Without Remorse

  “Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s using you, man.” The odd part was that while Morello was beginning to understand that Tucker was manipulating both of them, Piaggi, the target of that manipulation, did not. As a result, Eddie’s correct observation was singularly ill-timed.

  “I’ve thought about that,” Piaggi lied. “What’s in it for him? A linkup with Philadelphia, New York?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he thinks he can do it. Those people are getting awful big for their pants, man.”

  “We’ll sweat that one out later, and I don’t see him doing that. What we want to know is, who’s taking his people down? You catch anything about somebody from out of town?” Put him on the spot, Piaggi thought. Make him commit. Tony’s eyes bored in across the table at a man too angry to notice or care what the other man was thinking.

  “I haven’t heard shit about that.”

  “Put feelers out,” Tony ordered, and it was an order. Morello had to follow it, had to check around.

  “What if he was taking out some people from inside, reliability problems, like? You think he’s loyal to anybody?”

  “No. But I don’t think he’s offing his own people, either.” Tony rose with a final order. “Check around.”

  “Sure,” Eddie snorted, left alone at his table.

  24

  Hellos

  “People, that went very well,” Captain Albie announced, finishing his critique of the exercise. There had been various minor deficiencies on the approach march, but nothing serious, and even his sharp eye had failed to notice anything of consequence on the simulated assault phase. Marksmanship especially had been almost inhumanly accurate, and his men had sufficient confidence in one another that they were now running within mere feet of fire streams in order to get to their assigned places. The Cobra crews were in the back of the room, going over their own performance. The pilots and gunners were treated with great respect by the men they supported, as were the Navy flight crews of the rescue birds. The normal us-them antipathy found among disparate units was down to the level of friendly joshing, so closely had the men trained and dedicated themselves. That antipathy was about to disappear entirely.

  “Gentlemen,” Albie concluded, “you’re about to learn what this little picnic outing is all about.”

  “Ten-hut!” Irvin called.

  Vice Admiral Winslow Holland Maxwell walked up the center of the room, accompanied by Major General Martin Young. Both flag officers were in their best undress uniforms. Maxwell’s whites positively glistened in the incandescent lights of the building, and Young’s Marine khakis were starched so stiff that they might well have been made of plywood. A Marine lieutenant carried a briefing board that nearly dragged on the floor. This he set on an easel as Maxwell took his place behind the lectern. From his place on the corner of the stage, Master Gunnery Sergeant Irvin watched the young faces in the audience, reminding himself that he had to pretend surprise at the announcement.

  “Take your seats, Marines,” Maxwell began pleasantly, waiting for them to do so. “First of all, I want to tell you for myself how proud I am to be associated with you. We’ve watched your training closely. You came here without knowing why, and you’ve worked as hard as any people I have ever seen. Here’s what it’s all about.” The Lieutenant flipped the cover off the briefing board, exposing an aerial photograph.

  “Gentlemen, this mission is called BOXWOOD GREEN. Your objective is to rescue twenty men, fellow Americans who are now in the hands of the enemy.”

  John Kelly was standing next to Irvin, and he, too, was watching faces instead of the Admiral. Most were younger than his, but not by much. Their eyes were locked on the reconnaissance photographs—an exotic dancer would not have drawn the sort of focus that was aimed at the blowups from the Buffalo Hunter drone. The faces were initially devoid of emotion. They were like young, fit, handsome statues, scarcely breathing, sitting at attention while the Admiral spoke to them.

  “This man here is Colonel Robin Zacharias, U.S. Air Force,” Maxwell went on, using a yard-long wooden pointer. “You can see what the Vietnamese did to him just for looking at the asset that snapped the picture.” The pointer traced over to the camp guard about to strike the American from behind. “Just for looking up.”

