Tucker's Last Stand (33 page)

They see what they call the liberation of the South as a sublime and holy goal, and every last one of them—of us—would die to see it accomplished. To that end, Bui Tin whispered, President Ho had wrested very significant concessions from the governments of the Chinese and the Russian people. Peking and Moscow were not only helping the North Vietnamese in their war of liberation right then as the two gentlemen were speaking, in the most civilized way, but were prepared to go much further—I dare not be too specific about this, Bui Tin said—much, much further, if necessary, to accomplish our goal, which they too hold to be sacred. They are prepared to go right to—the brink.

And who knows, when nations in a nuclear age go to the brink, is it ever certain that they can just—stop? Bui Tin asked a philosophical question: Was there
ever
a war entered into willingly, which one combatant retrospectively would have engaged in if he had known its outcome? Imagine General Tojo authorizing the attack on Pearl Harbor if he could have known that five years later he would be swinging from a gibbet! Imagine Adolf Hitler marching into Russia if he had had a preview of his last days in the bunker! Imagine what prophetic knowledge would have done to quiet the enthusiasm in Athens for the last stage of the Peloponnesian War! What Carthaginian would willingly have provoked Rome if he could have seen the wasteland that was left of the great city its citizens had inhabited and taken such pride in?

In this respect, Colonel Bui Tin and Major Tucker Montana were as one, were they not? Neither wished to contribute to the destruction of their two countries. And what North Vietnam wished was so modest historically, so modest geographically: the end of the false division between North and South.

“Yes, sure. But we don't see that and we're preparing to knock the shit out of your supply line along the Trail, Colonel.”

Bui Tin smiled. “We know that you have in your hands the technology to prolong the struggle, to cause many more casualties, in the North and in the South—what a little preview Bien Hoa was of the horrors that lie ahead. And if American troops come there will be many casualties, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, but the end will always be the same.”

“But wait a minute, Colonel. If we stop you at the Trail, how're you going to keep going?”

Bui Tin told him that they would simply find other means. There was
no way
the Americans could stop the passage of the spirit of liberation from crossing rivers and mountains, oceans and rice paddies, seizing the heart of the people.

“You mean seizing the heart of the people by shooting them and torturing them. Come on, Colonel.”

Bui Tin explained that he was as much appalled by the practice of warfare as the major, even though the two were professional soldiers. Bui Tin explained that he had been brought up in a Catholic school in Hué, and knew both by education and by experience how precious human life was. But what matters is the objective. He didn't know, granted, whether, if he, Bui Tin, had the authority to drop an atom bomb, he would exercise that authority by going ahead and dropping it on Saigon. But short of an atom bomb, guerrilla warfare, by whatever it was called—look at Algeria!—had always been the same, throughout recorded time. There wasn't any way to keep people from using force and violence to advance objectives they thought themselves spiritually committed to.…

At about eleven, Colonel Bui Tin asked whether Major Montana would join him in a glass of cognac. His father, he said, had been a devoted cognac drinker, back in the Hué days, and even as a young man he had been infected with the habit, and liked every now and then to refresh his recollection of the French—miracle.

After so long a talk and all those questions and debate, Tucker was delighted at the idea. He reached into his briefcase and brought out a package of cigars, offering one to Colonel Bui Tin, who declined with a smile. “I used to. But they are too scarce now. I have put them away until—until Liberation Day.”

Cognac in hand, Tucker asked a pointed question. “What would it mean if the Trail were clear to you?”

“Just this: The end of the war after maybe one year, instead of five, six years. That, and much more: Avoiding any possibility of a nuclear war.”

Tucker emptied his glass, and put it out absentmindedly to accept a refill. They talked another hour, and Tucker announced he would turn in. They shook hands.

