Later, Dar could not remember the landing on the carrier. He vaguely remembered the confusion on board as he was carried to the crowded infirmary. The Navy surgeon asked, “How bad are you hit?”
“Not hit,” Dar had said. “Just cut up from ricochets and concrete chips.”
They had cut off his boots, cut away his filthy, bloody blouse and trousers, and sponged his bloody flesh. “Sorry, son,” the middle-aged surgeon had said. “You’re wrong. You have at least three AK-47 rounds in you.”
Even as they sedated him, Dar was not concerned. He had carried Sergeant Carlos to the chopper. He could not be badly hurt. The AK-47 slugs had probably spent most of their kinetic energy in striking the reactor wall or passing through a half-empty sandbag before striking him. He did not even remember being shot.
When he finally awoke after surgery and four days of unconsciousness, he was told that the huge carrier was now so overloaded with refugees that aircraft on deck—including the gunships and Sea Stallion that had saved them—were being pushed overboard into the sea to make room for more choppers carrying VIPs from Saigon.
Dar slept again. When he next awoke, the city had fallen, and Saigon was now Ho Chi Minh City. The last diplomats and CIA personnel had filed onto the roof of the U.S. embassy and been flown out by slicks while thousands of Vietnamese allies had been held back by the final circles of Marines. Then the Marines were airlifted out under heavy fire.
The carrier task force headed for home. The important South Vietnamese politicians were sleeping in officers’ quarters below, while hundreds of displaced Marines and sailors literally slept on the deck, crowding under the remaining choppers and A-6 Intruders, exhausted men trying to keep out of the rain that now fell constantly.
Dar had agreed to tell Syd about Dalat, but had suggested he make them dinner first.
“That was good pasta,” said Syd when she’d finished.
Dar nodded.
Syd raised her coffee cup in both hands. “Will you tell me about Dalat now? I only know the barest facts.”
“There’s not that much to tell,” said Dar. “I was only there for forty-eight hours in 1975. But I went back a few years ago—in 1997. There’s a six-day tour leaving from Ho Chi Minh City that ends up in Dalat. Americans are discouraged from traveling in Vietnam, but it’s not illegal. You can fly from Bangkok for just two hundred seventy dollars on Vietnam Airline, or three hundred twenty on the more comfortable Thai Airway. In Dalat you can stay in a bug-ridden hostel named Hotel Dalat, or a fleabag hotel called the Minh Tam, or in a Vietnamese version of a luxury resort named the Anh Doa. I stayed at the Anh Doa. It even has a pool.”
“I thought you don’t fly as a passenger,” said Syd.
“This was a rare exception,” said Dar. “Anyway, it’s a pretty tour. The tour bus goes along the National Road Number Twenty from Ho Chi Minh City past Bao Loc, Di Linh, and Duc Trong—mostly huge tea and coffee plantations in that area, very green—and then climbs up the Pren Pass onto the south end of the Lang Biang plateau to get to the city of Dalat.”
Syd listened.
“Dalat is famous for its lakes,” continued Dar. “They have names like Xuan Huong, Than Tho, Da Thien, Van Kiep, Me Linh…lovely names and pretty lakes, except for some industrial pollution.”
Syd waited.
“There’s some jungle,” said Dar, “but above the city, it’s mostly pine forests. Even the forests and valleys have magical names—Ai An, which means Passion Forest, and Tinh Yeu, which translates to Love Valley.”
Syd put down her coffee cup. “Thank you for the tour, Dar, but I don’t give a damn about how Dalat looked in 1997. Will you tell me what happened there in 1975? It’s all still classified in the dossiers, but I know that you came out of there with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”
“They gave decorations to everyone who was there at the end,” said Dar, sipping his coffee. “It’s what countries and armies do when they’re defeated—they hand out medals.”
Syd waited.
“OK,” said Dar. “To tell you the truth, the Dalat mission is still technically classified—but it’s no longer secret. In January of 1997 a little paper called the Tri-City Herald broke the story and it got reprinted in the back pages of several other papers. I didn’t see it, but the travel agent told me about it when I was booking my tour.”
