Darwin's Blade (29 page)

The hour of 0400 came and went and there was no air strike, no gunships, no Sea Stallion rescue chopper…Dar felt that there would be no hope for air evacuation after first light, as the NVA had serious antiaircraft guns and shoulder-launched SAMs all around Dalat by now. By 0540 hours, Dar had groggily swapped his remaining M-14 and Starlight scope for his M40 Sniper Rifle with its daylight Redfield scope. He remembered wiping blood off the lens, although whose blood it was, he could not tell. For the first time, as that second Dalat dawn set forth its rosy fingertips—the Homeric phrase kept echoing through his head—Dar felt the approach of
katalepsis.
He felt himself begin to surrender to both fear and bloodlust; he felt the loss of control he had spent his short life trying to master.

The fast movers roared in at 0645, six Phantom F-4s laying down so much napalm that Dar lost his eyebrows and most of his hair. The gunships came in before the deafening sound of the jets had faded, the Hueys rocketing and minigunning the tree lines in all directions. NVA shoulder-launched missiles flew out of the jungle by the score, leaving crisscrossing smoke trails like some elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display. But the gunships came in low and skimmed just a meter or so above the grass and flattened fences, actually passing through the walls of flames before opening fire with their miniguns, risking the massive amount of small-arms fire, rather than keep altitude and be brought down by a missile.

And then the Sea Stallion came in, blowing the smoke into complicated spirals that mesmerized the exhausted-beyond-numbness Darwin Minor. He almost forgot to move, so fascinated was he by the intricate spirals and vortexes of smoke created by the huge rotor blades. Years later, Dar used chaos mathematics to study the fractal variations of that phenomenon.

But of the events at 0645 hours on that second day, he only dimly remembered Chuck pulling him away from the parapet, carrying Sergeant Carlos's body to the waiting chopper while Chuck carried Ned's limp form, and then going back to help the scientists hump the isotopes and other trophies out into the light.

The lead-lined container of 80 grams of priceless weapons-grade plutonium had absolute priority—just like the contingency moonrocks the Apollo astronauts had grabbed as soon as they came out of their lunar module a few years before—and Chuck lifted it and jogged toward the Sea Stallion while Dar was pulling the last crate of reactor crap out the doorway.

Dar still retained a perfectly clear image of Chuck being struck by a dozen bullets as the smoke cleared enough for advancing snipers to fire from the inner fence. Dar had frozen in place. Wally and John were in the Sea Stallion, but Dar was outside, less than a hundred yards from the twenty-five or so NVA marksmen who had just cut Chuck to bloody ribbons. As warped as time seemed at that moment, Dar knew that he had no time to grab his rifle or to run for cover. He watched the AK-47 muzzles swing in his direction as if everything had been choreographed in slow motion. Then a Huey gunship seemed to drift over them, also in slow motion, its Gatling gun revolving and firing in a silence only Dar could hear, empty cartridges flying and dropping by the hundreds, by the thousands, dropping away and catching the light from the rising sun. It was a beautiful sight simply from an aesthetic point of view—the sunlight glinting on all that expended brass. Suddenly the entire mass of NVA snipers was enveloped by dust and then tumbled down and back, as if simply slapped away by the invisible backhand of God.

Dar threw Chuck's body over his shoulder, grabbed the priceless plutonium cylinder, and ran for the Sea Stallion.

To this day, Dar remembered nothing of the flight out to the waiting carrier except for his last glimpse of the Dalat reactor through the swirling smoke. The entire six-story building was cratered by bullets. Dar could not have spread his hand on any part of the wall without encountering more than one pockmark. The sandbags were completely gone—shot to pieces, and the pieces then shot away.

Later, Dar could not remember the landing on the carrier. He vaguely remembered the confusion on board as he was carried to the crowded infirmary. The Navy surgeon asked, “How bad are you hit?”

“Not hit,” Dar had said. “Just cut up from ricochets and concrete chips.”

They had cut off his boots, cut away his filthy, bloody blouse and trousers, and sponged his bloody flesh. “Sorry, son,” the middle-aged surgeon had said. “You're wrong. You have at least three AK-47 rounds in you.”

