To Kill the Pope (9 page)

“Okay, move out!” the pilot of Tim's helicopter shouted over the intercom. “I can't risk being a sitting duck here . . . There must be Charlie all around . . . Be sure you have marked the coordinates of this spot on your maps . . . This is where I'll pick you up when we get word that you're ready to go home . . . And, yes, have a nice day, you guys. . . .”

The birds were gone and “Romeo” were left in what seemed like the middle of absolutely nowhere, assembling their weapons, radios, and supplies. “So where the fuck do we find the Viet Cong?” the Ranger lieutenant asked Tim softly. “Do we ask for directions or what?”

Checking his compass and maps, Tim determined that their operational area was confined to a narrow rectangle between their landing spot and Khanh Hung, which lay approximately thirty
miles to the southeast. A dozen or more villages were within that perimeter, and South Vietnamese Intelligence had identified it as a major center of rising Viet Cong activity. Tim had already learned enough about Vietnam, though not from his CIA superiors, to assume that the Delta was very far from being “pacified”—indeed that for all practical purposes the entire countryside was controlled by the Viet Cong. He also knew that, in most cases, the villages led that double life: they were the home of peace-loving, land-cultivating families in daytime and Viet Cong strongholds after dark. Friendly Army types had given Tim private briefings.

Although it was easier and safer for the team to move at night, Tim feared that a nocturnal incursion might lead to a lethal confrontation with a vastly superior enemy, with heavily armed Viet Cong deployed around the cluster of houses forming a village. A daytime sweep would also present serious dangers inasmuch as the farmers would immediately shed their civilian identity and turn into a fierce fighting force, exchanging plows for Soviet-made Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers hidden in attics, cellars, and under rocks and boulders. Tim therefore decided to go for the only other alternative: a surreptitious attack just before dawn when, he hoped, most of the inhabitants would still be asleep and the armed sentinels relaxed and unsuspecting. They would be tired and sleepy after their nocturnal vigilance. It was the best approach Tim had learned from hearing about Viet Cong tactical habits.

Romeo's first target was True Thien village, about four miles east of the landing area. It had long been on the Phoenix hit list. Tim kept his detachment back in a gully obscured from view by trees, giving the men all day to check their equipment and concentrate their minds on the approaching action. They broke out K rations for the noon and evening meals. At nightfall, the team moved out, advancing silently in Indian file behind Tim. They were imitating the Viet Cong's stealthy ways.

Tim had spent the daylight hours trying to memorize the detailed map Kurtski had handed him before departure from Can Tho, but now he had to keep rechecking it with a tiny flashlight. He wore infrared goggles for night vision, as did all the team members, striving to match the terrain's features with the map's
indications. Of course, Tim was uncertain how accurate was his South Vietnamese Army map, adding to his mounting tension. It was a typical, humid, oppressive Delta night, and the men were bathed in sticky sweat. True Thien village was immediately west of the old French Colonial Route 4, which helped Tim in orienting himself toward the objective: The map had to be right, if nothing else, about the location of Route 4.

The trick was to advance atop the grassy tracks of the connecting network of dikes, avoiding the swampy trap of the rice paddies, though every once in a while one of the men would slip down, returning sheepishly to the column, covered with mud. It adds to the camouflage, Tim thought after falling himself into a paddy, as he spat mud out of his mouth. They covered three miles in eight hours of walking virtually on tiptoe in their heavy boots. The safety catches were off their weapons: The men were ready to fire if they suddenly ran into a Viet Cong unit returning to one of the villages from
its
nocturnal raids. Viet Cong attacks on “pacified” villages were almost invariably at night. But the silence now was broken only by the cries of night birds and the chatter of monkeys.

A few minutes after four o'clock in the morning, Romeo reached the cover of a small forest. True Thien, according to the map, lay immediately behind the woods. He signaled the team to halt and crouch down to rest on its western edge. It was blackness ahead, but Tim could discern through the infrared goggles the village's houses and huts. He saw no movement.

