I resent what you just said General!”
“You? Who the hell are you?”
“Easy, Lieutenant. You’re dismissed. ”
“I respectfully request to answer the general, sir!”
shouted Joel, in his anger refusing to move.
“You what, prissy flyboy?”
“My name is ”
“Forget it, I’m not interested!” Delavane whipped
his head back toward the ca plain. “What I want to
know is why you think you can disobey my orders the
orders from Command-Saigon!I called a strike
forfifteen hundred hours! You ‘respectfully declined’ to
implement that order!”
“A weather front’s moved in and you should know
it as well as I do. ”
20 ROBERT LUDLUM
“My meteorologists say it’s completely f gable!”
“I suspect if you asked for that finding during a
Burma monsoon they’d deliver it”
“That’s gross insubordination!”
“This is my ship and military regulations are quite
clear as to who’s in command here.”
“Do you want to connect me to your radio
room?l’ll reach the Oval Of dice and we’ll see just how
long you’ve got this ship!”
“I’m sure you’ll want to speak privately probably
over a scrambler. I’ll have you escorted there.”
“Goddamn you, I’ve got four thousand
troops maybe twenty percent seasoned moving up
into Sector Five! We need a low-altitude combined
strike from land and sea and weal have it if I have to
get your ass out of here within the hour!And I can do
it, Captain!. . . We’re over here to win, win, and win it
all! We don ‘t need sugarcoated Nellies hedging their
goddamned bets! Maybe you never heard it before, but
all war is a risk! You don ‘t win if you don ‘t risk, Ca
plain!”
“I’ve been there, General. Common sense cuts
losses, and if you cut enough losses you can win the
next battle. ”
“I’m going to win this one, with or without you,
Blue Boy!”
“I respectfuUy advise you to temper your language,
General. ”
“You what?” Delavane’s face was contorted in fury,
his eyes the eyes of a savage wild animal. “You advise
me? You advise Command-Saigon! Well, you do
whatever you like Blue Boy in yoursatin pants but
the incursion up into the Tho Valley is on.”
“The Tho,”interrupted Converse. “That’s the first leg
of the Pak Song route. We’ve hit it four times. I know
the terrain. ”
“You know it9″shouted Delawne.
“I do, but I take my orders from the commander
of this ship General. ”
“You prissy shit-kicker, you take orders from the
President of the United States!He’s your commander in
chief7And I’ll get those orders!”
Delavane’s face was inches from Joel’s, the
maniacal expression challenging every nerve ending in
Joel ‘s body: hatred matched by loathing Barely
realising the words were
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 21
his, Converse spoke. “1, too, would advise the General
to be careful of his language.”
“Why, shit-kicker? Has Blue Boy got this place wired?”
“Easy, Lieutenant! I said you were dismissed!”
“You want me to watch my language, big fellawith
your little silver bar? No, sonny boy, you watch it, and
you read it! If that squadron of yours isn ‘t in the air at
fifteen hand red hours, I’ll label this carrier the biggest
yellow streak in Southeast Asia! You got that,
satin-pantsed Blue Boy, third class?”
Once moreloel replied, wondering as he spoke
where he found the audacity. “I don’t know where you
come from, sir, but I sincerely hope we meet under
different circumstances sometime. I think you he a pig
”
“Insubordination!Also, I’d break your back.”
“Dismissed, Lieutenant!”
“No, Captain, you’re wrong!” shouted the general.
“He may be the man to lead this strike, after all. Well,
what’ll it be, Blue Boys? Airborne, or the President of
the United States or the label?”
At 1520 hours Converse led the squadron off the
carrier deck. At 1538, as they headed at low altitude
into the weather, the f rst two casualties occurred over
the coastline; the wing planes were shot down f erg
deaths at six hundred miles an hour in the air. At
15461oel’s right engine exploded, his altitude made the
direct hit easy. At 1546:30, unable to stabilise, Converse
ejected into the downpour of the storm clouds, his
parachute instantly swept into the vortex of the
conflicting winds. As he swung violently down toward
the earth, the straps digging into his flesh with each
whipping buffet, one image kept repeating its presence
within the darkness. The maniacal face of General
George Marcus Delavane. He was about to begin an
indeterminate stay in hell, courtesy of a madman. And
as he later learned, the losses were ink nitely greater on
the ground.
