Jungle Rules (57 page)

“The middle of the country,” Kirkwood said, raising his beer, too. “No excuses why we all can’t get there.”

Archie Gunn smiled, too, and raised his glass, making the commitment to join their first annual reunion in Denver. So did Buck Taylor, Terry O’Connor, Wayne Ebberhardt, and Michael Carter.

 
“ANOTHER SEVEN-AND-SEVEN, Tam,” Bruce Olsen called to the Vietnamese bartender at the Continental Hotel in Saigon. While most members of the U.S. Embassy staff celebrated Independence Day with the poolside barbecue in the American compound, several of the CIA field operators opted to relax away from the flagpole.

Olsen had served for nearly a year under the umbrella of a highly secret unit designated, Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation, better known among company circles as ICEX. This clandestine Central Intelligence Agency spin-off group, overseen by veteran CIA field officer Evan Parker, officially the director of ICEX, did the jobs rumored by Marines who talked to a guy who knew a guy who told wild stories of ninjas in black suits stalking the enemy’s leaders and sympathizers, putting bullets in their brains, or sawing through their necks with piano wire. They code-named it Phoenix.

Before picking up the tour in Saigon, Bruce Olsen had lived his navy life aboard small ships, riding in submarines, swimming in a frog suit during the night, doing all those sorts of things that members of the U.S. Navy’s two Sea-Air-Land Teams, SEALs, like best. He had excelled through his training at Coronado, and pulled one and a half tours in Vietnam before Evan Parker and his boss, Robert Komer, handpicked him for the Phoenix program.

Komer, a well-respected and powerful agent in the CIA, got the job of putting the wheels on the idea of Phoenix. He went to Saigon and opened shop as the head of the CIA’s Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development, which funded and sheltered ICEX and Phoenix.

Black-suited commandos, handpicked from the Army Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Reconnaissance, Force Reconnaissance, and Scout/Sniper units, and Special Weapons and Tactics units in the air force, stalked through the cities and the countryside, not just in Vietnam but also in neighboring Laos and Cambodia, and assassinated enemy leaders, and suspected leaders who sympathized with the Communists and caused harm to American and South Vietnamese forces.

They terminated targets without prejudice, meaning the poor sap just got in the way; with prejudice which meant they had put the hit on the man, and with extreme prejudice, which meant die now, motherfucker, die immediately.

In many covert operations that went beyond any concepts of legality, and simply amounted to outright murder, blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions, Olsen and his black ninja cohorts recruited, trained, and oversaw field agents who often did the actual trigger-pulling or neck-sawing, or they set up the victims so he and his Phoenix team associates could do it. Then, after the mission, they terminated these torpedoes, too, cleaning up all loose ends. They left no living witnesses or participants to the deeds who might betray their secret with a nudge or a buck or two. Killing the friendly, unsuspecting local shills after their use ran out, that was the ugly part of the job that Bruce Olsen detested. That was one reason why he liked his seven-and-seven with more Seagram’s Seven than Seven-Up.

“Hey, pal, got a light?” a voice behind Bruce Olsen said, surprising the SEAL.

“Wow, where’d you come from, Marine?” Olsen said, seeing the trim cut of the blond man with the clean smile and definite look of one of Uncle Sam’s misguided children.

“How did you know I’m a Marine?” Brian Pitts said, taking a stool next to Olsen and pointing to a beer tap that said San Miguel on the plastic handle.

“I knew you weren’t a SEAL,” Olsen said, and laughed. “We know each other personally, here in ’Nam. You don’t have a dog face, and your hair does not say ‘wild blue yonder’ or ‘anchors aweigh,’ so that just leaves Marines.”

“You’re good, man,” Pitts said, grabbing a book of matches off the bar and lighting his cigarette. “I take it you don’t smoke, then.”

“No, sorry,” Olsen said, finishing his drink and pointing to the bartender named Tam to bring him another.

Sam Madison, a CIA field supervisor close to ICEX director Evan Parker, sat at the other end of the bar with a colleague of Olsen’s named Bart Johnson, a SEAL, too, and a Phoenix man as well. A third associate, Mike Hammond, a Force Recon Marine, made up their close-knit, handpicked team. Sam and Bart watched Bruce and the stranger with short glances in the mirror behind the bar.