Even as they sedated him, Dar was not concerned. He had carried Sergeant Carlos to the chopper. He could not be badly hurt. The AK-47 slugs had probably spent most of their kinetic energy in striking the reactor wall or passing through a half-empty sandbag before striking him. He did not even remember being shot.

When he finally awoke after surgery and four days of unconsciousness, he was told that the huge carrier was now so overloaded with refugees that aircraft on deck—including the gunships and Sea Stallion that had saved them—were being pushed overboard into the sea to make room for more choppers carrying VIPs from Saigon.

Dar slept again. When he next awoke, the city had fallen, and Saigon was now Ho Chi Minh City. The last diplomats and CIA personnel had filed onto the roof of the U.S. embassy and been flown out by slicks while thousands of Vietnamese allies had been held back by the final circles of Marines. Then the Marines were airlifted out under heavy fire.

The carrier task force headed for home. The important South Vietnamese politicians were sleeping in officers' quarters below, while hundreds of displaced Marines and sailors literally slept on the deck, crowding under the remaining choppers and A-6 Intruders, exhausted men trying to keep out of the rain that now fell constantly.

Dar had agreed to tell Syd about Dalat, but had suggested he make them dinner first.

“That was good pasta,” said Syd when she'd finished.

Dar nodded.

Syd raised her coffee cup in both hands. “Will you tell me about Dalat now? I only know the barest facts.”

“There's not that much to tell,” said Dar. “I was only there for forty-eight hours in 1975. But I went back a few years ago—in 1997. There's a six-day tour leaving from Ho Chi Minh City that ends up in Dalat. Americans are discouraged from traveling in Vietnam, but it's not illegal. You can fly from Bangkok for just two hundred seventy dollars on Vietnam Airline, or three hundred twenty on the more comfortable Thai Airway. In Dalat you can stay in a bug-ridden hostel named Hotel Dalat, or a fleabag hotel called the Minh Tam, or in a Vietnamese version of a luxury resort named the Anh Doa. I stayed at the Anh Doa. It even has a pool.”

“I thought you don't fly as a passenger,” said Syd.

“This was a rare exception,” said Dar. “Anyway, it's a pretty tour. The tour bus goes along the National Road Number Twenty from Ho Chi Minh City past Bao Loc, Di Linh, and Duc Trong—mostly huge tea and coffee plantations in that area, very green—and then climbs up the Pren Pass onto the south end of the Lang Biang plateau to get to the city of Dalat.”

Syd listened.

“Dalat is famous for its lakes,” continued Dar. “They have names like Xuan Huong, Than Tho, Da Thien, Van Kiep, Me Linh…lovely names and pretty lakes, except for some industrial pollution.”

Syd waited.

“There's some jungle,” said Dar, “but above the city, it's mostly pine forests. Even the forests and valleys have magical names—Ai An, which means Passion Forest, and Tinh Yeu, which translates to Love Valley.”

Syd put down her coffee cup. “Thank you for the tour, Dar, but I don't give a damn about how Dalat looked in 1997. Will you tell me what happened there in 1975? It's all still classified in the dossiers, but I know that you came out of there with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

“They gave decorations to everyone who was there at the end,” said Dar, sipping his coffee. “It's what countries and armies do when they're defeated—they hand out medals.”

Syd waited.

“OK,” said Dar. “To tell you the truth, the Dalat mission is still technically classified—but it's no longer secret. In January of 1997 a little paper called the
Tri-City Herald
broke the story and it got reprinted in the back pages of several other papers. I didn't see it, but the travel agent told me about it when I was booking my tour.”

Syd sipped her coffee.

“Not too much of a story,” repeated Dar. His voice sounded ragged even to himself. Perhaps he was coming down with a cold. “In the last days before the big bugout from Saigon, the South Vietnamese reminded us that we'd built them a reactor at Dalat. There was some radioactive material there—including eighty grams of plutonium—that the U.S. officials didn't want falling into the hands of the Communists. So they rounded up two heroic scientists named Wally and John and flew them into Dalat to grab the material before the VC and NVA overran the place. The scientists succeeded.”

