Tucker's Last Stand (11 page)

“Now, I don't see any argument against taking that technology and adapting it to our problem—”

“What kind of a sound or vibration is made by men making their way over a trail?”

“Hold it, Abe! Hold that for a minute. What do we know in 1964 that we didn't know twenty years ago? Well,
we have computers
, and they will do the triangulation work for you in maybe one second. But we also have acoustic devices that are a hundred times as sensitive as the Sonobuoy's. Human voices, yes, and not only the buzz and hum of human voices: what they are actually
saying
.

“We want sound,” he said reflectively, “and we want sound waves. We need to build a version of the Sonobuoy—an acoustical buoy, ‘Acoubuoy,' if you like—that will come down all over those two passes and will transmit—sound. The actual noises will include conversations by NVA foot soldiers, though that would be incidental. Primarily the aim is sounds of vehicles, and our ability to particularize will tell us whether we're dealing with jeeps or trucks or tanks. Now, those signals could go up to orbiting aircraft and be relayed to our proposed facility at Nakhon Phanom. Over there we would need analysts to sort out what the noises all mean. If they add up to an opportunity for aerial attack, we shoot that information over to the airfield, or to the reconn planes.

“Now, if Rufus is right—that we aren't going to be allowed to use our stuff to drop down on these gentlemen—we might as well go home. But we do have the technology to take those two passes and convert them into electronic highways. Wherever we have Acoubuoys we would see their registrations on a huge situation display—to light up the locations where the sound is being picked up. And the instrumentation in those sensors”—Blackford was staring at Tucker Montana in amazement; he had heard nothing before from him that suggested he had any background in science—“shouldn't have any problem in giving out signals that will show up in different colors on our screen, depending on whether it's infantrymen or tanks, jeeps, trucks, whatever. And then we send out the right kind of signal to the right kind of airplane, which drops the right kind of stuff in the right place.”

“How would you get those sensors where you want them?” Strauss asked.

“You'd drop them from airplanes or helicopters. And they can be dropped in daylight—at least they can do that up until the NVA sets up radar and antiaircraft stuff, which can't be long delayed, Black and I figure.”

He took the second page from his scratch pad and fastened it alongside the first. “Here is my idea of a cross section of a revised Sonobuoy. I call it, for the hell of it, a Spikebuoy. You need to protect the delicate acoustic and seismic sensor from the impact of striking the ground. I calculate,” he pointed at the second drawing, “a 2.5-foot average penetration, with the sensor then sitting, camouflaged, right on the ground with its little antenna. Now, keeping equipment from being destroyed after a drop is something the parachute people have been working on for years. Our Spikebuoys should be of two kinds. One would come down by parachute and hang from the upper branches of trees where they'd be hard to notice. But most of them we'd want to come right down near and parallel to the Trail. Impact could be absorbed by collapsible cushioning elements in the Spikebuoy. What the paratroop guys do is make adjustments that depend on the weight of the object and the distribution of that weight. They spread about collapsible material which, on impact, itself crushes, absorbing the impact energy. It's very carefully done, so that the force of the crash is almost entirely absorbed by the collapse of the cushioning layers, which are variously tiered.

“So that work has been done, and done well after the war. It was done, interestingly enough, under the guidance of a foundation sustained by people—family, sons—who mourned a race car driver who died because his crash helmet didn't protect him. Safety helmets lined with sponge rubber are deadly. What happens is the foam collapses under impact, allowing the strike force to hit the head or even to transmit right through the collapsed rubber a jolt that reaches the head and then—the rubber having absorbed the incoming energy—release it back as the outside force disappears. The rubber then kicks back in the opposite direction and delivers a whiplash blow that, at the right frequencies, can create a bad nerve-tissue problem.”

“You are talking about helmets already developed?” Rufus wanted to know.

“Oh yes. The helmet that works we can borrow from, borrow the basic design to shield a Spikebuoy. It's lined with a rigid but collapsible foam which, on taking an incoming blow, absorbs the energy by collapsing its own rigid structure. The structure, now disintegrated, can't deliver the energy backward. The force is dead.

