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, 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’ 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. De Mille 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 wake-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—How tough 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.
&nb
sp; 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.