The Generals (37 page)

“What we have to know is where the other film and tape is,” Felter said to Lowell. “Otherwise it’s no go.”

“If we don’t go, there goes your story,” Lowell said. “Have you thought about that?”

“‘
Stern
reporter’s exclusive story stops U.S. widening of war,’” Peter-Paul quoted. “Yes, I’ve thought about it.”

“Your father is going to be in that operation,” Sandy said. “Your father. Have you considered that?”

“As I understand it,” Peter-Paul said, “it’s entirely a volunteer operation. Willing, would-be heroes only. He doesn’t have to go unless he wants to.”

“I want to go, and they won’t let me,” Geoff said.

Felter gave him a dirty look but chose not to say anything.

Peter-Paul met Geoff’s eyes and shrugged.
So what?

“What I’m saying,” Felter said, gently, as if trying to explain an obscure point in a complicated argument, “is that he’s liable to be injured, perhaps killed, if the other side has prior information of this mission.”

“In that case, Papa,” Peter-Paul said, “I would suggest you don’t go, and that you be grateful, Cousin Hero, that they won’t let you.”

“Give me three minutes with this sonofabitch,” Franklin said levelly. “I’ll get your film for you, Colonel Felter.”

“Major, tell me,” Peter-Paul said. “Are you what they call an ‘Uncle Tom’?”

There came a knock at the door.

“Perimeter Guard on the horn for you, Colonel Felter,” a male voice called.

Felter looked between them, and then walked out of the Quonset Hut.

Lowell looked at his son.

“Peter,” he said. “I have to know where your film and tape is.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I don’t trust you.”

“I give you my word of honor as an officer and a gentleman,” Lowell said, “as your father, that I will not destroy it, and that I will return it to you intact. But I have to know where it is.”

“It’s already on the way to Germany,” Peter said.

Lowell looked at his son for fifteen seconds, not blinking his eyes.

“You want my word of honor?” Peter-Paul said. “OK. You have it. The tapes and the film are already on their way to Germany. On my word of honor.”

No, they’re not, Lowell decided. He would not risk having the film ruined by exposure to routine antibomb X-rays of airmail.

“The word of honor of a young man who would give up his citizenship to avoid getting drafted isn’t worth very much to me, I’m afraid,” Lowell said.

“I’m half-German,” Peter said. “That was my right. I’m more German than American. I was raised there, you will remember.”

“I’m going to ask you one more time, son,” Lowell said.

“And then what?” Peter-Paul replied, defiantly.

Craig Lowell grabbed his son by his shirtfront. He had his right hand drawn back over his left shoulder, prepared to slap Peter-Paul’s face with the back of his hand, when Felter came back in the room. Lowell glanced at Felter, then let Peter-Paul go.

“That’s not going to do it,” Felter said, matter-of-factly. “On the other hand, we have to get this film. Or abort.”

Lowell met Felter’s eyes.

“Sodium Pentothal,” Lowell said.

“You wouldn’t dare!” Peter-Paul said.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” Felter said. “And there is a six-hour recovery period. We don’t have six hours, Craig.”

Lowell didn’t answer.

“Peter,” Sandy Felter said. “I need that film.”

Peter-Paul Lowell just looked at him.

“Colonel Felter,” Geoff Craig said. “Are you willing to bargain?”

Felter looked at him curiously.

“What have we got to bargain with?”

“We don’t have anything,” Geoff said. “You have the authority to authorize me to go along. I’ll get that film from him, and I get to go along.”

“
We
get the film,” Franklin said, “and
we
get to go along.”

“We don’t need you,” Felter said. “The pilots are all specially trained for this.”

“I’ll go as a grunt,” Geoff said. “I want to go, Colonel. A friend of mine is in Dak Tae. A master sergeant named Petrofski.”

“How do you know that?” Felter snapped. “From your cousin?”

“He didn’t tell me, I swear,” Geoff said. “But I won’t tell you who did.”

“I have more time in Chinooks than anybody else I know,” Franklin said. “Please don’t tell me I need any more training.”

There was a knock at the door. Felter turned and went to the door and opened it. Three stocky Green Berets, one of them an enormous black warrant officer, came into the Quonset.

Lowell tried hard not to let his distress show on his face. He knew what the Berets were for. Felter intended to get the film from Peter-Paul.

“For Christ’s sake, Sandy,” the father said. “Let Geoff and Bill have a shot at it before you turn him over to these guys.”

