The Aquitaine Progression (4 page)

“A weather front’s moved in and you should know it as well as I do.”

“My meteorologists say it’s completely flyable!”

“I suspect if you asked for that finding during a Burma monsoon they’d deliver it.”

“That’s gross insubordination!”

“This is my ship and military regulations are quite clear as to who’s in command here.”

“Do you want to connect me to your radio room? I’ll reach the Oval Office and we’ll see just how long you’ve got this ship!”

“I’m sure you’ll want to speak privately—probably over a scrambler. I’ll have you escorted there.”

“Goddamn you, I’ve got four thousand troops—maybe twenty percent seasoned—moving up into Sector Five! We need a low-altitude combined strike from land and sea and we’ll have it if I have to get your ass out of here within the hour! And I can do it, Captain!… We’re over here to win, win, and win it all! We don’t need sugarcoated Nellies hedging their goddamned bets! Maybe you never heard it before, but all war is a risk! You don’t win if you don’t risk, Captain!”

“I’ve been there, General. Common sense cuts losses, and if you cut enough losses you can win the next battle.”

“I’m going to win this one, with or without you, Blue Boy!”

“I respectfully advise you to temper your language, General.”

“You what?” Delavane’s face was contorted in fury, his eyes the eyes of a savage wild animal. “You advise me? You advise Command-Saigon! Well, you do whatever you like—Blue Boy in your satin pants—but the incursion up into the Tho Valley is on.”

“The Tho,” interrupted Converse. “That’s the first leg of the Pak Song route. We’ve hit it four times. I know the terrain.”

“You know it?” shouted Delavane
.

“I do, but I take my orders from the commander of this ship—General.”

“You prissy shit-kicker, you take orders from the President of the United States! He’s your commander in chief! And I’ll get those orders!”

Delavane’s face was inches from Joel’s, the maniacal expression challenging every nerve ending in Joel’s body: hatred matched by loathing. Barely realizing the words were
his, Converse spoke. “I, too, would advise the General to be careful of his language.”

“Why, shit-kicker? Has Blue Boy got this place wired?”

“Easy, Lieutenant! I said you were dismissed!”

“You want me to watch my language, big fella with your little silver bar? No, sonny boy, you watch it, and you read it! If that squadron of yours isn’t in the air at fifteen hundred hours, I’ll label this carrier the biggest yellow streak in Southeast Asia! You got that, satin-pantsed Blue Boy, third class?”

Once more Joel replied, wondering as he spoke where he found the audacity. “I don’t know where you come from, sir, but I sincerely hope we meet under different circumstances sometime. I think you’re a pig.”

“Insubordination! Also, I’d break your back.”

“Dismissed, Lieutenant!”

“No, Captain, you’re wrong!” shouted the general. “He may be the man to lead this strike, after all. Well, what’ll it be, Blue Boys? Airborne, or the President of the United States—or the label?”

At 1520 hours Converse led the squadron off the carrier deck. At 1538, as they headed at low altitude into the weather, the first two casualties occurred over the coastline; the wing planes were shot down—fiery deaths at six hundred miles an hour in the air. At 1546 Joel’s right engine exploded; his altitude made the direct hit easy. At 1546:30, unable to stabilize, Converse ejected into the downpour of the storm clouds, his parachute instantly swept into the vortex of the conflicting winds. As he swung violently down toward the earth, the straps digging into his flesh with each whipping buffet, one image kept repeating its presence within the darkness. The maniacal face of General George Marcus Delavane. He was about to begin an indeterminate stay in hell, courtesy of a madman. And as he later learned, the losses were infinitely greater on the ground
.

