Without Remorse

CHAPTER 13

Agendas

It was his first-ever visit to the Pentagon. Kelly felt ill at ease, wondering if he should have worn his khaki chiefs uniform, but his time for wearing that had passed. Instead he wore a blue lightweight suit, with a miniature of the Navy Cross ribbon on the lapel. Arriving in the bus and car tunnel, he walked up a ramp and searched for a map of the vast building, which he quickly scanned and memorized. Five minutes later he entered the proper office.

'Yes?' a petty officer asked.

'John Kelly, I have an appointment with Admiral Maxwell.' He was invited to take a seat. On the coffee table was a copy of NavyTimes, which he hadn't read since leaving the service. But Kelly was able to control his nostalgia. The bitches and gripes he read about hadn't changed very much.

'Mr Kelly?' a voice called. He rose and walked through the open door. After it closed, a red do-not-disturb light blinked on to warn people off.

'How are you feeling, John?' Maxwell asked first of all.

'Fine, sir, thank you.' Civilian now or not, Kelly could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a flag officer. That got worse at once when another door opened to admit two more men, one in civilian clothes, the other a rear admiral - another aviator, Kelly saw, with the medal of honor, which was even more intimidating. Maxwell did the introductions.

'I've heard a lot about you,' Podulski said, shaking the younger man's hand.

'Thank you, sir.' Kelly didn't know what else to say.

'Cas and I go back a ways,' Maxwell observed, handling the introductions. 'I got fifteen' - he pointed to the aircraft panel hanging on the wall - 'Cas got eighteen.'

'All on film, too,' Podulski assured him.

'I didn't get any,' Greer said, 'but I didn't let the oxygen rot my brain either.' In addition to wearing soft clothes, this admiral had the map case. He took one out, the same panel he had back at his home, but more marked up. Then came the photographs, and Kelly got another look at the face of Colonel Zacharias, this time enhanced somehow or other, and recognizably similar to the ID photo Greer put next to it.

'I was within three miles of the place,' Kelly noted. 'Nobody ever told me about -'

'It wasn't there yet. This place is new, less than two years old,' Greer explained.

'Any more pictures, James?' Maxwell asked.

'Just some SR-71 overheads, high-obliques, nothing new in them. I have a guy checking every frame of this place, a good guy, ex-Air Force. He reports to me only.'

'You're going to be a good spy,' Podulski noted with a chuckle.

'They need me there,' Greer replied in a lighthearted voice bordered with serious meaning. Kelly just looked at the other three. The banter wasn't unlike that in a chief's mess, but the language was cleaner. He looked. over at Kelly again. 'Tell me about the valley.'

'A good place to stay away from.'

'First, tell me how you got little Dutch back. Every step of the way,' Greer ordered.

Kelly needed fifteen minutes for that, from the time he left USS Skate to the moment the helicopter had lifted him and Lieutenant Maxwell from the river's estuary for the flight to Kitty Hawk. It was an easy story to tell. What surprised him were the looks the admirals passed back and forth.

Kelly wasn't equipped to understand the looks yet. He didn't really think of the admirals as old or even as totally human. They were admirals, godlike, ageless beings who made important decisions and looked as they should look, even the one out of uniform. Nor did Kelly think of himself as young. He'd seen combat, after which every man is forever changed. But their perspective was different. To Maxwell, Podulski, and Greer, this young man was not terribly unlike what they had been thirty years earlier. It was instantly clear that Kelly was a warrior, and in seeing him they saw themselves. The furtive looks they traded were not unlike those of a grandfather watching his grandson take his first tentative step on the living-room rug. But these were larger and more serious steps.

'That was some job,' Greer said when Kelly finished. 'So this area is densely populated?'

'Yes and no, sir. I mean, it's not a city or like that, but some farms and stuff. I heard and saw traffic on this road. Only a few trucks, but lots of bicycles, oxcarts, that sort of thing.'

'Not much military traffic?' Podulski asked.

'Admiral, that stuff would be on this road here.' Kelly tapped the map. He saw the notations for the NVA units. 'How are you planning to get in here?'

'There's nothing easy, John. We've looked at a helicopter insertion, maybe even trying an amphibious assault and racing up this road.'

Kelly shook his head. 'Too far. That road is too easy to defend. Gentlemen, you have to understand, Vietnam is a real nation in arms, okay? Practically everybody there has been in uniform, and giving people guns makes them feel like part of the team. There are enough people with guns there to give you a real pain coming up this way. You'd never make it.'

'The people really support the communist government?' Podulski asked. It was just too much for him to believe. But not for Kelly,

'Jesus, Admiral, why do you think we've been fighting there so long? Why do you think nobody helps pilots who get shot down? They're not like us over there. That's something we've never understood. Anyway, if you put Marines on the beach, nobody's going to welcome them. Forget racing up this road, sir. I've been there. It ain't much of a road, not even as good as it looks on these pictures. Drop a few trees and it's closed.' Kelly looked up. 'Has to be choppers.'

He could see the news was not welcome, and it wasn't hard to understand why. This part of the country was dotted with antiaircraft batteries. Getting a strike force in wasn't going to be easy. At least two of these men were pilots, and if a ground assault had looked promising to them, then the triple-A problem must have been worse than Kelly appreciated.

'We can suppress the flak,' Maxwell thought.

