Badger Games Read online

  The battle, if there had been a battle, was over. There were groups of uniformed troups dispersed here and there, in watchful, wary positions, but the main business concerned a cluster of men in civilian clothes. They were standing in the road, hands on their heads. There may have been more, shielded from his view by the cliff’s precipitousness. These, Franko felt sure, were the KLA, or what remained of them. They had been captured. There were eighteen men that he could see. What had happened to the others was in no way apparent. There were no bodies lying about.

  He saw that one of the men in the cluster was the old farmer, Daliljaj. He stood still, neither defiant nor defeated in his demeanor. Franko couldn’t be sure, but he thought that two of Daliljaj’s sons were also there.

  A Serbian officer spoke to what looked like a couple of sergeants off to one side. The NCOs signaled down the road and shouted for trucks. Then they all turned, along with a squad of soldiers, and forced the civilians to the side of the road, under the brow of the hill and hidden from Franko’s view. The soldiers suddenly opened fire, blazing away at the hill. There were screams, but Franko did not try to get closer, to witness the slaughter. The minute the guns began to sputter he turned and raced back the way he had come.

  He ran as hard but as warily as he could, for fear that he might encounter some escaped KLA men, who would, naturally, be eager for revenge. But he encountered no one. He was panting and scarcely able to speak when he found the hidden entrance of the cave, but as soon as he was inside and had crept nearly to the chamber he stopped.

  Something was wrong. With great effort he managed to suppress his panting, to lie quietly until he could breathe with some control. There should have been a light, some little sound. But it was utterly dark. He went forward on his hands and knees. There was a very bad smell. It was not just the odor of feces and urine, but perhaps of blood, of burnt hair, it might be. And then, of course, the acrid scent of gunfire.

  He put his hand in something wet. Something very wet, but sticky, as well.

  Comrades

  “We ran north every night,” the colonel said. He was reminiscing. Joe didn’t know where all this was heading, but he listened and didn’t say anything. He’d heard the colonel’s war stories before.

  They were sitting on the deck of a restaurant that looked out on Lake St. Clair, sipping drinks after dinner. The colonel was drinking straight whiskey in a glass; Joe was nursing a bottle of Stroh’s beer. The other members of the party had withdrawn after dinner. It was warm, still summer. There were a lot of boats in this marina, their masts like so many leafless trees. Joe supposed that the moon on the lake had evoked this nostalgic mood, but he was sure that there was some deeper point to it. The colonel liked to talk about his days in Vietnam, Joe knew, but there was always a point.

  There were still a few pleasure boats on the lake, their running lights twinkling, people partying. Occasionally a powerboat would come roaring up from the lake, then throttle down and motor slowly into the dock at the restaurant, and young people would hop out, laughing. Joe had a boat, a Sea Ray that was moored in its slip a few hundred yards away, among the masts.

  “I loved the moon on the tops of the clouds,” the colonel said, nodding toward the lake. “There were almost always clouds. But once in a while you could see the forest, the jungle. No lights down there, though. Except for the cockpit lights, the moon and the stars were the only lights you’d see. Nothing but night below you, blacker than Hades, except for a river, maybe, gleaming in the moonlight.

  “I had a little tape player. I’d slip the earplug device inside my helmet. I had to do it. My backseater liked rock. The first time we went up he played some Rolling Stones crap, something like that. Drove me nuts—I had to make him turn it off. The next day I got my own tape machine and earplugs for both of us, so I could listen to Bach and he could hear his rock on his machine.”

  “Bach?” Joe said.

  “My favorite tape,” the colonel said, “was one I’d made off a French LP—The Cello Suites, played by Fournier. Or for a change sometimes, I’d play another tape, one by Glenn Gould, of the Well-Tempered Clavier.” He was silent for a long moment, staring out at the lake. People at the other tables around them laughed and called to one another. The colonel did not hear them. He was listening to something else.

