, but he knew enough to get out of the way and run. We broke contact, leaving behind two of our little people dead and the rest of us all hit somewhere. I had shrapnel wounds all along my left side from a grenade, but fear can be a mighty motivator.

We beat feet, leapfrogging. Two men laying down a base of fire, two running, then alternating. The spook helped some, he had a Swedish K and he emptied a magazine now and then over our heads.

“To make a long story short, we ran until we hit the first piece of open ground we could find. The spook got on the radio and called in for extraction from his people. Then we got hit on the edge of the PZ.

Those son-of-a-bitches. whoever the fuck they were, wanted us bad. The spook got hit right at the start — caught a round through the chest. We lost the last two Montagnards and your dad took a round through his thigh. I was bandaging up the spook, trying to seal off his sucking chest wound, when I opened up the small ruck he was carrying, looking for anything I could use to block off the air coming out of the hole in his lung.

“There was gold in there. Four fucking bars of gold.”

Skibicki laughed bitterly.

“Of course that shit wasn’t very useful at the moment. That’s when I got hit again.” He tapped the side of his head.

“Lucky I got a thick skull.”

Skibicki fell silent and Boomer waited for a few seconds.

“Then what happened?” he finally asked.

“The black Cobra gunships came in. Your dad directed their fire using the spook’s radio. Jesus, he was great, Boomer.” Skibicki shook his head wonderingly at that day so long ago. “A true fucking professional. I was half out of it. I couldn’t see a damn thing; my eyes were full of blood, and I had a hell of a headache,” he said.

“I just kept firing in the general direction of the bad guys which wasn’t hard to do since we were surrounded.

“Your dad carried me out to the slick that came in. He threw me on board and he went back to get the spook. That was a big mistake. He was carrying the spook back when they got cut down. The bad guys must have brought up a heavy machine gun by that time and they opened up from the treeline. We got the bodies on board and the pilots got us the hell out of there in a hurry. The bird took a lot of hits on the way out but it got back in one piece.” Skibicki looked at Boomer.

“Your dad and the spook were KIA.”

“But that’s not what his citation read,” Boomer said. He knew a bit about classified operations and he was confused.

“How did my dad get a Medal of Honor for a cross-border mission? I thought all that stuff got buried deep. Hell, there’s guys who got wounded on some of those cross border missions who still can’t get VA treatment since their wounds aren’t recorded anywhere because they weren’t legally supposed to be where they were when they got hit.

The citation said he was killed defending an A Camp in South Vietnam, not across the border.”.

Skibicki gave a wicked grin.

“I did that. Me and the Special Operations Commander in-country. Colonel Rison. I was in the hospital recovering when Rison came to ask me what had happened. When I told him, he wrote up the award just as you saw it. The CIA backed the story. It was a trade-off. I kept silent about what really happened and your dad got the CMH. It was the least we could do for him.”

“What did happen?” Boomer asked. “What was that guy carrying gold for?”

“You know what CIA stands for, don’t you?” Skibicki didn’t bother to wait for an answer.

“Cocaine in America. Those guys were running a whole’nother show over there. Still probably are.”

“It was a drug operation?” Boomer asked, not as shocked as he probably should have been; his years in Delta had shown him a thing or two about the real world.

Skibicki shrugged.

“I don’t know that for sure, but what the hell else would that guy be carrying gold bars into the jungle for? He might have been paying some mercenary groups that were in the Cia’s employ. At least that was what the spooks briefed me afterwards, but I think that’s a bullshit cover story. If we were going in to pay off mercenaries, why didn’t we just land at the mercenaries’ camp.

If we were paying them, they should have been friendly, right?”

Skibicki shook his head.

“No, I heard enough and seen enough over there to know. It was a drug op. Gold for drugs, which they could turn a big profit on back here in the states. How the hell do you think they can fund all their bullshit? And those people who were after us wanted us a hell of a lot more than the VC and NVA usually did. They wanted us real bad to absorb the casualties they took.”

“But what about the Army?” Boomer asked.

“Didn’t the Special Ops commander — this Colonel Rison — do anything about his people getting caught up in that?”

