Profane Men (22 page)

“Oh!”

“Oh, God!”

“Oooooohhhhhhh Jesus!”

You will never remember falling. Only the vision that comes with the fall. You can visualize the sight of that big silver, spinning, deadly blade slicing out and down through the sky between you and a sharply banking AH-1G that you can still see firing its rockets out into nothingness as the picture tilts crazily and you see the sky and the clouds and the black smoke puffs
drop
as the blue and green of the rice fields and hootches and paddies and tree lines come flipping over the horizon in your blur of color and awful vibration of impact.

And there in that frozen fraction of a blink, it takes all your senses with such a big, devastating pile driver of concussive force that you think your eyeballs have been kicked loose out of their sockets and as the world spins and you plummet to your death in that whistling, crashing, scream-filled second of bottomless, piss-soaked “friendly” fire, your mind refuses to relinquish control. And somehow there's time to sort out the interesting piece of trivia that this close to the ground, in a bladeless, falling bird, you
can
tell the difference between 105s and 155s.

Well. No shit. Very interesting. I'll just file that away under A for Arty, and in case I'm ever killed again I'll have all this fucking information right there at my charred fucking fingertips.
J E S U S
,
you hear someone scream as you realize with some detachment that your mouth is wide open and you are praying to your Lord high in Heaven above and you pray your way I pray mine and when I have time I get down on my knees, but when I don't have the time I scrunch down into the fetal ball inside a dropping Huey slick and shriek His holy name at the top of my lungs
J E S U S
!!!!

And that little ice man with his evil, icicle-colored heart, you know the one I mean, that little mother that was there at Little Big Horn, and Waterloo, and at San Clemente, he opens his mouth with his lips right there by your ear, and he whispers something dirty to you, but you refuse to listen and, blind, burnt, hurt, you drag yourself away from it over ground heaving under the impact of this high explosive hell, just as you see a Huey tear apart in midair in a great, liquid fireball of allkill that you see with your ears in a last booming flash of overwhelming annihilation, in a sight that you hear down in the depths of your deafened, blackened soul.

Fleur Du Mal
“Mine is the Head of the Hawk! Abracadabra!”

—
The Equinox of the Gods,
Aleister Crowley, 666 The Beast

Later and in another place, a man sits reading about the fate of the spike team and smiling his chilling smile. Most of them are dead now and he feels nothing as he reads this, the KIAs appended to the usual jargon that will ultimately be reduced to bland computer spoonfeed. KIAs typed by some suited eunuch who has never heard the deafening explosions or been soaked in the blood-drenched horror or smelled the last foul breath of death.

This man is something else again. He knows death the way you know your own name, and it holds no terrors for him. He thinks of death only in the prosaic terms of any other workaday toot. A pair of gloves, a sack of nails, a pound of death. He plies a very ancient trade.

His profession goes back to the earliest memories of mankind, when weaker men banded together to form a tribe, and looked to the stronger warrior for their survival. But he sees himself not as a warrior. His profession actually crystallized in October, in the Year of Our Lord Ten Hundred and Sixty One, with the literal execution of the Ismaili's first contract against the Sunni government, when the act of premeditated murder as a political tool became so commonplace a new word was added to the vocabulary. This being the origin of the noun and transitive verb forms of the word taken from the Muslim Order of Ismaili Assassins.

But he sees himself as neither warrior nor assassin. He is simply a worker. Just as he was when he helped his family slaughter animals, just as he was when he killed livestock for a living. Man. Animal-Killing was killing. He could kill with a hammer, or a gun, or an order. It was all wet work. His kills were cold, emotionless, extremely precise. He smiled because long ago his level of expertise had reached the point where he thought of his work as a game. He reads:

ULTRA TOP SECRET ULTRA TOP SECRET

PERINTREP 680-K/CLANDESTINE SERVICES

Disposition of Covert Action Team Mike-3510

Cryptonym “Operation Toledo Blade”

Cryptonymic
“False Spikenard”
(Smilacina racemosa)

“Common woodland species”

Brown, Vernon (18), Radio Telephone Operator, Memphis, Tennessee. KIA

Cryptonymic
“Heal-all”
(Prunella vulgaris)

“Terminal spikes”

