To Kill the Pope (8 page)

With the morning's rising sun on the Blackhawk's portside and its oblique rays coloring the countryside pink and red—the haze had dissipated—Tim could discern the features of the landscape below. First came the western slice of the Plain of Reeds, a badly burned-out fire zone. Then, immediately past the provincial capital of My Tho, there was the silent immensity of the Mekong
Delta. The mighty Mekong River, born in the Tibetan highlands and known to the Vietnamese as Me Nam Kong, actually becomes two separate rivers as it splits just below the Cambodian border into the Tien Giang, forming the northern boundary of the delta, and the Hau Giang, the southern divide. Between the two rivers lies the Delta proper, an oblong stretch of land blessed by the most extraordinary fertility due to the annual overflow of the Tien Giang and the Hau Giang that empty themselves into the South China Sea.

Even before crossing the Tien Giang, Tim could see the green waterlogged rice paddies to the north of the swollen river and the tiny black shapes of water buffaloes already at work under their wooden yokes. Sunbeams lit the wet surface of the paddies like giant windowpanes. Tim knew that the Delta had two elements in great abundance: rice and the Viet Cong. Its Vinh Long and Vinh Binh provinces were the granary of South Vietnam, which might have starved without the delta rice. But this rice also sustained the Viet Cong and therefore the whole guerrilla war in the strategic region of IV Corps.

Tim also was aware of how precarious was the overall Vietnam situation, apart from the Delta problem. Two years earlier, the Viet Cong fighters had smashed their way into Saigon in a desperate gamble that crowned their Tet Offensive. Repulsed and mauled by the overwhelming firepower of the Americans and the ARVN, they quickly rebuilt their cadres, never yielding the control of the Mekong Delta. CIA battlefield maps Tim had studied in Saigon indicated that the guerrillas had new bases in the western delta, linking them with Cambodian sanctuaries where arms and supplies were moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam and from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville along the Sihanouk Trail.

The phantom Viet Cong underground headquarters—the famous COSVN, an American acronym for Central Office for South Vietnam—were believed to be located somewhere west or northwest of the delta, but they could never be pinpointed by Intelligence. Roger Stephens insisted that COSVN was the grand prize for his Phoenix teams to snatch or, at least, help locate through interrogations of captured Viet Cong commanders.

“I don't care what it takes or how many Charlie you've got to kill,” he had told his new Phoenix officers. “I must have COSVN . . .”

*  *  *

The Blackhawk had traversed the delta in less than a half hour and crossed Hau Giang. This was the southern Delta, the Viet Cong-infested Phong Dinh and Ba Xuyen provinces. The helicopter banked sharply to the right and dropped down on a concrete landing pad.

“This is the end of the line—Can Tho,” the pilot announced over the intercom. “Please disembark. I've got to refuel and head the hell back.”

Squatting on the southern bank of Hau Giang, Can Tho was a beehive of activity. Jumping out of the Blackhawk, Tim saw six or seven other helicopters in the landing area, among them two heavy-lift Chinooks, in various stages of unloading supplies and refueling. Helmeted South Vietnamese soldiers drove trucks in and out of the perimeter, watched by bored G.I.'s, beer bottles in hand, in Jeeps parked alongside. Down a rutted highway, beyond the landing zone, Tim could see clusters of houses, smoke curling lazily over the roofs. Mosquitoes buzzed contentedly. Well, Tim thought, this is my new home.

More precisely, his home in Can Tho was a comfortable room in a two-story house in the barbed wire fence-protected CORDS compound on the western outskirts of the town. It was assigned to him by Jake Kurtski, who occupied a nearby spacious villa belonging to a wealthy South Vietnamese landlord who had fled to Saigon when the Viet Cong began to assert themselves in the Delta. For company, Kurtski had two black-and-tan rottweilers and, in daytime, two Vietnamese women servants. The women's every movement was watched by armed CIA guards to assure that they did not try to poison Kurtski or otherwise kill him. Charlie often used women as underground operatives. Besides, Kurtski was convinced that the maids would steal from his stash of Jack Daniel's Black Sour Mash bottles. At night, Kurtski's home was guarded by a heavily armed CIA squad and all the approaches were bathed in floodlights.

