Memorial Bridge (49 page)

Dillon opened the door into a small anteroom where another guard sat at a desk. This one stood abruptly, at attention. No question of checking Dillon's credentials here. The door behind the guard was marked with the letters ISIC, which stood for Intelligence Support and Indications Center. Below the letters was a plate-sized silver and blue seal: "Defense Intelligence Agency," its legend read, above an arc of thirteen silver stars which crowned a torch growing out of a blue-green globe suspended in a pair of atomic ellipses. "The United States of America."

The guard, in bracing, had touched his fingertips to the sides of his trousers, the salute protocol required. Then he opened the door for the director.

ISIC was the DIA alert center, a compact version of the War Room. It had its own banks of equipment and walls of maps and screens. As he entered, Dillon relaxed. This was an area in which all the moves by now came naturally. It was his.

A dozen officers were present, half of them his senior staff and half the permanent crew that manned the center. If they served in DIA not precisely at his pleasure—assignments in and out of the agency were made by the JCS—these men were nevertheless devoted to the mission as he defined it, no one else. Dillon had never lost the ability—or the confidence in himself the ability gave him—to inspire loyalty in those who worked for him. What success he'd had at DIA, despite the opposition, depended on it.

Others in the room, the alert-center crew at their various stations, ignored his entrance, as they were trained to. They maintained focus on the communications and tracking equipment before them. But his staff, clustered in one corner in the eerie blue light of three television monitors, came to attention.

"Good day, gentlemen," he said, crossing to the swivel chair positioned in the central place. He sat, then they did.

Dillon exchanged a look with the only civilian present, Michael Packard, who'd come with him to the Pentagon from the Bureau eighteen years before and had been his special assistant both at OSI and DIA. A civilian's occupying the agency's second chair proved his detractors' point, but Dillon did not care. Packard was the only man in government
he completely trusted. For one thing, he was the only man in DIA who served solely at Dillon's pleasure. For another, he was a friend, perhaps Dillon's only friend.

Packard handed Dillon a folder with a red "Secret" stamped diagonally on it. "Khanh's people claim to have snagged four Chicoms in Songbe. In Chinese uniform."

"Songbe?"

"In Phuoc Long, near the Cambodian border."

"They came in from Cambodia?"

"If they did." Packard rolled his eyes. "None of our people have been allowed to see them."

"Who's following it?"

Packard glanced at the one-star general behind Dillon, Huber, the head of the Southeast Asia Task Force.

Huber said, "Clark should be in Songbe by now."

The television announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States." The ragged audio of the reporters coming to their feet had the effect of cutting everything else off. Dillon, having glanced inside the folder, closed it and rolled it into a tube with which he gestured. "Keep me up to the minute on this. Does Clark speak Chinese?"

Packard and Huber exchanged a look. "Vietnamese, yes," Huber said. "I don't know about Chinese."

"We're going to force Khanh to let us interview these people ourselves," Dillon said coldly. "Don't you think the language is relevant? If Clark doesn't have it, make sure he brings his own translator. If dialects are an issue, make sure he brings several. I don't want Clark depending on the ARVN interpreter. Is that clear? I want absolute confirmation, first, that there are four captives in Chinese uniforms. And second, that they are Chinese."

General Huber nodded his head, but not quite to agree. "We know there are Chicoms massed in Cambodia."

Dillon, his eye steady on one of the television screens, cut the discussion off. "Let's listen to the President."

The image of Lyndon Johnson solemnly at the podium filled the three screens on the wall in front of the DIA officers. The reporters in the East Room of the White House had settled back into their chairs. Johnson brought his eyes directly to the camera as it closed in on him. He stared
through his glass prompting device with that peculiar lugubrious leer which Dillon assumed was meant to convey sincerity but which in fact, for Dillon at least, always conveyed the opposite.

Dillon glanced at the digital clock on the wall above the monitors: 1233. He turned to Packard. "Do we need all three of these screens?"

