CHAPTER 13
Agendas
It was his first-ever visit to the Pentagon. Kelly felt ill at ease, wondering if he should have worn his khaki chiefs uniform, but his time for wearing that had passed. Instead he wore a blue lightweight suit, with a miniature of the Navy Cross ribbon on the lapel. Arriving in the bus and car tunnel, he walked up a ramp and searched for a map of the vast building, which he quickly scanned and memorized. Five minutes later he entered the proper office.
‘Yes?’ a petty officer asked.
‘John Kelly, I have an appointment with Admiral Maxwell.’ He was invited to take a seat. On the coffee table was a copy of Navy Times, which he hadn’t read since leaving the service. But Kelly was able to control his nostalgia. The bitches and gripes he read about hadn’t changed very much.
‘Mr Kelly?’ a voice called. He rose and walked through the open door. After it closed, a red do-not-disturb light blinked on to warn people off.
‘How are you feeling, John?’ Maxwell asked first of all.
‘Fine, sir, thank you.’ Civilian now or not, Kelly could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a flag officer. That got worse at once when another door opened to admit two more men, one in civilian clothes, the other a rear admiral – another aviator, Kelly saw, with the medal of honor, which was even more intimidating. Maxwell did the introductions.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Podulski said, shaking the younger man’s hand.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Kelly didn’t know what else to say.
‘Cas and I go back a ways,’ Maxwell observed, handling the introductions. ‘I got fifteen’ – he pointed to the aircraft panel hanging on the wall – ‘Cas got eighteen.’
‘All on film, too,’ Podulski assured him.
‘I didn’t get any,’ Greer said, ‘but I didn’t let the oxygen rot my brain either.’ In addition to wearing soft clothes, this admiral had the map case. He took one out, the same panel he had back at his home, but more marked up. Then came the photographs, and Kelly got another look at the face of Colonel Zacharias, this time enhanced somehow or other, and recognizably similar to the ID photo Greer put next to it.
‘I was within three miles of the place,’ Kelly noted. ‘Nobody ever told me about -‘
‘It wasn’t there yet. This place is new, less than two years old,’ Greer explained.
‘Any more pictures, James?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Just some SR-71 overheads, high-obliques, nothing new in them. I have a guy checking every frame of this place, a good guy, ex-Air Force. He reports to me only.’
‘You’re going to be a good spy,’ Podulski noted with a chuckle.
‘They need me there,’ Greer replied in a lighthearted voice bordered with serious meaning. Kelly just looked at the other three. The banter wasn’t unlike that in a chief’s mess, but the language was cleaner. He looked. over at Kelly again. ‘Tell me about the valley.’
‘A good place to stay away from.’
‘First, tell me how you got little Dutch back. Every step of the way,’ Greer ordered.
Kelly needed fifteen minutes for that, from the time he left USS Skate to the moment the helicopter had lifted him and Lieutenant Maxwell from the river’s estuary for the flight to Kitty Hawk. It was an easy story to tell. What surprised him were the looks the admirals passed back and forth.
Kelly wasn’t equipped to understand the looks yet. He didn’t really think of the admirals as old or even as totally human. They were admirals, godlike, ageless beings who made important decisions and looked as they should look, even the one out of uniform. Nor did Kelly think of himself as young. He’d seen combat, after which every man is forever changed. But their perspective was different. To Maxwell, Podulski, and Greer, this young man was not terribly unlike what they had been thirty years earlier. It was instantly clear that Kelly was a warrior, and in seeing him they saw themselves. The furtive looks they traded were not unlike those of a grandfather watching his grandson take his first tentative step on the living-room rug. But these were larger and more serious steps.
‘That was some job,’ Greer said when Kelly finished. ‘So this area is densely populated?’
‘Yes and no, sir. I mean, it’s not a city or like that, but some farms and stuff. I heard and saw traffic on this road. Only a few trucks, but lots of bicycles, oxcarts, that sort of thing.’
