White: A Novel (18 page)

Andropov handed Jeremy a folder that held details of his new identity.

“What about this Colonel Ellis and his group?” Jeremy asked, flipping through the dossier. “I’m going to need some background on these Phineas priests, as well as their . . .”

“All in good time,” Andropov said. “For now you study your own life. After that, we will concentrate on others.”

VIII

Wednesday, 16 February

10:05 GMT

Jefferson Room, The White House

THE SAUDI AMBASSADOR
arrived in a black Town Car with diplomatic plates. Two uniformed Secret Service officers escorted him into a formal sitting room where the president waited in an overstuffed wing chair, sipping a glass of ice water.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Venable said. He stood before realizing his shoes were undone. He had taken them off to ease the pain in his overworked feet and forgotten to retie them. “Nice of you to come over at such an early hour.”

The ambassador shook Venable’s hand and accepted a seat beside him. A pleasant wood fire glowed in a Rumford fireplace, but neither man felt cozy.

“I must assume something dire,” the ambassador said. He had attended Harvard, undergraduate, then Oxford. Some would argue that his English surpassed the president’s.

“Dire.” The president knelt forward to tie his shoes. “
Dire
might be the right word, actually.”

“Does this involve the terror attacks? Because the Crown Prince has asked me to convey our sympathies and assure the complete cooperation of my . . .”

“I’ve been up since this whole nightmare began,” the president blurted out. “I’ve been president of the United States for three weeks. Three weeks.”

He stood up and walked around behind his chair. The ambassador had to crane his neck unnaturally to look him in the eye.

“Yes,” the Saudi said, trying to understand the president’s subtext. “I know this.”

“Then you know that the people behind these attacks are trying to play on my inexperience, perhaps to expose me as vulnerable. They would try to take advantage of the fact that I haven’t been in office long enough to feel fully in control of our armed forces, that I might be ill prepared to fulfill my duties as commander in chief.”

“That’s certainly a possibility, I suppose,” the ambassador conceded. He looked genuinely concerned. “I hadn’t thought that myself.”

“No, of course not,” Venable agreed, somewhat facetiously. “You’re a diplomat. A student of tact and protocol.”

“Why have you asked me here, sir?” the ambassador inquired. As a diplomat, he felt well tuned to inflection.

Venable walked to the fireplace and tossed a birch log into the blaze. The bark caught immediately with sparks and a hiss.

“This government has solid evidence that interests inside your government have channeled money into the United States with the specific purpose of funding terror.”

Venable’s advisors had admonished him to broach the subject carefully, but Americans had died in these cowardly attacks. It was time for action.

“That’s preposterous,” the ambassador said. He looked confused, as if the hour were playing tricks on someone’s mind—either his or the president’s. “Saudi Arabia is your closest Arab ally. You cannot seriously imagine that . . .”

“We have concrete evidence: wire transfers, phone transcripts, corroborating data from several different investigations. We even have one of the men responsible for shooting down the airliner in Los Angeles—a Saudi. He is being interrogated as we speak.”

The ambassador did not know what to say.

“I asked you here to relay a message to your government,” President Venable announced. “You will have three days to provide us the names of those responsible for these terrorist crimes. We demand full disclosure of any threatening parties still inside the United States. We demand immediate cessation of financial support for terrorists. And we demand complete cooperation in an investigation to determine who in your government might have knowledge of these crimes.”

Venable pounded the back of the chair, but his drama seemed lost on the ambassador, who just sat there gazing blindly into the fire.

“I d-don’t know w-what to say,” the Saudi stammered. “This is absolutely outrageous. Are you threatening us?”

“Threatening you? Threatening you!” Venable’s voice rose. “No, I’m not threatening you, but if my country suffers so much as a falafel fart, you are going to understand the full breadth of my commitment!”

The fire crackled. The ambassador rose.

“I’m sorry that our first meeting couldn’t have been more conciliatory,” he said. “My government had great hopes for your administration.”

The ambassador started toward the door, then remembered himself.

