The Abduction (18 page)

Under orders from headquarters, FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had given live interviews on the network evening news, back to back to back. He had protested that he was too busy trying to find the girl, but he had been informed that his orders came straight from Director White himself. The Bureau brass liked its agents—particularly articulate agents like himself—on national TV. Good for PR. And next year’s budget requests.

Devereaux sighed; his investigation had become a goddamned $25 million sideshow.

He was now in the command post, slouched in his chair and alternating between his left and right buttock so as not to put additional pressure on his inflamed prostate while reviewing the latest leads. He had yet to read one that rang true.

“Prostate?”

Devereaux looked up to see Colonel Brice standing there.

“Recognize the butt position,” the colonel said.

“You, too?”

The colonel nodded. “Try saw palmetto.”

“Saul who?”

“Saw palmetto. Berry from the palmetto tree. Relieves the pain. You can buy it in any health food store.”

“I heard about those places.”

The colonel gestured at the stack of leads. “Anything?”

“Yeah, over two thousand sightings,” he said. “Couple more days, we’ll know where every blonde, blue-eyed girl in the Southwest lives.”

“You think they’re after the money?”

“I’m afraid so, Colonel.” The colonel sat in an adjacent chair; Devereaux adjusted his butt position. “Rewards of a few thousand dollars can be productive, but $25 million—that’s a whole ’nother ball game. Two thousand sightings, we’re wasting too much time chasing too many false leads.” He put his hand on the stack. “What if there
is
one good lead in all this?”

“May I?”

“Sure. Here, I’ve been through these.” Devereaux pushed a stack of papers toward Colonel Brice and yawned.

“You need some sleep. Give your prostate a rest.”

“I’ll sleep after we find Gracie.”

The colonel gave him a firm look. “You’re a good man.”

“And you were a great soldier.” The colonel did not respond. The silence was awkward, so Devereaux broke it by confessing to an American hero. “I wasn’t. I just wanted to come home. Nineteen days left in my tour and I’m walking point on patrol again and all I’m thinking is, My luck, I’m gonna be the last American soldier to die in Vietnam, when this VC steps out from behind a tree not ten feet in front of me, his weapon on me. I’m a dead man. Except his rifle misfires—it was an old bolt-action piece of shit. I raise my M-16 and shoot him dead. I step over to him, see he’s just a kid, maybe fourteen. I threw up.” Devereaux was too embarrassed to look directly at the colonel. “I’ve carried a weapon most of my adult life, but that’s the only time I’ve ever killed another human being.” He paused and shook his head. “Looks like we’ve both done some confessing now. I’ve never told anyone that story, not even my wife.”

The colonel’s voice was almost a whisper when he said, “Killing isn’t an easy thing to talk about … or live with.”

The two men were silent with their own thoughts of war and killing until Devereaux said, “How long were you a POW?” The colonel appeared puzzled, so Devereaux answered his unasked question. “Agent Randall, he saw the scars on your back, during your polygraph.”

The colonel nodded. “Six months, barely enough time to get settled in.”

“Hanoi Hilton?”

He shook his head. “Outlying camp, San Bie. After we escaped, NVA closed all the camps, moved all the Americans to Hanoi.”

And then it dawned on Devereaux, why the name Ben Brice sounded familiar.

“You’re the one. You’re the guy that rescued those pilots.” He paused and stared at this man. “You saved a lot of soldiers that day.”

Colonel Brice showed no emotion. He broke eye contact and squinted as if trying to see something in the distance. Or in the past. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

“Commander Ron Porter.”

“Who?”

His eyes returned to Devereaux. “One of those pilots, he flies out of Albuquerque.”

“Colonel, they gave you the Medal of Honor.”

The colonel picked up the papers, stood, and said, “So they did.” Then he walked away.

