“Hey,” Donny said over the roar, “it’s stopped raining.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Even in the hospital, Huu Co, Senior Colonel, was criticized. It was merciless. It was relentless. It went beyond cruelty. Each day, at 1000 hours, he was wheeled into the committee room, his burned left arm swaddled in bandages, his head dopey with painkillers, his brain ringing with revolutionary adages with which nurses and doctors alike pummeled him in all his waking hours.
He sat stiffly in the heat, waiting as the painkillers gradually diminished, facing faceless accusers from behind banks of lights.
“Senior Colonel, why did you not press on despite your casualties?”
“Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units to deal with the American sniper?”
“Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?”
“Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?”
“Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phuc Bo argue with you as to the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did you discount his advice? Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?”
The questions were endless, as was his pain.
They were also right in their implication: he had behaved unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison was evidently deep in his soul, unpurged by years of rigor and asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence reports could be believed.
He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion. He was a cockroach who had—
But then the strangest thing happened. Even as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of the political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the man tore open and read nervously.
Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the great Uncle Ho himself.
“Oh, Colonel,” he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it seemed nearly indecent, “oh, Colonel, you look so uncomfortable in that chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy? Sugar beet? American chocolate? Hershey’s, we have Hershey’s, probably, if I do say so myself, with … almonds.”
“Almonds?” said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy Hershey’s with almonds.
Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey bars for the new celebrity. In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring warmly about the colonel’s beautiful wife and his six wonderful children.
The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did everything to assure his comfort.
“Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?” he asked. “I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a deviationist, a secret Western spy.”
“Oh, Colonel,” the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, “you joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel’s wit is legendary!”
And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.
What on earth could be happening?
And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam could explain such a sea change: the Russians.
At their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU—Chief Intelligence Directorate—grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn’t preparation for a trial, it was an intelligence operation.
They were very thorough in their Western way. He talked them through it slowly, working first from maps and then, after the first day, from a scale model of the valley before Kham Duc, quickly built and painted with surprising accuracy. The conversations were all in Russian.
“You were … ?”
“Here, when the first shots came.”
“How many?”
“He fired three times.”
“Semiauto?”
“No, bolt action. He never fired quickly enough for semiauto, though he was very, very good with that bolt. He may have been the fastest man with a bolt I’ve ever heard of.”
The Russians listened intently, but it wasn’t just the sniper that interested them; that was clear. No, it was the whole action, the loss of the sapper squad, the sounds of fire from the right flank, the presence of the flares. The flares, especially.
“The flares. You can describe them?”
“Well, yes, comrade. They appeared to be standard American combat flares, bright white, more powerful than our green Chinese equivalent. They hung in the air approximately two minutes and grew brighter as they descended.”
They listened, taking notes, keeping elaborate charts and timelines, trying to reconstruct the event in painstaking detail. It was even clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Duc battle.
They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in a journey to understanding.
“Now, Colonel,” the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked Marlboros, “based on what we’ve learned, I wonder if you’d venture a guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares, particularly given their location vis-à-vis the angle of most of the fire directed at you?”
“Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams, they are almost always two-men operations.”
“Yes,” the team leader said. “Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets, which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper’s round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the standard combat load of the M14. So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the other the M14. Of course, that’s different than the men killed by the forty-five-caliber submachine gun. We believe that was the sniper’s secondary weapon.”
The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed. It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction of the threat.
“Do you wish to know about these men?”
The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its significance were him and not the cause.
“No, I think not. I care nothing for personality.”
“Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new assignment.”
Well, wasn’t this interesting? A new assignment under Russian sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?
/>
And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more victims.
They had a picture of him from something called Leatherneck magazine, and what he saw was what he expected. He knew Americans from Paris and from his time in Saigon with the puppets. This one was a type, perhaps exaggerated, but familiar. Thin, hard, resilient, braver even than the French, brave as any Germans in the Legion. Cunning, with that specially devious quality of mind that let him instinctively understand weakness and move decisively against it. Disciplined in a way the Americans almost never were. He would have made a brilliant party official, so tight and focused was his mind.