  Eyes narrowed at that, all of them, Kelly saw. It was a quiet, determined kind of anger, highly disciplined, but that was the deadliest kind of all, Kelly thought, suppressing a smile that only he would have understood. And so it was for the young Marines in the audience. It wasn’t a time for smiles. Each of the people in the room knew about the dangers. Each had survived a minimum of thirteen months of combat operations. Each had seen friends die in the most terrible and noisy way that the blackest of nightmares could create. But there was more to life than fear. Perhaps it was a quest. A sense of duty that few could articulate but which all of them felt. A vision of the world that men shared without actually seeing. Every man in the room had seen death in all its dreadful majesty, knowing that all life came to an end. But all knew there was more to life than the avoidance of death. Life had to have a purpose, and one such purpose was the service of others. While no man in the room would willingly give his life away, every one of them would run the risk, trusting to God or luck or fate in the knowledge that each of the others would do the same. The men in these pictures were unknown to the Marines, but they were comrades—more than friends—to whom loyalty was owed. And so they would risk their lives for them.

  “I don’t have to tell you how dangerous the mission is,” the Admiral concluded. “The fact of the matter is, you know those dangers better than I do, but these people are Americans, and they have the right to expect us to come for them.”

  “Fuckin’ A, sir!” a voice called from the floor, surprising the rest of the Marines.

  Maxwell almost lost it then. It’s all true, he told himself. It really does matter. Mistakes and all, we’re still what we are.

  “Thank you, Dutch,” Marty Young said, walking to center stage. “Okay, Marines, now you know. You volunteered to be here. You have to volunteer again to deploy. Some of you have families, sweethearts. We won’t make you go. Some of you might have second thoughts,” he went on, examining the faces, and seeing the insult he had caused them, not by accident. “You have today to think it over. Dismissed.”

  The Marines got to their feet, to the accompaniment of the grating sound of chairs scraping on the tile floor, and when all were at attention, their voices boomed as one:

  “RECON!”

  It was clear to those who saw the faces. They could no more shrink from this mission than they could deny their manhood. There were smiles now. Most of the Marines traded remarks with their friends, and it wasn’t glory they saw before their eyes. It was purpose, and perhaps the look to be seen in the eyes of the men whose lives they would redeem. We’re Americans and we’re here to take you home.

  “Well, Mr. Clark, your admiral makes a pretty good speech. I wish we recorded it.”

  “You’re old enough to know better, Guns. It’s going to be a dicey one.”

  Irvin smiled in a surprisingly playful way. “Yeah, I know. But if you think it’s a crock, why the hell are you going in alone?”

  “Somebody asked me to.” Kelly shook his head and went off to join the Admiral with a request of his own.

  She made it all the way down the steps, holding on to the banister, her head still hurting, but not so badly this morning, following the smell of the coffee to the sound of conversation.

  Sandy’s face broke into a smile. “Well, good morning!”

  “Hi,” Doris said, still pale and weak, but she smiled back as she walked through the doorway, still holding on. “I’m real hungry.”

  “I hope you like eggs.” Sandy helped her to a chair and got her a glass of orange juice.

  “I’ll eat the shells,” Doris replied, showing her first sign of humor.

  “You can start with these, and don’t worry about the shells,” Sarah Rosen told
her, shoveling the beginnings of a normal breakfast from the frying pan onto a plate.

  She had turned the corner. Doris’s movements were painfully slow, and her coordination was that of a small child, but the improvement from only twenty-four hours before was miraculous. Blood drawn the day before showed still more favorable signs. The massive doses of antibiotics had obliterated her infections, and the lingering signs of barbiturates were almost completely gone—the remnants were from the palliative doses Sarah had prescribed and injected, which would not be repeated. But the most encouraging sign of all was how she ate. Awkwardness and all, she unfolded her napkin and sat it in the lap of the terrycloth robe. She didn’t shovel the food in. Instead she consumed her first real breakfast in months in as dignified a manner as her condition and hunger allowed. Doris was turning back into a person.

  But they still didn’t know anything about her except her name—Doris Brown. Sandy got a cup of coffee for herself and sat down at the table.

