The fully armed Hueys seemed to suggest it wasn’t only that. And the soldiers lounging by their helicopters spoke volumes.
“Mason… Weaver,” Steve said, obviously finding the name on his clipboard. He looked up at her. “Is a woman?”
“Last time I checked, Steve,” she said. “We good?”
He nodded. She plucked the documentation from his hand and stalked up the gangplank. She was used to the casual discrimination encountered during her work, and her first name often attracted raised eyebrows when someone finally met her. The fact that they assumed she’d be a he said an awful lot about attitudes towards people working in war zones. For many, women should be back at home keeping the bed warm. She sometimes took pleasure in their surprise, but more often it just pissed her off.
Another man stood waiting for her at the top of the gangplank, and as she approached she saw it was a colonel. This would be Packard, then. She’d already done her homework and knew he was a hardass.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Weaver handed over her papers. If he was anything like she’d heard, he’d already done his homework on her, too. Still, he examined her papers. She was pleasantly surprised at the detail he picked on.
“Two years in-country. Where you been?”
“Embedded with MACV-SOG.”
“Which detachment?”
“CCS out of Ban Me Thuot.”
“You were in the shit.” He nodded. “I respect that.” He handed her papers back and she walked past him, pleased to be on deck at last. But she knew this conversation was not over.
“It’s people like you that lost us support back home,” he said.
Weaver sighed, stopped, turned around. She’d heard this before. Usually from the people higher up the ladder, not those on the ground and in the shit. Not those whose blood and stress and injuries and deaths she recorded, week after week. To them, she was telling the truth.
“You’re blaming the people without the guns for losing you the war?” she asked.
“A camera’s more dangerous than a gun,” Packard said. “And the war wasn’t lost. We abandoned it.”
Weaver sighed, went to respond, then shook her head and walked away. She’d argued with too many men like Packard to think she could change his mind. His body was stiff and hard as if carved from stone, and his opinion would be the same. He might think a camera was dangerous, but men like him were the most dangerous of all. Men like him wanted to carry on fighting.
“Yeah, you walk away,” he said softly. “Me, I have to live with it.”
Weaver headed below decks to find her quarters. It was already becoming clear that this wasn’t a simple scientific expedition. Having someone like Colonel Packard along for the journey made it even more obvious.
Once on deck, Conrad paused for a while to sense the ship beneath his feet. Even docked there was the subtlest of movements. It was a while since he’d been at sea, and despite the mysteries still surrounding the mission, he found himself looking forward to the voyage.
He spotted Brooks and Randa across the deck, accompanied by a man who was obviously the chopper guys’ commander. Even without seeing the insignia, Conrad could tell that this was a man in charge. Tall, straight, confident, he stood slightly aside from the two civilians, as if wanting to keep his distance.
Crossing towards them, Conrad passed one of the tied-down choppers. It was a Sea Stallion, and it was fully loaded. Gatling guns hung suspended under its belly, .50 cals fixed at the side doors, and inside the open doors were stacked napalm canisters.
Conrad paused, his skin prickling. He’d seen the results of a napalm attack on a small village and the enemy troops using it as a base, and he hoped to never see anything like that again. The sight of the shrivelled, blackened corpses had been bad enough, especially when it became clear that many of them were civilians being used as human shields. It was the stench that had made it unbearable.
A research and survey trip, they said. Yeah, right.
Randa saw him and gestured for him to join them. Conrad’s trust for the big man was already filtering away, and he’d hardly trusted him to begin with.
Conrad made a good show of examining the Sea Stallion’s weaponry, just so that they all knew where they stood. It didn’t seem to bother Randa. As Conrad walked across the deck, Randa took the colonel’s arm.
“Colonel Packard, this is Captain James Conrad.”
Conrad was the first to reach out. Packard held back for just a moment, then he offered his hand and they shook. A good strong handshake, but not too strong. Conrad smiled.
“Commander in the sky, commander on the ground,” Randa said, already drawing lines.
“I’m a commander wherever I am,” Packard said.
“No argument here,” Conrad said. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“What outfit did you serve in, son?” Packard asked. He might only have been ten years Conrad’s senior but was already acting the father.
“Special Air Service, until a few years ago. Then I was brought in to train the Army Combat Trackers.”
“‘Who Dares Wins’ huh? Trained the jungle lost-and-found guys? I’m happy to say we never needed your services.”
“No man left behind. Your combat record is well known, Colonel. It’s an honour to meet you.”
“What kept you around?” Packard asked, voice softer. “War’s over.”
“I heard something about that,” Conrad said.
“We do what we know, I suppose.”
“Try as we might,” Conrad said. He gestured back at the Sea Stallion, then turned to Randa and said, “You told me this was a civilian operation.”
“Oh, those? We just ordered the aircraft. The guns came extra.”
Conrad saw Brooks’s reaction—a slight widening of the eyes, then turning aside so that he was looking elsewhere. They knew about the weapons, and had likely ordered them. You don’t hire a man like Colonel Packard if you’re going on a leisure cruise.
“Fair enough,” he said. It wasn’t worth getting into now, and he wouldn’t likely change his mind about coming along. All it meant was that he’d approach the whole voyage with a lot more caution, and that was no bad thing.
“Briefing soon, main wardroom,” Randa said. “Why don’t you take a look around?”
Conrad bid the men good afternoon and walked to the railing to watch the rest of the loading operation. If they were going to be at sea for the next week or so, he wanted to make the most of this view of dry land.
It was at times like this, with a new mission dawning, that he thought about Jenny. She’d been seven years old when he’d gone in to find her. Kidnapped by a rogue unit of Indonesian troops and held to ransom, the Malaysian government had refused to pay. They’d turned to the British Special Forces for help, and Conrad and his team—already used to liberally interpreting the border between the two countries—had gone in to find her. Their orders had been to bring her back alive at all costs. She was, after all, the illegitimate daughter of a British embassy worker and a local woman.
Their mission had been troubled from the beginning. Conrad had quickly begun to suspect that while their efforts were expected, their success was not necessarily desired by some of those in power. A high-profile rescue would have been more troublesome than the simple discovery of a body, but he and his men knew that there was a little girl’s life at stake. Huddled one night around a camp fire close to the heavily jungled border, the six of them had made a vow that whatever new orders might come through, the girl’s life came before the mission.