Killer.' The pilot smirks.
'RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAWWWWWRRRRRR,' the radio crackles, [Garble] Diamond 21.' And he hears the static garbage of intercom noise.
Hillside Killer is a location where they are inserting this four man fireteam. Hillside Killer is actually a man light as Chaingang will move out on his own, a one-man fireteam in effect, and he smiles from ear to ear as he contemplates his lonely and thrilling jungle ambush that awaits him.
The other team members on board Diamond 21 will rendezvous with personnel from Central Park Killer, which is the location where the preceding bird has just overflown the landing zone. He has no interest in the overall mission of the ridiculous team, or whatever may happen to these other men. He works alone. He grins in anticipation.
But now his dream compresses and he does not have to ride in the noisy bird and feel the sickening descent down or hear the awful noise or the frightening time when he must drop off the skid and slam through the air his hundreds of pounds hurtling down to crush his already-sore ankle and he has no memories of dropping into the LZ or the bird hovering then lifting as the team disperses into the jungle.
He is moving deeper into his dream, and the dream takes him into another night and another ambush, and it is daytime and this is one of the favorite dreams—he has one of his best ambush dreams—and white humming lines hypnotically take him deep into his cozy and familiar jungle.
He is dreaming of a lovely moment, a killing of two humans in the jungles of Vietnam. It is a mission like all the other missions; he participates only for the night patrols. Ignoring all the rest of it. He walks drag so that no carelessness can harm him. He always remembers to close the back door, to look both ways before crossing the street, to walk softly and carry a big stick
They have just crossed a field and he has walked slowly, letting the others blunder ahead, hoping some of them will be killed. They seem foolish to him and he cannot admire their soldiering. It is pleasantly warm and he enjoys the feel of the hot sun as he slowly crosses the field and soon finds himself in jungle. Big trees just like he hoped for. He communicates with trees, actually holds intelligent conversations with them, and he will ask these trees for information.
The openings between some of the trees are very narrow and he realizes how he can use this later. Vines make movement more difficult, impeding it completely in some places. There are thickets, thorn bushes, all kinds of impenetrable jungle come out around the path he follows, the route where the others have gone now a wet, oozing slime of bootprints.
Water! Water and a trail have only one meaning. Ambush. He can smell little people everywhere. The main pathway goes off to the left but he can hear and smell the water to the right and he follows the scent. There is a creekbed under a protective arch of tree limbs that form a roof of sorts, having grown out from either side of the narrow stream of water, making a perfect green tunnel.
The word AMBUSH screams at him again. His skin prickles in pleasure and anticipation. He knows he can wait here and kill some of the little people. He sees nothing in terms of our side/enemy or North/South. He kills ARVN and Cong alike since in truth there is often no way to separate the two. Such distinctions don't concern him anyway. He hungers for an ambush of the little ones that the others call dinks and gooks and slopes. He hungers for their life source, lusting for bloodspill. This is the dream of the dreaming monster.
He does not exist, of course. They will promise you that and look you directly in the eye. His profession as been phased out, obsolete, they will assure you, long extinct like the cretaceous iguanodont, a profession made superfluous they'll tell you, rendered nonexistent like vaudeville, a bygone artifact like three-cent stamps and Davy Crockett caps. There is no much animal as a professional assassin. In Russia, maybe. But not here.
And so each time we learn of a professional assassin we are told he was that one exception to the rule. A rogue elephant. A once-in-a-lifetime deviation that was bungled or exposed and never tried again. The fact you have learned of his existence proves how inept we are at such things. No. Outside of show business and literary invention or perhaps some ancient leftover of whatever the goombahs are calling Cosa Nostra these days, he is an invention. A fictional device. And that is the official line. What else.
The real killers are seldom portrayed in popular fiction. They are seldom pretty enough for consumption. The word
The real irony is that our spymasters and those who control our intelligence monolith wish that they had a vast agency of highly efficient superkillers to draw from. How operationally marvelous it would be for all of them if they could only reach out and draw upon the wealth of diversity, the richness that our pop fiction would have you believe exists. We do have killers, of course, and have had for a long time. But their track record is far from great.
Unlike KGB or the Israelis we have not maintained a special section of security personnel whose sole function is to kill. We have had to build a small pool of talent outside the security umbrella, in the elite branches of the military, in certain areas of law enforcement, and even marginally in the private sector for 'termination with extreme prejudice.'
In 1960, with sensitivities raw, the national security heads decided to create a small and highly clandestine unit that could be used for assassinations. At the time our intelligence services taught the deadly arts but only as an adjunct to tradecraft. We had no counterpart to SMERSH's Active Measures Department that operated covertly as a unit trained to do sanctioned murder by governmental decree.
It proved as difficult for our controllers to find contact killers as it had for outraged wives wanting someone to cowboy their cheating spouses. So our security people turned to what is laughingly called organized crime, on one hand, and the military on the other. One of those military experiments was MACVSAUCOG, a hot mouthful of alphabet soup cooked up by an action arm of the National Security Council. Mack-Vee-Saw-Cog, as it was pronounced, was the first of the so-called secret sanction groups, and because of its special status of a 'paramilitary' unit the most clandestine.
MACVSAUCOG was classified out there in the vortical swirl of smoke beyond the ULTRA TOP SECRET YOUR EYES ONLY classification. The main course was counterinsurgency warfare. The first thing it served up to its proud masters was a nasty little piece of business called the spike team. The spike team was designed for one purpose. To assassinate covertly. And it was built around one man, a four-hundred-plus pounder who was then waiting to hear on an appeal, doing Death Row time in a federal prison in Illinois. He was a 'discovery' of unusual proportions in every sense.
Marion Federal Penitentiary has a number of nicknames, one of the more accurate being The House of Pain. It is the only correctional institution in the Federal lash-up with a level-six rating. A con inside Marion is serving an average sentence of forty-and-a-quarter years. Slammed down tight under a twenty-two-and-a-half-hour-a-day lockdown, behind a fortress of eight guard towers and chainlink and sharp razor wire, are some of the toughest, most feared, wild-eyed killer cons in the federal system. In 1961, over there with the 340-some animals in Max, was a creature named Daniel Bunkowski.
At the time of his incarceration Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski tipped the scales at 422 pounds. At six feet seven inches he was a find. A unique combination—both seemingly retarded and a mind that was incredibly keen, a rational-and-'sane'-appearing sociopathic mass murderer. If his ramblings under drugged hypnosis were to be believed he had killed more than any other human being alive. So many killings in fact that even he wasn't sure how many lives he had taken.
A respected sociologist had seen something in his personality, some camouflage, some signal, and he had begun a series of carefully structured tests on Daniel and come away amazed. Bunkowski's IQ was not measurable. It 'warped the curve.' He was an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect. A computer was spoon-fed the results of the testing and the consensus with respect to Mr. Bunkowski. And the computer served a select and highly covert series of on-line terminals.
There was even a bizarre, and far from scientific opinion advanced by one Dr. Norman there in the shop. He was of the opinion that this behemoth of a man had managed to escape detection and capture for so long a period, murdering wantonly and randomly as he had, because he was presentient. A physical precognate. None seriously believed this other than Dr. Norman, but it made the Bunkowski dossier even more interesting to certain folk in the