  “Where are you from?” she asked in as innocent a voice as she could manage.

  “Pittsburgh.” A place as distant to her house guest as the back end of the moon.

  “Family?”

  “Just my father. Mom died in ’65, breast cancer,” Doris said slowly, then unconsciously felt inside her robe. For the first time she could remember, her breasts didn’t hurt from Billy’s attention. Sandy saw the movement and guessed what it meant.

  “Nobody else?” the nurse asked evenly.

  “My brother... Vietnam.”

  “I’m sorry, Doris.”

  “It’s okay—”

  “Sandy’s my name, remember?”

  “I’m Sarah,” Dr. Rosen added, replacing the empty plate with a full one.

  “Thank you, Sarah.” This smile was somewhat wan, but Doris Brown was reacting to the world around her now, an event far more important than the casual observer might have guessed. Small steps, Sarah told herself. They don’t have to be big steps. They just have to head in the right direction. Doctor and nurse shared a look.

  There was nothing like it. It was too hard to explain to someone who hadn’t been there and done it. She and Sandy had reached into the grave and pulled this girl back from grasping earth. Three more months, Sarah had estimated, maybe not that long, and her body would have been so weakened that the most trivial outside influence would have ended her life in a matter of hours. But not now. Now this girl would live, and the two medics shared without words the feeling that God must have known when He had breathed life into Adam. They had defeated Death, redeeming the gift that only God could give. For this reason both had entered their shared profession, and moments like this one pushed back the rage and sorrow and grief for those patients whom they couldn’t save.

  “Don’t eat too fast, Doris. When you don’t eat for a while, your stomach actually shrinks down some,” Sarah told her, returning to form as a medical doctor. There was no sense in warning her about problems and pain sure to develop in her gastrointestinal tract. Nothing would stop it, and getting nourishment into her superseded other considerations at the moment.

  “Okay. I’m getting a little full.”

  “Then relax a little. Tell us about your father.”

  “I ran away,” Doris replied at once. “Right after David ... after the telegram, and Daddy... he had some trouble, and he blamed me.”

  Raymond Brown was a foreman in the Number Three Basic Oxygen Furnace Shed of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and that was all he was, now. His house was on Dunleavy Street, halfway up one of the steep hills of his city, one of many detached frame dwellings built around the turn of the century, with wood clapboard siding that he had to paint every two or three years, depending on the severity of the winter winds that swept down the Monongahela Valley. He worked the night shift because his house was especially empty at night. Nevermore to hear the sounds of his wife, nevermore to take his son to Little League or play catch in the sloped sanctity of his tiny backyard, nevermore to worry about his daughter’s dates on weekends.

  He’d tried, done everything a man could do, after it was too late, which was so often the way of things. It had just been too much. His wife, discovering a lump, still a pretty young woman in her thirty-seventh year, his best and closest friend. He’d supported her as best he could after the surgery, but then came another lump, another surgery, medical treatment, and the downhill slide, always having to be strong for her until the end. It would have been a crushing burden for any man, and then followed by another. His only son, David, drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed two weeks later in some nameless valley. The support of his fellow workers, the way they had come to Davey’s funeral, hadn’t stopped him from crawling inside a bottle, desperately trying to cling to what he had left, but too tightly. Doris had borne her own grief, something Raymond hadn’t fully understood or appreciated, and when she’d come home late, her clothing not quite right, the cruel and hateful things he’d said. He could remember every word, the hollow sound as the front door had slammed.

