The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel Page 3

  “Lieutenant Converse,” said a sailor by the open wardroom door.

  “Yes?”

  “The captain requests your presence in his quarters, sir.”

  The invitation was so nicely phrased, mused Joel, as he got out of his chair, acknowledging the somber looks of those around the table. The request was expected, but unwelcome. The promotion was an honor he would willingly forgo. It was not that he held longevity or seniority or even age over his fellow pilots; it was simply that he had been in the air longer than anyone else and with that time came the experience necessary for the leader of a squadron.

  As he climbed the narrow steps up toward the bridge he saw the outlines of an immense army Cobra helicopter in the distant sky stuttering its way toward the carrier. In five minutes or so it would be hovering over the threshold and lower itself to the pad; someone from land was paying the Navy a visit.

  “It’s a terrible loss, Converse,” said the captain, standing over his charts table, shaking his head sadly. “And a letter I hate like hell to write. God knows they’re never easy, but this one’s more painful than most.”

  “We all feel the same way, sir.”

  “I’m sure you do.” The captain nodded. “I’m also sure you know why you’re here.”

  “Not specifically, sir.”

  “Ramsey said you were the best, and that means you’re taking over one of the crack squadrons in the South China Sea.” The telephone rang, interrupting the carrier’s senior officer. He picked it up. “Yes?”

  What followed was nothing Joel expected. The captain at first frowned, then tensed the muscles of his face, his eyes both alarmed and angry. “What?” he exclaimed, raising his voice. “Was there any advance notice—anything in the radio room?” There was a pause, after which the captain slammed down the phone, shouting, “Jesus Christ!” He looked at Converse. “It seems we have the dubious honor of an unannounced visitation by Command-Saigon, and I do mean visitation!”

  “I’ll return below, sir,” said Joel, starting to salute.

  “Not just yet, Lieutenant,” shot back the captain quietly but firmly. “You are receiving your orders, and as they affect the air operations of this ship, you’ll hear them through. At the least, we’ll let Mad Marcus know he’s interfering with Navy business.”

  The next thirty seconds were taken up with the ritual of command assignment, a senior officer investing a subordinate with new responsibilities. Suddenly there was a sharp two-rap knock as the captain’s door opened and the tall, broad-shouldered general of the Army George Marcus Delavane intruded, dominating the room with the sheer force of his presence.

  “Captain?” said Delavane, saluting the ship’s commander first despite the Navy man’s lesser rank. The somewhat high-pitched voice was courteous, but not the eyes; they were intensely hostile.

  “General,” replied the captain, saluting back along with Converse. “Is this an unannounced inspection by Command-Saigon?”

  “No, it’s an urgently demanded conference between you and me—between Command-Saigon and one of its lesser forces.”

  “I see,” said the four-striper, anger showing through his calm. “At the moment I’m delivering urgent orders to this man—”

  “You saw fit to countermand mine!” Delavane broke in vehemently.

  “General, this has been a sad and trying day,” said the captain. “We lost one of our finest pilots barely an hour ago—”

  “Running away?” Again Delavane interrupted, the tastelessness of his remark compounded by the nasal pitch of his voice. “Was his goddamned tail shot off?”

  “For the record, I resent that!” said Converse, unable to control himself. “I’m replacing that man and I resent what you just said—General!”

  “You? Who the hell are you?”

  “Easy, Lieutenant. You’re dismissed.”

  “I respectfully request to answer the general, sir!” shouted Joel, in his anger refusing to move.

  “You what, prissy fly boy?”

  “My name is—”

  “Forget it, I’m not interested!” Delavane whipped his head back toward the captain. “What I want to know is why you think you can disobey my orders—the orders from Command-Saigon! I called a strike for fifteen hundred hours! You ‘respectfully declined’ to implement that order!”

  “A weather front’s moved in and you should know it as well as I do.”

  “My meteorologists say it’s completely flyable!”

  “I suspect if you asked for that finding during a Burma monsoon they’d deliver it.”

  “That’s gross insubordination!”

  “This is my ship and military regulations are quite clear as to who’s in command here.”

  “Do you want to connect me to your radio room? I’ll reach the Oval Office and we’ll see just how long you’ve got this ship!”

  “I’m sure you’ll want to speak privately—probably over a scrambler. I’ll have you escorted there.”

  “Goddamn you, I’ve got four thousand troops—maybe twenty percent seasoned—moving up into Sector Five! We need a low-altitude combined strike from land and sea and we’ll have it if I have to get your ass out of here within the hour! And I can do it, Captain!… We’re over here to win, win, and win it all! We don’t need sugarcoated Nellies hedging their goddamned bets! Maybe you never heard it before, but all war is a risk! You don’t win if you don’t risk, Captain!”

  “I’ve been there, General. Common sense cuts losses, and if you cut enough losses you can win the next battle.”

  “I’m going to win this one, with or without you, Blue Boy!”

  “I respectfully advise you to temper your language, General.”

  “You what?” Delavane’s face was contorted in fury, his eyes the eyes of a savage wild animal. “You advise me? You advise Command-Saigon! Well, you do whatever you like—Blue Boy in your satin pants—but the incursion up into the Tho Valley is on.”

