Black Tide (39 page)

The man's name had been Grayson. He wouldn't tell me his first name, saying, "Young fella, by the time you get high enough up the ladder to have earned the respect to know my first namc, I'll either be dead or getting a sunburn in Puerto Rico, working on my retirement." He smoked unfiltered Camels, wore government-issue eyeglasses, and had an undying hatred and fear of all sorts of enemies, both foreign and domestic. In the first few days I was with him, he had said, "Don't take offense, sonny, but I think this Mentor Program is an absolute waste of time. Sounds like something that a damn fool Democratic congresswoman from Colorado thought up. So you just stay out of my way."

Staying out of his way meant sitting in his outer office, reading newspapers and feeling out of place for the first day, until he tossed me a book and said, "Here, read this." It was E. B. Sledge's horrifying account of being a Marine in two of the worst Pacific battles in World War II ---
With the Old Breed
--- and when Grayson saw that I had finished that in a day, he gave me a couple more books to read. William Manchester's
Goodbye, Darkness
. Philip Caputo's
A Rumor of War
. And a work of fiction by James Webb,
Fields of Fire.
After my fourth day with him, Grayson took me for a cup of coffee at one of the half dozen or so snack bars in the five-sided palace and said, "Whatever you end up doing here, young fella, remember this bottom line. It all comes down to two things:  killing somebody else and protecting your own. Everything else is fluff. You can work in public affairs or research or with those corrupt contractors or whatever, but it all comes down to this. You're working to kill people you've never met, and you're also working equally hard to protect people you've never met, but who also happen to be your neighbors. Nothing else matters.  Read those books again in a few months. They tell the real story of guys --- and now women, God help us --- who are sent far away to do our bidding. Sometimes orders get fouled up. Sometimes they get nitwits for bosses. And sometimes their gear doesn't work, because some business guy's only interested in screwing the government."

He finished his coffee. "Remember that," and I always have. I also remembered one more thing with Grayson. One day he told me to be at work early and then we went for a drive, using a stripped Chrysler that belonged to the DoD motor pool. He just said one thing as we headed to our destination, and that was this:  “I have it on good authority that you're going into some type of research and analysis work. You may find this interesting."

After some long minutes of driving, we ended up in Maryland, in a suburban community. We drove up an unmarked driveway and we showed our identification cards to a gatehouse guard who wore a simple blue uniform that said "Security" on its shoulder patches. The uniform looked as if it belonged to a retired cop or a college student, but the guard looked like an ex-Marine who wished he were back in the service. The building we went to was a featureless concrete-and-metal cube, and after some more negotiations with guards and two elevator rides, I think we ended up in a basement. As we processed through, Grayson smiled at a man about his age and said, "Thanks for the favor, Tom.”

"No problem, Colonel," the man said, and I felt a bit uneasy. I had come to the conclusion earlier that Grayson was a bit of a nut, heading off to retirement with some strange thoughts about books and government service, but the respect he was being shown in this building changed my mind. We were given badges that said "Visitor" to wear around our necks on thin chains, but Grayson's was light blue while mine was red. We were both visitors, but as George Orwell might have said, some visitors are more equal than others.

In the basement we went into a small viewing gallery that overlooked a row of consoles and some large screens on a near wall. There were plush chairs in the gallery and a coffee setup in the rear, and we sat down, coffee cups in hand. The gallery was open, so we could hear the murmur of voices and sounds from below. The largest screen in the center of the room was blank, but then it flickered into focus, and it became an aerial picture of a highway along an ocean coast. The highway was nearly empty, but the waves were moving in to the rocky shore, so it wasn't a static shot. Grayson leaned over to me and said, "In case you're wondering, this is live time."

"Where is it?"