“Presuming, of course, sir,” Geoff said, “that we have a deal.”

Felter considered his options for a moment.

“Mr. Jefferson,” he said to the enormous black warrant officer, “would you take Colonel Lowell, please, to his quarters, and handcuff him to a cot?”

“What the hell?” Lowell asked, angrily.

“I don’t want you interfering,” Felter said. “Either Geoff gets the film from Peter-Paul, or Mr. Jefferson will.”

“What are you going to do?” Peter-Paul said. “Beat me?” There was just a suggestion of fear behind the bravado.

“You want to come with us, Colonel, please?” Mr. Jefferson said.

He walked toward Lowell, with the other two behind him.

“There’s nothing you can do, Colonel,” Mr. Jefferson said, reading Lowell’s mind. “There’s three of us.”

Lowell allowed himself to be led out of the room.

(One)
Hut Seven
Temporary Detention Facility
Camp McCall, North Carolina

“Now that we’re alone, Cousin Peter-Paul,” Captain Geoffrey Craig said to Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg Lowell, “I hope that we can settle this little difference between us like gentlemen.”

“I don’t suppose it matters to you,” Peter-Paul said. “But has it occurred to you that your friends can’t afford to get thrown out of the Army?”

“With reason,” Geoff said. “And I think the first thing I should tell you is that I am extraordinarily fond of your father. Among other things, he once got me out of the stockade. I was in the stockade because I was then what you are, a wise-ass who couldn’t really tell his ass from a hole in the ground.”

Peter-Paul ignored him.

Geoff slapped him with the back of his hand, hard enough to make his eyes water.

“Do I have your attention?” Geoff asked.

“You sonofabitch!” Peter-Paul said.

“I would have hit you a lot harder,” Bill Franklin said.

“The next thing I think we should discuss is who are the good guys in this world, and who are the bad guys.”

“You’re the good guys, of course,” Peter-Paul said.

“Relatively speaking,” Geoff said. “I don’t paint myself as a saint, the proof of which I devoutly hope is not going to be necessary, but relative to the other side, I
am
one of the good guys.”

“So you’re one of the good guys, so what?”

Geoff slapped him again, this time drawing a little blood at the corners of his mouth.

“That’s going to cost you, when I eventually get out of here,” he said.

Geoff slapped him again.

“The next time I want to hear you say something is when you are prepared to tell me where we can find your film,” Geoff said. “Is that clear?”

Peter-Paul glowered at him, but said nothing. This was all a bluff, he decided. They would slap him around a little and deny that they had. It would be their word against his, and they would probably get away with it. That realization made him furious.

“We were talking about the good guys and the bad guys,” Geoff said. “I suppose you know that I’m married to a German girl. But you probably don’t know much about her, so I’ll tell you just a little bit. She was born and raised in East Germany. The People’s Democratic Republic, they call it. Which is about as accurate as calling you a decent human being. My wife has a brother, who used to be an officer, a lieutenant of engineers, in the East German Army.”

Peter-Paul forgot Geoff’s admonition to keep quiet until he was prepared to tell him where the film was.

“It may come as a surprise to you, cousin,” he said. “But I am really monumentally disinterested in your German wife.”

Geoff hit him so hard he fell off his chair.

“That wasn’t telling me where the film is,” he said. “Get back in your chair, I’m not through talking to you.”

“Fuck you!” Peter-Paul blurted.

He did not get off the floor. Geoff walked over to him and kicked him in the ribs.

“I told you to get back to the chair,” he said.

“You sonofabitch,” Peter-Paul said, as he decided the best thing to do was get back in the chair. He had been wrong that they would go no further than slapping him around. But certainly they would go no further than kicking him. Still there was no sense getting kicked for no good reason.

“‘For yea, tho’ I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” Geoff quoted, liltingly. “‘I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest sonofabitch in the valley.’”

Despite what had just happened, Peter-Paul could not resist a smile.

“Except, perhaps, that big black sonofabitch who was just in here,” Geoff went on. “Major, would you be good enough to ask him to step back in here.”

Peter-Paul was a little frightened by that.

“You wanted to see me, Captain?” Mr. Jefferson asked.

“This little interview is not going as well as I hoped it would,” Geoff said. “I’m very much afraid that an aerial reconnaissance may be necessary. Would you be good enough to lay that on, please? Major Franklin has kindly consented to fly the aircraft.”

