Killer Instincts v5 (6 page)

I stared for a moment into the milky grey depths of my cafe au lait, imagining myself ten, twenty years from now. What kind of relationships to you build with people when your family gets taken away from you like this? I tried to picture the awkward revelation of what happened to my family, explaining it to some unknown future girlfriend. I could see the shock, the embarrassment when she realizes how she must look to me, the strained sympathy. The eventual disentanglement as she goes running, looking for someone without so much emotional baggage trailing behind.

I knew people could lead normal lives after family tragedies, despite the trauma and the grief. Lots of counseling, forgiveness, channeling their emotions into making the world a better place, shit like that. But most of the time, what were we talking about? A bad fire? A drunk driver or other car accident? Plane crash, even? But how do you get past “my father was gunned down and my mother and sister were beaten to death, then my house was burned down. Why? Oh, an organized crime family slaughtered them in order to terrorize witnesses testifying against a murdering rapist”.

See, that was the best part. There was no getting past this. It was 2001. Every major newspaper in the world put their stories on the Web. Even now, the whole awful business was probably a quick search-engine query away from any prospective girlfriends for the rest of my life, as well as classmates, faculty, employers, future friends and acquaintances, true crime writers...I had been immortalized to the world for the most terrible of reasons.

I can't place my finger on the exact moment the thought came to me. It seemed to worm itself into my mind, slipping in through some subconscious crawlspace, and before I knew it, the idea was right there before me. Not a possibility, not a half-considered urge, but a decision, a course of action fully formed before I knew I was even considering it.

I looked up and caught Jamie's gaze, saw his eyes change when they met mine.

"That look means nothing but trouble,” he said.

I pondered for a moment. "My freshman year, to fulfill a humanities requirement, I took a survey course on ancient European history. One day the prof tells us how the Vikings were famous for blood-feuds, especially between families. A common but very extreme method of ending the blood feud involved surrounding the offending family's longhouse, usually at night when everyone is inside, and setting fire to the the woven grass that made up the roof. If anyone came out to escape the smoke and the flames, they were killed with a bow or a thrown spear, or just cut down with a sword or axe. So, the family had two choices; come out fighting and die, or stay inside and die. Either way, the feud was over."

Jamie just stared at me.

"See, this is how I look at it. The Paggianos, they tried to do that to us. Burn the house down, kill everyone. Only you and I, we weren't in the family hall. Feud isn't over. Now it's our turn to do it to them. Go home, drive out to Swampscott, walk up to this place, throw a few Molotov cocktails through the windows, and anyone who comes running out, we just blow them away. Find ourselves a couple of black market machine guns or some hunting rifles out of that sporting goods store of yours up in Maine. We just burn those fuckers out and they either go quick with a bullet as they come out the door, or they go slow and cook in their fucking mansion."

Jamie kept staring at me. I couldn't believe how calmly it all came out. Even with the profanity, I found myself speaking in an almost conversational tone about burning a house to the ground and killing everyone inside. No one at any of the nearby tables even glanced my way, although I was glad for a moment that I was speaking English.

Our waitress walked by, and Jamie turned to catch her attention. I heard him ask for a bottle of cognac in passable French.

"I didn't know you spoke French."

"There's a lot you don't know."

"When did you learn it?"

"I was in Vietnam for almost four years, William. Before they kicked our asses, they beat up on these poor fuckers for a decade. Along with learning Vietnamese, we were encouraged to pick up a little French as well; it was easier for some of the guys, especially the college kids or the guys who went to good high schools; some of them had a little classroom French before they joined up."

The waitress brought us a bottle of Remy Martin XO and portioned out a fair measure into a pair of balloon snifters. Jamie picked his up, gave it a slow swirl, breathed in the aromas, and then imbibed half the glass in one long swallow.

"I think we're going to need the whole bottle, William."

I took a sip from my own snifter. It was like drinking smooth liquid flame. Fitting for our topic of conversation.

"So you agree with me."

"In principle, yes."