No such security measures protected the house where Tim had
been billeted. His landlord, so to speak, was Joseph Ryan, a civilian AID official who served as Kurtski's deputy. Two other CIA Phoenix officers also had rooms at Ryan's home, which was the nearest thing to an American boardinghouse in Vietnam. The men took their meals there between field missions and had access to the living room and its television set that easily picked up the powerful signal of Saigon's Armed Forces broadcasting station relayed south by microwave towers. Presiding over the household was Ryan's wife, Sonia, the only American dependent in Can Tho.

Can Tho was a reasonably desirable location, certainly for American military and CIA officers and CORDS personnel. Overall, it was protected from frontal attacks by a U.S. Army Rangers detachment, the South Vietnamese troops and gunship helicopters stationed there—and jet air support could be called in on a moment's notice. Among Americans in the Delta, Can Tho was famous as “Palm Springs” because the CORDS compound featured a swimming pool and a well-stocked officers' club. Americans at war, as Tim was learning in Can Tho, have a talent and penchant for escapism verging on the surreal. The first time he went to the cabana-fringed swimming pool, he joined fellow officers splashing about in bathing suits, their M-16s and their sidearms in holsters on the concrete deck within easy reach.

“Hey, isn't this a neat place for planning Pacification?” a deeply tanned Rangers captain clutching a beer bottle shouted to Tim. “Man, this is the life—if we live long enough!”

The Rangers' primary assignment in Can Tho was participation in Phoenix teams. Tim had met all the Phoenix officers—CIA and Rangers—the day he reached the delta headquarters at a meeting chaired by Jake Kurtski. Chewing on his unlit cigar between deep drafts of gin and tonic—his noontime drink—Kurtski encouraged the new arrivals to enjoy “all the joys of our Palm Springs.”

Squinting and winking obscenely, he told the men: “You better listen to me! Drink, swim, and get laid while you can—and there's plenty of native pussy here—and some not so native. You might as well face the fact that Phoenix has a hell of a high casualty rate. When the cocksuckers catch us, they kill us—just as we kill them. Just bear it in mind . . .”

Tim kept Kurtski's advice very much in mind around the Ryan household. In fact, the thought had occurred to him the instant he set foot at the house and saw Sonia Ryan. She was a pretty and remarkably well-sculpted woman in her late twenties, her olive hue, liquid brown eyes, and high cheekbones revealing her Latin, perhaps Aztec, ancestry. Sonia moved with perfectly natural sensuality, and Tim's first reaction was that Joe Ryan, who must have been twenty or more years her senior, had to have been out of his mind to bring her to Can Tho to live among exceedingly horny men who never knew whether they would be alive the next day. Ryan was away a lot on inspection trips to the “Resettlement Villages,” one of his principal projects, often gone for several days at a time, and there was no lack of opportunities for infidelity, if Sonia so desired.

As it happened, she did, wasting no time. Ryan having left on an inspection tour the third morning after Tim had moved into the house, Sonia appeared in his room just after midnight, her hair down and a flimsy peignoir over her naked body. She slid into bed next to Tim, kissed him deeply in the mouth, and whispered, “I want you to fuck me . . .” It was all over in ten minutes. Sonia planted a kiss on his cheek, patted him on the head, and was gone without a word.

Tim felt somewhat amused and pleasantly violated; it had not been very romantic, but what the hell! He had had sexual experiences, good ones, bad ones, and indifferent ones, starting with his Georgetown college days and continuing happily, if more discreetly, after he had joined the CIA. The Agency had no interest in the heterosexual life of its officers so long as it did not endanger national security. Not obsessed by sex, Tim had always been the initiator—the aggressor—because it came naturally to him, and Sonia's wholly utilitarian approach was an innovation. Sonia performed her brief pilgrimages to Tim's room whenever Ryan was away, and their sex life acquired the relatively satisfying regularity of evening meals. Her orgasms came with the precision of Swiss watchworks, lasting exactly ten seconds. She performed oral sex on Sunday afternoons. As Kurtski had pointed out, Can Tho did offer its own brand of joy.

