He went back to the men in his unit. He left one man in the trees across from the trailer with a pair of binoculars and a phone; he assigned the remaining vehicles to begin to patrol on preselected routes in Blue Eye and greater Polk County, in search of the truck, a green Dodge, one unpainted fender, Arizona plates SCH 2332. The instructions were simple. They weren’t to make contact or even follow. Instead, they were to phone in; Jorge himself, with telephone consultations with the boss, would try and determine where Bob was headed. The idea was to set the ambush well in advance and spring it with the whole team, in the coordinated way they had agreed upon.
Unawares, Bob started his hunt with a call to the Pentagon, Department of the Army, Archives Division, Sergeant Major Norman Jenks.
“Jenks.”
“Say, Norman.”
“Bob Lee, you old coot! What the hell, you still kicking around?”
“I seem to be.”
The old sergeant, who’d first met on Bob’s second tour when he led recons up near Cambodia while assigned to SOG and Jenks had been S-2 staff, chatted for a bit in the profane language of retired senior NCOs. But eventually Bob got to it.
“Need a favor.”
“Name it, Coot. If I can do it, I’ll do it. I’m too old for them to do anything to me now.”
“And too top-heavy,” sergeantspeak for having won too many combat decorations.
“Yeah, well,” said Jenks. “Go ahead, pard. Shoot.”
“You remember you guys had a gadget called a goddamned Set No. 1/M3 20,000 Volt?”
“That piece of shit? My first tour the ARVNs were using ’em. They were old then, and they was supposed to be fungus-proofed but whoever said they was never saw the fungus in Nam. That shit’d eat you for lunch!”
“Yeah, it was old by the sixties.”
“It was really World War II vintage. Based on some piece of German gear an OSS team brought back after the war, as I recall.”
“Well, anyway, I’m looking at the year 1955. Suppose a fellow had a need to use a night-vision setup in 1955 and he was in West Arkansas. How’d he get a hold of one? Where’d they be? Were they issued widely to troops? Would they have been, say, up at Campbell with the 101st Airborne? Would they have been at Bragg with the 82nd? Or maybe they were up at that ballistics development lab in Rhode Island? I’m just trying to get a feel for how common they was and how close to West Arkansas. And who was their expert? Who advocated them? Who trained on them and knew them? My feeling is, you couldn’t become proficient without training.”
“You couldn’t. It was like looking into an aquarium. The gooks never did figure it out. Anyhow, when do you need this by?”
“If it came yesterday, I’d be late.”
“Damn, Bob, what the hell this all about?”
“It’s a deal I’m working on with a writer.”
“Oh, a book! It’ll be a best-seller, I can guarantee you. You gonna tell him about An Loc?”
“I might.”
“Okay, I got a light schedule today and a newbie spec 4 just assigned; I’ll get this boy right on it. Number?”
Bob gave him the number.
“You hang tight. I’ll see what we can dig up.”
He hung up.
“Now what?” said Russ.
Bob opened his wallet and peeled out $300.
“I want you to take the truck and head up one exit on the Etheridge Parkway. That’s the Y City exit. I seem to recall a camping store up there. You go up there and buy two sleeping bags, a Coleman lantern, some Coleman fuel, some changes of underwear, toothbrushes, the works. Remember the fuel, the damn lantern don’t work without it! We’re not going back to my trailer for a spell.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s good to change your base of operations every once in a while. We been at the trailer a week. We’ll move somewhere else for a couple of days or so.”
“But I had a sleeping bag. At the trailer. I had underwear. I had—”
“Now, don’t get yourself lathered up. Man, you start to squeal like a pup every goddamned time. We’ll leave that stuff there. If anybody like a Mr. Duane Peck takes a look, he’ll see it and figure we’re due back at any time. Got it?”
“You are paranoid,” said Russ.
“Para-what?”
“Never mind.”
Russ left. Bob lay back and rested. He gave Russ time to drive off, then left the room and went down the hall to the pay phone and called his wife collect.
“Well, hello.”
“Well, howdy, stranger,” said Julie. “Thought you’d married a movie star and headed for California.” “Not this boy. No sir. Ah—”
“Ah—I know that tone. You’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
“Sweetie, it’s nothing. It just is going to take a bit longer than I thought. Maybe another week or two.”
“Are you having a good time?”
“It’s been interesting. I went to his grave. I had a moment with him. We been going through records. It’s very educational. Saw Sam. That sort of thing.”
“How is he?”
“Old. Older. I don’t know, he goes a little strange now and then. I’m worried about him.”
“We’re all older.”
“How’s my baby girl?”
“She’s fine. Misses her daddy.”
“I’ll be home as soon as possible.”
“You’re not in any trouble, are you?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You love trouble. That’s your problem.”
Bob bought a Coke and the Little Rock paper and went back to the room. About two o’clock the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Down-filled or polyester?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want down-filled or just simple polyester? For the sleeping bags? Maybe it’s too warm for the down-filled. Incidentally, I had to go all the way to Booneville. That camp store was closed.”
“Polyester is fine. And a cooler. Fair enough?”
“Gotcha.”
He hung up to more silence in the room and the minutes ticked by. At last the phone rang. It was about 3:30. “Hello.”
“Bob?”
It was Sergeant Major Jenks.
“Yes sir.”
“All right, I got some info for you. You guessed right pretty much about the M-3s. At no one time did the army have on its TO&E more than two thousand of those units. They was damned expensive, they was hard to operate and they was delicate, so distribution was mainly to elite units; they never handed ’em out to the troops at the company or platoon level. Hell, you couldn’t even buy one at the PX! Dispersion was mainly to special forces units in Europe, to the big airborne divisions at brigade or regimental S-2 level, to 4th Army in Washington State and the 3rd Mountain Division up in Alaska. The heaviest profusion of them was to 9th and 23rd Infantry on the DMZ at the 38th parallel in Korea. Another complement went to the Jungle Warfare School in Panama. Just what you’d expect.”
Damn, Bob thought.
“Okay, fine, Norman, I—”
“Wait a sec, ain’t done yet. Don’t this beat all? According to our records, three such units were transshipped from the Panama Zone, the Jungle Warfare School, to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, in late June of 1954.”
Bob waited a second.
“What for?”
“Well, one of the problems with the goddamned things was simple: no doctrine. They were not effectively used in Korea because nobody had thought much about the best methods of deployment and there was thought about junking the things altogether. Then a brilliant young first lieutenant wrote a paper on night-vision tactical doctrine which he submitted to the Infantry Journal, where it got published and he got noticed. So he finds himself TDY Camp Chaffee, where he’s put in charge of what they’re calling the Experimental Night Tactical Development Program, code-named B L, where they run a lot of night-fire operations trying to figure out the best way to deploy the thing, while also working with ways to refine it. They got some R&D types, they got some intel boys, maybe even some Agency boys in it.”