Syd sipped her coffee.
“Not too much of a story,” repeated Dar. His voice sounded ragged even to himself. Perhaps he was coming down with a cold. “In the last days before the big bugout from Saigon, the South Vietnamese reminded us that we’d built them a reactor at Dalat. There was some radioactive material there—including eighty grams of plutonium—that the U.S. officials didn’t want falling into the hands of the Communists. So they rounded up two heroic scientists named Wally and John and flew them into Dalat to grab the material before the VC and NVA overran the place. The scientists succeeded.”
“And you went with them as a Marine sniper,” said Syd. “And then?”
“And then, really, nothing,” said Dar. “Wally and John did all of the work finding and extracting the stuff they were supposed to find.” He managed a smile. “They knew how to shut down a nuclear reactor and use those remote handlers, but they had to teach themselves how to drive a forklift. Anyway, we took the isotopes and the canister marked plutonium and hightailed it out of there.”
“But there was fighting?” said Syd.
Dar went over to pour more coffee, realized that the pot was empty, and sat down. After a minute he said, “Sure. There always is in a war. Even in a lame-duck war like the one in 1975.”
“And you fired your rifle in anger,” said Syd. It was a question.
“No, actually, I didn’t,” said Dar. “I fired my weapon, but I wasn’t angry at anyone, except maybe at the assholes who had forgotten the damned reactor stuff in the first place. That’s the truth.”
Syd sighed. “Dr. Dar Minor as a Marine sniper…nineteen years old… It just doesn’t fit the person I know…sort of know.”
Dar waited.
“Will you at least tell me why you became a Marine?” asked Syd. “And a sniper of all things?”
“Yes,” said Dar, feeling his heart suddenly thud against his rib cage as he realized he was telling the truth. He would tell her. And in many ways, that was much more personal than the details of Dalat.
He glanced at his watch. “But it’s getting late right now, Investigator. Can we take a rain check on that part of the show-and-tell? I have some work to do before turning in tonight.”
Syd bit her lip and looked around the room—she had closed the curtains and shutters before they’d turned on the first lamp—but now the shadows were as rich as the orange lamp glow. For a wild second Dar thought that she was going to suggest that they spend the night—both of them—here in the cabin. His pulse was still racing.
“All right,” said Syd. “I’ll help you clear the dishes and we’ll hit the road. But you promise that you’ll tell me soon why you became a Marine?”
“I promise,” Dar heard himself say.
They were outside in the dark, heading for their respective vehicles, when Dar said, “The Dalat story has a punch line, sort of. It’s the main reason they kept it all classified, I think. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure,” said Syd.
“Remember I said that the mission was really about retrieving that priceless eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium?”
“Yes.”
Dar jingled his car keys in his right hand. He was carrying the gun case in his left. “Well, Wally and John found the lead-lined canister marked plutonium,” he said. “We got it out. The Feds, in their wisdom, sent it under guard to the big nuclear facility at Hanford, Idaho, where they carefully stored it along with thousands of other canisters of the stuff.”
“Yes?” prompted Syd.
“Well, four years after my first visit to Dalat, in 1979, someone finally got around to looking at it.”
br /> Syd waited in the pine-scented dark.
“It wasn’t plutonium at all,” said Dar. “We went to all that trouble to retrieve eighty grams of polonium.”
“What’s the difference?” said Syd.
“Plutonium makes atomic and hydrogen bombs work,” said Dar. “Polonium doesn’t do much of anything.”
“How could they—Wally and George or whatever—make that kind of mistake?”
“Wally and John didn’t,” said Dar. “One of the Vietnamese reactor techs must have slapped the wrong symbol on the canister.”
“So what happened to the plutonium?”
“According to another report in the reliable Tri-City Herald on January 19, 1997,” said Dar, “the Republic of Vietnam’s spokesman said, and I quote, ‘The Dalat Nuclear Research Institute is currently preserving the amount of plutonium left behind by the Americans as required by technical necessity.’”
