‘The pushers, too. All connected somehow. What connects them, Em? We know they were all – probably all – in the drug business.’
‘Two different MOs, Tom. The girls were slaughtered like – no, you don’t even do that to cattle. All the rest, though, all of them were taken down by the Invisible Man. Man on a mission! That’s what Farber said, a man on a mission.’
‘Revenge,’ Douglas said, pacing Ryan’s analysis on his own. ‘If one of those girls was close to me – Jesus, Em, who could blame him?’
There was only one person connected with either murder who’d been close with a victim, and he was known to the police department, wasn’t he? Ryan grabbed his phone and called back to Lieutenant Allen.
‘Frank, what was the name of that guy who worked the Gooding case, the Navy gay?’
‘Kelly, John Kelly, he found the gun off Fork McHenry, then downtown contracted him to train our divers, remember? Oh! Pamela Madden! Jesus!’ Allen exclaimed when the connection became clear.
‘Tell me about him, Frank.’
‘Hell of a nice guy. Quiet, kinda sad – lost his wife, auto accident or something.’
‘Veteran, right?’
‘Frogman, underwater demolitions. That’s how he earns his living, blowing things up. Underwater stuff, like.’
‘Keep going.’
‘Physically he’s pretty tough, takes care of himself.’ Allen paused. ‘I saw him dive, there’s some marks on him, scars, I mean. He’s seen combat and caught some fire. I got his address and all if you want.’
‘I have it in my case file, Frank. Thanks, buddy.’ Ryan hung up. ‘He’s our guy. He’s the Invisible Man.’
‘Kelly?’
‘I have to, be in court this morning – damn it!’ Ryan swore.
‘Nice to see you again,’ Dr Farber said. Monday was an easy day for him. He’d seen his last patient of the day and was heading out for after-lunch tennis with his sons. The cops had barely caught him heading out of his office.
‘What do you know about UDT guys?’ Ryan asked, walking out into the corridor with him.
‘Frogmen, you mean? Navy?’
‘That right. Tough, are they?’
Farber grinned around his pipe. ‘They’re the first guys on the beach, ahead of the Marines. What do you think?’ He paused. Something clicked in his mind. ‘There’s something even better now.’
‘What do you mean?’ the detective lieutenant asked.
‘Well, I still do a little work for the Pentagon. Hopkins does a lot of things for the government. Applied Physics Lab, lots of special things. You know my background.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I do psychological testing, consulting – what combat does to people. This is classified material, right? There’s a new special-operations group. It’s a spin-off of UDT. They call them SEALs now, for Sea Air Land – they’re commandos, real serious folks, and their existence is not widely known. Not just tough. Smart. They’re trained to think, to plan ahead. Not just muscle. Brains, too.’
‘Tattoo,’ Douglas said, remembering. ‘He has a tattoo of a seal on his arm.’
‘Doc, what if one of these SEAL guys had a girl who was brutally murdered?’ It was the most obvious of questions, but he had to ask it.
‘That’s the mission you were looking for,’ Farber said, heading out the door, unwilling to reveal anything else, even for a murder investigation.
‘That’s our boy. Except for one thing,’ Ryan said quietly to the closed door. ‘Yeah. No evidence. Just one hell of a motive.’
Nightfall. It had been a dreary day for everyone at SENDER GREEN except for Kelly. The parade ground was mush, with fetid puddles, large and small. The soldiers had spent most of the day trying to keep dry. Those in the towers had adjusted their position to the shifting winds. Weather like this did things to people. Most humans didn’t like being wet. It made them irritable and dull of mind, all the more so if their duty was also boring, as it was here. In North Vietnam, weather like this meant fewer air attacks, yet another reason for the men down below to relax. The increasing heat of the day had energized the clouds, adding moisture to them which the clouds just as quickly gave back to the ground.
