The Whisper of the Axe

  “That’s all right with me. I’m no sadist. Run those seven men through the computer and tell me who is the most rugged and that is the man we will give to Dr. Baum for de-briefing.”

  “I mean like if this is a conspiracy or somepin like that, thin iffen one a the seven dis’pears, the othuh six is gunna fade on us.”

  “Oh, come on, Maas. If a man has to disappear we can arrange a very convincing accident. Go find me the man. I’ll set Dr. Baum.”

  The most rugged of the seven transferees was flown from the touch down of his MATS flight from Illinois Air Base at Saigon. He was a powerfully built man who had once done two years of service in 1957–58, had mustered out in Illinois and, within three months, had been sentenced to one and a half to three years at Joliet for simple assault upon a policewoman. He was the only Illinois convict of the five convicts. He had been intercepted just before his transfer to join the other men in the Third Platoon.

  The transferee was flown to a base hospital at Quang Tri where he was prepared for de-briefing with three injections of Dr. Baum’s own preparations and strapped tightly to a chair that was bolted into the floor. He was strapped at ankle, knee, hips, chest, neck, forearm and wrist facing a nine-foot-square rear projection screen. At 7:09 A.M. on a Friday, Dr. Baum and the three colonels entered the small room and began de-briefing procedures that had been developed by Dr. Baum in eastern Europe during the last years of World War II when he had been employed under a different management.

  At 14:27 on the following Sunday Dr. Baum extracted the last available scrap of information from the rugged transferee regarding the mission of all seven men, but Baum did not bother to seal over the man’s memory stacks because he had, in fact, died at the termination of his questioning.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Purcell flew to Quang Tri to await Dr. Baum’s report. Baum’s gay colonel had transferred all the rough notes into a typescript of 117 pages that laid out everything the man had known about his mission.

  What the man knew, by his own confession to Dr. Baum, was both a little bit and a great lot at the same time. All he knew was that he would be part of a unit of seven GIs (whom he did not know but who would reveal themselves at the proper time), that with them he was to desert from his Army unit and travel northward along the north-south cordillera to make a rendezvous in North Vietnam, where they would be delivered detailed orders as to the operations that would follow. What he did not know or would not tell was who had recruited him for this action. He had, in fact, died while Dr. Baum was insisting that he reveal this information.

  Purcell flew the report to Washington. Baum remained in Quang Tri to de-brief three North Vietnamese. Purcell’s direct superior, General Marek, was waiting for him. Fifty minutes later they were both before an ad hoc committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presided over by its Chairman’s deputy, Lieutenant General Ludlow “Petey” Doncaster.

  Marek made the report on Dr. Baum’s findings. He introduced Colonel Purcell as the man responsible for the brilliant work of uncovering the plot. Purcell undertook to explain where the unit would need to be placed, as Three Platoon, before they could take off into the Cordillera and make their way north toward what Purcell and Marek assumed must be the Chinese frontier. The others agreed. What else could it be? He said, in the nature of military operations, there would be no way of predicting when the Three Platoon would be in such a position, if ever; the seven men might have been transferred into Three Platoon to wait years for the chance of finding themselves conveniently at the farthest northwest of the war zone.

  General Doncaster asked for Colonel Purcell’s recommendations. Colonel Purcell recommended that they wait until all six of the transferees were in place inside Three Platoon in Saigon and then rearrange operations so that Three Platoon was part of a strike by the 9th Infantry Brigade of the Colombio Division to be made to the farthest north and northwest. He further recommended that an Army Intelligence agent be chosen immediately to take the dead man’s place, to be escorted, they hoped, inside China with official Chinese sanction. Finally, he recommended that his own unit undertake an analysis of the records of all seven men who had been ticketed for the rendezvous and that nothing be spared to run down their origins, backgrounds, and recent contacts to uncover who in the United States had recruited them and for what reason. When the Army Intelligence plant came out of China, his report would coincide with the evidence they must find to stop the plot—whatever it was—from ever reaching fruition.