Grayson chuckled.  "Well, of course, that's classified. But I'll tell you. It's the coastal highway near a town called Barranquilla, on the road to Cartagena, Colombia. On the road is a certain drug lord, hurrying to Cartagena to see his mistress. This gentleman has unusual tastes, which his mistress is all too glad to satisfy. For a price, of course. This gentleman's mistress has been in Europe on a shopping expedition for two weeks, and has just returned. So he's driving back to get, well, he's driving back to get reacquainted. "

The murmur of voices from the workers below us grew a bit louder, and the view of the highway and ocean rotated a bit and tightened in on a stretch of road. There were four dark-colored vehicles there, moving in a single line. They all looked like Ford Broncos.

"Where's the picture coming from?" I asked. "Satellite?"

"On some days you'd be right, but not today," Grayson said.  "This is one of our new surveillance platforms." He paused and smiled again. "Everyone's heard of the Stealth fighter and the Stealth bomber. But why does everybody think we've stopped there? Don't you think there'd be times when we'd want to take good live-time pictures without being noticed? Look now."

The road curved a bit, near an outcropping of some rocks that were awash with water and foam from the waves. A flash of light winked from the rocks and the lead Bronco disappeared in a bigger flash of light and a ballooning cloud of smoke. The other three Broncos swerved and braked, but in a matter of seconds, there were four burning hulks on this bright morning on this coastal highway in Colombia. Armed men in camouflage gear came out from the rocks, moving swiftly and surely. Some of the survivors from the Broncos tried to fight. Others tried to run away, and a couple were crawling. It didn't make much of a difference one way or another. I turned away a few times, not wanting to see what was going on. My mouth was dry, and it came to me, in a way that almost made me laugh with disgust, that I was in a room thousands of miles away, yet I had a comfortable and safe ringside view of at least a couple of dozen people being killed.

I finally said, "No prisoners?"

Grayson replied, "That wasn't the point. I don't think the public or news media have gotten wind of this, but here are our new marching orders. We've gone beyond sanctions, extradition treaties and burning crops, Lewis. It's something a lot dirtier and tougher. This isn't a matter of taking prisoners away for a trial somewhere so they can end up in a plush prison cell with color TV. This is a lot more final."

On the screen the armed men had gone to the side of the road. Two of them exchanged high-five salutes. The four Broncos continued to burn, and there were little lumps of clothing along the asphalt and roadside that used to be people. Then two helicopters came into view ---black and unmarked --- and in seconds they had landed and taken on the group of armed men. In another few seconds the helicopters were gone, leaving behind the rubble of an early morning drive. The screen flickered and then went out. A couple of people below me clapped. I felt like throwing up. Later this would change, as I read and learned more about my new line of work, but at that moment I was afraid that my coffee would end up on Grayson's shoes.

"Was this a lesson?" I said, my voice demanding, looking squarely at Grayson. ''A lesson on how dirty I can expect my job to be?"

Grayson looked surprised. "Oh, it was a lesson, all right, Lewis, but not the one you're thinking of. I left one thing out when I was telling you about the drug lord and his mistress. Up to now this particular gentleman was using encrypted telephone gear, some of the latest stuff from his friends in Cuba. So we never knew where he was going or what he was doing, through the telephone at least."

Grayson rubbed the coffee cup for a moment. "Today, he made one mistake. He let his libido overtake his good sense, and he made one phone call in the clear. Uuencoded. And we snapped that right up." He turned to me, his white skin even more pale in the artificial light. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Lewis? One phone call and we were there. We've got this little globe of ours wired, my young fellow, and don't you ever forget it. We've got satellites and listening ships and mobile vans and remote sensing units all over this planet. This time, some nut spoke in the clear and we were on him in an hour. One phone call, in the clear. Don't you forget that."

I didn't, and I haven't. A day or so later, after searching through the
Washington Post
, the
Washington Times
and the
New York Times
, I found two little stories of interest. One was that some U.S. Navy units were just concluding an exercise in the Caribbean Sea near the Colombian coast. And the other was a piece about a prominent Colombian senator who had died in an auto accident on the coast near Cartagena. From that day forward, I stopped trusting anything I read in the newspapers, and I gained a very healthy respect for the power of a single phone call.

