Black Market Page 19

  Very slowly, then, Caitlin rolled over. She rolled just a few inches and struggled to sit up. Her face was a blank… but she was alive.

  Carroll ran to her and cradled her gently like an injured child against his broad chest.

  Then she suddenly drew away from him; she stared at something across the room that obviously terrified her. Carroll followed the line of her eyes to an inert shape that lay on the other side of the barren room. The body seemed to be that of a young man, but you couldn't tell. Half his head had been blown away. The darkish hair was matted with blood. The figure was dressed in the dark blue uniform of a Belfast policeman.

  “Who is he?” Carroll asked.

  Caitlin weakly shook her head. “I don't know. I only know that if he hadn't come when he did, I'd be dead. He came through that doorway and started shooting at them.”

  Carroll couldn't take his eyes away from the murdered Irish policeman. A hero, Carroll thought. A hero with no name or face anymore. Police work in all of its glory.

  Caitlin was sobbing quietly.

  “Shhh, now, shhh,” Carroll whispered.

  Caitlin couldn't control herself anymore. She sobbed into Arch Carroll's chest. She held him with all of her remaining strength.

  They were still enfolded that way, holding each other tightly, when the teams of British Special Branch men and Irish police arrived. Once again, Green Band had disappeared.

  21

  By the evening of December 12, the letters, all stuffed inside nine-by-twelve manila envelopes, had finally arrived. More than three thousand bulky letters had been mailed to every region across the United States.

  The letters had come to the strangest and most unlikely places: Sedona, Arizona; Dohren, Alabama; Totowa, New Jersey; Buena Vista, California; Iowa City, Iowa; Stowe, Vermont; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Boulder, Colorado.

  Kenny Sherwood in Eire, Pennsylvania, turned out to be one of the chosen few.

  Sherwood stayed home from work that day because if he went to the mill, he'd just say something dumb and either get his ass royally chewed out or be fired. For nine years he'd been a machine operator with Hammond Tool and Die.

  He made almost twenty-four thousand now, thirty-five hundred of which went for shrink sessions with a psychologist in Pittsburgh -little goateed fellow who treated him for his recurrent war dreams.

  There was a neatly typed cover letter inside the envelope; it looked government official, a little scary, even.

  Dear Mr. Sherwood:

  During the years 1968 to 1972, you served your country proudly as a specialist in the U.S. Army. You were a POW from January 1970 to June of 1972. You received two Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

  Please consider the enclosed a token of our appreciation for your services, a chance for your country to serve you.

  Kenny Sherwood cautiously slid a peculiar piece of parchment out of the envelope. Now what the hell was this?

  There was some kind of chained woman holding a globe of the world at the top of the paper. Farther down, the certificate clearly read “General Motors common stock.”

  The legend went on: “This certifies Kenneth H. Sherwood is the owner of five thousand shares.” It was tied with a shiny green ribbon, a green band.

  Part Two. Black Market

  22

  Manhattan

  Colonel David Hudson woke with a headache in his room in the Washington-Jefferson Hotel. It was snowing lightly outside, the satiny whiteness evenly blanketing West Fifty-first Street.

  Hudson pinched his wristwatch off the wobbling night-stand. It was just past two. He sat up and yielded to an uncharacteristic moment of panic. His throat was dry, his hands clammy. His whole body felt feverish.

  It wasn't Green Band troubling him this time.

  Green Band was hurtling along without an apparent hitch. Even at its psychological core, Green Band was moving beautifully, creating uncertainty in all the places where Hudson wanted to create it.

  It wasn't the time he'd spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp, either. The memories of the shrieking, taunting Lizard Man had stayed out of his dreams that night, at least.

  None of these things bothered David Hudson right now. It was something else… something completely unexpected and unplanned.

  It was Billie Bogan…

  Like the poet, Louise.