“Listen, Boomer. I don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing, but let me tell you a few things I’ve learned in my time. One is that you don’t fuck with the CIA. And the other is that the CIA and the top ranks of the Army are wired in tight. It’s us guys wearing the green beanies who are on the outside. Everyone always thinks the CIA is some world unto its own, but you just need to look at its history to see that it was formed right out of the Army at the end of the Second World War. And its aims and the Army’s have never been very far apart. Hell, Boomer, whenever you give someone a whole lot of power, then cloak it in secrecy in the name of national security, you got the ingredients for some bad shit to happen.

“Hell, that whole fucking war was just like a big game for some of them people. Think about it. What the fuck were we doing? We didn’t fight it to win, and we didn’t fight it to lose. We just sort of dicked around until the damn civilians had enough of it and made us come home.”

Boomer had heard it all before from other veterans. He was surprised, though, when Skibicki leaned forward and grabbed his arm.

“You went to West Point, didn’t you? I heard you took the Presidential from your dad’s medal.”

“Yeah,” Boomer said, extracting his arm from the other man’s fierce grip.

“That’s pretty ironic,” Skibicki growled, “considering how it was West Pointers that got your dad killed.”

“What do you mean? You said it was the CIA.”

“Colonel Rison was a West Pointer. He told me about some of the shit that was going on. Hell, they tried to courtmartial him about six months after your dad got killed.”

“What happened to him?” Boomer asked.

Skibicki shook his head.

“He ran into the establishment and they broke him. And he was one of them too, a West Pointer, but they busted his ass. We damn near had the closest thing to a revolt that the U.S. Army ever saw when they arrested Rison at group headquarters in Nha Trang. A camps all over the country were locking and loading and ready to fight it out with the regular Army. Hell, all us guys in SOG were ready to fly into Saigon and waste those regular motherfuckers at MACV headquarters.”

“Rison was arrested?” Boomer asked.

“For what?”

“Remember that double agent I mentioned earlier?” Skibicki paused and seemed to consider what he was saying and then changed his mind.

“You don’t want to get into all that.” Skibicki waved a hand.

“Forget what I said all right? I’ve heard so much bullshit in twenty-nine years in the service that I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not. Forget it.”

Despite Boomer’s attempts at rekindling the subject, Skibicki refused to talk and Boomer reluctantly went with him back to the tunnel. He spent the rest of the morning going through the classified files, destroying out of date folders and inventorying what was left.

His mind was only half on his job, and just before lunch he cornered Skibicki, who was in the very rear of the tunnel, pulling maintenance on scuba equipment.

“Sergeant major, do you know someone at Bragg in the schoolhouse who can check records?”

“What kind of records?” Skibicki asked, carefully leaning a scuba tank against a wall locker.

“Q Course graduates. Or, more specifically, eighteen qualified officers.”

Skibicki nodded.

“Sure.” He glanced at the large dive watch on his wrist.

“Only problem is that it’s 1200 here.

That makes it 1700 on a Thursday afternoon on the east coast. They’ll all be at the Green Beret club at Bragg sucking down brews.”

“Can you do it first thing tomorrow?”

“Who do you want me to check on?”

“A major named Keyes.”

“The new CO for Alpha, 1st of the 1st?”

Boomer nodded.

Skibicki’s heavily tanned’ arms rippled as he hoisted the air tank and settled it in place in the wall locker.

“That battalion in Okinawa has been fucked up for twenty years, sir.

Never could quite figure out what was going on out there. They had that big shit storm eight years ago about running demo into Thailand and selling it on the black market.

Hell, 60 Minutes did a special on it. Then they had that plot to kill one of the company sergeant majors.”

Boomer had heard about some of that. It had been a bad blemish on the name of Special Forces in the media. Every so often there was an article about some Green Beret doing something stupid, and it tainted the entire Special Operations community. One of the most aggravating things for Boomer was when he walked into a bookstore and saw the book Fatal Vision with the green beret with the old 5th Group flash and the medical corps insignia on the cover.

The subject of the book, McDonald, had not even been Special Forces-qualified, yet he had always been referred to as the “Green Beret Doctor.”

There was no doubt that some Special Forces people went over the edge occasionally. When an organization attracted highly qualified people as S-F did, it invariably attracted its own share of highly qualified wackos. When Boomer had gone through selection for Delta Force, he had to go through severe physical and mental challenges that had knocked out over ninety-five percent of his classmates.

Then the survivors had undergone a rigorous psychological screening to find out if they could handle the stress of the job and were mentally stable.

