‘Rescue One, feet-wet. We have SNAKE aboard, over.’
‘Rescue One, this is CRICKET, roger, copy that. Standing by. Out.’ Albie looked up. ‘Well, that’s it.’
Podulski took it the hardest of all. BOXWOOD GREEN had been his idea from the start. Had it been successful, it might have changed everything. It might have opened the door for CERTAIN CORNET, might have changed the course of the war – and his son’s death would not have been for nothing. He looked up at the others. He almost asked if they might still try it again, but he knew better. Washout. It was a bitter concept and an even more bitter reality for one who had served his adopted country for nearly thirty years.
‘Tough day?’ Frank Allen asked.
Lieutenant Mark Charon was surprisingly chipper for a man who’d been through a fatal shooting and the almost-as-rigorous interrogation that had followed it.
‘The damned fool. Didn’t have to happen that way,’ Charon said. ‘I guess he didn’t like the idea of life on Falls Road,’ the narcotics-division lieutenant added, referring to the Maryland State Penitentiary. Located in downtown Baltimore, the building was so grim that its inmates referred to it as Frankenstein’s Castle.
Allen didn’t have to tell him much. The procedures for the incident were straightforward. Charon would go on administrative leave for ten working days while the Department made sure that the shooting had not been contrary to official policy guidelines for the use of ‘deadly force.’ It was essentially a two-week vacation with pay, except that Charon might have to face additional interviews. Not likely in this case, as several police officers had observed the whole thing, one from a mere twenty feet away.
‘I’ve got the case, Mark,’ Allen told him. ‘I’ve been over the preliminaries. Looks like you’ll come out okay on this. Anything you might have done to spook him?’
Charon shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t shout or anything until he went for his piece. I tried to ease him into it, y’know, calm him down, like? But he just jumped the wrong way. Eddie Morello, died of the dumbs,’ the Lieutenant observed, impassively enjoying the fact that he was telling the exact truth.
‘Well, I’m not gonna cry over the death of a doper. Good day all around, Mark.’
‘How’s that, Frank?’ Charon sat down and stole a cigarette.
‘Got a call from Pittsburgh today. Seems there may be a witness for the Fountain Murder that Em and Tom are handling.’
‘No shit? That’s good news. What do we have?’
‘Somebody, probably a girl from how the guy was talking, who saw Madden and Waters get it. Sounds like she’s talking to her minister about it and he’s trying to coax her into opening up.’
‘Great,’ Charon observed, concealing his inward chill as well as he’d hid his elation at his first contract murder. One more thing to clean up. With luck that would be the end of it.
The helicopter flared and made a soft landing on USS Ogden. As soon as it was down, people came back out on the flight deck. Deck crewmen secured the aircraft in place with chains while they approached. The Marines came out first, relieved to be safe, but also bitterly disappointed at the way the night had turned out. The timing was nearly perfect, they knew. This was their programmed time to return to the ship, with their rescued comrades, and they’d looked forward to this moment as a sports team might anticipate the joys of a winning locker room. But not now. They’d lost and they still didn’t know why.
Irvin and another Marine climbed out, holding a body, which really surprised the assembled flag officers as Kelly alighted next. The helicopter pilot’s eyes grew wide as he watched. There had been two bodies in the meadow. But mainly he was relieved at achieving another semisuccessful rescue mission into North Vietnam.
‘What the hell?’ Maxwell asked as the ship commenced a turn to the east.
‘Uh, guys, let’s get this guy inside and isolated right now!’ Ritter said.
‘He’s unconscious, sir.’
‘Then get a medic, too,’ Ritter ordered.
They picked one of Ogden’s many empty troop-berthing spaces for the debrief. Kelly was allowed to wash his face, but nothing else. A medical corpsman checked out the Russian, pronouncing him dazed but healthy, both pupils equal and reactive, no concussion. A pair of Marines stood guard over him.
‘Four trucks,’ Kelly said. ‘They just drove right in. A reinforced platoon – weapons platoon, probably, they showed up while the assault team was inbound, started digging in right away – about fifty of ’em. I had to blow it off.’
