Keeping Watch (32 page)

Paula's death was followed in short order by a new house, another school, and the hiring of Mrs. Mendez. Entries were spotty, every six to ten months, and brief, usually a June review of “the boy's” progress in school that year or a winter description of one of their hunting trips. The airplane was purchased eighteen months after Paula's death, when Jamie was nine and a half, and O'Connell found pleasure in his son's interest in the new toy:

The kid's clever, give him that. I had to go to Vegas on Saturday, and took him along, and he spent the whole time asking questions and practicing at the controls. Then when I had to meet with my guys to sign some papers, he asked if he could stay behind with the plane. The mechanic's a good guy with kids of his own and he wasn't too busy that morning, so I left the boy there for a couple of hours, and came back to find him in a set of overalls with grease to his eyeballs. Looked funny, I have to admit. The mechanic said the boy could get a job with him any day. Nice to know the kid has a future, even if it is at union wage.

There was nothing at the time of Jamie's disappearance, although Allen supposed that could be a normal enough reaction on the part of a grieving parent. The final entry, the only one since May, was just four days old—written the same day Allen had received Rachel's letter, a scant thirty-six hours before O'Connell's plane had dropped off the radar. It read:

My son has been gone nearly three months. Not knowing what happened to him is the worst, a torment day and night. I must force myself to carry on. I've decided to fly to Mexico to stay with friends, and when I get back, I will start anew. The boy's things are still in his room—maybe I will start by putting them in boxes, so they are not a constant reminder.

This will be the first time I've had the plane up in months. In fact, the last time I saw the thing, my son went with me to the airport, and played happily around it while I had a meeting with some associates. He got greasy then, too, just like he did in Vegas that time, so I had to make him scrub off before getting into the car.

At least my last memory of him is a happy one.

And that was it. When he reached the end, Allen flipped back and forth among the early pages for a minute, reflecting on what a peculiar document it was. The very fact of its existence had struck him as unlikely, given his impression of O'Connell. The journal's sole subject was Jamie, a child the man had consistently either neglected or actively tormented. Yet the entries seemed designed to present the other side of their relationship, that of a busy man who was yet very concerned about his son's well-being. It was almost as if O'Connell was aware of the criticisms the world would level against him, and he was writing for posterity. The words themselves seemed as stilted as the handwriting, highly self-conscious: Referring to business contacts as “associates” didn't strike Allen as the sort of thing a person would do in a journal meant for himself alone. And if he hadn't known what went on inside the O'Connell house, he would have thought that Mark O'Connell's protestations of affection were just a bit cautious. Almost, he thought, as if the man was nervous around his son.

It was an odd thought.

He stared unseeing at the busy lake, turning the implications over in his mind, while the park filled with its evening crowd. When the first smell of charcoal smoke hit the air, Allen looked at his watch, startled: nearly five, and he'd told Alice he'd call her at four.

He trotted toward the parking area and located a pay phone near the entrance kiosk.

“Alice?”

“I thought something had happened to you,” her voice said in his ear, sounding more worried than he'd have expected.

“Did you hear the news?”

“About the plane crash? Yes.”

“What do you want to do?”

“If the father's gone, the boy needs to come back.”

“I agree, but there's a lot here I don't understand. Could we leave it a day or two, until we're sure?”

“What's not to understand? The man's plane went into the sea.”

“And if he turns out to have miraculously escaped, we'd be in a hell of a place.”

“You think that's likely?”

“I just want to be certain. Alice, the guy's a con man.”

“You think the father faked his own death?”

When put as starkly as that, Allen had to admit that short-timer's jitters were a more likely explanation for his suspicions. “I know it's far-fetched. I'm probably seeing things.”

“What sort of things?”

He was not about to go into the subtle overtones of the O'Connell diary over the phone. “It just occurred to me that maybe if a con man knew that the cops were closing in on his scam, he might . . . Oh, hell, I don't know, Alice. Except that you and I need to go over some of this stuff together.”