“It takes careful engineering, but that's what created the Snell Foundation–approved safety helmet.”

“Wouldn't that suggest the need of a very large circumference in the Spikebuoy?” Blackford asked.

“Good question. Depends on the weight. But the weight of the sensors is always diminishing, just as the size of the batteries is down to about one tenth of what it used to be. The Spikebuoy could have just that amount of protection it needs. We could very quickly establish how much. An aspect of how high off the ground the plane is when it's dropped, among other factors. With a few thousand of those peppering those passes, on the ground, on trees and vines, and replenished every month or so—that's how long the batteries would last—and besides, we'd be blowing them up along with the stuff in between them—we'd have a pretty good chance, seems to me, to find the best places to block that Trail …” he paused, for the first time “… without senseless, random bombing.”

There was silence for a minute. Colonel Strauss spoke: “You believe you could design the Spikebuoy, and also the other receiver—the acoustic buoy that would transmit sounds of Trail activity and yield exact targets to appropriate receiving stations?”

Tucker Montana said, “Give me a lab and a few assistants who speak science, and the answer is, sure. Only thing I'd need to brush up on is the size and weight of components and the latest computer capabilities. And I'd need to know something about our aircraft and aerial ordnance capabilities as they stand these days, to recommend the right kind of airplane—that kind of thing. It can't be done overnight. But there just isn't any problem about designing something. We got to design it, then we got to manufacture it, then we got to build up that Nakhon place, then we get some sound analysts, then we get permission from Lyndon Johnson or from God or whoever is in charge to use the Spikes, preferably before the South is inundated with the stuff that's going down that crazy Trail. Blackford and I saw enough of it getting by as it is. Unless we block them, that's only the beginning.”

Rufus spoke slowly. “Gentlemen, I have reflected on what Tucker has said and on our other conversations. We must meet very soon again. But in Washington. Blackford will arrange the details and inform you of flight schedules. We should try to leave on the eleven
P.M.
flight to Honolulu.” He looked over at Blackford, who nodded.

Tucker spoke. “Gee, Rufus, sorry, but not tonight for me. Just plain can't. Absolutely unbreakable engagement, a matter of personal honor.” He looked up at Blackford. “Make my flight tomorrow, okay?”

Blackford nodded. And suppressed a smile. He'd as likely have denied a request by Thomas Alva Edison.

Riding in the Army sedan with Rufus, Blackford turned to him. “Why in the hell wasn't I told about that guy's background?”

“For the very good reason that I knew nothing about it. Special Forces sent him over to us as an expert fieldman with an antiterrorist background.”

“I'm surprised our friend Tucker hasn't invented a bomb that aims only at terrorists.”

“Or a bomb that eliminates dumb personnel in Special Forces who send Wernher von Braun types out to the field to do guard duty.” Rufus was annoyed. Blackford wondered: Was Rufus
angry
? Could that ever happen to a man so professional?

Only, Blackford, concluded, when provoked by highly unprofessional behavior. He knew that not much time would go by before Rufus had the full biography of Major Tucker Montana.

11

July 9, 1964

Mexico City

Tucker Montana caught up with Rufus and Blackford in Hawaii, where Rufus spent a day in consultation with CINCPAC, the Commander in Chief, Pacific. In conversations with Washington, Rufus established that the officials critical to a decisive meeting on the proposed operation could not assemble until ten days later. He would use that period to explore and refine Tucker's proposals. And he was now free to yield to Blackford's request for a week's vacation.

In San Francisco, Rufus and Tucker caught the connecting flight to Washington. Blackford flew south to Los Angeles, changing there for a flight to Mexico City.

Why didn't Compañía Mexicana de Aviación offer their tourist-class passengers Mexican food? He'd have exchanged the entire menu—tasteless shrimp, mystery meat, mashed potatoes, unclassified beans, the kind of pudding that reminded him of Greyburn, his old school in England—for one hot enchilada, one tamale, a half-dozen tortillas. Never mind, he would make up for it in Mexico, though it is hard, he had discovered, to find good Mexican food in the city of Mexico—at least hard to find it in restaurants where you'd want to eat.

