Foreign Enemies and Traitors (32 page)

Jenny crabbed away from him on her back, hyperventilating, finally sitting against the pillaged bookshelf, staring at her would-be rapist’s prone body.  She was naked except for her panties and socks.  Downstairs, she could still hear the music, the yelling, and the screaming.  Nothing had changed except that her attacker was apparently dead.  Dead and now on fire, already smelling like burnt hair and roasting meat.  But he wasn’t the meat she was interested in.  She stood and snatched the sausage from atop the bureau and tore into its open end with her teeth while still watching his body for signs of movement.  She washed down half-chewed chunks of the sausage with gulps of water from his plastic bottle; it was flavored with some kind of citrus.  Something like Gatorade—sheer heaven.  Within minutes, she had consumed almost a foot of the sausage.  She belched with great pleasure, her stomach already rumbling agreeably.

It took no deliberative planning, there was no moment of eureka, she simply saw his uniform pieces on the floor and went straight into action.  As long as the “party” continued downstairs, she hoped she might have time.  On went her undershirt and sweater and vest, then his pants, his boots, his uniform blouse and insulated outer jacket.  His pants were baggy on her, but they fit tolerably well with the belt cinched tight, and the strings at the bottoms of the legs tied.  It took a minute to figure out how to adjust the wide pistol belt that went on over his jacket, around her waist. 

The holster was made of black plastic.  A special button had to be pushed to release the gun.  The pistol was a big one, a Springfield XD .45, according to the inscription on the slide, but her fingers were long enough to get a good grip around it.  One thing she knew was guns: Uncle Henry had shown her how to operate all of the most common models.  There wasn’t enough ammunition to waste on much practice, she’d fired only a few real bullets, but she was confident that she’d be a good shot when the time came.  She knew how to line up the sights, she’d dry-fired her uncle’s pistols without ammunition hundreds of times.

This Springfield XD pistol was similar to her uncle’s Glock.  That meant there was no manual safety catch—you just pulled the trigger to fire it.  The XD’s hinged safety was right on the trigger, like on a Glock.  She mentally thanked her uncle for teaching her about guns, something her own father, a non-shooter, had never done.  This lapse had cost their family dearly when Memphis had been transformed into hell on earth by the earthquakes.  The silver barrel extended a half inch beyond the front of the slide, and it was threaded like a bolt or screw on the outside.  A small light was attached under the barrel, in front of the trigger guard.  From the grip’s length and thickness, she estimated that it carried at least ten bullets in its magazine.  Two extra magazines fit into a black plastic pouch on the opposite side of the web belt.  There was no time to examine the gun further, so she holstered it.  

There were twenty or thirty armed soldiers downstairs, along with a dozen local girls she didn’t even know.  She pushed mad thoughts of a rescue from her mind.  What was impossible was not worth wasting time thinking about.  Jenny was a survivor first and foremost: it was why she was still alive a year after the quakes, when so many others—including her parents—were dead.  She knew that there was a time to fight and a time to run.  Anybody could die for a pointless, futile gesture.  Thousands had.  Maybe millions.  Not Jenny McClure.

She went to the window and rolled the shade halfway up.  After she figured out how to unlock the old-fashioned clasp, the bottom section of the wood-framed window slid up and open.  Cold air blasted in, along with snow.  The snow was really coming down now!  She looked outside.  It was too dark to see much except that the world was now blanketed in white, but she could make out a small angled roof just a few feet below the windowsill.  She put a leg over and then had a thought, looking back into the room.  She climbed back inside, grabbed the would-be rapist’s pack, and put the rest of the sausage and the water bottle into the side compartment and snapped it shut. 

It was heavy but manageable.  She’d carried heavier.  It weighed maybe twenty-five or thirty pounds.  She heaved it over the windowsill and then let it go.  It dropped onto the lower roof, slid for a second, and disappeared from sight.  One last look: on the floor by the bed, the dead traitor’s fur cap caught her eye.  She scooped it up and put it on her head, looked at herself in the mirror above a low dresser, and pulled the fur earflaps down on the sides and back.  The inside of the hat was as soft as mink.  It would protect her head almost like a helmet when she landed.

