The Protocol: A Prescription to Die (24 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John P. Goetz:

Crafter of Intrigue, Master of Storytelling.

By day
, John P. Goetz is a hard charging, assertive, high performing professional with decades of solid, verifiable management expertise. His math and computer science training complement a love of the written word.

By night
, John P. Goetz is a driven writer, crafting compelling stories that grab a reader’s attention with intense, ingenious plots, and clever characters.

The disparate worlds of John P. Goetz collide in stories that are rife with realism, authority, controversy, and adventure. Audaciously original novels spotlight the author’s pervasive curiosity and his artistic eye for fascinating twists and turns that delight and captivate readers. You will be frightened. You will be moved. You will also be teased, surprised, and horrified. And, after reading just one John P. Goetz book, you will become a fan for life.

John lives in Golden Valley, MN.

Follow John P. Goetz on Twitter @JohnPGoetz. Look for John’s postings to his blog and for updates about his new books at johnpgoetz.com. You can also follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jpgoetz.

praise foR
“doorway to your dreams”

“A thriller with a touch of the supernatural and a rock-solid pace.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Doorway To Your Dreams contains everything you’d expect from a great science fiction adventure, but it’s also a vivid recollection of a dark little pocket of American history and a true story of unlikely heroes overcoming great evil. Overall, a recommended read for action, wartime and sci-fi fans.”

K.C. Finn, Readers’ Favorite

“The book is definitely a must-read for all those who enjoy action, war and thrillers. With its three-dimensional characters and action, this story has an esoteric vibe that grabs the attention of readers and keep them glued to the pages.”

Mamta Madhavan, Readers’ Favorite

“This complex and harrowing thriller is thought-provoking and, ultimately, very entertaining. Doorway to Your Dreams is highly recommended.”

Jack Magnus, Readers’ Favorite

“If you like your fictional warfare to be gritty and graphically violent, Doorway to your Dreams by John P. Goetz contains enough scenes that will keep you teetering on the edge of your seat, but not all of its battles take place on solid ground and in the here and now. The story matches outer struggles with groundbreaking inner exploration. One aspect that sets the book apart is some truly top notch characterization. While the hero is portrayed as a multi-faceted individual who is easy to root for, readers will also gain insight into some of the events and factors that shaped the story’s villains and, ultimately, the darkest corners of the human psyche. A well told story.”

Carine Engelbrecht, Readers’ Favorite

Available June 2015 at Amazon.com

Enjoy A Sneak PeEk from “Doorway to Your Dreams”
By John P. Goetz

Coming June, 2015

Available at Amazon.com

Vinh Long, South Vietnam

July, 1967

*

If given five days of R&R, most men stationed at an army helicopter base and mobile hospital in the middle of Vietnam would eagerly forgo a month’s salary and their left nut for a seat on the next sixty mile trek to Saigon—even if that seat was on a rickety, splintered cart pulled by a pair of yak, guided by a blind rice farmer named Ving. Their goal would be to not only get away from the aromatics and sights of war, but also to get drunk, fuck whatever had two legs, sober up, and do it all over again. If things were really bad, the legs were optional.

Most would.

But not Spooncake.

Helicopter pilot Tim “Spooncake” McAllister preferred the near-quiet solitude of his small plot of sand on the banks of the Mekong to the cacophony of thought-noise and intrusive color spikes he’d be subjected to in the crowds and bustle of Saigon.

Spooncake was heading to his beach fully equipped for the day. He carried what the camp cooks concocted and called a lunch wrapped in his beach towel. Five amber bottles of warm beer were securely nestled in the pockets of his flight jacket. In his left hand was a bottle of gin, and in his right was a tattered lounge chair. The camp’s mascot, a black and brown shepherd mix named Dinner, bumbled a dozen feet ahead of him through the overgrown elephant grass, joyously sniffing everything. The dog had, after all, been to their solitary campsite dozens of times before with Spooncake and knew the way. As always, a spike of happy, white light bounded above the dog’s head.

Spooncake jealously relished the quiet serenity of white.

Dinner wasn’t
his
dog. He was the camp mutt who just happened to shadow Spooncake’s every move. It was a one-way adoption that Spooncake had just learned to accept. Legend has it that some anonymous lieutenant rescued the dog from the local butcher two years ago. He bought him right off of the chopping block for five bucks and, until now, Dinner had meandered around the camp begging food from whoever would spare a scrap. The name started as a joke, and stuck. Somehow, for some reason, Dinner found Spooncake irresistible. The dog escorted him to his chopper each day and napped under the fuel tanks until his rotors stopped turning. When he wasn’t flying, the dog was never more than three feet away at any given moment. If anyone wanted to know where Spooncake was, all they had to do is look for Dinner.

