M
ick drove back to the base camp at the head of Tulpohocken Creek feeling dazed, bewildered. Who was he, now? All his life he had thought of himself as Irish first and American second. Now he had found out it could just as easily be the other way around. His blood was half-American and half-Irish. His real name was not O'Day. It was Oxenford or Monahan, take your pick.
He did not know, he could not know, the incredible tangle of Dutch, English, German, and Irish with whom the Oxenfords had intermarried during their twenty generations in America. He did not need to know. American was what registered, American was what had meaning to him. For the first time, he saw these silent woods, the white beaches of the shore, as his land by inheritance. He was not a recent visitor, tossed up on this continent by history.
He could make the same claim with his Irish-American blood, of course. It was 120 years since the first Monahan had staggered from the steerage of an English ship in
New York harbor. But the ghetto mentality into which his people withdrew for a century had forfeited this claim. Now nationality thundered in Mick's soul. It somehow made him calmer, more resolute, in his preparations for tomorrow.
First, they lugged the steamer trunk full of cocaine into the deep woods at the head of Tulpohocken Creek, known as the Hocken Lowlands. Around it in a hundred-yard semicircle they dug foxholes for Mick and Joe and Phac. Each man had twenty clips of ammunition for his M 16 and Molotov cocktails, whiskey bottles full of gasoline. “We don't use these unless I give you the word,” Mick said.
He hated the thought of setting the woods on fire as much as Pop Oxenford did. They gave extra firebombs to Trai and Suong and told them how and where to use them, to produce lateral fires beyond the battleground. On a sandy road a few hundred yards farther back, Mick parked his American Rebel. “If there's any shooting, start the fires and head for the car and get the hell out of here,” he said.
“No,” Trai said. “I am staying here as long as you stay here.”
This declaration made Phac twitch. “You will go,” he said to Suong in Vietnamese. “Let the whore stay.”
“If she stays, I stay,” Suong said. “Give me a gun.”
“Order him to go, Mick. If he doesn't go, I will go now. I will quit this business now,” Phac said.
“You've got an order, Suong. You take Trai with you.”
“I'm a grown woman. I won't be dragged around by a boy.”
“Let's get some sleep. We'll decide it in the morning.”
Mick wrapped himself in a blanket and fell asleep almost instantly. He dreamt he was back in Binh Nghai and Trai was in his arms on the riverbank. It was dark and peaceful and her body felt like crushed flowers against his flesh.
A hand on his shoulder. Trai's voice whispered, “Mick.”
“What?” His hand reached instinctively for his M16.
“Your friend Joe. He's gone. He ran away.”
“I don't believe you.”
Mick rushed to the foxhole on the left flank where Joe had bedded down for the night. It was empty. The gun was there but Joe was gone. Suddenly he knew, he understood, the reason for Joe's long years in the woods. He had committed an act of cowardice in Korea. It may have been the same thing he had done hereâslipped away in the dark, leaving his friends exposed to infiltration and disaster.
For the first time Mick realized they all might die tomorrow.
“Maybe we should go away now,” Trai said.
“No,” Mick said. “They couldn't find the stuff. They might kill Pops Oxenford and the Prof. Maybe even my mother.”
Trai put her arms around him. “Oh, Mick. I feel a great dark thing creeping toward us through the woods. Phac told me what you did, saving his life. It was noble, it was good. But he's part of the darkness. You were never part of it. You were always my white god. You still are.”
“You're married to Phac.”
“He's never touched me. He can't love anyone or anything, except Suong. Mick, tell me you forgive me for what I did in Binh Nghai.”
“I forgave you a long time ago.”
“That makes me so happy. But you can't forgive yourself. You still mourn your men.”
“Yes.” The truth fell between them, as lacerating and impenetrable as concertina wire.
“Give them to God, Mick. Give all of that terrible time to God.”
He did not want to tell her he had lost God somewhere between Binh Nghai and Paradise Beach and Atlantic City. He did not want to add to her sorrow. “I'll try,” he said.
“Le Quan Chien wanted to kill you too, that night. He wanted to send four men to kill you just as they attacked
the fort. I threatened to betray the whole plan if that was part of it. I tried to hold back the darkness. Even then I sensed it rising toward us like a great wave from the sea.”