'You're not talking about -52s again, are you?' Greer asked.

'Newport News goes back on the gunline in a few weeks. John, ever see her shoot?'

Kelly nodded. 'Sure did. She supported us twice when we were working close to the coast. It's impressive what those eight-inchers can do. Sir, the problem is, how many things do you need to go right for the mission to succeed? The more complicated things get, the easier it is for things to go wrong, and even one thing can be real complicated.' Kelly leaned back on the couch, and reminded himself that what he had just said wasn't only for the admirals to consider.

'Dutch, we have a meeting in five minutes,' Podulski said reluctantly. This meeting had not been a successful one, he thought. Greer and Maxwell weren't so sure of that. They had learned a few things. That counted for something.

'Can I ask why you're keeping this so tight?' Kelly asked.

'You guessed it before.' Maxwell looked over at the junior flag officer and nodded.

'The Song Tay job was compromised,' Greer said. 'We don't know how, but we found out later through one of our sources that they knew - at least suspected - something was coming. They expected it later, and we ended up hitting the place right after they evacuated the prisoners, but before they had their ambush set up. Good luck, bad luck. They didn't expect Operation kingpin for another month.'

'Dear God,' Kelly breathed. 'Somebody over here deliberately betrayed them?'

'Welcome to the real world of intelligence operations, Chief,' Greer said with a grim smile.

'But why?'

'If I ever meet the gentleman, I will be sure to ask.' Greer looked at the others. 'That's a good hook for us to use. Check the records of the operation, real low-key like?'

'Where are they?'

'Eglin Air Force base, where the kingpin people trained.'

'Whom do we send?' Podulski asked.

Kelly could feel the eyes turn in his direction. 'Gentlemen, I was just a chief, remember?'

'Mr Kelly, where's your car parked?'

'In the city, sir. I took the bus over here.'

'Come with me. There's a shuttle bus you can take back later.'

They walked out of the building in silence. Greer's car, a Mercury, was parked in a visitor slot by the river entrance. He waved for Kelly to get in and headed towards the George Washington Parkway.

'Dutch pulled your package. I got to read it. I'm impressed, son.' What Greer didn't say was that on his battery of enlistment tests, Kelly had scored an average of 147 on three separately formatted IQ tests. 'Every commander you had sang your praises.'

'I worked for some good ones, sir.'

'So it appears, and three of them tried to get you into OCS, but Dutch asked you about that. I also want to know why you didn't take the college scholarship.'

'I was tired of schools... And the scholarship was for swimming. Admiral.'

'That's a big deal at Indiana, I know, but your marks were plenty good enough to get an academic scholarship. You attended a pretty nice prep school -'

'That was a scholarship, too.' Kelly shrugged. 'Nobody in my family ever went to college. Dad served a hitch in the Navy during the war. I guess it just seemed like something to do.' That it had been a major disappointment to his father was something he'd never told anyone.

Greer pondered that. It still didn't answer things. 'The last ship I commanded was a submarine, Daniel Webster. My chief of the boat, senior chief sonarman, the guy had a doctorate in physics. Good man, knew his job better then I knew mine, but not a leader, shied away from it some. You didn't, Kelly. You tried to, but you didn't.'

'Look, sir, when you're out there and things happen, somebody has to get it done.'

'Not everybody sees things that way. Kelly, there's two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves,' Greer pronounced.

The highway sign said something that Kelly didn't catch, but it wasn't anything about CIA. He didn't tumble to it until he saw the oversized guardhouse.

'Did you ever interact with Agency people while you were over there?'

Kelly nodded. 'Some. We were - well, you know about it, Project phoenix, right? We were part of that, a small part.'

'What did you think of them?'

'Two or three of them were pretty good. The rest - you want it straight?'

'That's exactly what I want,' Greer assured him.

'The rest are probably real good mixing martinis, shaken not stirred,' Kelly said evenly. That earned him a rueful laugh.

'Yeah, people here do like to watch the movies!' Greer found his parking place and popped his door open. 'Come with me, Chief.' The out-of-uniform admiral led Kelly in the front door and got him a special visitor's pass, the kind that required an escort.

For his part, Kelly felt like a tourist in a strange and foreign land. The very normality of the building gave it a sinister edge. Though an ordinary, and rather new, government office building, CIA headquarters had some sort of aura. It wasn't like the real world somehow. Greer caught the look and chuckled, leading Kelly to an elevator, then to his sixth-floor office. Only when they were behind the closed wooden door did he speak.

'How's your schedule for the next week?'

'Flexible. I don't have anything tying me down,' Kelly answered cautiously.

James Greer nodded soberly. 'Dutch told me about that, too. I'm very sorry, Chief, but my job right now concerns twenty good men who probably won't see their families again unless we do something.' He reached into his desk drawer.

'Sir, I'm real confused right now.'

'Well, we can do it hard or easy. The hard way is that Dutch makes a phone call and you get recalled to active duty,' Greer said sternly. The easy way is, you come to work for me as a civilian consultant. We pay you a per-diem that's a whole lot more than chief's pay.'

'Doing what?'

'You fly down to Eglin Air Force Base, via New Orleans and Avis, I suppose. This' - Greer tossed a billfold-like ID in Kelly's lap - 'gives you access to their records. I want you to go over the operations plans as a model for what we want to do.' Kelly looked at the photo-?. It even had his old Navy photograph, which showed only his head, as in a passport.