“And you went with them as a Marine sniper,” said Syd. “And then?”

“And then, really, nothing,” said Dar. “Wally and John did all of the work finding and extracting the stuff they were supposed to find.” He managed a smile. “They knew how to shut down a nuclear reactor and use those remote handlers, but they had to teach themselves how to drive a forklift. Anyway, we took the isotopes and the canister marked plutonium and hightailed it out of there.”

“But there was fighting?” said Syd.

Dar went over to pour more coffee, realized that the pot was empty, and sat down. After a minute he said, “Sure. There always is in a war. Even in a lame-duck war like the one in 1975.”

“And you fired your rifle in anger,” said Syd. It was a question.

“No, actually, I didn't,” said Dar. “I fired my weapon, but I wasn't angry at anyone, except maybe at the assholes who had forgotten the damned reactor stuff in the first place. That's the truth.”

Syd sighed. “Dr. Dar Minor as a Marine sniper…nineteen years old…It just doesn't fit the person I know…sort of know.”

Dar waited.

“Will you at least tell me why you became a Marine?” asked Syd. “And a sniper of all things?”

“Yes,” said Dar, feeling his heart suddenly thud against his rib cage as he realized he was telling the truth. He
would
tell her. And in many ways, that was much more personal than the details of Dalat.

He glanced at his watch. “But it's getting late right now, Investigator. Can we take a rain check on that part of the show-and-tell? I have some work to do before turning in tonight.”

Syd bit her lip and looked around the room—she had closed the curtains and shutters before they'd turned on the first lamp—but now the shadows were as rich as the orange lamp glow. For a wild second Dar thought that she was going to suggest that they spend the night—both of them—here in the cabin. His pulse was still racing.

“All right,” said Syd. “I'll help you clear the dishes and we'll hit the road. But you promise that you'll tell me soon why you became a Marine?”

“I promise,” Dar heard himself say.

They were outside in the dark, heading for their respective vehicles, when Dar said, “The Dalat story has a punch line, sort of. It's the main reason they kept it all classified, I think. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure,” said Syd.

“Remember I said that the mission was really about retrieving that priceless eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium?”

“Yes.”

Dar jingled his car keys in his right hand. He was carrying the gun case in his left. “Well, Wally and John found the lead-lined canister marked plutonium,” he said. “We got it out. The Feds, in their wisdom, sent it under guard to the big nuclear facility at Hanford, Idaho, where they carefully stored it along with thousands of other canisters of the stuff.”

“Yes?” prompted Syd.

“Well, four years after my first visit to Dalat, in 1979, someone finally got around to looking at it.”

Syd waited in the pine-scented dark.

“It wasn't plutonium at all,” said Dar. “We went to all that trouble to retrieve eighty grams of polonium.”

“What's the difference?” said Syd.

“Plutonium makes atomic and hydrogen bombs work,” said Dar. “Polonium doesn't do much of anything.”

“How could they—Wally and George or whatever—make that kind of mistake?”

“Wally and John didn't,” said Dar. “One of the Vietnamese reactor techs must have slapped the wrong symbol on the canister.”

“So what happened to the plutonium?”

“According to another report in the reliable
Tri-City Herald
on January 19, 1997,” said Dar, “the Republic of Vietnam's spokesman said, and I quote, ‘The Dalat Nuclear Research Institute is currently preserving the amount of plutonium left behind by the Americans as required by technical necessity.' ”

Dar had said this lightly, but Syd's silence seemed heavy. Finally she said, “You mean the reactor is up and running again?”

“The Russian scientists helped the North Vietnamese get it operational a month after they won the war,” he said.

D
ar, the merciless ex-Marine sniper, spent the rest of Friday night and all day Saturday sewing and going through his back issues of
Architectural Digest.

