Collateral Damage (4 page)

He'd taken off early the day before and driven down to Minot, the nearest town with a jewelry store. He'd bought his girl a ring with a small diamond, bargaining with the owner and striking a deal that he could afford, agreeing to make weekly payments directly to the store. It was not an obligation he assumed lightly, and he would make those payments even if he had to forego food.

Marcus had been raised by parents who valued honesty and hard work and he'd learned the lessons they taught. Like his father, he was an honorable man and would pay the jeweler every penny owed.

The young man went to the bathroom and used something called Goop to clean the grease and dirt from his hands. His nails were cracked and jagged and grease seemed to accumulate under them with a vigor that even Goop couldn't overcome. He shook his head. Riley didn't mind. She had told him once that the grease was the mark of honest work, and a man couldn't do much better than that. He smiled at the thought of her, and of the promise the night would bring.

The teacher with the bad tire was the last customer of the day. Marcus closed up the shop and walked the two blocks to the house he shared with his parents. They liked Riley and would be happy to know they were to be married. He knew he'd have to find another place to live. His meager salary from the shop would supplement Riley's salary from the town's only restaurant where she waited tables. They could make it, but would have to put off babies for a few years.

Spring days are long in the northern latitudes and the sun wouldn't set until nine thirty. He showered, shaved, and dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a plaid long-sleeve shirt. The temperature was in the low sixties and would drop further when the sun went down. He pulled a worn wind-breaker
over the shirt, slipped into his gym shoes, and walked toward the house where his girl and their friends waited.

It was only later, when Marcus didn't show for the party, that Riley and her brother went looking for him. They followed the route along which he would have walked on the way to Riley's parents' house. And it was there, in the gathering dusk of a cool spring evening in the far north of America, in a ditch beside the road, that they found his lifeless body. The hard-working, honorable young man who loved a girl named Riley had been shot through the head.

I was sitting on the patio of my cottage staring at the bay. It was early on a Monday morning near the end of July. The sun had barely risen over the mainland, the heat of a summer day lingering just over the horizon, the air not yet soggy with the humidity that would come with the sun. This was the favorite part of my day, a time to sip my coffee, read the morning's paper, and enjoy the slight breeze blowing over the water.

The lead story in the Sarasota paper was about the murders that had taken place on our key six weeks before. There had been no progress. The police had no clues, no suspects, and no indication that the cases would be closed anytime soon.

I'd kept up with the progress of the cases during my regular visits with J. D. Duncan. She was stymied. She could find no connection between any of the victims. As far as she could tell, none of the dead had known any of the others. There was no reasonable place that their lives would have intersected. Garrison was an aging lawyer in a silk-stocking firm in North Florida who handled real estate matters. Katherine Brewster was a waitress at a Hooters Restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Desmond had just finished college and had been accepted at the Georgia State University Law School in Atlanta for the fall semester. He hadn't made up his mind to enroll and had been looking for a job in the Atlanta area. His brand-new wife was from Savannah and was planning to teach at an elementary school in the Atlanta suburbs.

The captain of
Dulcimer
had been murdered. Somebody broke his neck. The first people on the scene didn't pay any attention, thinking that since there was no blood, he must have died of natural causes. As soon as the medical examiner took a look at the body, he realized that the captain's
neck was broken. The autopsy confirmed and the official cause of death was listed as “mid-level cervical fracture caused by a person or persons unknown.” Death had been instantaneous.

The island had been quiet, the gossip trailing off as the mystery of the murders wore on without solution. The days became hotter, the humidity more pronounced, the sun brighter. Summer on Florida's southwest coast is a time of aimlessness, the people lethargic and huddled in their air-conditioned homes. The brave ones venture out to the Publix market or lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant. The outdoor dining areas, aswarm with snowbirds during the season, were empty. No self-respecting Floridian would dine al fresco in the summer heat. Time itself seemed to slow, the earth's rotation sluggish in its daily movement, the heat only slightly diminished by the afternoon thunderstorms that prowled the state, regular as a Swiss timepiece, bringing the deluge that caused the pavement to steam and the air to hang ever more heavily over the sweltering peninsula.