Peter-Paul couldn’t quite figure that out. Did Geoffrey Craig actually intend to go looking for the film from the air?

“You check that with Colonel Felter, Captain?” Jefferson asked.

“Trust me, Mr. Jefferson,” Geoff said. “And would you send in the other two gentlemen, to protect me from this walking turd while you and the major are off setting things up?”

Then Geoff looked at Franklin.

“I volunteered you for that,” he said, “didn’t I? You don’t have to fly it.”

“‘In for a penny, in for a dime,’” Major Franklin quoted dryly, and walked out of the room. The two Green Berets came in.

“I was just explaining to this turd why I dislike Communists,” Geoff said. “I was telling Peter-Paul about my brother-in-law.”

“Yes, sir,” they said, in chorus.

“My brother-in-law, in order to hold his head up as a man, felt it was necessary to sever his connection with the East German Army. He was then engaged in laying mines at the Wall in Berlin, which we all know was built to keep all the West Germans from breaking into East Germany to avail themselves of the benefits of socialism.

“He had to come over the wall by literally crashing through it. He also had with him my wife-to-be. She fucking near got shot. Fortunately, they missed. She and Karl-Heinz—my brother-in-law’s name, Peter Hyphen Paul, is Karl Hyphen Heinz Wagner, which is apparently yet another odd Kraut custom. Anyway, the first thing that happened when Karl-Heinz got to America was that he enlisted in the Green Berets. Which is where I met him, and through him the lady who was to be my wife—and the mother of my sons. We have two sons, Porter, after my father, and Craig, after
your
father. He will probably call himself C. Lowell Craig, because Craig L. Craig sounds a little funny.

“But I digress. I was telling you about Karl Hyphen Heinz and the Green Berets. It was his great ambition to become a Green Beret officer, and I daresay he was a bit miffed when I made it before he did. But he finally made it, and he went to Vietnam to murder babies and shoot innocent people and do the other things we Green Berets do. He was inspecting, one afternoon, one of a number of medical clinics he had set up…to turn innocent Vietnamese children into drug addicts, as I’m sure you’re aware. Anyway, while he was there one afternoon, the forces of liberation and good decided that the best way to keep the Americans from turning all those innocent Vietnamese children into drug addicts was to blow up the clinic.

“They did so, Peter-Paul. They killed about thirty children and some mothers and a couple of Berets. But Karl Hyphen Heinz wasn’t so lucky. He didn’t take the full force of the explosive. All he got was a piece of shrapnel through his spinal cord.

“He is currently retired from military service, living in a place near Ursula and me in Alabama. I don’t go to see him often, because every time I do he asks me, as one officer and a gentleman to another, to get him a pistol. He doesn’t like being a paraplegic.

“All of this makes my wife very unhappy. I suppose it boils down to that, Anybody that makes my wife unhappy is a bad guy. There is just one more thing I think you should know about me. There is a guy in Dak Tae, a guy named Petrofski, who saved my ass on more than one occasion. I would very much like to get him out of Dak Tae. They are very unkind to people in Dak Tae. Now the point I’m trying to make to you, Peter Hyphen Paul, is that making this operation is personally important to me. I intend that it will go forth. If I have to kill you to see that it does, I will kill you. Do I make my point? You may now speak.”

“You were doing pretty good until you got to the end. I almost believed that business about your brother-in-law,” Peter-Paul said.

“Lieutenant Wagner’s your brother-in-law, Captain?” one of the Green Berets asked. “‘Dutch’ Wagner?”

“Yes.”

“Very clever, Sergeant,” Peter-Paul said.

“One more time, Cousin Peter Hyphen Paul, where is that fucking film?”

“One more time, go fuck yourself.”

“Well,” Geoff said to the Green Berets, “it can’t be said he wasn’t given every possible opportunity to do right. Aerial reconnaissance is going to be necessary. Would you help me wrap the package please?”

“Yes, sir,” the Berets said, almost in unison.

They walked toward Peter-Paul.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Peter-Paul asked.

Then he suddenly felt himself flying backward off the chair. He landed on his back. Before he could even sit up, the larger of the two Green Berets was sitting on his chest, pinning Peter-Paul’s arms over his head to the floor. Peter-Paul flailed his legs around, but after a moment the other Green Beret and Geoff Craig caught them and pressed them to the floor. He felt something being wrapped tightly around his ankles.

