Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

treatment-were found dead in Saigon alleyways, throats cut. A

lieutenant was fragged in his sleep, blown to bits. The weasel-faced

houseboy and poor Mai Van Trang disappeared, and Ben was sure that the

former was alive somewhere and that the latter was just as certainly

dead and buried in an unmarked grave, not a difficult disposal problem

in a nation torn by war and undermined by unmarked graves. In custody

awaiting trial, Sharp could effectively plead innocence to involvement

in this series of convenient deaths and vanishings, though it was surely

his influence with the Vietnamese underworld that provided for such

favorable developments. By the start of the court-martial, all of the

witnesses against Sharp were gone, and the case was essentially reduced

to Ben’s word-and that of his investigatorsagainst Sharp’s smug

protestations of innocence. There wasn’t sufficient concrete evidence

to ensure his imprisonment but far too much circumstantial evidence to

get him off the hook entirely. Consequently he was stripped of his

sergeant’s stripes, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.

Even that comparatively light sentence had been a blow to Sharp, whose

deep and abiding self-love had not permitted him to entertain the

prospect of any punishment whatsoever. His personal comfort and

well-being were his central-perhaps onlyconcern, and he seemed to take

it for granted that, as a favored child of the universe, he would always

be assured of unrelieved good fortune.

Before shipping out of Vietnam in disgrace, Sharp had used all of his

remaining contacts to arrange a short surprise visit to Ben, too short

to do any harm, but just long enough to convey a threat, “Listen,

asshole, when you get stateside again, just remember I’ll be there,

waiting for you. I’ll know when you’re coming home, and I’ll have a

greeting ready for you.

Ben had not taken the threat seriously. For one thing, well before the

court-martial, Sharp’s hesitancy on the battlefield had grown worse, so

bad on some occasions that he had come perilously close to disobeying

orders rather than risk his precious skin. If he had not been brought

to court for theft, black-marketeering, drug dealing, and statutory

rape, he very likely would have been arraigned on charges of desertion

or other offenses related to his increasing cowardice. He might talk of

stateside vengeance, but he would not have the guts for it. And for

another thing, Ben was not worried about what would happen to him when

he went home because, by then, for better or worse, he had committed

himself to the war until the end of it, and that commitment gave him

every reason to believe he would go home in a box, in no condition to

give a damn whether or not Anson Sharp was waiting for him.

Now, descending through the shadowy forest and at last reaching the

first of the half-cleared properties where houses were tucked in among

the trees, Ben wondered how Anson Sharp, stripped of rank and

dishonorably discharged, could have been accepted into training as a

D.S.A agent. A man gone bad, like Sharp, usually continued skidding

downward once his slide began. By now he should have been on his second

or third term in prison for civilian crimes. At best, you could have

expected to encounter him as a seedy grifter scratching out a dishonest

living, so pathetically smaltime that he did not draw the notice of the

authorities. Even if he had cleaned up his act, he could not have wiped

a dishonorable discharge off his record. And with that discredit, he

would have been summarily rejected by any law-enforcement agency,

especially by an organization with standards as high as those of the

Defense Security Agency.

So how the hell did he swing it? Ben wondered.

He chewed on that question as he climbed over a split-rail fence and

cautiously skirted a two-story brick and weathered-pine chalet, dashing

from tree to tree and bush to bush, staying out of sight as much as

possible.

If someone looked out a window and saw a man with a shotgun in one hand

and a big revolver tucked into the waistband at his back, a call to the

county sheriff would be inevitable.

Assuming that Sharp wasn’t lying when he had identified himself as a

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