'Wait a minute, sir. I am not qualified -'

'As a matter of fact I think you are, but from the outside it will look like you're not. No, you're just a very junior consultant gathering information for a low-level report that nobody important will ever read. Half the money we spend in this damned agency goes out the door that way, in case nobody ever told you,' Greer said, his irritation with the Agency giving flight to mild exaggeration. That's how routine and pointless we want it to look.'

'Are you really serious about this?'

'Chief, Dutch Maxwell is willing to sacrifice his career for those men. So am I. If there's a way to get them out-'

'What about the peace talks?'

How do I explain that to this kid? Greer asked himself. 'Colonel Zacharias is officially dead. The other side said so, even published a photo of a body. Somebody went to visit his wife, along with the base chaplain and another Air Force wife to make things easier. Then they gave her a week to vacate the official quarters, just to make things official,' Greer added. 'He's officially dead. I've had some very careful talks with some people, and we' - this part came very hard - 'our country will not screw up the peace talks over something like this. The photo we have, enhancement and all, isn't good enough for a court of law, and that's the standard that is being used. That's a standard of proof that we can't possibly meet, and the people who made the decision know it. They don't want the peace talks sidetracked, and if the lives of twenty more men are necessary to end the goddamned war, then that's what it takes. Those men are being written off.'

It was almost too much for Kelly to believe. How many people did America write off every year? And not all were in uniform, were they? Some were right at home, in American cities.

'It's really that bad?'

The fatigue on Greer's face was unmistakable. 'You know why I took this job? I was ready to retire. I've served my time, commanded my ships, done my work. I'm ready for a nice house and playing golf twice a week and doing a little consulting on the side, okay? Chief, too many people come to places like this, and reality to them is a memo. They focus in on "process" and forget that there's a human being at the far end of the paper chain. That's why I re-upped. Somebody has to try and put a little reality back into the process. We're handling this as a "black" project. Do you know what that means?'

'No, sir, I don't.'

'It's a new term that's cropped up. That means it doesn't exist. It's crazy. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Are you on the team or not?'

NewOrleans... Kelly's eyes narrowed for a moment that lingered into fifteen seconds and a slow nod. 'If you think I can help, sir, then I will. How much time do I have?'

Greer managed a smile and tossed a ticket folder into Kelly's lap. 'Your ID is in the name of John Clark; should be easy to remember. You fly down tomorrow afternoon. The return ticket is open, but I want to see you next Friday. I expect good work out of you. My card and private line are in there. Get packed, son.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

Greer rose and walked Kelly to the door. 'And get receipts for everything. When you work for Uncle Sam yon have to make sure everyone gets paid off properly.'

'I will do that, sir.' Kelly smiled.

'You can catch the blue bus back to the Pentagon outside.' Greer went back to work as Kelly left the office.

The blue shuttle bus arrived moments after he walked up to the covered pickup point. It was a curious ride. About half the people who boarded were uniformed, and the other half civilians. Nobody talked to anyone, as though merely exchanging a pleasantry or a comment on the Washington Senators' continuing residency at the bottom of the American League would violate security. He smiled and shook his head until he reflected on his own secrets and intentions. And yet - Greer had given him an opportunity that he'd not considered. Kelly leaned back in his seat and looked out the window while the other passengers on the bus stared fixedly forward.

'They're real happy,' Piaggi said.

'I told you all along, man. It helps to have the best product on the street.'

'Not everybody's happy. Some people are sitting on a couple hundred keys of French stuff, and we've knocked the price down with our special introductory offer.'

Tucker allowed himself a good laugh. The 'old guard' had been overcharging for years. That was monopoly pricing for you. Anyone would have taken the two of them for businessmen, or perhaps lawyers, since there were lots of both in this restaurant two blocks from the new Garmatz courthouse. Piaggi was somewhat better dressed, in Italian silk, and he made a mental note to introduce Henry to his tailor. At least the guy had learned how to groom himself. Next he had to learn not to dress too flashy: Respectable was the word. Just enough that people treated you with deference. The flashy ones, like the pimps, were playing a dangerous game that they were too dumb to understand.

'Next shipment, twice as much. Can your friends handle it?'

'Easy. The people in Philly are especially happy. Their main supplier had a little accident'

'Yeah, I saw the paper yesterday. Sloppy. Too many people in the crew, right?'

'Henry, you just keep getting smarter and smarter. Don't get too smart, okay? Good advice,' Piaggi said with quiet emphasis.

'That's cool, Tony. What I'm saying is, let's not make that kind of mistake ourselves, okay?'

Piaggi relaxed, sipping his beer. 'That's right, Henry. And I don't mind saying that it's nice to do business with somebody who knows how to organize. There's a lot of curiosity about where your stuff comes from. I'm covering that for you. Later on, though, if you need more financing...'

Tucker's eyes blazed briefly across the table. 'No, Tony. No now, no forever.'

'Okay for now. Something to think about for later.'

Tucker nodded, apparently letting it go at that, but wondering what sort of move his 'partner' might be planning. Trust, in this sort of enterprise, was a variable quantity. He trusted Tony to pay on time. He'd offered Piaggi favorable terms, which had been honored, and the eggs this goose laid were his real life insurance. He was already at the point that a missed payment wouldn't harm his operation, and as long as he had a steady supply of good heroin, they'd do business like a business, which was why he'd approached them in the first place. But there was no real loyalty here. Trust stopped at his usefulness. Henry had never expected any more than that, but if his associate ever started pressing on his pipeline...