  “The CIA has been trying for twenty-seven years to get a man inside China,” General Doncaster said. “They failed so many times it could have filled Arlington Cemetery. This is the biggest chance we’ve ever had. We’ve got to give it everything we’ve got.”

  Everyone at the table agreed enthusiastically. General Doncaster directed General Marek to handpick a volunteer for the “China” assignment. “Find a tough one, General. Probably better if it isn’t an officer. We want an agent who can live the way ex-convicts live and talk the way they talk. But smart! The agent has to be one of the best anywhere in Army Intelligence today. Put your personnel computers on overtime, give them the most detailed profile you can build for this agent and bring whoever you choose into Quang Tri from wherever in the world you have to for a briefing by Dr. Baum.”

  Everyone at the table involuntarily dropped his eyes at the mention of Dr. Baum’s name. Marek’s eyes were shocked at the idea of sending one of his own people into that. “Dr. Baum, General?”

  Doncaster chuckled a fake chuckle that convinced no one. “Baum isn’t rough on his briefings. A lot of men—the greater percentage, I would say—have survived them. It is his de-briefings that take their toll. Anyway, Dr. Baum has updated his techniques to include hypnosis, narco-hypnosis, bio-feedback, and behavior modification processes like the ‘second signal’ system. He is considerably in advance of Asian methods of human programming.”

  “Yes, sir.” Marek relaxed. Chillingly cold science had taken over.

  “This man, whoever he is, is going to need to be made over into the psychological image of the dead transferee. Get moving, General. There’s no time to spare.” Hurrying away from the meeting Colonel Purcell asked General Marek, “Why the hell does the agent need to be made over into the psychological image of the dead man? Who is going to be with him that will know who he was, what he was like, how he thought—and things like that? I mean, what the hell, the old man wasn’t talking about any cosmetic surgery here, was he?”

  “No, no, no,” Marek said irritably. “What the hell, you can figure it out. Suppose this agent the computers find for us was once a dress designer or a tap dancer? He’s going to be thrown in with a lot of convicts and he’s got to think like a convict—he’s got to get that criminal kink put into his mind to be able to live with them, swap stories, keep his place and be believed by them, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Yes,” Colonel Purcell muttered, wishing he had thought the thing through before he opened his mouth. He didn’t want any dumb attitudes to go on his service record. He wanted to make full colonel, get out into leading some combat, then keep moving up as a general officer until the time came to retire.

  In April, the month the war in Vietnam cost the people of the United States thirty million dollars a day, Task Force Headquarters were set up at Landing Zone Margie, southwest of Hué, where Able, Bravo and Charlie Companies of the 414th Battalion were assembled. Their strike areas had been located for them by ARVN because ARVN was Vietnamese and able to infiltrate to find out where Charley was hiding. It was never reliable information. A lot of Americans were lost that way but this was a different kind of war the Americans were fighting.

  Bravo and Charlie Companies were ferried out by nine troop transport helicopters accompanied by two gunships. Bravo Company was flown farthest west to a target area that was almost at the Laos frontier. Three Platoon was ordered farthest west of Bravo Company. Three went almost to the base of the cordillera.

  Bravo didn’t reach the target a
rea until 7:47 A.M., which was thirty-two minutes after Charlie Company had started to search out and destroy anything that moved at Khe Thong, thirty-one miles east of the Bravo target. The men were told that large numbers of Cong would be waiting for them. According to the official rationale of the mission, surprise was the key factor. Once the helicopters put them down, it took twelve minutes to form the men, with officers yelling. The men were bug-eyed. They expected to be blown apart by BAR as they came off, but nothing happened. ARVN had fucked up again. The guys milled around a couple of minutes, then began to move out, splitting into platoons and dividing the target area. It was a very hot day.

  The Three Platoon moved across the wet plain and the myriad canals, some with bridges, others just with slippery poles to sidle over. The whole country was one big box of Uncle Ben’s Quick Rice. It was so flat, so hot, and so monotonous that a man stuck out there, even if he expected to get shot any minute, got bored. It was just a boring country. Nobody could figure out how they had gotten the people to fight for it.