“I can be down there tonight.”

“No, I'll come back. I think I'm about finished here, anyway. Give me 'til Sunday.”

“If you're sure?”

“I'm not sure of anything.”

“What about calling our friends on the farm?” Rachel and Pete Johnson, and through them, Jamie. Yes, that was the question. Allen rubbed his face as if he could scrub away his confusion.

“You know, I really think we ought to wait to break the news until you and I have put our heads together. It's unlikely that there would be mention of his father's . . . presumed death on the national news.”

“We can hope.”

“Yeah. Okay, then. See you Sunday.”

Allen got into the car and gravitated back to his motel room, where it was at least cool and relatively quiet, to brood over all the oddities piling up around the case of Jamie O'Connell. He had come to San Jose merely to look into O'Connell's whereabouts, either to reassure Jamie that the mystery figure who had briefly abducted little Sally Johnson could not have been his father, or else to find cause to remove him from the Johnson house immediately. Instead of that, all Allen had found was uncertainty and contradiction, even concerning things he'd taken for granted.

He couldn't get the reactions of Gina and Karin Rao out of his mind: two so different women, both of them all too ready to label Jamie as dangerous. How could Karin not like the boy in her care? Why would Gina assume that someone ought to be watching him closely? Allen found that he was pacing the worn motel carpet, four steps to the door, then back to the desk; he forced his legs to stop their restless movement and sat down in front of the desk, where the boxed
Rings
trilogy rested beside his laptop. Karin Rao's gift was as much of a conundrum as the boy she had given it to.

Absently, he picked up the case and let the three books slide out into his left hand, laying the box aside and opening volume one to its title page. Nothing there; no teacher's dedication inside the cover, just the books, a wordless gift that Jamie had interpreted as love. Damn the woman, anyway. Allen slid the first book back into its box and picked up the remaining two, but in the process of trying to thread the covers into their snug holder, he saw something sticking out from the upper edge of the third volume. He held the book's spine and gave it a sharp shake: A sheet of paper, folded into quarters, dropped onto his knees and then to the floor. He laid the books on the desk and picked up the piece of paper, unfolding it.

He wasn't sure what he expected to see. A woman's handwriting, perhaps—a long-treasured message from Paula O'Connell, hidden by her son in one place he might reasonably hope that his father would not find it. Or a secret letter packed with anger, or a childish last will and testament, or the instructions for a computer game, or a gynecological drawing, or—

Almost anything but what it was.

It looked to be a printout from an undisclosed Web site. At the top of the sheet, two partial sentences continued from some previous page, but an inch and a half down from the upper edge stood a phrase in bold, below which was a crude mechanical sketch and a list beginning with the number “1.” Allen started to skim the list of terse instructions, smiling at this latest illustration of the gaming industry's ever more realistic plots and machinations. This story line seemed to involve sabotage, he decided, but as he read on, it dawned on him that this was no mere electronic fantasy. The smile began to flake off his face like dried paint, revealing an expression of disbelief shading into horror.

This looked like no game Allen had ever seen.

It looked like no game at all.

Hidden within one of Jamie O'Connell's meager possessions, in a book given him by one of the few adults who had ever shown him kindness, the boy had secreted a printout, a thing that appeared to have come from some sort of terrorist Web site. (
Christ,
a small part of Allen's mind said beneath the roaring sensation that was beginning to build in his ears;
is there
anything
you can't find online?
)

The heading in bold read:

TEN WAYS TO MAKE A SMALL PLANECRASH AFTER TAKEOFF.

BOOK FOUR

Man and Boy

Chapter 28

A small white plane, riding the blue air above the calm Pacific Ocean, flashed and pattered down to the water; as if in echo, a flash and the sensation of shattering glass jolted through Allen's mind, and he was twenty years old again, skin crawling with prickly heat and leech bites, the beat of helicopters throbbing through his veins.