She paused on her way to the window to look again at the traitor’s body, its upper half now sizzling and burning in the fireplace.  A sudden idea overtook her.  She looked around the room, yanked comforters and sheets from the bed, and shoved them partway into the blazing fireplace.  Next, she slid the low bookshelf sideways away from the wall and tipped it over across the traitor’s back.  The way the drunken soldiers were carrying on downstairs, the sound would never be noticed.  The flames were already dancing along the bed sheets into the jumble of open pages beneath the overturned wooden shelf.  Finally, she climbed over the windowsill and lowered herself downward until her boots touched the angled roof, its wet slate covered with a thin layer of snow.  She let go, slid on her fanny down to the edge, and was launched into space.

                                           
      10

Phil Carson was on another sailboat,
but it was not a catamaran this time, and not on the ocean, or even on water.  The boat was somehow mounted on wheels, and he was trying to negotiate a mountain road.  The vessel’s mast was as tall as the surrounding trees, and he worried about how he would navigate the boat through overhanging branches and under electrical power lines that he could see ahead.  He was steering the boat from behind the wheel, high up in the cockpit; somehow, the boat’s means of locomotion was not important.  Gravity, he vaguely understood.  It did not seem at all strange to him that he was driving a big sailboat down a mountain road.  Then the boat began swaying beneath him.  The dirt shoulder at the edge of a turn began crumbling away, the boat slid toward the edge…

                He was awakened by harsh words and cold steel against his cheek.  His eyes opened to see pistol and rifle barrels inches away from his face.  There were two guns, and behind them, two men.  One man held a large black pistol with a suppressor fixed to its end.  The other had an M-16 carbine across his lap, its barrel casually angled to aim at his chest.  The men were dressed in dark rain gear, their faces hidden behind black balaclava masks.  Both were sitting on kitchen chairs, their backs to the iron stove.  Zack was nowhere to be seen.  The man holding the pistol said, “Sorry to wake you up.  We’re on a tight schedule, and we need to talk.”  He had a Southern accent, but not overly strong.

                “Who are you?”  Carson had spent the last three weeks dreading a sudden and unhappy end to his peaceful convalescence, and here it was.

                “That doesn’t concern you.  We ask, you answer—that’s the only program tonight.  Got it?”  The mask had one slit across his eyes and another across his mouth.

                Carson tried to sit up on the couch, but was jabbed down by the carbine’s muzzle in his ribs.  He had to address his tormenters while lying helplessly on his back.

                The man with the pistol asked, “What’s your name?  I mean your real name.”

                He sighed.  What was the point of holding out, or lying?  Presumably, they’d already interrogated Zack.  “Phil Carson.”

                The second masked man with the rifle asked, “So who is this Colonel Brice?”  He held the laminated military ID card in front of Carson’s face. 

                “He’s a dead man, or at least that’s what I was told.  The card was made for me.”

                “By who?” asked the pistol wielder.

                “It’s a long story.”

                “So start telling it.”

                Carson repeated the truthful version of his shipwreck, detention and escape from Camp Shelton, as nearly as he remembered telling it to Zack.  The two men listened quietly, occasionally asking questions about details.

                The man with the pistol changed tacks while Carson was describing the Christmas Eve drive up the eastern side of Mississippi.  He held up a sheet of loose-leaf paper.  “Where did you get this list?”  Its many creases showed that it had been recently folded to postage-stamp size.  Carson recognized his list at once, but it was not in his handwriting.  It was an exact copy of his hidden personal contact sheet.  Zack had sold him out.

                The masked man shook the page in Carson’s face.  “What are you, deaf and dumb?  We’re not playing around.  Where did you get this list?”

                “It’s my own—I didn’t ‘get’ it anywhere.”

                “Who is on this list?  I mean, who are these people?  What’s your connection to them?”

                Carson’s mind spun.  Now he risked compromising more people, endangering them through his carelessness.  What a huge mistake it had been to carry a copy in clear text, uncoded, even if it was in miniature and—he had thought—well concealed.  “They’re old friends.”