Some years ago, when Lawrence was poking around amidst Dar's shelves, the adjuster had come across several years' worth of the white-spined interior design magazines, and said, “Who the hell do
these
belong to?” Dar had made the mistake of trying to explain why he liked reading such home interior design magazines—how the pictured worlds without humans were so static, so perfect, so…
minded
…how that frozen-forever-perfection always translated in the prose to a couple, gay or straight, living in a timeless, clutterless, decision-free universe since everything was in its place, every pillow fluffed and creased to perfection. In reality the
Architectural Digest
edition was usually off the stand less than three months before the director and movie star who had built their perfect palace announced their divorce. The irony of the great gap between the perfectly designed, perfectly photographed homes and the chaos of real life amused Dar. Besides, it made good bed and bathroom reading.

“You're nuts,” Lawrence had suggested.

Now Dar thumbed through almost two years of back issues before coming across the article he remembered.

Dallas Trace's $6 million home had been built from scratch in a crowded neighborhood just below the crest of Mulholland Drive along the Valley side. The neighborhood—Coy Drive, Dar found out, although not through the magazine article, of course—was comprised of relatively modest ($1 million and up) 1960s-era ranch houses, but Attorney Trace had bought three of the properties, had the homes bulldozed, and hired one of America's stranger architects to build him a Luxor-like post-postmodernist cement, rusted iron, and glass…thing…clinging to the hillside and dwarfing all of the other homes on the ridgeline.

Dar read and reread the article, concentrating on three pages of photographs and memorizing which of the huge windows looked out from which room. There was a small insert of the thinly smiling Counselor Trace—“The World's Best Legal Mind” was the caption—sitting in an uncomfortable-looking Barcelona chair. His bride, Imogene, the big-breasted then twenty-three-year-old Miss Brazil (second runner-up in that year's Miss Universe competition) whom Dallas Trace had legally renamed Destiny (because it was her destiny to marry the famous lawyer), perched on the even-less-comfortable-looking metal arm of the chair.

Dar thought that the house itself was an abomination—all postmodernist walls going nowhere, show-off knife-edge cornices, pretentious forty-foot-high living room ceilings, industrial materials with bolts and hinges and catwalks jutting everywhere, rusting iron “wings” that did or signified nothing, a strip of swimming pool narrow enough to step across—but he was delighted to read about the architect's decision “… not to bother with such bourgeois amenities as drapes or blinds, since the tall, magnificent windows, many coming together glass-to-glass at sharp angles overhanging the wild ravine, served to destroy any distinction between ‘outside' and ‘inside' and to pull the magnificent wilderness into each of the bright and varied living areas.”

This “magnificent wilderness,” Dar knew from studying his Thomas Guide and topo maps of the area, was actually the only undeveloped ridge in the area, one saved from the bulldozers by the discovery of multiple Indian artifacts and the relentless lobbying of some of Coy Drive's more stubborn residents—including Leonard Nimoy and a writer named Harlan Ellison.

Sewing the ghillie suit was a pain in the ass. Dar had to take the oversized, two-piece camouflage overalls, attach netting to the whole damn thing, reinforce the front of the suit with heavy canvas—also camouflage-patterned—and then sew on more tough canvas to the elbows and knees.

Dar then took the several hundred irregularly cut strips of hessian/burlap and “garnished” the suit—a seven-hour job of sewing the bastardly bits of cloth to every part of the net, which in turn had been sewn to the outer coveralls. The front of the ghillie suit was only lightly garnished, but Dar had to apply enough strips to the back of the suit for the floppy pieces of fabric to hang down to drape on the ground whenever he was in a prone position. The wide-brimmed boonie hat he had purchased was similarly garnished, only here the Alaskan mosquito-netting outfit came in handy.

Dar had never worn or made himself a ghillie suit in his training for Vietnam—Marines had humped into the jungle and fought in their green or camouflage fatigues, often using branches and greenery for camouflage while waiting for the enemy, or occasionally excavating a dug-out and camouflage-covered so-called belly-hide fire position. Ghillie suits were just too damned hot and clumsy for jungle fighting. But in the mid-1970s at Camp Pendleton just up the road from San Diego, Dar had been taught the history of the ghillie suit.