  “The Tho,” interrupted Converse. “That’s the first leg of the Pak Song route. We’ve hit it four times. I know the terrain.”

  “You know it?” shouted Delavane.

  “I do, but I take my orders from the commander of this ship—General.”

  “You prissy shit-kicker, you take orders from the President of the United States! He’s your commander in chief! And I’ll get those orders!”

  Delavane’s face was inches from Joel’s, the maniacal expression challenging every nerve ending in Joel’s body: hatred matched by loathing. Barely realizing the words were his, Converse spoke. “I, too, would advise the General to be careful of his language.”

  “Why, shit-kicker? Has Blue Boy got this place wired?”

  “Easy, Lieutenant! I said you were dismissed!”

  “You want me to watch my language, big fella with your little silver bar? No, sonny boy, you watch it, and you read it! If that squadron of yours isn’t in the air at fifteen hundred hours, I’ll label this carrier the biggest yellow streak in Southeast Asia! You got that, satin-pantsed Blue Boy, third class?”

  Once more Joel replied, wondering as he spoke where he found the audacity. “I don’t know where you come from, sir, but I sincerely hope we meet under different circumstances sometime. I think you’re a pig.”

  “Insubordination! Also, I’d break your back.”

  “Dismissed, Lieutenant!”

  “No, Captain, you’re wrong!” shouted the general. “He may be the man to lead this strike, after all. Well, what’ll it be, Blue Boys? Airborne, or the President of the United States—or the label?”

  At 1520 hours Converse led the squadron off the carrier deck. At 1538, as they headed at low altitude into the weather, the first two casualties occurred over the coastline; the wing planes were shot down—fiery deaths at six hundred miles an hour in the air. At 1546 Joel’s right engine exploded; his altitude made the direct hit easy. At 1546:30, unable to stabilize, Converse ejected into the downpour of the storm clouds, his parachute instantly swept into the vorte
x of the conflicting winds. As he swung violently down toward the earth, the straps digging into his flesh with each whipping buffet, one image kept repeating its presence within the darkness. The maniacal face of General George Marcus Delavane. He was about to begin an indeterminate stay in hell, courtesy of a madman. And as he later learned, the losses were infinitely greater on the ground.

  Delavane! The Butcher of Danang and Pleiku. Waster of thousands, throwing battalion after battalion into the jungles and the hills with neither adequate training nor sufficient fire-power. Wounded, frightened children had been marched into the camps, bewildered, trying not to weep and, finally understanding, weeping out of control. The stories they told were a thousand variations on the same sickening theme. Inexperienced, untried troops had been sent into battle within days after disembarkation; the weight of sheer numbers was expected to vanquish the often unseen enemy. And when the numbers did not work, more numbers were sent. For three years command headquarters listened to a maniac. Delavane! The warlord of Saigon, fabricator of body counts, with no acknowledgment of blown-apart faces and severed limbs, liar and extoller of death without a cause! A man who had proved, finally, to be too lethal even for the Pentagon zealots—a zealot who had outdistanced his own, in the end revolting his own. He had been recalled and retired—-only to write diatribes read by fanatics who fed their own personal furies.

  Men like that can’t be allowed anymore, don’t you understand? He was the enemy, OUR enemy! Those had been Converse’s own words, shouted in a fever of outrage before a panel of uniformed questioners who had looked at each other, avoiding him, not wanting to respond to those words. They had thanked him perfunctorily, told him that the nation owed him and thousands like him a great debt, and with regard to his final comments he should try to understand that there were often many sides to an issue, and that the complex execution of command frequently was not what it appeared to be. In any event, the President had called upon the nation to bind its wounds; what good was served by fueling old controversies? And then the final kicker, the threat.

  “You yourself briefly assumed the terrible responsibility of leadership, Lieutenant,” said a pale-faced Navy lawyer, barely glancing at Joel, his eyes scanning the pages of a file folder. “Before you made your final and successful escape—by yourself, from a pit in the ground away from the main camp—you led two previous attempts involving a total of seventeen prisoners of war. Fortunately you survived, but eight men did not. I’m sure that you, as their leader, their tactician, never anticipated a casualty risk of nearly fifty percent. It’s been said often, but perhaps not often enough: command is awesome, Lieutenant.”

  Translation: Don’t join the freaks, soldier. You survived, but eight were killed. Were there circumstances the military is not aware of, tactics that protected some more than others, one more than others? One man who managed to break out—by himself—eluding guards that shot on sight prisoners on the loose at night? Merely to raise the question by reopening a specific file will produce a stigma that will follow you for the rest of your life. Back off, soldier. We’ve got you by simply raising a question we all know should not be raised, but we’ll do it because we’ve taken enough flak. We’ll cut it off wherever we can. Be happy you survived and got out. Now, get out.

