The Specialists

Two

“Extremely interesting,” the colonel said. “It might be worthwhile to know just what you’ve encountered here, Eddie. Now just let me review my thoughts for a moment.” His eyes scanned the sheet of notes he had taken during the conversation. His mind caught at ideas, played with them. “Yes,” he said at length. “Yes. Extremely interesting. You know, Eddie, we haven’t seen you in quite some time. Helen said as much just the other morning. It might be pleasant for all of us if you could arrange a trip east. The day after tomorrow? That’s a Thursday, I doubt you’d have any trouble booking a flight. Good, we’ll expect you.”

The colonel pushed away from his desk, wheeled himself over to the west window. He looked down at the highway and across it to the river below. From that height and distance the Hudson appeared to be as clean and pure as it had been when he had learned to swim in it half a century ago.

But few things seemed as pure after close examination. In April his sister Helen had given him a particularly thoughtful gift on the occasion of his fifty-eighth birthday, a pair of high-quality German binoculars. He enjoyed watching birds through them, but he had learned not to use them when he looked out at the river.

Twenty-five miles to the north on that same river stood West Point, where a sportswriter was the first to name him The Old Rugged Cross. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to recapture the feeling, playing fullback out of the old single-wing formation, hitting the line hard, blocking for the halfbacks, taking the long snap from center and angling a punt deep for the coffin corner. His right foot ached pleasantly with the memory and he grinned hugely at the brief pain, thinking how utterly the mind and the body live at the mercy of one another.

“What’s so funny?”

He turned to smile at his sister. She had a tall drink in her hand and he took it from her. “Time-traveling,” he explained. “All of a sudden my foot hurt. It forgot it was somewhere in Laos.”

“Do you want a pill? I’ll—”

“No, it was just a memory twinge. I was remembering what it was like to kick a football. This” — he raised his glass — “is a superb idea. Aren’t you having one?”

“In a little while. Did the phone ring? I was in the yard.”

“I took it. It was Eddie Manso.”

“Is he in town?”

“No. He’s in Las Vegas, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, dear. And he’s gambled himself into poverty, I suppose. Shall we wire him a few dollars?”

“Not that at all. He’s run into something.”

“Oh?”

“Something rather interesting.”

Helen’s face had clouded briefly when he mentioned his legs, eased when he spoke of Manso. Now as she seated herself in one of the leather chairs she was positively beaming.

“I told Eddie he might come see us on Thursday,” he said.

“How marvelous.”

“Yes. I might be having the rest of the boys as well. It depends on several things. What time is it?”

“Just past four.”

“Do you feel up to some reconnaissance? An hour or so in the library, I should think. You may not get much because I don’t know exactly what you would want to look for.”

“Just what did Eddie tell you?”

“My notes are on the desk. Bring them over and I’ll brief you.”

While she was out he stayed in his chair at the window, alternately gazing out over the Hudson and rereading Churchill’s Marlborough. He had just gotten to the account of the duke’s first major victory at Blenheim, and he reviewed Marlborough’s strategy and thought how little the basic principles of warfare had changed over the ages. The same general pattern of thrusts and parries worked as well for Marlborough as it had six centuries earlier for William at Hastings. Communications changed, weaponry evolved, armies grew even larger and more complex in structure, but the more things changed, the more they remained as they had always been.

Laos had been the third war for Roger Elliott Cross. He led a platoon at Salerno and Anzio, fought up and down numbered hills in Korea. When they put together Special Forces, he was one of the first Regular Army types selected, one of the first to see action in Southeast Asia. The men under his command trained tribesmen and villagers, launched hit-and-run missions in Laos and Vietnam.

And he had always liked it. It was hell, as Sherman had said, but at the same time it was a football game for adults, with the sweet harsh joy of contact and the sense of being utterly alive that exists only in the midst of death. Someday, he knew, it would be time to retire. There was the house in Tarrytown, the house he grew up in. There was his sister Helen and her husband Walter. There was enough money to live comfortably on, between the family estate and his own savings and a full colonel’s retirement pay. But retirement could wait; he was too busy being alive.

Then one day one of his men took a bullet in the throat just as he pulled the pin of a grenade, and the grenade dribbled across the ground toward Colonel Roger Cross. He woke up in a bed with his legs on fire and when he reached down for them they weren’t there. Both gone, one just above the knee, the other halfway up the thigh.

He surprised the hell out of his doctors. They told him he was lucky to be alive, prepared for bitter denial, and he agreed with them completely. He was still the same man as he had been before. A man lived in his mind, and as long as his mind was unimpaired, he remained alive.

