The Return: A Novel (6 page)

He dragged Skelly toward the door and out into the lot. The people outside backed off when they saw the pistol, but Marder knew one of them was bound to have a gun and it was only a matter of minutes before they started using it.

The first shot sounded and Marder heard the snap of the bullet. He shot out the two beer signs. People scattered. He let go of Skelly and they both reached the camper, putting its bulk between them and the crowd of bikers.

“Give me the keys,” said Marder.

“Oh, please!” replied Skelly, scooting into the truck from the passenger side, slipping into the driver’s seat, and cranking the engine. Marder got in. More shots and the sound of bullets striking the sides and back of the camper as they roared away.

Then Skelly slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel violently, sending the truck slewing across the road. It teetered for a hideous second, all four wheels crashed to the pavement, and they were pointed back toward the roadhouse, accelerating. A bullet holed the windshield as Skelly drove the big truck’s brush guard into the line of Harleys, which went over like dominoes, some skidding away, others crushed under the heavy tires. More shots: Marder could hear them thudding into his new camper.

Skelly did yet another 180, swinging across the two-lane and sending a road sign flying. Marder slid off the seat into the foot well and wrapped his arms over his head. A horrible metallic grinding from below, the sound of gunfire from above, Marder literally praying and then laughing inwardly at the absurdity of it.

Now they were heading at high speed back toward the interstate. In the side mirror Marder could see the glow of flame—perhaps the gas from the smashed motorcycles had caught fire. Amazingly, no one had shot out the tires, no one had sent a lethal bullet into either of them or punctured the fuel or propane tanks. Marder got up on his seat. Skelly said, “Christ, you know what? I’m starving. I could go for some Hardee’s. What do you say?”

“Hardee’s would be good,” said Marder. “To go, I think.”

*   *   *

He awoke with bright sunlight in his eyes. A shaft of it, thin and bright as a laser, was coming from a bullet hole in the over-cab compartment. It took Marder a moment to recall where he was and how he’d come to be there. The truck was not moving. The only sound was wind and, faint and distant, the twang of a country song. He left the bed and slipped down into the camper’s main cabin. Well, so much for his fourteen-thousand-dollar investment. Most of the windows were shattered, and the cabinetwork was marred by bullet holes. The floor was covered in broken glass and splinters and bits of pink insulation. Besides the cosmetic damage, it seemed that the camper had not suffered functional impairment: the lights worked, the refrigerator was cold, the toilet swallowed his pee, and the shower gushed. He stripped and jumped under it.

Dressed in a fresh T-shirt, jeans, and worn leather huaraches, Marder left the camper. He found that it was parked in a small lot facing what appeared to be a public beach. He presumed that the oily green swells he observed rushing shoreward and pounding a slight surf against the sand were part of the Gulf of Mexico. He could see a large gray naval vessel moving slowly against the horizon. Skelly was nowhere around.

Marder used his iPhone to find out where he was. He ignored the many messages indicated and consulted the map app, which told him he was off Highway 90, in a park near Pascagoula, Mississippi. Skelly had driven well over seven hundred miles during the night and early morning. He must be exhausted now; Marder wondered where he was.

*   *   *

As he was not about to leave an unlockable camper with a lot of money and weapons in it, Marder busied himself with light housekeeping. He charged his iPhone. He used the little broom and dustpan that came with the camper to clear away the glass and debris from the floor and surfaces, made himself a cup of instant coffee on the stove, and ate a packet of cold, greasy fries left over from the previous night. Thus restored, he sat in the passenger’s seat, switched on the radio, and waited.

Marder was good at waiting. He had learned the skill from Skelly, in fact, long ago. Skelly said that survival in combat was largely a matter of knowing when to move and when not to, and not moving—becoming so still that you essentially disappeared—was a discipline hard to acquire, especially for the large, anxious, jittery Americans. But Skelly had acquired it and so had Marder, under Skelly’s strenuous direction.