Packard promptly stood and reached to the controls, snapping off two monitors. "My fellow Americans," Johnson began, bending the words with the drawl that was always a surprise. "Not long ago, I received a letter from a woman in the Midwest. She wrote: 'Dear Mr. President, In my humble way I am writing to you about the crisis in Vietnam...'"

Dillon was aware of the officers behind him shifting in their seats, eyeing each other: Oh brother. He pressed his fingers against his temples, forcing himself just to listen. But the President's handlers had neglected to give him paper to hold, stationery, a lady's letter. He was reading the letter from the prompter, making it seem false.

" '...I have a son who is now in Vietnam. My husband served in World War II. Our country was at war. But now, this time, it's just something that I don't understand. Why?'" Johnson paused, frowned, nodded to himself. "Well, I've tried to answer that question dozens of times and more in practically every state in the Union..."

Reciting the familiar litany of reasons, Johnson explained the American presence in Vietnam once more. "We did not choose to be guardians at the gate, but there is no one else ... The pledges of three Presidents ... to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated ... We cannot abandon those who trusted us."

Dillon accepted all of it, but he listened impatiently. His question wasn't why Americans were in Vietnam but how, and it made him uneasy that Johnson was once more loading up his announcement with the mind-numbing rhetoric of justification.

Finally the President came to it. "I have asked the commanding general, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet the mounting aggression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs."

Dillon leaned forward, and was aware that every officer in the room, including the duty officers at their consoles, was doing likewise.

"I have today ordered to Vietnam the Airmobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from seventy-five thousand to one hundred twenty-five thousand men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later and they will be sent as requested..."

"Oh Christ," someone behind Dillon muttered, and someone else let out a mystified "What the hell?" Another said, "A five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit."

Dillon stiffened, and the men behind him checked themselves at once.

"...necessary to raise the monthly draft call from seventeen thousand to thirty-five thousand and for us to step up our campaign for voluntary enlistments. After this past week of deliberations I have concluded that it is not essential to order Reserve units into service now..."

The President continued to speak—"...steps the government of South Vietnam will take to reform itself and strengthen its fighting force ... Secretary Rusk and Secretary McNamara available to Congress ... to move from the battlefield to the conference table"—but the words registered only vaguely with Dillon, as if he were hearing them at the bottom of a swimming pool. The realization had hit with awful clarity that Johnson was changing nothing. Notching up the draft, deepening dependence on Saigon, sending in the famous Air Cavalry as if this were the movies. No call-up of Reserves. No mobilization. No declaration of a national emergency. Just another fifty thousand men. Not enough—as it was Sean Dillon's job to know better than anyone—to do anything in Vietnam but die.

Dillon had slumped back in his chair. The men with him were as stunned into disbelief as he was. They stared blankly at the television screen, seeing nothing but the beagle-like lying eyes—lying because it was unthinkable that Westmoreland had asked for so little—of their commander in chief.

"...a personal note," Johnson was saying. "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle ... the most agonizing and the most painful duty of your President ... what I've wanted all my life since I was a little boy ... help every Negro and every American ... all of our dreams for freedom, all, all—will be swept away on the flood of conquest. This will not happen. We will stand in Vietnam."

Dillon had to avert his eyes from Johnson's. He looked down into his lap, at his fists, and saw only then what he had done, strangling the tube of the top-secret memo on the Chicoms in Songbe into a twisted rod.

***

"Cass? Are you awake?" He leaned against the doorjamb, waiting.

She was turned on her side toward him, the bedside lamp still on, her book open on the blanket, an Allen Drury novel.

He approached, walking softly, then was unable to resist bending down to touch her. He let his fingers fall into her hair. "I'm sorry I'm so late."

He wanted her to wake up. He had decided on his way home to break his absolute and oldest rule. He had decided to talk to her. He had to talk to someone.

She stirred, then pushed deeper into the covers, apparently dreaming.

He took his hand away, and realized it would never work, after all these years. She wouldn't have a clue what to do if he confided secrets from the office, even if she didn't know they were secrets. If he described the surreal sequence of events at the Pentagon that had followed upon Johnson's speech or if, God forbid, he let her see the terrible effect it had had on him, she would think he was having a nervous breakdown, which he wasn't, not even close. But something had snapped in him, he did not know what, and that was all he'd hoped to say.