“I am your mama and your papa,” chanted Brennan. “Let's go kill us some gooks.” The pounding syncopation of the approaching Hueys drowned out the actual words, but none of the platoon needed to hear Brenda, because the lieutenant used the same words at the outset of every patrol. They tossed their smokes and shouldered their packs, lining up to climb through the chopper doors. Allen wedged himself against his squad-mates and wrapped his arms around his rifle, sweltering in silence.

He didn't think about the heat, or the upcoming patrol, or anything much. He'd found it was much easier not to think, better just to keep on keeping on. He was, however, fully aware that Brennan was not in the Huey with him. The freedom from that blue-eyed gaze lifted his burden enough that his mind began to turn over, dully.

In the months since Woolf had died, the platoon had been reshaped into a fighting machine so self-contained, the rest of the world just bounced off its sides. Whenever new men came on board, they spent their first few days looking a bit stunned. Some of them requested a transfer out; those requests were always granted within twenty-four hours. Brenda's platoon was a reflection of its commander—hard, clean, violent, and more than a little deranged. The men polished their boots as if rubbing dirt into Charlie's face. The members of the Second Platoon had very little to do with the rest of the company. And every man there collected ears.

Except Allen.

Funny, his mind tossed out, how The Wolf as an officer was aloof and casual, yet had brought his men together like a band of brothers, whereas the ever-present paternalist Brenda took the same platoon, declared them his family, hammered them into a disciplined unit, and had somehow managed to turn them into a rabble of wolves, shaggy and sharp-toothed under the polish. Wolf—brothers; brother—wolves. There must be a lesson in that somewhere. He stirred, thinking of saying something to Mouse, but then the Huey lurched tail-up, and he didn't bother.

In moments the helicopter was high above the lush green landscape, and the air rushing through the tight-packed interior was delicious. As one, the young men raised their sweaty faces to the wind, and breathed deeply.

It was late June, a temporary break in the monsoon, and down there the heat was enormous. The post-Tet lull was but a memory, the Army wanted a victory to give the people at home, and men like Brennan were only too happy to go out there after it, chasing the enemy down in his lair, hunting him through his tunnels and hills, wielding the platoon like a bludgeon.

Brennan really was, Allen had begun to suspect, quite insane. The man glittered with a manic energy, first goading his platoon, then riding on their blood lust, a spiral that had brought him in front of the CO twice now for excessive use of force against civilians. He carried with him the smell of smoke, and of desperation, the need to stay on top, to be in control, to win his little section of war.

Then again, maybe it was all in Allen's imagination. He seemed to be the only man in the platoon aware of Brennan's edginess, the only one to question and object. Or, not object, but simply turn a deaf ear to certain orders. The kinds of orders that led to burning hooches and the taking of trophies.

He had thought for a while that this was why Brennan had begun to hassle him, but in truth, those black glasses had sought him out from the very beginning. The lieutenant had picked Allen out of the platoon that first morning, and hadn't let up since. Every time Allen turned around, it seemed, the lieutenant was already looking at him. Allen had developed a sixth sense about the man almost as sure as his sense for Charlie, a sensitivity that was weirdly akin to a schoolboy crush: He always knew where Brennan was, often felt the touch of Brennan's glance on the back of his neck. He'd tried once or twice to talk to Mouse or ThreeG about Brenda's peculiar attentions, but the others had scoffed, saying that every grunt in the Army thought his LT had it in for him. And invariably, the day following one of these conversations, Brenda seemed to look over at Allen with that infuriating smirk as if to say,
“I know what you were talking about, but this is between us.”

