CHAPTER 9

Labor

It was almost grim to watch, Sandy thought. The strange thing was that he was being a good patient. He didn't whine. He didn't bitch. He did just what they told him to do. There was a streak of the sadist in all physical therapists. There had to be, since the job meant pushing people a little further than they wanted to go - just as an athletic coach would do - and the ultimate aim was to help, after all. Even so, a good therapist had to push the patient, encourage the weak, and browbeat the strong; to cajole and to shame, all in the name of health; that meant taking satisfaction from the exertion and pain of others, and O'Toole could not have done that. But Kelly, she saw, would have none of it. He did what was expected, and when the therapist asked for more, more was delivered, and on, and on, until the therapist was pushed beyond the point of pride in the result of his efforts and began to worry.

'You can ease off now,' he advised.

'Why?' Kelly asked somewhat breathlessly. 'Your heart rate is one-ninety-five.' And had been there for five minutes.

'What's the record?'

'Zero,' the therapist replied without a smile. That earned him a laugh, and a look, and Kelly slowed his pace on the stationary bike, easing himself down over a period of two minutes to a reluctant stop.

'I've come to take him back,' OToole announced.

'Good, do that before he breaks something.'

Kelly got off and toweled his face, glad to see that she hadn't brought a wheelchair or something similarly insulting. 'To what do I owe this honor, ma'am?'

'I'm supposed to keep an eye on you,' Sandy replied. 'Trying to show us how tough you are?'

Kelly had been a touch lighthearted, but turned serious. 'Mrs O'Toole, I'm supposed to get my mind off my troubles, right? Exercise does that for me. I can't run with one arm tied up, I can't do push-ups, and I can't lift weights. I can ride a bike. Okay?'

'You have me there. Okay.' She pointed to the door. Out in the bustling anonymity of the corridor, she said, 'I'm very sorry about your friend.'

'Thank you, ma'am.' He turned his head, slightly dizzy from the exertion, as they walked along in the crowd. 'We have rituals in uniform. The bugle, the flag, the guys with rifles. It works fairly well for the men. It helps you to believe that it all meant something. It still hurts, but it's a formal way to say goodbye. We learned to deal with it. But what happened to you is different, and what just happened to me is different. So what did you do? Get more involved in work?'

'I finished my masters. I'm a nurse-practitioner. I teach. I worry about patients.' And that was her whole life now.

'Well, you don't have to worry about me, okay? I know my limits.'

'Where are the limits?'

'A long way off,' Kelly said with the beginnings of a smile that he quickly extinguished. 'How am I doing?'

'Very well.'

It hadn't gone all that smoothly, and both knew it. Donald Madden had flown to Baltimore to claim the body of his daughter from the coroner's office, leaving his wife home, never meeting with anyone despite pleas from Sarah Rosen. He wasn't interested in talking to a fornicator, the man had said over the phone, a remark that Sandy knew about but which neither medic had passed on. The surgeon had filled her in on the background of the girl, and it was merely a final sad chapter to a brief and sad life, something the patient didn't need to know. Kelly had asked about funeral arrangements, and both had told him that he would be unable to leave the hospital in any case. Kelly had accepted that in silence, surprising the nurse.

His left shoulder was still immobilized, and there had to be pain, the nurse knew. She and others could see the occasional wince, especially close to the time for a new pain medication, but Kelly wasn't the type to complain. Even now, still breathing hard from a murderous thirty minutes on the bike, he was making quite a point of walking as rapidly as he could, cooling himself down like a trained athlete.

'Why the big show?' she asked.

'I don't know. Does there have to be a reason for everything? It's the way I am, Sandy.'

'Well, your legs are longer than mine. Slow down, okay?'

'Sure.' Kelly eased off his pace as they reached the elevator. 'How many girls are there - like Pam I mean?'

'Too many.' She didn't know the numbers. There were enough that they were noticed as a class of patient, enough that you knew they were there.

'Who helps them?'

The nurse pushed the elevator button. 'Nobody. They're starting up programs for dealing with the drug habits, but the real problems, the abusive backgrounds and what comes from it - there's a new term now, "behavioral disorder." If you're a thief, there are programs. If you abuse kids, there's a program, but girls like that are outcasts. Nobody does much of anything. The only people who deal with that are church groups. If somebody said it was a disease, maybe people would pay attention.'

