Tucker's Last Stand (24 page)

“No. I doubt you'd have asked for mercy if you
had
been carrying out orders personally given to you by Ho Chi Minh.” He raised his cup and drank deeply, as did Le Duc Sy. “I mourn not your removal from the scene—the days and months and years ahead of us are too important to accommodate eccentric misbehavior. I might even say, Le Duc Sy, that what you did was a form of exhibitionism, taking on two U.S. destroyers and precipitating a diplomatic crisis.”

“Well, what about the North Vietnamese exhibitionists who did it on Tuesday?”

“There was no attack on Tuesday. That is all U.S. invention.”

“You are telling me we made no attacks against the American destroyers on Tuesday? You should know, Bui Tin, that friends who have visited me during the past forty-eight hours do not get
all
their news from Hanoi Radio. They also get it from BBC.”

“BBC has no reason to question the official American account.”

“Very well. But every time I think of those American hypocrites arming the enemy, interfering with commercial shipping without any thought given to their precious freedom of the seas, and then, on Sunday, attempting a physical invasion of Hon Me! If
only
I had hit one of those fuckers with one of those torpedoes and seen their ship go gurgling down! Ah, let's drink to that!”

Bui Tin raised his cup. “We drink to your last drink, Le Duc Sy.” The guards were at the door.

Bui Tin heard the fusillade while sitting at his desk. He closed his eyes for the briefest moment. Then he leaned over and took from his briefcase the letter his late comrade had written to Lao Dai. He could not send it unexamined, and it even crossed his mind that it was surprising that Le Duc Sy thought he would do so. He opened the envelope after exposing it to the steam escaping from the teakettle. He read quickly the opening paragraphs, which were professions of great, ardent, perpetual love. And then:

“My darling, you must know that tomorrow morning I leave on a very hazardous expedition. It is always just possible that I shan't return. If that should be, communications from me will end. If so, remember that you can memorialize me only by making every effort to advance the great cause of independence, even as I am doing. With all my love, my darling Lao Dai.”

Bui Tin picked up the telephone.

“Get me Colonel Giap … Giap? Bui Tin. I wish to read you from the letter written by Le Duc Sy to Lao Dai.”

After he had read the passage he said to him, “He was reckless and he paid a price. But he was truly loyal. In a few days you will—of course—inform Lao Dai that Le Duc Sy died an honorable death for his country?”

“Of course, Bui Tin.”

Senator Goldwater was always faintly amused by intrigue no matter how serious the matters dealt with. Now it was a new communication from General X, one that had not come in the customary way. First, the telephone had rung. As usual, the telephone request came to be put through to Bill Baroody. But then General X had said to Baroody that he would be sending a personal communication by messenger which must go directly to Senator Goldwater. Baroody asked how the envelope would be identified. It would be on writing paper of Washington's Hay-Adams Hotel. Baroody told the receptionist at headquarters that a messenger coming in with a personal envelope to the senator on Hay-Adams stationery was to be sent up to the inner sanctum.

Now he took the letter into the office next door, where Senator Goldwater was struggling to adjust the digital recall mechanism on a ham radio set. Baroody handed him the envelope. “General X. Says only for you.” Goldwater sat down, opened the envelope, and read the letter silently. He handed it to Baroody and went back to his radio set. Baroody read it:

Dear Senator:

The passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution means, as far as I am concerned, that the United States is at war with North Vietnam, never mind the waffle. Anything the President now does is authorized de jure, authorized by Congress, and what he decides to do is wholly his responsibility. But since I believe that we are at war I can no longer take a political view of my responsibilities. He is now my Commander in Chief
in wartime
. Accordingly, with continuing high regard, I close my final communication to you. With all good wishes,

X.

“Eggs says we're at war, Bill.” The Senator was bent over, observing the effects on the panel of his switching the toggle up front with his right hand.

“Are we, Barry? You ought to know. You voted in favor of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.”