  He was angry with himself, disappointed that he'd let the Englishwoman affect him. It was unlike him; it was so undisciplined and out of character for Hudson to permit such a distraction before his mission was complete. Yet somehow he felt he could handle it, that he could keep everything in perspective…

  Or was he fooling himself? Or was she going to ruin everything? The one serious slipup, the one fatal flaw?

  Would he allow himself to blow Green Band because of Billie Bogan? This woman he barely knew, this expensive escort.

  He needed to see her at least once more, he decided. Now, if he could. The most vivid images of Billie suddenly drifted past his eyes in the darkened West Side room.

  Hudson was aroused. He threw on an old mufti shirt and trousers and went down to the Washington-Jefferson lobby, where he prowled around nervously, watched by a suspicious clerk at the desk. Finally he called Vintage Service, not wanting to use the phone in his room again.

  “I'd like to see Billie. Would that be possible? This is David. Number three twenty-three.”

  There was a pause as he was put on hold-three or four minutes, which seemed even longer.

  “Billie's not on her beeper, love. She doesn't seem to be available right now. You could meet one of our other escorts. They're all very beautiful. Former and part-time models and actresses, David.”

  David Hudson hung up. He felt disappointed, unsatisfied, and empty in a cold, gnawing way… Maybe he couldn't handle this right now. Maybe he shouldn't ever try to see Billie Bogan again.

  The idea of blowing Green Band over some English whore-it almost made him laugh. It would indeed be ludicrously funny if it all ended like that. But Hudson knew that was quite impossible. The final Green Band plan was designed to be flawless. It was so good, it could work without him from here on.

  Deception, Hudson remembered. The very beginnings of Green Band. Deception and illusion that had started in Vietnam.

  La Hoc Noh Prison, North Vietnam

  Captain David Hudson's tortured one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound frame slumped forward like that of a barroom drunk. The fragile shell of his body threatened to shatter into pieces, to finally collapse in exhaustion or perhaps death. Hudson 's mind screamed for him to give up this useless fight.

  What remained of his body was racked by excruciating pain, intense suffering that would have been unthinkable before the last eleven months in North Vietnamese prison camps. He was trying unsuccessfully to put his mind somewhere else now. He ached to be outside the seething bamboo hut, somewhere safe and relatively sane in his past, even as far back as his Kansas boyhood.

  He'd been trained to resist interrogation and enemy brainwashing. “Sisyphus” the program was called at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  He remembered that now. Sisyphus had supposedly prepared him for enemy interrogation-or so the army instructors had told him.

  You must put your mind in another place altogether.

  It had sounded so simple, so coldly logical. Now it seemed highly unlikely and absurd, infuriating in its stupidity and typical American arrogance. Sisyphus had been yet another cruel fraud invented by the United States Army…

  The Lizard Man, the obdurate North Vietnamese commandant of La Hoc Noh, raised a white stone game marker and decisively put one of Hudson 's black stones in check.

  There was a hard clack of the playing piece against the highly polished teak board.

  The North Vietnamese prison guards, all dressed in muddy black pajamas, tipped homemade rice wine from long-necked green bottles. They snorted out ridiculing laughter at this obvious mismatch of competitors.

  The camp commandant was frightening, swift, s
ure of his game moves. He was on a different skill level, Hudson understood that.

  According to the strict rules of Go, the game should have been played with a sizable handicap called okigo. Should have been… But strict adherence to rules meant nothing here.

  “Yow play!” the Lizard Man once again screeched. “Yow play now!”

  He wanted his victory now-the cruel bloodletting, the slow death for the loser in the festering jungle swamps just beyond the prison camp.

  The guards were physical extensions of their leader's personality. They, too, became impatient now, grumbling and growling for faster action, like spectators at a cockfight who weren't getting the fix of swift, bloody action they needed.

  Clack!

  David Hudson finally made a ridiculous, arbitrary move on the game board. He smiled crookedly at the commandant, as if he'd suddenly turned the game in his favor.

  “You play!” Hudson snapped. He knew the smile on his face was hopelessly spacey, but he savored the small moment of triumph.

  The Lizard Man was momentarily confused, clearly so. Then he howled shrill, birdlike laughter.

  The Vietnamese soldiers howled high-pitched laughter as well. They inched even closer to the two players as the commandant made a surprisingly conservative move with one of his white stones.

  Disappointment immediately etched itself across the soldiers' faces. Here was uncertainty for the first time. David Hudson was amazed at the commandant's sudden hesitation.

  “Yow!” Lizard Man screamed. “Fast play! Yow play riii now!”

  “Fuck you, asshole… Watch this one.”

  A faint smile, hollow and incomprehensible, slipped across David Hudson's blistered white lips. Once again he made a bizarre and seemingly pointless and foolish game move.

  “You play!” he said in a barely audible whisper. “You play fast, too.”

  The Lizard Man squinted and studied the exquisite, highly reflective teak board more closely. He gazed into Hudson 's bloodshot eyes, then looked down again at the Go board.

  The North Vietnamese guards crushed in closer.

  This was getting better, much more dramatic, finally. A real game was starting to develop.

  The soldiers began to whisper conspiratorially among themselves. They were like the professional gamblers, the unsavory flotsam always crowded into the fan-tan parlors of Saigon.

  Something interesting and very curious was happening in the game now. Even the wily camp commandant was confused, troubled for the moment by his American opponent, by his seemingly unfathomable moves.

  For the first time, one of the prison guards offered a side bet on the American soldier. The commandant threw the soldier a threatening glance.

  Suddenly, then, so smoothly and so coolly, as if he were performing an ordinary movement such as lighting a cigarette, Captain David Hudson removed the revolver from one of the Vietnamese soldiers' loosely dangling holsters.

  Hudson swiveled back to face the hated Lizard Man.

  Once again, the faint half-crazed smile crossed David Hudson's blistered lips. “Fucker. Miserable shit fucker.”

  A heartbeat later, the revolver thundered.

  It was like an army field cannon in the tiny bamboo room. White smoke blossomed everywhere around the game table.

  The commandant's small head flew back. Bone cracked hard against the wooden wall's main support post. The commandant's military hat sailed away, saucer style, across the smoking hut.

  A dark hole gushed in the Vietnamese officer's forehead. The Lizard Man's mouth dropped open, to show broken, ugly yellow teeth. A lathering, pale white tongue flopped out.

  David Hudson reflexively fired the service revolver a second time. And a third time. He felt like a confused child-playing with a toy gun. Bang, bang, bang.

  He thrust the point of the revolver directly into the frozen wide eyes of a guard. The man's face shattered like delicate pottery. Skull, flesh, bone, flew apart.

  He shot another guard in the throat.

  The two remaining guards had dropped their near empty liquor bottles; they were struggling frantically to get out their holstered revolvers.

  The next three deafening gunshots tore through a chest, pierced the other's stomach, then his heart. The foul-smelling, boiling jungle hut was suddenly a bloody, smoking abattoir.

  Shakily, David Hudson ran outside the command hut. He was limping badly, as if his legs belonged to someone else. He stumbled, scrambled forward, on the unfamiliar, unsteady supports. His legs were like wooden stilts.

  Every object he saw now seemed part of a blurred, impossible dream. Everywhere he looked, there was harsh unreality. A late afternoon sun flared orange and bright red over the dense wall of jungle green. Screeching monkeys skittered away. Insects buzzed angrily between the trees.

  The humidity, stifling, choking, filled his lungs. He thought he would surely drown in the moist weight of this awful air.

  Machine-gun fire suddenly erupted from a bamboo guard post overhead, a control post that subtly blended into the dark green of the jungle.

  David Hudson awkwardly weaved back and forth across the exposed exercise yard. Prisoners cheered from their locked cells, their bamboo animal cages.

  He ducked into the thick jungle that kept threatening to swallow up the prison camp and served as a natural barrier against escape for all the prisoners. David Hudson lunged forward. He tripped ahead, anyway.

  He had no choice now.

  Nowhere else to go but into the terrifying jungle.

