really' ought to hold off until we can give them something they can really use, but, well, like you say, we have to do something. I'll call down first thing tomorrow morning.'
'Will it put her - the person - in danger?' the Reverend Meyer asked, vexed with himself for the slip.
'Shouldn't,' Peter judged. 'If she's gotten herself away - I mean, they ought not to know where she is, and if they did, they might have got her already.'
'How can people do things like that?'
Peter lit up another. His father was just too good a man to understand. Not that he did either. 'Pop, I see it all the time, and I have trouble believing it, too. The important part's getting the bastards.'
'Yes, I suppose it is.'
The KGB rezident in Hanoi had General-Major rank, and his job was mainly that of spying on his country's putative allies. What were their real objectives? Was their supposed estrangement with China real or a sham? Would they cooperate with the Soviet Union when and if war came to a successful conclusion? Might they allow the Soviet Navy use of a base after the Americans left? Was their political determination really as solid as they said it was? Those were all questions whose answers he thought he had, but orders from Moscow and his own skepticism about everyone and everything compelled him to keep asking. He employed agents within the CPVN, the country's Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere, Vietnamese whose willingness to give information to an all? would probably have meant death - though to be politic about it, the deaths would be disguised 'suicides' or 'accidents' because it was in neither country's interest to have a formal breach. Lip-service was even more important in a socialist country than a capitalist one, the General knew, because symbols were far easier to produce than reality.
The enciphered dispatch on his desk was interesting, all the more so since it did not give him direct guidance on what to do about it. How like the Moscow bureaucrats! Always quick to meddle in matters that he was able to handle himself, now they didn't know what to do - but they were afraid to do nothing. So they stuck him with it.
He knew about the camp, of course. Though a military-intelligence operation, he had people in the office of the attache who reported to him as well. The KGB watched everyone, after all; that was their job. Colonel Grishanov was using irregular methods, but he was reporting good results, better than the General's own office got from these little savages. Now the Colonel had come up with the boldest idea of all. Instead of letting the Vietnamese kill the prisoners in due course, bring them home to Mother Russia. It was brilliant in its way, and the KGB general was trying to decide if he'd endorse the idea to Moscow, where this decision would surely be kicked up to ministerial, or perhaps even Politburo level. On the whole, he thought that the idea had real merit... and that decided matters.
As entertaining as it might be for the Americans to rescue their people with this boxwood green operation, as much as it might show the Vietnamese again that they should cooperate more closely with the Soviet Union, that they really were a client state, it would also mean that the knowledge locked in those American minds would be lost to his country, and it was knowledge they must have.
How long, he wondered, could he let this one wait? The Americans moved quickly, but not that quickly. The mission had been approved at White House level only a week or so earlier. All bureaucracies were alike, after all. In Moscow it would take forever. Operation kingpin had gone on forever, else it would have succeeded. Only the good luck of a low-level agent in the Southern United States had allowed them to warn Hanoi, and then almost too late - but now they had real forewarning.
Politics. You just couldn't separate that from intelligence operations. Before, they'd all but accused him of delaying matters - he shouldn't give them that excuse again. Even client states need to be treated as comrades. The General lifted his phone to make a luncheon date. He'd bring his contact over to the embassy, just to be sure that he had some decent food to eat.
CHAPTER 29
Last Out
There was a vicarious exhilaration in watching them. The twenty-five Marines worked out, finishing with a single-file run that looped around the helicopters parked oft the deck. Sailors looked on quietly. The word was out now. The sea sled had been seen by too many, and like professional intelligence officers, sailors at their mess tables assembled the few facts and garnished them with speculation. The Marines were going into the North. After what, nobody knew, but everyone wondered. Maybe to trash a missile site and bring back some important piece of hardware. Maybe to take down a bridge, but most likely the target was human. The Vietnamese party bosses, perhaps.
'Prisoners,' a bosun's mate third-class said, finishing his hamburger, called a 'slider' in the Navy. 'It's gotta be,' he added, motioning his head to the newly arrived medical corpsmen who ate at their own isolated table. 'Six corpsmen, four doctors, awful lot of talent, guys. What d'ya suppose they're here for?'
'Jesus,' another sailor observed, sipping at his milk. 'You're right, man.'
'Feather in our cap if it comes off,' noted another.
'Dirty weather tonight,' a quartermaster put in. 'The fleet-weather chief was smiling about it - and I seen him puke his guts out last night. I guess he can't handle anything smaller'n a carrier.' USS Ogden did have an odd ride, which resulted from her configuration, and running broadside to the gusting westerly winds had only worsened it. It was always entertaining to see a chief petty officer lose his lunch - dinner in this case - and a man was unlikely to be happy about weather conditions that made him ill. There had to be a reason for it. The conclusion was obvious, and the sort of thing to make a security officer despair.
'Jesus, I hope they make it.'
'Let's get the flight deck fodded again,' the junior bosun suggested. Heads nodded at once. A work gang was quickly assembled. Within an hour there would be not so much as a matchstick on the black no-skid surface.
'Good bunch of kids, Captain,' Dutch Maxwell observed, watching the walkdown from the starboard wing of the bridge. Every so often a man would bend down and pick up something, a foreign object that might destroy an engine, a result called FOD, for 'foreign-object damage.' Whatever might go wrong tonight, the men were promising with their actions, it wouldn't be the fault of their ship.
'Lots of college kids,' Franks replied, proudly watching his men. 'Sometimes I think the deck division's as smart as my wardroom.' Which was an entirely forgivable hyperbole. He wanted to say something else, the same thing that everyone was thinking: What do you suppose the chances are? He didn't voice the thought. It would be the worst kind of bad luck. Even thinking it loudly might harm the mission, but hard as he tried he couldn't stop his mind from forming the words.
In their quarters, the Marines were assembled around a sand-table model of the objective. They'd already gone over the mission once and were doing so again. The process would be repeated once more before lunch, and many times after it, as a whole group and as individual teams. Each man could see everything with his eyes closed, thinking back to the training site at Quantico, reliving the live-fire exercises.
'Captain Albie, sir?' A yeoman came into the compartment. He handed over a clipboard. 'Message from Mr Snake.'
The Captain of Marines grinned. 'Thanks, sailor. You read it?'
The yeoman actually blushed. 'Beg pardon, sir. Yes, I did. Everything's cool.' He hesitated for the moment before adding a dispatch of his own. 'Sir, my department says good luck. Kick some ass, sir.'
'You know, skipper,' Sergeant Irvin said as the yeoman left the space, 'I may never be able to punch out a swabbie again.'
Albie read the dispatch. 'People, our friend is in place. He counts forty-four guards, four officers, one Russian. Normal duty routine, nothing unusual is happening there.' The young captain looked up. 'That's it, Marines. We're going in tonight.'
One of the younger Marines reached in his pocket and pulled out a large rubber band. He broke it, marked two eyes on it with his pen, and dropped it atop what they now called Snake Hill. 'That dude,' he said to his team- mates, 'is one cool motherfucker.'
'Y'all remember now,' Irvin warned loudly. 'You fire-support guys remember, he's gonna be pounding down that hill soon as we show up. It wouldn't do to shoot his ass.'
