Jack Ryan 1 - Without Remorse (84 page)

'Yevgeniy Leonidovich? I have an urgent dispatch from Washington.'

'As do I, Vanya. Your recommendations?'

'If the American claims are true, I urge immediate action. Public knowledge of such idiocy could be ruinous. Could you confirm that this is indeed under way?'

'Da. And then ... Foreign Ministry?'

'I agree. The military would take too long. Will they listen?'

'Our fraternal socialist allies? They'll listen to a shipment of rockets. They've been screaming for them for weeks,' the Deputy Chairman replied.

How typical, the Academician thought, in order to save American lives we will send weapons to take ??r? of them, and the Americans will understand. Such madness. If there was ever an illustration as to why detente was necessary, this was it. How could two great countries manage their affairs when both were involved, directly or not, in the affairs of minor countries? Such a worthless distraction from important matters.

'I urge speed, Yevgeniy Leonidovich,' the Academician repeated. Though far outranked by the Deputy Chairman, they'd been classmates, years earlier, and their careers had crossed many times.

'I agree completely, Vanya. I'll be back to you this afternoon.'

It was a miracle, Zacharias thought, looking around. He hadn't seen the outside of his cell in months, and just to smell the air, warm and humid as it was, seemed a gift from God, but that wasn't it. He counted the others, eighteen other men in the single line, men like himself, all within the same five-year age bracket, and in the fading light of dusk he saw faces. There was the one he'd seen so long before, a Navy guy by the look of him. They exchanged a look and thin smiles as all the men did what Robin was doing. If only the guards would let them talk, but the first attempt had earned one of their number a slap. Even so, for the moment just seeing their faces was enough. To not be alone any longer, to know that there were others here, just that was enough. Such a small thing. Such a large one. Robin stood as tall as his injured back allowed, squaring his shoulders while that little officer was saying something to his people, who were also lined up. He hadn't picked up enough Vietnamese to understand the rapid speech.

'This is the enemy,' the Captain was telling his men. He'd be taking his unit south soon, and after all the lectures and battle practice, here was an unexpected opportunity for them to get a real look. They weren't so tough, these Americans, he told them. See, they're not so tall and forbidding, are they? They bend and break and bleed - very easily, too! And these are the elite of them, the ones who drop bombs on our country and kill our people. These are the men you'll be fighting. Do you fear them now? And if the Americans are foolish enough to try to rescue these dogs, we'll get early practice in the art of killing them. With those rousing words, he dismissed his troops, sending them off to their night guard posts.

He could do this, the Captain thought. It wouldn't matter soon. He'd heard a rumor through his regimental commander that as soon as the political leadership got their thumbs out, this camp would be closed down in a very final way, and his men would indeed get a little practice before they had to walk down Uncle Ho's trail, where they would have the chance to kill armed Americans next. Until then he had them as trophies to show his men, to lessen their dread of the great unknown of combat, and to focus their rage, for these were the men who'd bombed their beautiful country into a wasteland. He'd select recruits who had trained especially hard and well.. .nineteen of them, so as to give them a taste of killing. They'd need it. The captain of infantry wondered how many of them he'd be bringing home.

Kelly stopped off for fuel at the Cambridge town dock before heading back north. He had it all now - well, he had enough now, Kelly told himself. Full bunkers, and a mind full of useful date, and for the first time he'd hurt the bastards. Two weeks, maybe three weeks of their product. That would shake things loose. He might have collected it himself and perhaps used it as bait, but no, he couldn't do that. He wouldn't have it around him, especially now that he suspected he knew how it might come in. Somewhere on the East Coast, was all that Burt actually knew. Whoever this Henry Tucker was, he was on the clever side of paranoid, and compartmentalized his operation in a way that Kelly might have admired under other circumstances. But it was Asian heroin, and the bags it arrived in smelled of death, and they came in on the East Coast. How many things from Asia that smelled of death came to the Eastern United States? Kelly could think of only one, and the fact that he'd known men whose bodies had been processed at Pope Air Force Base only fueled his anger and his determination to see this one thing through. He brought Springer north, past the brick tower of Sharp's Island Light, heading back into a city that held danger from more than one direction.