Tears streamed down Mick's cheeks. “I forgive you, Trai. I really do. Except for that bastard Le Quan Chien. Whenever I thought of you kissing that communist pig, I went nuts.”
“Oh, Mick. That was my worst sin. He made me do it. He said he would kill my father. I never loved him. I told you that in Binh Nghai.”
“Then you forgive meâfor what I did when I killed him?”
“There was nothing to forgive. I was glad to see him die.”
“Trai, I still love you. I've never stopped.”
“I've never stopped loving you. I never will.”
Her lips found his mouth in the dark. A wind from the sea sighed through the tops of the oldest, tallest pines. American, on American earth, Mick loved the woman who had stirred primary love in his soul in tormented Asia. He had yearned to cherish and above all to protect her, and failed. He was amazed to discover that love survived failure, perhaps was even enriched by it. Thirteen years fell away from both their souls; for a little while time did not matter.
“You hear that wind in the trees?” Mick whispered. “The Pineys think it's the devil playing music.”
“It's not the devil,” Trai whispered. “It's God. I feel God all around us here. I saw him on your grandfather's face. He only jokes about the devil. You have to be holy to do that. For the rest of us, the devil is not a joke.”
She wanted to tell him that she sensed, she almost saw, the evil wave rising from the shore of Paradise Beach, she saw the hooded figure, immense wings outspread, riding its crest, she heard his icy, guttural laugh. But Mick would think she was trying to frighten him. Trai could not offend what was divine in him, what she had loved from the moment she saw him: his warrior soul.
“W
e have to kill all of them. That's understood,” O'Gorman said.
“Yeah,” Bill O'Toole said in his heavy, bitter way. He looked at O'Gorman with total loathing. O'Gorman had seen his type in Belfastâthe man who began the business with a heroic or at least proud view of himself. They were the ones who sickened of what they soon became. Either they stuffed off the sickness and accepted their new murderous selves or they died. They arranged for the British to kill them by bungling an operation or they drank themselves to death. O'Gorman suspected O'Toole would die soon, one way or another.
“Sure we're gonna kill all of them. What the fuck else we gonna do?” Tommy Giordano growled.
O'Gorman smiled. He was one with this capitalist thug, one with the scum of the earth. He liked it. Are you listening, Captain Littlejohn?
Last night he had enjoyed a farewell fling with Barbara Kathleen O'Day. He had made all sorts of promises to her
that he had no intention of keeping. She would find out the truth later today. He had been in touch with the judge and his fellow politicians in New York, and they had arranged a new rendezvous with the freighter and a boat from Cape May.
The Houlihans, looking hangdog, followed O'Gorman and O'Toole and Giordano to the car. O'Gorman had interrogated them yesterday and decided they knew nothing of Hugh McGinty's treachery. He had ordered each of them to kneecap McGinty before he shot the informer in the belly, and they had obeyed with relish. They were second-rate cannon fodder, but they were loyal.
It was a gray, cloudy day, with a brisk wind blowing from the southwest. Over the causeway, they met three limousines with twenty of Giordano's thugs in them. They formed a procession and drove into the Pines over sand roads to Pop Oxenford's house. He met them at the door without his customary smile. “Hello, boys,” he said. “Welcome to Hog Wallow.”
The thugs got out of their limousines to stretch their legs and relieve themselves like dogs against the trees. One of them set up a target on a tree and fired a few dozen rounds from his Uzi machine pistol. The rest liked this idea and soon the tree and target were riddled.
O'Toole, Giordano, and O'Gorman went into the house with Oxenford. He had a map spread out on the table. “Here's where you'll find Mick,” he said, showing them a road that ran well east of the Hocken Lowlands. “You got to walk from here. I hope you got a compass.”
“We got one,” O'Toole said.
There were other roads that ran much closer to Mick's camp. But Mick wanted to separate them from their cars.
“How the hell did you get mixed up in this, Bill?” the old man said.
“Shut up,” O'Toole said.
“Is there a quick way to get out of these woods from there?” O'Gorman asked.
“No. You got to come back here,” Pop lied.
“We'll wait here for you,” O'Gorman said. “You're in charge of getting the stuff, Bill. You lost it.”
“Yeah,” Giordano growled. “I ain't up to hoofin' through a couple of miles of woods. We'll stay here and take care of grandpa.”
“You fellows goin' to kill me?” Oxenford might have been asking them if they wanted coffee.
