Tucker's Last Stand (25 page)

Rufus: “Do you forget, Blackford? The Germans did not penetrate the Maginot Line in 1940. They went around it.”

“I remember that, Rufus. But Igloo White and Operation 34-A are less even than a Maginot Line. And the question becomes not so much, How many of them do we stop? as, How many of them get through? Right, Tucker?”

“You right, Black. You right. By 1944 we had command of the skies over Europe. But the German rockets got through. You sure as hell right about that.… But that doesn't mean they aren't in for one kick-ass surprise when Igloo White gets going. And at some point maybe, who knows, they got to worry about how many reserves are they going to use up. Wouldn't make much sense, would it, to fight to the last man? Till there are no North Vietnamese left?”

Blackford half-smiled—but there was not much humor in it. Rufus stood up. He had a lunch date with the ambassador. He would meet Blackford the following morning and together they would go to Danang to survey the situation there, and meet again here “the day after tomorrow. In forty-eight hours.” Spontaneously, both Blackford and Tucker looked down at their watches, as if to begin the forty-eight-hour countdown. They laughed. Rufus smiled, said good night, and left. Tucker walked into the little kitchen and Blackford heard his voice. “Any safe hootch in this-here safe house, Black?”

“The Agency has been known to look after creature comforts.” He walked aimlessly, patrolling the parlor. “Besides, how do we know—maybe tomorrow the safe house will set the scene for a seduction of a North Vietnamese lieutenant general?”

Blackford could hear Tucker opening and closing cabinets. “A
he
general?”

“No. A
she
general.”

“We got people in the Agency who can seduce a he general? I wouldn't mind meeting that lady. Ah! I found it! We got … scotch, looks like rye or something, gin … vodka, two-three bottles of wine. You liking?”

“Scotch. And a little water. Ice, of course. I'll get the ice.” He walked into the kitchen.

At lunch, around the corner at a little Chinese restaurant, Tucker was talking, relaxed. He sipped his coffee, noisily. Then he went silent for a time, staring at the table. When he looked up, he said, “Rufus ever discuss with you my past history?”

“Not specifically. I know, of course, about the whole Huk business. And I was there when General Taylor said you hadn't quite leveled with the Army when you filled out the forms. He said something about your work at … was it Los Alamos? But I don't know what you did there.”

“What I did there was to help to build the bomb, Black. In fact—I've never said this to anybody, but I suppose it's sitting there, in some notebook somewhere; I don't care if it is, but it's a fact—I hit on the way to trigger the bomb. That problem had held up the whole operation for over three months. It was just luck, but in fact the engineers went to work on my design. And then I guess this you don't know. I was there.”

“You were where?”

“Hiroshima.”

“What do you mean, you were there?
At
Hiroshima?”

“No no. I was on the
Enola Gay
. I was nursing our baby until we dropped it. Saw that all the dials were reading right.

“Then there were the big celebrations. You never saw
anybody
celebrate the way those physicists celebrated at Alamos. Looked like University of Texas football coaches the day they win the Conference, after upsetting Oklahoma. Made the crowd at Times Square look like a retirement home. Well, hell, they'd been working on it for two and a half years.

“I celebrated too. Then, beginning the next few days, the reports began coming in. And of course we had a clinical interest in what happened, like a doctor poking around human organs. That's what it was, really—an autopsy.”

He looked down into his coffee cup. “But they were all affected by it, and so was I—as the monks would say,
a fortiori
. A lot—because I was twenty years old, not forty, fifty, sixty. Then I started to read—I was stuck at Los Alamos, under Army orders; my military rank was corporal. I didn't have enough points to get out until December. So I read, and saw the literature on Hiroshima and Nagasaki begin to pile up, and after a time I saw myself as what I had been, a little cog, but who knows, maybe an important one, in a people-killing business out of all proportion to anything ever done before.”

“And?”

“And inside, I went gray—and panicked.”