When Peter-Paul’s legs had been taped together and immobilized, Geoff moved up to his head. He had a roll of something in his hand. In a moment, Peter-Paul recognized it as medical adhesive tape, except that it was overprinted in a camouflage pattern. Geoff ripped off a two-foot-long strip of the inch-wide tape. And then with a practiced gesture—holding Peter-Paul’s head immobile by grabbing a fistful of hair above his forehead—wrapped it around the back of his head and then over his mouth.

Without moving, he ripped open two foil-wrapped field dressings, set them down, and ripped off a longer piece of the surgical tape. Peter-Paul struggled, but with one Green Beret sitting on his legs and the other sitting on his chest, he was effectively immobilized.

His head was pulled by the hair off the floor again. Tape was looped around the back of his head. Geoff shifted his grip and pinned his head to the floor. With his free hand, he picked up one of the field dressings, held it over Peter-Paul’s left eye, then fastened it in place with the tape. Then he covered the right eye with a field dressing and taped that in place.

“You better get his knees, Captain,” Peter-Paul heard one of the Berets say.

There was a rosy haze over his eyes, instead of the blackness he expected. But he couldn’t see anything. Someone, probably the Green Beret who had taped his legs, was now working on his knees. He felt them being lifted, felt something being shoved under them, felt them being drawn together, heard the ripping noise adhesive tape makes when pulled from its roll. He tried to spread his knees, but they were locked together.

A hand grabbed his hair again, and pulled him into a sitting position. He kicked his legs, hoping at least to connect with someone, but they just flailed uselessly. He realized that each of his wrists was now held by two hands.

He felt something being put onto his shoulders, a belt of some kind, and then something tucked between his legs. With his knees taped together, it was hard to get whatever it was between his legs.

“Captain,” a voice Peter-Paul recognized as belonging to the enormous warrant officer asked. “What if you kill him?”

There was no answer.

Peter-Paul decided these people had the art of psychological terror down pretty good. If he didn’t have the experience to know that there was only so far they dared go, he might be a little frightened himself.

He felt straps coming together. Buckles, snaps. They had put him in some kind of harness.

He was pushed to the floor again and roughly rolled on one side. He heard the sound of tape being ripped from a roll again, and then felt the pressure of tape at his elbows and around his chest. His arms were being taped to his sides. He was rolled over and over as the tape was wound around him.

“If you kill him, Captain,” the warrant officer’s voice said, “you’re going to have to worry about what to do with the body.”

Cousin Geoff could apparently think of no clever answer to that, for he made no comment.

Peter-Paul was on his back again. And then he was being dragged across the floor, a hand on each shoulder. He heard the sound of a door opening, and then, immediately, he felt himself being picked up and thrown like a bag of potatoes. He landed painfully on his shoulder.

“Take it easy, Captain,” one of the Berets said.

There was the sound of a truck door closing, and in a moment the floor under him shook. He was in some kind of a truck. He was in an
ambulance
. He remembered seeing ambulances when they’d brought him in here.

Doors, up front, closed. The truck engine started, and with a heavy whine of gears, moved off. He tried to move his mouth to loosen the tape. He pulled some skin on his lip loose, but the tape stayed in place.

They rode for fifteen minutes slowly over rough, dirt roads, and then stopped. He heard the door open, and there was a brighter light on the gauze over his eyes. Hands were laid on his feet, and he was pulled out of the truck. A hand on the harness pulled him into a sitting position, and then he felt hands under him, lifting him.

Someone’s warm breath was on him, and there was grunting. He was dumped onto the ground, then pushed flat on his back. Someone touched his shoulders, and there was a clicking sound.

Then he heard the ambulance doors shut, and the engine start.

After a minute or two, the pounding of his heart stopped, and he forced himself to breathe regularly. He could hear nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Just the wind blowing in trees.

What the hell were they doing to him?

He got control of his emotions. What they were doing was scaring him. Well, they’d done a good job. But it wasn’t going to work. There was no way they could do anything more than threaten him. He was a German citizen, a journalist, and they couldn’t hurt him.

And when they were through with their little games, they would pay. It would be a diplomatic incident. He would have them all court-martialed, see them all in jail, see Sandy Felter kicked out of the Army in disgrace. They couldn’t cover up something like this.

He heard footsteps approaching. They were going to ask him if he had enough.

He was sure of it when the tape was ripped from his mouth. There was a sharp pain on his lips, more skin pulled off, and he tasted warm, salty blood. They’d pay for that, too.