A single phone call. I thought about that as I waited at a traffic light in Kennebunk, on my way home to New Hampshire. One phone call. I had been busy these past weeks, working hard on the telephone, and I knew I had better stop it. Things were getting too crazy, and I didn't want to set off an invisible electronic trip wire with one phone call too many. 

Though I never saw Grayson again, I always remembered what he had said. One phone call could mean a lot, especially if the listeners were out there. Waiting at the traffic light, I thought over the scenario of how it could happen. There could be a caller ID trace on any incoming calls to the Justice Department's switchboard. I had talked only briefly with Jack Carney, but with the latest upswings in technology, well, it wouldn't take much. There was a good chance that when I hung up on him at lunchtime today, some security section could have told Jack Carney that the strange phone call had originated from a pay phone on Commercial Street in Portland.

The light changed and I advanced, following two burly men on Harley-Davidsons, the mufflers on the motorcycles rumbling loudly in the afternoon weather. Then what? Then a flash call to the FBI office in Portland, and in a matter of minutes that place would have been flooded. The pay phone would be isolated and sniffed over, and agents would start canvassing the neighborhood. Who had been there? Who had been using that phone? Do you know what kind of vehicle he had been driving?

Some grunt work and a little luck. That's all it would take, and I would have polite men in suits and correct haircuts knocking at my door within the week, asking me why I had been harassing a Deputy Assistant Attorney General.

One phone call.

When I reached Ogunquit I left the main road and parked in a large lot near the beach and the main town area. Unlike Tyler Beach, there's no distinct strip in Ogunquit, just a real downtown with buildings and a lot of restaurants and craft shops, and a beautiful beach, as always.

There was a fair-sized crowd of mostly families. As I walked around, I noticed there wasn't the edge, the sharpness that I always felt when I was at Tyler Beach, and it only took me a few minutes to figure it out. Ogunquit is far enough up the coast from Massachusetts so that the young men and women from the urban sprawl in that state who enjoy raising hell would never think of coming up here. Too far to drive, and too many tolls to pay.

It made me think, only for a moment, about someday pulling up stakes in Tyler Beach if that urban colonization from Massachusetts ever got too far north. After being there for only a few minutes, I had an early dinner, which consisted of two lobster rolls and two ears of corn, sold by a sidewalk vendor. I ate my dinner and drank an iced tea while sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean battering itself against the breakwater. This town was used as a setting once in a bestselling novel by Stephen King, about a killer flu virus that slaughtered nearly everyone in the world. I had read the book before encountering my own special virus. One of the main characters had come from this town, and thinking about her and the book and the survivors --- who lived only to fight another evil --- made me stop eating for a while. In King's book, the virus had come from a secret government installation out West, and that was striking a bit too close to home.

I then decided I didn't want to eat any more, and I threw out an ear of corn and a half-eaten lobster roll, and I kept on walking. At a place in the downtown there was a store that made saltwater taffy, and there were wide windows in the building where people stopped on the sidewalk to see how it was made. Diane Woods had told me about this place, and she said it made the best saltwater taffy in the world.

From what I saw, it involved old machinery that looked as if it was installed around the turn of the century, with lots of cranks and gears and flywheels. The workers had on white smocks and paper hats, and through either boredom or long practice, they ignored the crowd that had stopped by the window. A phrase came to me "feeding time at the zoo” and in looking around, it wasn't clear who was on the outside looking in.

A man near me spoke to his companion. "Hank, I couldn't work there. I'd eat up all the profits."

His friend said, "Hah, that's what everybody thinks. They don't mind if you eat while you're working, Gil. In fact, they encourage it. You know why? Because in a few days, they'll get sick of it, and then they'll stop. Simple psychology. Don't make it forbidden and it loses its attraction."