Nature of the Game (9 page)

“I don't smoke,” said Jud.

Ghostman laughed. “Of course you don't! You aren't even here! None of us are! There's one senior officer in SOG who knows this nitty-gritty, plus we three stooges on a whorehouse roof.”

“Who's the senior officer?” asked Jud.

“You don't need to know,” said the CIA liaison. He clicked a Zippo lighter: Capt. Art Monterastelli and Jud stepped away from that flicker of flame.

“Now who's paranoid?” said Ghostman.

“Sergeant Stuart,” he said, “the people who count know what a fine job you've done. Damn good. You're the kind of man America can depend on. We think you're our kind of man. We've had our eye on you. We think you're ready for the big time.”

“Is that what this is?” said Jud, resisting the urge to challenge Ghostman's arrogance with a dozen examples of past exploits.

Art kept his gaze flat. He had a boyish face.

“God, this is a backwater!” Ghostman said. “These people believe there's spirits everywhere—in rocks, our airplanes, people. Call it
phi
.”

A man moaned in a room downstairs.

“We want you to do something for us,” said Ghostman. “It's risky, catch-as-catch-can. It's vital. It's gotta stay buried deep. We think you can do it. If you don't think you can handle it, if you say no”—he shrugged—“we'll understand.”

Then they told him what they wanted.

Two months later, Jud was in the belly of a B-52 bomber, 43,000 feet above enemy North Vietnam: 2322 hours, 19 November, 1969. The plane had a skeleton flight crew of four American fly-boys, the right number for this moonless night's mission.

The plane shuddered as its payload sailed down to earth.

Cold
. Jud was so cold.

Cramped, sitting on the bomb-bay rack, he'd been embraced by the cold, numbed by it and by the drone of the jet's engines. The metallic air he breathed through his oxygen mask chilled his lungs. When the bomb-bay doors cranked open, he'd looked through the steel catwalk under his boots, watched giant, finned barrels roll out into blackness.

One one-thousand. Two one-thousand.

The bomb-bay doors stayed open. In the dim red light, Jud imagined he could see through the goggles and oxygen masks to the eyes of the five men sitting beside him. The four Nungs would show all white. Their throats were dry, like his; their pants wet, like his wanted to be. Next to them was Curtain, the one-one to Jud's one-zero. Curtain was second-in-command. He and Jud filled out the crew's official full-strength quota, in case Uncle Ho's boys got lucky with one of their Soviet surface-to-air missles and they had to play it as a normal mission. And
don't think
about the Nungs,
don't think
about what would happen to them in the chaos between enemy hit and bailout or impact.

What are you thinking, Curtain?
Jud wondered.
What's in your heart?

Twenty-three one-thousand. Twenty-four one-thousand.

Curtain could see no better in the light silence than Jud. He was just as cold.
God knows what the Nungs feel
, thought Jud.
This must be colder than any grave they ever dreamt
.

Thirty-one one-thousand. Thirty-two one-thousand.

The plane arced, turned south and west, pushing Jud back against his main parachute. G forces sucked Jud's aching guts.

Forty-two one-thousand. Forty-three one-thousand.

Back toward the tail, in the swirling blackness below: silent orange mushroom flashes.

Everything's fine
, thought Jud. He remembered a sign on the door of the restaurant where he'd worked during high school:
PROPER ATTIRE REQUIRED
.
No shit
, thought Jud.

That night Jud wore full thermal long underwear. Double socks. Nylon gloves covered by wool gloves with the fingers cut out—risky but he'd need the flexibility. Next came black ski gloves. Jud had the sergeant major wrap black duct tape from the nylon cuff of each ski glove to Jud's forearms. They knew about another mission in which the wind had ripped the team leader's right glove off at 40,000 feet. His Number Two had seen it go, seen the leader's hand curl and crack and his fingers freeze solid, snap off. The man went into shock, tumbled in without pulling a cord. No one on
his
team would die that way, vowed Jud. Over his thermals, Jud wore a black jumpsuit with black zippers, Velcro flaps. Jungle boots. Over his head, Jud slipped a skintight black hood, with eye holes and mouth slit. A second hood went over that, then an extralarge jump helmet.