The picture simply showed a slit-eyed young man with prominent cheekbones, his leathery face lit with a grin. He held some ludicrous trophy thing in his arms; next to him was an older version of the same man, same slit eyes, close-cropped hair but with more vanity on his chest. “Sergeant Swagger accepts the congratulations of the Commandant after winning at Camp Perry,” read the caption, translated into the Vietnamese. It was warrior’s glee, the colonel knew; and he saw in those slit eyes the deaths of so many, and the remorselessness that had driven their executioner.
“For this one,” he said, “the war is not a cause. It is merely an excuse.”
“Possibly,” said the Russian intelligence chief. “Perhaps even the war releases him to find his greatness. But do you not think he has a certain discipline? He is not profligate, he is not one of their criminals, like the Calleys and the Medinas. He has never raped or murdered in combat. He has no sexual weaknesses, a pathology associated with psychopathy.”
“He is not a psychopath,” Huu Co said. “He is a hero, though the line between them is thin, possibly fragile. He needs a cause to find his true self, that is what I mean. He is the sort who must have a cause to live. He needs something to humble himself in front of. Take that from him and you take everything.”
“Very good. Here, here is more, here is what we have.”
It was more on Swagger, culled from various American public resources. The package included, unbelievably, Marine records, obviously from a very sensitive source.
“Yes.”
“Study this man. Study him well. Learn him. He is your new responsibility.”
“Yes, of course. I accept. And what is the ultimate arrival of this project?”
“Why … his death, of course. His death and the death of the other one, too. They both must die.”
He slept Swagger, he dreamed Swagger, he read Swagger, he ate Swagger. Swagger engaged and caused the rebirth of the Western part of his mind: he struggled to grasp principles like pride and honor and courage and how their existence sustained a corrupt bourgeoisie state. For such a state could not exist without the pure fire of such centurions as Swagger standing watch, ready to die, on the Rhines of its empires.
“Why me?” he asked the Russian. “Why not one of your own analysts?”
“What can our analysts know? You have been fighting these people since 1964.”
“You have been fighting them since 1917.”
“But ours is a distant fight, a theoretical fight. Yours is up close, close enough to smell blood and shit and piss. That’s experience hard bought and much respected.”
Then another day brought another surprise: reconnaissance photos, taken from a high-flying vehicle of some sort, of what appeared to be a Marine post in the jungles of some province of his own country.
“I Corps,” said the Russian. “About forty kilometers from Kham Duc. One of the last American combat posts left in the zone. They call it Firebase Dodge City. A Marine installation. It is from here the American Swagger and his spotter mount their missions.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, well, if we’re to take him, it’ll be on his territory. He’ll always have the advantage, unless, of course, we can learn the terrain as well as he knows it.”
“Surely local cadre…”
“Well, now, isn’t that an interesting situation? Local cadre have been extremely inactive in that region for some months. This man Swagger terrifies them. They call him, in your language, quan toi.”
“The Nailer.”
“The Nailer. Like a carpenter. The nailer. He nails them. At any rate, at the local cadre level, most combat operations have ceased. That is why Firebase Dodge City still exists, when so many other Marines have been shipped home. Because the Nailer has nailed so many people that nobody likes to operate in his area. What is the point? The war will be over soon, he will be recalled, that will be that. But we cannot let that be that, can we?”
But try as he might, Huu Co could not hate the American. It seemed pointless. The man was no architect of war, no policy designer; he clearly had no sadistic side to him, no tendency toward atrocity: he was merely an excellent professional soldier, of the sort all armies have relied upon for thousands of years. He had some extra gene for aggression, some extra gene for shooting ability, and that was it. He was a believer—or maybe not. The colonel remembered, from his other life, the Frenchman Camus, who said, “When men of action cease to believe in a cause, they believe only in action.”
It didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that he wondered what the delay was. Why were they not moving now, if this was so important? Why were they waiting, what were they waiting for? He applied himself to the problem, and set out to master the terrain in and around Firebase Dodge City.