They, too, saw the short haircut, and knew all the military operators in the Saigon area. He looked the part but did not have a face that matched a known commodity.

“Hey, I just checked in down here, and tonight got my first chance to scope out the ville,” Pitts offered, since the American who was obviously a serviceman said nothing. “Say, you’re not an officer, are you?”

“Aw, no,” Olsen said and shrugged. “I’m a regular navy enlisted guy— you know, the Donald Duck suit and ‘ships ahoy.’ ”

“Same here, only Marines. Sergeant Franklin’s the name, Jesse Franklin,” Pitts lied, even though the identification card in his wallet read First Lieutenant Joseph A. Russell, matching the dog tags around his neck. The real Jesse Franklin, an old black man, swept the floors and shined shoes in Robbie’s Pool Hall back in Kansas City, and had given Brian his street name, Small Change. Next to his Uncle Joe Russell, he liked Jesse best.

“Bruce Olsen, petty officer second class,” the Phoenix hit man said, and shook Brian Pitts’s outstretched hand. “Glad to know you, Sergeant Franklin.”

Pitts smiled at the stranger as they exchanged introductions, curious to know if this guy was really a deserter in disguise, like himself. When he first ventured into the city of Saigon, just getting his legs back on the ground, he had encountered others such as himself, deserters on the run, mingling in bars along Tudo Street, in the city’s tenderloin, wearing civilian clothes, trying to blend with scores of others who looked like them. With their stoic, out-of-place faces, though, they often presented easy targets for the CID rat dogs who scouted the watering holes now and then, looking for deserters gone native, trying to get lost in the crowds of round-eyed, Western contractors and civilian adventurers who migrated to Saigon from Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. for big money made easy.

Pitts envisioned developing a small circle of American-born confidants to work with him in his Asian empire, operating throughout the Indochina region with home base in Bangkok, where he planned to live like a sultan. However, he needed trusted people in South Vietnam both in the northern provinces as well as in Saigon and its lucrative surroundings. He concluded that deserters on the run would be more than glad to find a fellow countryman who would lend them a hand. They would naturally cooperate and keep their mouths shut.

That’s how he had recruited his two colleagues, Tommy Joyner and Robert Matthews, a pair of division Marines from northern I Corps who stowed away on a C-130 Hercules cargo plane that landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon instead of the Marines’ El Toro air station in California. The pair looked worse than Mau Mau Harris when Chung and Bao found them and took the two men to their big brother Huong to either shoot or present to the Snowman for disposition. Talking to the anxious duo who only wanted to go home from the war, Brian Pitts devised his brainstorm for an Asian empire with American deserters as his most trusted associates.

In the few months that he had lain low, clothing, feeding, and educating Matthews and Joyner to the ways and opportunities of the Snowman and his well-paying business, he also had made fresh contacts with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese agents who supplied him with pure heroin and Buddha at cut-rate prices. He had taken a million dollars and invested it in a massive dope inventory, and now looked to move product not only in South Vietnam, but also ship truckloads of it back to America. He needed trusted hands to do the work. Deserters had everything to gain, and if they failed him he could kill them with no questions or concerns coming from anyone. Deserters were disposable.

Tonight, while the Snowman went looking for potential recruits, and took the opportunity to wet his whistle in a setting more sociable than the stucco plantation house with the red tile roof that he and his cowboys had procured in the countryside west of Saigon, just off the highway that led to Cu Chi, Chung, Joyner, Matthews, and Turd held down the fort.

“So, what do you do here in Saigon?” Pitts asked, sipping the suds off the top of his beer.

Bruce Olsen looked at the Marine, who wore an expensive white-on-white brocaded silk shirt and black silk pants with canvas deck shoes.

“Stuff,” he shrugged, and then thought about the prying question and decided to put the dog off his scent. “Logistics, you know, supply stuff.”

“Oh!” Pitts smiled, and then sipped more beer. He could use a man who knew how to get stuff shipped.

“What’s your story?” Olsen smiled at the newfound friend.

“I got reassigned down here to work for, let’s just say part of the embassy,” Pitts lied, feeling like making himself sound exotic and mysterious to the potential recruit.

“CIA?” Olsen shrugged, taking a sip of his whiskey cocktail. “I know guys who got assigned there. Marine Recon guys, SEALs, green beanies. They got special operations, you know. At least that’s what I heard from the guy on the second shitter.”