Spooncake could smell the stench of his approaching salvation and quickened his pace in anticipation of his imminent relaxation. As he crested the small hill, the thought-noise from camp a little more than a mile away in Vinh Long, diminished from a roar to a mere buzz, and he exhaled a long sigh of relief; the quiet already felt good. By the time he reached his destination, the noise created by the hundreds of men and women at the base would taper to a slight, yet manageable, hum. A sound he could easily sleep through with a bit of help from the bottle of gin he carried in his left hand. Even though his grandfather had taught him how to control the volume of the thoughts travelling into his brain, when combined with the chaos and emotion of war, the thought-noise worked its way through regardless of what he did to lock it away.

The colors he saw were different; they never went away. Unlike the thought-noise, the colors, thankfully, were silent and relatively unobtrusive. He turned back towards camp and saw hundreds of colored spears stretch into the cloudless, cyan morning sky of Vietnam. Most of the shards of light were a mixture of orange confidence and the hurried intensity of turquoise. A few lights were angry crimson. Since it was a helicopter base and hospital taking care of wounded soldiers was its function, too many lights were pink transitioning to the black of death. As each person faded, so did his light.

It was a pattern of color, he’d learned that was common to everyone—regardless of where they called home.

Spooncake stopped walking when he heard a torrent of explosions behind him. He turned and eyed a column of thick, silvery black smoke billow and grow in the sky north of the Mekong towards the jungle canopy several miles away. He heard the distinctive roar of the F-4 Phantoms, then craned his neck and waited for the jets to appear behind the scream of their engines.

Even from this distance, the F-4 pilots’ emotions were clearly on display. The orange shards beaconed from each cockpit, broke through the black smoke they’d created, and streamed into the blue sky above them. The pilots’ colored spears announced the jets’ approach before he could even see their triangular forms.

As the colors foretold, a quartet of silver-gray ghosts appeared over the tree line with the orange bolts of light bouncing above each pilot’s canopy. In unison, the aircraft pulled a stiff 45-degree turn then disappeared into the blue as wraithlike as their namesake implied. Their orange lights transformed to creamy yellow then faded to nothing as Spooncake’s perception of the pilots’ emotions faded.

Spooncake looked back towards the pillar of smoke and saw dozens of crimson, pink, and black pins of light climb from the jungle floor and pierce the smoke curling higher into the sky. Spooncake knew what the lights were. It was war after all, and he’d become very familiar with this particular light sequence. He called it the colored dance of death. He’d seen the lights of friends follow the same path: from the anger of crimson, to the “am I dying?” confusion of pink, to the quiet acceptance of black. Each crimson pin represented the anger of individual Vietcong who survived the attack just moments ago. The black bolts of lightning belonged to the men on the edge of death who were likely still burning from the package delivered by the phantoms he’d just seen. As Spooncake continued to watch the cavalcade of light and emotion, several crimson shards lightened to pink then turned dark, as the blackness overcame them. At the moment of death, each black light dissipated into nothingness and was replaced by the cloudless blue sky. Only two crimson shards of angry revenge remained. Each one furiously pulsated with life.

Within minutes of the attack, the acrid scent of the petroleum-based payload delivered by the American pilots assailed Spooncake’s nostrils. He shook his head in a fruitless attempt to avoid the smell the morning breeze tossed in his face. Even from this distance, the smoldering, heavy odor of burning napalm bit his lungs with each breath. Aiming his nostrils away from the smoke didn’t help, as the equally offensive, humid aroma of the slurry of yak shit that comprised the Mekong, flowing a hundred yards further ahead, immediately accosted him. The morning smog of Van Nuys, California, the place he called home, was a bouquet of roses in comparison.

Spooncake turned back onto his path, accepting that this was the freshest air he was going to get on this otherwise beautiful morning, and continued his trek through the green grass towards the small patch of sand he’d claimed as his own almost two years ago.

He was technically on vacation, after all.

Dinner stopped and turned, sniffed the air, sneezed, then feverishly shook his head. His tail, or what remained of it, wagged furiously as he checked his friend’s progress.

“Bless you,” said Spooncake. “Napalm. Shit reeks.”

The dog muffed in reply then turned and continued towards the river bank and their private Eden with his beam of white light following his every move.

Spooncake hitched up the tattered lounge chair closer to his armpit and continued down the path to the river. The sun began to break through the spreading smoke, and even though the morning temperature was mild, the humidity made the sweat rain down his forehead and trickle down the bridge of his nose. Spooncake licked salty droplets from his top lip as the river finally came into view—the yaks already cooling themselves and wading in the river appeared drier than he felt. However refreshing it may appear, Spooncake wasn’t about to join them. Unless he wanted his dick to fall off, Spooncake wasn’t about to step into the gray-brown slurry of the Mekong. Despite the fact that he chose not to have it exercised with the others heading to Saigon, he still liked having it around when he needed it.