One last time.

There were few places in Eastern America as sleepy as Somerset County. An area of large and widely separated farms, the whole county had but one high school. There was a single major highway, allowing people to transit the area quickly and without stopping. Traffic to Ocean City, the state's beach resort, bypassed the area, and the nearest interstate was on the far side of the Bay. It was also an area with a crime rate so low as to be nearly invisible except for those who took note of a single-digit increase in one category of misbehavior or another. One lone murder could be headline news for weeks in the local papers, and rarely was burglary a problem in an area where a homeowner was likely to greet a nocturnal intruder with a 12-gauge and a question. About the only problem was the way people drove, and for that they had the State Police, cruising the roads in their off-yellow cars. To compensate for boredom the cars on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had unusually large engines with which to chase down speeders who all too often visited the local liquor stores beforehand in their effort to make a dull if comfortable area somewhat more lively.

Trooper First Class Ben Freeland was on his regular patrol routine. Every so often something real would happen, and he figured it was his job to know the area, every inch of it, every farm and crossroads, so that if he ever did get a really major call he'd know the quickest way to it. Four years out of the Academy at Pikesville, the Somerset native was thinking about advancement to corporal when he spotted a pedestrian on Postbox Road near a hamlet with the unlikely name of Dames Quarter. That was unusual. Everybody rode down here. Even kids started using bikes from an early age, often starting to drive well under age, which was another of the graver violations he dealt with on a monthly basis. He spotted her from a mile away - the land was very flat - and took no special note until he'd cut that distance by three quarters. She - definitely a female now - was walking unevenly. Another hundred yards of approach told him that she wasn't dressed like a local. That was odd. You didn't get here except by car. She was also walking in zigzags, even the length of her stride changing from one step to another, and that meant possible public intoxication - a huge local infraction, the trooper grinned to himself - and that meant he ought to pull over and give her a look. He eased the big Ford over to the gravel, bringing it to a smooth and safe stop fifty feet from her, and got out as he'd been taught, putting his uniform Stetson on and adjusting his pistol belt.

'Hello,' he said pleasantly. 'Where you heading, ma'am?'

She stopped after a moment, looking at him with eyes that belonged on another planet. 'Who're you?'

The trooper leaned in close. There was no alcohol on her breath. Drugs were not much of a problem here yet, Freeland knew. That may have just changed.

'What's your name?' he asked in a more commanding tone.

'Xantha, with a ex,' she answered, smiling.

'Where are you from, Xantha?'

'Aroun'.'

'Around where?'

'Lanta.'

'You're a long way from Atlanta.'

'I know that!' Then she laughed. 'He dint know I had more.' Which, she thought, was quite a joke, and a secret worth confiding. 'Keeps them in my brassiere.'

'What's that now?'

'My pills. Keep them in my brassiere, and he dint know.'

'Can I see them?' Freeland asked, wondering a lot of things and knowing that he had a real arrest to make this day.

She laughed as she reached in. 'You step back, now.'

Freeland did so. There was no sense alerting her to anything, though his right hand was now on his gunbelt just in front of his service revolver. As he watched, Xantha reached inside her mostly unbuttoned blouse and came out with a handful of red capsules. So that was that. He opened the trunk of his car and reached inside the evidence kit he carried to get an envelope.

'Why don't you put them in here so you don't lose any?'

'Okay!' What a helpful fellow this policeman was.

'Can I offer you a ride, ma'am?'

'Sure. Tired a' walkin'.'

'Well, why don't you just come right along?' Policy required that he handcuff such a person, and as he helped her into the back of the car, he did. She didn't seem to mind a bit.

'Where we goin'?'

'Well, Xantha, I think you need a place to lie down and get some rest. So I think I'll find you one, okay?' He already had a dead-bang case of drug possession, Freeland knew, as he pulled back onto the road.

'Burt and the other two restin', too, 'cept they ain't gonna wake up.'

'What's that, Xantha?'

'He killed their ass, bang bang bang.' She mimed with her hand. Freeland saw it in the mirror, nearly going off the road as he did so.

'Who's that?'

'He a white boy, dint get his name, dint see his face neither, but he killed their ass, bang bang hang.'