Dar had said this lightly, but Syd’s silence seemed heavy. Finally she said, “You mean the reactor is up and running again?”
“The Russian scientists helped the North Vietnamese get it operational a month after they won the war,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“R IS FOR RECON”
DAR, THE MERCILESS ex-Marine sniper, spent the rest of Friday night and all day Saturday sewing and going through his back issues of Architectural Digest.
Some years ago, when Lawrence was poking around amidst Dar’s shelves, the adjuster had come across several years worth of the white-spined interior design magazines, and said, “Who the hell do these belong to?” Dar had made the mistake of trying to explain why he liked reading such home interior design magazines—how the pictured worlds without humans were so static, so perfect, so…minded…how that frozen-forever-perfection always translated in the prose to a couple, gay or straight, living in a timeless, clutterless, decision-free universe since everything was in its place, every pillow fluffed and creased to perfection. In reality the Architectural Digest edition was usually off the stand less than three months before the director and movie star who had built their perfect palace announced their divorce. The irony of the great gap between the perfectly designed, perfectly photographed homes and the chaos of real life amused Dar. Besides, it made good bed and bathroom reading.
“You’re nuts,” Lawrence had suggested.
Now Dar thumbed through almost two years of back issues before coming across the article he remembered.
Dallas Trace’s $6 million home had been built from scratch in a crowded neighborhood just below the crest of Mulholland Drive along the Valley side. The neighborhood—Coy Drive, Dar found out, although not through the magazine article, of course—was comprised of relatively modest ($1 million and up) 1960s-era ranch houses, but Attorney Trace had bought three of the properties, had the homes bulldozed, and hired one of America’s stranger architects to build him a Luxor-like post-postmodernist cement, rusted iron, and glass…thing…clinging to the hillside and dwarfing all of the other homes on the ridgeline.
Dar read and reread the article, concentrating on three pages of photographs and memorizing which of the huge windows looked out from which room. There was a small insert of the thinly smiling Counselor Trace—“The World’s Best Legal Mind” was the caption—sitting in an uncomfortable-looking Barcelona chair. His bride, Imogene, the big-breasted then twenty-three-year-old Miss Brazil (second runner-up in that year’s Miss Universe competition) whom Dallas Trace had legally renamed Destiny (because it was her destiny to marry the famous lawyer), perched on the even-less-comfortable-looking metal arm of the chair.
Dar thought that the house itself was an abomination—all postmodernist walls going nowhere, show-off knife-edge cornices, pretentious forty-foot-high living room ceilings, industrial materials with bolts and hinges and catwalks jutting everywhere, rusting iron “wings” that did or signified nothing, a strip of swimming pool narrow enough to step across—but he was delighted to read about the architect’s decision “…not to bother with such bourgeois amenities as drapes or blinds, since the tall, magnificent windows, many coming together glass-to-glass at sharp angles overhanging the wild ravine, served to destroy any distinction between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ and to pull the magnificent wilderness into each of the bright and varied living areas.”
This “magnificent wilderness,” Dar knew from studying his Thomas Guide and topo maps of the area, was actually the only undeveloped ridge in the area, one saved from the bulldozers by the discovery of multiple Indian artifacts and the relentless lobbying of some of Coy Drive’s more stubborn residents—including Leonard Nimoy and a writer named Harlan Ellison.
Sewing the ghillie suit was a pain in the ass. Dar had to take the oversized, two-piece camouflage overalls, attach netting to the whole damn thing, reinforce the front of the suit with heavy canvas—also camouflage-patterned—and then sew on more tough canvas to the elbows and knees.
Dar then took the several hundred irregularly cut strips of hessian/burlap and “garnished” the suit—a seven-hour job of sewing the bastardly bits of cloth to every part of the net, which in turn had been sewn to the outer coveralls. The front of the ghillie suit was only lightly garnished, but Dar had to apply enough strips to the back of the suit for the floppy pieces of fabric to hang down to drape on the ground whenever he was in a prone position. The wide-brimmed boonie hat he had purchased was similarly garnished, only here the Alaskan mosquito-netting outfit came in handy.