  Lieutenant Orin Dawes led the Third Platoon west for about twelve hundred yards. Their mission was to make it to a spit of land holding a small hamlet, then to search it and destroy it and everything living in it. They had done it many times before, but none of them could get used to the women who all looked seventy when they were maybe thirty, dragging their babies and trying to run ahead of the Armalites as they were cut in half at the rate of 750 bullets a minute traveling 3,250 feet a second.

  The hamlet was screened by a thick hedge and was densely guarded by booby traps. Three mines were tripped at the same time. Everybody in the platoon heard the screams. A sergeant was killed and four GIs were badly hurt. Helicopters were called in to evacuate the wounded men. As the platoon moved forward again, booby traps killed three more men. After the second set of booby traps, the GIs who were left passed the word that they were not going to continue the mission. Colonel Braden, leading the Task Force, flew in himself to see to the evacuation of the wounded. Rather than bring up the Second Platoon he canceled Bravo Company’s order. After Braden flew away, Lieutenant Dawes was frantic to find a substitute target. What was left of the Third Platoon followed him in an aimless struggle in the general direction of west by northwest. The pine-covered slopes of the 6,000-foot-high Annamese Chain loomed ahead, retreating north into Laos, then back farther into China. Before they had gone 300 yards they could see, through heavy brush and trees, a collection of straw and mud houses. They could see only women, children and old men.

  “Okay, men,” the lieutenant said, “there’s your Cong. Blow them away!”

  Two machine gunners set up the M60E1s on tripods and put on asbestos gloves for the barrel changes. The barrels got hot but they were still great machines, using a feed system of the German MG42 because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Dawes ordered the gunners to open fire.

  When the gun handlers had finished, four point men went into the village street with Armalites to shoot civilians still skulking in their straw houses. The noises of the rapid fire, grenades exploding, the screams of the dying, and Dawes’s shouts to kill the fucking Cong all blended into a hot threnody. Ninety Vietnamese were dead almost instantly. Surviving women, lifting or dragging children, had run out of the village toward the hamlet’s system of bunkers and tunnels, which was well out of sight about 110 yards away. Dawes took two point men and four GIs and set out after them, yelling back at the radio operator to tell the CP to fly in more explosives.

  When the seven soldiers got into position near the mouths of the tunnels, they were isolated from the rest of the platoon. Everything changed. The frantic urgency was replaced by cool.

  “This is the shape-up,” Dawes said to the men. “Show your slips.” Each man unbuttoned his blouse pocket and produced a blue piece of paper with a number on it. “Who has the map?” Dawes said.

  Sergeant Kranak had the map. He spread it on the ground and they made a circle around him. It was a Lambert conformal conic projection of northern Laos, Tonkin, and lower China. It showed Ho Chi Minh trails marked as Road Routes 8, 12, 23, and 122. It indicated numbered paths through the mountains along the Xe Bangfair and the Na Oa La rivers where the greatest opium crop in the world was harvested.

  Kranak looked very nervous; as if he thought nobody was going to believe him. “You know what it means, I got the map?” Kranak asked them.

  “It means you’re in command,” Dawes said.

  “How come him?” Lurky Anderson said.

  “We’re going through those mountains to the north,” Kranak said. “I was Special Forces in those mountains.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Dawes said. “I believe in discipline.”

  They heard someone running toward them. They turned. It was Flash Vorshuta, the youngest grunt in the platoon. “What are you doing here, Vorshuta?” Dawes yelled at him with shrill irritation.

  “I couldn’t stay back there, Lieutenant,” Vorshuta said. “It’s too much. Our guys are shooting at dead bodies now. Jesus. Lemme stay here.”

  Dawes looked at Kranak. The men looked at Kranak. “Gimme your sidearm,” Kranak said to Dawes. Dawes jerked his automatic pistol out of its holster and handed it to Kranak. It was an M1911A1, the most successful combat pistol ever developed; sweetly crafted by the Singer Sewing Machine Company with a muzzle capacity of 860 feet per second. It took most of the top of Vorshuta’s head off at that range and knocked him about sixteen feet backward.