*

Spooncake pulled off his fatigues and stripped to his red and white striped boxers. He balanced himself across the few intact plastic straps holding the lounge chair together and stretched out along the river’s murky bank to relish the sun and solitude. His pale, near-naked body appeared as a beacon next to the grass and dark brown water in the river. Anyone passing by would likely mistake him for a corpse. A corpse who wore gloves.

Everyone thought he wore the glove because of a case of contagious meningeal psoriasis, a disease he made up. Most laughed it off. Some crinkled their faces in worried concern and backed off, afraid they’d catch what he had. Spooncake knew the real reason: he couldn’t touch anyone with his hands without having their thoughts broadcast through his mind. Hearing them was one thing, seeing them was something he could not tolerate.

The past few months had been hectic and harrowing. His team had pulled in more than four hundred wounded soldiers, a camp record. His gunner, Hammond, had likely killed just as many of the enemy, and his new medic, Franklin, had washed gallons of blood off of his hands and face. Franklin’s fatigues were now more red than green. He looked like a watermelon at times.

He and his chopper crew had earned the five days of R&R that Uncle Sam had graciously provided them, but now Spooncake’s only goal was to diminish the constant din of thoughts flowing into his brain. The DNA handed down to the McAllister Men was a curse he had to endure.

Spooncake reached down to his knees and brought the bottle of gin to his mouth, pushed its neck between his lips, and took another long pull. Dinner, who was now relaxing next to him and chewing on one of his old socks as if it were a T-bone, looked up with wanting eyes as the hand that had been scratching his single ear stopped the massage in order to raise the bottle. The gin burned on the way down, and he was sure he heard the faint echo as it splashed in the pit of his empty stomach.

“Shit. That’s bad,” he said through his clenched jaw and looked at the dog. “I don’t think you want any of this, my furry friend. It’s the local stuff. Formaldehyde and yak piss with a tinge of pine.”

Dinner ignored him and returned his attention to his sock.

Despite frequent experiments with alcohol intake, he had yet to find a way to totally silence the constant invasion of thoughts. The gin helped somewhat. At best, it helped him fall asleep. At worst, it just muffled the noise rattling between his ears.

Even after two years, the smell at the riverbank was something that took a bit to get used to. He’d tried to unwind the secrets of the fragrance but had yet to discover its exact formula. Dead fish, sewage, and yak shit were primary ingredients, as he could see them floating with the current, but there was something missing. There was an aromatic high note he just couldn’t place.

He could tolerate the smell better than the noise from the base camp almost a mile away. That’s why he liked this particular spot. The thought-noise down here came from the fishermen and arrived in an odd dialect of Vietnamese. It wasn’t at all like the parlance he’d grown used to at the base from the locals. That was a concoction of Vietnamese, American English, British English, and a bit of French all rolled into one giant barely comprehensible ball. Even though he’d been stationed here for two years, he couldn’t follow their speed-of-light thoughts, and he certainly didn’t want everyone to repeat themselves just so he could listen to them think.

One pass was enough.

The fishermen’s thoughts flowing between his ears now were like listening to a heard of cows bellow in a far off pasture.

It was a sound.

Incomprehensible yet almost as relaxing as a mother’s hum.

Just white noise from a television left on after midnight.

When he was at the base, the noise was different. It was prime time with all three channels on at the same time.

The individual words were understandable, but they were usually garbled into a jumbled, never-ending paragraph. American thoughts at the base were primarily English. There were some Spanish transmissions. Some even came with a southern twang or “wacha tawkin’ bout” Brooklyn emphasis.

His brain continuously and involuntarily deciphered each and every brainwave, whether it was something he wanted to know or not. And because of this, he knew many of the inner most secrets and desires of almost everyone at the base. Luckily, his grandfather had taught him how to create and use a “psychic volume” knob. It wasn’t 100% effective, but it helped dim the noise when it became unbearable. Since coming to ‘Nam, he found that even when the volume was cranked all the way down, the noise still made it through, just as his grandfather had warned.

Right now though, McAllister found the random baying of the fishermen to be relaxing and didn’t bother tuning anything out. He put his hand back on Dinner’s head and shut his eyes in desperate search of sleep with hopes of dreaming of the days before everything went to hell. The day, nineteen years ago, when his father decided to put the barrel of a 12-guage to his right eye and pull the trigger.

*

With his eyes still shut, Tim felt for the reassuring neck of the gin bottle between his knees. He didn’t want to turn into his father, but he had to admit that the booze did help quiet the clamor. He had a better understanding of what his father went through now. He doubted that he’d put the barrel of a shotgun in his eye socket to quiet things, but perhaps that’s why he volunteered for Vietnam and kept re-upping time after time. Maybe he wanted someone else to pull the trigger.