‘We have a bust, sir,’ Oreza observed calmly.
Lieutenant Mark Charon of the Narcotics Division, Baltimore City Police Department, leaned against the doorframe – hatch, whatever these sailors called the thing – and smiled. He was dressed in casual clothes, and might have easily been mistaken for a coastie with the required orange life jacket.
‘You handle it, then. How does it go in the books?’
‘Routine safety inspection, and, golly, they had drugs aboard,’ Oreza said in mock surprise.
‘Exactly right, Mr Oreza.’
“Thank you, sir.’
‘My pleasure. Captain.’
He’d already explained the procedure to Oreza and English. In order to protect his informants, credit for the arrest would go to the coasties, which didn’t exactly displease the quartermaster or the warrant officer. Oreza would get to paint a victory symbol on his mast, or whatever they called the thing the radar was attached to, a representation of the five-leafed marijuana plant, and the crewmen would have something to brag about. They might even have the adventure of testifying before a federal district court – probably not, since these small-timers would undoubtedly cop to the smallest offense their attorney could negotiate. They would get word out that the people to whom they were making the delivery had probably informed on them. With luck those people might even disappear, and that would really make his task easy. There would be an opening in the drug ecostructure – another new buzzword Charon had picked up on. At the very least, a potential rival in that ecostructure was now out of business for good. Lieutenant Charon would get a pat on the back from his captain, probably a flowery thank-you letter from the United States Coast Guard and the US Attorney’s office, not to mention congratulations for running such a quiet and effective operation that had not compromised his informants. One of our best men, his captain would affirm again. How do you get informants like that? Cap’n, you know how that works, I have to protect these people. Sure, Mark, I understand. You just keep up the good work.
I’ll do my best, sir, Charon thought to himself, staring off at the setting sun. He didn’t even watch the coasties cuffing the suspects, reading them their constitutional rights from the plastic-coated card, smiling as they did so, since for them this was a very entertaining game. But then, that’s what it was for Charon, too.
Where were the damned helicopters? Kelly asked himself.
Everything about the damned mission had been wrong from the first moment. Pickett, his usual companion, had come down with violent dysentery, too bad for him to go out, and Kelly had gone out alone. Not a good thing, but the mission was too important, and they had to cover every little hamlet or ville. So he’d come in alone, very, very carefully moving up the stinking water of this – well, the map called it a river, but it wasn’t quite large enough for Kelly to think of it that way.
And, of course, this is the ville they’d come to, the fuckers.
PLASTIC FLOWER, he thought, watching and listening. Who the hell came up with that name?
PLASTIC FLOWER was the code name for an NVA political-action team or whatever they called it. His team had several other names, none of them complimentary. Certainly they weren’t the precinct workers he’d seen on election day in Indianapolis. Not these people, schooled in Hanoi on how to win hearts and minds.
The ville’s headman, chief, mayor, whatever the hell he was, was just a little too courageous to be called anything but a fool. He was paying for that foolishness before the distant eyes of Bosun’s Mate 1/c J.T. Kelly, The team had arrived at oh-one-thirty, and in a very orderly and almost civilized way, entered every little hooch, awakening the whole population of farmers, bringing them into the common area to see the misguided hero, and his wife, and his three daughters, all waiting for them, sitting in the dirt, their arms cruelly tied behind their backs. The NVA major who led PLASTIC FLOWER invited them all to sit in a mannerly voice that reached Kelly’s observation point, less than two hundred meters away. The ville needed a lesson in the foolishness of resistance to the people’s liberation movement. It was not that they were bad people, just misguided, and he hoped that this simple lesson would make clear to them the error of their ways.
They started with the man’s wife. That took twenty minutes;
I have to do something! he told himself.
There’s eleven of them, idiot. And while the Major might be a sadistic motherfucker, the ten soldiers with him had not been selected exclusively for their political correctness. They would be reliable, experienced, and dedicated soldiers. How a man could be dedicated to such things as this, Kelly didn’t have the imagination to understand. That they were was a fact that he could not afford to ignore.
Where was the fucking reaction team? He’d called in forty minutes earlier, and the support base was only twenty minutes off by chopper. They wanted this Major.
His team might also be useful, but they wanted the Major alive. He knew the location of the local political leaders, those the Marines hadn’t swept up in a superb raid six weeks earlier. This mission was probably a reaction to that, a deliberate response so close to the American base, to say that, no, you hadn’t gotten us all yet, and you never will.
And they were probably right, Kelly thought, but that question went far beyond the mission for tonight.
The oldest daughter was maybe fifteen. It was hard to tell with the small, deceptively delicate Vietnamese women. She’d lasted all of twenty-five minutes and was not yet dead. Her screams carried dearly across the flat, open ground to Kelly’s watery post, and his hands squeezed the plastic of his CAR-15 so hard that had he thought or noticed, he might have worried about breaking something.
The ten soldiers with the Major were deployed as they should be. Two men were with the Major, and they rotated duty with the perimeter guards so that all of them could partake in the evening’s festivities. One of them finished the girl with a knife. The next daughter was perhaps twelve.
Kelly’s ears scanned the cloudy sky, praying to hear the distinctive mutter of a Huey’s two-bladed rotor. There were other sounds. The rumble of 155s from the marine fire base to the east. Some jets screaming overhead. None were loud enough to mask the high-pitched screech of a child, but there were still eleven of them, and only one of him, and even if Pickett had been here, the odds would not have been remotely close enough to try a play. Kelly had his CAR-15 carbine, a thirty-round magazine securely fixed in its place, another taped, inverted, to the end of that one, and two more similar sets. He had four fragmentation grenades, two willie-petes, and two smokes. His deadliest appliance was his radio, but he’d already called out twice and gotten an acknowledgment both times, along with orders to sit tight.
Easy thing to say back at the base, wasn’t it?
Twelve years old, maybe. Too young for this. There was no age for this, he told himself, but he’d never be able to change things alone, and there was no good for anyone in adding his death to those of this family.
How could they do it? Were they not men, soldiers, professional warriors like himself? Could anything be so important that they could cast aside their humanity? What he saw was impossible. It could not be. But it was. The rumbles of the distant artillery continued, dropping planned fire-missions on a suspected supply route. A continuous stream of aircraft overhead, maybe Marine intruders doing a Mini-Arc Light strike at something or other, probably empty woods, because most of those targets were just that. Not here, where the enemy was, but that wouldn’t help anything, would it? These villagers had bet their lives and their families on something that wasn’t working, and maybe that Major thought he was being merciful in just eliminating one family in the most graphic method possible instead of ending all their lives in a more efficient way. Besides, dead men told no tales, and this was a tale he would want repeated. Terror was something they could use, and use well.
Time crept on, slowly and rapidly, and presently the twelve-year-old stopped making noise and was cast aside. The third and final daughter was eight, he saw through his binoculars. The arrogance of the fuckers, building a large fire. They couldn’t have anyone miss this, could they?
Eight years old, not even old enough, not a throat large enough for a proper scream. He watched the changing of the guard. Two more men moved from the perimeter into the center of the ville. R&R for the political-action group, who couldn’t go to Taiwan as Kelly had. The man nearest to Kelly hadn’t had his chance yet, probably wouldn’t. The headman didn’t have enough daughters, or maybe this one was on the Major’s shit list. Whatever the real reason, he wasn’t getting any, and it must have frustrated him. The soldier’s eyes were looking in now, watching his squadmates partake in something that he would miss tonight. Maybe next time … but at least he could watch… and he did, Kelly saw, forgetting his duty for the first time tonight.