Somebody had put a coin in the jukebox, and the machine blared out a sibilant Chinese melody that seemed to amble about without any musical narrative, although the noise was deafening. Blackford hoped it wouldn't abort Tucker's narrative. Finally, the music ended. Tucker picked himself up but spoke, at first, telegraphically.…

“Got out, finally, in December, went back to San Antonio, stayed with my mother, talked with Fr. Enrique, Mexican-American priest who sort of looked after me after my father was killed. Why not a monastery? he said. Why not. I tried that, was happy, really, but never was able to talk about Hiroshima, and nobody knew what I had done during the war. Only the abbot, and he talked to me only when I wanted to talk to him, and that was only twice. He told me that the atom bomb was, like everything else, God's design. That to condemn it out of sight was to lose moral perspective. Well, you know the arguments, there'd have been a million U.S. casualties if we'd had to land in Japan, that kind of thing. But even if that's so, it doesn't mean you want to work on the thing that killed a hundred thousand men and women and kids and scarred up as many more. I got involved with a woman, who later got involved with me, and I left the monastery and decided I'd look around myself, to find the perspectives. So I went back into the Army, this time as a simple soldier, and fought in Korea, killed plenty of people, including a couple with my bayonet. And then, in the Philippines, helped organize a lot of killing, though nothing on the scale of Hiroshima. I myself killed forty-one Huks one night—”

“I know about that. It got you the Medal of Honor.”

“Yeah, and when I heard the news I told the White House guy over the telephone that if there was any reference in the citation to Los Alamos, I'd walk out, I didn't care what Ike's reaction would be. I can understand necessary killing. I can understand Igloo White and 34-A; I'm no pacifist, God knows. The bomb is something else. If I have regained any perspective, it isn't quite the way the abbot had in mind. Before I'd use the bomb I'd surrender. Or maybe just kill myself.”

Blackford understood. He was familiar with the arguments, had run into people (including defecting Soviets) who took that position. He simply thought them—it—wrong.

Tucker watched Blackford's face. His colleague, his companion. He drank down his coffee. “Ever had any of the same problems?”

“No. Not about the bomb. But more and more I'm feeling them about … enterprises that don't work. Waste. I was involved in the Bay of Pigs. Result? Confirmed the loss of Cuba, several hundred men killed, more than that tortured. I know all about the need to take risks, but I am less patient with futile enterprises.”

“
Like this one
?”

Blackford was startled. He had reservations about the policies of the Johnson administration, but hadn't voiced them.

“I don't doubt that the policy of containment is the correct policy, though if it leaned to liberation, I'd like it better.”

“I didn't ask you that. I don't even say we couldn't keep it”—his pointed finger slashed his neck like a straight razor—“from happening, keep the North from taking over South Vietnam. But I'm wondering whether we
will
keep it from happening. Goldwater's not going to be our next President.”

Blackford said he'd just as soon not talk about it. “I haven't come to any conclusions on what you're going into, frankly. My rule has always been—based on the assumption that the gang up there probably knows more than I do—Do what you're told to do. Unless it's something you can't do and go on living with yourself, in which case you disobey orders, or you resign. In one case that happened to me. Only I didn't resign, I was canned.” He smiled. And, however briefly, he thought back on his decision, and on his friend, the Soviet physicist …

They talked more. Tucker spoke of the days, as a boy, when his mother worked overtime so that she could build his own little library, and about his tutor at St. Mary's, and about the time he tried to enlist when he was only sixteen.

“I was sixteen the day of Pearl Harbor,” Blackford commented.

“Sixteen the day of Pearl Harbor?” Tucker stood up, glass in hand. “Goddamn! We were born on
the same day
!” They drank to that, also.

Tucker asked about Blackford's youth, and so he told Tucker about the divorce, when he was fifteen, of his mother and father, about his father's life as an airplane gypsy, about his mother's remarriage to a titled Brit, about an unpleasant term at a strict boarding school in England, which he left just before Pearl Harbor, about completing school in Scarsdale and going from there to the Air Force (“Dad's contacts didn't exactly slow me down when when I applied for flight school”), about hot engagements with Nazi fighter planes in the winter of 1945 before he got sick, and about going to Yale after that, and meeting …

“Her name is Sally Partridge. Correction. Her name now is Sally Partridge Morales.”

