A small delegation awaited me on the ground. I returned the salutes politely, and held out my hand to shake hands with the guy who looked like the most senior.
"Welcome to Vietnam, Admiral Magruder." The English was clear and fluent, only a slight trace of accent tingeing the vowels. I felt my hand tighten around his.
"I appreciate your cooperation," I said. It had taken me a long time to decide on those words, to figure out how to phrase my gratitude for what the Vietnamese were evidently willing to do.
That is, what they said they were willing to do.
"I am Bien Than, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. I will be your primary contact during your time in our country for these matters." He glanced from side to side at the rest of the delegation and the reporters, and his face took on a slightly guarded expression. "We should talk. Perhaps I can assist you in refining your plans."
Now, this was curious. What was it that Than evidently wanted to say to me that he didn't want to advertise to the members of the media crowding around us?
"It would be my pleasure." I started to elaborate on that, but then followed his lead and fell silent.
After we posed for a few pictures, Than led us away from the gabbling horde. I heard a few voices call out, some almost unintelligible and others were clear American accents. I smiled, waved, and followed Than off, repeating the magic phrase "No comment" as though it were a mantra that would carry me through their midst.
"Tombstone." That one particular voice stopped me dead in my tracks. Kames, following close on my heels, bumped into me, and I heard her mutter a quick apology.
I turned to scan the crowd. There she was, at the forefront of the mass of media now being held back by security forces. As stunning as ever, with the years adding a patina of grace and confidence that was missing in her younger counterparts. She held the microphone down low, an indication that she knew her viewers would be at least as interested in her words as anything I'd have to say. This was in sharp contrast to the others, who thrust the foam-covered mikes at me in some sort of phallic symbolism.
Pamela Drake, star reporter for ACN News. She'd dogged my path for the last twenty years, first as a news reporter, later as friend and lover, then as an adversarial representative of the media that refused to admit that there was any reason that they should not be present for every second of every military maneuver. Our disagreements over the First Amendment versus the safety of my people had escalated to the point where we'd broken off our engagement.
Lucky break, that. After being married to Tomboy for one and a half years, I knew that there was no way that Pamela and I could have ever had a life together.
Pamela had always insisted that I give up my career in the military. Tomboy, with her own career skyrocketing, would never even have considered such a thing. She knew how important flying was to me ― almost as important as it was to her.
"Hello, Tombstone," Pamela said. Her voice reached me even over the clamor of the rest of the crowd. It was an odd, deadly sensation starting at her. Like watching sharks circle your underwater cage. Dangerous, deadly dangerous, both for me and my people ― but somehow still so compelling, so hard to look away from.
I don't know how long I would have stood there. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my back. A jab, an elbow if I weren't mistaken. The momentary pain, not to say the sheer shock that a junior lieutenant commander would attempt such a thing, broke the spell. I looked away from Pamela and back at Lieutenant Commander Kames. She just stood there, her eyes calm and staring. "Sorry, Admiral. I slipped." The expression on her face bore no trace of guilt.
Pamela faded back from a foreground figure into just one of the reporters, yapping like baying hounds after the stories that were their life's blood.
Pamela had intruded too often in my military operations for me to believe her presence here was anything but an extremely well-planned example of her almost psychic nose for news. She'd capitalized on our relationship several times in the recent past, most notably during the last conflict in the Mediterranean. There she'd counted on my good graces to provide access to the story, and had gone so far as to throw herself into the ocean from the deck of an old fishing vessel nearing the carrier, knowing that the sea-air-rescue helicopters would undoubtedly pick her up.
That had been a mistake. A big one. She hadn't realized how much of one until I'd placed her under armed guard in a stateroom. How her lawyer had ever managed to finagle her out of the criminal charges that had been pending, I'll never know.
"Let's get going," I said to Than, who had stopped to watch this side play with an expression as inscrutable as Kames's. I swore silently to myself, uncomfortable at being on the receiving end of a stone-faced expression.
That's how I got my nickname, of course. It had had nothing to do with the fight at the OK Corral. No, my orderly squadron mates had decided that my face was so expressionless that it reminded them of a tombstone. It had stuck all these years, as first call signs usually do. My friends abbreviated it to "Stoney."
It was a short walk into the icy air of the terminal building. Than led us around Customs, through a few side passageways that were luxuriously carpeted and decorated. A moment later, we were at the VIP Conference Room located immediately in the front of the airport terminal building. Than opened the door, and stepped aside to let me precede him in.
I stepped into a conference room much like any other. There was a certain ineffable sameness to these rooms, characterized by heavily draped windows ― when windows were even allowed ― gleaming wooden tables, and relatively comfortable chairs. The obligatory water pitcher and coffee urn stood in the center of the table, and a stack of brown folders at the head of it.
I slung my flight bag onto the table, not worried about how out of place the battered green canvas satchel would look amongst the trappings of power. I wasn't in the mood for courtesies, formalities, and the other rituals that had been handed to me along with my first set of stars. Then, I had not been senior enough to reject them. Now I was. I turned to Than. "It's been a long flight, sir."
Than nodded, and a grave smile crossed his face. "And a long time. I am hoping that the material I have for you will make it seem that much more worthwhile."
He picked up the top folder, and handed it to me without comment. I opened it, started to take a deep breath, and felt the air catch in my lungs. It was as if all power to make even the slightest voluntary motion had left me, like a deep sucker punch to the gut. I stared down until basic instinct took over and I found myself sucking in another deep, shuddering breath. I looked up at Than. He was concerned now, more than he had a right to be. He must have known how it would affect me.
"Where did you get this?" I asked.
"From a resistance fighter, a very old one. He says he has more ― hard evidence, he says. Not just photos."
I glanced back at the photo, a face I thought I'd forgotten. It was so like my own, even more so now that the passing years had carved their marks on me. Was this how I would look in later years?
The photo showed three men in cut-off shorts and T-shirts, standing comfortably together. The man in the middle had his arms slung over the two on either side, and was grinning for the camera. The man to the left held up a newspaper, printed in English, with the words "Clinton Wins Second Term" emblazoned across the front of it.
There was no mistaking that face, not even after all these years. The skin was darkly burnished by the sun, rough and shiny on the nose as though peeling from a recent sunburn. The eyes were dark, maybe gray ― I couldn't tell from the photo. Even with a smile for the camera, there was a sense that deep secrets hid behind those eyes, more eons of experience than any one man could have had. The eyes were alert, keen, confident without being arrogant. It was my father.