the ARVN side.”
“You think so?” he said, his face close to mine and his voice low and obscenely intimate so his men couldn’t hear. “Remember Cu Lai?”
The Cambodian village. I felt a sick feeling creeping in that had nothing to do with the aftereffects of the electric shock they had administered.
“What about it?” I said.
“Remember ‘Waste ’em’? Remember ‘Son, I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me’? You were tough, John! I had to use three sets of voices to convince you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a source, a guy who could do a lot for me. I had to show him what I could do for him. Someone in the village had lent him a lot of money, was causing some problems about it. I wanted to show him how I could make those kinds of problems go away.”
“So you massacred an entire village to get to one guy?”
“Had to. You all look alike, you know.” He laughed at his joke.
“Bullshit. Why not just give the source money to pay back the loan?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “C’mon, Rain, the bean counters were paying much more attention to the money being expended than they were to the bullets. Some dead villagers? Just a few more V.C. to add to the body count. Christ, it was easier to do it that way than it would have been to requisition funds, fill out the paperwork, all that shit.”
For the first time since some of the nightmares of the war, I could feel real despair starting to drill its way into my mind. I began to understand bone deep that in a very few minutes I would be dead, that Holtzer would have won, as he’d been winning all along. And while the thought of my own death no longer particularly fascinated me, the knowledge that I had failed to stop him, at the same moment that I came to understand what he had caused me to do so long ago, was overwhelming.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, playing for time. “What were they giving you that would have been worth it? I know it wasn’t money — you’re still a government bean counter in a cheap suit, thirty-five years later.”
He made a face of exaggerated sympathy. “You’re such a farmer, Rain. There’s the way of the world, and you just don’t get it. You trade intel for intel, that’s the game. I had a source who was passing me information on NVA movements — information that was critical for the Arc Light raids that we used to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply chain. And even though SOG’s missions weren’t doing any real operational damage, the North had a bug up its ass about you cowboys because you made them look like they couldn’t control their own backyard. So they wanted intel on SOG, and were willing to pay a lot for it with intel of their own. I was bartering pigshit for gold.”
I knew he was telling the truth. There was nothing I could say.
“Oh, and let me share just one more tidbit before these men take you outside, shoot you in the back of the head, and dump your body in the harbor,” he went on. “I know all about ‘Crazy Jake.’ I volunteered you for the mission to get rid of him.”
My throat constricted. I couldn’t speak. It was like being raped.
“It’s true, it was just good luck that the problem of his little Montagnard army came to my attention. But I knew just the guy to handle it — his old high-school pal, John Rain. No one else could get close enough.”
It was over. I was going to die. My mind started to drift, and a strange calmness descended.
“I got the word out afterward. It was supposed to be confidential, but I made sure people knew. ‘Just between you and me,’ don’t you love that phrase? You might as well say, ‘make sure it gets in the papers.’ It’s great.”
I found myself remembering the time I had first climbed Mount Fuji. I was with my father, and neither of us had dressed properly for the cold. We took turns wanting to go back, but somehow the other always insisted on going on, and eventually we made it to the top. We always laughed about it afterward, and he had loved to tell the story.
“I’ll tell you, it made people uncomfortable, John. What kind of man can off his own best friend? Just sneak up on him and cap him? Not someone you could ever trust afterwards, I’ll tell you that. Not someone you could promote, whose career you could advance. I guess that bit of ‘just between you and me’ info pretty much ruined your career in the military, didn’t it? You’ve been nothing but a murderous little half-breed errand boy for your betters ever since.”
The old man had always liked to tell that story. And how glad he was that we had managed to take turns convincing each other to go on until we had made it.
“Cat got your tongue, Rain?”
Yeah, it was a good memory. Not a bad one to have with you on your way out.
He stood up and turned to the two men at the door. “Don’t kill him here — it’s too close to the naval base. The military still has his dental records, and might ID the body. We don’t want anyone to make any connection between him and the U.S. government — or with me. Take him somewhere else and dump him when you’re done.”
One of the men opened the door for him, and he walked out.
I heard car doors opening and closing, then two sets of tires crunching the gravel as they drove off. We had arrived in three cars, so only one was left. I didn’t know if there were other men outside.
The two men remained at the door, their faces impassive.
Some deep part of me welled up, insisting on going out fighting.
“These cuffs are starting to hurt,” I said, standing up slowly. “Can you do anything?”
One of them laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the pain in a few minutes.”