At five o'clock, the roosters came awake, a dog barked here and there. Now it was dawn, not like thunder, but like the lazy end of a gentle spring night's dream. Romeo had mastered the art of communicating by hand signals; when it was to dark, the men conveyed signals by touch, whispering only if urgently required. Slithering through the forest floor muck to the first line of trees, his M-16 in his left hand, Tim hid behind a clump of thick bushes, the rest of the team taking up positions on either side of him. It was already light enough for him to observe the village through his high-powered binoculars. He made out six or seven one-story houses, some with narrow verandas, in the center of True Thien, and probably fourteen or fifteen thatched huts around the perimeter. He saw a tall, thin old man in a loose black
garment stepping out on the veranda of his house, looking toward the rising sun, yawning and stretching.

“Go! . . . Go!” Tim shouted, leaping out from behind the bushes and running toward the village houses across a stretch of tamped-down, yellowish soil. The team raced alongside and behind him, a flying wedge.

Tim Savage, a CIA officer named Silva, and a Vietnamese sergeant rushed onto the veranda of the first house, knocking down the old man in black and hurling themselves inside through the open door. The Rangers fanned out to secure the approach to the village from the west—a rutted track emerging from rice paddies beyond—while the other CIA man, Gervasi, and the remaining South Vietnamese posted themselves around the house, their weapons raised in readiness against an attack.

*  *  *

Inside, Tim found the family at breakfast by a charcoal stove. The two men, three women, and four or five children froze with their rice bowls in midair as the Phoenix team burst in.

“Down on the ground, facedown!” Tim shouted, the South Vietnamese sergeant barking out the translation in his language. The villagers obeyed wordlessly. They were patted down for weapons; they had none.

“Okay,” Tim said, “now get up and stand against the far wall, facing me.” He instructed Silva to search the house for arms. The Rangers brought in four black-clad men at gunpoint.

“We grabbed them in the other houses,” the lieutenant announced, “but others ran away, they just vanished.”

Tim nodded, signaling for the Rangers' captives to join their fellow villagers at the wall. A straight-backed chair, the only one in the household, was placed in the center of the room, and Tim motioned Gervasi to lead one of the Vietnamese to it. The man was thrown into the chair like a rice sack.

“Let's have a conversation,” Tim told him, and the corpulent South Vietnamese translated. “I'm going to ask a few questions, and if you answer truthfully, nothing will happen to your family. Do you understand?”

The Vietnamese, an emaciated man in his thirties, remained impassive and silent.

“How many fighters live in your village?” Tim asked.

The man in the chair stared at the ground, motionless. His facial muscles made his face hard like a mask. Tim repeated the question. Again, silence, expressively loud in its defiance and contempt.

“All right, have it your way,” he said.

The South Vietnamese stepped up and backhanded the prisoner across the face, the force of the blow hurtling him out of the chair. He collapsed on the ground, and the sergeant kicked him viciously in the groin. The man uttered no sound. The South Vietnamese and Gervasi threw him back in the chair, tying his wrists with strong twine. The man's hands rested limply on his lap.

“This is the last time I'll ask you to answer,” Tim said quietly.

The villager's face still betrayed no emotion. Tim raised his eyebrows as a signal to the South Vietnamese, who produced sharpened bamboo sticks from his backpack and deftly stuck two of them under the nail's of the man's right hand. The sticks tore off the nails, and blood spurted from the tips of his fingers. Now the villager howled in pain, then relapsed into silence. He will never talk, Tim told himself, but I guess we must keep trying. He felt nausea rising up from his stomach. God, is this what we should be doing? This is wrong, terribly wrong! How can
I
allow this to happen, let alone order it? It's inhuman! He clenched his teeth, letting the torture proceed.

The South Vietnamese sergeant yanked up the man's head, thrusting the sharp point of his curved knife into his right eye. There was a squishy sound and the eyeball slid down the villager's cheek onto his lap, then on the hard clay soil. Blood gushed out of the socket. A woman at the wall screamed piercingly. The man, her husband, fell forward, his bloodied face hitting the ground. He had lost consciousness. Tim ran out of the house, vomiting on the veranda.

Back in the room, the Vietnamese sergeant asked Tim, “Shall we dispose of him, sir?” Tim looked wildly at him and at Gervasi.