  “Okay,” Kranak said to Dolly Fingus, a skinny black GI. “Get his rifle, his canteen, any Mars bars, and we’ll move out.”

  The seven men went toward the mountains at a steady pace, Kranak in the lead. They were off the plain and under the evergreen shelter before the helicopter bringing up the dynamite Dawes had sent for appeared far back in the sky.

  9

  1967

  Teel was a great cook. A writer for Gourmet who had been hanging around pretending to ask her about the origins of Soul Food (he was convinced that it had been brought to the Gulf Coast by the Sumerians who had ridden the Atlantic currents past Nigeria 9900 years before) was actually there just to eat the way he liked to eat. The third time, he brought Dr. Kung. Dr. Kung was in the United States “from Korea” to study Theological Administration & Funding under a two-year scholarship from the China Lobby.

  Dr. Kung and Teel met in the spring of 1967. Orientals merely look bland. In the hay, Dr. Kung was a ball of fire.

  Despite their intimacies, and the fact that Dr. Kung was actually a subversive agent of the Chinese government sent to the United States to teach Revolutionary Administration & Funding to underground Presbyterian Maoist groups (in cities of more than two million population), it was some time before he saw Teel as a possible extension of himself, someone who could continue his work when he was recalled. She was black. Like all revolutionaries Kung believed that all blacks seethed with impatience to overthrow the white yoke. Having completed her Plan, Teel actually was seething with impatience. Aside from fielding a few hundred orgasms for Dr. Kung, Teel was unable to think of much else beyond her urban guerrilla miracle. After his first confidence about himself, however, she stayed cool. She talked to him about her ideas, but only peripherally.

  Slowly, he began to understand how unique was this mechanism which lay under him (and frequently all over him). As he locked his mind into that conclusion he began to talk about what was on his mind.

  “Teel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We are friends.”

  “Right.”

  “You are black.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “I trust you.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Teel, listen—I am a revolutionary.”

  “So was George Washington.”

  “No! Listen. I am not really a Korean. I am Chinese. My government has sent me to the United States to take up one small part in the fomenting of revolution.”

  “What do you do???
?

  “I teach Revolutionary Administration and Funding to Presbyterian groups in cities of over two million.”

  “Whaaaat?”

  “You are shocked. I thought, because you were black, you would understand everything.”

  “Shit, Kung—I am shocked that the Chinese would send a perfectly good man all this way to teach a fucking college course. What is this Administration and Funding? You want to break the back of this country? It would only take a handful of experienced saboteurs, if they were fanatical enough and if they were so trained for urban guerrilla war that they couldn’t think about anything else, to tie up the key cities of this country for months, even years, Kung, to scare the people themselves so shitless they wouldn’t even leave their houses. The economy would evaporate. That’s administration. That’s revolutionary funding.”

  “No, no. That is tactics, Teel. Administration and Funding are entirely different things which altogether—”

  “Revolution isn’t all talk, Kung. And what is urban guerrilla war if it isn’t the weak against the strong until the strong become weak and the weak strong?”

  “All that is entirely out of my field,” Kung said. “We have all that behind us.”

  “Oh, horseshit! You people fought a running war across a lot of mountains and out in the fucking snow. I am talking about war in cities—more complicated than anything China ever knew. You know anything about the wiring in an eighty-story skyscraper, what a metropolitan water supply is like, with all that pumping necessary? Do you have any idea what it takes just to get food into complexes like that? This is a new kind of guerrilla war I’m talking about. Inferior, more lightly equipped forces harassing conventional armies—sure. But inside gigantic cities so that the light force always holds the surprise, and can never be found when the conventional force tries to strike back. If they strike back they murder their own people—and, man, are they ever going to murder a lot of their own people. Cities are the kind of terrain that gives guerrillas absolute insurance when it comes to total revolutionary victory. Remember Carlos Marghela: ‘It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions to force those in power to transform the political situation into a military situation. That will alienate the masses who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.’ Now—that is a scenario for a civil war in American cities, Kung.”