'Is it a disease?'

'John, I'm not a doctor, just a nurse-practitioner, and it's outside my field anyway. I do post-op care for surgical patients. Okay, we talk over lunch, and I know a little. It's surprising how many of them show up dead. Drug overdoses, accidental or deliberate, who can say? Or they meet the wrong person or their pimp gets a little too rough, and they show up here, and their underlying medical problems don't help very much, and a lot of them just don't make it. Hepatitis from bad needles, pneumonia, add that to a major injury and it's a deadly combination. But is anybody going to do anything about it?' O'Toole looked down as the elevator arrived. 'Young people aren't supposed to die that way.'

'Yeah.' Kelly gestured for her to get in the elevator first.

'You're the patient,' she objected.

'You're the lady,' he insisted. 'Sorry, it's the way I was raised.'

Who is thisguy? Sandy asked herself. She was managing the care of more than one patient, of course, but the professor had ordered her - well, not exactly, she told herself, but a 'suggestion' from Dr Rosen carried a lot of weight, especially since she had great respect for him as a friend and counselor - to keep a special eye on him. It wasn't matchmaking, as she'd initially suspected. He was still too hurt - and so was she, though she would not admit it. Such a strange man. So like Tim in many ways, but much more guarded. A strange mixture of the gentle and the rough. She hadn't forgotten what she had seen the previous week, but it was gone now, and never a hint of it had returned. He treated her with respect and good humor, never once commenting on her figure, as many patients did (and to which she pretended to object). He was so unlucky and yet so purposeful. His furious effort in rehab. His outward toughness. How to reconcile that with his incongruous good manners?

'When will I get out?' Kelly asked in a voice that was light but not light enough.

'Another week,' O'Toole replied, leading him off the elevator. 'Tomorrow we unwrap your arm.'

'Really? Sam didn't tell me. Then I can start using the arm again?'

'It's going to hurt when you do,' the nurse warned.

'Hell, Sandy, it hurts already,' Kelly grinned. 'I might as well get some use out of the pain.'

'Lay down,' the nurse ordered. Before he could object, she had a thermometer in his mouth and was taking his pulse. Then she checked his blood pressure. The numbers she put on the chart were 98.4, 64, and 105/60. The last two were especially surprising, she thought. Whatever else she might say about the patient, he was rapidly getting himself back into shape. She wondered what the urgency was.

Onemore week, Kelly thought after she left. Got to get this damned arm working.

'So what have you found out for us?' Maxwell asked.

'Good news and bad news,' Greer replied. 'The good news is that the opposition has very little in the way of regular ground forces within response distance of the objective. We have ID's three battalions. Two are training to go south. One just returned from Eye Corps. It's pretty beat-up, in the process of reconstituting. The usual TO and E. Not much in the way of heavy weapons. What mechanized formations they have are well away from here.'

'And the bad news?' Admiral Podulski asked.

'Do I have to tell you? Enough triple-A along the coast to turn the sky black. SA-2 batteries here, here, and probably here, too. It's dangerous there for fast-movers, Cas. For helicopters? One or two rescue birds, sure, it's doable, but a large lift will be real dicey. We went all over this when we scoped our kingpin, remember?'

'It's only thirty miles from the beach.'

'Fifteen or twenty minutes in a helo, flying in a straight line, which they will not be able to do, Cas. I went over the threat maps myself. The best route I can identify - it's your area, Cas, but I do know a little, okay? - is twenty-five minutes, and I wouldn't want to fly it in daylight.'

'We can use -52s to blast a corridor through,' Podulski suggested. He'd never been the most subtle man in the world.

'I thought you wanted to keep this small,' Greer observed. 'Look, the real bad news is that there isn't much enthusiasm for this kind of mission anywhere. kingpin failed-'

'That wasn't our fault!' Podulski objected.

'I know that, Cas,' Greer said patiently. Podulski had always been a passionate advocate.

'It ought to be doable,' Cas growled.

