The Cassandra Conspiracy (18 page)

No more than ten minutes elapsed before they detected movement along the trail. The VC, now wary of more mines, moved along the edges of the trail but at a pace fast enough to overtake the retreating Americans. Parker couldn’t get an accurate count before the first three men walked into the Claymores’ range. Barron promptly detonated the mines. Three down, maybe four. Parker tossed a grenade at the rest of the squad, and then opened up with his M-16. The return fire was immediate as the enemy gauged their position. The distinctive signature of the AK-47s on full auto mixed with the boom of their M-16s.

Barron waited until the Claymores went off before taking careful aim at the VC further up the trail. He fired selective three round bursts,
and then moved west keeping cover. He knew Parker expected him to hold his position, but the chance to finish off the remaining VC outweighed the risk that he might get caught in Parker’s fire.

Parker didn’t see any return fire coming from behind the mound. He wasn’t sure if Barron had been hit or had moved off. Not wanting to take any chances, he swept the north side of the trail. Finally only the sound of their M-16s
punctured the jungle’s tranquility. Both men cautiously held their fire while waiting to see if any the Vietcong were still alive. When nothing moved, Barron shouted an all clear coming out from behind a tree to meet up with Parker.

“I got the two that tried to get away. There’s no one alive from here back to where I nailed those two. Let’s get the hell out of here.”  They moved as fast as they could toward the border. As soon as they cleared the fence, Parker called for their dust
-off.

They waited until they heard the helicopter before using the PRC
-25 to radio the chopper. Once a team hadn’t bothered communicating with the chopper before it fired its smoke, and the door gunner, thinking that the chopper was under fire, opened up with the M-60. It had scared the shit out of the team, but fortunately no one was injured. Now it was policy to speak first, and then fire off the smoke.

“Puffing smoke, puffing smoke,” Parker said into the handset, not indicating the color. Ever since the VC started carrying smoke grenades and monitoring the PRC
-25 frequencies, the ground units never indicated what color smoke they were using.

“We have yellow, we have yellow,” came back from the chopper.

“Confirm yellow. Exfil site is green,” signifying no anticipated enemy ground fire.

Smoke billowed up toward the sky,
and then was forced down like a cloud by the downwash from the hovering UH-1. The chopper swung in, touching down in the clearing. As soon as they could reach the skids, Barron and Parker made their dash to the waiting Huey. With the men onboard, the UH-1 whirled around and climbed through the lush green canopy. Neither man said a word on the way back to the base camp. The loud thump of the rotors would have made it impossible to be heard anyway. Besides there wasn’t anything else left to say.

Later, Parker watched as Barron slammed his K
-Bar into Charlie Wingate’s now-abandoned bedroll. Each time the knife struck home, another rent appeared. Again and again Parker heard the K-Bar as Barron attempted to quell the smoldering rage within. Finally, it stopped–just as the fury had begun, without a whimper. Whoever called the shots that almost got them killed would someday be paid back in his own coin.

.   .   .   .   .   .

Two months later, Parker’s time was up. When he finally got out of the Army, Parker made a half-hearted attempt at finishing his engineering degree. He had completed two years of schooling before the Selective Service took a personal interest in his future, and he figured he’d complete the electrical engineering curriculum under the GI Bill. He enrolled in the same university he attended before the war. Two years later he collected his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

It was right after graduation that the nightmares began in earnest, ones in which he relived the death of his close friend Charlie Wingate. Vietnam created a churning anger in Parker’s gut that wouldn’t go away. He had seen and done too much, the effects of which tore at his subconscious during the day. At night his experiences took command. He thought that he had gotten over Charlie’s loss. Death wasn’t anything new to anyone who had seen combat duty in Vietnam. Yet somehow this was different. Logically, he knew that he should be able to cope with the loss. Psychologically, it was an entirely different story.

Parker had to do something to lift the burden from his shoulders, and he had only two options:  he could commit himself to the nearest Veterans Administration Hospital, a waste of time, or he could go to Maryland and find Charlie’s family. Maybe sharing the loss with someone who understood what he had gone through would help. He opted for the latter.

.   .   .   .   .   .

Bill Parker arrived at the Wingate estate two months after Joanna Wingate had died. When he heard that Charlie’s father had lost his wife, his first reaction was that he had picked a bad time to make the trip. The elder Wingate, however disagreed, making Parker feel very much at home. When Parker flatly refused to impose by staying in the mansion, Wingate pressed him to stay in one of the estate’s guesthouses.

