Black Market

She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I've already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told me what you were fishing for, I put in some hours of overtime. My material comes from the Pentagon and from our own classified files. Everything I could collect this quickly on your lists of names. It wasn't easy, I must say. Some of it I transcribed from material already on computer file. The rest-as you can smell-is contained in some really musty documents.”

Samantha Hawes escorted Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.

Carroll nearly groaned as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like every other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this yawning heap of history?

He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all the folders were connections between men-the tracks, the spoor they laid down; the events they lived through during and after Vietnam. Somewhere, surely, tracks would have crisscrossed, correspondences would have been made, relationships established.

“I have more. Do you want to see them now? Or is this enough to hold you for a while?” Samantha Hawes asked.

“Oh, I think this will do me pretty well. I didn't know we collected this much dirt on everybody down here.”

Agent Hawes grinned. “You should see your file.”

“Did you?”

“I'll be back over there, working in the stacks. You just holler if you need any more light reading, Mr. Carroll.”

The FBI agent started to turn away, then, suddenly, she turned back. Samantha Hawes seemed to be a very contemporary woman, very pretty, very confident, and genteel southern, from her looks, anyway. Carroll couldn't help thinking that in days of old she would already have been a young mother of two or three, tucked away in Alexandria.

“There is something else.” She looked concerned. “I don't know exactly what this all means. Maybe it's just me. But when I went through these files yesterday evening… I had the distinct feeling that some of them had been tampered with.”

A small, very unpleasant warning bell rang in Arch Carroll's head. “Who would tamper with them?”

Samantha Hawes shook her head. “Any number of people have access to them.”

“What do you mean when you say they've been tampered with.”

“I mean that I think documents are missing from certain files.”

Carroll reached out and grasped her wrist lightly. The information excited him. It meant that certain files, in some ways, were important to someone. Someone else had looked at them. Someone had possibly pilfered some of the documents.

Why? Which files?

He saw a strange look cross her face, as if she were asking herself about the precise nature of this unorthodox man who'd been admitted to FBI headquarters.

“Can you remember which files?”

“Of course I can.” She moved toward the worktable and began sifting. She picked out five thick files, dropping them in front of Carroll. “This one… and this… this one… this one.”

He gazed quickly at the names on the files.

Scully, Richard

Demunn, Michael

Freedman, Harold Lee

Melindez, Paul

Hudson, David

Why these five?” he asked.

“They served together in Vietnam, according to their documents. That's one good reason.”

Carroll sat down. He still expected to come away from Washington empty-handed. He expected that the faint sense of anticipation he now felt would turn out to be nothing more than a false alarm. Five men on the FBI computer list of “subversives”-a term he knew was next to meaningless, at least the way the FBI used it.

He checked his own printouts, and his heart began to beat rapidly.

Scully and Demunn had been explosives experts.

And David Hudson had been a colonel, who, according to the brief note on the printout, had been active in the organization of veterans groups and veterans rights after Vietnam.

Five men who had served together in the war.

Five men who were on his list and the FBI's.

He slipped off his jacket and then the tie he'd worn especially for his big trip to Washington. He began to read about Colonel David Hudson.

32

Washington, D.C.

When he had finished reading, Arch Carroll softly shook his head.

U.S. Army Colonel David Hudson's thick 211 file, his entire life in the military, was spread out on the desk before him.

Colonel David Hudson was the final enigma.

David Hudson's military career had begun with high promise at West Point, where he'd been an honor graduate in 1966. He'd been a four-year member, and finally captain, of the tennis team. He was also a popular cadet, according to the available reports-a modern-day version of the all-American boy.

It got even better. David Hudson had subsequently volunteered for Special Forces “Q” courses, followed by special Ranger training. On a first impression, at least, the army couldn't have asked for a more diligent or professional young soldier.

Colonel David Hudson: all-American boy.

Every succeeding report Carroll read was highlighted and underscored with phrases like “one of our very best”; “the kind of young officer who should make us all proud”; “a model soldier in every way”; “unbridled, absolutely infectious enthusiasm”; “definitely one of our future leaders”; “the kind of material we can build the modern Army around.”

In Vietnam Hudson had been awarded the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross during his first tour. He had been captured and transported into North Vietnam for interrogation. He'd spent seven months as a POW. Apparently he'd almost died in the prison camp… He had then volunteered for a second tour and performed with “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” on several occasions.

Then, three months before the evacuation of Saigon, he'd been savagely wounded by a Vietcong grenade blast and subsequently lost his left arm. Hudson had reacted with characteristic bravura.

A hospital report read: “Colonel David Hudson has been a godsend, helping other patients, never seeming to feel sorry for himself… In every way, a thoroughly idealistic young man.”

Following Vietnam, though, quite suddenly after his return to the United States, Colonel David Hudson's career, his entire life, became disturbingly unhinged. According to the files, the change was bewildering to his friends and family.

“It was almost as if a different man had returned from the war.” His father was interviewed and quoted several times. “The fire, that wonderful, contagious enthusiasm, was burned out of David's eyes. His eyes were those of a very old man.”

Colonel David Hudson: enigma, almost phantom, after coming home from the Vietnam War.

Hudson was stationed first at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, then at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. At Fort Polk in Louisiana, Hudson was quietly disciplined for “activities detrimental to the Army.” Another report indicated that he was transferred twice within three months, for what seemed on the surface to be petty insubordinations… His marriage to Betsy Hinson, his hometown sweetheart, ended abruptly in 1973. Betsy Hinson said, “I don't even know David anymore. He's not the same man I married. David's become a stranger to everyone who knows him.”

Hudson, in the postwar years, had become almost obsessive about his participation in a handful of Vietnam veterans organizations. As an organizer and spokesman at rallies around the country, Hudson had met and been photographed with liberal motion picture stars, with sympathetic big-business leaders, with recognizable national politicians.

At one point during the morning, Arch Carroll meticulously laid out Xerox copies of every available photo of David Hudson.

He rearranged the pictures until he liked the pattern of his collage. One photo was stained with coffee or cola. The stain looked recent. Samantha Hawes? Someone else? Or was he just getting squirrely?

In the photographs, Colonel David Hudson looked like the classic, idealized military man of past decades. With his Jimmy Stewart wholesomeness, he looked the way American soldiers had been pictured in the years before Vietnam. He had short blond hair in almost all the war photographs, a tightly set, somewhat heroic jaw, a pinched, slightly uncomfortable smile that was disarming. Colonel David Hudson was clearly very sure of himself and what he was doing. He was obviously proud, fiercely proud, to be an American soldier.

Carroll got up from the mess of official papers and wandered around the research room. Okay-what did he have here?

A leader, a natural soldier, who somewhere along the way had fucked up royally. Or maybe Hudson had been royally fucked?

There were probably hundreds, maybe even thousands, of men like David Hudson across the country. Some of them went berserk and had to be removed to the “screaming floors” in VA hospitals. Others sat quietly in dingy, lonely rooms and ticked slowly like time bombs.

Colonel David Hudson?… Was he Green Band?

Samantha Hawes reappeared with a pot of coffee, deli sandwiches, and assorted salads on a tray. “Getting into it, I see.”

“Yes, it's something all right. Odd, and absolutely mesmerizing. Hard to figure, though.”

Carroll rubbed the palms of his hands in circles over his red-rimmed eyes. “Thanks for the food, especially the coffee. The whole file is extraordinary. Colonel Hudson, especially. He's a very complex, very strange man. He's too perfect. The perfect soldier. Then what? What happened to him after he returned to the