Dinh and his family were hoisting the dismantled carcass of a Volkswagen over the side when the fog bank suddenly shifted. The search-light of a cruising Coast Guard patrol boat pierced the darkness and found them.
“Shut down your engines and prepare to be boarded,” the captain barked over the loudspeaker.
Dinh flicked a look to the others and shook no sharply.
This had always been his fear, and he made a habit of working under the cover of darkness and fog to avoid it. Dumping wasn’t illegal — dumping without a permit was. And like most Gulf fisherman, Dinh didn’t file for one because the precise location of his reef would be marked on charts of local waters, an open invitation to poachers who’d rather fish someone else’s reef than build their own.
Dinh and the others quickly muscled the old VW over the side. The instant it hit the water, he punched the boat’s throttles home and headed for another fog bank about a mile away.
The cutter accelerated and pursued.
But Dinh’s boat disappeared in the dense haze before the cutter could catch it. The captain watched the blip on his radar screen, and decided the fog was too thick to continue pursuit safely.
Dinh kept his throttles to the wall to put as much water between the two vessels as possible. The boat had raced a few miles through the fog when Dinh spotted something dead ahead in the water. He turned the wheel hard, putting the boat into a sharp high-speed turn.
Thirty-six hours had passed since Churcher had climbed onto the piece of floating debris from his helicopter. He’d been carried northward by the South Equatorial current, finally catching the curling flow of the Mississippi River that spun him inland toward the Louisiana coast.
The sharply turning vessel sideswiped the piece of debris, knocking Churcher into the water. Then the stern whipped around right over him, and the propeller bit into his left arm, severing it just below the elbow. He was suffering from exposure and dehydration, and hovered on the edge of consciousness, but he let out a long, piercing scream nonetheless.
Dinh heard it and throttled back the engines, circling the boat while his brother-in-law panned a searchlight across the choppy surface. They quickly found Churcher and plucked him from the water.
Dinh reacted instinctively the instant he saw Churcher’s wound. After the bombings, booby traps, and napalm of the Vietnam War, this wasn’t the first severed limb he’d seen.
“Get the first-aid kit,” he shouted to one of his sons; then, turning to his brother-in-law, ordered, “Head for home, wide open!”
Dinh ripped open the plastic case his son brought from the cabin, removed a length of rubber tubing, tied it tightly around Churcher’s bicep, stemming the flow of blood; then went about bandaging the stump. All the while his brother-in-law had the boat at full throttle heading for the village where they lived.
It was close to midnight when the boat pulled up to a swaybacked dock built on angled stilts that marched into the placid Delta waters.
Dinh’s wife ran from the Quonset hut to greet them. She was stunned to see the two men lifting Churcher’s lifeless form out of the boat.
“What happened? Is he alive?” she asked as she helped them.
“Barely,” Dinh replied. “Propeller.”
“I’ll get the pickup,” she said, assuming they would take him to the hospital.
Apprehensive looks flicked between the two men. But there was no need for discussion. Neither wanted to deal with the authorities who would want to know where they were and what they were doing when the accident occurred.
“No!” Dinh shouted, grasping his wife’s arm to stop her. “Get Doctor Phan.”
Giang Phan had been a fully accredited physician in Vietnam, and served as a battlefield surgeon. The immigrant families trusted him. He knew their customs, spoke their language, and cared for them. But he had not yet been licensed to practice in Louisiana.
Churcher lay pale and unconscious on a mattress on the floor of the Quonset hut as Doctor Phan examined him.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said. “He needs a transfusion. He’ll die without it. And I don’t even have the equipment to type his blood, let alone access to supplies to replenish it.”
“We can’t take him to the hospital,” Dinh said forcefully. “We can’t. Besides, he might die there anyway. Just do your best.”
The doctor let out a weary breath. “I’ll need a dish or a plate,” he said to Dinh’s wife. “Line up over here,” he ordered the assembled group when she returned with it. Then, pricking the forefinger of each, he “field typed” Churcher’s blood — mixing samples from the potential donors with a drop of Churcher’s blood on the plate until he found one that blended smoothly and didn’t clump, which meant they were the same type.
A direct, donor-to-patient transfusion was made.
Then Dr. Phan turned his attention to Churcher’s crudely severed forearm. “I don’t know,” he said dismayed at the state of it. “I just don’t know.”
Chapter Sixteen
Four days had passed since Gisela Pomerantz rattled President Hilliard and Keating with her query about the Soviet Heron missile system.
Following the NATO luncheon, Keating and Hilliard discussed the subject in the limousine on the way to Capitol Hill. The President was scheduled to meet with auto industry leaders who had been pressing for import quotas, and he was in a testy mood. The three CEOs were averaging just under six million dollars a year, each, in compensation. For that kind of money, Hilliard thought, they should solve their own problems.
“Talk to me, Phil,” he ordered curtly.
“I don’t know what to say. According to the NIE, the Heron was tested, failed, and never deployed,” Keating replied, citing the National Intelligence Estimate, a top secret evaluation of the military and economic status of all foreign nations.
“When was all that?” the President shot back.
“Last test monitored — July of seventy-five. We’ve seen nothing of it since.”
“Not like the Russians to scrap an entire missile system, Phil,” Hilliard pressed. “I mean, I’ve waded through more NIEs than I can count. The bottom line is, they just can’t afford it.”
“Maybe they had no choice.”
“Come on, Phil,” