painstaking detail. It was even clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Due battle.
They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in a journey to understanding.
'Now, Colonel,' the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked Marlboros, 'based on what we've learned, I wonder if you'd venture a guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares, particularly given their location vis-a-vis the angle of most of the fire directed at you?'
'Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams, they are almost always two-men operations.'
'Yes,' the team leader said.
'Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets, which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper's round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the standard combat load of the M14.
So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the other the M14. Of course, that's different than the men killed by the forty-five-caliber submachine gun.
We believe that was the sniper's secondary weapon.'
The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed.
It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction of the threat.
'Do you wish to know about these men?'
The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its significance were him and not the cause.
'No, I think not. I care nothing for personality.'
'Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new assignment.'
Well, wasn't this interesting? A new assignment under Russian sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?
And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more victims.
They had a picture of him from something called Leatherneck magazine, and what he saw was what he expected.
He knew Americans from Paris and from his time in Saigon with the puppets. This one was a type, perhaps exaggerated, but familiar. Thin, hard, resilient, braver even than the French, brave as any Germans in the Legion.
Cunning, with that specially devious quality of mind that let him instinctively understand weakness and move decisively against it. Disciplined in a way the Americans almost never were. He would have made a brilliant party official, so tight and focused was his mind.
The picture simply showed a slit-eyed young man with prominent cheekbones, his leathery face lit with a grin.
He held some ludicrous trophy thing in his arms, next to him was an older version of the same man, same slit eyes, close-cropped hair but with more vanity on his chest.
'Sergeant Swagger accepts the congratulations of the Commandant after winning at Camp Perry,' read the caption, translated into the Vietnamese. It was warrior's glee, the colonel knew, and he saw in those slit eyes the deaths of so many, and the remorseless ness that had driven their executioner.
'For this one,' he said, 'the war is not a cause. It is merely an excuse.'
'Possibly,' said the Russian intelligence chief.
'Perhaps even the war releases him to find his greatness. But do you not think he has a certain discipline? He is not profligate, he is not one of their criminals, like the Calleys and the Medinas. He has never raped or murdered in combat. He has no sexual weaknesses, a pathology associated with psychopathy.'
'He is not a psychopath,' Huu Co said.
'He is a hero, though the line between them is thin, possibly fragile. He needs a cause to find his true self, that is what I mean. He is the sort who must have a cause to live. He needs something to humble himself in front of. Take that from him and you take everything.'
'Very good. Here, here is more, here is what we have.'
It was more on Swagger, culled from various American public resources. The package included, unbelievably, Marine records, obviously from a very sensitive source.
'Yes.'
'Study this man. Study him well. Learn him. He is your new responsibility.'
'Yes, of course. I accept. And what is the ultimate arrival of this project?'
'Why ... his death, of course. His death and the death of the other one, too. They both must die.'
He slept Swagger, he dreamed Swagger, he read Swagger, he ate Swagger. Swagger engaged and caused the rebirth of the Western part of his mind: he struggled to grasp principles like pride and honor and courage and how their existence sustained a corrupt bourgeoisie state.
For such a state could not exist without the pure fire of such centurions as Swagger standing watch, ready to die, on the Rhines of its empires.