I looked out over the bay, a flat gray expanse of still water, not a puff of wind to disturb its quiet surface.
Recess
sat quietly in her berth, no movement, the lines holding her to the dock were slack. A brown pelican sat in repose on a piling, still, as if not daring to move for fear that the heat would overcome him. A fish jumped nearby and the pelican took no notice. A kind of torpor had settled over the island, bringing with it a stillness of body and mind. I sat and watched and tried to summon the energy to head for the beach and my morning jog.

My doorbell rang, a strangely discordant note in the early morning quiet. I looked at my watch. Not yet seven o'clock. It was either bad news or a friend who knew I was an early riser dropping by for a cup of coffee. That is not as unusual as it sounds. It's part of the island rhythm that we have adapted to, friends visiting at odd hours, knowing that if you didn't want to be disturbed you'd simply ignore the doorbell. Feelings would not be hurt.

I left my coffee and paper on the table and walked barefoot to the front door. I was wearing a white T-shirt with the Grady-White boat logo on the breast pocket. The back of the shirt featured a picture of a twenty-eight-foot boat and the name of the dealer, Cannon's Marina, owned by my
friends David and Lucille Miller. Khaki cargo shorts completed my skimpy summer attire.

I opened the door to find a stranger fidgeting uncomfortably on my front stoop. He was about six feet tall, lean and fit, a head of gray hair, the planes of his face sharp and creased by years of tension, bright blue eyes, good teeth showing when he smiled. He was wearing a pair of taupe slacks, white golf shirt with the logo of an Atlanta country club on the pocket, cordovan loafers. I could tell by the contours of his body that he was younger than his face and hair made him appear.

He smiled, and held out his hand. “Long time, L.T.”

L.T. The universal appellation given by soldiers to the young lieutenants with whom they serve. I'd once been a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, back at the tail end of the Vietnam War, back when I wore a green beret and killed people who were trying to kill me. I'd led some of the toughest men on earth, an A team of U.S. Army Special Forces, the storied Green Berets, as we prowled the jungles seeking our human prey. We became closer than family, closer than anyone who hasn't been part of a small group of young men engaged in mortal combat can understand. It has often been said that soldiers do not fight wars for honor, or country, or policies dictated by governments in faraway capitals, but for their buddies, the ones who share their danger and their fear and their disgust, who understand the emotional damage done to one who kills another human being whose only crime was wearing the uniform of the opposing army, who identifies with the necessity of the kill, because that other soldier would have killed you or your buddy for the same reason.

My mind flashed back to a time when flies buzzed in the heat of a quiet day, the high sun baking the plain on which I lay, the sound of gunshots in the distance giving substance to the combat that was about to come. I lay in the tall grass near a line of trees that marked the beginning of another jungle-like expanse of Southeast Asia. My left leg was afire, the result of the bullet that had gone through my calf, fired by some scared kid in the Viet Cong unit ensconced in the trees.

My men had moved on, attacking, going forward to clear the area of the enemy. Our medic had stayed with me, wrapped my leg, and told me
not to try to stand. He thought the slug had nicked one or both of the bones in the lower leg. I ignored him, tried to stand, and fell back when the pain struck, a sapling taken down by one stroke of a good ax. Blood was running down my leg, warm and bright in the harsh sun.

“Goddamnit, L.T., you don't listen good.”

“Okay, Doc. I'll stay here. You go on. The guys might need you.”

“They'll be fine. I'm getting you back to the LZ.”

The landing zone was three miles away, and I didn't think I'd make it back without a stretcher. We'd improvise that when the team reassembled. And Doc was right. The men would be fine without him. Most had been cross-trained as medics and could handle things. All of them, including Doc, were Rangers and infantrymen. Doc had taken extra training in medical matters back at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, so he was designated the team's medic. But at heart, he was an infantryman, and in the end, he would act as one.