“Forgive my rudeness,” he said, reaching out to shake the president’s hand. Venable held tightly the damask back of his chair.

“You just relay my thoughts to the prince,” Venable growled. “I think this situation has already moved past courtesy.”

“THERE ARE THOSE
who obey God’s law and those who don’t. Those who obey are the Lawful. Those who disobey are outlawed by God. God has specified the outlaw’s punishment.”

Colonel Ellis sat in a leather-padded morris chair and read by the light of a wrought-iron floor lamp. The mounted heads of exotic game stared down at him—ibex, bork, water buffalo, polar bear, lynx—more than a dozen rare, even endangered, species from around the world. Knotty-pine paneling gave the room a stolid prairie-manor feel.

He held a worn hardback and read without glasses. The words danced in his mind, sharp and clear to eyes that had seen more than most would believe.

Vigilantes of Christendom,
by Richard Kelly Hoskins, had always struck him as a well-intentioned though limited treatment of fact. Books like it and
The Turner Diaries,
by William L. Pierce, were held up to ridicule by those who poorly understood the underlying passion of Christ’s remaining disciples. To the true believers who served this cause, however, these pages inspired hope of a better world.

Better world,
Ellis thought to himself. The irony almost choked him.

For thirty years he had served his country, a patriot in search of ways to prove it. First there was Vietnam. He’d arrived in Hue-Phu Bai just after Christmas 1965, a brand-new baby lieutenant in charge of a Special Forces “spike” reconnaissance team assigned to the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group—better known as MAC-V-SOG. The army had only recently taken over black and covert operations from the CIA, leading Montagnard, Hoa, and Nung tribesmen against Vietcong in Laos, Cambodia, and Southern China.

The Phineas priests administer the judgment, and God rewards them with a covenant of an everlasting priesthood.

From there he moved on to the CIA’s pacification program, code-named Operation Phoenix, and served under Lt. Colonel Frank Barker in 1968. Ellis was initially assigned to the Census Grievance cadre in Quang Ngai Province. Though still a Special Forces officer, Ellis reported to a CIA Special Branch advisor.

It was then that he had seen and done things he didn’t think possible with MAC-V-SOG. In fact, his time in the Phoenix program had changed the way this eager young officer felt about war. He learned that infliction of terror through torture, rape, and extermination worked far better than any conventional weapons at stemming resistance. The air force could defoliate the jungles with Agent Orange and rattle the countryside with Arc Light strikes, but the enemy simply disappeared into the sprawling cave networks or melted back into rural villages, waging a guerrilla war U.S. forces were ill prepared to fight.

What worked best was degrading the enemy’s will to fight.

Let the soldiers hide in tunnels,
the thinking went.
We’ll kill their families while they’re gone. Let Ho Chi Minh preach sacrifice; we’ll spread fear of rape, torture, and assassination until sacrifice becomes too horrifying to use as a political slogan.

In July 1966, he got a visit from a man in civilian clothes. Ellis was told that his successes with MAC-V-SOG had drawn the attention of superior officers. A CIA sponsored Roles and Missions Study, he was told, had concluded that only a “pacification” effort would achieve what conventional military operations had failed to do. Run through what was called the Revolutionary Development cadre, this program sought the destruction of the Vietcong infrastructure, followed by a campaign to secure the support of the Vietnamese. Propaganda and psychological warfare were becoming the new weapons in this guerrilla war. The CIA needed foot soldiers.

Ellis bought in immediately.

First there was My Lai. Then Quang Nam Province, Phuoc Tuy, and a half dozen other places no Westerner would want to know about. Ellis worked with small teams of Montagnard hill people, coordinating a campaign of terror that reached up and down the Laotian and Cambodian borders. In the early stages, they directed their efforts against suspected Vietcong and their immediate support structure. Soon, however, the list of targets degenerated to collaborators, supporters, sympathizers, anyone who lived in a particular village. Eventually, the target barely mattered at all. Cutting off a couple dozen heads and sticking them on stakes at the entrance to villages made a statement, regardless of political affiliation.