  Death in the jungle.

  He was breathless, crashing clumsily against trees and through thick, tangled jungle brush. He kept running, faster than he thought possible. Dizziness grabbed and clawed at him. Whirling bright, then rolling colors came. Shivering cold flashes. Diarrhea. Vomit that wouldn't stop flowing. He kept running, zigzagging forward. As the jungle foliage got thicker, the trail became darker-almost complete blackness less than three hundred yards from the Vietnamese camp.

  He ran forward, anyway. A half mile, a mile-he had no idea of time or space now.

  A cold, paralyzing thought struck him. They weren't even chasing him… They weren't even giving chase.

  Hudson continued running-falling and picking himself up.

  Then it was so dark that it seemed as if there were suddenly nothing left in the world. Hudson kept running all the same. Falling, picking himself up. Falling, picking up. Falling, falling, falling…

  A song from the Doors played in his head: “Horse Latitudes”… Then nothing at all…

  Hudson woke with a nightmarish jolt. A scream never quite made it out of his tight, dry larynx.

  Long grass was stuck to one side of his face. Sticky, gummy tears had formed in his half-closed eyes. Fat black flies had attached themselves to his lips and nostrils. Hundreds of black flies were plastered all over his body.

  Trying to right himself, he nearly laughed. It was exactly as he'd always believed this putrid affair called life to be: resolutely unfair, pointless in the end, and in the beginning, and in the middle, too. Anyone with any reason could see the absurd eternal pattern. David Hudson fell away into the unrelenting darkness once again. “Horse Latitudes” played again. Why that fucking song now?

  Strangely for him, the incessant fighting, the mind-numbing combat, the suffering and death in Vietnam, had worked for a time against the bitter truth of his life. It had distracted him from his natural cynicism, the overwhelming pessimism. his natural self-destructiveness.

  Just before his capture, he'd been secretly dreading going back to the States, trying mentally to fit himself into civilian life somehow, even into the droning subexistence of the peacetime army… He knew a lot of others who felt as he did. A lot of his men felt that way…

  He woke again. Wildly confused. Unnaturally alert. He had to concentrate everything, every trace of energy he had now. He wrestled with himself to stay awake, to hold on to a thin, sane lifeline. Tormenting waves, disconnected images and thoughts, kept coming.
Ghosts just beyond his full comprehension. Raging rivers of shadowy, half-formed images, words, hellish fantasy shapes. Almost a psychedelic experience. As if he'd been smoking the strongest Thai sticks. Shooting scag… There was no sense of real time or spatial relationships out here. He was on sensory deprivation overload. He had this shifting, disturbing sense of place.

  He began to gag. His entire body squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and painfully released.

  This was so horrible, too horrible, too much for anyone to take much longer. What did it feel like when you cracked wide open?… The severe gagging stopped as soon as he put it out of his mind.

  David Hudson began to scream. He was swimming toward some kind of release. Eternity was rushing forward-leaping at him in the form of a sea of leeches; screeching, clawing monkeys; indistinct, shadowy jungle insects; and reptiles. He screamed for hours and hours. The hallucinations were so powerful and real, they became his only reality.

  They were there! The prison guards! On him! Everywhere!

  They'd finally come to take him back. Busy hands were scrabbling, poking, reaching all over his body… Hot hands were probing, poking him continually. Blood roared in the funnels of Hudson 's ears. The vicious leeches were crawling all over him, too. Sharp little leech strings. Strong hands were suddenly lifting him.

  Then whispering, almost choral voices. There were no distinct, recognizable words.

  “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” David Hudson was pinioned down and helpless. “Please leave me alone!”

  Something very large and black, a huge flapping bird grabbed on to his face. It smelled like burning rubber, but worse than that, it began to crawl all over his face.

  “Get it off me! Get it off me! Please get it off me!”

  Then a shaft of light-gleaming, beautiful light shone in his deep dark tunnel of terror.

  A scream came that seemed very far away… It was his.