shook her head. No way. The Feds took the easy way out. They never looked past the obvious connection And it hit her: she had committed the same sin.
Jan was back in the federal building in under five minutes, running past the security desk with a quick nod to Red, the night guard-she felt his eyes on her backside-then up the elevator to the third floor and down the corridor of the silent FBI offices, her pounding feet and heart the only noises. She opened her office door, turned on the light, went over to her desk, opened the Walker file, flipped the pages fast… her eyes raced down each page for names… names of AUSAs… Assistant United States Attorneys… prosecutors on the Walker case ten years ago…
“Oh my God.”
She found a name: Raul Garcia. And another: James Kelly. And a third: Elizabeth Austin.
Elizabeth was sitting in the nearly dark den of her mansion and drinking hard liquor. She now understood Ben Brice.
Kate had said he drank to escape the past. To forget so he could sleep. How much would she have to drink to escape her past? To sleep. To not think of the past that had brought her to this present. To this day. To this life. A life without Grace.
Ten years ago, she had arrived in Dallas armed only with impressive letters of recommendation from the United States Attorney General and the FBI Director attesting to Elizabeth Austin’s legal brilliance, incredible determination, and remarkable courage under extreme personal duress. She was thirty years old, just married, two months’ pregnant, and running from her past as fast and as far as possible. Dallas, Texas, had seemed far enough.
Five years before that she had just graduated from Harvard Law School; she had turned down the Wall Street firms for a job with the Justice Department. She wanted to be one of the good guys. She wanted to put the bad guys in jail. She wanted to use the rule of law to make people safe, so no other ten-year-old girl would ever suffer her father’s murder.
But she hadn’t been safe.
Her daughter hadn’t been safe.
No one was safe.
Evil does not obey the rule of law. Evil makes its own rules.
DAY NINE
“ Nam yen! Nam yen! ”
He’s yelling in Vietnamese-Stay down! Stay down! — so the rotating blades don’t take their heads off. They’re crowded onto the Embassy roof where the Huey is perched and panicked because they hear the NVA tanks at the outskirts of the city and gunfire from the battle between the Communists and the last of the South Vietnamese forces at Tan Son Nhut airport. An NVA rocket whistles overhead and explodes on Thong Nhat Boulevard just outside the Embassy walls and their panic escalates tenfold. Six stories below, thousands more South Vietnamese civilians are massed on the Embassy grounds; hundreds more scramble over the high concrete wall surrounding the Embassy only to be entangled in the barbed wire, joined in their desperation to flee their imploding country and their innocent faith that the Americans will save them. The end is near, and they know it. They do not know that this Huey will be the last U.S. helicopter out of Vietnam. Ever.
Wednesday, 30 April 1975: the fall of Saigon.
Since midnight he has stood on the roof of the American Embassy in downtown Saigon and loaded thousands of refugees onto a steady stream of Navy helicopters for their evacuation to the Seventh Fleet ships waiting offshore in the South China Sea-Operation Frequent Wind, his final mission in Vietnam. It’s now morning and time has run out. This chopper flew in from the USS Midway to retrieve the few remaining American soldiers and the American flag flying over the Embassy-“No civilians! Those are my orders!” the pilot said; but he pulled rank and his sidearm on the pilot. So the troop compartment now holds a huddled mass of refugees from Communism leaving everything they possess behind because possessions mean nothing without freedom; the engine is powering up, kids are crying, women are wailing, sirens are screaming, and outside the Embassy a river of refugees are exiting Saigon on trucks, buses, motor scooters, and bicycles; the looting is already beginning. Another rocket explodes even closer and the Navy pilot is yelling to the last American soldier in Vietnam to get his butt in the aircraft, sir!
Instead, he gives the last place inside the chopper to a teenage girl traveling alone, no doubt orphaned by the war; he will stand on the skid for the flight out to the Midway. He hoists her up, her bare feet joining four others hanging out the open hatch, and he recalls kids riding on the tailgates of pickup trucks back in West Texas and wonders if they still do.
He turns and yells, “ Thoi! D? r?i! ” — No more! That’s all! — to those next in line, a young woman and her baby girl, from her features an Amerasian child abandoned by her American father. The woman is the type of Viet the American soldiers favored, slim and smooth-skinned with soft brown eyes and full lips, now a fallen angel; a silver crucifix hangs around her neck. Their eyes meet, and the woman sees the truth in his: the Americans will not return to save her family. Their freedom ends today. As the Huey’s engines rev louder and the blades rotate faster and the machine strains mightily to hoist its human cargo, the woman kisses her baby and holds the child out to him.
He hesitates then takes the child. With his free hand, he rips off the nametag stitched onto his fatigues and the silver eagle insignia of a full colonel in the United States Army and presses both into the woman’s delicate hand so she can find her child if she survives or die knowing that her child will live free in America. He steps onto the skid and reaches into the cabin with his free hand for a hold; the baby is curled up in his other arm, her tiny fingers clutching his uniform, her brown eyes wide and gazing up at him, her head pressed against his chest.
As the chopper rises from the roof, his eyes never leave the woman; tears run down her face, one face among thousands left behind on the Embassy grounds, their arms outstretched to the Americans, to God Himself, praying to be saved, knowing what their fate will be at the hands of the Communists, their fate for trusting the Americans, for being Catholic, for believing in God. As he knows. Looking down at these desperate people that America and God now abandon, tears fill his eyes. Ben Brice came to their country to free the oppressed. He failed. He closes his eyes, ashamed-of himself, his country, and his God.
“Colonel!”
Ben’s eyes snapped open. He was not looking down upon the Viet mother, but upon Misty, Dicky’s buxom girlfriend wearing a tight sweatshirt and a smile and waving at them as the chopper lifted off the ground. The sheriff had been good to his word. They had met him at 0600 and driven to an open field south of town where they found Dicky in mirrored sunglasses and a Caterpillar cap on backward and Misty in her sweatshirt standing next to an old helicopter. Ben’s billionaire son had hired Dicky and his flying machine for the morning.
“Brings back memories, don’t it, Colonel!”
The sheriff turned to Ben from the front seat of the chopper; he had to yell to be heard over the chopper’s engine. Ben nodded from the back seat; John was sitting next to him.
The sheriff laughed. “ ’Cept you ain’t sitting on your pot to keep your dick from being shot off!”
The Viet Cong’s AK-47 rounds had easily pierced a Huey’s aluminum fuselage; they made sport of shooting at U.S. choppers flying by overhead. Thus, the prudent practice during an airmobile assault in Vietnam was to sit on your helmet in the chopper so as to arrive at the landing zone with your private parts intact. Butt armor, they called it.
The sheriff handed a map back to Ben: “Numbered the camps!”
Dicky dipped the chopper’s nose to gain speed. They were soon flying over the magnificent landscape of northern Idaho. Ben looked at John; John looked queasy. He said, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
