Without Remorse

  “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 U.S. 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 nearly to the camp’s main gate. On the overhead photos it looked like a good road, blacktopped 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 a 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 1 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? What if I hadn’t moved at all and let the bastard 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 cornrows 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 stern 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 on 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.

  Just about 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.