*   *   *

Waiting in a truck, with the heat just starting to build, it had been early, just after first light. Marder had been ordered to report to his commanding officer, a bottlecap colonel named Honus “Honey” Folger. Folger was out on the pistol range at Nakhon Phanom. One of his policies was that every person in his command be a proficient shot and that every person carry a sidearm when on duty, although the possibility of any of his airmen ever having to defend the base against enemy attack was remote—more than remote, absurd. Still, he was the CO of all the pinball wizards and they all had to qualify, including their leader. There he was in the approved stance, blasting away with his .45 while his aides stood in a worshipful little group behind the firing line.

After he was done and had cleared his weapon and stuck it back in the romantic leather shoulder holster he wore, an aide motioned peremptorily to Marder, who jumped out of his seat and moved smartly over to the line, where he saluted and reported as ordered.

Colonel Folger looked him up and down and indicated the holstered army .45 on Marder’s hip.

“Can you shoot that thing, son?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marder.

“Then do so.”

The pit crew set up a new man-shaped target at the ten-meter line, and Marder produced a single ragged hole in the silhouette’s head with his seven bullets.

Honey’s fleshy red face lit with a grin. “See? That’s what a little training can do,” he crowed to his assembled aides, and then in a lower voice said to Marder, “You didn’t learn to shoot like that in the goddamn air force, did you?”

“No, sir. I shot pistols as a boy. A lot.”

“Country boy, were you?”

“No, sir. I’m from Brooklyn.”

A surprised grunt from the colonel. He said, “Come on over here, I want to talk to you.”

They walked over to where a table and chairs had been set up under a distinctly un-military striped umbrella and sat down.

“Marder, I’ve had my eye on you for some time,” the colonel said. “You’re smart, and I think you’re tough. I have an instinct about these things. You’re not meant to spend the war staring at screens. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So tell me what you think, son. I mean about Igloo White and Alpha. The air force thinks it’s a great program, a war-changing program. Charlie needs three hundred tons of supplies every day to function in the south, and if we can strangle him on the trail, the VC will dry up and blow away. And we can, we can! I want to know every time a mouse farts along the whole length of the trail, and if that mouse is a commie mouse, I want to drop a bomb on him—not just near him, mind, but right on top of him. So tell me, son, why can’t I do that yet? Why in hell are those supplies still getting through?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. I’m pretty low down on the intel food chain.”

“That’s why I’m asking you, Airman. I want the view from the trenches.”

“Well, sir,” replied Marder after a moment’s thought, “the first problem is the whole idea that it’s a trail. It’s not a trail; it’s a whole road network constantly being expanded and improved by an army of workers. I mean, you can just look at the maps, sir. Plus, the sensors are scattered by aircraft, sort of approximately where we know they have road networks. Some of them supposedly go into the ground like lawn darts, and others supposedly hang from camouflaged parachutes in the treetops. But we don’t know that. It’s a crapshoot. And the other thing is, the VC are no fools. They have to know about the sensors; they’ve probably taken them apart and know how they work. For all I know, they’ve found a lot of them and moved them to where they can’t do us any good. And also, well, the whole thing you said about strangling them. Basically we’ve got million-dollar computers and millions of dollars’ worth of aircraft, costing God knows how much to operate, just so we can drop a bomb and blow up a World War Two Russian truck and a thousand bucks’ worth of rice. I mean, won’t we run out of dollars before they run out of rice?”

The colonel frowned. “Don’t you think that’s a little above your pay grade, Airman Marder?”

“Yes, sir. Like I said before, but you asked me—”

“Yes, yes, but the other things you said are quite true. Very perceptive, Marder. I see I wasn’t wrong about you. Now let me ask you this: What’s the solution? How can we know the location of every vehicle on your vast road network? What would we need?”

“I don’t know, sir. The logistics and routing schedule of the Central Office for South Vietnam in your pocket, updated daily?”

Folger laughed. “Yeah, that would do it. But failing that—and, son, I’m going to tell you something that maybe ten people in this theater know about—we’ve got something just as good. We’ve got a new kind of sensor a little bigger than a regulation softball. It gets buried by the trail, and when trucks or personel pass by, it sends out data on speed and vector. I’m talking exact location now. What do you think of that, Marder?”

“It sounds pretty cool, sir. Who gets to bury these softballs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail?”