All three men hovered over the reconnaisance photos. It was a good collection, two from satellites, two from SR-71 Blackbirds, and three very recent low-obliques from Buffalo Hunter drones. The camp was two hundred metres square, an exact square in fact, undoubtedly fitting exactly the diagram in some East Bloc manual for building secure facilities. Each corner had a guard tower, each of which was exactly ten meters in height. Each tower had a tin roof to keep the rain off the NVA-standard-issue RPD light machine gun, an obsolete Russian design. Inside the wire were three large buildings and two small ones. Inside one of the large buildings were, they believed, twenty American officers, all lieutenant-colonel/commander rank or higher, for this was a special camp.

It was the Buffalo Hunter photos that had first come to Greer's attention. One was good enough to have identified a face, Colonel Robin Zacharias, USAF. His F-I05G Wild Weasel had been shot down eight months earlier; he and his weapons-systems operator had been reported killed by the North Vietnamese. Even a picture of his body had been published. This camp, whose code name, sender green, was known to fewer than fifty men and women, was separate from the better-known Hanoi Hilton, which had been visited by American citizens and where, since the spectacular but unsuccessful Operation kingpin raid on the camp at Song Tay, nearly all American POWs had been concentrated. Out of the way, located in the most unlikely of places, not acknowledged in any way, sender green was ominous. However the war would turn out, America wanted her pilots back. Here was a place whose very existence suggested that some would never be returned. A statistical study of losses had shown an ominous irregularity: flight officers of relatively high rank were reported killed at a higher rate than those of lower rank. It was known that the enemy had good intelligence sources, many of them within the American 'peace' movement, that they had dossiers on senior American officers, who they were, what they knew, what other jobs they had held. It was possible that those officers were being held in a special place, that their knowledge was being used by North Vietnam as a bargaining chip for dealing with their Russian sponsors. The prisoners' knowledge in areas of special strategic interest was being traded - maybe - for continuing support from a sponsor nation that was losing interest in this lengthy war, with the new atmosphere of detente. So many games were going on.

'Gutsy,' Maxwell breathed. The three blowups showed the man's face, each one staring straight at the camera. The last of the three caught one of his guards in the act of swinging a rifle butt into his back. The face was clear. It was Zacharias.

'This guy is Russian,' Casimir Podulski said, tapping the drone photos. The uniform was unmistakable.

They knew what Cas was thinking. The son of Poland's one-time ambassador to Washington, by heredity a count and scion of a family that had once fought at the side of King John Sobieski, his family had been extinguished on one side of the demarcation line by the Nazis along with the rest of the Polish nobility and on the other by the Russians in Katyn Forest, where two brothers had been murdered after fighting a brief and futile two-front war. In 1941, the day after graduating Princeton University, Podulski had joined the US Navy as an aviator, adopting a new country and a new profession, both of which he had served with pride and skill. And rage. That was now all the more intense because soon he would be forced to retire. Greer could see the reason. His surprisingly delicate hands were gnarled with arthritis. Try as he might to conceal it, his next physical would down-check him for good, and Cas would face retirement with memories of a dead son and a wife on antidepressant medications, after a career he would probably deem a failure despite his medals and personal flag.

'We've got to find a way,' Podulski said. 'If we don't, we'll never see these men again. You know who might be there, Dutch? Pete Francis, Hank Osborne.'

'Pete worked for me when I had Enterprise,' Maxwell acknowledged. Both men looked at Greer.

'I concur in the nature of the camp. I had my doubts. Zacharias, Francis, and Osborne are all names they'd be interested in.' The Air Force officer had spent a tour at Omaha, part of the joint-targeting staff that selected the destinations for strategic weapons, and his knowledge of America's most secret war plans was encyclopedic. The two naval officers had similarly important information, and while each might be brave, and dedicated, and obstinately determined to deny, conceal, and disguise, they were merely men, and men had limits; and the enemy had time. 'Look, if you want, I can try to sell the idea to some people, but I'm not very hopeful.'

'If we don't, we're breaking faith with our people!' Podulski slammed his fist on the desk. But Cas had an agenda, too. Discovery of this camp, rescue of its prisoners, would make it explicitly clear that North Vietnam had publicly lied. That might poison the peace talks enough to force Nixon to adopt yet another optional plan being drawn up by a larger Pentagon working group: the invasion of the North. It would be that most American of military operations, a combined-arms assault, without precedent for its daring, scope, and potential dangers: an airborne drop directly into Hanoi, a division of marines hitting the beaches on both sides of Haiphong, air-mobile assaults in the middle, supported by everything America could bring to bear in one, massive, crushing, attempt to break the North by capture of its political leadership. That plan, whose cover name changed on a monthly basis - currently it was certain cornet - was the Holy Grail of vengeance for all the professionals who had for six years watched their country blunder about in indecision and the profligate waste of America's children.

