“She said she didn’t think it was a good idea to give her location over the phone,” Maggie replied. She threw a newspaper down on the table.
“I just picked a copy of the evening paper. You might want to look at it.”
Boomer picked it up and scanned the front page. His eyes immediately focused on a story on the bottom left.
TWO BODIES FOUND AT KAENA POINT
A local fisherman discovered the bodies of two men at Kaena Point early this morning. Both men had been shot but police were unwilling to release any more information. The identity of the men has not been released.
Boomer checked the rest of the article, but it yielded little information.
“The police have found the bodies from last night,” Boomer said, laying the paper down.
“Any ID?” Skibicki asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Not according to the paper, but we don’t know what the police have.
What about the weapons we used?”
“I deep-sixed those,” Skibicki said.
“That’s one of the things I took care of while I was gone.”
Boomer was relieved that those pieces of evidence were gone.
Maggie wasn’t done.
“Trace also said for you to get the story about what happened to Colonel Rison in Vietnam from Ski.”
Boomer turned to the sergeant major.
“What does that mean?”
Skibicki wearily sank down into a chair.
“Rison was the best damn commander I ever served under. What it means is that Rison probably didn’t have the time to tell her about what happened to him when he ran afoul of The Line.”
“And you know?” Boomer demanded.
“Yes, I know.”
Boomer was agitated.
“Why didn’t you tell me everything you knew?”
“Because I didn’t have proof and I didn’t really know what was going on,” Skibicki snapped.
“Rison had the proof and the real knowledge. And now Trace is going after it. I also didn’t make all the connections with what happened back then with what’s going on now. It’s been a long time.”
Boomer sat across from him.
“Tell me what you do know.”
Maggie bustled over with mugs of coffee and sat on the other corner of the table as Skibicki gathered his thoughts.
“When you first came to me about The Line, I tried to blow you off. I didn’t know why you were asking me, and quite honestly, I thought you might be from them. They want that proof back too. They want it bad — bad enough to kill for. It was only when I realized who your dad was that I knew you probably weren’t from The Line, but even then I had to play it safe.”
Skibicki looked off, out at the ocean.
“I ran into The Line when Rison did — way back in Vietnam. Of course I didn’t know it was called The Line or anything about it.
That all came later. It was after the mission where your dad died. We were running operations constantly so there wasn’t any time to stand around and contemplate things. I got a new team. This time I was the team leader, we were so short of personnel.
“I also got a new assignment. Command and Control North, MACVSOG. We were also under B-57, Project Gamma, but we weren’t going west. We were going north, right into the little shitheads’ backyard and snooping around. We were also crossing into Laos to get earlier readings on stuff moving south through there and into Cambodia on what everyone called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but it wasn’t just one trail — it was a whole complex of trails and roads and supply depots and staging areas.
“You got to understand something else that was going at the same time, something that was affecting Special Forces throughout the theater. A lot of our A Teams in 5th Group proper were working with the Montagnards — had been for years. And that was a big burr under the skin of the South Vietnamese government. In 1964, the Montagnards in the Ban Me Thout region had actually rebelled against the government, and it was only with the greatest of diplomacy that the Special Forces advisors in the area were able to keep the peace.
The teams working with the Yards were always caught between a rock and a hard place. The Yards were damn good fighters, but they hated the South Vietnamese as much as they hated the North and if you remember rightly, our government’s policy was to support the South, not the Montagnards.”
Skibicki shook his head.
“I’m not sure about the exact political maneuvering. AH I know is what Colonel Rison told me afterwards and what I saw myself. Rison said that he was approached by someone sent by the MACV Commanding General in Saigon and told to back off on supporting the Montagnards. They wanted us to disarm over fifty percent of our indigenous forces. Rison refused to do that, so the regular Army assholes started doing whatever they could to screw with our operations. Since they also had the help of the CIA, you could tell that someone really high up was rocking the boat.
“In the middle of this bullshit we were trying to fight a war. And it was starting to go badly in B-57. We still had to deal with our counterparts in the LLDB — the South Vietnamese army — and sometimes it was hard to tell who was more of a threat, the LLDB or the VC. Our counter intel guy was picking up information that our fucking LLDB counterparts were selling ammunition and weapons to the North Vietnamese. So much for democracy and the free enterprise system.
“We tried tightening down the screws on security at CCN headquarters but we were still losing people on missions and it was obvious there was a leak. But it wasn’t like we could just call time-out and put all our energy into finding out where the leak was. Our counter intel guys went to work on it and we kept getting on board the choppers and going out not knowing if our mission was compromised from the word go. You want to talk about having a shit feeling in your gut, you try that someday, flying into the badlands not knowing whether your whole OPLAN has been compromised and the bad guys were waiting for you to get off the bird.
“Then my team, RT Texas, went on a mission in, well, let’s simply call it a classified area, although I can tell you now that it was north of the DMZ. We came across what had been an enemy base camp. It was empty. We searched the place, sometimes you’d be amazed what you can find left behind, and hit paydirt: we found some film negatives that had been discarded in a pile of trash that had been half burnt. We brought those back with us.”
Skibicki laughed, a low growl that held no mirth.
“We had the double-dealing motherfucker on film: one of our LLDB agents, Ta Chon, meeting with North Vietnamese in uniform. We brought the son of a bitch in and wired him up to the polygraph and he flunked it. Shit, he was sweating bullets and we knew that he knew we knew.”
Skibicki paused and Boomer and Maggie both impatiently waited for him to continue. The sergeant major took a deep breath, then picked up the story.
“I was ready to pop Chon right then and there. Hell, I’d lost friends on those teams he’d compromised. Rison was down in Saigon at some damn meeting, so he was out of the net. The FOB executive officer.
Lieutenant Colonel Killebrew, wasn’t authorized to make such a command decision, so he went to the CIA for instructions. In reality, he wanted to turn Chon over to them and he knew that would take care of that. We’d done it before. The spooks liked fresh meat. Plus there was always the possibility the Company could triple Chon and turn him back against his own people and we could scarf up the rest of his buddies.
“But what Killebrew didn’t know was that the CIA was wired in with The Line and they were waiting for something like this. I didn’t know it either when I went to the CIA safe house outside Nha Trang with Chon.
The asshole I talked to wouldn’t take Chon. He suggested to me that we’ eliminate Chon ourselves since we had such strong evidence. Hell, he didn’t suggest it, he practically ordered me to do it.”