with around the world. He was bright, capable, and a good addition to the team, but he lacked tempering. Sensing his own inadequacies, Frank often found relief in tormenting the slightly built accountant responsible for all supplies and logistics.
And who would have thought we needed accountants? Hoover shook his head slightly, as though in disbelief. But we did in Vietnam, didn’t we? They were the ones who kept the supplies and the ammo coming to the front lines. Not particularly glamorous, but a necessary part of any operation.
In the last three months, these three men had emerged as a group he had come to trust. Yes, they lacked his abilities to bring it all together, but each one brought something to the table that he could use.
“Ah, come on, sir,” the first man protested. He had taken Hoover’s involuntary shake of his head as a sign of disapproval. “This is just what we’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”
“It is, and it isn’t,” Hoover replied, picking his words carefully. It wasn’t enough that he must discern the proper course of action. He also had to translate it into terms that men such as these could latch on to. “Yes, it’s an opportunity — but there’s also some danger.” He considered a moment explaining to them that the Chinese symbol for
“We can’t let them get away with it,” Frank said, outrage evident in his voice.
“He wasn’t one of ours,” the accountant pointed out.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Perhaps it should. After all, our resources are limited. We can’t take on every opportunity that presents itself. We have to wait for the right time.” The accountant’s voice held a note of finality, as though that settled the matter.
“In a way, it’s even better that he’s not one of ours,” Hoover said, deepening his voice slightly. He saw the unconscious response in the others’ body language, and sent a silent prayer up to the Marine Corps drill instructor who taught him about tone of voice and command. “There’s no sense in what happened to them, not in the minds of the average Joe Citizen. These weren’t dangerous radicals. Although,” he conceded, “in time, they might have come over to our way of thinking. They were headed that way. But for now, there’s a good case to be made that Kyle Smart was just Mr. Joe Average Citizen. A farmer, facing all of the problems that farmers everywhere know about. Weather, banks, the feds — there’s a lot to identify with.
“But we’ve got to handle it the right way.” He fixed Frank with a hard look. “No violence. No guns. Nothing like that. Not at first.” He saw the grudging look of acquiescence in Frank’s eyes and continued. “We are patriots. We are concerned citizens who love our country and don’t want to see power-mad politicians murdering innocent citizens.”
“That’s not going to work in the long run, you know,” the accountant replied mildly. “No permanent change comes without bloodshed.”
“I know that.” They had the Marine Corps background in common, although they’d never known each other while in the Crotch. Still, service laid down some core fundamentals, particularly service in the Marine Corps. So there was that bond — and yet it was also a difference. Because the other man understood violence just as well as Hoover did, understood it and was willing to use it. Hoover had gone beyond that, looking for more effective ways. The danger was each knew the other so well that they could anticipate each other’s objections. If there were ever a serious challenge to his leadership, it would not come from one of the younger hotheads. No, it would come from this man.
“But we need an icon, not a martyr,” Hoover said slowly, still thinking it through. There was a difference — an icon was a symbol to rally around. A martyr, when you wanted revenge. If this was handled right, Kyle Smart and his doomed family would be a rallying point for everyone who knew — or even felt at some level — there was something wrong with the country.
Hoover took a picture out of his file and studied it again. The Smarts were a good-looking family, lean and hard-working. No softness to any of them — they lived a hard life and it showed. He was willing to bet that displaced auto workers in Detroit, dirt-poor farmers in the South, and even unemployed computer workers in California would find something in those faces to identify with. And parents, God, parents — no parent among them could look at the pictures of the murdered children without shuddering.
Hoover reached his decision. There were too many young Turks snapping at his heels, too many men eager to take his place. It was time for success, the kind of success that only he could pull off. And Kyle Smart and his family were going to insure that success.
Herbert Hoover believed no less fiercely than Abraham Carter in their cause. But while this intellectual commitment to patriotism and freedom matched the elder Carter’s, he had more in common with Carter’s son in terms of practicality. And, unlike the Carters, there was a degree of dark loathing and self-destruction that permeated Hoover’s being.
Not that anyone would ever suspect such dark recesses in the man. On the surface, all they saw was a large, jovial fellow, one with an endearing, guileless sincerity in his blue eyes. Few people noticed that the eyes were often unblinking, staring a little longer than was polite, that his teeth were often bared what he smiled. His demeanor was as smooth and polished as a televangelist’s, and he gave off the same dramatic sense of life-and- death that many of them did. A smaller man could not have pulled it off, but weighing in just short of 280 pounds, Hoover was built for dramatics.
Hoover’s disillusionment with the United States had begun during Vietnam. Raised on a small North Dakota farm, the then-lean and hungry Hoover had fervently believed that what he and his high school classmates were doing was laying their bodies in front of the line of advancing Communism. Dramatic self-sacrifice appeal to him, and the idea that he personally could die seemed very remote. He had enlisted in the Marine Corps even before the lottery numbers were picked.
In boot camp, he found himself surrounded by similarly minded young men, with the occasional recruit simply trying to dodge service in the Army. Their drill instructors had encouraged them to believe in the rightness of their cause as they broke down the would-be Marines’ characters and personalities and rebuilt them from the ground up.
It wasn’t until later — within a week of arriving at his first assignment in Vietnam — that the illusion began to crumble. There, at the base camp, death became a reality. It was no longer self-sacrifice, but mutilation of dying flesh, death approaching screaming. There was nothing noble, he saw, about dying for your country. General Patton’s words came back to him — better to make the other son of a bitch die for
Sure, there was the camaraderie he’d expected, but all tainted and perverted. It was, he began to realize, the fault of the United States. They had taken brave men, men willing to risk their lives for what was right, and perverted their dedication. They had wasted their favorite sons.
And for what? Nothing, as far as Hoover could see.
After he returned to the United States, Hoover’s disillusionment was completed. Besieged by rising gas prices and inflation, his parents had been unable to make the mortgage payments on their farm. It had been sold at auction and fallen into the possession of their family’s arch-nemesis. In the airport, he was spat upon, jostled, and called a baby-killer. His experience was all too typical for men returning from Vietnam, but Hoover’s anger took a different path. He blamed the government, not the hippies and the yippies and the protesters. At some level, he sympathized with them, because he knew firsthand just how misguided the war really was. He had been an intelligence specialist, and his quick mind had seen readily that America was not fighting to win. America was fighting to look good.
A knock sounded at the door. “Come in,” Hoover said, standing up. He walked around the desk to greet the thin, disheveled man warmly, throwing his arms around him and then shepherding him to the desk with an arm slung over the man’s shoulders. “You made it. Good, good. Let me introduce you to some new friends.”
Hoover turned the man around to face the others. “Gentlemen, I’d like you to welcome Jackson Carter. He’s got a little problem I think we can help him with.”
