And all the time he smiled and shaved and whistled.
It was another hot, fetid morning when Remo saw the first arrivals on the second wire. And heard them.
They were not dead.
Two Vietnamese civilians were hanging, like the corpses, by their wrists. One was an old man with white hair. He was stripped naked. The other was a boy no more than nine or ten years old. He had a bullet wound in his side. The old man moaned softly. The boy, near death, only opened and closed his mouth in short gasps.
"What do you think, Private?" It was the major, cleaner than Remo had ever seen him.
Without a word, Remo cut down the old man and the boy. He held the boy in his arms. The child didn't weigh fifty pounds.
"These people need a doctor," Remo said.
The major scowled. "Did I hear you call these walking garbage heaps people, soldier? Get them back up there before I have you court-martialed."
"They're civilians, sir," Remo said, tasting the bile in his mouth.
"They're scum! You hear me? Scum. Like you, Williams. Now, you string those VC up, or a court-martial's going to be too good for you."
A few soldiers had come around to see what was causing the commotion. With them was Conrad MacCleary, the CIA man.
Remo set the boy down. "You go straight to hell," he muttered. "Sir."
In a flash the major's knife was out and slashing toward Remo's throat. Remo turned. The blade sliced across the fleshy part of his back.
The major's face hardened into a terrifying grin. "You're going to be sorry you ever said that, Private." His voice was soft as he backed Remo against the hanging bodies.
"Hold it, Major." It was Conrad MacCleary. His hook was pressed into the soft flesh of the major's throat.
"You've got no jurisdiction here."
"No?" MacCleary said. "What do you call this hook?" He jabbed it deeper into the major's neck.
The military man looked wildly to his troops. "Stop him," he croaked.
None of the soldiers moved.
After a long moment, MacCleary released him. The CIA man went to the two prisoners and looked them over. "The boy's already dead," he said. "The old man won't live out the day. Get your men to find him a place to die in peace."
The major obeyed.
The next day the corpses were taken down.
The day after that, the food chopper arrived. MacCleary radioed a message and waited. By six o'clock that evening, the major received orders of transfer, and the men on the Hill were ordered to evacuate.
"I thought you couldn't do anything," Remo told MacCleary.
The big man shrugged. "What did I do? Sicced the fruitcake on some other outfit. I couldn't get him out. Guys like that are good for wars."
"But you got us out of here."
MacCleary grunted.
"Why?"
"Because I want to see you live through this mess. I've seen you before. I've seen you kill."
It was years before Remo saw Conrad MacCleary again and found out that the man he was working for in the CIA was Harold W. Smith. And that MacCleary had come to the Hill looking for an orphan named Remo Williams, because Smith's computers had pegged him as a possible candidate for the enforcement arm of CURE.
Remo never did find out what happened to the major. The episode on the Hill was one he tried not to think about. But sometimes the major's grinning, frighteningly clean face still haunted him, like the sound of helicopter blades.
Major Deke Bauer. The name was etched into his memory as deeply as the image of bodies hanging on wire.
?CHAPTER EIGHT
Deke Bauer had the patience that every good soldier required, but at the moment it was stretched to the limit. The major glanced at the clock on the mantel for the hundredth time that night.
Where in the hell were Brickell and his men? They'd gone down the mountain hours ago. They should have returned by now, bringing along with them the bodies of the three intruders.
The mantel clock chimed midnight. Bauer pushed back his chair, crossed the room to the dying fire, and then turned abruptly around, heading for the door. On his way out he scooped up his Uzi and a pair of infrared nightglasses.
He would check out the situation himself. That was the only way he'd get any sleep.
"I'm going out for a while," the major informed the sentry at the main door. "If Brickell and his team get back before I do, tell Brickell to wait in my office for me. I don't care how late it is."
"Yes, sir," the sentry responded quickly. He would not, he thought silently, want to be in Brickell's size twelves for anything right now. The old man was pissed, and someone, probably Brickell, was going to pay the price. In spite of his heavy field jacket, the sentry felt a sudden chill. The money on this job was tops, and any mercenary in the country would jump at the chance to work here, but Bauer was no one to fuck with.
It was cold and windy on the mountaintop. Wisps of fog eddied and swirled around the tall pines. The major kept to the overgrown path, the same one the monks had hacked out of the mountainside nearly a hundred years before. When they'd first taken over the monastery, Bauer considered clearing away all the underbrush that obscured the trail. But then he'd decided it was best left as they'd found it. The buckbrush and high grass were an effective camouflage. Why let anyone else know there was an easy way up and down the mountain?
He smelled smoke. With his nightglasses, he could make out the embers of a campfire. Three figures were lying near it.
Dead?
He watched for another quarter-hour. One of the figures moved. So the intruders were still alive.
Bauer slipped by the clearing where the fire was and then worked his way up from the downwind side. Two tours of duty in Nam had taught him that it was best to arrive from the direction from which you were least expected.
When he found Brickell and the team, he resolved, he'd teach them a lesson they'd never forget. He'd told them to do the job and come straight back. The order had been clearly understood. There was no damn excuse for not carrying it out to the letter.
Bauer clambered over a boulder and dropped softly down into a shallow arroyo. His boot sank into something firm but yielding. Overhead, the moon shook off a bank of ragged clouds. Now Bauer could see the path clearly. What he'd stepped on was someone's stomach.
"Brickell," he whispered, looking down at the shattered remains of the man's face. It was the team leader…. No, goddammit, it was the whole team. The broken bodies were stacked in a pile like leftover sandwiches from a party to which no one had come.
The major sank down on the rock. "Jesus," he said in a choked whisper as he spotted something a few yards away. He went over to examine it. It was a severed head wedged between two rocks, its blackening eyes wide and seeming to stare right at him. Bauer snaked his hand between the rocks to dislodge it, but it slipped away from him and rolled down the rocks to rest at Brickell's feet.
What the hell happened here? Bauer recalled hearing a single burst of gunfire about a half-hour after he'd sent the team out. He'd assumed he'd heard the three intruders being finished off. But that wasn't what had happened. He kicked the pile of mangled and twisted bodies and realized with a shudder that his men hadn't been shot. Some kind of thing had literally torn them apart.
He immediately ruled out the three civilians. If the team had been shot, he would have considered them, but he damn well knew that no three guys, no matter how good they were, could take out a party of well-armed, combat-trained men.