Tucker's Last Stand (30 page)

They boarded the boat, the sailors were frisked, and a conventional search began. With his Polaroid print in hand the technician, followed by Blackford and Alphonse, went through the boat stem to stern, attempting to match metal objects they saw with corresponding spots on the facsimile screen. The anchor was definitely there as a bulbous dot, so was a large barrel used for scraping the fish, so was the engine, and here and there little dots, some of which did not appear to correspond to anything.

“What if the bad stuff was parked right alongside the engine?” Blackford asked.

The technician shrugged his shoulders. “No way our little scanner could help you out there. Where it's useful is in finding the big, bulky items. Fifty crates of hand grenades. A hundred rifles. Twenty bazookas. That kind of thing.”

The
Mai Tai
spent the balance of a hot and windless day going from junk to junk, the technician making his notes, conducting his searches and consulting with Blackford. They boarded twenty-one vessels, which meant that they did not board another twenty-one, for lack of time. And the question before the house was: Would Operation 34-A be more effective scanning all forty-two with the new devices and boarding only those with a suspicious density of dots or an eye-catching configuration? Sweating heavily from the heat, Blackford, Alphonse, and the American technician walked off the
Mai Tai
, having informed the captain they would go out again the following day and look out only for much more suspicious cargo. Blackford agreed with the technician that the day's run had been inconclusive, but instructive. He would report the results to Rufus, and meet the
Mai Tai
at seven in the morning. Blackford said good night to Juilland and walked the few blocks to his BOQ, grateful for the rise of an onshore wind. There he showered, dressed, and soon arrived five minutes early at the little restaurant. Rufus was exactly on time, of course.

They sat outdoors, at the seaward corner of the second-story veranda, well insulated for private conversation conducted in a low tone of voice. The waitress took their order, iced tea for Rufus, an icy beer for Blackford.

Blackford told him about the ambiguous day aboard
Mai Tai
. He gave him every detail, let him ponder every question. “I know they checked the machine out with various kinds of shipping off the coast of Maryland, but I can see that it isn't easy to duplicate the traffic in junks we got out here. Tomorrow, limiting our boarding to suspicious ships, we can probably scan three or four times the number we did today.”

Rufus nodded. “Yes, we will need more substantial sampling before we equip the entire patrol fleet with the scanner. Let's see what happens tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Blackford said, draining his glass of beer in a swallow and signaling for another one. He knew what Rufus was saying: That is the end of our conversation on that subject. We can move to another.

Blackford said, “Any news?”

“The Warren Commission filed its report. The investigation concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself.”

“You go along?”

“I haven't read the report. I am not surprised by its findings. There was no mention of Oswald's visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico.”

“Why didn't … we give them that?”

“The decision was made.”

Blackford laughed, pulling out the front of his shirt to receive the evening breeze. “You kill me, Rufus. You're the damnedest combination. The no-questions-asked, that's-none-of-my-business Rufus, your eyes trained on duty. And yet if there is a moral breeze in the air, I can feel you rustling.”

Rufus did not enjoy personal references, and few of his associates would have ventured to make any. But he permitted himself a smile.

And then, out of the blue, he said, “Do you know, Blackford, our friend Tucker is not very bright. He is something of a genius, but not, no, not very bright.”

Blackford was taken aback. Instinctively he was defensive about his friend—while wondering whether, in their association, he had missed something Rufus hadn't. He found himself forcing a retrospective review of all that he had seen and heard from Tucker during the past weeks, begining when they had met to survey the Trail. Meanwhile:

“What do you mean, Rufus? We're talking about a guy who—I mean, just look at the whole Igloo enterprise—”

“I am not talking about his gifts. I am talking about his judgment.”