Piaggi wondered if he'd pressed too far, wondering if Tucker knew the potential of what they were doing. To control distribution on the entire East Coast, and do so from within a careful and secure organization, that was like a dream come true. Surely he would soon need more capital, and his contacts were already asking how they might help. But he could see that Tucker did not recognize the innocence of the inquiry, and if he discussed it further, protesting his goodwill, that would only make things worse. And so Piaggi went back to his lunch and decided to leave things be for a while. It was too bad. Tucker was a very smart small-timer, but still a small-timer at heart. Perhaps he'd learn to grow. Henry could never be 'made,' but he could still become an important part of the organization.

'Next Friday okay?' Tucker asked.

'Fine. Keep it secure. Keep it smart.'

'You got it, man.'

It was an uneventful flight, a Piedmont 737 out of Friendship International Airport. Kelly rode coach, and the stewardess brought him a light lunch. Flying over America was so different from his other adventures aloft. It surprised him how many swimming pools there were. Everywhere you flew, lifting off from the airport, even over the rolling hills of Tennessee, the overhead sun would sparkle off little square patches of chlorine-blue water surrounded by green grass. His country appeared to be so benign a place, so comfortable, until you got closer. But at least you didn't have to watch for tracer fire.

The Avis counter had a car waiting, along with a map. It turned out that he could have flown into Panama City, Florida, but New Orleans, he decided, would suit him just fine. Kelly tossed both his suitcases into the trunk and headed east. It was rather like driving his boat, though somewhat more hectic, dead time in which he could let his mind work, examining possibilities and procedures, his eyes sweeping the traffic while his mind saw something else entirely. That was when he started to smile, a thin, composed expression that he never thought about while his imagination took a careful and measured look at the next few weeks.

Four hours after landing, having passed through the lower ends of Mississippi and Alabama, he stopped his car at the main gate of Eglin AFB. A fitting place for the kingpin troopers to have trained, the heat and humidity were an exact match with the country they'd ultimately invaded, hot and moist. Kelly waited outside the guard post for a blue Air Force sedan to meet him. When it did, an officer got out.

'Mr Clark?'

'Yes.' He handed over his ID folder. The officer actually saluted him, which was a novel experience. Clearly someone was overly impressed with CIA. This young officer had probably never interacted with anybody from there. Of course, Kelly had actually bothered to wear a tie in the hope of looking as respectable as possible.

'If you'll follow me, please, sir.' The officer, Captain Griffin, led him to a first-floor room at the Bachelor Officers Quarters, which was somewhat like a medium-quality motel and agreeably close to the beach. After helping Kelly get unpacked, Griffin walked him to the Officers' Club, where, he said, Kelly had visitor's privileges. All he had to do was show his room key.

'I can't knock the hospitality, Captain.' Kelly felt obligated to buy the first beer. 'You know why I'm here?'

'I work intelligence,' Griffin replied.

'kingpin?' As though in a movie, the officer looked around before replying.

'Yes, sir. We have all the documents you need ready for you. I hear you worked special ops over there, too.'

'Correct.'

'I have one question, sir,' the Captain said.

'Shoot,' Kelly invited between sips. He'd dried out on the drive from New Orleans.

'Do they know who burned the mission?'

'No,' Kelly replied, and on a whim added, 'Maybe I can pick up something on that.'

'My big brother was in that camp, we think. He'd be home now except for whatever...'

'Motherfucker,' Kelly said helpfully. The Captain actually blushed.

'If you identify him, then what?'

'Not my department,' Kelly replied, regretting his earlier comment. 'When do I start?'

'Supposed to be tomorrow morning, Mr Clark, but the documents are all in my office.'

'I need a quiet room, a pot of coffee, maybe some sandwiches.'

'I think we can handle that, sir.'

'Then let me get started.'

Ten minutes later, Kelly got his wish. Captain Griffin had supplied him with a yellow legal pad and a battery of pencils. Kelly started off with the first set of reconnaissance photographs, these taken by an RF-101 Voodoo, and as with sender green, the discovery of Song Tay had been a complete accident, the random discovery of an unexpected thing in a place expected to have been a minor military training installation. But in the yard of the camp had been letters stomped in the dirt, or arranged with stones or hanging laundry: 'K' for 'come and get us out of here,' and other such marks that had been made under the eyes of the guards. The list of people who had become involved was a genuine who's who of the special operations community, names that he knew only by reputation.