“You've got nothing to worry about if Mick cooperates,” O'Gorman said.
“What've you got them twenty machine gunners out there for?” Oxenford said. “He ain't gonna shoot you. There's no percentage in that for him.”
“I told you to shut up,” O'Toole said.
“Let's finish him now,” Giordano said. “I ain't gonna put up with his bullshit.”
“Now wait a minute. I don't fancy goin' this way. I always hoped I'd die game.”
As he said this, the old man backed into the shadowy rear of his cabin. Suddenly he had a gun in his hand, an ancient pistol that looked left over from some Western movie. O'Gorman could not believe his eyes. He dove for the door as the pistol thundered.
He heard a scream of rage and pain from Tommy Giordano and the crash of answering shots. The machine gunners practically trampled O'Gorman as they stormed the cabin. An Uzi chattered.
When O'Gorman got to his feet and stumbled inside, he found the Mafia leader slumped against the wall, blood spurting from a terrific wound in his throat. The old man was lying on the floor in the back of the cabin, riddled by a hundred bullets.
Giordano was trying to talk. On the brink of eternity, he was intent on passing on his power: “Car-lie. Car-lie.”
A young swarthy brute with surprisingly intelligent eyes knelt beside him. Giordano dipped his fingers in his own blood and traced a cross on Carlie's forehead, in a parody of a sacrament. O'Gorman felt, no saw, an icy darkness swirl through the cabin. I'm watching, Captain
Littlejohn. Are you? he mocked. A moment later Giordano was dead.
Carlie stood up, the man in charge. “Let's go. Let's grab this goddamn stuff and get the hell out of these woods. Now we got a funeral to worry about.”
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Thrashing sounds in the thick brush, feet pounding on the sandy soil. Mick grabbed his M16. He had spent the morning repositioning his firebombs and teaching Trai and Suong how to shoot Joe Turner's M16. With only Mick and Phac to defend the perimeter someone might break through and get to Trai and Suong in the car. They might have to defend themselves as they fled.
Now these sounds. “Who's that?” Mick called, dropping into his foxhole.
“It's meâJoe.”
In a moment the big black man was panting beside him. Tears drenched his face. “I'm sorry I ran away, Mick. I couldn't handle it. I'm a lousy marine. But I want another chance. They killed Pop. They're gonna kill you.”
“Pop? Are you sure?”
“I was comin' down to see him, to tell him I ran away. I thought maybe he could talk me into comin' back. I didn't want to run, Mick. I couldn't help it. Just as I got to his clearing, they come in their cars and I hung back in the trees. They went in the house and there were shots. They dragged Pop's body out behind the house and left him there. They took another guy out too. He killed one of them. Mick, give me back my gun.”
“You've got it,” Mick said.
A wave of fury swept through his soul. He would kill all of them. Not one would get away. Above all he was going to kill that lying IRA bastard O'Gorman. Grimly, he summoned his little band and told them what to expect. They went back to the plan he had worked out last night. Suong and Trai would set their fires and retreat to
the car. But they altered the location of the steamer trunk. They moved it into the middle of the fire zone.
“Anyone who gets this thing is going to have be made of asbestos,” Mick said.
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“This is bullshit,” Carlie Mammartino said as he trudged beside Bill O'Toole in the woods. Carlie was the new don and was almost overwhelmed with the sudden responsibility. There were a lot more important things to settle in the family than this pursuit of a million dollars' worth of cocaine.
Bill O'Toole and Carlie were the same age. They had played football against each other in high school, back in the city. He was the perfect choice for the new don; he was cool, objective, not a wild man like Tommy the Top. He didn't believe in shooting people if he could avoid it. But he had to finish this job or lose face.
Carlie started dealing with Bill O'Toole as they plodded along. “Screw these IRA guys. Let's take the dope and blow them away. Nobody knows what happened. If anybody from Dublin asks questions, blame it all on me.”
“You got a deal,” Bill O'Toole said.
“But we gotta kill these people up ahead. They gotta go. They know the story, for one thing. This guy, your nephew, shot two, maybe four of our guys.”
“He goes, don't worry.” O'Toole had acquired a strong deep hatred of Mick O'Day.
“You talk to him. Get the stuff,” Carlie said. “We'll fan out in the woods on both sides of you. The minute you got it spotted, start running. We'll blow him away. The others should be easy.”