“Yup,” Goldwater said. “We're at war. But Lyndon's not going to make any big moves before the election. And I'm not sure he's going to make any decisive moves
after
November. We'll have to lay relatively low on the Vietnam issue from now on. Don't, really, have much choice.” For once he didn't end a sentence directed at his chief brain truster with the interrogatory, “Don't you think so?” Baroody made this unnecessary:

“Yes, I agree. We're at war—and maybe at a standstill.”

BOOK 2

24

September 10, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

It was in early September that Blackford, Rufus, and Tucker next met in Saigon. The political scene had considerably changed since what now went in the military-diplomatic trade by the name of Tonkin 2, distinguishing the events of August 4, which brought on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, from the patrol boat raid of August 2. Although President Johnson's retaliatory bombing of the installations at Quang Khe hadn't been followed up by more U.S. bombing, there were plentiful signs of accelerated military activity. Most conspicuous was the construction of a massive air base near Saigon. And the Thai jets that under the guidance of the CIA had been furtively harassing illegal traffic from the North down the Ho Chi Minh Trail were now regularly foraging for targets along the Trail, and here and there engaging in direct strikes. These were not greatly productive, granted, given the route's natural camouflage.

Camouflage
. That, Tucker Montana, hard at work outside Savannakhet, would hope soon to penetrate, after Operation Igloo White was operative. At Nakhon Phanom the great old barnlike building originally commissioned by the French was being reconstructed by a heavy concentration of U.S. soldiers operating with the engineering corps. A moving-picture camera recording the day-to-day activity in the area of the big square building would have caught an occasional Asiatic face, but mostly it was sweat-soaked young Americans carrying materiel into the barn while others furnished new roofing and labored to beef up the structure. A candid movie of the events would have suggested a great army enterprise going on during the summer in swampy country in Louisiana or Florida.

Tucker Montana unbuttoned a second button on his shirt and rolled its sleeves high on his arm. He was eager to talk about Igloo.

It was the first time the three had met since Tonkin 2, the historic Tonkin raid against two U.S. destroyers. Conducted by one heavily camouflaged Stiletto 26-footer manufactured by the Sea Ray Company in Florida capable, with its 350-horsepower Mercury, of traveling 45–50 knots.

“I got to say,” Tucker laughed heartily, “when I read that the destroyers had ‘seen'—‘felt'—‘heard'—‘experienced'?—I forget all the words they used—
twenty-two
torpedoes, I thought, Oh God, Black and that Frenchman are overdoing it! Course, the next day that twenty-two torpedoes they spotted was down to twelve, and then down to four; don't know where it is right now—one attack by a water-skier? Damn, but those sonar-delusion containers did a nice job! Kind of sorry we don't have any more use for those babies; I'm kind of proud of the way they were designed, what you say, Rufus? And I
knew
that conventional mobile amplifier would do the job on the sonars; you weren't all that sure, now, were you, Blackford?”

“
Gentlemen
.”

Rufus did not approve of talk about the mechanics of operations that had been consummated. It was hardly a question of security. They were in a Saigon safe house, and all three of them had been intimately engaged in the operation, and one of them executed it. It was habit.
Habit! habit! habit
! Blackford had once complained; but he was younger then, and now he knew that training the instinct, the reflex, even—the cultivating of correct
habits
was a part of what Alphonse Juilland called “intelligence practices.” And the habit of not discussing, even among confederates, a deep covert operation once it had been accomplished was one of those habits intelligence agents were supposed to get into, as if ignoring a covert operation heightened the chances that the enemy would also ignore it. Blackford permitted himself to dwell on the irony that the “enemy,” in this case, was the Congress of the United States. The gooks knew
they
hadn't done whatever it was that had been done.…

Blackford softened the apparent reproach by reminding Tucker that he had only been conscripted into formal intelligence duty in June, “just three months ago.”

“Yup. Before that I was just a soldier of fortune, Black.”

Rufus said nothing about this soldier of fortune's basic training, building the atom bomb.