What a shitty day, all the guards would be saying to one another over their dinner. All would nod and concentrate on their meals, looking down, not up, looking inward, not outward. The woods would be damp. It was far quieter to walk on wet leaves than dry ones. No dry twigs to snap. The humid air would muffle sound, not transmit it. It was, in a word, perfect.
Kelly took the opportunity of the darkness to move around some, stiff from the inactivity. He sat up under his bush, brushing off his skin and eating more of his ration concentrates. He drained down a full canteen, then stretched his arms and legs. He could see the LZ, and had already selected his path to it, hoping the Marines wouldn’t be trigger-happy when he ran down towards them. At twenty-one hundred he made his final radio transmission.
Light Green, the technician wrote on his pad. Activity Normal.
‘That’s it. That’s the last thing we need.’ Maxwell looked at the others. Everyone nodded.
‘Operation BOXWOOD GREEN, Phase Four, commences at twenty-two hundred. Captain Franks, make signal to Newport News.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
On Ogden, flight crews dressed in their fire-protective suits, then walked aft to preflight their aircraft. They found sailors wiping all the windows. In the troop spaces, the Marines were donning their striped utilities. Weapons were clean. Magazines were full with fresh ammo just taken from airtight containers. The individual grunts paired off, each man applying camouflage paint to his counterpart. No smiles or joking now. They were as serious as actors on opening night, and the delicacy of the makeup work gave a strange counterpoint to the nature of the evening’s performance. Except for one of their number.
‘Easy on the eye shadow, sir,’ Irvin told a somewhat jumpy Captain Albie, who had the usual commander’s jitters and needed a sergeant to steady him down.
In the squadron ready room aboard USS Constellation, a diminutive and young squadron commander named Joshua Painter led the briefing. He had eight F-4 Phantoms loaded for bear.
‘We’re covering a special operation tonight. Our targets are SAM sites south of Haiphong,’ he went on, not knowing what it was all about, hoping that it was worth the risk of the fifteen officers who would fly with him tonight, and that was just his squadron. Ten A-6 Intruders were also flying Iron Hand, and most of the rest of Connie’s air wing would trail their coats up the coast, throwing as much electronic noise into the air as they could. He hoped it was all as important as Admiral Podulski had said. Playing games with SAM sites wasn’t exactly fun.
Newport News was twenty-five miles off the coast now, approaching a point that would put her exactly between Ogden and the beach. Her radars were off, and the shore stations probably didn’t know quite where she was. After the last few days the NVA were getting a little more circumspect about using their coastal surveillance systems. The Captain was sitting in his bridge chair. He checked his watch and opened a sealed manila envelope, reading quickly through the action orders he’d had in his safe for two weeks.
‘Hmm,’ he said to himself. Then: ‘Mr Shoeman, have engineering bring boilers one and four fully on line. I want full power available as soon as possible. We’re doing some more surfing tonight. My compliments to the XO, gunnery officer, and his chiefs. I want them in my at-sea cabin at once.’
‘Aye, sir.’ The officer of the deck made the necessary notifications. With all four of her boilers on line, Newport News could make thirty-four knots, the quicker to close the beach, and the quicker to depart from it.
‘Surf City, here we come!’ the petty officer at the wheel sang out loud as soon as the Captain was off the bridge. It was the official ship’s joke – because the Captain liked it – actually made up several months before by a seaman first-class. It meant going inshore, right into the surf, for some shooting. ‘Goin’ to Surf City, where it’s two-to-one!’
‘Mark your head, Baker,’ the OOD called to end the chorus.
‘Steady on one-eight-five, Mr Shoeman.’ His body moved to the beat. Surf City, here we come!
‘Gentlemen, in case you’re wondering what we’ve done to deserve the fun of the past few days, this is it,’ the Captain said in his cabin just off the bridge. He explained on for several minutes. On his desk was a map of the coastal area, with every triple-A battery marked from data on aerial and satellite photographs. His gunnery department looked things over. There were plenty of hilltops for good radar references.
‘Oh, yeah!’ the master chief firecontrolman breathed. ‘Sir, everything? Five-inchers, too?’