“Elizabeth? No. She knows I served in Vietnam, nothing more. She wouldn’t understand. Anyone who wasn’t there, they just can’t understand.”
“Amen to that.”
The colonel snapped the buttons on the cuff of his sleeve and said, “Agent Devereaux, I’d consider it a personal favor if you didn’t mention that man’s tattoo in front of my family.”
Devereaux studied the colonel a moment and said, “All right, Colonel, we’ll keep it between us for now. Just as well, I don’t want to go public with the tattoo anyway, in case I can get the names of those Green Berets.”
The colonel stared at Devereaux but it was as if he were looking straight through him. Eugene Devereaux had been Army infantry in Vietnam. A grunt. Green Berets were the Army’s elite, trained in the art of killing. Ben Brice did not have the look of a trained killer. He was not a physically intimidating man, as were the Green Berets Devereaux had seen in the Army. Nor was he the macho commando stereotype. In fact, he seemed almost too gentle a man to have done what Green Berets did in Southeast Asia four decades ago. But there was something in his eyes that told Devereaux otherwise.
His blue eyes betrayed him like a cheating wife.
Gracie was in pain, scared and crying and praying to be saved. And her father wasn’t doing a damn thing to save her. He didn’t know how.
Instead, Little Johnny Brice was staring at a life-sized image of his daughter’s soccer photo attached to the side of the concession stand under a banner with WE LOVE YOU, GRACIE painted in big letters; stacked below were pink ribbons, cards, fancy balloons, and hundreds of flower arrangements and teddy bears. The concession stand was now a memorial to his daughter.
Gracie was gone because her father wasn’t much of a man.
John had not wanted to attend this vigil, but the FBI said it was important to appeal to the abductor’s sympathy-if he saw on television the pain he was causing her family, he might let her go. But John could think only of Gracie’s pain.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. John turned and looked into the eyes of his father, this man he had called colonel and now Ben but never father or dad, who once was a hero with a family but who now was a drunk with a dog. His mother had told him that his father was a good man destroyed by a bad war; that terrible things had happened to him in Vietnam; that the war had ended but Ben Brice had never found his peace.
John Brice had never allowed himself the slightest sympathy for his father.
“Come on, son,” Ben said, gently pulling John away from the makeshift memorial.
His son’s eyes remained locked on Gracie’s image. He said in a whisper, “I didn’t tie her shoe.”
Ben turned John away, and they walked past the local mayor giving a TV interview-“A safe place, a wonderful place to build your dream home and raise your children”-and around to the front of the building where a young priest was leading the crowd in prayer. Ben and John stood among hundreds of parents and children wearing Gracie buttons and tee shirts with Gracie’s picture on the back and holding candles flickering in the night. Mingling with them were FBI agents; several were inconspicuously videotaping the candlelight vigil with palm-sized camcorders. Agent Devereaux said it was not out of the question that the abductor might show.
“Mr. Brice.” A young blond man and a pregnant woman had come up to John, who turned and looked at them but did not seem to see them. “Mr. Brice,” the young man began again, “I just want to say how sorry I am. We’re having a baby and… I mean…” He glanced at Ben; he was at a loss for words.
“Thanks for your thoughts,” Ben said to the young man.
The couple left. Up front, a young girl stood and sang:
“A-ma-zing Grace, how sweet the sound…”
And the crowd joined in:
“That saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now I’m found, I was blind, but now I see…”
The overhead park lights dimmed slowly until the only light came from the flickering flames of hundreds of candles held high as the people sang.
The stars in the dark Vietnam night seem to flicker in fright, as if flinching at the sound of high-powered weapons firing on full auto and bringing death to this village. But not to this girl. He is determined to save her.
Lieutenant Ben Brice is now carrying the china doll like a football, dodging livestock and running through the burning hamlet toward the jungle where he can hide her. He glances back and trips over a dead pig, sending himself and the china doll sprawling into the dirt. The china doll scrambles up first. Before he can get to his feet, her head explodes like a ripe watermelon; her brains and blood splatter the twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant’s face and fatigues. He looks up to see the major standing there, smoke from the barrel of his. 45-caliber sidearm hanging in the humid air, clouding the Viper tattoo on his bare left arm.
“She was just a girl!” he screams at his SOG team leader.
“She was just a gook,” the major responds calmly, wiping the girl’s blood from his weapon. “They’re all just gooks, Lieutenant. And your job is to kill gooks.”
SOG rules are few but absolute: never leave a live team member behind; never let yourself be captured by the enemy; and never question the team leader in the field. The major turns his back on the naive and idealistic young lieutenant, who violates a SOG rule on his first mission.
“You violated the law of war! And the rules of engagement!”
The major stops, pivots, and two steps later he is towering over the lieutenant, glaring down at him, his blue eyes burning with anger.
“Out here in the bush, I’m the law! I make the rules! And I say we kill VC! We kill livestock that feeds VC! We burn huts that shelter VC! We kill civilians that aid VC! Those are my rules of engagement, Lieutenant!”
The major blows out a breath and calms. He squats in front of his newest disciple, the anger subsided now, and for a moment Ben thinks the major is going to console him, perhaps offer a personal word of encouragement to a young Army soldier unversed in fighting a war in a moral vacuum; instead the major puts the barrel of his. 45 to Ben’s head and says in a steady voice: “Soldier, you ever question what I do out here again, I’ll put a bullet through your head and let the VC make soup out of you, too. I guarangoddamntee it.”
The major stands and walks away through smoke and fire and blowing ashes. Ben raises his hand to wipe the blood from his face and sees that his hand is trembling.
Ben felt proud when he had learned the major had selected him to fill a vacancy on SOG team Viper. The major was thirty-seven and a living legend in the Special Forces. Ben Brice was twenty-two and naive. “You’re a goddamn warrior now, Brice,” the major said after Ben got his Viper tattoo in Saigon. “One of us.” And he was proud when they ambushed that NVA convoy heading south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, bearing supplies that would aid the enemy and arms that would kill Americans.
Today, he is not proud.
Lieutenant Ben Brice slowly stands and looks down upon the china doll, her arms and legs splayed grotesquely, her vacant eyes staring back at him, the final moment of her life frozen on her face-a face that will haunt him the rest of his nights. He turns and walks away, leaving the china doll and his soul to rot in the rich black soil of the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam.
God has a plan for Ben Brice, or so his mother had always said and so he had always believed, right up until that dark night in Vietnam. Each evening now, thirty-eight years after the fact, Ben would sit in his rocking chair on the porch of the small cabin he had built with his own hands, watch the sun set over Taos, and wonder what God’s plan had been and why it had gone so wrong. Now, staring at the stars above his son’s mansion outside Dallas, the vague outline of an answer was taking shape in his mind.
DAY FOUR
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux gave a little salute to the uniformed guard wearing a Gracie button as