The configuration of the camp was not terribly different from the one in which he was interested now, he saw, making appropriate notes. One document surprised him greatly. It was a memo from a three-star to a two-star, indicating that the Song Tay mission, though important in and of itself, was also a means to an end. The three-star had wanted to validate his ability to get special-ops teams into North Vietnam. That, he said, would open all sorts of possibilities, one of which was a certain dam with a generator room... oh, yeah, Kelly realized. The three-star wanted a hunting license, to insert several teams in-country and play the same games OSS had behind German lines in the Second World War. The memo concluded with a note that political factors made the latter aspect of polar circle - one of the first cover names for what became Operation kingpin - extremely sensitive. Some would see it as a widening of the war. Kelly looked up, finishing his second cup of coffee. What was it about politicians?- he wondered. The enemy could do anything he wanted, but our side was always trembling at the possibility of being seen to widen the war. He'd even seen some of that at his level. The phoenix project, the deliberate targeting of the enemy's political infrastructure, was a matter of the greatest sensitivity. Hell, they wore uniforms, didn't they? A man in a combat zone wearing a uniform was fair game in anyone's book of rules, wasn't he? The other side took out local mayors and schoolteachers with savage abandon. There was a blatant double standard to the way the war had been conducted. It was a troubling thought, but Kelly set it aside as he turned back to the second pile of documents.

Assembling the team and planning the operation had taken half of forever. Good men all, however. Colonel Bull Simons, another man he knew only by his reputation as one of the toughest sharp-end combat commanders any Army had ever produced. Dick Meadows, a younger man in the same mold. Their only waking thought was to bring harm and distraction to the enemy, and they were skilled in doing so with small forces and minimum exposure. How they must have lusted for this mission, Kelly thought. But the oversight they'd had to deal with... Kelly counted ten separate documents to higher authority, promising success - as though a memo could make such a claim in the harsh world of combat operations - before he stopped bothering to count them. So many of them used the same language until he suspected that a form letter had been ginned up by some unit clerk. Probably someone who'd run out of fresh words for his colonel, and then expressed a sergeant's contempt for the interlocutors by giving them the same words every time, in the expectation that the repeats would never be noticed - and they hadn't been. Kelly spent three hours going through reams of paper between Eglin and CIA, concerns of deskbound bean-counters distracting the men in green suits, 'helpful' suggestions from people who probably wore ties to bed, all of which had required answers from the operators who carried guns... and so kingpin had grown from a relatively minor and dramatic insertion mission to a Cecil B. DeMille epic which had more than once gone to the White House, there becoming known to the President's National Security Council staff-

And that's where Kelly stopped, at two-thirty in the morning, defeated by the next pile of paper. He locked everything up in the receptacles provided and jogged back to his room at the Q, leaving notice for a seven o'clock walk-up call.

It was surprising how little sleep you needed when there was important work to be done. When the phone rang at seven, Kelly bounced from the bed, and fifteen minutes later was running along the beach barefoot, in a pair of shorts. He was not alone. He didn't know how many people were based at Eglin, but they were not terribly different from himself. Some had to be special operations types, doing things that he could only guess at. You could tell them from the somewhat wider shoulders. Running was only part of their fitness game. Eyes met and evaluated others, and expressions were exchanged as each man knew what the other was thinking - Howtough is he, really? - as an automatic mental exercise, and Kelly smiled to himself that he was enough a part of the community that he merited that kind of competitive respect. A large breakfast and shower left him fully refreshed, enough to get him back to his clerk's work, and on the walk back to the office building, he asked himself, surprisingly, why he'd ever left this community of men. It was, after all, the only real home he'd known after leaving Indianapolis.

And so the days continued. He allowed himself two days of six-hours' sleep, but never more than twenty minutes for a meal, and not a single drink after that first beer, though his exercise periods grew to several hours per day, mainly, he told himself, to firm up. The real reason was one that he never quite admitted. He wanted to be the toughest man on that early-morning beach, not just an associate part of the small, elite community. Kelly was a SEAL again, more than that, a bullfrog, and more still, he was again becoming Snake. By the third or fourth, morning, he could see the change. His face and form were now an expected part of the morning routine for the others. The anonymity only made it better, that and the scars of battle, and some would wonder what he'd done wrong, what mistakes he'd made. Then they would remind themselves that he was still in the business, scars and all, not knowing that he'd left it - quit, Kelly's mind corrected, with not a little guilt.

The paperwork was surprisingly stimulating. He'd never before tried to figure things out in quite this way, and he was surprised to find he had a talent for it. The operational planning, he saw, had been a thing of beauty flawed by time and repetition, like a beautiful girl kept too long in her house by a jealous father. Every day the mockup of the Song Tay camp had been erected by the players, and each day, sometimes more than once, taken down lest Soviet reconnaissance satellites take note of what was there. How debilitating that must have been to the soldiers. And it had all taken so long, the soldiers practicing while the higher-ups had dithered, pondering the intelligence information so long that... the prisoners had been moved.

'Damn,' Kelly whispered to himself. It wasn't so much that the operation might have been betrayed. It had just taken too long... and that meant that if it had been betrayed, the leaker had probably been one of the last people to discover what was afoot. He set that thought aside with a penciled question.

The operation itself had been meticulously planned, everything done just right, a primary plan and a number of alternates, with each segment of the team so fully briefed and trained that every man could do every function in his sleep. Crashing a huge Sikorsky helicopter right in the camp itself so that the strike team would not have to wait to get to the objective. Using miniguns to take down the guard towers like chainsaws against saplings. No finesse, no pussyfooting, no movie-type bullshit, just brutally direct force. The after-action debriefs showed that the camp guards had been immolated in moments. How elated the troopers must have felt as the first minute or two of the operation had run more smoothly than their simulations, and then the stunning, bitter frustration when the 'negative Item' calls had come again and again over their radio circuits. 'Item' was the simple code word for an American POW, and none were home that night. The soldiers had assaulted and liberated an empty camp. It wasn't hard to imagine how quiet the choppers must have been for the ride back to Thailand, the bleak emptiness of failure after having done everything better than right.

