“Like my getting chaptered out of the army on a psych eval?” Dane asked.
“Yes,” Freed said, meeting Dane's gaze. “We knew about your discharge, but all we could find out was that it was listed as combat stress.”
Dane's laugh had a bitter edge to it. “I was on my second tour and I'd been running cross-border recon missions for six months. I'd had more than my share of combat stress, but when I got debriefed in Laos by the CIA field rep, he didn't back up a word I said, just passed me to their army liaison who thought I was bonkers.”
Dane hadn't been worried about keeping his army career. Not after what he had seen. Surprisingly, Foreman had listened to him carefully, asking many questions, expressing no opinion one way or the other. But the army had definitely had a negative reaction and with no back-up from Foreman, they had quickly dumped him.
“What kind of monsters?” Freed asked, ever the professional, trying to size up the opposition no matter how strange.
Dane wondered why they believed him. Of course, he reminded himself, maybe they didn't and were just humoring him.
“If we're going in there,” Dane said, pointing at the ever-present map on the table in front of him, “then you need to hear what happened on that mission.”
He told the story, from leaving the CCN camp in Vietnam, through the CIA base in Laos, the flight in, the landing zone, the movement and the crossing of the river. He wasn't interrupted once, not even when he tried as best he could to describe the encounter on the other side of the river. When he finished describing Flaherty being dragged away into the fog by a blue beam of light, he had to stop for a moment. He had never told another person the complete story after being debriefed by Foreman.
There were many times he had wondered if it all hadn't been a nightmare, but always the reality of his memory was reflected by the scar on his forearm.
“How did you get away?” Freed asked.
“I ran,” Dane said.
They waited for an elaboration, but Dane added none.
“How did you get out of immediate area and escape the monst-whatever it was that did that to your team?”
It was hard for Dane to know what Freed believed by the tone of his voice. “I was lucky.” The voice in his head, Dane decided was something he best keep to himself. Over the years working with Chelsea, he had learned to keep silent about the voices and the things his mind saw and heard that others didn’t. He’d known since he was very small that he was different. He’d learned early on that people feared and distrusted different.
“Lucky?” Michelet repeated.
Dane shrugged. “I was chased to the river. Once I got on the other side, out of the mist, there was no problem.”
“No monsters?” Freed said, his voice flat.
“No monsters.”
“No beams of light?”
“No.”
“How did you get out of Cambodia?” Freed pressed. “You said you didn't know where the CIA pick-up zone was.”
“I used the river as my left guide. I knew it would flow east, eventually emptying into the Mekong. Then I followed the Mekong to South Vietnam. I was picked up by friendly forces there and immediately flown back to Laos for debrief.”
“You make it sound simple,” Freed said. He tapped the map. “It's over five hundred kilometers from where you were to South Vietnam. Through territory thoroughly infiltrated by the Viet Cong and the NVA.”
Dane shrugged, but didn't elaborate. He felt no need to share that hellish trip with these men, safely seated in the comfort of the Michelet corporate jet. The nights spent pushing through the jungle. The days hidden, covered by leaves, insects crawling over his body. The grubs he'd eaten for nourishment. The feeling of sitting totally alone, sensing there wasn't anyone within miles, listening to the sounds of the jungle, falling into fitful sleep, nightmares jolting him awake, hearing the cries of his teammates.
“What do you think it was that burned you and Flaherty?” Freed asked, bringing the conversation back to possible threats. “The beam of light?”
Dane thought it interesting that of everything he described that was the threat Freed focused on. He could feel the scar tissue on his forearm. “I have no idea. I just saw the beam of light.”
“A laser?” Michelet asked.
“I don't know.”
“You say there were two colors of light. One gold, one blue?” Michelet asked.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps the other things-the monsters-you saw were holograms,” Michelet suggested. “One of my divisions has been doing some work on those for the movie industry. Very realistic. In fact,” he added, “this strange fog you're talking about, it would help with the projection process considerably.”
Dane wasn't surprised at that response. “It wasn't a hologram that killed my team. The thing Flaherty shot died. I don't think you can do that with holograms. The bullets would have went right through it. And it was almost thirty years ago. I don't believe anyone had technology that could have produced those things back then or even now.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might have imagined the whole episode?” Freed quietly asked.
Dane stared at the black man. “Yes. It occurred to me.”
“The CIA has done quite a bit of work on hallucinogens,” Freed said. “Perhaps you were part of an experiment. I know that some of those cross-border teams used chemical warfare agents, some of it pretty cutting edge stuff.”
Dane shrugged. “If you think I hallucinated the whole thing then you made a big mistake bringing me here. Unless of course you've hallucinated your plane going down.”
“I'm not doubting you,” Freed said. “I'm just doing my job.”
“I know that,” Dane said, “but remember you came to me.”
“I've heard that MACV-SOG used to issue drugs to its people,” Freed persisted, ignoring him.
Dane nodded. “We used amphetamines sometimes on missions, after we'd been in for a few days, but I hadn't taken anything on that mission. We weren't in long enough.”
“Did you carry any chemical agents to use on enemy personnel?” Freed asked.
“No.”
“But-” Freed began, when Dane interrupted him.
“Listen,” he said, pointing at the recorder on the table. “You're the one who told me that message from my old team was real and only two days old. And that it came from here,” Dane's fist thumped down onto the map. “So unless you're lying, then you have to believe I'm telling the truth.”
“Uhh-” Beasley caught everyone's attention. “Could you describe the thing that your team leader shot a little more clearly?”
Dane ignored Freed's look of irritation and gave as much detail as he could.
Beasley pulled a folder out of his briefcase when Dane was done. The professor thumbed through then stopped on a certain page. “Did it look like this?”
Dane looked at the picture of carved stone, then up at the professor. “That's it exactly.”
“Hmm,” was Beasley's only comment.
“Where was that picture taken?” Freed demanded.
“Angkor Wat,” Beasley replied. “Off a temple wall.”
“What is it?” Freed asked, taking the book and looking at it more closely.
“A creature of Cambodian myth,” Beasley said. “It seems the legends are coming alive.”
Dane flipped pages, looking at other carvings. There were no representations of the cylindrical objects that had gotten Castle. He paused at one page. “What’s this?”
Beasley looked down. “That’s a Naga.”
“There was a sculpture of that on each corner of the watchtower we found,” Dane said.