  “There’s nothing like it,” he said. “Riding that Thud up Route Pack Six, listening to the cello with the moon on the tops of the clouds. I love those suites, especially the preludes … this statement of theme, then the elaboration, the argument. A solo cello can sound like many voices, at times … babbling, conversing with itself … then the solitary voice, winding and sonorous. The piano pieces are different, of course—fugues. But I prefer the suites. Have you ever listened to them?”

  Joe said that he regretted that he hadn’t.

  “After the prelude,” the colonel said, “come these stately or lively dance figures. It’s very civilized music, formal but it has an implacable drive. It was amazing to listen to them while you were flying up to Hanoi, to bomb. Nobody’s talking in the strike force, just this rushing background sound of the engines, the breathing noise of the oxygen, the occasional remark from the backseater, noting a turning point, pointing out a site we’d bombed a couple of days earlier.

  “The tape would stop just about the time things got interesting. Just about the time the backseater said, ‘I’ve got five rings, probably a SAM.’ That meant you were being tracked by enemy radar. Then you’d have to run down Thud Ridge into Hanoi. Everything blazing away at you. Two minutes of pure hell, the Cong screaming on the radio, dodging SAMs, Fire Cans, Fan Songs—those were kinds of anti-aircraft guns. Guys in the strike force yelling out on the radio. Then the MiGs as you came out, down the river, running for your life. Plenty of light then, lots of explosions, aircraft on fire—guys yelling again: ‘I’m hit! I’m on fire!’ Then the dark again, as you climbed out. And I’d start the tape. I’d be almost calm by the time I got back to Korat.”

  “What about your backseater?” Joe asked. “Was he calm?”

  “Him? No. He was wired. He was jumping around, eager to go again. But,” he said, “one day he didn’t come back.”

  “What happened?”

  The colonel drank off his whiskey. “Come on,” he said. He picked up the bill, and Joe followed him out. The colonel paid in cash, tossing in a huge tip. They walked along the concrete abutment toward the wooden catwalks that would take them through the maze of boats to where Joe’s Sea Ray was moored. The colonel took out a cigar, but he didn’t light it. There were too many signs forbidding smoking about. But once they reached the boat and went aboard, he clipped the cigar and lit it. They sat in the tall cockpit seats beneath the canopy. It was dark here. The bluish lights on tall poles, and those that reflected from nearby boats where others were relaxing aboard, didn’t really illuminate the cockpit where Joe and the colonel sat.

  “That kid,” the colonel said, “my first backseater, he went down with the plane.”

  “No shit,” Joe said. “You were shot down?” Joe recalled another version of this story, from when he’d first met the colonel. In that version, the colonel had spent some time in a Vietnamese prison.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t like you see in the movies, the newsreels. We weren’t in B-52s, six miles above the war. We were in the Thuds, F-105s. We rolled in on target, diving down to a thousand feet or so, then pickling the bombs and hauling ass down river. Going downtown, we called it. Did it every day. Anyway, what the news-reels don’t show is that Hanoi was the most heavily defended target in aerial war history. In the news shots you see these big 52s, way up there in a silent, empty sky, releasing thousands of bombs like dropping handfuls of pretzel sticks, then turning away and flying safely home to Guam. It wasn’t like that, at all.”

  “It wasn’t?” Joe said, more or less on cue.

  “That was down south,” the colonel said. “They were up around thirty thousand. They could release bombs from the DMZ.
No MiGs, no SAMs south of the DMZ, see? The real war was ‘going downtown’ every day. Besides all the missiles, the guns, they had every kid in Vietnam who could carry a rifle lying on the tops of buildings, or in the parks, firing up at us.”

  “With rifles?” Joe laughed.

  “You don’t think a .30-caliber rifle bullet can bring down an F-105?” the colonel said. “Well, they can’t, or not often. They don’t hit anything. But once in a while you’d get a hit. It’s a sharp rap, like a stone hitting the windshield of your car on a dirt road. Only those bullets penetrated the skin of that plane. It might do no harm; usually it didn’t. But it could tear up the wiring, puncture a fuel line, a hydraulic line. Everything’s there for a purpose, Joe. You need it all. Usually, nothing happened. You’d get back to Korat and look at the plane, find the bullet hole. Usually in the wing. You might have leaked some fluid, maybe some fuel. The guys would have to go in there and check it out.