They spoke of scheduling, and of the nature and function of several innovative devices being constructed. In the Gulf, 34-A was now, of course, an open operation, and such camouflage as Blackford directed be used was for the purpose of foiling only North Vietnamese artillery, not of fooling the AP or Reuters. The little armed “fishing boats,” closely backed by the Seventh Fleet, were on day and night war alert. Rufus summed it up: “There is no difference between how the 34-A-equipped boats are behaving at sea right now and how they would behave at sea if we were in an official shooting war. Scrupulous attention paid to territorial boundaries is a concern of the past. The trouble is, the Viets—our Viets—know that however much of the contraband they succeed in stopping at sea, the stuff is getting through.” He looked at Tucker. “Coming in your side door, isn't it?”

“Yup. And there's nothing much we can do about it, unless the President orders a few U.S. divisions to come on in and take those passes and hold them down. No, nothing we can do about it until those Spikebuoys come in and get set up—the sensors, the acoustic numbers. I've already got most of the preliminary model computers set up, and I got an aide who is lining up analysts and rapid-fire interpreters—not all that easy to get, Vietnamese–English. He's having to settle, for the time being, for a couple of shifts of Vietnamese-to-French-to-English. See, two interpreters listen to the radio voices, the gook puts it quickly into French, the second guy, American, puts it into English.

“My goal is”—dramatically, Tucker pulled a stopwatch from his pocket, depressing the lever with a highly exaggerated arm motion, like the starter at an automobile race—“my goal is
three minutes, thirty seconds
from the time the guy
says it
, to the time the pilot gets his instructions.

“The NVA guy, on the Trail, says to the soldiers sitting down eating their lunch, ‘Get moving, assholes'”—he looked up at Rufus. “Sorry, Rufus. The NVA officer says, ‘Come on, gang, wiggle your tail: We got thirty trucks need getting down before dark.'

“That's translated into French in forty seconds …

“Into English in forty seconds …

“Typed, thirty seconds.

“Operations officer reads it, decides affirmative for action required, forty-five seconds.

“Gives estimated location of the caravan.

“Sees on the screen which sensor was activated when the message was recorded, forty seconds.

“Radios Air Control target and location.

“Air Control checks location against placement of aircraft, and either gives the attack order to one that's orbiting in the area, or else zips the signal to a bomber pilot on the ready.

“Five minutes, maybe?

“
No
, Montana, not five minutes—
three minutes, thirty seconds
. Or, you just pick up the sound of trucks going by and the sensors pick up those sounds and the calculations begin: How fast are they traveling? In which direction? How long will it take before they reach Point A? Zap!—They're hit by our planes!”

Tucker Montana looked up triumphantly. “That's what Igloo's going to look like. It will be a few months before it's operational but only a couple of weeks before we test out here the essential parts. We'll have a few dozen each of the ground-piercing and parachute units, drop them, spread them about in a tight area, get a couple of planes up there, connect up with the computers. Igloo White in miniature.”

Tucker was exuberant. The whole of his six-foot-one-inch frame seemed to tremble with excitement. He fondled technological terms and used acronyms to the point of eluding Rufus's understanding; even Blackford, an engineer by training, was sometimes left behind. Neither interrupted Tucker even as he dug deeper and deeper into the bowels of the paraphernalia of Igloo White. Strange. Suddenly Blackford understood. He was listening to a soliloquy. Tucker Montana was letting out in a torrential stream what for so many years he had suppressed. It was a fire storm of technical and inventive ingenuity. An opera singer finally recovered from lung cancer, singing in a shower.

Suddenly he stopped. A little embarrassed, Tucker asked, “Did I go on too long on this?”

Rufus replied, “Tucker, I can say only two things. One: You did not go on too long; and two: I did not follow everything you said. But then it isn't so very important that I should know how it is all going to work. It is only important that I know that it will work. And you have certainly convinced me that you are confident on this point.”

Tucker turned. “How 'bout you, Black? Follow me?”

“Mostly,” Blackford said. “Though I worry. What I'm up to in the Gulf, combined with what you're up to on the Trail. Doesn't it remind you of the Maginot Line?”