Delavane! The Butcher of Danang and Pleiku. Waster of thousands, throwing battalion after battalion into the jungles and the hills with neither adequate training nor sufficient fire-power. Wounded, frightened children had been marched into the camps, bewildered, trying not to weep and, finally understanding, weeping out of control. The stories they told were a thousand variations on the same sickening theme. Inexperienced,
untried troops had been sent into battle within days after disembarkation; the weight of sheer numbers was expected to vanquish the often unseen enemy. And when the numbers did not work, more numbers were sent. For three years command headquarters listened to a maniac.
Delavane!
The warlord of Saigon, fabricator of body counts, with no acknowledgment of blown-apart faces and severed limbs, liar and extoller of death without a cause! A man who had proved, finally, to be too lethal even for the Pentagon zealots—a zealot who had outdistanced his own, in the end revolting his own. He had been recalled and retired—-only to write diatribes read by fanatics who fed their own personal furies.

Men like that can’t be allowed anymore, don’t you understand? He was the enemy, OUR enemy!
Those had been Converse’s own words, shouted in a fever of outrage before a panel of uniformed questioners who had looked at each other, avoiding him, not wanting to respond to those words. They had thanked him perfunctorily, told him that the nation owed him and thousands like him a great debt, and with regard to his final comments he should try to understand that there were often many sides to an issue, and that the complex execution of command frequently was not what it appeared to be. In any event, the President had called upon the nation to bind its wounds; what good was served by fueling old controversies? And then the final kicker, the threat.

“You yourself briefly assumed the terrible responsibility of leadership, Lieutenant,” said a pale-faced Navy lawyer, barely glancing at Joel, his eyes scanning the pages of a file folder. “Before you made your final and successful escape—by yourself, from a pit in the ground away from the main camp—you led two previous attempts involving a total of seventeen prisoners of war. Fortunately you survived, but eight men did not. I’m sure that you, as their leader, their tactician, never anticipated a casualty risk of nearly fifty percent. It’s been said often, but perhaps not often enough: command is awesome, Lieutenant.”

Translation:
Don’t join the freaks, soldier. You survived, but eight were killed. Were there circumstances the military is not aware of, tactics that protected some more than others, one more than others? One man who managed to break out—by himself—eluding guards that shot on sight prisoners on the loose at night? Merely to raise the question by reopening a specific file will produce a stigma that will follow you
for the rest of your life. Back off, soldier. We’ve got you by simply raising a question we all know should not be raised, but we’ll do it because we’ve taken enough flak. We’ll cut it off wherever we can. Be happy you survived and got out. Now, get out
.

At that moment, Converse had been as close to consciously throwing away his life as he would ever have thought possible. Physically assaulting that panel of sanctimonious hypocrites had not been out of the question, until he studied the face of each man, his peripheral gaze taking in rows of tunic ribbons, battle stars on most. Then a strange thing had happened: disgust, revulsion—and compassion—swept over him. These were panicked men, a number having committed their lives to their country’s practice of war … only to have been conned, as he had been conned. If to protect what was decent meant protecting the worst, who was to say they were wrong? Where were the saints? Or the sinners? Could there be any of either when all were victims?

Disgust, however, won out. Lieutenant Joel Converse, USNR, could not bring himself to give a final salute to that council of his superiors. In silence, he had turned, with no military bearing whatsoever, and walked out of the room as if he had pointedly spat on the floor.

A flash of light again from the boulevard, a blinding echo of the sun from the Quai du Mont Blanc. He was in Geneva, not in a North Vietnamese camp holding children who vomited while telling their stories, or in San Diego being separated from the United States Navy. He was in Geneva, and the man sitting across the table knew everything he was thinking and feeling.

“Why
me?
” whispered Joel.

“Because, as they say,” said Halliday, “you could be motivated. That’s the simple answer. A story was told. The captain of your aircraft carrier refused to put his planes in the air for the strike that Delavane demanded. Several storms had moved in; he called it suicidal. But Delavane forced him to, threatened to call the macho White House and have the captain stripped of his command. You led that strike. It’s where you got it.”

“I’m alive,” said Converse flatly. “Twelve hundred kids never saw the next day and maybe a thousand more wished they never had.”

“And you were in the captain’s quarters when Mad Marcus Delavane made his threats and called the shots.”

“I was there,” agreed Converse, no comment in his voice. Then he shook his head in bewilderment. “Everything I told you—about myself—you’ve heard it before.”