“Married?… Happily?”

“Was—her husband is dead. The question now is: Will we get married when the Mexican mourning period is over. She wants me to quit the Agency.”

“Because it's inconvenient for her?”

“No—though it is that. More. She thinks the Agency is a kind of Strangelovish organization that's prolonging the Cold War.”

“God. I assume she has
other
virtues.” He chuckled.

Blackford raised his glass to his lips. “Yes. She is divine.”

“In that case, I'll drink to her,” Tucker said.

And then, after lowering his glass, “But you must join me in drinking to Lao Dai. I will be with her tonight at eleven, in a half hour. She's tutoring until then. You did find her … beautiful?”

“Very. And endearing.”

Tucker smiled happily as they got up, splitting the restaurant bill.

That night Tucker set out to persuade Lao Dai to take the next day off from her teaching. He had no official engagements until the day following. “All tomorrow, Friday, is free.” They could go on a tour in the late morning, after checking in at a suite he had reserved at the Caravelle. Maybe go up to Bien Hoa, fifteen miles north of Saigon, to a nifty restaurant he had heard about, run by the same French family that had started it before the war and somehow kept it going through the Japanese occupation and through the war against the French. Called Le Bon Laboureur, ever heard of it? Good!

Then, after lunch, maybe return for a little relaxation to the suite, where they could have a late dinner brought up.

Lao Dai promised to get permission for the day off.

The discreet waiter at the Caravelle lived up to Tucker's expectations. He served the late dinner expertly and disappeared. The champagne, the Biftek Calé de Paris, the Meringue Glacée, the Bordeaux. It was so very grand.

But then, suddenly, Lao Dai reached her hand up to her throat. She was trying to control herself. She did not succeed. The tears came from her eyes. And then the sobs, becoming almost hysterical. Tucker was feverishly concerned. He touched her lightly at first, something on the order of a there, there, now caress, but it didn't work. Desperate, he seized her in his strong arms and hugged her close to him. “Dear, darling Lao Dai” (he pronounced it “Laodai”), “you must tell me. Tell me the whole thing. Tell me
everything
, or I can't help you, my darling.”

Lao Dai tried to arrest her sobbing. She felt welling within her a desperate desire to tell the truth to this extraordinary American, so big and tender, so brainy and naïve.

She shouldn't, but she would.

“I told you a lie.”

“That's all right, my darling. Most people do.” Tucker put his big hand behind her neck. “What is it?”

“I told you my husband had been killed with the South Vietnamese Army in May. Well, that was a lie. But now he
has
been killed. Since I last saw you. And”—Lao Dai's voice evened out, and her tears stopped—“he did not die with our army. He died fighting with—the North.” Her eyes were now hers to control. She lowered her eyebrows, and then her head. “He—he was a sympathizer with Ho. And he deserted the—the ARVN troops, and went to the North, and joined the North Vietnamese. He wrote to me and told me. But there was nothing to be done. And then … I got the news, just three weeks ago. Killed in action.” She paused, and her eyes filled up again.

“He was such a lovely man. You would have liked him—I mean, the political problems, never mind them, you would have loved him, and he would have loved you.”

Tucker urged her to talk to him about her late husband, but soon, lying with her head on his lap, she was talking instead of the awful conflict that separated her countrymen. Tucker said that perhaps there would be an end to the conflict, but an end could only come when the North became convinced that its enterprise against the South would not prevail. “After all, that is what finally happened in Korea. I was there, you know that, Laodai. Finally, after 1953, the North Koreans discovered that—it wouldn't work. And when they realized
that
, they slowed down; and South Korea went its own way, and the North Koreans went their way. That's what's important, to persuade the North that it won't work.”

“But how is it possible, when they are all sworn to make ‘it' work?”

Tucker Montana paused, and then said that he was himself engaged in a project which, when fully realized, might in fact persuade the North that it was fruitless to pursue its aggression against the South.