There was, nonetheless, much to learn here. Kelly made his notes, cramping fingers and wearing out numerous pencils. Whatever else it had been, kingpin was a supremely valuable lesson. So much had gone right, he saw, and all of that could be shamelessly copied. All that had gone wrong, really, was the time factor. Troops of that quality could have gone in much sooner. The quest for perfection hadn't been demanded at the operational level, but higher, from men who had grown older and lost contact with the enthusiasm and intelligence of youth. And a consequence had been the failure of the mission, not because of Bull Simons, or Dick Meadows, or the Green Berets who'd gladly placed their lives at risk for men they'd never met, but because of others too afraid to risk their careers and their offices - matters of far greater importance, of course, than the blood of the guys at the sharp end. Song Tay was the whole story of Vietnam, told in the few minutes it had taken for a superbly-trained team to fail, betrayed as much by process as by some misguided or traitorous person hidden in the federal bureaucracy.

sender green would be different, Kelly told himself. If for no other reason than that it was being run as a private game. If the real hazard to the operation was oversight, then why not eliminate the oversight?

'Captain, you've been very helpful,' Kelly said.

'Find what you wanted, Mr Clark?' Griffin asked.

'Yes, Mr Griffin,' he said, dropping unconsciously back into naval terminology for the young officer. 'The analysis you did on the secondary camp was first-rate. In case nobody ever told you, that might have saved a few lives. Let me say something for myself: I wish we'd had an intel-weenie like you working for us when I was out in the weeds.'

'I can't fly, sir. I have to do something useful,' Griffin replied, embarrassed by the praise.

'You do.' Kelly handed over his notes. Under his eyes they were placed in an envelope that was then sealed with red wax. 'Courier the package to this address.'

'Yes, sir. You're due some time off. Did you get any sleep at all?' Captain Griffin asked.

'Well, I think I'll depressurize in New Orleans before I fly back.'

'Not a bad place for it, sir.' Griffin walked Kelly to his car, already loaded.

One other bit of intelligence had been stunningly easy, Kelly thought, driving out. His room in the Q had contained a New Orleans telephone directory in which, to his amazement, had been the name he'd decided to look up while sitting in James Greer's office in CIA.

This was the shipment that would make his reputation, Tucker thought, watching Rick and Billy finish loading things up. Part of it would find its way to New York. Up until now he'd been an interloper, an outsider with ambition. He'd provided enough heroin to get people interested in himself and his partners - the fact that he had partners had attracted interest of its own, in addition to the access. But now was different. Now he was making his move to be part of the crew. He would be seen as a serious businessman because this shipment would handle all the needs of Baltimore and Philadelphia for... maybe a month, he estimated. Maybe less if their distribution network was as good as they said. The leftovers would start meeting the growing needs in the Big Apple, which needed the help after a major bust. After so long a time of making small steps, here was the giant one. Billy turned on a radio to get the sports news, and got a weather forecast instead.

'I'm glad we're going now. Storms coming in later.' Tucker looked outside. The sky was still clear and untroubled. 'Nothing for us to worry about,' he told them.

He loved New Orleans, a city in the European tradition, which mixed Old World charm with American zest. Rich in history, owned by Frenchmen and Spaniards in their turn, it had never lost its traditions, even to its maintenance of a legal code that was nearly incomprehensible to the other forty-nine states, and was often a matter of some befuddlement to federal authorities. So was the local patois, for many mixed French into their conversations, or what they called French. Pierre Lamarck's antecedents had been Acadians, and some of his more distant relatives were still residents in the local bayous. But customs that were eccentric and entertaining to tourists, and a comfortable life rich in tradition to others, had little interest to Lamarck except as a point of reference, a personal signature to distinguish him from his peers. That was hard enough to do, as his profession demanded a certain flash, a personal flair. He accentuated his uniqueness with a white linen suit complete with vest, a white, long-sleeved shirt, and a red, solid-color tie, which fitted his own image as a respectable, if ostentatious, local businessman. That went along well with his personal automobile, an eggshell-white Cadillac. He eschewed the ornamental excesses that some other pimps placed on their automobiles, nonfunctional exhaust pipes. One supposed Texan even had the horns of a longhorn steer on his Lincoln, but that one was really poor white trash from lower Alabama, and a boy who didn't know how to treat his ladies.

This latter quality was Lamarck's greatest talent, he told himself with great satisfaction, opening the door of his car for his newest acquisition, fifteen years old and recently broken in, possessed of an innocent look and demure movement that made her a noteworthy and enticing member of his eight-girl stable. She'd earned the pimp's unaccustomed courtesy with a special service of her own earlier in the day. The luxury car started on the first turn of the key, and at seven-thirty, Pierre Lamarck set off on another night's work, for the nightlife in his city started early and lasted late. There was a convention in town, distributors for something or other. New Orleans attracted a lot of conventions, and he could track the cash flow of his business by their comings and goings. It promised to be a warm and lucrative night.