“Read it before,” corrected the lawyer from California. “Like you—and I think we’re the best in the business under fifty—I don’t put a hell of a lot of stock in the written word. I have to hear a voice, or see a face.”

“I didn’t answer you.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But
you
have to answer
me
—
now
. You’re not here for Comm Tech-Bern, are you?”

“Yes, that part’s true,” said Halliday. “Only the Swiss didn’t come to me, I went to them. I’ve been watching you, waiting for the moment. It had to be the right one, perfectly natural, geographically logical.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Because I’m being watched.… Rosen did have a stroke. I heard about it, contacted Bern, and made a plausible case for myself.”

“Your reputation was enough.”

“It helped, but I needed more. I said we knew each other, that we went way back—which God knows was true—and as much as I respected you, I implied that you were extremely astute with finals, and that I was familiar with your methods. I also put my price high enough.”

“An irresistible combination for the Swiss,” said Converse.

“I’m glad you approve.”

“But I don’t,” contradicted Joel. “I don’t approve of you at all, least of all
your
methods. You haven’t told me anything, just made cryptic remarks about an unidentified group of people you say are dangerous, and brought up the name of a man you knew would provoke a response. Maybe you’re just a freak, after all, still pushing that safe Yippee label.”

“Calling someone a ‘freak’ is subjectively prejudicial in the extreme, counselor, and would be stricken from the record.”

“Still, the point’s been made with the jury, lawyer-man,” said Converse quietly but with anger. “And I’m making it now.”

“Don’t prejudge the safety,” continued Halliday in a
voice that was equally quiet. “I’m not safe, and outside of a proclivity for cowardice, there’s a wife and five children back in San Francisco I care deeply about.”

“So you come to me because I have no such—what was it?—priority entanglements?”

“I came to you because you’re invisible, you’re not involved, and because you’re the best, and I can’t do it! I
legally
can’t do it, and it’s got to be done legally.”

“Why don’t you say what you mean?” demanded Converse. “Because if you don’t I’m getting up and we’ll see each other later across a table.”

“I represented Delavane,” said Halliday quickly. “God help me I didn’t know what I was doing, and very few people approved, but I made a point we used to make all the time. Unpopular causes and people also deserve representation.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

“You don’t know the cause. I do. I found out.”

“What cause?”

Halliday leaned forward. “The generals,” he said, his voice barely audible. “They’re coming back.”

Joel looked closely at the Californian. “From where? I didn’t know they’d been away.”

“From the past,” said Halliday. “From years ago.”

Converse sat back in the chair, now amused. “Good Lord, I thought your kind were extinct. Are you talking about the Pentagon menace,
Press
—it is ‘Press,’ isn’t it? The San Francisco short-form, or was it from Haight-Ashbury, or the Beverly Hills something or other? You’re a little behind the times; you already stormed the Presidio.”

“Please, don’t make jokes. I’m not joking.”

“Of course not. It’s
Seven Days in May
, or is it
Five Days in August?
It’s August now, so let’s call it
The Old-Time Guns of August
. Nice ring, I think.”

“Stop it! There’s nothing remotely funny, and if there were, I’d find it before you did.”

“That’s a comment, I suppose,” said Joel.

“You’re goddamned right it is, because I
didn’t
go through what you went through. I stayed out of it, I wasn’t conned, and that means I can laugh at fanatics because they never hurt me, and I still think it’s the best ammunition against them. But not now. There’s nothing to laugh at now!”

“Permit me a small chuckle,” said Converse without smiling. “Even in my most paranoid moments I never subscribed
to the conspiracy theory that has the military running Washington. It couldn’t happen.”

“It might be less apparent than in other countries, but that’s all I’ll grant you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It would undoubtedly be much more obvious in Israel, certainly in Johannesburg, quite possibly in France and Bonn, even the UK—none of them takes its pretenses that seriously. But I suppose you’ve got a point. Washington will drape the constitutional robes around itself until they become thread-bare and fall away—revealing a uniform, incidentally.”