“Ah, SOG has been tasked with that by MACV—you know, the so-called Green Berets and their little jungle helpers. I’d argued that the air force has the capability to get in there and do the job and place its own sensors, but unfortunately I was overruled. Basically, it’s the army’s war, and they get to do it their way. However, we did prevail in one respect. MACV has authorized USAF liaison teams to work with the Special Forces, to calibrate the equipment when emplaced and do maintenance on the repeaters.”

“The repeaters, sir?”

“Yes, like network amplifiers. The little balls don’t have much range, and for technical reasons I won’t go into, their signals have to be picked up by a man-portable stationary unit and relayed up to the EC-121s. These repeaters will have to be buried at precise locations along the road network, and that task naturally will fall to us. To, uh, volunteer technicians who will infiltrate with the Special Forces and their montagnard allies and do the job. You understand what this means, right? For the first time we’ll have a true electronic fence, with defined sensor locations, across the whole trail complex. Nothing will move south that we don’t know about. It’ll be an order of magnitude increase in accuracy from what we’ve got now. We’ll bomb the living shit out of the bastards. And one other thing: such a technician would have to, uh, ascertain that the VEDUUs were properly deployed.”

“Voodoos, sir?”

“Vehicle detection uplink units. The softballs. We don’t want the little friends to just toss them anywhere, do we?”

“No, sir. So let me see if I’ve got this straight. These volunteer technicians are supposed to go unsupported into the most hostile area on earth in the company of the most dangerous men we’ve got, to deploy an untried technology, which, if it works, will focus the attention of the entire People’s Army of Vietnam on these volunteer technicians, and, in addition, these volunteer technicians are supposed to spy on the most dangerous men we’ve got, who are the only people protecting them from the PAVN. Do I have it right, sir?”

The colonel stared at him; Marder returned the stare. “Well, you’re certainly a direct bastard, Marder.”

“Yes, sir. I try to be. It saves time, and I figure if you want ass-kissing you’ve got all those guys over there to do it.” He gestured broadly to the waiting staffers.

“And dangerously close to insolent in the bargain.”

“Yes, sir, but I try to stay on the good side of that line. I figured you for an officer that can handle a little straight talk. You know and I know that you’re talking about something very close to a suicide mission. On the upside, obviously, any volunteers would get a full step up in grade and hazardous-duty pay.”

“Obviously. But I want you to know that should any of these volunteers get into trouble, the entire resources of the Seventh Air Force would be devoted to extracting them.”

“That’s good to know, sir. In that case, I would be happy to volunteer for the mission. Does it have a name, by the way, sir?”

“Yes, we’re calling it Iron Tuna,” said Honey Folger. He stood; Marder stood. “You’ll report to squadron immediately for your new orders,” said Folger, now looking intently off at the horizon, as if he could with enough effort see the trail. “And, Marder? Not a fucking word about any of this to anyone.”

*   *   *

Marder reconstructed this dialogue in his head, found it interesting and satisfying that he could still do it. Whether it was literally true or not he couldn’t have said. He did recall the feel in his hand of the little devices, which they immediately rechristened “voodoos,” and of the grinding, Sisyphean weight of the man-portable repeaters on his back. His view of Honey Folger was conflated with other images: the man left the USAF in ’71, still a light colonel, went into defense contracting with Raytheon, made a bundle, ran for Congress in Arizona, won a seat, and then wrecked himself like so many others in the savings-and-loan scandal. Marder could recall the man’s face, fleshier than it had been, with the deer/headlights look they all had coming out of the courtroom after the indictment. He remembered that shot more clearly than he did the interview that had changed his life, that morning under the striped umbrella at the Naked Fanny pistol range.

*   *   *

There was one other vehicle in the lot, a large RV, the source of the faint music Marder had heard earlier. As the morning wore on, other cars and campers arrived. Marder was trying to think of the names of the other two volunteers in his volunteer group, one a tall pale boy from Tennessee and the other an Italian from Providence they called Sandhog. Sandhog and…?

While he was thus engaged, the rear door of the RV opened and Skelly emerged, and after him followed a middle-aged woman with teased blond hair and a tanned, ferrety face. She embraced Skelly warmly and her laugh rang across the parking lot, louder than the sound of the gulls. Then another woman stepped down, the same teased straw hair, the face less ferrety, pretty even, somewhat younger than the other. Marder figured them as sisters.