                “So you say.  Don’t play stupid.  Let me ask you again: what do these
old friends
have to do with you?”

                Carson hesitated, considering his words.  “I knew some of them in the military, a long time ago.  Some I met later.”

                Now the two masked invaders were quiet, and exchanged glances.  The man with the pistol held the paper with his gun hand and pointed to a single line written near the bottom.  “This one, right here.  Can you read this name?”

                Carson fiddled on his narrow reading glasses, squinted at the list, and sighed.  “Eric Vikersun.  Viker, rhymes with biker, not Vikker rhymes with liquor.”  The ditty giving the pronunciation of the name just popped into his head, after lying dormant somewhere in his brain for decades.

                The masked pistol holder nodded almost imperceptibly.  “How did you know him?”

                Carson exhaled again, and continued.  “Vietnam.  He was in one of my my recon teams for a few months.  Before he was medevacked out.”

                “When did that happen?”

“Oh…that would have been in 1970, I think.”

“Where did it happen?  His getting hit, I mean.  Be specific, and don’t even try to bullshit me.”

“Officially, or in reality?”

“Try both.”

“Officially, up around Dak To.  We were staging out of Kontum.  In reality, we were in southern Laos.  Those cross-border missions were part of Operation Prairie Fire.  That was all classified back then.  It was classified for years and years after the war.”

“How was he wounded?”

“Mortar frag in his legs and back.  They caught us on the LZ, on insertion.  We barely got out.  I caught some too, but not as bad.  It was almost normal to get hit on the LZs by then.  The NVA had most of the likely LZs indexed and wired—it was grim.  Prairie Fire was just about finished by 1970.  A lost cause, the way we were fighting it.”

“Who else was on that mission?”

Carson closed his eyes, thinking.  There had been so many cross-border ops, and the recon teams frequently changed as men were wounded or killed.  Typically, there would be three or four Americans and six or seven ’Yards.  “Let’s see…I think…Chuck Miller, and Dick Fielding.  They were the only other Americans on that one, I think.  I could be wrong—there were a lot of missions like that, and it was a long time ago.” 

The second man leaned over and whispered into the masked ear of the man holding the list.

“Tell me something else.  What was Eric Vikersun’s nickname?”

Carson replied without hesitation.  “Eric the Red.  But usually we just called him the Viking.”

The man with the pistol nodded.  “Describe him.”

Carson closed his eyes again, remembering.  “Real tall.  At least six foot four.  Kind of reddish-blond hair, I think, but it was usually cut short, of course.  Blue eyes, for sure.  What’s all this about Eric Vikersun?  Why do you want to know?”

The man dropped the list and pulled off his mask.  He had long dark blond hair, a thick chestnut beard, and piercing blue-green eyes.  “Eric Vikersun was my father.  I’m Boone Vikersun.”

“Viker, rhymes with biker,” Carson murmured.

“You got it.  But folks call me Boone.”

Phil Carson stared in wonder for a few moments.  “You know what?  I think I met you before.  You were just a kid, not even ten.  It would have been at Fort Bragg, at the SOG reunion.  I remember seeing Eric at the reunion, and that he had his boy with him—so that would have been you.  I’m guessing it was in the late ’80s.  How’s your father?”

“My father’s dead.  He died five years ago.  Heart attack.”

“Damn…”

“Yeah.  Look, I don’t remember meeting you at the reunion, but I heard of you.  My dad thought a lot of you.  You were in some of his best stories.  I heard them since I was a kid.  Maybe that’s why I joined up too, all of my dad’s old war stories.  I put eighteen years in the green machine before this current shit storm came down.  Airborne Ranger, Green Beret.  The whole nine yards, from Kuwait to Kandahar.  You know the drill.  You were in it too, back in the day.”

Carson nodded, looking at the face of the man who so strongly resembled his old recon teammate.  It was like seeing a ghost in the flesh, except for the long hair and the beard.  “You only did eighteen years instead of going for twenty?  Did you voluntarily separate?  Or did they RIF you out, get you during a reduction in force?”