"What do you mean, 'in principle'? I would figure you'd be all over this idea. Hell, I'm amazed you aren't the one proposing it to me. Double hell, I'm actually amazed you aren't there right now, doing the deed, instead of here talking to me."

"Why is that?"

"You know why. You were in Vietnam. You've killed people before."

Jamie's face grew hard.

"Vietnam was war. I was eighteen when I signed up, and the world seemed a much simpler place when viewed through those eyes. I'm not the same guy I was back then, and I know the world isn't a simple place. In fact, it never was. You don't just go and burn people out of their own homes, not if you want to still think of yourself as the good guy."

"So you never did anything like that? Never burned ‘Charlie’ out of his hut and shot them dead as they tried to escape the flames?"

I realized I was beginning to sound like an asshole, but I didn't care. My blood was up and I was really beginning to feel the wine. The cognac wasn't helping matters.

Jamie finished his snifter, refilled it with a healthy pour. He picked the glass up, balloon cupped in his hand, and stared into the golden depths of the liquid like it was a crystal ball.

"The VC and NVA were experts at using the natural environment to their advantage. They would dig tunnel systems underground, vast networks, whole bases. You could walk a recon team right over their fucking heads and not have the foggiest clue there were two hundred guys right under your feet.

"Back in 1970, one of our recon teams provided us the location of this little hideaway, supposedly a whole company-sized body of NVA were entrenched in one of these underground bases, just over the Laotian border. My hatchet force, perhaps a hundred guys divvied up into a dozen Kingbee helicopters, we go out there, and sure enough, we find signs of these little fuckers buried in deep; ventilation tubes disguised as hollow tree trunks, hidden hatches, the works.

"So we all spread out, make sure we've got as many exits covered as we can, and we decide to tear gas these assholes out of their nest. Pop a dozen CS canisters down their ventilation tubes. Follow those with a couple of smokers, even a white phosphorous grenade or two. Those are incendiaries, burn so hot they can turn a tank to slag in minutes. We spent a good two hours just dumping grenades down those holes and waiting to see a whole mess of dinks boiling out of those hatches so we could cut them down; had a couple of M-60's set up to cover the most likely exits and everything.

"Problem was, none of those little fuckers came out. We waited, and waited, and finally the hatchet force leader, this lieutenant of ours, he gets all impatient and orders one of the Nung mercenaries we fought with to go on in and scout around. Gives him a Tokarev pistol and a flashlight and sends him in, tells him to be back out in ten minutes. Time passes, we don't see the guy. Ten turns to twenty, no show. We wait a whole half hour, then the LT sends in three more guys, down into different tunnel entrances. Same deal, no one comes back. The Nungs are starting to spook, and even us Berets are getting nervous.

"So I ask my best tunnel guy, little Hispanic fellow from Tuscon, Javier. He's got his .45 auto, fighting knife, couple of frags if it's desperate, his flashlight. He's a stone-cold motherfucker, that little dude. I'd personally seen him kill two dozen men. I can see he's thinking the Nungs are pussies, they're lost or got caught by a booby trap, or ran into each other in the dark and bam bam bam, party's over. He's thinking this is going to be a piece of cake.

"So down into the hole Javier goes, pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, and I'm at the entrance, got the hatch propped open, a flashlight on his ass in one hand, and my CAR-15 tucked into the crook of my elbow in the other, set to full-auto, ready to cover him if he comes squirming out of there in a hurry. I see his boots disappear around a corner, maybe fifteen feet in, and by now I'm halfway into the hole myself, so I can see in the dark better. I see his feet go around the bend, and not ten seconds later, I hear that .45 go wild, hear Javier empty those seven rounds so fast you think he'd had a submachine gun, not a pistol. I hear all those shots, and I give him a holler, ask if he's okay.

"I get no response. Nothing. Seconds go by. Minutes. I'm contemplating throwing a frag in there, but on the off chance that Javier is still alive, I hold back. But after twenty minutes, I know he's not coming out again. None of us have any idea how they were doing it, but those assholes down there; all the gas and smoke and fire we dumped down those holes, didn't stir them up one bit. They just waited it out, knew eventually we'd send someone in to take a look, and started making those guys disappear."