‘Not much military traffic?’ Podulski asked.
‘Admiral, that stuff would be on this road here.’ Kelly tapped the map. He saw the notations for the NVA units. ‘How are you planning to get in here?’
‘There’s nothing easy, John. We’ve looked at a helicopter insertion, maybe even trying an amphibious assault and racing up this road.’
Kelly shook his head. ‘Too far. That road is too easy to defend. Gentlemen, you have to understand, Vietnam is a real nation in arms, okay? Practically everybody there has been in uniform, and giving people guns makes them feel like part of the team. There are enough people with guns there to give you a real pain coming up this way. You’d never make it.’
‘The people really support the communist government?’ Podulski asked. It was just too much for him to believe. But not for Kelly,
‘Jesus, Admiral, why do you think we’ve been fighting there so long? Why do you think nobody helps pilots who get shot down? They’re not like us over there. That’s something we’ve never understood. Anyway, if you put Marines on the beach, nobody’s going to welcome them. Forget racing up this road, sir. I’ve been there. It ain’t much of a road, not even as good as it looks on these pictures. Drop a few trees and it’s closed.’ Kelly looked up. ‘Has to be choppers.’
He could see the news was not welcome, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. This part of the country was dotted with antiaircraft batteries. Getting a strike force in wasn’t going to be easy. At least two of these men were pilots, and if a ground assault had looked promising to them, then the triple-A problem must have been worse than Kelly appreciated.
‘We can suppress the flak,’ Maxwell thought.
‘You’re not talking about -52s again, are you?’ Greer asked.
‘Newport News goes back on the gunline in a few weeks. John, ever see her shoot?’
Kelly nodded. ‘Sure did. She supported us twice when we were working close to the coast. It’s impressive what those eight-inchers can do. Sir, the problem is, how many things do you need to go right for the mission to succeed? The more complicated things get, the easier it is for things to go wrong, and even one thing can be real complicated.’ Kelly leaned back on the couch, and reminded himself that what he had just said wasn’t only for the admirals to consider.
‘Dutch, we have a meeting in five minutes,’ Podulski said reluctantly. This meeting had not been a successful one, he thought. Greer and Maxwell weren’t so sure of that. They had learned a few things. That counted for something.
‘Can I ask why you’re keeping this so tight?’ Kelly asked.
‘You guessed it before.’ Maxwell looked over at the junior flag officer and nodded.
‘The Song Tay job was compromised,’ Greer said. ‘We don’t know how, but we found out later through one of our sources that they knew – at least suspected – something was coming. They expected it later, and we ended up hitting the place right after they evacuated the prisoners, but before they had their ambush set up. Good luck, bad luck. They didn’t expect Operation KINGPIN for another month.’
‘Dear God,’ Kelly breathed. ‘Somebody over here deliberately betrayed them?’
‘Welcome to the real world of intelligence operations, Chief,’ Greer said with a grim smile.
‘But why?’
‘If I ever meet the gentleman, I will be sure to ask.’ Greer looked at the others. ‘That’s a good hook for us to use. Check the records of the operation, real low-key like?’
‘Where are they?’
‘Eglin Air Force base, where the KINGPIN people trained.’
‘Whom do we send?’ Podulski asked.
Kelly could feel the eyes turn in his direction. ‘Gentlemen, I was just a chief, remember?’
‘Mr Kelly, where’s your car parked?’
‘In the city, sir. I took the bus over here.’
‘Come with me. There’s a shuttle bus you can take back later.’
They walked out of the building in silence. Greer’s car, a Mercury, was parked in a visitor slot by the river entrance. He waved for Kelly to get in and headed towards the George Washington Parkway.
‘Dutch pulled your package. I got to read it. I’m impressed, son.’ What Greer didn’t say was that on his battery of enlistment tests, Kelly had scored an average of 147 on three separately formatted IQ tests. ‘Every commander you had sang your praises.’