Creer and Ritter traded a look. No coincidence.
Kelly looked at Maxwell. ‘God, I’m sorry, sir.’ He paused. ‘It would not have been possible to execute the mission. I had to leave the hill because they were putting listening posts out. I mean, even if we were able to deal with that -‘
‘We had gunships, remember?’ Podulski growled.
‘Back off, Cas,’ James Greer warned.
Kelly looked long at the Admiral before responding to the accusation. ‘Admiral, the chances of success were exactly zero. You guys gave me the job of eyeballing the objective so that we could do it on the cheap, right? With more assets, maybe we could have done it – the Song Tay team could have done it. It would have been messy, but they had enough firepower to bring it off, coming right into the objective like they did.’ He shook his head again. ‘Not this way.’
‘You’re sure? ‘ Maxwell asked.
Kelly nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Sure as hell.’
‘Thank you, Mr Clark,’ Captain Albie said quietly, knowing the truth of what he’d just heard. Kelly just sat there, still tensed from the night’s events.
‘Okay,’ Ritter said after a moment. ‘What about our guest, Mr Clark?’
‘I fucked up,’ Kelly admitted, explaining how the car had gotten so close. He reached into his pockets. ‘I killed the driver and the camp commander – I think that’s what he was. He had all this on him.’ Kelly reached into his pockets and handed over the documents. ‘Lots of papers on the Russian. I figured it wasn’t smart to leave him there. I figured – I thought maybe he might be useful to us.’
‘These papers are in Russian,’ Irvin announced.
‘Give me some,’ Ritter ordered. ‘My Russian’s pretty good.’
‘We need somebody who can read Vietnamese, too.’
‘I have one of those,’ Albie said. ‘Irvin, get Sergeant Chalmers in here.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Ritter and Greer moved to a corner table. ‘Lord,’ the field officer observed, flipping through the written notes. ‘This guy’s gotten a lot… Rokossovskiy? He’s in Hanoi? Here’s a summary sheet.’
Staff Sergeant Chalmers, an intelligence specialist, started reading through the papers taken from Major Vinh. Everyone else waited for the spooks to get through the papers.
‘Where am I?’ Grishanov asked in Russian. He tried to reach for his blindfold, but his hands couldn’t move.
‘How are you feeling?’ a voice answered in the same language.
‘Car smashed into something.’ The voice stopped. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re aboard USS Ogden, Colonel,’ Ritter told him in English.
The body strapped in the bunk went rigid, and the prisoner immediately said, in Russian, that he didn’t speak English.
‘Then why are some of yow notes in English?’ Ritter asked reasonably.
‘I am a Soviet officer. You have no right -‘
‘We have as much right as you had to interrogate American prisoners of war, and to conspire to kill them, Comrade Colonel.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your friend Major Vinh is dead, but we have his dispatches. I guess you were finished talking to our people, right? And the NVA were trying to figure the most convenient way to eliminate them. Are you telling me you didn’t know that?’
The oath Ritter heard was a particularly vile one, but the voice held genuine surprise that was interesting. This man was too injured to dissimulate well. He looked up at Greer.
‘I’ve got some more reading to do. You want to keep this guy company?’
The one good thing that happened to Kelly that night was that Captain Franks hadn’t tossed the aviator rations over the side after all. Finished with his debrief, he found his cabin and downed three stiff ones. With the release from the tension of the night, physical exhaustion assaulted the young man. The three drinks knocked him out, and he collapsed into his bunk without so much as a cleansing shower.
It was decided that Ogden would continue as planned, steaming at twenty knots back towards Subic Bay. The big amphibious ship became a quiet place. The crew, pumped up for an important and dramatic mission, became subdued with its failure. Watches were changed, the ship continued to function as before, but the mess rooms’ only noise was that of the metal trays and utensils. No jokes, no stories. The additional medical personnel took it the hardest of all. With no one to treat and nothing to do, they just wandered about. Before noon the helicopters departed, the Cobras for Danang and the rescue birds back to their carrier. The signal-intelligence people switched over to more regular duties, searching the airways for radio messages, finding a new mission to replace the old.