And it was a private war, with rules that took some figuring, but seemed to involve challenges. Not to talk to others about it, that was one of them. This extended to a general agreement not to involve the others: Brennan didn't try to make the rest of the platoon uncomfortable over Allen's holier-than-thou attitude, while Allen wouldn't try to undermine the platoon's leadership by pointing out Brennan's growing instability. Another rule was that Allen's refusal to burn innocent villages or commit violence on civilians would be permitted, as long as he never refused an order that merely put him in danger: crap jobs in exchange for moral purity; his ass on the line the price for his personal shield. So Allen shut up, even though he always seemed to be maneuvered into volunteering for recon and point duty, and he tried like hell to ignore those damned eyes on his back. It was making him more than a little crazy, too. He had recently found himself imitating Brenda's smile, both as a challenge and an assertion of victory. He had also begun to wonder of late if Brennan intended to allow the hostilities to remain at this level.

A private war, just him and Brenda out in the green, winner being the last man to break.

That Allen had already broken once, that he'd stood with the others at Truc Tho and raised his rifle at civilians, was both a danger and a protection: Like a broken bone, once healed it was stronger than the bones around it; like that broken bone, it would be vulnerable until it had healed. In the meantime, Allen held the knowledge of that act before him, forging his defenses from the raw material of weakness.
Never again,
he would chant to himself.
You won't get me to do it again, you bastard; not this time.

The Huey made a sharp pull upward, sending the stomachs of all the passengers lurching and giving them all the brief thrill of knowing that someone had been shooting at them from the ground, and had missed. Allen hugged his rifle to him. The cooler air made him glad for the warmth of the men sandwiching him, and he thought back to the episode on the last patrol, puzzling over Brennan's apparent escalation of hostilities.

It had started when Brennan noticed Allen walking away from his squad as they were lining up the inhabitants of a tiny ville, softening them up for the interrogation to follow. The sequence of events was so standard by now—take the ville, then slap them around, while “Crazy” Carmichael found something else to do—that no one even thought about it, but this time, Brennan shouted Allen's name and ordered him to get back to his squad.

Allen glanced over his shoulder in time to see ThreeG lower his gun to the forehead of a man old enough to be his great-grandfather; he straightened out and told the lieutenant, “Sir, I didn't sign on to beat up civilians.”

“They're VC, soldier.”

“No guns, no food stores, and the kids half-starved. They're not VC.”

“And I say they are.”

“Yes, sir.” Allen stood facing the distance, shutting his ears to the sounds behind him.

“Go back to your squad, Carmichael.”

“All respect, sir, no. You can report me if you like, but I'll rejoin them when they're finished.”

At that, Brenda came up to Allen, stopping inches from his chest, and pulled the lenses from those pale eyes. He stared up at Allen, that weird smile on his full lips, and murmured, “You turning into a communist, Carmichael? Maybe some kind of contentious objector hippie? Queer boy, maybe? I always wondered why you got so hot when pretty little deRosa went missing.”

Allen's hands clenched white, wanting to strangle the bastard, pound those blue eyes with the butt of his M16, but he worked to keep it from his face. A reaction was just what Brenda wanted. When he thought he had his voice under control, he replied, “No sir, I'm here to kill the enemy. These people are just farmers.”

“They're VC,” the loot repeated, although by now Allen could hear in Brennan's voice that he didn't believe it himself.

Allen said nothing.

“I can shoot you if I like, for disobeying an order.”

“Yes sir,” Allen repeated, adding under his breath,
Not this time, you bastard; I will not give in this time.
He didn't actually think Brennan could shoot him, not without risking his career—or his neck—but he could almost believe that the man was crazy enough not to care. Allen stood as if he was back in boot camp with a drill sergeant cursing him out, gazing stony-faced over the top of the small man's head. After a long time, the glasses went back on.

“You're an interesting case, Carmichael,” Brenda said, and walked away. It felt less like a reprieve than a declaration of open war.

Penroy had been standing within earshot; after watching Brennan stalk off toward the villagers, he said, “Christ, Carmichael, why don't you just do as you're told for once?”

“These people are not VC.”

“What the fuck does it matter? He's your lieutenant, Crazy. You'd just be following orders.”

“Yeah, that's what they said in Nazi Germany, too,” Allen answered.

