Bernardino Mountains visible in the near horizon, dwarfing the small, low-slung
beige-brick buildings. The dark blue outfit the prisoner had been made to wear,
with the white cloth circle attached by Velcro to the center of his chest. The
special chair, with a pan beneath it to catch blood, and head restraints that
were attached loosely to the prisoner’s neck. The pile of sandbags behind, to
absorb the volley and prevent ricochets. Demarest had faced a wall, twenty feet
away—a wall with firing ports for each of the six members of the squad. Six men
with rifles. The wall was what he had protested most about. Demarest had
insisted on execution by firing squad, and his preference had been accommodated.
Yet he also wanted to be able to see his executioners face-to-face: and this
time he had been refused.
Now Janson took another deep breath. “Mesa Grande is where a bad man met a bad
end.”
A bad end, and a defiant one. For on Demarest’s face there had indeed been
defiance—no, more than that: a wrathful indignation—until the volley was loosed,
and the white cloth circle turned bright red with his blood.
Janson had asked to witness the execution, for reasons that remained murky even
to him, and the request had reluctantly been granted. To this day, Janson could
not decide whether he had made the right decision. It no longer mattered: Mesa
Grande, too, was part of who he was. Part of who he had become.
To him, it had represented a moment of requital. A moment of justice to repay
injustice. To others, so it appeared, that moment meant something altogether
different.
Mesa Grande.
Had the monster’s devoted followers gotten together, somehow decided to avenge
his death all these years later? The idea seemed preposterous. That did not,
alas, mean it could be dismissed. Demarest’s Devils: perhaps these veterans were
among the mercenaries that Novak’s enemies had recruited. How better to counter
one disciple of Demarest’s techniques than with another?
Madness!
He knew that Jessie wanted to hear more from him, but he could not bring himself
to speak. All he said was “We need to make an early start tomorrow. Get some
sleep.” And when she placed a hand on his arm, he pulled away.
Turning in, he felt roiled by shadowy ghosts he could never put to rest, however
hard he tried.
In life, Demarest had taken too much of his past; in death, would he now take
his future?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was three decades ago, and it was now. It was in a jungle far away, and it
was here.
Always, the sounds: the mortar fire more distant and muffled than ever before,
for the trail had led them many miles away from the official combat zones.
Immediate proximity made the sounds of mosquitoes and other small stinging
insects louder than the immense blasts of the heavy artillery. Cheap ironies
were as thick on the ground as punji sticks, the sharpened bamboo stakes that
the VC placed in small, concealed holes, awaiting the unwary footfall.
Janson checked his compass once again, verified that the trail had been leading
in the correct direction. The triple-canopy jungle left the ground in permanent
twilight, even when the sun was shining. The six men in his team moved in three
pairs, each spaced a good ways apart, the better to avoid the vulnerability of
clustering in hostile territory. Only he traveled without a partner.
“Maguire,” he radioed, quietly.
He never heard the response. What he heard, instead, was automatic rifle fire,
the overlapping staccato bursts of several ComBloc carbines.
Then he heard the screaming of men—his men—and the barking commands of an enemy
patrol party. He was reaching for his M16 when he felt a blow to the back of his
head. And then he felt nothing at all.
He was at the bottom of a deep, black lake, drifting slowly along the silt like
a carp, and he could stay there forever, swathed in the muddy blackness, cool
and close to motionless, but something began to drag him toward the surface,
away from his comforting and silent underwater world, and the light began to
hurt his eyes, began to sear his skin, even, and he struggled to stay below, but
the forces that drew him up were irresistible, buoyancy dragging him up like a
grappling hook, and he opened his eyes only to see another pair of eyes upon
him, eyes like bore holes. And he knew that his world of water had given way to
a world of pain.
He tried to sit up, and failed—from weakness, he assumed. He tried again, and
realized that he was tied, roped to a litter, rough canvas stretched between two
poles. He was stripped of his trousers and tunic. His head swam and his focus
wavered; he recognized the signs of a head injury, knew there was nothing he
could do about it.
A harsh exchange in Vietnamese. The eyes belonged to an officer, either of the
NVA or the Viet Cong. He was a captive American soldier, and there was clarity
in that. From some distance came the static of a shortwave radio, like a section
of tuneless violins: the volume waxed and waned until he realized that it was
his perception, not the sound, that was shifting, that his consciousness was
zoning in and out. A black-clad soldier brought him rice gruel and spooned it
into his parched mouth. He felt, absurdly, grateful; at the same time, he
realized that he was an asset to them, a potential source of information. To
extract that information was their job; to prevent them from extracting it,
while keeping himself alive, was his. Besides, he knew, amateur interrogators
would sometimes reveal more information than they elicited. He told himself that
he would have to use his powers of concentration … when they returned. Assuming
they ever did.
A bit of the rice gruel caught in his throat, and he realized it was a beetle
that had fallen into the pasty substance. A half smile flickered on the face of
the soldier who fed him—the indignity of feeding a Yank made up for by the
indignity of what he was feeding him—but Janson was past caring.
“Xin loi,” the soldier said, cruel as a jackknife. One of the few Vietnamese
idioms Janson knew: Sorry about that.
Xin loi. Sorry about that: it was the war in a nutshell. Sorry we destroyed the
village in order to save it. Sorry we napalmed your family. Sorry we tortured
those POWs. Sorry about that—a phrase for every occasion. A phrase nobody ever
meant. The world would be a better place if someone could say it and mean it.
Where was he? Some sort of Montagnard hut, was it? Abruptly, a greasy cloth was
wrapped around his head, and he felt himself unroped and dragged down, dragged
under—not to the bottom of the lake, as in his dream, but into a tunnel,
burrowed around and beneath the shallow tree roots of the jungle soil. He was
dragged until he started to crawl, simply to spare his flesh the abrasion. The
tunnel veered one way and then another; it sloped upward and downward and
intersected with others; voices grew muffled and close, then very distant;
smells of tar and kerosene and rot alternated with the fetor of unwashed men.
When he reemerged into the insect symphony of the jungle floor—for it was the
sound of insects that told him he had left the network of tunnels—he was trussed
up again and lifted onto a chair. The cloth around his head was removed, and he
breathed deeply the clammy air. The rope was coarse, the sort of hemp twine used
for tying river sloops to bamboo docks, and it bit into his wrists, his ankles.
Small insects hovered around the fretwork of small cuts and abrasions that
covered his exposed flesh. His T-shirt and underpants—that was all he had been
left with—were encrusted with dirt from the tunnels.
A large-boned man with eyes that looked small beneath his steel-framed glasses
approached him.
“Where … others?” Janson’s mouth was cottony.
“Members of your death squad? Dead. Only you safe.”
“You’re Viet Cong?”
“That is not correct term. We represent Central Committee of the National
Liberation Front.”
“National Liberation Front,” Janson repeated, his cracked lips forming words
only with difficulty.
“Why you not wear dog tags?”
Janson shrugged, prompting an immediate whack with a bamboo stick across the
back of his neck. “Must’ve got lost.”
Two guards stood to either side of the scowling interrogator. They each carried
AK-47s and a link-belt of rounds around their waists; a Makarev 9.5mm pistol
hung just below the ammo belt. One of them had clipped to his belt a U.S. Navy
SEALs combat knife, the six-inch blade gleaming. Janson recognized the scars on
its Tenite handle; it was his.
“You lie!” the interrogator said. His eyes darted toward the man standing behind