What Ellis saw in his first months in the Phoenix program changed the way he looked at war. At America. At humanity.

The rape, the torture, the kidnapping and sheer depravity. Soldiers within his immediate command began “counting coup,” an old Native American custom of taking body parts after a kill. Men wore strings of ears, tongues, fingers, and scalps like service medals. They eschewed any respect for rank, believing correctly that orders from a CIA Special Branch civilian carried the same weight as those from a four-star. The only thing that mattered was killing. It became a currency of sorts, a rank structure all its own. Those who excelled survived. Those who didn’t died. Simple. Poetic.

After three years in MAC-V-SOG and another three with Phoenix, Ellis knew that he had to make a choice. Despite his time in-country, the now captain had sired three children. His wife was doing her best to raise them in a diplomatic compound in Bangkok. If he wanted to save any aspect of the last thing in the world that mattered to him, he would have to escape the jungles of Southeast Asia and learn something other than murder.

The answer had come one night in a rice paddy near map coordinates he remembered only because they were all threes.

The mission was classified, of course, like everything they did in those days. They wore black “pajamas,” with special soles sewn onto their jungle boots so the footprints they left behind would resemble native sandals. They ate native food so they’d smell native. They carried American weapons because the dinks did too. No rank insignia or signs of conventional military allegiance. Ellis had two South Vietnamese Special Exploitation Service noncoms, three Nung scouts, and a Fourth Psychological Operations Group communication expert to augment his A-team regulars.

They made an air insertion into what was known as the Prairie Fire AO—one of the hottest areas of operation in Vietnam. Two Vietnamese-piloted H-34 helicopters dropped them into an area that looked more like the White Mountains of New Hampshire than a Southeast Asian jungle.

Within a couple hours, they had descended into a marshy lowland: rice paddies and rain. No moon. The only sound came from the hypnotizing patter of water splashing into more water.

One of the Nung tribesman—a tiny but vicious scalp toter named Seu—was walking point. Ellis remembered staring at a string of hairy skins around Seu’s neck when the man’s head suddenly disappeared from his body. Ellis had seen every kind of death and wounding, but he had never seen such a clean excision, as if the rain itself had simply dissolved it.

Then came the “Stranger”—that’s what his men called the bogeyman—and the moment of accountability they all knew would one day come. None of these men knew fear anymore, but they understood reckoning.

Mortar rounds, AK rattle, the smell of sulfur, fire, spitting air, body parts splashing into the rice paddy, that silence of battle when incomprehensible violence factors down to a slightly distracting hum.

That’s when Ellis found Him. Badly wounded, fighting desperately through the pain and the hopelessness and the sheer justice of dying by the sword, Ellis had felt something inside that he’d never felt before.

Faith.

He mistook it for adrenaline at first, a natural physiological reaction to imminent death. So much light, so much darkness roiling around him. Tortured faces. Blood and entrails leaching into someone else’s homeland. The Stranger laughing, just farther than he could reach.

Faith.

Ellis knew he was dying, that he couldn’t survive this firefight, that he would never see the wife and children he had just weeks ago decided to save. Yet something gripped him, something he had never felt before—not in his alcoholic uncle’s house or the foster homes or college or even in the army. He felt filled up with something, the way he had always filled up full of rage. Only different. This time he filled up with an unmistakable sense that this would mean something someday. That he would survive. That he had other battles to wage.

When they found him, Ellis had three life-threatening wounds. His left lung had collapsed, his skull was fractured, and flesh literally hung from one thigh. The corpsman who saved him initially passed him for dead but came back after finding only two other bodies still breathing. Another lay concealed beneath Ellis, who held tightly to a bloody entrenching tool.

The Medal of Honor citation said he had killed nine enemy soldiers with that shovel. The two surviving witnesses claimed he had fought like a man possessed. Possessed of what, they couldn’t say.

“Colonel?” his wife’s voice interrupted. Pat knocked on the open door but did not come in. “Colonel? Aren’t you ever coming to bed?”