We sat quietly, neither of us saying anything. The pain was getting worse, but I didn't want morphine. I needed to stay coherent. When I took the bullet, command of the unit had fallen to Master Sergeant Jimbo Merryman, the most capable soldier I'd ever known. My men were in good hands. I had a walkie-talkie, a small radio with limited range, but I could talk to Jimbo if I needed to.

I heard the occasional snap of rifle fire in the forest, but much of it was muffled by the thick vegetation. An hour passed and the air came alive with the sound of gunfire. A machine gun chattered in the distance, then the whoop of mortar rounds.

Jimbo came up on the radio. “L.T., Charlie has moved in behind us in force. I don't think we can get through. I'm going to have to go forward, get through these woods, and find another landing zone so the chopper can extract us. Can you move?”

“Go for it, Jimbo,” I said. “We're on our way back to the original LZ. It's too hot here to bring in a chopper.”

“Can you walk, sir?”

“I can, Jimbo. You take care of the men. Doc's with me. I'm fine.”

“Will do, sir.”

I put the radio down, looked at the soldier sitting beside me. “Get out of here, Doc. It's going to get hot as soon as Charlie starts coming out of those trees.”

“Yes, sir. We got to go.”

“You go. I can't walk.”

“I ain't leaving you, L.T. You remember what they did to Ronnie Easton.”

Easton was one of us. He'd gotten separated from the team the week before and disappeared. Late that night, we'd snuck up on an encampment in the bush that was full of black pajama clad Viet Cong, fifty or more of them. We heard Easton start to scream. He screamed for a long time, longer than any of us wanted to contemplate. The men begged for permission to go after him, but Jimbo and I kept them hidden. We wouldn't help Easton by getting ourselves killed.

Finally, the screaming stopped. We waited out the night and moved in at first light. The VC had left, and all we found was Ronnie Easton hanging by his feet from a tree, his body badly mutilated. He'd suffered greatly and died in a trackless jungle about as far from his South Carolina home as he could get. He'd died terribly, and we'd all heard it. We cut him down and brought his body out, back to what served as civilization, our putrid base camp at the edge of the mountains.

“I remember. I've got a loaded rifle, and I know exactly how many rounds are in the mag. I'll save the last one for myself. Go. Lieutenants get to give orders. That's one right there.”

“I'm going, sir.”

He squatted beside me. “Now, listen up. You ever hear of the fire-man's carry?”

“Won't work, Doc. Too far to go.”

“I'm going to put you on my shoulders and we're going to move. It ain't going to be comfortable, but I'll hold onto your right leg so you can move the left one a bit when the pain hits.”

He lifted me onto his shoulders. I was wrapped around him like a stole, my right arm around his chest, my left over his shoulder, my left leg sticking straight out from his left shoulder. He held onto my left arm and right leg and we set off. He'd slung both his and my M-16s around his
neck and they banged against his chest as he walked. It was going to be a rough afternoon.

It was slow going. We'd walk for fifteen minutes and take a five-minute break, sip from our canteens, and rest in the knee-high grass. Doc checked my calf and on the third stop redressed the wound. We were five minutes into the fourth leg of the trek when he came to a stop and set me down. “We got Charlies coming out of that tree line,” he said.

I looked back out over the plain. “I see them. They're pretty far back, but coming fast. You've got to get out of here.”

“There's a dry creek bed about five minutes in front of us. It's got some big rocks that'll give us some cover. Let's go.”

“Five minutes with me on your back is going to slow you enough to give Charlie a chance to catch up.”

“Then we'll attack.”

I laughed. “There's got to be a hundred of those guys coming our way.”

“That'll make it a fair fight. Ain't a one of those pissants got a green beanie.”

He picked me up and started toward the creek bed. We'd make it, but we had two rifles and a lot of ammo against a hundred rifles and a lot more ammo. Not very good odds.

We had moved about a hundred yards when we heard the distinctive
whomp whomp
of a chopper. The enemy didn't have helicopters, so it was one of ours. Doc set me on the ground and stood, waving, trying to get the pilot's attention. The radio on the ground next to me came alive.