'Don't you think I know that? Osborne worked for me at Suitland. I went with the chaplain when he delivered the fucking telegram, okay? I'm on your side, remember?'

Unlike Cas and Dutch, Greer knew that certain cornet would never be more than a staff study. It just couldn't happen, not without briefing Congress, and Congress had too many leaks A possibility in 1966 or '67, maybe even as late as 1968, such an operation was unthinkable now. But sender green was still there, and this mission was possible, just.

'Cool down, Cas,' Maxwell suggested.

'Yes, sir.'

Greer shifted his gaze to the relief map. 'You know, you airedales kind of limit your thinking.'

'What do you mean? 'Maxwell asked.

Greer pointed to a red line that ran from a coastal town neatly to the camp's main gate. On the overhead photos it looked like a good road, black-topped, and all. 'The reaction forces are here, here, and here. The road's here, follows the river most of the way up. There are flak batteries all over the place, the road supports them, but, you know, triple-A isn't dangerous to the right sort of equipment.'

'That's an invasion,' Podulski observed.

'And sending in two companies of air-mobile troops isn't?'

'I've always said you were smart, James,' Maxwell said. 'You know, this is right where my son was shot down. That SEAL went in and recovered him right about here,' the Admiral said, tapping the map.

'Somebody who knows the area from ground level?' Greer asked. 'That's help. Where is he?'

'Hi, Sarah.' Kelly waved her to the chair. She looked older, he thought.

'This is my third time, John. You were asleep the other two.'

'I've been doing a lot of that. It's okay,' he assured her. 'Sam's in here a couple times a day.' He was already uncomfortable. The hardest part was facing friends, Kelly told himself.

'Well, we've been busy in the lab.' Sarah spoke rapidly. 'John, I needed to tell you how sorry I am that I asked you to come into town. I could have sent you somewhere else. She didn't need to see Madge. There's a guy I know in Annapolis, perfectly good practitioner...' Her voice stumbled on..

So much guilt, Kelly thought. 'None of this was your fault, Sarah,' he said when she stopped talking. 'You were a good friend to Pam. If her mom had been like you, maybe - '

It was almost as though she hadn't heard him. 'I should have given you a later date. If the timing had been a little different-'

She was right on that part, Kelly thought. The variables. What if? What if he'd selected a different block to be parked on? What if Billy had never spotted him? Whatif I hadn't moved at all and letthebastard just go on his way? A different day, a different week? What if a lot of things. The past happened because a hundred little random things had to fall exactly into place in exactly the right way, in exactly the proper sequence, and while it was easy to accept the good results, one could only rage at the bad ones. What if he'd taken a different route from the food warehouse? What if he'd not spotted Pam at the side of the road and never picked her up? What if he'd never spotted the pills? What if he hadn't cared, or what if he'd been so outraged that he had abandoned her? Would she be alive now? If her father had been a little more understanding, and she'd never run away, they would never have met. Was that good or bad?

And if all that were true, then what did matter? Was everything a random accident? The problem was that you couldn't tell. Maybe if he were God looking down on everything from above, maybe then it would fit some pattern, but from the inside it merely was, Kelly thought, and you did the best you could, and tried to learn from your mistakes for when the next random event happened to you. But did that make sense? Hell, did anything really make sense? That was far too complex a question for a former Navy chief lying in a hospital bed.

'Sarah, none of this is your fault. You helped her in the best way you could. How could you change that?'

'Damn it, Kelly, we had her saved!'

'I know. And I brought her here, and I got careless, not you. Sarah, everyone tells me it's not my fault, and then you come in here and tell me it's yours.' The grimace was almost a smile. 'This can be very confusing, except for one thing.'

'It wasn't an accident, was it?' Sarah noted.

'No, it wasn't.'

'There he is,' Oreza said quietly; keeping his binoculars on the distant speck. 'Just like you said.'

'Come to papa,' the policeman breathed in the darkness.