  At that moment, Converse had been as close to consciously throwing away his life as he would ever have thought possible. Physically assaulting that panel of sanctimonious hypocrites had not been out of the question, until he studied the face of each man, his peripheral gaze taking in rows of tunic ribbons, battle stars on most. Then a strange thing had happened: disgust, revulsion—and compassion—swept over him. These were panicked men, a number having committed their lives to their country’s practice of war … only to have been conned, as he had been conned. If to protect what was decent meant protecting the worst, who was to say they were wrong? Where were the saints? Or the sinners? Could there be any of either when all were victims?

  Disgust, however, won out. Lieutenant Joel Converse, USNR, could not bring himself to give a final salute to that council of his superiors. In silence, he had turned, with no military bearing whatsoever, and walked out of the room as if he had pointedly spat on the floor.

  A flash of light again from the boulevard, a blinding echo of the sun from the Quai du Mont Blanc. He was in Geneva, not in a North Vietnamese camp holding children who vomited while telling their stories, or in San Diego being separated from the United States Navy. He was in Geneva, and the man sitting across the table knew everything he was thinking and feeling.

  “Why me?” whispered Joel.

  “Because, as they say,” said Halliday, “you could be motivated. That’s the simple answer. A story was told. The captain of your aircraft carrier refused to put his planes in the air for the strike that Delavane demanded. Several storms had moved in; he called it suicidal. But Delavane forced him to, threatened to call the macho White House and have the captain stripped of his command. You led that strike. It’s where you got it.”

  “I’m alive,” said Converse flatly. “Twelve hundred kids never saw the next day and maybe a thousand more wished they never had.”

  “And you were in the captain’s quarters when Mad Marcus Delavane made his threats and called the shots.”

  “I was there,” agreed Converse, no comment in his voice. Then he shook his head in bewilderment. “Everything I told you—about myself—you’ve heard it before.”

  “Read it before,” corrected the lawyer from California. “Like you—and I think we’re the best in the business under fifty—I don’t put a hell of a lot of stock in the written word. I have to hear a voice, or see a face.”

  “I didn’t answer you.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “But you have to answer me—now. You’re not here for Comm Tech-Bern, are you?”

  “Yes, that part’s true,” said Halliday. “Only the Swiss didn’t come to me, I went to them. I’ve been watching you, waiting for the moment. It had to be the right one, perfectly natural, geographically logical.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Because I’m being watched.… Rosen did have a stroke. I heard about it, contacted Bern, and made a plausible case for myself.”

  “Your reputation was enough.”

  “It helped, but I needed more. I said we knew each other, that we went way back—which God knows was true—and as much as I respected you, I implied that you were extremely astute with finals, and that I was familiar with your methods. I also put my price high enough.”

  “An irresistible combination for the Swiss,” said Converse.

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  “But I don’t,” contradicted Joel. “I don’t approve of you at all, least of all your methods. You haven’t told me anything, just made cryptic remarks about an unidentified group of people you say are dangerous, and brought up the name of a man you knew would provoke a response. Maybe you’re just a freak, after all, still pushing that safe Yippee label.”

  “Calling someone a ‘freak’ is subjectively prejudicial in the extreme, counselor, and would be stricken from the record.”

  “Still, the point’s been made with the jury, lawyer-man,” said Converse quietly but with anger. “And I’m making it now.”

  “Don’t prejudge the safety,” continued Halliday in a voice that was equally quiet. “I’m not safe, and outside of a proclivity for cowardice, there’s a wife and five children back in San Francisco I care deeply about.”

  “So you come to me because I have no such—what was it?—priority entanglements?”

  “I came to you because you’re invisible, you’re not involved, and because you’re the best, and I can’t do it! I legally can’t do it, and it’s got to be done legally.”

  “Why don’t you say what you mean?” demanded Converse. “Because if you don’t I’m getting up and we’ll see each other later across a table.”

  “I represented Delavane,” said Halliday quickly. �
��God help me I didn’t know what I was doing, and very few people approved, but I made a point we used to make all the time. Unpopular causes and people also deserve representation.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “You don’t know the cause. I do. I found out.”

  “What cause?”

  Halliday leaned forward. “The generals,” he said, his voice barely audible. “They’re coming back.”

  Joel looked closely at the Californian. “From where? I didn’t know they’d been away.”

  “From the past,” said Halliday. “From years ago.”

  Converse sat back in the chair, now amused. “Good Lord, I thought your kind were extinct. Are you talking about the Pentagon menace, Press—it is ‘Press,’ isn’t it? The San Francisco short-form, or was it from Haight-Ashbury, or the Beverly Hills something or other? You’re a little behind the times; you already stormed the Presidio.”

  “Please, don’t make jokes. I’m not joking.”

  “Of course not. It’s Seven Days in May, or is it Five Days in August? It’s August now, so let’s call it The Old-Time Guns of August. Nice ring, I think.”

  “Stop it! There’s nothing remotely funny, and if there were, I’d find it before you did.”

  “That’s a comment, I suppose,” said Joel.

  “You’re goddamned right it is, because I didn’t go through what you went through. I stayed out of it, I wasn’t conned, and that means I can laugh at fanatics because they never hurt me, and I still think it’s the best ammunition against them. But not now. There’s nothing to laugh at now!”