“What's that?” he gasped. “Oh, I see . . . Well, do your job.”

Tim was in the doorway, fleeing again, when he heard the dry crack of a pistol. He did not look back to see the villager writhing in agony as his skull shattered. It lasted less than a second.

“Look, Tim,” Gervasi said, “this ain't gonna work here. I mean the interrogation. Let's just get it over with. Let 'em see what happens when they refuse to cooperate. That we don't take any crap from them.”

Tim Savage nodded weakly. Gervasi was an experienced Phoenix officer from the CIA's Security Division to whom the jungle sweeps were a totally impersonal assignment: his judgment was widely respected among the teams. Tim felt sick, lightheaded. What am I doing here? he asked himself as he stepped, blinking, into the sun that now shone brightly down on the Delta village. The Rangers herded the Vietnamese out of the house—the men, the women, and the children. It was very quiet. A minute or so elapsed, and the Rangers lieutenant looked questioningly at Tim.

“Shall we go ahead, sir?” he finally asked. “Er . . . you know, what's necessary?”

“No, let them go,” Tim ordered the men. To the South Vietnamese sergeant he added, “just tell 'em to get the hell out of here.”

“But, Tim,” Silva, the other CIA officer, interjected, “they will run to their Viet Cong buddies, give away our position. There must be fucking Charlie all around . . .”

“Yeah, I realize that,” Tim replied. “That's tough. But I'm not about to have a mass execution in the village only because we couldn't get answers from that guy. Anyway, he's already dead. Let that be an example.”

The villagers had vanished from sight before he could complete his sentence. The Provincial Forces sergeant spoke out: “Sir, every village of this kind keeps caches of rice for the guerrillas. This village is no different. They usually hide the rice in cellars under their houses, under trapdoors. Shouldn't we . . .”

“Yes,” Tim told him evenly. “Yes, we should. Set fire to every house and every hut. That will take care of the rice.”

As Romeo retreated to the woods, flames were shooting up high from the village roofs and smoke was curling up around the structures. Then there were loud explosions.

“The sons of bitches had ammo stashed in their homes,” Silva said. “We missed it when we searched the houses, but now they've lost it anyway.”

It took Tim less than two hours to retrace their steps to the landing zone, marching rapidly in daylight. If there were Viet Cong in the area, they made no attempt to ambush or attack the team. In fact, the few peasants in conical hats they saw guiding their water buffaloes across the rice paddies seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to them, as if the Americans were ghosts. After all, they were peaceful farmers, tilling their land as their ancestors had done for hundreds or thousands of years. They knew nothing about wars, certainly not while the sun shone.

Halfway to the landing zone, Tim radioed Can Tho base in code for a helicopter pickup. Resting in the gully by the stand of trees, the men presently heard the clack-clack of the Hueys' rotors. The two birds sat on the hillock and Team Romeo climbed aboard. The pilot shouted to Tim as they were lifting, “I bet you guys had a great time! We saw the smoke in the distance as we were coming . . .”

“Absolutely,” Tim told him. “Absolutely. We had a ball.”

*  *  *

“You focked up!” Jake Kurtski screamed at Tim. His red face had turned wine-dark as if he had been struck with apoplexy. He had trouble breathing and his words tumbled out almost incoherently in his boundless fury. It enhanced his Polish accent pronunciation in English. In a strange sort of way, Kurtski must have sensed that, because of his strange European background and personality, he was an American caricature, and he seemed compelled to act it out.

“You focked up at that focking village, Savage!” Kurtski repeated in a primal scream. “We're not focking missionaries! . . . We're trying to win the focking war! You had no right to let them go scot-free . . . The motherfockers should've been executed. Every focking one of them . . . If you can't get information out of them, you kill them all. It's the only way we can get the focking Viet Cong to respect us!

“This is
not
what Phoenix is all about,” Kurtski continued, growing somewhat calmer as he read again Tim's after-action report. “The idea is to destroy—yes, destroy—the Viet Cong infrastructure,
not
to play focking missionary or Good Samaritan. It's not enough to torch villages if the people are allowed to
escape. This way, we'll never smash the cadres. So what's your excuse for this focking disaster?”