He straightened to stand over her, noting the lightness of her open hand on the pillow beside her cheek. His own hands had been in fists for hours, but not now. His fingers tingled from having touched her there, those wisps of hair which fluttered at her eye, her lips, each time she breathed. The form of her body under the summer blanket was so familiar, that curve of the hip, the fold of legs and the shadow between them which remained a mystery to him. The threat of pregnancy, of course, hadn't been an issue in years, but Cass's menopause had not released them from their inhibition. Sex, by then, was simply not a language they spoke to each other. If Dillon had a language of the body now, it was of his clenched teeth and tight fists, and those had nothing to do with her.

Cass was Sean's only woman, had always been. Like her, he took their bond for granted, as well as the marital tranquility which had been purchased at a cost neither was aware of. Sex had been repressed, but so had something else, what Dillon stood on the brink of acknowledging. The sight of his wife, blessed in sleep but also pulled by what dream away from him, filled Dillon with astonishment. The feeling was more than he could handle, and so he deflected the rare urge to speak plainly
into the far safer, more familiar hunger of his simple, old sexual desire. That he knew how to stifle.

She stirred again, smiling in her sleep. He thought, Perhaps she is dreaming of me. She did not wake up. He turned the light off and went back downstairs for a drink.

By the time she woke in the morning he was already gone again. She found his note which read simply, "Hot time in the old towne. Came and went to shower and change. See you tonight. I'll make it home for dinner. Promise. S."

Dillon's appointment at ten was with the secretary, but when he arrived at the plushest suite in the Pentagon, he was directed down the hall to the office of the assistant secretary, William Basset, one of the bright young managers McNamara had brought with him from Ford. Dillon had misread Basset early on. He had so ferociously challenged the entrenched military bureaucracy, including those elements that had opposed DIA, that Dillon had taken him for a man whose main commitment was to an organizational ideal. But in fact Basset's reforming zeal had fallen off along the same curve as McNamara's, and Dillon realized that the assistant secretary's only commitment was to McNamara himself. Basset was still only in his late thirties, the age of Dillon himself when he'd been commissioned the youngest general in America, but youth no longer seemed a note of Basset's. The five brutal years had taken their toll, and it was during the last one—the year of Vietnam—that his hair had gone completely white. His skin had the permanent sickly pallor of flesh that never saw the sun, and his eyes were always red. That he did not stand when Dillon entered his small, unpretentious office seemed less a matter of the discourtesy that set the brass grousing than of simple weariness.

"I'm sorry, General. The secretary's on the Hill. Fulbright went ballistic over the President's announcement. Mr. McNamara asked me to see you and convey any message."

"I'm ballistic too."

"Not the way Fulbright is. He thinks the President's program goes too far."

"Look, Bill, I need a meeting with McNamara right away. He put me off last night."

"Negative, General. You won't see him. You have to deal with me."

"The President is not getting briefed properly. I found out what happened at thé NSC meeting two days ago. General Wheeler failed to make the case for the Reserve call-up. Neither MacDonald nor Mc-Connell made a peep. The JCS went into that meeting determined to demand full mobilization, but when the President asked for their opinion they said nothing."

"So did Mr. McNamara. And at one point he wanted the call-up too."

"I know. That's what I wanted to ask him about. What the hell is going on? Isn't our job to tell the President the truth?"

Basset shrugged, a gesture of sublime resignation which infuriated Dillon, who slammed his hand down on the desk that separated them. "Don't you know what this means, what Johnson announced yesterday? Fifty thousand more troops won't alter the balance near enough. Taking the Vietcong and the NVA together, there are two hundred and fifty thousand seasoned fighters in the South, commanded by Hanoi's best officers, including Tran Do, and equipped with rocket launchers and AK-47s. ARVN has already broken and run, and when our boys show up, even too few of them, the South Vietnamese will pull back even further. There is no way fifty thousand—"