It had to be him, Kelly thought, half a block away, behind the wheel of his still-rented car. Who else would wear a three-piece suit and be accompanied by a young girl dressed in a tight mini? Certainly not an insurance agent. The girl's jewelry looked cheap-showy even from this distance. Kelly slipped the car into gear, following. He was able to lay back. How many white Caddies could there be? he wondered, crossing the river, three cars back, eyes locked on his target while peripheral parts of his mind dealt with the other traffic. Once he had to risk a ticket at a traffic light, but otherwise the tracking was simple. The Caddy stopped at the entrance to an upscale hotel, and he saw the girl get out, and walk towards the door, her stride a mixture of the businesslike and the resigned. He didn't want to see her face all that closely, afraid of what memories might result from it. This was not a night for emotion. Emotion was what had given him the mission. How he accomplished it had to come from something else. That would be a constant struggle, Kelly told himself, but one he would have to contend with successfully. That was, after all, why he'd come to this place, on this night.

The Cadillac moved on a few more blocks, finding a parking place by a seedy, flashy bar close enough to the nice hotels and businesses that a person could walk there quickly, yet never be far from the safety and comfort of civilized safety. A fairly constant stream of taxicabs told him that this aspect of local life had a firm, institutional foundation. He identified the bar in question and found himself a place to park three blocks away.

There was a dual purpose in parking so far from his objective. The walk in along Decatur Street gave him both a feel for the territory and a look at likely places for his action. Surely it would be a long night. Some short-skirted girls smiled at him as mechanically as the changing of the traffic lights, but he walked on, his eyes sweeping left and right while a distant voice reminded him of what he had once thought of such gestures. He silenced that voice with another, more current thought. His clothes were casual, what a moderately comfortable man might wear in this humid heat and heavy atmosphere, dark and anonymous, loose and baggy. They proclaimed money, but not too much, and his stride told people that he was not one to be trifled with. A man of understated substance having a discreet night on the wild side.

He walked into Chats Sauvages at eight-seventeen. His initial impression of the bar was smoke and noise. A small but enthusiastic rock band played at the far end. There was a dance floor, perhaps twenty-five feet square, where people his age and younger moved with the music; and there was Pierre Lamarck, sitting at a table in the corner with a few acquaintances, or so they seemed from their demeanor. Kelly walked to the men's room, both an immediate necessity and an opportunity to look the place over. There was another extrance on the side, but no closer to Lamarck's table than the one through which both he and Kelly had entered. The nearest path to the white Caddy led past Kelly's place at the bar, and that told him where his perch had to be. Kelly ordered a beer and turned conveniently to watch the band.

At nine- ten two young women came to Lamarck. One sat on his lap while the other nibbled at his ear. The other two men at the table watched with neutral interest while both women handed over something to him. Kelly couldn't tell what it was because he was looking towards the band, careful not to stare too often in Lamarck's direction. The pimp solved that problem immediately: it turned out, unsurprisingly, to be cash, and the man somewhat ostentatiously wrapped the bills around a roll removed from his pocket. Flash money, Kelly had troubled himself to learn, an important part of a pimp's public image. The first two women left, and Lamarck was soon joined by another, in what became an intermittent stream that didn't stop. His table mates enjoyed the same sort of traffic, Kelly saw, sipping their drinks, paying cash, joshing with and occasionally fondling the waitress who served them, then tipping her heavily by way of apology. Kelly moved from time to time. He removed his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, to present a different image to the bar's patrons, and limiting himself to two beers, which he nursed as carefully as he could. Tedious as it was, he disregarded the unpleasant nature of the evening, instead noticing things. Who went where. Who came and left. Who stayed. Who lingered in one place. Kelly soon started recognizing patterns and identifying individuals to whom he assigned names of his own creation. Most of all he observed everything there was to see about Lamarck. He never took off his suit jacket, kept his back to the wall. He talked amiably with his two companions, but their familiarity was not that of friends. Their joking was too affected. There was too much emphasis on their interactive gestures, not the casual comfort that you saw among people whose company was shared for some purpose other than money. Even pimps got lonely, Kelly thought, and though they sought out their own kind, theirs was not friendship but mere association. The philosophical observations he put aside. If Lamarck never took off his coat, he had to be carrying a weapon.

Just after midnight, Kelly put his coat back on and made yet another trip to the men's room. In the toilet stall he took the automatic he'd hidden inside his slacks and moved it to the waistband. Two beers in four hours, he thought. His liver ought to have eliminated the alcohol from his system, and even if it hadn't, two beers should not have had much effect on one as bulky as he. It was an important statement which, he hoped, wasn't a lie.

His timing was good. Washing his hands for the fifth time, Kelly saw the door open in the mirror. Only the back of the man's head, but under the dark hair was a white suit, and so Kelly waited, taking his time until he heard the urinal flush. A sanitary sort of fellow, the man turned, and their eyes met in the mirror.

'Excuse me,' Pierre Lamarck said. Kelly stepped away from the sink, still drying his hands with a paper towel.

'I like the ladies,' he said quietly.

'Hmph?' Lamarck had no less than six drinks in him, and his liver had not been up to the task, which didn't prevent his self-admiration in the dirty mirror.

'The ones that come up to you.' Kelly lowered his voice. 'They, uh, work for you, like?'

'You might say that, my man.' Lamarck took out a black plastic comb to readjust his coiffeur. 'Why do you ask?'

'I might need a few,' Kelly said with embarrassment.

'A few? You sure you can handle that, my man?' Lamarck asked with a sly grin.