After the events of the past year, he had thought so much about their next encounter that he decided finally he would not speculate any further on how it would be, exactly, to see Sally again, for the first time since she had been married. They had, after all, always tended to extemporaneity with each other; yes, ever since that crazy afternoon at the college fraternity cocktail party when they had first met. He (in the Air Corps books a senior), a minor hero (he had knocked down three Messerschmitts in hand-to-hand encounters), studying—and playing—in a large undergraduate class that had a dozen such heroes, uniformly unrecognized as such. She, a graduate student, stunning, smart, scholarly, and in no particular need of young heroes. She outshone him, he remembered, in every way that mattered. And when, on the fateful night only ten days after their first meeting, lying together, she had told him in the matter-of-fact tones she used in describing her academic work that he was the most beautiful young man she had ever laid eyes on, he remembered what she had said more because it amused him than because it appealed to his vanity: his vague, outspoken, irrepressible mother had repeatedly embarrassed him in public with such references to him (“Oh, my beautiful Blacky!”) ever since he was fourteen years old. Theirs had been a volatile romance, but Blackford had never doubted that in the truly providential sense of it they were meant for each other, and when she suddenly married Antonio a year earlier, he had known what it meant to go about, for weeks on end, with an empty heart.

In due course he came to know the works of Jane Austen, of necessity, that author being Sally's specialty, and he had to remind himself that what had happened to him that afternoon after the football game was not insane or unique: it happened several times in Miss Austen's six novels, genuine struck-dead, love-at-first-sight situations. Sally was slightly withdrawn, indomitably independent in spirit, dazzling to look at if you began by discarding as irrelevant most of the competition in icons of the day—she didn't look like Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. In fact, she didn't look like anybody else, and every now and then he wondered whether he alone found her so beautiful, and then one day he asked the question, rather shyly, of his closest friend, Anthony Trust, who had answered: “Is Sally beautiful? Is Mona Lisa beautiful? Is Venice beautiful? Is that Grecian Urn beautiful that Keats wrote about? What's the matter—Ah! You are thinking maybe of Doucette? She was very beautiful too. I wonder what she looked like with clothes on.”

Blackford had smiled at this reference to a joint “date” Anthony had engineered in Paris with two quite unusual ladies of the night. Blackford had had numerous engagements in the sportive mode during the fifteen years since he had met Sally. In an unconcentrated sort of way he vaguely disapproved of his own casual sexual behavior, but excused himself on the grounds that Sally had put off a wedding date, pending the completion of her dissertation; and then it was he who had (twice) put off fixing a date because he had been preoccupied with two successive time-consuming appointments for the Agency, the result of all of which had been frequent separations over extended periods of time. And then there was the summer when they were both in Washington and it was the season of her maximum irritability, the locus of which was Blackford's continuing service in the Agency, which, more or less flippantly, she held responsible for the prolongation of the Cold War. He remembered one expression of it.

“Darling,” she had said, “do you agree with the sociological generality that people tend to be very anxious about holding on to their jobs?”

“Of course I do—is this the right turn?” They were headed for a little inn they visited from time to time in Virginia, where they were always welcomed as Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes, “the handsomest young couple in the state,” the old lady behind the desk would beam.

“No. Next one. Well, wouldn't it then be fair to say that people who work in the … Agency” (she always went along, if a little playfully, with the protocol never to refer to the CIA as the CIA. She flatly declined to refer to it as the “firm,” never mind that it had become quite universal, but went along with “the Agency”) “would be out of a job if the Cold War ended?”

“Yes, sure. And doctors would be out of a job if illness ended.”

“You know,” she said in quick exasperation, “you are
always
doing that kind of thing when we talk about these subjects, just sheer outrageous point evasion. When you study engineering, I forget, do you have to take a course in logic? Obviously if you did, you failed it. So let me just say, Blackford—yes, that's the right one. Turn and go about two miles, it's on the left—that illness is a part of the human condition; the Cold War isn't.”