But the truth of the matter was, by now morality had little to do with his refusals. The game itself, the unacknowledged battle for superiority, was all. He wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, but he was having the time of his life. Every minute felt so intense, so alive, it was like being half-drunk all the time. He moved in an electric sea, tingling with awareness and with the sheer reality of things, his senses so finely tuned, they seemed near to clairvoyance. Colors vibrated, odors intoxicated, and even the more repulsive types of C-rations hit his palate like a blast.

In his own way, he knew he was as mad as his lieutenant, egging him on, carrying out their dialogue of death and domination, as if the whole war came down to him and Brenda in the green. Sure, sooner or later his luck would run out, and after one too many patrols on point he'd sit down on the mouth of a VC spider hole or walk into a trip wire and get himself shipped home in a box.

Didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except not letting Brennan win.

The Huey lurched and dropped down from the sky, going in fast in case the LZ was hot, rearing back when its runners were skimming the vegetation. The heavy-laden men jumped awkwardly, jogging through knee-high grass toward the bushes.

One by one the Hueys emptied, their door gunners giving the grunts a farewell wave, and the machines dipped their noses and rose, making for base like a line of dun-colored dragonflies. The thunder of their passing faded into the distance, and when the beating had passed, the jungle noises began tentatively to return.

Back in the green again.

It was to be a patrol of two, at the most three, days. Five days later, they were still out, high in the mountains, within shouting distance of the Laotian border. Radio contact had been spotty all that day, supplies were getting low, ammunition was down to one good firefight, and Brennan appeared to have given up sleeping. Eyes had begun to shift this morning, when the loot had folded his maps away and told them to prepare to move out.

Allen's squad leader had been the one to ask. “Sir, aren't we supposed to be lifting out from here?”

“Change of plans, Penroy,” he replied. The grin on Brennan's face would have looked at home above a straitjacket—but then, by this time half the platoon wore that same grin. He raised his voice to shout, “Men, I am your mama and your papa. Let's go kill us some gooks.”

“Sir, I thought—”

“The Army pays you to shoot, Penroy, not to think. Let's move out. That okay with you, Carmichael?”

“Oh yes sir,” Allen answered, continuing their dance. He felt as if he hadn't slept in days. A small part of his mind warned him that he was going to crash sooner or later, that if he didn't attend to his body pretty soon he'd stroll blindly off a cliff, but he didn't listen, just bared his teeth at Brenda and kicked the remains of his breakfast into the dust.

The others glanced at Sergeant Keys to see what he thought about this unannounced change of plans, but they saw only his usual stoic expression as he stood to toss his C-rat cans into the bushes. So they followed his example, and set out due west, into the hills.

Four hours later they stopped for lunch, on the bald side of a hill with the wind whistling around them. The shade was cooler than their heat-thinned blood found comfortable, and a number of them huddled into the patches of sun, spooning down their cold rations and lighting up a quick cigarette. None of them were inclined to linger; they shouldered their packs without regret.

The ridge they had been following dipped into a sheltered valley, where they picked up the telltale odors of a village, shit and smoke and fish sauce. The men brought their rifles up across their chests, and walked quietly.

The platoon was practically inside the ville before being spotted. It was a scattered village, built around an outcrop of rock with jungle rising behind it and terraces of vegetables stepping down the hill. A shout went up from very close, sweeping like a breeze through the hooches and shelters, the cries of women, the hoarse calls of old men. An M16 sounded, down the line to Allen's right; a running man tumbled into the vegetables. Figures could be seen darting through the bamboo and trees into the rocky area; guns picked some of them off, and the platoon moved to secure the ville.

The villagers came out of their hooches with hands in the air and fear on their faces. Perhaps two dozen women and old men, and one young man missing his right leg and half his fingers. Most of them clutched papers in their upraised hands, and Allen felt his tension loose a notch. Brenda generally looked for some token resistance before committing his platoon to aggression; there was none here.