Ghillies had been Scottish gamekeepers in the 1800s who developed such man-made camouflage outfits for stalking game—and poachers—on the great Highland estates. German snipers had started the trend toward the modern ghillie suit in World War I when they discarded their issued, oversized, hooded, stiff and cumbersome canvas greatcoats and constructed their own camouflage robes for use when crawling around in No Man's Land. They had soon discovered the usefulness of adding a camouflaged hood that could be pulled over the head, leaving only a small slit with a gauze eyepiece for vision. Snipers also soon learned that the human eye—especially in a battlefield environment—is exceptionally sensitive to both unusual movement—say, a bush crawling along under its own propulsion—and to the slightest glimpse of the outline of a human face. The sight of a rifle barrel also tended to catch a soldier's or counter-sniper's attention very, very quickly.

And so the sniper's ghillie suit had evolved this century through a harsh but very efficient process of natural selection. Today, in sniper schools such as the Royal Marines' school at Lympstone in Devon or the U.S. Marines' Scout Sniper Schools in Quantico, Virginia, or Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, it is common practice for the Marine NCOs to take visiting officers from other services out onto the training field and explain the theoretical advantages of camouflage in the profession of sniping. At the end of the short lecture, five to thirty-five ghillie-suited snipers stand up—usually none of them farther than twenty paces from the startled Army officers, and many of them literally within touching distance. The rule in making a successful ghillie suit is that if someone can see it before he steps on it, it's back to the sewing machine or forward to the grave.

Dar was pleased in some obscure way that even today, the Marines' Sniper School students were expected to make their own ghillie suits during their spare time. Some of the products, Dar knew from visiting Camp Pendleton in recent years, were quite original.

This reminded him. He stopped sewing and cussing for a few minutes and called Camp Pendleton, making an appointment to see Captain Butler there late on Tuesday afternoon. Returning to his worktable, Dar was glad that he would not be bringing his own ghillie suit along for inspection. Marines can be very insensitive sometimes.

Dar finished the ghillie suit about dinnertime. He tried it on—slipping into the fatigues, buttoning everything up, pulling on the boonie hat with its three feet of netting and mosquito-screen camouflage attachments—and then went to stand in front of the full-length closet mirror to see how he looked.

There was no full-length mirror—only its frame and two bullet holes.

Dar went into the bathroom and stood on the edge of the tub to check out his new suit. The bathroom cabinet gave him only a partial view, but it was ridiculous enough to make him just want to lie down in the tub and take a nap until everything—including Dallas Trace and his Alliance and his Russian enforcers—just went away.

Dar thought that he looked like some low-budget, Roger Corman, 1961 horror-movie monster—a shapeless sheepdog mass with hundreds of irregular dun and tan and soft green tatters hanging from it. He could not see his own eyes through the mosquito-netting veil, and accompanying camo-strips. His hands were concealed by the overhanging sleeves, netting, and strips of hessian/burlap. He was no longer a human shape, merely a raggedy-ass blob looking like a pile of ambulatory hound dog ears.

“Boo!” he said to his reflection. The blob in the mirror did not react.

Lawrence agreed to give him a twilight ride to a trailhead so that Dar could go camping. The ghillie suit and everything else Dar needed—theoretically—was crammed into his oversized rucksack.

When Dar had called with the request, about 7:00
P.M.
that Saturday evening, Lawrence had said, “Well, sure, I'll drive you to where you want to go camping…but what happened to that nine-ton Land Crusher you used to own? It seems to me that would do the job.”

“I don't want to leave it on the road where I'm hiking in,” Dar said truthfully. “I'd worry about it.”

Lawrence certainly understood that. It was a running joke between Trudy and Dar how Lawrence invariably parked in the most distant edge of any parking lot, and then with the curb and shrubs and cacti on one side if he could—anything to avoid dings. When Larry's car got dings, Larry's car got sold.

“Sure, I'll drop you off,” Lawrence had said. “I wasn't up to anything except watching a video tonight.”

“Which one?”

“Ernest Goes to Camp,”
said Lawrence. “But that's OK, I've seen it.”

Two hundred and thirty-six times,
thought Dar. Aloud, he said, “I appreciate this, Larry.”

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “You want to leave your Crusher here or shall I come pick you up in town?”