Corns, Edwin Allen (21), Forward Observer, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Spotted Cowbane”

(Cicuta maculata) “Poisonous plant”

D'Allesandro, Jonathan (19), Weapons and Demolition, New York, N.Y., KIA

Cryptonymic
“Purple Joe-Pye-Weed”
(Eupatorium purpureum)

“Large, coarsely toothed”

Ewell, Andrew Llewellyn (24), Grenadier, Edina, Minnesota, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Canadian Burnet”
(Sanguisorba canadensis)

Means “to absorb blood”

Hedgepath, Merlin Lyle (22), Special Weapons, Wooddale, Illinois, WIA, deceased

Cryptonymic
“Dayflower”
(Commelina communis)

“A native of Asia”

Kuang, Tran Van (20), Indigenous Scout, KIA

Cryptonymic
“White Hellebore”
(Veratrum viride)

“Very poisonous”

Laidlaw, William Lee (18), Machine Gunner, Weapons, Amazonia, Mississippi, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Blazing Star”
(Liatris spicata)

Other names include “gayfeather”

McAllen, Thomas Joyner (20), Medical/Liaison, Blytheville, Arkansas, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Fly-Poison”
(Amianthium muscae-toxicum)

“Very toxic”

Price, Robert Tinnon (19), Sniper, Fort Worth, Texas *see watch file e/e388-t

Last seen: Iviza (Ibiza) Spain, 1982, present whereabouts unknown

Cryptonymic
“Catfoot”
(Gnaphalium obtusifolium)

“Thrives in waste places”

Rodriguez, Albert (20), Radio Telephone Operator, Bettendorf, Iowa, KIA

Cryptonymic “
Fringed Phacelia
(Phacelia fimbriata)

“Handsome little plant”

Smith, Merle Edward Neal (18), Rifleman, Special Weapons, Elmhurst, New York, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Viper's Bugloss”
(Echium vulgare)

“Supposed to resemble the head of a poisonous serpent”

Spangler, Roy (21), Topographical Exploitation Officer, Carson City, Nevada, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Black-eyed Susan”
(Rudbeckia hirta)

“An obnoxious weed”

Warren, Cleotis (18), Rifleman, Richmond, Virginia, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Wild potato-vine”
(Ipomoea pandurata)

“An enormous root”

Washington, LeRoi Malcolm (19), Grenadier, Special Weapons, Detroit, Michigan, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Erect trillium”
(Trillium erectum)

“Due to its unpleasant scent, this plant is sometimes known as Stinking Willie”

Vandervoort, Franklin Thomas (21), Machine Gunner, Special Weapons, Chino, California, KIA

Cryptonymic
“Poison Hemlock”
(Conium maculatum)

“Deadly”

Grein, Harold Ovid (20), Special Weapons, Machine Gunner, Demolition, Grenadier, Kansas City, Kansas. *see watch file e, e294-t Sep. certificates/reftel a-101M-3.

Grein is carried as an open Watch File, officially listed “MIA,” subject probably deceased.

A seventeenth team member, Cryptonymic
“Common Speedwell”
is officially deleted by Clandestine Services.

Cryptonym “Hawkhead,” whose identity remains unknown even to ACCD (pronounced “acid”) administration, smiles at his own entry in the team report and closes the dossier. Once again, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

“Eat shit: 50,000 toilets can't be wrong.”

— latrine graffiti

The young man had watched the building for many hours now, and yet he felt only exhilaration. He had always found offensive tactics a great stimulant. There was even backup in the form of an “insurance policy” of sorts, and the job was paying such a lot of money. Enough to take him far away. When he finally saw the car pull up to the front of the building and the two men emerge, he double-checked the small photograph he carried in his pocket to make sure that it was Toby Beals. Satisfied, he picked up his heavy bag of tricks and crossed the street, crossing in shadow, using the water-snake-across-the-bank glide as he had been taught.

Princess had been clever, making sure that her friend's lover had a key to the back entrance of the studio, where there were no surveillance cameras as there were in the front of the building. The young man entered quietly, carrying the bag with great respect. He had some firsthand experience in witnessing the destructive power of shaped demolition “satchel” charges such as this, and the detonating equipment in particular was extraordinarily sensitive.