In his bed he tried to sleep, gave it up. He had to think. He thought first about Lao Dai. There could be no mistaking the love she felt for him. That was a given. He thought then of the sacrifices she had been prepared to make. He found himself admiring, in a professional way, what she had done. Who was he, who had machine-gunned forty-one Huks, to criticize her deceptions? And then the points she made, and those Bui Tin had made, paraded by his mind. And, there was no way to avoid it, he felt the same seizure he had felt a week or two after his flight on the
Enola Gay
after he had seen the pictures—hundreds of pictures, clinically reviewed by his colleagues: the pictures of the aftermath of total war.

He began to sweat. He was afraid of that particular sweat. It had hit him at Los Alamos, and again in one of his conversations with Fr. Enrique, after he had left the hospital where he had been given something or other that kept him, those three weeks, only half conscious, trying to drive those pictures out of his mind. And, of course, the jeep episode with Lao Dai …

It was only after he had come to his solemn conclusion that he finally slept, just as the dawn came.

They did not wake him. It was eleven when he suddenly snapped up from a deep, serene sleep. He dressed and went down to the dining room. A waitress was there and he asked for coffee, and for Colonel Bui Tin.

Back in the colonel's suite, Tucker began.

“Do you know, I think you're right, Colonel. Now, that doesn't mean I like your system of government. I hate it. If I lived there I'd do my best to assassinate Ho.” He looked up at Bui Tin. Had he gone too far?

His host smiled, in patient understanding of his guest's position. He said only, “President Ho is mortal, Major Montana.”

Tucker resumed. “What makes you think I could clear the Trail for you?”

“I don't think you can, Major. If … reports of what you are doing in Nakhon Phanom are accurate about the technology you are amassing, you will make it very difficult. Especially in the two passes. It is very sad, because obviously you cannot persuade the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon to cancel the project.”

“You kidding? If you think for one minute that your line of thinking would sell in official Washington, you're crazy. No. They're not going to stop work on the Trail. But …” Tucker hesitated. His last hesitation. He put down his glass. “What I can do is teach you how to beat our Spikebuoys.”

“Spikebuoys?” Bui Tin feigned ignorance of the contents of Tucker's thirty-two-page notebook, which he and Vietnamese and Soviet technicians had been studying for two weeks.

“Yuh. They're the pivotal devices of our Igloo operation, as we call it. They're designed to send the signals to our computers, which will relay the information to bombers and fighter planes.”

Colonel Tin looked forlorn.

“The thing of it is,” Tucker said, “I could develop a counterweapon. Something that would make the Spikebuoys useless.”

Suddenly Tucker Montana, scientist, was engrossed again, as he had been years before, searching for a trigger mechanism, now beginning the search for a device that might remove a trigger. “It's a matter of getting at their frequency and displacing it. High-tech dislocators, but doable in the field. Lead scout comes upon the first Spikebuoy, a truck comes in equipped with the right stuff.” Each Spikebuoy has a separate frequency, he thought. “You'd need to envelop the aboveground portion of the Spikebuoy in a copper flyscreen. At the bottom of the flyscreen you'd need a braided copper wire a few feet long, soldered to the screen on one end and soldered to a copper pointed rod at the other end. You got to then stick a carefully shielded antenna, connected to a portable frequency analyzer in there. A technician slams a big sledgehammer on the ground and the Spikebuoy broadcasts an alarm. But it doesn't go anywhere except into the analyst's frequency analyzer. Do that along the whole Spikebuoy fence and then load the frequencies into a kind of sequencer. You can destroy the Spikebuoys and then set a series of transmitters to those frequencies. The sequencer will activate the transmitters and provide the same sounds the Spikebuoys would have broadcast if trucks or troops were being heard. Only you'd do this at the other edge of the pass. Aircraft would attack where the Spikebuoys had been—and then your trucks and troops go through fast after the attack is over. There are lots of details. For instance, the truck would need to be heavily protected by wet blankets or canvas over its hood, prevent infrared detection. And over its body too, to protect against radiation of heat by the crew and their electronics. But I guess I'm just telling you all this. It can be done. I know how to do it.”