'Some friends in town with me. One's having a birthday, and -'

'A party,' the pimp observed pleasantly.

'That's right.' Kelly tried to be shy, but mainly came off as being awkward. The error worked in his favor.

'Well, why didn't you say so? How many ladies do you require, sir?'

"Three, maybe four. Talk about it outside? I could use some air.'

'Sure thing. Just let me wash my hands, okay?'

'I'll be outside the front door.'

The street was quiet. Busy city though New Orleans might be, it was still the middle of the week, and the sidewalks, while not empty, weren't crowded either. Kelly waited, looking away from the bar's entrance until he felt a friendly hand on his back.

'It's nothing to be embarrassed about. We all like to have a little fun, especially when we're away from home, right?'

'I'll pay top dollar,' Kelly promised with an uneasy smile.

Lamarck grinned, like the man of the world he was, to put this chicken farmer at ease. 'With my ladies, you have to. Anything else you might need?'

Kelly coughed and took a few steps, willing Lamarck to follow, which he did. 'Maybe some, well, something to help us party, like?'

'I can handle that, too,' Lamarck said as they approached an alley.

'I think I met you before, couple years back. I remember the girl, really, her name was... Pam? Yeah, Pam. Thin, tawny hair.'

'Oh, yeah, she was fun. She's not with me anymore,' Lamarck said lightly. 'But I have lots more. I cater to the men who like 'em young and fresh.'

'I'm sure you do,' Kelly said, reaching behind his back. 'They're all on - I mean they all use things that make it - '

'Happy stuff, man. So they're always in the mood to party. A lady has to have the proper attitude.' Lamarck stopped at the entrance to the alley, looking outward, maybe worried about cops, which suited Kelly just fine. Behind him, he had not troubled to see, was a dark, scarcely lit corridor of blank brick walls, inhabited by nothing more than trash cans and stray cats, and open at the far end. 'Let's see. Four girls, rest of the evening, shall we say, and something to help get the party started... five hundred should do it. My girls aren't cheap, but you will get your money's -'

'Both hands in the open,' Kelly said, the Colt automatic leveled twelve inches from the man's chest.

Lamarck's first response was a disbelieving bluster:

'My man, that is a very foolish -'

Kelly's voice was all business. 'Arguing with a gun is even more foolish, my man. Turn, walk down the alley, and you might even make it back to the bar for a nightcap.'

'You must need money real bad to try something this dumb,' the pimp said, trying an implied threat.

'Your roll worth dying for?' Kelly asked reasonably. Lamarck measured the odds and turned, moving into the shadows.

'Stop,' Kelly told him after fifty yards, still behind the blank wall of the bar, or perhaps another just like it. His left arm grabbed the man's neck and pushed him against the bricks. His eyes looked up and down the alley three times. His ears searched for sounds separate from traffic noise and distorted music. For the moment it was a safe and quiet place. 'Hand me your gun - real careful.'

'I don't -' The sound of a hammer being cocked sounded awfully loud, that close to his ear.

'Do I look stupid?'

'Okay, okay,' Lamarck said, his voice losing its smooth edge now. 'Let's be real cool. It's only money.'

'That's smart,' Kelly said approvingly. A small automatic appeared. Kelly put his right index finger into the trigger guard. There was no sense in putting fingerprints on the weapon. He was taking enough chances, and as careful as he'd been to this point, the dangers of his action were suddenly very real and very large. The pistol fit nicely into his coat pocket.

'Let's see the roll next.'

'Right here, man.' Lamarck was starting to lose it. That was both good and bad, Kelly thought. Good because it was pleasing to see. Bad because a panicked man might do something foolish. Instead of relaxing, Kelly actually became more tense.

'Thank you, Mr Lamarck,' Kelly said politely, to calm the man.

Just then he wavered, and his head turned a few inches or so, as his consciousness asserted itself through the six drinks he'd had this evening. 'Wait a minute - you said you knew Pam.'

'I did,' Kelly said.

'But why- ' He turned farther to see a face that was bathed in darkness, only eyes showing with light glistening off their moisture, and the rest of the face a shadow white.

'You're one of the guys who ruined her life.'

Outrage: 'Hey, man she came to me!'

'And you got her on pills so she could party real good, right?' the disembodied voice asked. Lamarck could hardly remember what the man looked like now.

'That was business, so you met her, so she was a good fuck, right?'

'She certainly was.'

'I shoulda trained her better an' you coulda had her again insteada - was, you say?'

'She's dead,' Kelly told him, reaching in his pocket. 'Somebody killed her.'

'So? I didn't do it!' It seemed to Lamarck that he was facing a final exam, a test he didn't understand, based on rules he didn't know.

'Yes, I know that,' Kelly said, screwing the silencer onto the pistol. Lamarck saw that somehow, his eyes making the adjustment to the darkness. His voice became a shrill rasp.

'Then what are you doing this for?' the man said, too puzzled even to scream, too paralyzed by the incongruity of the past few minutes, by the passage of his life from the normality of his hangout bar to its end only forty feet away in front of a windowless brick wall, and he had to have an answer. Somehow it was more important than the escape, whose attempt he knew to be futile.

Kelly thought about that for a second or two. He could have said many things, but it was only fair, he decided, to tell the man the truth as the gun came up quickly and finally.

'Practice.'