He used the key and quickly crossed the threshold of the back entranceway, pulling the heavy steel door closed and locking it soundlessly. He walked down the hallway, moving in the manner he had learned as the sliding-
pu
(literally, slide step or slide walk), which is a gliding, ball-of-the-foot-forward movement. He focused his energies on performing the step without sound, convincing himself that he was a deadly, invisible force. Deadly, yes. Invisible, not quite.

Sorry, Princess, there were surveillance cameras in the rear of the building too. And at that moment when the young man glided up to the threshold of the first studio doorway, there were in fact eight men watching various monitors, who could attest to his being very visible indeed. There were eight watchers because Toby Beals did not acquire his twenty-eight mil by being stupid. There were eight watchers because Toby, Toby's partners, and Toby's
real
partners had all been warned that a penetration team was coming.

Eagle operated within the need-to-know strictures, except when it was in his best interests not to. He waited until Hawkhead confirmed the termination of Operation Toledo Blade, and at that second signaled another party to tell “The Big Man” about the mission coming in to destroy KILL, and how Eagle's team was drawing a line through it, true to the spirit of “their understanding.”

Said gratuitous leak was tunneled outside his office, through what Eagle thought of as his independent channel, the Joint Chiefs having provided him with a thirty-year power base, and it became simply a thing of one general whispering in the ear of another. This last whisper, transmitted directly into the misshapen ear of The Big Man, was accompanied by a price tag to be eventually repaid in like coinage. Hot air rising. Thus did a prominent Saigon industrialist come to learn right from the dragon's mouth — so to speak — of a skein of events that might result in jeopardy to KILL.

So when the young man glided around the threshold of the doorway, he glided into a world of hurt. The fired projectiles of three automatic weapons, one of which immediately jammed, blasted their target in a hail of seventy-one rounds, an aggregate cluster of forty-three striking him somewhere on his body, all of this happening in that eye blink that it took him to fall from an erect posture to the bullet-pocked, blood-smeared wall, and down to the floor, death claiming him within that instant.

Toby Beals and his partners did not die in the blast from the satchel charge that blew when the bag flew against the wall, the explosion taking four lives as it took out the entire back section of the building in which “China Production Services” made its tape-delay recordings for KILL's main northern relay.

They perished one minute and seven seconds later, when the timer clicked its red pointer to “zero” and two wires were allowed to touch, electrically detonating twenty-five kilos of high explosive up through the guts of the R-9K auto-destruct unit, blowing Beals Joint Ventures of Southeast Asia and all who sailed in her into a smoking pile of charred rubble and miscellaneous fragments of human corpses.

When Kim Lee came in the front way with his package for Broadcast Control/Engineering, presumably to pick up the next day's tapes, nobody thought anything about it as he walked past the surveillance monitors. And that was why, when the young North Vietnamese deserter had first heard about Princess's offer, he had built his plan inside-out, having known Kim Lee since he'd defected to the south.

He knew that Kim could easily slip behind the big transmitter, and simply press the round, red-colored activate button that was now being operated in the dangerous “on” mode. Kim Lee would then have one hundred twenty seconds to get as far away from the building as he could, having been taught how to easily defeat the alarms on the warning system of the auto-destruct. The little boy had been an inexpensive insurance policy. Nobody pays any attention to the little ten-year-old courier always parking his bicycle in the foyer, always running a few minutes late. Besides, little kids don't blow up production studios. So you don't watch ten-year-olds. Especially not when you're busy watching a mysterious intruder carrying a bag full of explosives who happens to be walking down your hallway. A little inadvertent misdirection as it turned out. Tick-tick-tick-tick . . . (
Bannnngggg!
)

. . . Surprise!

Abracadabra, you might say. Now you see it. Now you don't.

And of course the young man who came in KILL's back door was a Vietnamese street cowboy who had been handsomely paid for his time and expertise. The young North Vietnamese deserter had done the only prudent thing. He had farmed out the contract.

It amused both him and his ladylove to no end that the vastly wealthy Mr. Beals, forewarned and forearmed, surrounded by bodyguards and security systems, had been careless enough to let himself get offed by a ten-year-old kid. Xin Loi, motherfucker.