It was just a happy coincidence, the officer told himself. The people in question owned a corn farm in Dorchester County, but between the corn-rows were marijuana plants. Simple, as the saying went, but effective. With a farm came barns and outbuildings, and privacy. Being clever people, they didn't want to drive their product across the Bay Bridge in their pickup truck, where the summer traffic was unpredictably interrupted, and besides, a sharp-eyed toll taker had helped the State Police make a bust only a month before. They were careful enough to become a potential threat to his friend. That had to be stopped.

So they used a boat. This heaven-sent coincidence gave the Coast Guard the chance to participate in a bust and thus to raise his stature in their eyes. It couldn't hurt, after he'd used them as the stalking horse to help get Angelo Vorano killed, Lieutenant Charon thought, smiling in the wheelhouse.

'Take 'em now?' Oreza asked.

'Yes. The people they're delivering to are under our control. Don't tell anybody that,' he added. 'We don't want to compromise them.'

'You got it.' The quartermaster advanced his throttles and turned the wheel to starboard. 'Let's wake up, people,' he told his crew.

The forty-one-boat squatted at the stem with the increased power. The rumble of the diesels was intoxicating to the boat's commander. The small steel wheel vibrated in his hands as he steadied up on his new course. The funny part was that it would come as a surprise to them. Although the Coast Guard was the principal law-enforcement agency on the water, their main activity had always been search and rescue, and the word hadn't quite gotten out yet. Which, Oreza told himself, was just too goddamned bad. He'd found a few coastguardsmen smoking pot in the past couple of years, and his wrath was something still talked about by those who'd seen it.

The target was easily seen now, a thirty-foot Bay-built fishing boat of the sort that dotted the Chesapeake, probably with an old Chevy engine, and that meant she couldn't possibly outrun his cutter. It was a perfectly good thing to have a good disguise, Oreza thought with a smile, but not so clever to bet your life and your freedom on one card, however good it might be.

'Just let everything look normal,' the policeman said quietly.

'Look around, sir,' the quartermaster replied. The boat crew was alert but not obviously so, and their weapons were holstered. The boat's course was almost a direct one toward their Thomas Point station, and if the other boat even took note of them - and nobody was looking aft at the moment - they could easily assume that the forty-one-footer was just heading back to the barn. Five hundred yards now. Oreza jammed the throttles to the stops to get the extra knot or two of overtake speed.

'There's Mr English,' another crewman said. The other forty-one-boat from Thomas Point was on a reciprocal course, outbound from the station, holding steady in a straight line, roughly towards the lighthouse that the station also supported.

'Not real smart, are they?' Oreza asked.

'Well, if they were smart, why break the law?'

'Roger that, sir.' Three hundred yards now, and a head turned aft to see the gleaming white shape of the small cutter. Three people aboard the target craft, and the one who had looked at them leaned forward to say something to the guy at the wheel. It was almost comical to watch. Oreza could imagine every word they were saying. There's a Coast Guard boat back there. So just play it cool, maybe they're just changing the duty boat or something, see the one there... Uh-oh, I don't like this... Just be cool, damn it! I really don't like this. Settle down, their lights aren't on and their station is right down there, for Christ's sake.

Justabout time, Oreza smiled to himself, just about time for: oh, shit!

He grinned when it happened. The guy at the wheel turned, and his mouth opened and shut, having said just that. One of the younger crewmen read the man's lips and laughed.

'I think they just figured it out, skipper.'

'Hit the lights!' the quartermaster ordered, and the cop lights atop the wheelhouse started blinking, somewhat to Oreza's displeasure.

'Aye aye!'

The Bay boat turned rapidly south, but the outbound cutter turned to cover the maneuver, and it was instantly clear that neither could outrun the twin-screw forty-one-boats.

'Should have used the money to buy something sportier, boys,' Oreza said to himself, knowing that criminals learned from their mistakes, too, and buying something to outrun a forty-one-foot patrol boat was not exactly a taxing problem. This one was easy. Chasing another little sailboat would be easy, if this damned fool of a cop would let them do it right, but the easy ones wouldn't last forever.

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 US 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 doorframe - 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 US 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;

Ihave to dosomething! 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 hadn'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 dearly 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 the 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. RR 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 toward 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 vill?. 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 chest 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.'

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