  “This time we didn’t get back. We started smoking on the climbout. We probably got eighty miles south before we had to eject. Only what’s-his-name didn’t eject. At least none of the other planes saw his chute. I never saw it. He must have ridden her down.”

  Joe didn’t say anything about “what’s-his-name.” Either the colonel had forgotten the kid’s name or he didn’t want to think about it. “So, you were captured?” he asked.

  The colonel didn’t answer the question. He took a big drag off the cigar. “I landed in a rice paddy,” he said. “I was lucky. You don’t want to come down in those trees. I ran for high ground as quick as I could get rid of the chute. We had a radio transmitter on us, so the ResCap people could keep track of us. The militia was out, looking for me, of course. It took me the better part of an hour to get up on this hilltop, up in the woods. I found a clearing. The ResCap guys—F-4s—kept cycling back, off the tankers, strafing the militia. They could see their flashlights. I could hear the militia troops calling to each other, coming up the hill. I figured I was about due for a long stay in the Hanoi Hilton. They got pretty close. Then I heard the chopper. He came in just above the trees, turned on some big lights, and down came the ladder. I jumped on that thing and held on for dear life! Away we went! The bastards didn’t haul me up into the chopper until we were away from there.

  “Jesus!” The colonel shivered. “You ever ride through the treetops at a hundred miles an hour, clinging to a ladder? My God, I thought they’d kill me.”

  “But they never found wh—your backseater?”

  “No. They ran missions out there for days, but no sign, no signal. He must have augured in. They could see where the plane went in, but finally the Vietnamese carted it off.”

  “Did you go on the missions?”

  “The ResCap? Oh, no. No, I was back up on the run the next night, new plane, new backseater.”

  “They didn’t send you home?”

  “Eventually. But I wasn’t hurt, just a little bruised. No, we couldn’t spare the pilots. We had something like a thirty percent loss rate in that squadron. No, I went downtown on my regular rotation.”

  They sat silently for a few moments, Joe mulling this story over. The previous telling had been different, with no mention of the backseater, and there had been at least a strong suggestion that the colonel had endured some heavy time in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. He had no idea how much of it was true, if any of it, although he believed that the colonel had flown in combat. But why was he being told it in the first place? The last time, out in Salt Lake City, the story had been part of the colonel’s cover. But that situation had long been superseded.

  Finally, the colonel said, “Yeah, the rescue guys, they were pretty thorough. They looked every day for … I don’t know … weeks, I guess. The air force must have spent thousands … well, hell, maybe a million, on that operation. The kid never showed up at Hanoi. We didn’t forget him. But eventually, you know, it was clear: he hadn’t gotten out. There was a formal hearing. I testified.”

  Joe had found some beers in the boat’s refrigerator. The colonel hoisted his, saying, “Here’s to fallen comrades.”

  Joe drank. This was it, he thought. He was right.

  The colonel was very direct, after this long prelude. “So, what happened to Pollak?” he said.

  “I told you about Pollak,” Joe said.

  “Tell me again,” the colonel said.

  Joe told the story. He and Pollak had gone up Lake Huron, in this boat, to an island off the Bruce Peninsula, in Ontario, a few weeks earlier. They were after an escaped mobster who had faked his death. When they found the man, Humphrey DiEbola, he was dying—ironically, he’d caught a stray bullet in his escape. Joe had argued with Pollak that they should leave the guy to die. Their mission was simply to make sure he was dead. Evidently, Pollak had believed that “making sure” meant shooting the mobster. But DiEbola, according to Joe, had enough life in him to shoot Pollak first.

  “The old devil had a gun under the covers,” Joe said. DiEbola had popped Pollak, who was leaning over the bed. Joe had fled. A Detroit police detective, Sergeant Mulheisen, was on the island and was expected to show up any moment. Joe hadn’t had time to remove Pollak.

  It was a simple story and Joe stuck to it. The colonel obviously didn’t buy it.