Delavane! The Butcher of Danang and Pleiku.
Waster of thousands, throwing battalion after
battalion into the jungles and the hills with neither
adequate training nor sufficient firepower. Wounded,
frightened children had been marched into the
camps, bewildered, trying not to weep and, finally
understanding, weeping out of control. The stories
they told were a thousand variations on the same
sickening theme. Inexperi
22 ROBERT LUDLUM
enced,untried troops had been sent into battle
within days after disembarkation; the weight of
sheer numbers was expected to vanquish the often
unseen enemy. And when the numbers did not
work, more numbers were sent. For three years
command headquarters listened to a maniac.
Delavane! The warlord of Saigon, fabricator of body
counts, with no acknowledgment of blown-apart
faces and severed limbs, liar and extoller of death
without a cause! A man who had proved, finally, to
be too lethal even for the Pentagon zealots a
zealot who had outdistanced his own, in the end
revolting his own. He had been recalled and
retired only to write diatribes read by fanatics who
fed their own personal furies.
Men like that can’t be allowed anymore, don ‘t you
understand? He was the enemy, Otis enemy! Those
had been Converse’s own words, shouted in a fever
of outrage before a panel of uniformed questioners
who had looked at each other avoiding him, not
wanting to respond to those words. They had
thanked him perfunctorily, told him that the nation
awed him and thousands like him a great debt, and
with regard to his final comments he should try to
understand that there were often many sides to an
issue, and that the complex execution of command
frequently was not what it appeared to be. In any
event, the President had called upon the nation to
bind its wounds; what good was served by fueling
old controversies? And then the final kicker, the
threat.
“You yourself briefly assumed the terrible
responsibility of leadership, Lieutenant,” said a
pale-faced Navy lawyer, barely glancing at Joel, his
eyes scanning the pages of a file folder. “Before you
made your final and successful escape by yourself,
from a pit in the ground away from the main
camp you led two previous attempts involving a
total of seventeen prisoners of war. Fortunately you
survived, but eight men did not. I’m sure that you,
as their leader, their tactician, never anticipated a
casualty risk of nearly fifty percent. It’s been said
often, but perhaps not often enough: command is
awesome, Lieutenant.”
Translation: Don’t join the freaks, soldier. You
survived, but eight were killed. Were there
circumstances the military is not aware of, tactics that
protected some more than others, one more than
others: One man who managed to break out by
himself eluding guards that shot on sight prisoners on
the loose at night? Merely to raise the question by
mOpening a specific file will produce a stigma that
willfollow you
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 23
for the rest of your life. Back oft; soldier. We’ve got you
by simply raising a question we all know should not be
raised, but we’ll do it because we’ve taken enough }yak.
We’ll cut it off wherever we can. Be ha ppy you
survived and got out. Now, get out.
At that moment, Converse had been as close to
consciously throwing away his life as he would ever
have thought possible. Physically assaulting that
panel of sanctimonious hypocrites had not been out
of the question, until he studied the face of each
man, his peripheral gaze taking in rows of tunic
ribbons, battle stars on most. Then a strange thing
had happened: disgust, revulsion and
compassion swept over him. These were panicked
men, a number having committed their lives to their
country’s practice of war . . . only to have been
conned, as he had been conned. If to protect what
was decent meant protecting the worst, who was to
say they were wrong? Where were the saints? Or the
sinners? Could there be any of either when all were
victims?
Disgust, however, won out. Lieutenant Joel
Converse, USNR, could not bring himself to give a
final salute to that council of his superiors. In
silence, he had turned, with no military bearing
whatsoever, and walked out of the room as if he had
pointedly spat on the Hoor.
A flash of light again from the boulevard, a