I sat there, almost numb. It was the most Jamie had ever revealed to me about Vietnam. I don't even know if he'd told that much to my dad before.

"So what did you do?" I asked.

Jamie smiled at me, gazed back into his glass. "Lieutenant called in a couple of our Kingbee helicopters. Had them chopper in as many artillery shells as they could get their hands on, a whole mess of demo charges, whole shit-ton of thermite incendiary charges. All in all probably a good five tons of explosives. We spent the rest of the day packing every entrance we could find with shells and explosives and thermite, and everything we had left, we just went around, dug a few feet into the ground, dropped a charge in, packed it down with earth. Wired the whole fucking place up like Bill Murray in Caddyshack, going after the gopher.

"Once we had all that in place, we pulled back, good two hundred meters or so, maintaining our perimeter best we could, and then we set that shit off. It was like seeing a football field just disappear in a shower of grass and dirt and trees. Once everything settled back to earth, it looked like one of those pictures you see of a newly-tilled field, just dark moist churned earth. But no bodies. No fragments of bodies, no bones or blood. There was some broken gear, some wooden supports, a few feet of electrical cable here or there, but no bodies at all, not even Javier or the Nungs."

"So what then?" I asked.

Jamie shrugged. "We said fuck it. Packed up, headed home. Wrote up in a report that we lost four Nungs and one SOG member and killed a hundred entrenched NVA, destroyed all their weapons and communications equipment, and sterilized their underground base of operations. That lieutenant of ours got a medal for it, too. As the highest-ranking man on the scene, it was technically his gig. We never did find out what was going on down in those tunnels though."

Jamie went quiet then, and took another long sip from his glass.

"Thank you for sharing that with me," I said. "I'd never heard anything like that from you before."

"William, there's a reason I don't talk about the war," Jamie replied. "I didn't spend all those years in another country; I was on another goddamn planet. In another solar system. Shit, another galaxy. Whole other fucking universe, even. There was a different kind of reality at work over there, so alien in how you thought about everything that when you come back to the Real World, this is the place that doesn't seem real anymore. It took me years, decades to work it out of my system enough that I felt I was fit to be around normal people again, and even now I don't feel quite right about it."

We were both silent for a few long minutes. I wondered what Jamie was trying to say, how I should ask him about his decision. Jamie refilled both our snifters, the bottle of cognac now half gone, and kept staring into his glass, possibly reliving the moment he saw Javier's boots go around that corner, seeing him for the last time over and over again. Maybe that's how he saw me, how I thought it was going to be a simple task, and Jamie knowing it'd be the end of me.

Finally I couldn't hold back any longer.

"Well, what's your answer?" I asked.

Jamie shook his head, the movement so small as to be almost unnoticeable.

"Doing what you ask, I'd be going back to that place, living in that alternate reality once more. I think it'd kill me to live like that a second time and then have to come back and readjust all over again. I'm too old, and finally at peace with myself. I'm sorry, I just can't do it."

I looked off into the distance, out to the edge of the horizon, west towards the States and the Paggianos and their shoreside mansion. I imagined I had a telescope that could look over the curvature of the earth and see their great house sitting up on its cliff, see the waves breaking white down below.

"I understand, Jamie,” I said, not looking back at him. "But if you're not going to help me, I'm going to do it on my own. I owe it to mom and dad and Danielle."

I could hear Jamie let out a long breath, similar to the sound he made on the phone when he told me the news of what happened.

"Maybe I won't help you, William..."

I turned back and looked at my uncle, a small, sad smile on his face.

"But I know someone who can."

FOUR

We spent the rest of our time in Calais speaking of nothing consequential, and we were similarly quiet on the flight back to the States the next day. I spent most of it sleeping, and the few times I awoke Jamie was just staring out the window. When we landed in Bangor, the drive back to Jamie's cabin along Moosehead Lake was similarly silent. Only a few brief and meaningless comments were traded between the two of us, the ride interrupted just once by a quick stop at a small grocery store along the way.