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