A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (5 page)

Private Thomas Holt—Tommy, radioman—(taller than he, thinner, with thick glasses) runs a commo—communications—check: “Eagle three this is Fuzzy Delta, over.”

For a full week—straining to see through a screen of tangled leaves during the day and listening at night for phantom clicks—they have stayed in position. No more, though. Against orders, and to keep their nerve, the ambush patrol steals out the gate of Fire Base Eagle.

Blackness occupies the bamboo thicket where the men are hiding. All is quiet except for their frightened, labored breathing.

On a stretch of footpath glistening in the gray night, Lou bends over a Claymore mine, fingers working expertly. He clips a long string of wire onto its curved back, and then threads the wire through the poles of the hand-held generator. Finished, he slides into the clump of wood stalks, touches Mulrane, and starts the silent signal rippling through the line of men.

A platoon of NVA, one by one, glides by as if levitating over the hard-packed dirt trail, their AK-47 rifles and B-40 rocket launchers slung across their chests at the ready, their faces gleaming, wet and waxy.

His heart thumps audibly. A sharp, scared ache clutches his trachea.

He spins the handle of the generator. The night erupts in flame and chaos—the staccato chop of AR-16s, the thump of grenade launchers, screams of confusion and fear.

On their bellies, the soldiers rattle through the bamboo to the rear of their position—all except Holt, who writhes in pain, ugly, purple holes dug in the flesh of his torso.

“Where’s Holt!” Lou shouts.

“He’s hit, lieutenant!” Mulrane shouts over the noise.

“Get the men back to rendezvous, sergeant. Give me ten minutes, then go!”

“No way, lieutenant! We circle the wagons right here until you get back!”

“Ten minutes, sergeant. Go! Now!”

The fronds and branches of the jungle reach out to grab Lou as he runs, then crawls back. The enemy, what’s left of it, searches methodically.

“Can you move?” he whispers to Holt.

“Lieutenant. I can’t feel anything.”

From the harness of his rucksack, he extracts a grenade. He pulls the pin and heaves.
Crunch
! Another.
Crunch
! On his feet, he empties his AR-16 into the bamboo thicket, throws the weapon aside. He hauls Holt to his shoulders. The night flashes with NVA small arms fire.

Then he feels it: a shot to the butt. Like a punji stake shoved to the bone and twisted.
He’s hit.

“Get out of here, lieutenant!”

Groping in the darkness, he finds Holt’s harness and two more grenades. Pulls the pin.
Crunch
! Again.
Crunch
! Staggers to his feet. In the open. Drags Holt to his shoulders again. Rips the flare gun from his shirt. Points to the sky. A single flare arcs, crests, bursts, and becomes three red clusters settling into the treetops.

The howitzers of Base Camp Eagle
crump
in the distance and the trail ignites with the blast of high explosive and white phosphorous artillery shells.

Clopclopclopclop.
Down the deep valley. The UH-1B medevac yaws, hovers, and then settles into the mud. The men of the patrol lift the wounded, slide them into the belly of the ship, and then gather in a worried clutch at the door to reach in, touch them, and tuck a heavy wool blanket around them.

He, face up, Holt face down, ashen, eyes staring straight from their filthy faces. Holt’s muddied hand in his. Mulrane waving at the door. Rising. The world spinning outside. Deep green jungle mountains turning to blue.

Medics rush in. Lift them on litters. Someone, Colonel Readfield, bends over Holt, strokes the side of his face. Bends over Lou, curled in a painful crescent, face to the side, breath coming in short, rasping gulps.

Readfield hangs over him, fist gripping the shoulder of his fatigue shirt, eyes boring into his ear, stale cigar juice poisoning his air.

“The private looks bad, hear?” Readfield shouts. “Hear? You, you’ll live. You were told to sit tight up there. Sit tight and report. A man gets shot up. You’ll get yourself a goddamn Silver Star. Take it home with you. Tell your kids someday what a hero you were. But get the hell out of this Army, Lieutenant Christopher.”

Chapter Three

The day started off with a rear view of Mag at the window in a flimsy, mauve, night thing.

“Look, a Pine Warbler,” she said, her face pressed to the glass.

“I’m staying right here,” he said, clasping his hands behind his head.

She crawled back in beside him and he began to rub her lower back, just the way she liked it; and if the alarm clock rang, they didn’t hear it. She delivered him to the station, panting.

The eight-fifteen was nearly empty as its silver cars clacked into the station pushed by a solid black diesel. A mother and her toddler at the far end of the platform boarded at the same time he did. The horn was unique. Two short
bla
noises and a mournful
wa wa wa
sounded just as it passed Sterling Place where they lived, a block from the tracks.

It was the tail end of the rush hour out of Bergen County, a milk run hitting all the stops to Hoboken, not the train favored by even the oldest veterans of Wall Street. You had to take the 8:07 Express if you wanted to be on the floor of the Exchange at the bell.

The sprawl of Bergen County blurred through the window as they sped toward the Hudson River. The conductor rocked down the aisle of the lurching train, stopped, and then spread out to steady himself as he reached for Lou’s ticket, tucked into the seat in front of him. Lou had not had time to get a newspaper, so he sat idly and his thoughts went their own way.