He did the exercises. He mended quickly. They flew him from Tokyo to San Francisco to New York, and by the time the jet set down at Kennedy, he was anxious only to see Helen and Walter and make a new life with the two of them. He was confident he would not be a burden. A wheelchair gave one a good deal of mobility and he had learned to use his well. He could amuse himself, he was accustomed to solitude.

Helen met him at the airport, her eyes red from crying. “Now you’re being ridiculous,” he scolded her. “The important thing is being alive. They say I’m too tough to kill, they broke three hacksaw blades amputating. Pull yourself together, will you? And where in hell is that husband of yours?”

She dissolved completely then, turned and fled from him. He started to wheel the chair in pursuit, then decided to let her be. She came back a few moments later, face washed and hair neat, and told him quickly and concisely what had happened.

Walter was dead. Three weeks ago, while Cross was learning how to operate a wheelchair, Walter Tremont updated his will, paid the delinquent premiums on his insurance policies, and hanged himself in his office.

“I couldn’t write you,” she said. “I wrote letters, but I couldn’t mail them, I had to wait until you were here. When they cut him down his face was all purple and his tongue was huge and black. Oh, Roger—”

A lengthy suicide letter explained everything. Walter Tremont, who had never in his life bet two dollars on a horse race, had lost almost a quarter of a million dollars in Canadian mining stock. He got into it a little at a time, and at first he did well and then he began doing badly, and he plunged deeper and deeper in an effort to get even, and by the time he put the rope around his neck, he had gone through his money and his wife’s inheritance and the funds he held in trust for the colonel.

“But he could have gotten back on his feet,” Cross said. “He must have known I would have understood. He was a young man, he could have found a way to work things out.”

“Roger, he was broken. I... the last few weeks I must have made his life miserable. He looked awful, really awful. I kept telling him to see a doctor. I think it would have ruined him physically one way or another even if he hadn’t done what he did. Roger, they killed him.”

“They?”

The stockbrokers, she told him. Or confidence men, because that was what they really were. A lawyer had gone through Tremont’s papers and reconstructed the situation for her. Cross went over it himself and saw that she was right, they had killed him, they had fastened the rope around his neck. It was a boiler room swindle, the main operation based in Toronto with a pair of outside men who had spent months winning Walter Tremont’s friendship and setting him up step by step for the kill.

Cross hired detectives. He learned the names of the men who had set up Tremont along with the names of the crew back home in Toronto. He spent time and money assembling folders of evidence, and when he was done, he called in a federal district attorney and showed him what he had.

“He says we haven’t got a leg to stand on,” he told Helen later. “And then the damned fool blushed like a schoolgirl when he remembered that you’re not supposed to use that sort of metaphor in front of a paraplegic. Do schoolgirls still blush? I don’t suppose they do. There’s no case against those men. They don’t seem to have broken any laws. All ten commandments, perhaps, but no laws. God damn it, if I did have a leg to stand on, if I had both legs—”

He spent his days reading military theory and history and his nights drinking until sleep came. One day he closed a volume of Clausewitz and shoved the book impatiently aside. Clausewitz didn’t tell you how to reach the men who couldn’t be reached, the law-abiding thieves who stole a man’s money and ruined a man’s life.

Or did he? Was it, after all, not a legal problem but a military one, an exercise in strategy and tactics?

He wrote to Washington. He asked the Pentagon for the addresses of men who had served with him in Laos and had since returned to civilian life. The request spent some time going through channels, but eventually he received a list with twenty-three names on it.

He spent two days going over the list and remembering each of the men, assessing strengths and weaknesses, calculating probable motives and desires. At first he planned to get in touch with all of the men, and when he thought about this later on, he guessed that perhaps a dozen of the twenty-three would have responded favorably.

But instead he had picked five men. Four were former enlisted men, only one a commissioned officer. He called those five, and all of them came to Tarrytown, and all of them reacted as he had expected them to react.

And they were good men. It was all the same jungle, he thought, in Laos or the States. It was the same kind of jungle and the same kind of war, and it took the same kind of men to fight it. Men like Manso and Murdock and Simmons and Giordano and Dehn.

Helen returned at six. He asked her if she had found anything, and she said it could wait until after dinner. He argued and she won. He ate a thick slab of roast beef without tasting it. Then, with coffee, she told him what she had learned.

Back in his office he sent four telegrams. To Murdock and Simmons and Giordano and Dehn.