Six months before the day he had walked into the San Bie POW camp in North Vietnam, Colonel Ben Brice had been living in the jungles of Vietnam with the Montagnards, the indigenous inhabitants of the country known to GIs as the “Yards,” a people much like the American Indian. The men wore loincloths; their bronze-skinned bodies were lean and muscular and their facial features were hard and sharply etched, but they were not without humor or intelligence. The tribal elders spoke French fluently, learned when the owners of that language took their ill-fated turn at colonizing Vietnam. Eighteen million people called Vietnam home; the Montagnards numbered one million, scattered among numerous tribes. Ben’s tribe was the Sedang.

When first deployed to Vietnam, the Green Berets’ primary mission was to organize the Montagnard tribes into Civilian Irregular Defense Groups to stem Communist infiltration into South Vietnam along the western borders with Laos and Cambodia. Ben was supposed to teach the Sedang guerrilla warfare tactics; but it was the Sedang who taught him: how to live off the land, how to hunt wild game and Viet Cong on the mountains that rose eight thousand feet and in the thick jungles that covered the valleys below, and how to move through the night like a shadow. The Sedang were natural hunter-killers. He became one of them. They even presented him with a hand-fashioned brass bracelet, which represented membership in the tribe; it was a great honor for a white man. Ben Brice had “gone native.”

They were operating in North Vietnam just inside the Seventeenth Parallel—the DMZ that divided North from South, Communist from free—when they spotted a USAF F-4 Phantom flying low overhead and trailing smoke, hit on a Rolling Thunder raid over Hanoi. The two-man crew ejected just before the jet crashed and exploded in a fireball; both parachutes opened, so Ben and the Montagnards made for the Americans. But they arrived too late; the NVA had captured them.

The NVA marched the pilots north to the San Bie prison camp. On still nights, camped a thousand meters out, Ben heard the blood-curdling screams of the Americans being tortured. The next morning he heard them sing “God Bless America.” Ben and the Montagnards planned a rescue, which required he be captured. The NVA had standing orders to kill their American prisoners in the event of a rescue attempt. The only successful rescue would come from inside, with help on the outside.

Now, six months a prisoner of war, he will escape and take one hundred American pilots with him, with the help of the Montagnards. Ben Brice had taught them a few things too, including the proper use of C-4 explosive. Together they destroyed enemy arms depots, disrupted supply convoys on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, ambushed VC, assassinated NVA officers, radioed in grid coordinates for B-52 Arc Light bombing raids, and snatched that Marine slick driver back from the NVA in Laos. Today they will rescue American POWs.

He remains sprawled in the same position on the concrete floor in which he had been deposited five hours earlier, awaiting the morning guard. He soon hears the familiar sound of keys rattling, so familiar that he knows the guard’s exact location in the hallway outside as he comes closer and closer to Ben’s cell. The guard arrives and bangs on the cell door, then looks in through the small barred opening and sees the American colonel still lying on the floor, the blood on his raw back dried and caked and the rats nibbling at his feet. Ben hears metal grating against metal as the guard slips the key into the rusty lock. The key turns, and the lock releases. The door creaks open. Footsteps, a bit wary, come close; the guard wonders if the highest-ranking American officer in the prison survived the fierce beating inflicted by Big Ug and his fan belt last night. Ben braces himself not to react to the kick that is sure to come and does; he stifles a groan as the guard’s boot drives into his side. The prisoner did not respond, so the guard circles around and squats to check his pulse.

It is his last living act.

Ben grabs the guard by the throat with hands made strong in the oil fields of West Texas and the jungles of Vietnam and chokes off all sound and jerks him to the floor. Ben Brice does not kill him out of vengeance; he kills him because he must. The guard’s neck sounds like a brittle chicken bone snapping when Ben rotates his head past the breaking point.

Ben stands and surveys his cell for the last time. The thick odor customary to the cell is joined by that of fresh urine and feces as the guard’s body accepts its death and surrenders its dignity. More death will follow. He must kill to save these pilots. He takes no satisfaction in the killing, but he is skilled in the art of killing. It is what he knows.

This is his moment in the great human tragedy known as the Vietnam War.

John ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape and walked into Gracie’s room. He hit the overhead light switch.