  Only a day later he’d come to his senses, driving with tears in his eyes to the police station, abasing himself before men whose understanding and sympathy he never quite recognized, desperate again to get his little girl back, to beg from her the forgiveness that he could never give himself. But Doris had vanished. The police had done what they could, and that wasn’t much. And so for two years he’d lived inside a bottle, until two fellow workers had taken him aside and talked as friends do once they have gathered the courage to invade the privacy of another man’s life. His minister was a regular guest in the lonely house now. He was drying out—Raymond Brown still drank, but no longer to excess, and he was working to cut it down to zero. Man that he was, he had to face his loneliness that way, had to deal with it as best he could. He knew that solitary dignity was of little value. It was an empty thing to cling to, but it was all he had. Prayer also helped, some, and in the repeated words he often found sleep, though not the dreams of the family which had once shared the house with him. He was tossing and turning in his bed, sweating from the heat, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, is this Raymond Brown?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” he asked with closed eyes.

  “My name is Sarah Rosen. I’m a doctor in Baltimore, I work at Johns Hopkins Hospital.”

  “Yes?” The tone of her voice opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, the blank white place that so closely matched the emptiness of his life. And there was sudden fear. Why would a doctor from Baltimore call him? His mind was spinning off towards a named dread when the voice went on quickly.

  “I have somebody here who wants to talk to you, Mr. Brown.”

  “Huh?” He next heard muffled noises that might have been static from a bad line, but was not.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have nothing to lose, dear,” Sarah said, handing over the phone. “He’s your father. Trust him.”

  Doris took it, holding it in both hands close to her face, and her voice was a whisper.

  “Daddy?”

  From hundreds of miles away, the whispered word came through as clearly as a church bell. He had to breathe three times before answering, and that came out as a sob.

  “Dor?”

  “Yes—Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you okay, baby?”

  “Yes, Daddy, I’m fine.” And incongruous as the statement was, it was not a lie.

  “Where are you?”

  “Wait a minute.” Then the voice changed. “Mr. Brown, this is Doctor Rosen again.”

  “She’s there?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brown, she is. We’ve been treating her for a week. She’s a sick girl, but she’s going to be okay. Do you understand? She’s going to be okay.”

  He was grasping his chest. Brown’s heart was a steel fist, and his breathing came in painful gasps that a doctor might have taken for something they were not.

  “She’s okay?” he asked anxiously.
r />   “She’s going to be fine,” Sarah assured him. “There’s no doubt of that, Mr. Brown. Please believe me, okay?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus! Where, where are you?”

  “Mr. Brown, you can’t see her just yet. We will bring her to you just as soon as she’s fully recovered. I worried about calling you before we could get you together, but—but we just couldn’t not call you. I hope you understand.”

  Sarah had to wait two minutes before she heard anything she could understand, but the sounds that came over the line touched her heart. In reaching into one grave, she had extracted two lives.

  “She’s really okay?”

  “She’s had a bad time, Mr. Brown, but I promise you she will recover fully. I’m a good doc, okay? I wouldn’t say that unless it were true.”

  “Please, please let me talk to her again. Please!”

  Sarah handed the phone over, and soon four people were weeping. Nurse and physician were the luckiest, sharing a hug and savoring their victory over the cruelties of the world.

  Bob Ritter pulled his car into a slot in West Executive Drive, the closed-off former street that lay between the White House and the Executive Office Building. He walked towards the latter, perhaps the ugliest building in Washington—no mean accomplishment—which had once held much of the executive branch of government, the State, War, and Navy departments. It also held the Indian Treaty Room, designed for the purpose of overawing primitive visitors with the splendor of Victorian gingerbread architecture and the majesty of the government which had constructed this giant tipi. The wide corridors rang with the sound of his footsteps on marble as he searched for the right room. He found it on the second floor, the room of Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. “Special,” perversely, made him a second-line official. The National Security Advisor had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House. Those who reported to him had offices elsewhere, and though distance from the Seat of Power defined influence, it didn’t define arrogance of position. MacKenzie had to have a staff of his own in order to remind himself of his importance, real or illusory. Not really a bad man, and actually a fairly bright one, Ritter thought, MacKenzie was nonetheless jealous of his position, and in another age he would have been the clerk who advised the chancellor who advised the King. Except today the clerk had to have an executive secretary.