education jawing away like piglets in the slop could give me a serious pain in the eyes.”
It took time but Nick and Dobbler, fierce adversaries at first, soon enough found their common ground. Bob himself disappeared with his rifle and as the two of them were talking there came the far-off sound of shots. When he returned, he regarded them without enthusiasm. Nick rose and came at him.
“Now what have you got cooked up, Memphis?” Bob asked.
“It’s all here,” Nick finally said. “With what he’s got and what I’ve got, we can put them away. We can clear you.”
But Bob just went to the cabinet where he stored his cleaning rod and equipment, and began the laborious, greasy job of scrubbing down the bore of the rifle.
In his remoteness, it wasn’t so much that he offered a counterargument, but that he communicated his displeasure by his stoicism and the hard look on his face. Nick pressed on, bringing a trophy out for all to see.
“Annex B. This is it.” He lifted the green bag of documents he’d found under the cab seat in New Orleans. “It turns out that Annex B is simply the Bureau abstract of the Agency file on its contract outfit, RamDyne, except that all the names and dates and pertinent memoranda are included. The facts are what we knew from the Bureau file itself. It was started in 1962, right after Bay of Pigs. Who started it? My bet is that it was founded by somebody who was formerly with CIA who was actively involved in planning the invasion, but who got the ax when the invasion failed. Does that add up?”
Dobbler said, “Yes. Bay of Pigs was weakness, failure, lack of nerve. They hated weakness.”
“Of course,” said Nick.
“Neurotically. And I can see how to them the Bay of Pigs was the beginning of American weakness – of committing to something, then changing your mind, beginning to equivocate, beginning to undercut, and finally dooming your operation to failure by your own doubts. RamDyne was about following through. About seeing the course.”
“The name even comes from Bay of Pigs,” said Nick. “
“They were zealots,” Dobbler said. “They were true believers. They had a sense of building from the ruins, like Hitler, I suppose. It guided them. To God knows what.”
Bob just sat there, listening to the pitch, running the rod, with its bright crown of bronze bristle and its dank lubrication of Shooter’s Choice, through the bore guide and up and down the rifle barrel.
“Bob, we can put them away. In a jail. There can be a happy ending. There can be justice.”
“He’s right, Mr. Swagger. Terrible wrongs were done. But the world can be restored to order. And some of us in this room – there’s a provisional salvation for us, too. You can be at peace.”
Bob looked at them harshly.
“It’s just words,” he said. “In Vietnam we had a saying. ‘Don’t mean a thing.’ That’s what this is. It don’t mean a thing.”
He put the rod down, removed the Delrin bore guide from the action, and began to scrub at the insides of the chamber and the receiver with a blackened toothbrush, giving the weapon his full attention.
“It’s all here!” Nick exploded. “Or most of it. I don’t quite know what mission first got them together in the early sixties. That’s lost to history. And the early stuff is mundane, when they worked for the Agency as a cover organization for shipping illegal cargos to various hot spots in the world. It gets interesting in sixty-nine when this nutcase Shreck was recruited after the Army sacked him, with the mission of building an operational and training arm. He seems to have created a kind of Green-Beret-for-Hire unit. These boys saw some action, no shit. Africa in the early seventies. Lots of time in the Mideast in the late seventies and eighties, and, lately, lots of time in Central America. Whenever some tin-pot country had a job that needed doing but not the capacity, RamDyne could field an operations nasty-ass team. But never so nasty as with Panther Battalion on the Sampul River last year. They talk about that much, Doctor?”
“Nothing. They had perfect professional discipline. I didn’t know until I saw the tape. And the job on the bishop – they said he was a secret guerrilla and that he was working to sabotage the peace process. He had to be stopped so that peace could be achieved. He was an enemy of peace.”
Nick leaned toward Bob.
“This is the key part. Two hundred civilians, most of them women and kids, all wiped out. But it wasn’t a mistake. That’s the secret of the Sampul River. It’s what this thing has always been about. They did it on purpose.”
He had Bob’s attention now.
“Here’s the killer,” Nick said. “Here’s the only thing in Annex B that’s worth a damn. It’s what puts Shreck, Payne, and all the RamDyne yo-yos in the chamber when they drop the little pill.”
He handed it over to the doctor.
“It’s a note from Shreck to – name obliterated, notice how the big guys protect themselves – dated 2 May ’91, sent through U.S. diplomatic pouch from the embassy in El Salvador. Read it to us, Doctor.”
Dobbler cleared his throat.
Eyes Only: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Washington, D.C.
Re: Panther Bn. training operations, Ocalupo, Salvador.
General de Rujijo agrees that punitive measures must be taken against the peasant population but finds that his soldiers, drawn from the same population, are reluctant on the scale we have conceptualized. My training cadre has isolated two platoons of Panther Battalion and we seem to be making real progress in bringing them to the proper level of willingness. Will be moving onto Sampul River district in June and commencing counterinsurgency ops that area. Anticipate sanitation program to commence that date.
Signed,
There was a moment of silence.
“You see,” said Nick, “some genius in an office somewhere wants to get the guerrillas to the peace talks. But there’s no pressure on them. Nothing’s happening. They’ve made some kind of deal with the rural population. So he dreams up this idea: send in some crack troops, line up the peasants and blow ’em away. It was a massacre ordered up out of a catalogue. Atrocity, one each, OD, Summer Issue, Number 5554442. Murder-R-Us. The point being to scare the peasants so fucking bad they’ll
“The hard thing,” said Dobbler. “Yes, they could have done that. Yes, that’s what the tape shows.”
“Anyway,” said Nick, “with the tape and Annex B, Shreck’s dead. The whole fucking program is blown out of the water. And anybody who sailed on the ship – that includes the Bureau’s Lancer Committee, who bought the National Interest bullshit hook, line and sinker – goes down with her. Down to the bottom.”
Bob just nodded grimly.
“There’s only one problem,” said Nick. “This file was sent to the general prior to the operation against the archbishop. It was meant to keep him from going hog-wild. And boy, the stink it’s going to make when it gets out. Man, it’ll make Watergate and Iran-Contra look like tea parties. But maybe it’ll get you off the hook. And maybe it won’t.”
Bob was done with the action. He took an aerosol can of Gun Scrubber and began to blow compressed-air- driven solvent into the trigger mechanism with a sharp, wet hiss.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob.
