III
“Our contact agent is a Vietnamese national named Hoang Tanh,” said the major with the toothbrush moustache. The patch on his right sleeve was the sword-and-lightnings insignia of the Special Forces. The silver and blue Combat Infantry badge glittered over the left breast pocket of his uniform. Kelly had disliked Major Nassif on sight. “He’s a physicist, was involved with the Dalat Nuclear Facility before the Communist takeover. The Defense Attache’s Office recruited Tanh as a stay-behind agent.”
“Hoang,” the civilian said.
“What?” asked the major.
“His family name would be Hoang, the first name in the series, not the last,” Kelly explained. “Same with most Oriental languages.”
“To return to something significant,” the soldier snapped, “this slopehead became of some importance during the past year when the Vietnamese government began to explore reactivation of the Dalat facility—it was disabled in 1975, of course—as a counterweight to Chinese pressure. Even if they couldn’t build bombs, the option of sowing the border between the two countries with radioactive material might deter another incursion by the Chinks.” The major fixed Kelly with what they probably said at West Point was a look of command. Maybe at West Point it was a look of command. “The Russians are always looking for chances to stab their former comrades in the back, of course. It’s not surprising that they provided fuel and technical support to the gooks. And that’s where our man made contact with—” he looked down at the briefing file—”this Professor Evgeny Vlasov. The target.” Nassif paused. “Code named Mackerel.”
“Christ on a crutch,” said Kelly as he stood up. “What’s my code name? Turkey?” He paced sullenly toward one of the spotless desks. Not everybody followed the Defense Attache’s own sloppy security practices. Though—having met General Pedler, Kelly was willing to believe that he dumped the clutter from his desk by armloads into his Mosler safe every day before he left for home. “What’s the hold we’ve got on Hoang?” Kelly asked abruptly.
“Sergeant, if you’ll sit your ass down where it belongs,” said Major Nassif, “we’ll get through this a lot quicker.” He rapped the desk in front of Kelly’s empty chair with his index finger.
Head-height, sound-deadening panels divided Room 302 into three alcoves. Everyone had been moved out for the briefing, but the walls and the hallway door were something short of code-vault secure. With that in mind, and the fact that he genuinely did not like to lose his temper openly, Kelly said in a normal voice, “Look, Major, if I’m going to trust my life to this bird, I’ve got to have some reason to hope I’m not being set up. There wasn’t a whole lot in the way we left Nam in ‘75 to make somebody who stayed put want to risk his neck for us, was there? We lied to the Reds and we lied to Congress . . . but mostly we lied to the South Vietnamese themselves. And weren’t they cute to keep right on believing we wouldn’t really let’em go down the tubes? Dr. Hoang sounds like the closest thing the new regime has to a homegrown nuclear physicist. That makes him valuable enough to coddle, even if he is from the South. Why should he work for us?”
The major glanced back at his folder, then up at the civilian again. “Sit down, Sergeant,” he said. “You’ll be told as much about the sources and methods involved in setting up this operation as you have a personal need to know. As for Mackerel’s bonafides, they’ve been checked by the people whose job it is to check such things. That’ll have to be sufficient, I’m afraid.”
Kelly sat down, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. He was watching through his fingers, though. When Nassif opened his mouth to continue, the civilian said, “Shut up for a minute, Major. I’ve got a story to tell you, and then a suggestion.”
“Serg—”
“And if you call me ‘sergeant’ once more, I’ll feed you your teeth!” Kelly shouted. His voice was as raw as a shotgun blast, and for the moment as disconcerting. Major Nassif started up, but he locked angry eyes with the squat man and subsided again.
“This is a Special Forces story, so you’ll be able to appreciate it,” Kelly continued quietly, hoarsely. He nodded toward the losing-unit patch on the major’s right shoulder. “I was young, then, and I took orders better. . . .” Kelly coughed, trying to smooth the roughness from his voice. “I was with the Five-Oh-First Radio Research Detachment. We’d go out in the field with ground combat units and set up one hell of a beautiful communications intercept system. We’d pick up everything Charlie was saying on the air, whether it was out at the treeline with a handie-talkie or a divisional command near Hanoi. Everything was taped and flown back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade . . . but we were language-trained, too, you see. That way we knew to tag anything really hot for cable from Saigon.”
Kelly sucked his lower lip under his teeth. He was hunched over as if the rain were driving at his back. “One afternoon we picked up calls from an NVA forward artillery observer. He was handing out targets to a mortar company getting ready to do a number on a Special Forces camp about thirty clicks away. The way we knew exactly what he was doing is he was using an Army Map Service sheet to give grid coordinates. A US map!
“So we sent a query to Theater HQ in Long Binh requesting permission to release the intercept to the camp. I mean, they didn’t even know they were going to be hit. We knew exactly what targets, what order, how many rounds—and the exact time. We knew everything the dink battery commander did—” the civilian raised his voice and his angry eyes “—and our receivers were enough better than his that we got every coordinate the first time while the dink had to ask for repeats on a couple of them.”
Kelly stood up and paced, his hands locked behind his back. The thick, blunt fingers wound together. “Long Binh wouldn’t clear it. They shot it on to Maryland, though, in case somebody there would authorize release. We got word back three hours later, about an hour after the bombardment had ended. Fort Meade wouldn’t clear it either.” Kelly swallowed. “Compromise of NSA sources and methods was more important than the purposes to be served by such a compromise. Permission refused.” The civilian slammed his right fist into the table. “I never did learn how many people got killed by that bullshit. They weren’t any of them in NSA headquarters, though, and that was all that mattered to the top brass. But it wasn’t all that mattered to me.”
“Umm, well,” said Major Nassif, as if he had understood the point of the story. They hadn’t warned him that he would be briefing a psycho. . . .”Well, to continue,” the major said.
“Sorry, Major, just one more thing,” Kelly said tiredly. “I said I had a suggestion. I’m going back over to my room in the ETAP—” he thumbed toward the blank north wall of the office. “I suggest you check with whoever it takes, General Pedler, I suppose, and then drop the file off with me there.”
Nassif started to rise in protest. “I said check, didn’t I?” Kelly overrode him. “And the whole file, too—the file and every other scrap of data there is in this embassy, anything that might have something to do with it.” The civilian opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Turning, he added, “If the ETAP isn’t secure, you’re really up a creek.”
Major Nassif plucked at his moustache. Suddenly he glanced from the open door to the open file in his hand. He slapped the file shut, but it was another minute before he actually stood up.