“Hiya, pal,” she would always say when he knocked on her bedroom door each day when he got home. He would usually find her on the floor, reading the sports pages or doing her homework or singing a new song. But her room was empty tonight. Her stuff was still there, but without her there was no life in this room. Or in this house. Gracie Ann Brice had been the life of the house.

He turned on the nightlight and turned off the overhead. He crawled into her bed. He pulled the comforter up and buried his head in her pillow. He cradled her big cushy teddy bear. He closed his eyes, breathed in his daughter, and remembered.

“One day you’ll be singing on the radio,” he had said to her once, sitting right here on this bed.

She had frowned and said, “You know how hard it is to get radio stations to play a new artist’s songs?”

“No. How hard?”

“Like, totally.”

“Then I’ll buy a bunch of radio stations and play only yours.”

“You can’t do that.”

“After the IPO I can. I’m gonna buy the Red Sox for Sam.”

“No, I mean it doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to struggle a long time trying to break in so I’ll have material for my songs.”

“Oh, so that’s how it works.”

“Yeah, see, the Dixie Chicks struggled for like, well, a really long time, and they had to move to Nashville. I guess I’ll have to, too.”

“And leave me? No way, girlfriend. I’ll buy a jet, you can fly to Nashville to record. Or I’ll build you a recording studio here, and they can come to you. And they will.”

“Yeah, right. You know how many great singers are out there totally begging to break into country music?”

“No. How many?”

“Well … a bunch.”

He shook his head. “Odds don’t apply to statistically unique occurrences.”

“Huh?”

“There’s only one Gracie Ann Brice.”

She had looked at him with a strange expression, one he had never before seen on her sweet face; he immediately thought,
Cripes, I said something wrong! You bogoid, you never could talk to girls!
But she abruptly hugged him and said, “You’re the best father a girl could ever want.” When she pulled back, her big blue eyes were wet. “Thanks for not making fun of my dreams.”

He had cupped her perfect face and said, “Gracie, ill-behaved cretins can thrash your user interface, frag your hardware, unplug your peripherals, uninstall your components—but dreams are proprietary technology.”

“Huh?”

“No one can take your dreams away.”

But he had been wrong. Someone had taken his dream away.

Ben was now sitting at the kitchen table and flipping through the stack of FBI lead sheets. By this time of night, he was usually drunk enough to sleep. He wanted a drink now, just one shot of whiskey. Or two. He could feel its warmth inside him.

But there would not be another drink for him. On the drive from Taos to the Albuquerque airport, alone in the pre-dawn hours, he had made a vow to Gracie, a vow that now required he reach back almost four decades to find the strength to overcome: when they had beaten him at San Bie, he thought of Kate and John and found strength; now, when the cravings came, he thought of Gracie and found the same strength.

He went over to the refrigerator, a commercial-sized one concealed behind wood paneling that matched the cabinetry. Inside he found orange juice. Maybe a glass of juice would relieve his craving. He opened several overhead cabinets searching for the glasses; he found a liquor cabinet instead. He stared at the bottles. He reached in and removed a fifth of Jim Beam. Only his third sober night, but looking at the familiar label brought the cravings back. He was still staring at the bottle when he heard, “Ben.”

He turned and saw his wife standing in the door—and the disappointment in her eyes. He replaced the bottle in the cabinet and shut the door.

“I won’t let her down, Kate.”

Nothing is more disappointing to a lawyer than a client’s deal falling apart—all right, next to not getting paid, nothing is more disappointing to a lawyer than a client’s deal falling apart. How many times had a lawyer arrived at the bargaining table ready to close a deal only to have the other party shrug lamely and turn his palms up, empty-handed? No money. Nothing to put on the bargaining table. Can’t close the deal. Lying in bed, alone, as she had felt most of her life, Elizabeth Brice now wondered: What if the abductor can’t close the deal? What if the abductor had nothing to put on the bargaining table?
Three-fourths of all children abducted by strangers are killed within three hours
. Grace had been abducted seventy-eight hours ago.