It was situated on a hill, and the Americans had deforested for a thousand yards all around it with their Agent Orange. The camp was typical: he’d seen hundreds in his long years of war. Its tactical problems were typical, too. In many respects it was similar to the unfallen A-Camp Arizona. The doctrine was primitive, but usually effective: approach at night, rally in the dark, send in sappers to blow the wire, attack in strength. But for the killing of one sniper team, that was a different tactical problem. The team would probably exit at night, that is, if they weren’t helicopter extracted. The trick would then be understanding from which point from the perimeter they would leave, and what would be their typical passage across the open zone. One could therefore hope to intercept them if one knew the terrain and the way Swagger’s mind worked.
Studying the photos, Huu Co saw three natural paths away from the camp, through gulches, enfilades, natural depressions in the land, where men would travel to avoid being spotted. One would set an ambush at such points, yes. It would be possibly effective, a long stalk, luck playing the most likely role. But if for some reason, the Americans could be induced to leaving during the day, right, say, at first dawn, a good shooter might have a chance to hit them from a hill not quite fifteen hundred yards out. Oh, it was a long shot, a desperately long shot, but the right man might bring it off, much more effectively, say, than an ambush team, who’s luck might be on or off.
But where would such a man be found? He knew the North Vietnamese certainly didn’t have such a man. In fact, such a man, such a specialist might not exist, at least not effectively. Huu Co said nothing about his conclusions; the Russians did not ask him. And then one night, he was awakened roughly by SPETSNAZ troopers and informed that they had a journey to make.
He climbed into a shiny black Zil limousine in his dress uniform, among four or five Russians, all talking and laughing boisterously among themselves. They ignored him.
They drove into Hanoi, through darkened streets, down the broad but now empty boulevards, and by the ceremonial plazas where the American Phantoms were displayed. Banners flapped mightily in the wind: ONWARD TO VICTORY, BROTHERS and LONG LIVE THE FATHERLAND and LET US EMBRACE THE REVOLUTIONARY FUTURE. The Russians paid them no mind, and laughed, and talked of women and alcohol and smoked American cigarettes; they were like Americans in many ways, not an observant or respectful people, but men who took their own destiny so much for granted that
they could be annoying.
After a time, Huu Co realized where they were going: unmistakably, they headed for the People’s Revolutionary Airfield, north of Hanoi, passed through its wire defenses and guard posts with the wave of passes of the highest clearance, and sped not to the main building but to an out-of-the-way compound, which was heavily guarded by white men with automatic weapons, in the combat uniforms of SPETSNAZ, the hotshots who got all the sexy assignments and handled training for NVA cadre on certain dark, arcane secret arts.
The Zil parked, debarking its men, who escorted Huu Co inside, to discover an extremely comfortable little chunk of Russia, complete with televisions, a bar, elaborate Western furniture and the like. Also, many Playboy magazines lay about, and empty beer bottles, and the walls were festooned with pictures of blond women with large, gravity-defying breasts and no pubic hair.
Russians, thought Huu Co.
After a time, the little party went out to the tarmac, parked at the obscure end of a runway and awaited the arrival of someone designated Solaratov, whether a real name or a trade name, Huu Co was not informed. No rank, either; no first name. Just Solaratov, as if the name itself conveyed quite enough information, thank you.
Again, it was chilly, though no rain. The hot season was hard on them, but it had not arrived yet. In the emerging gray light, Huu Co stood a little apart from the crowd of bawdy, laughing Russian intelligence and SPETSNAZ people, himself the solitary man, not a part of their camaraderie and unsure why his presence was required. Yet clearly, they wanted him here: he was seeing things possibly no North Vietnamese below the Politburo level had seen. Why? What was the meaning of it all?
The sound of a jet airplane asserted itself, low but insistent, coming in from the east, out of the sun. The plane flashed overhead, glinting in the rising light, revealing itself to be a Tupolev Tu-16, code-named by the Americans “Badger,” a twin-engine, three-man bombing craft with a bubble canopy and sparkle of plastic at the nose. It wore combat drab, and its red stars stood out boldly against green camouflage. Its flaps were down and it peeled to the west, found a landing vector and set down on the main runway. It taxied for a distance, then began to head over toward the little party standing by itself on the runway.