“So the evidence in this case is backward. It’s the evidence you didn’t find that’s bothering you.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” the admiral muttered. “The dog that didn’t bark.”
“That’s correct, Admiral,” Mcnair said, nodding. “So your news about the slippers is, unfortunately, entirely consistent. But until you told me about this letter, it was still ambiguous. What was this guy’s name, Admiral?”
“He was a hospital corpsman-a medic, as well as a SEAL. HMI Marcus Galantz.”
Mcnair blinked, almost as if the name meant something to him. But then he asked the admiral to spell it for him, and he wrote it’in his notebook. Then he asked another question. “Since Mr. von Rensel is here, can we assume the Navy’s working on this Galantz I angle, Commander Lawrence?” t,” That came out of nowhere, Karen thought quickly. “On getting his old service records, yes,” she replied. “Beyond that-“
Beyond that, the Navy didn’t yet know about Galantz.
“The records may be of use, and they may not,” the admiral interjected.
“My guess is that they’ll end abruptly in 1969.
Mcnair stared at him, his expression making it clear that the admiral could not go on with all this secrecy.
Sherman looked back at him for a moment and then got up, walked over to a front window, and stared out at the growing darkness. Mcnair, as if sensing a critical moment, remained quiet, watching him. Then he spoke.
“Admiral, it’s becoming pretty clear that something happened to Elizabeth Walsh, something that was not an accident. We-‘re reasonably satisfied that you didn’t go over there Friday night and do something to her. Now you’ve given us another lead to pursue, but you’re leaving too much out. We need your help. We need to make this guy real.”
And to get you entirely off the hook, Karen thought.
The admiral remained at the window, his back to them, for almost a minute. “Okay,” he said finally, so quietly that Karen wasn’t sure she had heard him. Then he turned around, and she was startled by the pain in his eyes. “Okay.
This’ll take a while.”
He returned to his chair and sat down, his eyes slightly out of focus as the memories came flooding back. Then he told them the story of the aborted SEAL pickup and that terrifying night on the river.
“Did they go back the next night?” Train asked.
Sherman hesitated. “No. They didn’t. Saigon naval headquarters called it off. They concluded that the SEAL never made the rendezvous and that the VC probably had him, which was why there was a mine ambush waiting.”
“But they were wrong, weren’t they, Admiral?” Train said. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
Then Sherman looked away and exhaled. “Yes. They were wrong. Because three years later, the SEAL came to see me.
I was finishing up my department-head tour in a destroyer and was actually home for a change. But I remember it.
God, do I remember it. He was a memorable guy. I was sitting in my dining room, working on some overdue fitness reports.”
It had been after ten o’clock on a rainy February night, one of the few such nights in San Diego’s unvarying pattern of monotono usly beautiful weather. Sherman had been downstairs in the dining room when he thought he heard the front door open. He remembered sitting up and thinking, What the hell? I locked that door. There had been a gust of wind and the sudden sound of rain, and then suddenly a figure was standing in the entrance to the dining room, just outside the cone of light from the chandelier. Sherman absorbed a vague image of jeans and a wet black windbreaker, but the face-the face looked familiar. Only this time, there was no brown and green paint. Just those eyes. Actually, just one eye. I
“Remember me?” the figure asked in a husky, strangled I voice.
There was something wrong with his throat. There was a small swatch of gray bandage where his voice box should have been, and a livid scar.
Sherman had been speechless, glued to his armchair, try-I ing to comprehend what he was seeing. A very dangerous looking one-eyed man was n his dining room, dripping rainwater on the rug.
“How-who-“
“Oh, you remember, Lieutenant. You know who I am.
Or who I was,” the man said, advancing closer to the table, into’ the light, appearing to get bjgger as he did so. He was not visibly armed, but there was no mistaking the menace in that mutilated face. And then Tag Sherman knew.
“You’re-you’re the SEAL.”
“Yeah, the SEAL. The one you left behind. In the Rung Sat.”
Sherman could only stare at him, trying to remember what the division commander had said-what, exactly? He couldn’t recall the words, other than him saying, “You did the operationally right thing, aborting the mission.” But by then, the SEAL had come even closer to the table, and with a sweeping motion of his left arm, he scattered Sherman’s pape rwork. That’s when Sherman saw the glove, the black glove with a glint of stainless steel at, the-left wrist. What was his name? he’d asked himself. Galantz, that was it.
Galantz perched on the edge of the dining room table, making it creak, and leaned down to stare directly into Sherman’s eyes. His face was pale, gaunt, hollow-eyed, with taut skin, a bony forehead fringed with only a stubble of closecropped black hair. The right eyebrow was flat, but the left was bisected by an ugly red and obviously unstitched scar running from his voice box up into his jaw and then exiting across the left cheek up into his scalp, transacting the puckered skin of his empty left eye socket. Sherman had been able to smell the wet clothes, overlaid with the rising scent of his own fear.
“See this?” the SEAL asked, pointing to his face and throat with his finger. “One of your fifties did this. Ricochet round. While you girls were busy running away, shooting that stuff indiscriminately all over the riverbanks-where I was hiding, waiting for you. And this”-he brandished the bulky black glove in Sherman’s face-“this is where I had to amputate my own hand after a croc bit most of it off.”
He leaned even closer to Sherman, who remained frozen in his seat.
Sherman had to crane his neck just to look up at this man, whose single eye burned in his face like the headlight of that proverbial oncoming train.
“It had lots of time to’get infected, Lieutenant,” he whispered. “Five nights in the mangrove roots, while I tried to get down out of the Rung Sat and into the harbor. Couldn’t quite make it, though, because the Cong knew I was running, see? And I couldn’t go into the main river because by then the crocs could smell the arm. All that heat and mud and humidity. They call it gangrene. Stinks real bad. I’m a medic. Know it when I smell it. Crocs love rotten meat. So finally one night, I found a tree stump and chopped it off at the wrist with my trusty knife. This knife, right here.” Out of nowhere, he brandished a heavy dulled steel knife, then deliberately put it down on the table right in front of Sherman. It looked bigger than he remembered it, when the SEAL had had it strapped to his ankle. It made an audible clunk when Galantz laid it on the table.
Galantz had leaned back then, staring down at the knife, and continued his story, “I clamped off the artery with a piece of string and then that night I bellied into a VC camp and killed some people so I could get to their fire and cauterize the stump. Didn’t happen to have any anesthetics, by the way. It hurt a lot. But I did what I had to do.
Stuck that bloody stump into the fire and bit a piece of bamboo right in half waiting for it to cook. I gotta tell you: I did scream.
But the screaming sounded better than the barbecue noises, you know?”
“We were in an ambush,” Sherman had said, feeling his stomach grab. His voice seemed to be stuck in his throat, which was as dry as sand. “There were mines. We had standing orders to withdraw. We came back the next night.”