Pitts laughed at the term for scuttlebutt, unfounded rumor.

“If I told you I’d have to kill you,” Pitts smiled and took a long drag off his smoke.

“I’m not asking what you do now,” Olsen said, putting up his hands, pretending to fend off any sense from Pitts that he wanted to pry into anything he had no business knowing. “What did you do up north?”

“Sniper,” Pitts lied, and took a big drink of his beer. His ego had led him over a line that he knew better than crossing. His subconscious haughtiness and need to inflate his esteem wanted this no-name stranger, who worked some dead-end job on a supply barge trapped in the doldrums, to be impressed with him. To admire his heroic masculinity and dash.

“Oh, wow, Murder, Incorporated!” Olsen beamed, and smiled at his boss, who watched him with increased interest.

“Hey, man, not so loud,” Pitts said, and looked at the two men huddled at the end of the bar who apparently paid him no mind.

“I heard of those scout/snipers up there in I Corps. Who’s that sergeant that’s got all those kills? What’s his name, Hathcock? Yeah, that’s the guy. I read about him in the
Sea Tiger
. You work with him at all?”

“Sure, Hathcock. Yeah, I’ve done a turn or two with the guy. He’s back at Da Nang last I saw,” Pitts said, taking another drink of beer and now breaking a sweat. He had no idea about this sergeant named Hathcock. Then he thought about something that this sailor said early in their conversation. “I thought you said you were a SEAL when I sat down.”

“Oh, no. Sorry if I misled you,” Olsen shrugged, and offered a sheepish smile while in the back of his mind he pondered the Hathcock answer, and knew for sure that his new friend was a phony. Olsen had worked with Carlos Hathcock and a corporal named John Burke back when he first began the Phoenix program in early 1967. Hathcock had rotated home after that, about a year ago, and Burke had died this spring at Khe Sanh. No way this clown was a sniper and didn’t know that common scoop among the close-knit special operations crowd.

“I work at supply with the SEAL teams,” Olsen finally said, lowering his head as though embarrassed, “so I guess I was vague about my job. I make that mistake sometimes. I’m not a SEAL. I guess just wishful thinking on my part. I’m a storekeeper. Sounds dull when you put it up against a SEAL, so I’m sometimes a little misleading about it, maybe subconsciously trying to impress people. That’s a bad thing to do, considering my friends and what they went through to earn the right to call themselves SEALs. A supply clerk just doesn’t excite anyone, so I’m sometimes vague about it.”

Brian Pitts patted Bruce Olsen on the shoulder.

“Everybody’s job is important,” Pitts said, consoling the storekeeper caught exaggerating about being a SEAL. “You work with the SEAL teams, so that’s pretty cool. They’re your buddies, too. You work inside their circle.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I guess it’s pretty cool what I do,” Olsen said, and smiled. “So, what unit you work with up north?”

“I started with Seventh Marines, then got shipped up to Ninth Marines,” Pitts said, waving to Tam to bring him a fresh beer. “Then I got orders here.”

“You’re not one of those Phoenix guys, are you?” Olsen whispered, widening his eyes, showing his enthusiasm toward the exciting unit that American servicemen mostly knew only by way of rumor and sea story.

“Like I said, I can’t really say,” Pitts said in a hushed voice, and then smiled and gave the man a wink as if to confirm the suspicion.

“Yeah, I knew it,” Olsen said, and drank more seven-and-seven. “Shit, I bet that’s wild-ass work. Damn!”

“How long you been in the navy?” Pitts asked the new admirer, gloating with his phony nonchalance.

“Six years come September,” Olsen said, telling the truth. He had learned in his training to tell as much truth with lies as possible, making the whole story more believable.

“You’re not a deserter, are you?” Pitts then asked, and his face flushed as he asked the hard question. He had to finally ask, though, to get down to business. “I mean, most military guys don’t hang in a fancy bar like this, and dress in nice civilian clothes. It’s cool if you are. I’m no cop or anything. Like I said, I have my own kettle of fish to cook.”

Olsen looked down both directions of the bar and then leaned close to Brian Pitts and whispered, “What if I am?”

“It’s cool,” Pitts whispered back. “If you are, I have a good-paying job. If you’re not, and you do supply like you say, I still have a good-paying job. Maybe.”