T
IM
S
AVAGE HAD SPENT
the first month in Can Tho organizing and training his Phoenix team, studying the intelligence traffic and trying to familiarize himself with the geography of the Mekong Delta from available South Vietnamese and U.S. military maps, unreliable as they were. Kurtski had also ordered Tim to undergo intensive exercises in jungle warfare, survival skills, and interrogation techniques. Rangers and CIA veterans of Phoenix were his instructors, among them Paul Martinius, a wiry son of Sicilians, who was completing a year at Can Tho and whom Tim found to be the most thoughtful and intelligent of all the Agency officers there. South Vietnamese intelligence officers attached to CORDS and Regional Forces' unit commanders taught Tim all they knew about Viet Cong movements, tactics, and concealment practices. But from the very outset, Tim had the disturbing feeling that what the South Vietnamese knew about their Vietnamese opposite numbers amounted to very little.

“What did you expect?” Martinius asked Tim, who had been complaining about the quality of South Vietnamese intelligence. “Einstein and James Bond wrapped into one?”

The most complex aspect in organizing Phoenix teams was to integrate their members as closely as possible, notwithstanding their basic differences in backgrounds, cultures, and languages. To succeed and survive, they had to get to know and trust one another and be able to function together like a fine-tuned instrument. It was a tall order, but after a month Tim believed that it was as ready as it would ever be. There were ten men in the team, code-named by Kurtski as “Romeo,” from the military designation for the letter “R” (they were the “R Team”).

The two other CIA officers in “Romeo” had participated in
previous Phoenix missions, but they were primarily counterinsurgency classroom experts with little actual military experience. The three Rangers under Tim—a young gung-ho lieutenant and two sergeants—had each gone on only one foray. The four South Vietnamese were drawn from the Regional Forces, a militia operating in its native region and ostensibly familiar with the delta jungle and its trails and with local villages and peasants. They had worked with Phoenix in the past, and their command of English was just sufficient for them to act as interpreters in interrogating the Viet Cong captured by the teams. Tim had asked Martinius whether the South Vietnamese could be trusted as interpreters; his friend shrugged, replying, “Why should they be trusted? They, too, are Vietnamese. We always keep forgetting that . . .”

Jake Kurtski, for his part, knew exactly what he expected the team to accomplish. His Phoenix detachments were deployed in a generally random fashion for sweeps in areas where intelligence suggested that Viet Cong leaders were active under the cover of peaceful villagers. A sweep could last a week or two or longer, depending on the results, fresh intelligence acquired in the field, food supply, and the condition of the men. It was always something of a lottery whether a team would actually locate Viet Cong leaders, but Kurtski operated on the probably correct theory that there were
some
Viet Cong in every village and should be treated accordingly. He spelled out what he meant by “accordingly” at a briefing for the American members of “Romeo” the evening before the team set out on their assignment.

“This is a three-step operation,” he said. He sat behind his desk in the living room of his villa, mauling his cigar and sipping Jack Daniel's from a short, fat glass. “The first step, obviously, is to move into a village—it doesn't matter which one. The second step is to flush out the cadres. They could be village elders. Or they could be women. You begin interrogating them about how many guerrillas there are in the village or in the immediate vicinity, who are the chiefs, how they communicate among their groups, where they stash weapons and food, and so on. It's okay to hit them, beat them, torture them, or whatever, but you gotta be patient. Dead Viet Cong don't talk. The third step is to liquidate them
after
finishing the interrogation; you can do it any way you like. There is
no point in letting them live—after all, they are the enemy. And, yes, it's up to you whether you want to torch the village when you're done . . . Good luck and good hunting, gentlemen!”

*  *  *

Tim's first mission was a sweep in the southern Delta in an area of several hundred square miles roughly between the district towns of Due Long and Khanh Hung, some thirty miles south of Can Tho. Kurtski had told Tim that the sweep should take about two weeks. The team could radio Can Tho only in dire emergencies: if it was in serious jeopardy or if it had obtained information of an urgent nature requiring that it be communicated instantly—in code. The Viet Cong had learned how to intercept American radio traffic, and it was much safer to maintain radio silence.

Aerial reconnaissance had indicated that there were dry patches of land among dikes and rice paddies near Due Long, the town nearest to Can Tho, where helicopters could drop the men. At dawn, Tim and the team were driven to the Can Tho landing zone, boarding two Huey gunships for the flight. Tim was in the lead chopper with a CIA officer, the two Ranger sergeants, and two Vietnamese Regional Forces troopers. The Hueys flew low, taking advantage of the morning ground fog below them, and twenty or so minutes later they landed, a minute apart, atop a small hillock overlooking waterlogged paddies. A stand of trees was discernible through the mist.