Holy shit.

'Where?'

'On the boat.' Didn't everybody know that?

'What boat?'

'The one out on the water, fool!' That was pretty funny, too.

'You shittin' me, girl?'

'An' you know the funny thing, he left all the drugs right there, too, the white boy did. 'Cept'n he was green.'

Freeland didn't have much idea what this was all about, but he intended to find out just as fast as he could. For starters he lit up his rotating lights and pushed the car just as fast as the big 427 V-8 would allow, heading for the State Police Barracks 'V' in Westover. He ought to have radioed ahead, but it wouldn't really have accomplished much except to convince his captain that he was the one on drugs.

'Yacht Springer, take a look to your port quarter.'

Kelly lifted his mike. 'Anybody I know?' he asked without looking.

'Where the H have you been, Kelly?' Oreza asked.

'Business trip. What do you care?'

'Missed ya,' was the answer. 'Slow down some.'

'Is it important? I have to get someplace, Portagee.'

'Hey, Kelly, one seaman to another, back down, okay?'

Had he not known the man... no, he had to play along regardless of who it was. Kelly cut his throttles, allowing the cutter to pull alongside in a few minutes. Next he'd be asked to stop for a boarding, which Oreza had every legal right to do, and trying to evade would solve nothing. Without being so bidden Kelly idled his engines and was soon laying to. Without asking permission, the cutter eased alongside and Oreza hopped aboard.

'Hey, Chief,' the man said by way of a greeting.

'What gives?'

'I was down your sandbar twice in the last couple of weeks looking to share a beer with you, but you weren't home.'

'Well, I wouldn't want to make you unfit for duty.'

'Kinda lonely out here with nobody to harass.' Suddenly it was clear that both men were uneasy, but neither one knew why the other was. 'Where the hell were you?'

'I had to go out of the country. Business,' Kelly answered. It was clear that he'd go no further than that.

'Fair enough. Be around for a while?'

'I plan to be, yeah.'

'Okay, maybe I'll stop by next week and you can tell me some lies about being a Navy chief.'

'Navy chiefs don't have to lie. You need some pointers on seamanship?'

'In a pig's ass! Maybe I ought to give you a safety inspection right now!'

'I thought this was a friendly visit,' Kelly observed, and both men became even more uncomfortable. Oreza tried to cover it with a smile.

'Okay, I'll go easy on you.' But that didn't work. 'Catch you next week, Chief.'

They shook hands, but something had changed. Oreza waved for the forty-one-footer to come back in, and he jumped aboard like the pro he was. The cutter pulled away without a further word.

Well, that makes sense. Kelly advanced his throttles anyway.

Oreza watched Springer continue north, wondering what the hell was going on. Out of the country, he'd said. For sure his boat hadn't been anywhere on the Chesapeake - but where, then? Why were the cops so interested in the guy? Kelly a killer? Well, he'd gotten that Navy Cross for something. UDT guy, that much Oreza knew. Beyond that, just a good guy to have a beer with, and a serious seaman in his way. It sure got complicated when you stopped doing search-and-rescue and started doing all that other cop stuff, the quartermaster told himself, heading southwest for Thomas Point. He had a phone call to make.

'So what happened?'

'Roger, they knew we were coming,' Ritter answered with a steady look.

'How, Bob?' MacKenzie asked.

'We don't know yet.'

'Leak?'

Ritter reached into his pocket and extracted a photocopy of a document and handed it across. The original was written in Vietnamese. Under the text of the photocopy was the handwritten translation. In the printed English were the words 'green bush.'

'They knew the name?'

'That's a security breakdown on their side, Roger, but, yes, it appears that they did. I suppose they planned to use that information for any of the Marines they might have captured. That sort of thing is good for breaking people down in a hurry. But we got lucky.'

'I know. Nobody got hurt.'

Ritter nodded. 'We put a guy on the ground in early. Navy SEAL, very good at what he does. Anyway, he was watching things when the NVA reinforcements came in. He's the guy who blew the mission off. Then he just walked off the hill.' It was always far more dramatic to understate things, especially for someone who'd smelled gunsmoke in his time.