While Parker rested up and recharged his emotional batteries, Wingate was busy running his countless companies. After dinner, the two men sat in the library talking about the war’s impact on the nation. Later Parker explained how he had come to grips with the trauma that was Vietnam. The two of them sat there, thousands of miles away from the where the action had taken place, and talked about the missions. They spoke of the men who came back, and those who didn’t. They talked of everything that was part of the Vietnam experience. What Wingate never saw through the eyes of his son, he witnessed through Parker’s.

It soon became obvious the relationship between the elder Wingate and the man Parker had known in Vietnam had been strained from childhood on. When the younger Wingate decided to serve his country, his father first refused to allow it. Later, when it was too late, Wingate all but disinherited him.

The old man would not tolerate one of his own going against his wishes in any way, much less in such a
n outspoken and public manner, which is exactly what Charlie did when he joined up. It was evident that Wingate had sufficient connections to prevent his son from being drafted, much less ever seeing combat. The younger Wingate, however, refused to allow his father to interfere with his future, even if that future involved a side-trip to Southeast Asia.

At first, Parker thought that Wingate wanted a better understanding of his son, to come to grips with his son’s death in a land so foreign and far away. But the older Wingate was a master at masking his emotions. It wasn’t until they had been meeting for some time that Parker sensed a slight emotional change in the older man. Parker first detected a frustration, and later anger, in the man who sat across from him every evening.

Their late-night discussions were not an attempt by Wingate to understand what had driven his son to serve overseas. Nor were they to break down any walls that might exist between Wingate and Parker; the man couldn’t care less about that.

Although the financier always managed to keep his emotions under control, Parker sensed his unspoken turmoil. Parker was never sure if Wingate ranted at the world for taking his only son, or railed at the boy’s stupidity in enlisting. He suspected the latter. Each night as Parker spoke of the horrors of Southeast Asia, Wingate sat there silently cursing his son.

Bill Parker wasn’t surprised when, after a few weeks, Wingate suggested that he stay on as a full-time security director for Wingate’s business far-flung interests. Parker didn’t want any handouts, but Wingate knew the combination of SOG experience coupled with Parker’s knowledge of electronics made the man a natural choice for the trusted role. It took some convincing, but finally Parker and Wingate came to terms.

All the while that he’d been a guest at the Wingate estate, the nightmares that had driven him to Maryland decreased both in frequency and intensity. The catharsis taking place in Wingate’s library was also helping Bill Parker.

CHAPTER 14

To Parker, the essence of a successful mission was
in the planning. As he made his way back to his quarters, a plan began to form in his head, and Parker headed straight for his basement workshop.

His electronics lab took up most of the space. By modern standards it wasn’t all that sophisticated, but then most of the stuff Parker worked on wasn’t sophisticated either. Two six-foot-long Masonite
-topped benches placed end-to-end made up the center of his workspace. His test equipment consisted of a couple of digital volt ohmmeters, a storage oscilloscope, and a signal generator. Two rows of supply shelves held the wide range of parts and components needed to keep the estate’s security and surveillance systems in top notch order.

Parker switched on the fluorescent lights over the workbench and began rummaging through a box of odds and ends. He had decided on a bomb, and an explosive device needed a rock solid detonator. Parker had just the right idea.

In front of him were a commercially available car alarm and the system’s remote pager. Minor surgery was, of course, in order.

First, Parker unscrewed the back of the alarm pager. Then he removed the transmitter’s cover. The pager was roughly three inches long by two inches wide and an inch deep–a model of tight packaging and miniaturization. The electronics revolution had affected virtually every area of consumer electronics. The largest component was the tiny battery that powered the receiver circuitry and the audible alarm.

He made a mental note to check its capacity. He didn’t want to use the device in such a critical application only to find out that the battery was shot. He placed the pager on the workbench and picked up the transmitter.

According to the instructions, the transmitter operated from the car’s battery and had an effective range of two to eight miles; plenty for what he had in mind. Since it connected directly to the car battery, it would always have a reliable source of power. Just to be safe, Parker planned to wire the transmitter so that it worked from its own battery or from the car’s.