Blackford thought hard. True, Tucker's fixation with Hiroshima clouded his political judgments—that certainly was so. And, clearly, Tucker was not in sufficient control of his libido, though Blackford, who considered himself “bright,” acknowledged that in making that judgment, he was living in a glass house. Though Blackford hadn't, in fact, let his romance affect his political judgment.… Surely if he'd done so, Sally would long ago have been his wife.…

Rufus continued. “I have looked very closely into his background, only the general outline of which you are familiar with, I think. When we took him on, we had
only
an outline. His role in Los Alamos turns out to have been much more than merely that of an assistant physicist. Did you know that?”

“Yes. He told me. Just two weeks ago.”

“In fact at one stage of the bomb's development Tucker's contribution was evidently critical. It is entirely probable that the bomb would have been delayed weeks, conceivably even months or more if it hadn't been for a breakthrough of his. You also did not know this: he was on board the
Enola Gay
—”

“Yes, he told me that too.”

“And after returning from that mission, after a month or two, he had a nervous breakdown. He was discharged, and went into a Benedictine monastery in Rhode Island. Did he tell you that as well?”

“Not quite so—nakedly.”

“And then—” Rufus did his half-smile.

“And then?” Blackford asked, gravely.

“The priapic daemon. Our friend is a highly developed—highly obsessed—satyr. It began—at least, I suppose it began, there being no record of his romancing while at Los Alamos—not easy to do, at Los Alamos—at the monastery. Before Alamos he was at the University of Texas, working around the clock. But his stay in the monastery was aborted by—”

“A lady?”

“A woman. He left and took a job as a Spanish teacher in a boys' school in Massachusetts, and seduced the French teacher. He was dismissed—in those days, such behavior was thought incorrect”—Blackford noticed that Rufus was not at this exact moment looking Blackford directly in the eye—“and we next found him back in Texas. El Paso, where he lived with a rich Mexican socialite until Don Husband came in one day with a loaded pistol. He missed. Tucker joined—rejoined, actually—the Army. Personnel, for some reason, never came up with the record of his previous service at Los Alamos, which for reasons having to do, I suppose, with the Hiroshima pathology he had intentionally concealed. He was sent to Fort Benning, got a commission in the infantry, and found himself in Korea, where he seemed to have no psychological problem at all engaging in combat. He won a Silver Star. And then there was the business in the Philippines, which you know about, and the Medal of Honor. I did tell you about the forty-one Huks he overwhelmed?—Yes. He was frequently absent without leave, always because of a … romance. But when General Lansdale was consulted about someone to go with you on the Trail, he said he had just the right man, named Montana. Then there was that odd business, his suddenly coming up with that dazzling concatenation of—Well, he is the godfather of Igloo.”

“What makes you conclude—what you began by saying?”

“That he's not very bright? Observation, my dear Holmes.”

“You mean the business of his girlfriend in Saigon? Lao Dai?”

“In part. At first I thought that his rushing off to see her so often was simply the priapic imperative at work, his—”

“Phallus?”

“—Yes, taking over from his brain, one more time.”

“It's more than that. He is genuinely nuts about her.”

“Yes. Understandably so, I gather from you. But no, it is his—naïveté I had in mind.”

“You worried?”

“Yes. Lao Dai is an agent of the North Vietnamese. She has done steady work for them for several years. I have been checking her out since she first came into view. It was confirmed today who she takes orders from.”

“Oh
God
! You going to tell him today? Tomorrow?”

“No, not wise at this point. I can't imagine he would give Lao Dai details of Igloo. But we are having him followed. Also the girl. The woman.”

“We doing it?”

“No. Colonel Yen. But he is reporting only to me. And now, Blackford, you will need to … observe him very carefully. He has a way, both of us have noticed—you have noticed it, I must assume—of talking very frankly about what is on his mind. And often in a contradictory way. Last week he was dizzy with delight over the Spikebuoy and the whole Igloo operation. In more recent conversations he was almost unintelligible, talking, rather distractedly, about the whole operation, wondering whether, in trying to block those choke points—the two passes—we weren't engaged, in fact, in maneuvering in such a way as to
require
the intervention of the Chinese army. He is now invoking the Korean parallel. There, we were fighting the North Koreans—and suddenly we were fighting the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists.…”

“I'm not all that sure that point is all that dumb, Rufus.”