“Your HALO gear costs two-plus grand,” the instructor had announced during training. “Secure your DZ, then bury that shit.”

Jud strapped an altimeter to each wrist, stuffed a third one into a chest pocket, fastened the Velcro of the pocket shut, and tied the altimeter's cord around his neck. The wind ate the only altimeter carried by Milder, so he'd had to guess when to pull. He guessed wrong, popped open a mile too high (falling at 185 mph, who could blame him?)—which meant a patrol spotted him. The patrol missed seeing the rest of the team drop, and they got Milder back, but it cost the mission and an arm for Milder.

They wouldn't hit the ground. Not at first. First was the jungle, five canopy layers, steam rising from emerald-green trees full of bone-eating bugs and ten-step snakes. Perfumed flowers and rotting swamp. Tigers usually weren't a problem. They'd crash through the trees until the branches grabbed the chutes and left them dangling, swinging in the moonless night while monkeys screamed and birds took wing and God
please
let any patrols think it was just another jungle jump-up and God
please
don't let there be any patrols, there weren't supposed to be. Not tonight. Not according to the briefing given Jud and Curtain.

Jud had strapped a knife to his right boot. A second knife hung butt down from a sheath above his heart. For safety, he carried a razor knife in a zippered side pocket. To cut free of the chute, to let him use the three hundred feet of climbing rope packed ready to spill out from his waist under his reserve chute.

Jud looked over at the Nungs—men whose ancestors had walked from China to Southeast Asia. These four had not done their ancestors proud. Murderers and thieves, they'd looked up from their North Vietnam death-row prison hole weeks ago and there had been Jud, beckoning, the cell door swinging open, their jailer slumped against a far wall. They'd gone, believing there was no worse hell than the cell.

Now, huddled in the belly of the B-52, Jud wagered they weren't so sure. There'd been ten. The handlers washed four out right away; where they went, Jud didn't know. Number five washed out because he couldn't learn enough about weapons. The sixth left when Jud saw the wrong terror in his eyes. That left four, the mission needed four, so Jud made them make it. Babied them through their only other parachute drop: hooked up to an open canopy before dawn when the other troops at the Okinawa jump school slept, then shoved off the platform for a three-hundred foot controlled drop to the sand.

“Tell 'em it's like Disneyland,” Jud ordered the interpreter who was coaxing the Nungs onto the jump platform. Jud spoke almost none of the Nungs' dialect; gambled on hand signs, obvious common interest, and their hunger to interpret divine will to get the team through the mission. “Tell 'em anything, but make sure they understand I am head fuckin' Mickey Mouse.”

No one mentioned High-Altitude, Low-Opening alternatives.

They'd been on three patrols together, trial runs based from Da Nang, safaris into Indian country. The Nungs showed a crook's instincts for stealth, slaughter, and survival. They slept in a circle with Jud at the center—their choice. He rewarded them with beer and Thai whores who didn't speak their dialect.

Crouched now on the plane, Jud shifted his weight and felt the black canvas bag on his shoulder that held his silenced Russian AK-47. In a shoulder holster underneath his jumpsuit was a fourteen-shot, Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic. A holster on his belt cradled a .45 automatic. He'd rigged a holster next to his naked left thigh for a two-shot derringer guaranteed to put a .22 long inside your skull and keep it bouncing around until your brain turned to mush. The derringer's slugs were coated with shellfish toxin from the same Langley lab that in 1960 dispatched lethal bacteria to an assassination team targeting Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. Jud could pull the trigger without drawing the derringer, send a slug into his leg. The Wizards promised him results in sixty seconds and didn't know Jud knew they lied about the agony.

A black nylon HALO chute and special breathing apparatus rode on the team's backs. Oxygen masks had been rigged into the bomb bay for the flight, but no internal radio links.

We have no need to talk anyway, Jud thought, remembering when he and Curtain met the B-52's crew, told them sketchy cover stories, and memorized trivia about each of the fly-boys to con an NVA interrogator into thinking Curtain and Jud belonged on the plane. Photos of Jud and Curtain with girls and football buddies were taped on the plane wall, just as two real crewmen might have done. Faked pictures, faked girlfriends. In case the bomber survived being shot down.