At last, Tucker thought. The elusive trigger. The huge cloud. The charred figures at table. The blur, the dizziness as he had fought for consciousness. Study the
problem
, solve the engineering question. Yes … more. But now he was maybe preventing a nuclear war.

Bui Tin drew a deep breath.

“You would be willing to teach us how?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Now. Tomorrow. It's all here. In my head. No point in postponing it, is there?”

“No point at all, Major.”

35

November 3, 1964

Phoenix, Arizona

On Election Eve Barry Goldwater was the star of the biggest rally, his supporters and some newsmen reported, in the history of San Francisco. He was grateful for it, but as a practiced politician with a sensitive ear he knew how to distinguish that special sound that said, “Barry, we love you—
even though you're going to lose
” from “Barry, we love you and rejoice in your forthcoming victory!” He thought back on the acclaim given to Adlai Stevenson at the Democratic Party convention in 1960, which had been a way of saying: “Adlai, we love you truly, but we're going to vote for Jack Kennedy.” Everyone knew what was going to happen, Goldwater thought to himself, though it was of course important to keep spirits high; and for that reason, in his speech he stressed what he intended to do after he was sworn in, ha-ha. It was only with Bill Baroody and young Freddy Anderson, from whom nothing was any longer withheld, that he would permit himself to speculate on just which half-dozen states he might actually win. Unlike many candidates, Barry Goldwater had adjusted to the outcome. In fact he had adjusted to it at his last appearance in San Francisco—when he was nominated.

His wife, Peggy, almost always at his side—the exceptions being when she sensed that her presence was an encumbrance—whispered to him on the airplane. “Why Fredonia again, dear?” Barry Goldwater had made it a habit to end his campaigns at that little town of three hundred people, half of them Indians, on the Arizona-Utah border, a habit begun when he first ran for state office. “Superstition?” Freddy asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. If it was superstition, that would mean I thought I was going to win. Hell, I'm not even sure I'll carry Fredonia.” There he mingled with ease and pleasure among the cowboys and ranchers, the Navajo and Paiute Indians—“my people,” he referred to them, intending to convey exactly that about people uncontaminated with the disease he thought himself at war with.

And then his final flight as a candidate, to Phoenix, to his house high in the hills, nearby Camelback Mountain.

He'd dearly have loved to be left alone that evening, but he would not do that to his staff. They needed those last hours together. The press insisted on one final meeting, and he interrupted his drink of bourbon long enough to say to the crowded room, without much spirit, that he only regretted that he had not spelled out the issues as well as he had hoped to do. But then he decided he would not assume the entire burden of an unsuccessful campaign. He added, “If only Jack Kennedy were here.” Yes, it would have been a genuine national debate on national issues if it had been Jack Kennedy. Kennedy was shrewd, like his successor, but there was a certain wholesomeness there, an appetite for a genuine encounter for which Lyndon Johnson had absolutely none. Everyone in the Congress knew, though they did not dwell on it, that Johnson had stolen the votes necessary to get him his seat in the Senate. By means other than vote theft he would continue to win elections. But the loss tomorrow, Goldwater thought, could not be attributed either to the political craft of Johnson or the premature idealism of Goldwater's causes. The public was fatigued. He had several times made a point of this in private conversation. The voters did not like the prospect of three different Presidents in twelve months. He closed his eyes and determined not to think about it.

He would have an hour or two of relaxation before sitting down with the gang in front of the television set and watching the returns overrun him. He'd spend that time engaged in his highest form of relaxation, tuning in on ham radio. The setup next door was his Elysian Field, and in no time he was standing by, as had become his habit for over a year, to patch calls through from U.S. servicemen in the field to their wives or sweethearts or parents or, in one case, banker. This accommodation cannot be performed without listening in to the conversation; the intermediary needs to know when it is terminated in order to bring in the next call.

He patched through four calls, one from a Signal Service sergeant in Danang, a second from a major in Hué, a third from a private in Saigon, and then a lieutenant in Saigon. Every conversation touched on the Bien Hoa assault.