Rufus looked at Blackford intently. “The larger geopolitical question is not our
professional
concern, Blackford. Granted, we're never going to extrude from our own pessimistic strategic analysis factors that bear on our Indochinese operation. But we aren't here to write foreign policy. This is done, well and badly, in Washington. I think it is, currently, being done badly, as I expect you think it is being done badly. But we are here to apply our professional skills to the problem at hand
as defined in Washington
. And we face a problem.”

Blackford found his mind fidgeting. He said nothing, and Rufus was silent.

“Any ideas?”

Blackford shook his head. “I'm not sure I see the point in not telling him what you know about Lao Dai.”

“I was on the phone an hour with the Director on that point. The decision was his, and I understand it. What it comes down to is that Tucker is absolutely essential for about eight weeks more on Igloo White. He sizes up the situation as dangerous if I barge in and shatter him about Lao Dai.”

“Thinks he'd quit?”

“Maybe, but also we have to weigh it that, given the record, he might have another nervous breakdown. He also figures the North Vietnamese are going to know pretty soon what it is we're up to and it wouldn't make all that much difference if they found out a day or two earlier. But it would make a great difference if Tucker Montana were not here to stitch the operation together.”

Blackford leaned back in his chair. “You know something, Rufus, even though I think you're right, that Tucker isn't sophisticated politically, we mustn't ever let ourselves think that he's—dumb. Or—” Rufus began to say something, but Blackford said, “—Or, that he doesn't have some pretty deep insights.”

“You mean, on our risking a nuclear war by being out here?”

“No. Not so much that. But on his occasionally wondering whether we're getting anywhere, or how much we are risking and how much we might be paying eventually trying to get somewhere.”

“Do you think we are getting anywhere, Black?”

“No, Rufus. I don't. And I'd bet three stripes of Old Glory that, strapped down on a polygraph, you'd give the same answer.”

Rufus rose. “Time to go, Blackford. A lot to do.”

31

November 1, 1964

Bien Hoa, South Vietnam

At first, when reached by phone at BOQ Danang, Blackford, in his deepening gloom, tried to beg off. But Tucker was so enthusiastic about the idea, he pressed Blackford. The three of them—Blackford, Lao Dai, and Tucker—would drive to Bien Hoa for lunch at his favorite restaurant. “After all, you've got to come in to Saigon for our five o'clock meeting with Rufus. Just come on a morning flight instead of the afternoon flight.”

Blackford quickly reflected and said yes, he would enjoy such an excursion hugely, he would have the pleasure of seeing Lao Dai again and after all, Bien Hoa was only 12 miles away so they could easily be back for whatever Rufus had for them on the agenda that afternoon in Saigon.

“How're things going?” Blackford was more experienced than Tucker in the Aesopian mode by which intelligence agents speak to each other over the telephone, but Tucker managed, haltingly. “They're slow, the … construction workers. But the, er, machinery, you know, the
agricultural
machinery that—that does all those wonderful combinations?—that is going
very
well,
extremely
well. Am very anxious to talk to you about it. And on your front?”

“That new … razor's going to work out just fine, I think. Shaves you real clean. Knows just about as close as it needs to know where the beard is. Very intelligent little razor.”

“Good, good. Well, you're a bright, sharp li'l ol' razor yourself, Black-o. I'll see you on Wednesday, five o'clock, usual place. I mean, not the usual place. The new place. So long, Black.”

“So long.”

Tucker extended the lunch invitation for the following day to Rufus. Rufus replied that he had another engagement, that he was very sorry, and if the 4:15 he had in mind for their meeting the next day was too early, it would not inconvenience him to move the hour to 5:15, since the agenda as of this moment was not crowded. “No sweat, Rufus,” Tucker said, to a man who had never visibly sweated in his life. “We can be back easily by four.”