Don't think about anything you don't need to think about
, Jud warned himself, and he remembered a girl in high school he'd never dared to talk to.

Panic seized Jud: What if he couldn't understand the asset waiting for them on the ground? The asset was a survivor of two groups of North Vietnamese the CIA smuggled out of Haiphong in 1955, trained in Saigon, then sent back to the communist north. He was supposed to speak French and English, plus Curtain spoke beaucoup Vietnamese, but what if the asset didn't make it to the rendezvous? What if Jud couldn't see the amber light that was supposed to be flashing through the trees to guide them to the DZ? What if the asset had been picked up, hot-ironed, and hell, what if he wasn't an asset? Double, NVA, Pathet Lao, or even Chinese? What if he just fucked up? What if—

Then
, Jud told himself, pulling it all down to one word he could manage, one word he could keep from mutating into a million shapes and sounds:
then
.

Two red dots glowing in the bomb bay violated light silence and let Jud see not much, not far. But enough to realize the Nungs had joined hands, each gripping the hand of a man from their tribe whom they might not care about but whose fate they were destined to share. Jud reached out, gripped the free hand of the Nung next to him, raised it. The Nungs stared. Curtain made the chain complete. Slowly, all the joined hands rose, triumphant. Jud felt energy flow through their chain, knew the Nungs felt it, too. The right move at the right moment, and even if it wasn't, what the hell, Jud loved the energy, too.

He was already linked to the two Nungs closest to him, as was Curtain to the other two. Two clusters of three men, each cluster bonded with a rope. Jud had tied the Nungs twenty feet apart, giving Curtain and himself more slack. The Nungs only knew they were going to jump, that it would be like on the tower. That they would fall a long time, then Jud would pull himself in close, cut their daisy chain, and jerk their rip cords before he popped himself. Jud knew they thought the free-fall would last about ten seconds. If he'd told them three minutes, they would never have jumped. The plan called for them to panic, falling, blackness all around, the wind rushing, the cold … freeze-up. They'd drop like stones. If they didn't panic enough, one of them might find his rip cord, and they'd all be jerked out of free-fall, too much weight for one too-soon chute, tumbling out of control….

That happens
, Jud told himself,
you can still cut free. You'll have time. Cut free, stabilize, skim away like a bird. Pop your chute, improvise a ground plan. You mind will be clear and your will won't fail you
.

Someone tapped his left shoulder. He looked up into the body of the plane and saw the copilot, oxygen mask, safety line. The copilot made the okay sign, then in the air drew an
L
.

Laos.

Jud stood. Watched his team follow him, watched them remove the plane's oxygen masks and affix their own self-contained breathing apparatuses. Again Jud grabbed the hand of the Nung behind him, had that man do the same, only this time the chain was two separate sections, with Curtain leading the second group. Jud was One-Zero, so first out. The copilot pulled away the catwalk's rope railing. The steel grate trembled beneath Jud's feet. The giant bomber pitched and swayed, dropping down to 41,000 feet. Jud fought to keep his balance and not tumble into the open blackness. The cold rushed in through the bomb-bay doors. Wrapped in his layers of clothing and gear, Jud was sweating. And he was cold.

Down the line, he saw Curtain's black form. Jud pointed his forefinger at him, and Curtain nodded.

I'll see you on the ground
, thought Jud.
I'll see you then
.

The copilot's hand chopped up and down, a metronome counting off seconds relayed over the intercom to him by the pilot as Jud and his team watched. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

He hit Jud's shoulder.

And Jud rolled off to his left, his daisy chain slipping behind him into the roar of wind and jet engines, followed without a skipping beat by Curtain's group. The copilot watched them spin away into swirling blackness and cold and thought of penguins diving off an ice floe, of lemmings.

Cold. Black, timeless cold.

Jud hit the ground.

“
What hell you doing in my truck!
” roared a God voice in the clouds of Jud's mind. Jud was on his back, on sand, the shoulder of a road, sunshine warmer than his dream, blue sky …

“
Who hell you think you are up there anyway?
”

A wiry old man in a battered straw Stetson, faded print shirt, and jeans with their cuffs tucked into scruffy black boots stood beside the junk-filled cattle truck, staring down and screaming at the bum he'd just rolled off his scavenged treasures.