  “The inescapable fact is,” the colonel pointed out, “that Mulheisen didn’t find Pollak there. If he had, we’d have heard about it. But nothing. He found DiEbola, dead, as you say. But Pollak hasn’t reappeared, dead or alive. So where is he? It’s been weeks. Your story isn’t acceptable, Joe.”

  Joe shrugged. “I have no idea.” This was not true. Pollak was, at least for the time being, at the bottom of Lake Huron. Joe had shot him and carried off the body, with the help of DiEbola’s bodyguard, Roman Yakovich. It hadn’t been a very good plan, disposing of the dead man at sea, so to speak, but Joe couldn’t very well afford to have the body autopsied. So far, it hadn’t washed up, or been found if it had.

  Joe’s plan was to avoid seeing the colonel ever again. That hadn’t worked out. He’d dropped Roman Yakovich off at Port Huron. He should have walked then, himself. But he’d taken a chance that the colonel wouldn’t be expecting him back so soon. With any luck, he’d thought he could slip into the St. Clair Shores Marina, park the boat, and get away in his car. Unfortunately, the colonel and his friends were waiting for him at the mooring. Joe had made his report and then he’d hung around, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The meeting tonight looked like it might be the occasion, but instead they’d had dinner and then the others had gone.

  “Joe, we just can’t overlook this,” the colonel said. He tossed his cigar into the dark water. “You know the nature of our group. Pollak wasn’t on an official assignment with us. Hell, we don’t even exist. He was in town, officially, with Immigration. That’s what I’m doing here, officially. We weren’t on any assignment that can justify or explain Pollak’s disappearance. So far, nobody knows he’s missing. But that can’t be sustained any longer, Joe. Eventually, somebody will come asking. They’ll come to me. That will threaten the Lucani.”

  The Lucani was the amusing name that the colonel and his people had dubbed their organization. It was based on the origins, in Italy, of DiEbola’s family. The rationale behind the group’s existence was their dedication to ridding the world of people like DiEbola. The members were made up of agents in various federal crime-fighting agencies who had become disillusioned by official policies. They had decided to take matters into their own hands.

  That was the story Joe had been told, anyway. It could be true or it could be crap. He had thought about this on the long trip back across Lake Huron. Maybe they were acting officially, after all. Maybe the Lucani gag was just that, a cover story they had concocted to convince him to help them get DiEbola, who had been his one-time employer. He had no idea how many agents were involved—assuming the Lucani pitch was more or less true—but they seemed to have plenty of resources. His initial impression was that it was just five or six disi
llusioned agents. But others kept popping up.

  “Joe, the guys have put themselves at risk, for a purpose,” the colonel said. “It’s a purpose we believe in. It’s what we got into the service for, but found we couldn’t—weren’t allowed to—do. They got you out of that hospital in Denver. You were looking at years in a federal pen—if the mob didn’t have you hit first. They put themselves out for you. If it was you missing, we’d be looking. We wouldn’t leave you hanging—pardon the allusion.”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe Mulheisen’s got him. Maybe the Mounties, or the FBI. Maybe they’ve got some reason not to talk about it.”

  “All the more reason,” the colonel said. “We can’t ignore this. We’ve got to know. Maybe you dumped him.”

  “And if I did?”

  “We’ll have to deal with that, Joe. I don’t know what the group would decide, but at least we’d know. Maybe they wouldn’t do anything. It depends on the circumstances. Pollak can be a difficult man. If you felt for some reason that you had to take him out, the group might decide that you were justified. But we have to know.”

  Joe wondered: Was “we” the Lucani? Or was it just the colonel? If there was such a group as the Lucani, every member’s ass would be equally at risk. Yet it was always the colonel who did the talking. And there were other disquieting factors. Joe was confident, for instance, from some things that Pollak had let drop, that one of his missions was to get rid of Joe. Whose idea was that? Fortunately, it hadn’t worked out that way. Joe didn’t have any bad feelings about having popped Pollak. The way he saw it, it was him or Pollak.