“Sounds good.”
In another five minutes they were close to where the old man had located Mick on the map. “Mick,” O'Toole called. “Mick.”
“I hear you, Uncle Bill.”
Carlie Mammartino motioned to the Houlihans and his
men. They spread out in two arcs on either side of the leaders. It was hot and there were lots of curses as the mobsters tripped over fallen branches and stumbled into sudden dips in the sandy soil. Lousy infantry, O'Toole thought, remembering Guadalcanal. But there were enough of them to do the job.
“I'm here to get the stuff. No questions. No problems,” O'Toole said.
“It looks like you've got an army with you.”
“You've got some pretty good guns. We're not takin' any chances. Come on out, without a gun, and let's shake hands. Show me where the stuff is and it's all over.”
“The stuff is about a hundred yards away, right in front of you. But you're never going to get it.”
“Get down,” Carlie yelled, and everybody dove for the earth, thinking Mick was about to open fire. Instead, puffs of smoke and flame appeared in front of them and on both flanks. The woods erupted into a roaring wall of fire. Behind it were glimpses of Mick and his friends, firing M 16s at anything that moved on the other side of the flames.
“Run through it. Run through the fire,” O'Toole roared. He had spent more than a few of the days of his youth fighting fires in the Pines and he knew the key to survival. But no one listened to him. Panic engulfed Carlie Mammartino and his troops. Firing their guns at phantoms, they backed away from the flames, which rushed toward them with the help of the brisk wind.
Men went down on the left and right and screamed for others to save them. But the fire was gaining momentum and no one tried to save anyone but himself.
Only one of the Houlihans showed some loyalty. When his brother went down, he tried to drag him to safety. But the head of the fire rushed toward them like the flash of a giant serpent's tongue. Suddenly they were both burning and screaming.
It was insanity. O'Toole could hear Mick shouting,
“Kill Kill Kill.”
The mafiosi were being caught by the
flames or falling in the hail of bullets Mick and his men were spraying through the woods.
Through a break in the fire O'Toole saw what he had come to find. The steamer trunk. The fire was rising on the wind into the treetops, turning into a crown fire that could devour all the oxygen around them. But it was vaulting over the trunk, which stood, scorched but essentially untouched, in burned-out ground.
O'Toole lunged forward, flames searing his face and hands. He burst through the head of the fire and was onto the burned ground, lumbering toward the steamer trunk, his holy grail, his salvation.
From behind the trunk rose Phac, his fellow police chief. He had his M16 leveled. He pulled the trigger but the gun jammed. O'Toole had heard Mick curse the weapon for jamming and killing marines in Vietnam. Maybe his luck was finally changing. He riddled Phac with a blast from his Uzi and crouched beside the trunk, glaring to right and left around the burned ground in search of another target. Maybe he could kill them all single-handed.
Behind him the fire roared out of control. The screams, the gunfire, died away. A plane came roaring in to drop chemical retardant on the head of the blaze. Out of the bushes beyond the burned ground stepped Mick and a black man, as big as Mick, with anger on his long, mournful face. “That's him,” Joe said. “He went into the house and killed Pop.”
O'Toole leaped up and poured bullets at them from his Uzi. They went flat and he heard Mick call, “You can't kill a marine that way, Uncle Bill. You should know that.”
“Mick. Let's deal. You're gonna need protection.”
“You got it wrong, Unk. Your pals are all roasted or dead. You're the one who needs protection.”
“Remember what I did for you, Mick. I helped you when no one else would.”
“I know you did. That's why I'm gonna let you gamble for your life, Uncle Bill. You can run back through the fire
or stay where you are until we outflank you, which should take about five minutes. Or you can play roulette. You got your pistol with you?”
“No.”
“I've got mine. Throw that machine gun over here and I'll give you the pistol. There's one bullet in the chamber. If you can beat the odds three times, you can go home to Paradise Beach.”
His luck was changing. He had killed Phac, hadn't he? Bill O'Toole thought. Mick was right about the other two choices. Running back through the fire was hopeless. The head was a hundred yards deep by now. Looking over his shoulder, O'Toole could see the blackened corpses of the mafiosi and the Houlihans on burned ground. It was only a matter of time before Mick and the black guy worked their way around his flanks.