Ellis nodded. “Rough luck for certain. Now, your pappy was a sniper, too. I think you knew that? No? He started out that way, at least. He was highly effective in Vietnam. Later, they took all his records down off the boards at Sniper School down to Fort Benning. Made him disappear. Dickie-Will became their dirty little secret.”
A choking envy gripped Ben’s chest. “He told you all about it, I guess.”
“He didn’t have to tell me a thing, Ben. I was Dick Blackshaw’s spotter for Five. Motherfuckin’. Tours.” Ellis tossed off a mock salute. “So I’m a dab hand with the shooting iron myself, as if I need to tell you. You best bear that in mind.”
Ben reeled. The dead men in his skull pressed their shoulders hard against the inner wall. It shuddered. A more eerie legacy than all the gold was this inheritance of lethal stealth. It was a rare operator who killed after leaving the service. Yet in two straight generations of the Blackshaw line, the hunter’s prowess had somehow been perverted to the work of murder. That’s how a sniper’s mission was viewed by regular soldiers on all sides, even his own. There was no random blizzard of machine gun fire to assuage a sensitive soldier’s conscience. No faceless targets to placate the sniper’s guilt. No guesses; only certainty as to whose round had done the deadly work. A sniper knew the man he was killing, intimately. Or the woman.
So Ben was truly his father’s hawk-eyed son. This was a link beyond flesh, beyond DNA. It seemed they shared the spirit of Smith Island’s darker history. Ben had hoped it would be different. He had wished that his own infernal path had been anomalous, and not the fulfillment of a curse passed down to him. Now Ben knew he could look to himself for clues to understanding Pap. The path to his father, to his ancestry on Smith Island, lay within himself. It was a long, dark, corpse-strewn alley of the soul. Though perhaps unrighteous to some, the sniper’s way was not for weaklings. So Ben also saw Ellis in a new light, with grudging respect. And with a clip full of questions that would have to wait for now, perhaps forever.
Ellis returned from an inward visitation with his own demons. He went on. “That life got to your father, Ben. Got to him bad. After the war it was one shot, one pill. The shot was rye. The pill, Valium. Or ’ludes.
“Then you were born. Thank God he pulled up before he crashed, but he’d seen too much. Even your coming along couldn’t rub out Vietnam. He couldn’t forget. See, we’d been offered a whole slew of volunteer details that were technically off the books. Made a little extra cash to send home. The thing of it is, these gigs weren’t stamped by LBJ. Bobby Strange was behind them.”
“Bobby Strange?”
“That would be Robert S. McNamara. Might have heard of him. Secretary of Defense back in the day? He didn’t always like to pussyfoot with the enemy like Johnson did. Maybe we didn’t add up to the punch of one of his B-52s, but hell yes we could do our thing. Bobby Strange knew it. We were part of his Flexible Response and Limited Warfare philosophy. After the war, our immediate superiors, the ones without Bobby Strange’s high-level immunity, they got worried your Pap would get chatty about some of the gigs we drew. They were right. Dick had a conscience eating at his insides like he’d swallowed a school of live piranha. He wanted to get the truth out. They tried to bribe him, but he wasn’t in it for the bucks, and that terrified the spooks. So they came for him that night fifteen years back. And when they did that? I guess that pissed your daddy off some.”
“Why didn’t they come for you?”
Ellis smiled. “I was already dead. Killed In Action. Body Not Recovered. Man, I had to git ghost! Your father saw the trouble rolling down on us the first time when we were still in Vietnam. Our immediate bosses, low-level C.I.A. spooklets, they were afraid of what we knew, because of what we’d done. Because of what they’d ordered us to do. So on our last mission together your father sent me hightailing over the border into Laos. Reported I was killed. I damn near was, too. Took a long time, but I made it back here. Through Thailand. Burma. Working my passage on old freighters and scows. A few soldiers came home that way. Once I got here, well who’d notice one more negro poaching in the mesh?
“The thing about islands? You can see folks coming from a long way off. Your father was okay for a while after his discharge. He’d stashed a few incriminating files that he thought would keep your family safe from our old bosses. Time passed like I said, and the bastards got scared. Seems nobody can leave off investigating that damn war, and by now the spooklets have wives and kids and plenty to lose. Fifteen years ago, some of those boys panicked. Guys like us who took the unofficial jobs during the war were getting killed stateside. Right here! Like a clean-up operation. They came for your father to do some housekeeping.”
For Ben this was only half the story. “All this talk about Pap. What about my mother? She’s been gone just as long. Left that same night. Did he give you any word about her while he was dropping lines in the mail to you?”
Clearly, it was easier for Ellis to talk about his old partner. His old captain. But Ida-Beth Blackshaw was the real mystery in this. The innocent bystander swept up in an invisible twister of lies and fear.
He said, “No, Ben. I only had that letter, and one postcard before it about ten years back. Dick didn’t mention her either time. I can tell you this. Before they left, she was in danger, too. They figured your pap talked to her, right enough. Remember a couple months before they went? That car wreck they had out by Mardela Springs, on the main? A Friday night. Late. How do you recall it?”
Ben cast his mind back. “Too much party in Easton, they said. On the way home. Got lost. A fog. Rolled the old truck into a ditch. They both got banged up, and Mom came home from the hospital with hardware. Some steel pins screwed into her left arm. She showed me x-rays. She framed one and hung it on the wall.”
Ellis shook his head. “Remember what I told you. Dick had cleaned up by then. He had turned himself around, and they were both stone cold sober that night. It wasn’t an accident, Ben. Two operators in the car, and it walloped into them three times hard before they went over the culvert. Wasn’t a ditch. It was a deep stream. The killers had picked the spot. Sweet little kill zone. That was the first attempt.
“Take it forward, now. A couple months later. The night Dick took off? Somebody came at him in the dark with a knife. Cut his face. Dick put him down. They were there, Ben. Right on Smith Island. They had never dared come there before.
“So Dick left first to dig up some weapons he’d stashed over to the Martin refuge. Ida, she hung back a couple hours to pack a few things. More food. Blankets, she said. Maybe they thought they were going to lay low in the mesh for a time, not run for good. Just a few days, or maybe a week. Me, I don’t think Ida stayed back for supplies. I think it was for you. To rest her heart that you were okay. You were a teenager by then. Maybe somehow she knew it was good-bye.”
Another image returned to Ben from that final harried night as a family. “You were at our house when they left. Why didn’t you go, too?”
“Hell, Ben. I owe your father my life. He’d put me in the clear reporting me KIA on our last mission. Believe me, I wanted to repay him, and ride shotgun. He didn’t want me to go. I’d offered, and he refused outright. The fact is, he told me to stay. Wanted me to look after things here.”
So Ellis was a lying coward. Ben was furious now. “You were his spotter! You should have stuck with him, watched his back like he did for you. What’s the hell’s so important that he left you here?”
Knocker Ellis said nothing. Then it struck Ben. He flushed with shame. “Me. He wanted you to look after me. Overwatch mission.”