In retrospect. Boomer found the psych screening amusing, although at the time it had been very serious — several otherwise highly qualified individuals who had passed all other tests had been washed out on the rd of the psych panel. Boomer had to wonder what kind of stable personality they were looking for: one that was capable of performing brutal tasks, yet not enough of a sociopath to ignore orders.

All those thoughts brought Boomer’s mind back to the matter of 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group.

“Lheard the battalion commander out there got relieved over that black market stuff.”

Skibicki took out talcum powder and began sprinkling it on the rubber cuffs of a dry suit.

“Nope. He finished his tour and got his little command box checked off. They said he wasn’t responsible. That he didn’t know what was going on in his own unit.”

“You heard anything about strange personnel procedures out there?” Boomer asked.

Skibicki put the talcum powder down.

“We don’t use this scuba gear too much here, but we’re authorized four dive slots. I pull one. Colonel Falk has one, and we got two open.”

He looked at the patch on Boomer’s chest.

“You definitely want to get some diving in while you’re here. We got some great water. I’ll sign you out a complete set.”

“I’d like that,” Boomer said.

Skibicki leaned back against the wall locker and folded his massive arms. He spoke slowly.

“Yeah, there’s some weird shit going on in 1st Battalion. I’ll check on that name for you.”

The scuba gear reminded Boomer of the message in his pocket.

“One other thing, sergeant major. Do you know of a jump scheduled for early morning on the second?”

“Saturday morning? No.”

“Ever heard of a Task Force Reaper?”

“No.”

“Ever heard of a water DZ named Gumbo?”

“Yeah. That’s off the northeast corner of the island: We use it once in a while for water jumps.”

Boomer pulled the message out of his pocket and silently handed it over. Skibicki scanned it.

“If someone’s jumping Gumbo Saturday morning, I sure as shit should have heard about it because there ain’t too many people that can be drop zone safety officer for a water jump on this island other than me.

I should have been tasked for bodies to pull drop zone safety.

According to safety regs you have to have one boat per jumper. It’s a damn nightmare. I don’t know why the colonel hasn’t told me about this.”

“Maybe they aren’t having any safety boats,” Boomer said.

“Maybe the colonel doesn’t want you to know about these people coming in. He got kind of pissed when he saw that I had broken the message out.”

Skibicki’s eyes widened slightly.

“If they ain’t using safety boats, then they’re violating about twenty fucking regulations. And that means they’re planning on drowning their chutes and not recovering them. You know how much a chute costs?

Sounds to me like someone’s planning a real world operation.”

“Any idea where these people are from?” Boomer asked.

“Not a clue, and I don’t think I’ll be going to ask the colonel either.

He don’t want me to know, I don’t fucking know.” Skibicki answered, handing back the message.

Boomer pocketed the piece of paper and hesitated. He had one last question, triggered by Skibicki’s comments.

“Sergeant major, have you ever heard of an organization called The Line?”

Skibicki paused ever so briefly, then answered almost inaudibly, his eyes locked on the scuba locker.

“No.”

“You sure?” Boomer pressed, picking up the hesitation.

“The reason I’m asking is cause you said my dad’s death was caused by West Pointers and I’ve heard that there was this group of West—”

“I said no,” Skibicki snapped, glaring at Boomer. He turned and looked away for a few seconds, regaining his composure. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to Boomer. A green beret with a knife across it was embossed on it. Along the top it said PARATROOPER, RANGER, SPECIAL FORCES, WORLD TRAVELER, SINGER, SALESMAN, BULLSHIT ARTIST. Skibicki’s home and work address and phone numbers were listed in the center. At the bottom the rest of Skibicki’s qualifications were listed: revolutions started; orgies organized; ASSASSINATIONS PLOTTED; BARS EMPTIED; ALLIGATORS CASTRATED; TIGERS TAMED; VIRGINS CONVERTED; OTHERS SATISFIED.

“I only did that shit in my younger days,” Skibicki said, noting Boomer reading it. “you need anything, you give me a call, OK? I don’t know why you’re here, but it sounds like you might be needing some help.”

Boomer took the card.

“Thanks, sergeant major, but I’m just here TDY for a couple of weeks to take it easy.”

“Uh-huh,” Skibicki, said, turning back to the equipment.

“Well, be careful taking it easy.”