Dar had never worn or made himself a ghillie suit in his training for Vietnam—Marines had humped into the jungle and fought in their green or camouflage fatigues, often using branches and greenery for camouflage while waiting for the enemy, or occasionally excavating a dug-out and camouflage-covered so-called belly-hide fire position. Ghillie suits were just too damned hot and clumsy for jungle fighting. But in the mid-1970s at Camp Pendleton just up the road from San Diego, Dar had been taught the history of the ghillie suit.
Ghillies had been Scottish gamekeepers in the 1800s who developed such man-made camouflage outfits for stalking game—and poachers—on the great Highland estates. German snipers had started the trend toward the modern ghillie suit in World War I when they discarded their issued, oversized, hooded, stiff and cumbersome canvas greatcoats and constructed their own camouflage robes for use when crawling around in No Man’s Land. They had soon discovered the usefulness of adding a camouflaged hood that could be pulled over the head, leaving only a small slit with a gauze eyepiece for vision. Snipers also soon learned that the human eye—especially in a battlefield environment—is exceptionally sensitive to both unusual movement—say, a bush crawling along under its own propulsion—and to the slightest glimpse of the outline of a human face. The sight of a rifle barrel also tended to catch a soldier’s or countersniper’s attention very, very quickly.
And so the sniper’s ghillie suit had evolved this century through a harsh but very efficient process of natural selection. Today, in sniper schools such as the Royal Marines’ school at Lympstone in Devon or the U.S. Marines’ Scout Sniper Schools in Quantico, Virginia, or Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, it is common practice for the Marine NCOs to take visiting officers from other services out onto the training field and explain the theoretical advantages of camouflage in the profession of sniping. At the end of the short lecture, five to thirty-five ghillie-suited snipers stand up—usually none of them farther than twenty paces from the startled Army officers, and many of them literally within touching distance. The rule in making a successful ghillie suit is that if someone can see it before he steps on it, it’s back to the sewing machine or forward to the grave.
Dar was pleased in some obscure way that even today, the Marines’ Sniper School students were expected to make their own ghillie suits during their spare time. Some of the products, Dar knew from visiting Camp Pendleton in recent years, were quite original.
This reminded him. He stopped sewing and cussing for a few minutes and called Camp Pendleton
, making an appointment to see Captain Butler there late on Tuesday afternoon. Returning to his worktable, Dar was glad that he would not be bringing his own ghillie suit along for inspection. Marines can be very insensitive sometimes.
Dar finished the ghillie suit about dinnertime. He tried it on—slipping into the fatigues, buttoning everything up, pulling on the boonie hat with its three feet of netting and mosquito-screen camouflage attachments—and then went to stand in front of the full-length closet mirror to see how he looked.
There was no full-length mirror—only its frame and two bullet holes.
Dar went into the bathroom and stood on the edge of the tub to check out his new suit. The bathroom cabinet gave him only a partial view, but it was ridiculous enough to make him just want to lie down in the tub and take a nap until everything—including Dallas Trace and his Alliance and his Russian enforcers—just went away.
Dar thought that he looked like some low-budget, Roger Corman, 1961 horror-movie monster—a shapeless sheepdog mass with hundreds of irregular dun and tan and soft green tatters hanging from it. He could not see his own eyes through the mosquito-netting veil, and accompanying camo-strips. His hands were concealed by the overhanging sleeves, netting, and strips of hessian/burlap. He was no longer a human shape, merely a raggedy-ass blob looking like a pile of ambulatory hound dog ears.
“Boo!” he said to his reflection. The blob in the mirror did not react.
Lawrence agreed to give him a twilight ride to a trailhead so that Dar could go camping. The ghillie suit and everything else Dar needed—theoretically—was crammed into his oversized rucksack.
When Dar had called with the request, about 7:00 P.M. that Saturday evening, Lawrence had said, “Well, sure, I’ll drive you to where you want to go camping…but what happened to that nine-ton Land Crusher you used to own? It seems to me that would do the job.”