“I'll drive out to your place,” said Dar.

Now, on the way out from Escondido in Lawrence's Trooper, the bulging rucksack loaded in the backseat, Lawrence said, “Where you headed? Borrego Desert State Park? Cleveland National Forest? Or are we going as far as Joshua Tree or someplace?”

“Mulholland Drive,” said Dar.

Lawrence almost drove off the road. “Mul…hol…land…Drive? As in L.A.?”

“Yeah,” said Dar.

Lawrence squinted at him. “For camping.”

“Yep,” said Dar. “Probably two days' worth. I've got my cell phone, so I'll give you a call when I need to be picked up.”

“Eight-thirty on a Saturday night, it'll be after midnight when we get there, and you're going camping somewhere off Mulholland Drive.”

“Right,” said Dar. “Just off Beverly Glen Boulevard, actually. You don't have to drive on Mulholland, just through Beverly Hills and up Beverly Glen to just over the ridge-line…on the Valley side.”

Lawrence squinted at him and then slammed on the brakes, kicked up dust in a turnout, and turned the Trooper around, headed back toward his home.

“You're not going to take me?” said Dar.

“Sure, I'll take you,” growled his friend. “But if I'm going into goddamned Los Angeles on a Saturday night and going through goddamned Beverly Hills, and stopping on Mulholland after midnight, I'm going home to get my .38.” He glanced suspiciously at Dar. “Are you armed?”

“No,” Dar said truthfully.

“You're nuts,” said Lawrence.

Dar asked Lawrence to stop once, on Ventura Boulevard. It had taken Dar three minutes on the Internet to track down Dallas Trace's unlisted phone number, and now he used a pay phone to call that number. A woman's voice answered in a Latina accent—not sultry Brazilian, but no-nonsense Central American housekeeperese.

“Mr. John Cochran calling for Mr. Trace,” he said in his softest male-secretary voice.

“Just a minute,” said the woman. A minute later, Dallas Trace's fake West Texas drawl boomed on the line. “Johnny! What's up, amigo?”

It was Dar's turn to turn on a fake dialect. Speaking through his red bandana, he growled in his best East L.A. gang voice, “Chew're what's up, you honky motherfucker turf-jumping chickenshit bastard. If chew thing you can off Esposito that way and cut us all out—I mean, fuck your Russian fucking mafia, man—we know about Yaponchik and Zuker and we don't give a fuck, man. Those Commie fag bastards don't scare us, man. We comin' for
you,
homme.”

Dar hung up and got back in the Trooper. Lawrence had been close enough to hear most of Dar's monologue.

“Calling your girlfriend?” said the adjuster.

“Yeah,” said Dar.

Dar had Lawrence drop him off about two hundred yards east of the intersection of Beverly Glen Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. They waited for a car or two to pass, until the road was dark, and then Dar was out of the Trooper with his rucksack and moving quickly downhill into the tall weeds. He did not want to be arrested by Sherman Oaks police in the first five minutes of his mission. Lawrence drove off.

Dar reached into his heavy rucksack and found the carefully wrapped L. L. Bean night-vision goggles and the small box of camouflage color sticks. The ghillie suit was heavy, but most of the weight in his pack came from optical aids he had brought along and wrapped carefully in foam.

Dar was wearing black jeans, dark Mephisto boots, and a black Eddie Bauer cotton henley. Clicking on the battery-powered night-vision goggles, he saw that he had stopped just before running into a barbed-wire fence. The lights of the San Fernando Valley were so bright that it caused the goggles to flare every time Dar raised his gaze above the uninhabited ridge.

“The Counselor and his wife designed the house to take maximum advantage of the view of the city lights,” the
Architectural Digest
article had read, “the same view that inspired their former neighbor, Steven, to create the unforgettable alien Mother Ship.” It had taken Dar twenty minutes to figure out that the writer was talking about Steven Spielberg, who had lived in this neighborhood long ago when he was working on
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Right now that Mother Ship–shaped V of bright lights visible between the darker hills was just a pain in the ass—or to be more specific, a pain in the eyes.