And then he remembered: No, they hadn’t.
The SEAL had just looked at him with that one baleful eye. “Sure you did, Lieutenant. But you know what? I was three klicks from the main river by then, trying to lick my wounds with my tongue swelling out of my mouth, hiding out inside the hollow trunk of a dead tree that was full of that Agent Orange stuff. And trying to figure out if that was my eyeball dangling on my left cheek or just another leech.
And that was just the beginning. It took me five weekv to get back to friendly territory. Five weeks of crawling around in the Rung Sat, no compass, no landmarks, no food, no clean water, moving only at night, going the wrong god damned way every god damned time. And killing people.
Lots of people, you know? Anyone who got anywhere near me ate steel.
This steel, right here. Men, women, children anyone. Five bloody weeks until I got into the outskirts of Saigon. And then I got arrested by the White Mice, who put me in a Chinese jail for a year in Cholon until they found somebody who would buy my ass out. All thanks to a bunch of chickenshit Swift boat guys. Like you.”
“I did what I had to,” Sherman had protested. “They were setting off mines. Lose the boat and nobody gets out.
I’m sorry it happened. But we had no choice.”
The SEAL had stared down at him with that one glaring eye, his ravaged face twisting in contempt.
“What do you want?” Sherman whispered.
“Want?” The SEAL leaned forward again. “I want revenge. I want to stick this knife through your hand and into this table here so you don’t go anywhere. Then I want to go upstairs and rape your wife and blind your kid, and then I want to come back down here and open up your belly with this knife and strangle you with your own guts. That’s what I want.
The knife had been lying on the table the whole time, right in front of him, but Sherman was transfixed in the chair, a watery feeling in his stomach, his mouth still arid.
And then with the swiftness of a rattlesnake, the man had him hauled up out of his chair and bent over the table, his right arm pinned behind his back by the SEAL’s knee in a bone-cracking arch, his face pressed down on the table by the SEAL’s left forearm, the edge of the table pressing hard against his windpipe. He could barely breathe, and then he felt, rather than saw, the cutting edge of that knife resting across the bridge of his nose about one millimeter from his eyes. The SEAL’s voice hissed in his ears.
“What do I want, Sherman? I want to pop your eyeballs out and make you eat them while the nerves are still attached. I want to drive twentypenny nails into your skull and wire them to your car battery. I want to jam your mouth open with a bent fork and put a black widow spider in there and piss her off. I want lots of fun shit for you and yours, Lieutenant, but guess what?-I’ve learned to wait for what I want.
I’ve learned to be a patient man. I’m going to wait some more. I’m going to wait until you have accumulated some things of real value. And then I’m going to make you pay for what you and your crew did to me, no matter how long it takes. You were the skipper, so you’re the Man.
You’ll never know when I’m coming. Until I tell you. And I will tell you, you son of a bitch. You will get one warming.”
His air shut off by the table’s edge, Sherman’s vision had gone red and his ears were roaring ominously. He had barely heard the small voice from the edge of the room. “Daddy?”
The SEAL had come off his back in an instant, leaving Sherman to slide off the table and onto the floor like a sack of potatoes, his mouth working but nothing coming out, all his muscles putty. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Galantz had grabbed his son, Jack, and was holding the petrified child off the floor with his good arm, growling at him like a wild animal, as if he was about to dash him against the wall.
Sherman had tried desperately to move, to get up, but he had been perfectly helpless, gagging on the floor, his nearly dislocated right shoulder preventing him from even beginning to get up.
And then suddenly, it was over. The terrified child was sobbing in the comer of the dining room, and Sherman was pulling himself across the floor to get to him. His wife had slept through it all, even when little Jack had begun to wail like a banshee in his arms. It had taken him an hour and a half to calm the child and get him back to bed. He had not awakened his wife. There seemed to be no point in her being terrified, too. He had gone back downstairs to get some brandy to steady his shaking hands and to close the front door, which was still standing wide open in the rain. He had nearly lost it again when he found the knife lying on the dining room table-a little reminder that it had all been real.
A little message from the SEAL: I don’t need the knife anymore. But you might.
Now Sherman’s eyes refocused and looked over at Mcnair. “I was mostly ashamed when it was all over.
Ashamed for what we had done back there in the Rung Sat.
Ashamed that I had been scared to death in this guy’s presence. Ashamed that I had been helpless to do anything when he had my son up against the wall like a rag doll.”
Karen ‘remembered to breathe, and she swallowed hard.
Mcnair, who had been listening intently, reopened his notebook.
“This was when, Admiral? And you’re sure this man’s name was Galantz?
Marcus Galantz?”
“In 1972. February. And I’m sure about the name.”
“And you’re sure this was Galantz?” Mcnair asked again, his face a study in concentration. Sherman said yes.
Sherman looked drained, as if the memories had emptied him of all energy. He was slumped in his chair like a teenager.
“Well, this of course makes a difference,” Mcnair said.
“The fact that he came back proves he lived through what happened out there in Vietnam.”
“If he was that disfigured, he should be easier to find, don’t you think?” Karen asked.
Train shook his head. “That was 1972. Cosmetic surgery has come a long way since then.” He turned to Sherman.
Admiral; is there a possibility that he was still in the Navy then? That he was on active duty?”
“I don’t think so.” He took a deep breath, as if trying to make the memories go away. But then he looked over at Mcnair. “I’ve told you this story because now I’m more convinced than ever that she was killed.
Elizabeth, I mean.
But the Navy would not take kindly to having this story get out.”
“It’s been over twenty years, Admiral,” Mcnair said.
“Why would it be. such a big deal if it comes out now?”
Sherman rubbed his face with both hands. “We left one of our own behind, Detective,” he said. “‘In the armed forces, that’s a big deal. You don’t abandon your wounded, and you sure as hell don’t leave a guy out there just because headquarters makes some assumptions. You go back and get him. Guys count on that, in return for which, they’re willing to fight and die.”
“I understand, Admiral,” Mcnair replied. “But if Miss. Walsh was indeed murdered, that takes precedence, don’t you think? What I’m saying is that you did the right thing in telling me this. I promise to be discreet about this matter.
Although, now that I think about it, we may have a small bureaucratic problem here.”
“Which is?”
“The department has several cases that are clear-cut homicides.
The admiral nodded slowly. “I think I understand. Cases where there is direct evidence of a crime, as opposed to evidence that isn’t there.”
“Something like that,” Mcnair said. “Our lieutenant isn’t convinced about this, although he doesn’t know what you’ve told me tonight. But right now from an evidentiary point of view, this one’s still sort of a reach.”