Something was missing
. Whenever he talked with Mag about how this whole crummy deal came to be, they seemed to skip the main point. Well, he didn’t skip it. He chose to avoid it. It had to do with the boys. Mag could never understand. It was the paths they’d taken in life. Like it or not, he’d pushed them toward this crazy “follow your bliss” crap.
He
never had it as an option, but, by God, there was no reason why
they
wouldn’t. And so, in the end, the decision to “go brokerage” was a need-to-have-a-paycheck-right-away decision; and
that
was ultimately a complication of fatherhood, not career choices.

Pete, their firstborn, was contemptuous of authority from his first breath. He had always been more interested in building a world acceptable to himself than in finding a place in the one everyone else inhabited. He knew how to take care of himself, that one. Pete had done a lot, including cocaine. He’d seen no reason for college until he hit twenty-seven, when he began to think that law was for him. All this after only eight years of marriage and two boys of his own. Quite a transformation. It had taken every ounce of character Pete had to come to him for money—even then, only under the threat of expulsion unless he paid up his tuition.

In Hoboken, Lou squinted against the brilliant sun that knifed through the roof of the station platform and cut a diagonal plane of light through the dusty air. The diesel engine at the back of the train gave off a deafening roar. He made his way to the stairs leading to the tubes.

One of the older Port Authority Trans Hudson cars sat beside the platform. As soon as Lou descended the final two stairs, the putrid odor of sulfur pushed against his face. He went to the change machine, then through the turnstile. There were only a couple of people sitting in the first car. The rotten-egg smell immediately took him back to the training commute. The memory had been locked away somewhere in his brain and now came rushing back like a flood. He braced for the train’s sudden, jerking start he knew would come.

Oliver, his younger son, emerged from a different mold altogether. It wasn’t that he excelled in school; he just dominated schools and the people in them by the sheer force of his personality. From the time he was old enough to speak in sentences, he seemed to always be the center of attention.

The train screeched to a halt and sat in total darkness until a train going in the opposite direction screamed by in a riot of sparks. The train lurched into motion again.

Oliver had misfired during a brief fling with international banking. He responded to logic, however, and it was logical for him to rebound into broadcast journalism as a career. From that came an application to Columbia University at twenty-three and tuition bills approaching thirty thousand. Lou’s pension from twenty-five years of military service was a start, but now he needed more than that, lots more.

Under the World Trade Towers, Lou stepped out of the car as the doors slid open. He strode to the escalators and through the turnstile, and then stepped nimbly onto the long escalator that carried him to the promenade level of the complex. Another short escalator ride deposited him at street level in downtown Manhattan.

He made a right turn coming out of the World Trade Center and walked past NYU, through the Trinity Churchyard, across Broadway. He walked into the shadows of Wall Street, a chill wind burning his face, a kind of low roar joining the dusty air, pushing furrows through American flags that lined the marble canyon walls.

The main offices of Pierson Browne were on the second floor of 14 Wall. It was exactly nine-thirty when he told the receptionist, a woman who could've been Terri Garr, that he was Mr. Christopher. Patricia was expecting him. The receptionist asked him to please have a seat behind the potted plants while she checked Ms. Buck’s availability.

It was nine-fifty when Terri Garr opened the door and said, “Come on in, Mr. Christopher,” then quietly slipped out behind him.

Buck was out of her chair and halfway across the room by the time he got in the door; her handshake was a brief, hard clasp. She wore a short brown skirt, a beige blouse that hugged slightly across her breasts, and a signature scarf draped around her neck and pinned at the side. Her hair was black with one streak of gray, pulled back straight from her face. She wore a light shade of lipstick, and the whole effect made it look as if she had just emerged from a cabana.

“Now that you’re here, I remember you very well, Louis. What was it, four years ago when we first chatted? Cal says you’re doing fine out there in Paramus.” She had small humor lines at the corners of, and just below, her large, black eyes. And when she smiled, her whole face seemed to flash—a flash that said, “look out.”

“Good to see you again,” Lou said.
If you’re expecting a “Ms. Buck” out of me, you’ll have a long wait.

“You’re not used to the wind down here in Manhattan,” she said, glancing at his ruffled hair. “I like your shoes.”
Flash.
“How do you like Paramus?”

“How could you not like Paramus?” he said, ignoring the dig at his hair.

The office was immaculate. Buck used a Sheraton writing table as a desk, its surface barren save for a thin crystal bud vase and a yellow rose. Her chair was black leather. Next to it, by the large window that overlooked Wall Street, a tall dictionary stand held a cream telephone console that periodically blinked red.

Buck motioned to the corner of the office where a camelback sofa sat between two big wingback chairs and faced one of those Chinese Chippendale tea tables.
What had she paid for that little gem?
Maggie would have flipped.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Louis? I’m going to have one. I can’t get started in the morning unless I have some caffeine.”

“Yes, I’d like a cup,” he said, timing it so that he sat down on the sofa at just about the same time Buck dropped into one of the wingbacks and crossed her legs, exposing a healthy, tanned thigh.

Okay, you have a hell of a thigh, but I’ll roast in hell before I ever let you catch my eyes on it. In fact, if I had a cup of coffee, I’d set it right out there on that thigh, saucer and all.

“Winnie’ll be in, in a minute. How long have you been out in Paramus, Louis? Cal said it’s been long enough to start getting established.”

“Well, it’s been a long haul. Longer than I thought it was going to take. The market hasn’t been the best. The little guy just doesn’t feel much like doing anything with stocks.”

“Maybe you ought to be going after the big guys and leave the little fish to someone else.”
Flash
. “Cal said you came out of the Army.”