Parker picked up the owner’s manual, and turned to the two page schematic layout of the transmitter circuitry. The alarm system worked in a very straightforward manner. When the alarm tripped, usually as a result of someone’s attempting to steal the protected vehicle, the transmitter sent out a coded digital signal on a dedicated frequency. The pager, tuned to the same frequency, decoded the signal and sounded the beeper.

Slowly, Parker began to trace the general flow of the schematic diagram, noting the power circuitry as well as the design of the circuitry that kept the transmitter on frequency. The manufacturer had used a crystal
-controlled oscillator to stabilize the transmitted frequency, which was a lot better than Parker had expected to find.

The crystal guaranteed that the transmitter would always be sending its signal out on the right frequency. He also took note of the tone generator circuitry that would create the unique tone sequence, the receipt of which would sound the remote pager.

Parker removed the battery from the pager unit. He then carefully cut the wires to the small audible alarm. With the beeper disconnected from the rest of the circuitry, he drilled a small hole in the side of the pager-receiver to mount a micro-miniature female jack.

He needed access to the two wires that originally connected the audible alarm to the rest of the receiver circuitry for another purpose. Parker located the small switch assembly that matched the receiver circuitry to the transmitter.

Under normal circumstances the user wouldn’t be concerned if by accident someone else was sending out the same coded signal, but for what Parker had in mind, that would be catastrophic. He took out a small screwdriver and selected a random five-digit binary code, pushing the small toggle switches on the plastic switch assembly until they matched the code he had chosen. Having set the pager-receiver’s code, he performed the same procedure on the transmitter. The two units were now in sync.

Parker picked up the paging receiver and located the small wire antenna wound inside the plastic case. He cut the wire, then soldered on a length of additional wire thereby increasing the range.

It was amazing that something so innocuous as a simple car alarm could parallel the capabilities of the Army Special Forces Radio Detonation Unit or RDU. Parker’s SOG team had used the RDU extensively in Vietnam. Of course the military version was waterproof, and this wasn’t. But the military spec unit also cost a hundred times more and was harder to acquire without anyone asking questions that Parker didn’t want to answer. Besides, he wouldn’t be using the system under water.

Before replacing the cover, Parker snipped the wires leading to the pager’s test switch. The switc
h sounded the audible alarm. Its purpose was to let the user know that the system worked. Since he planned to wire the pager to a detonator, he didn’t think it smart to leave the switch operational. It wouldn’t do to accidentally hit the switch after connecting the detonator.

With the pager modifications out of the way, Parker turned his attention to the transmitter. First he took a tw
elve-volt D-cell pack from his supply cabinet and wired its two terminals to the battery. If this battery failed, he could revert to the car’s electrical system for power.

For safety’s sake-his-he also wired in an on
-off switch between the positive lead going to the battery and the transmitter. Parker next found the two screw terminals on the transmitter that, when shorted together, caused the transmitter to send out its digitally encoded signal. To these he wired a second switch, this time, however, he used a push button switch. If all his modifications performed as expected, he had built a digitally encoded remote detonator with the proximate capabilities of the RDU.

Like anything else he wanted, Parker requisitioned explosives simply by providing Wingate with a list of whatever he needed, and he always made a point of keeping some C-4 on hand. He had become familiar with the explosive during his time in Vietnam, and was adept at using it. Parker stashed his
C-4 in the explosives shed with the dynamite and detonators used to remove tree stumps.

The explosive storage shed was located over a mile from the cluster of estate buildings. Wingate wanted to make sure that if the shed went up, none of the other buildings would be damaged. Parker took one of the golf carts that the staff used to get about, and drove out to the shed. From a special, locked chest, Parker selected a two-inch by three-inch piece of military-grade plastic explosive. He also removed one mil standard blasting cap. He locked the door behind him,
and then drove back to his workshop.

In spite of his considerable experience handling explosives, Parker’s attention remained riveted on the workbench and his device. Although it was too soon to introduce the blasting cap into the C
-4, Parker wired it to the male jack that he would later insert into the pager when he was ready to plant the bomb. All kinds of transmitters were in use on the estate. Given the special frequency and equally unique tones, it was unlikely that a random signal would detonate the bomb, but there was no sense in taking any chances. When he was ready to plant the device in Albright’s car, he need only plug the assembly with its blasting cap into the pager-receiver and he’d be ready to go.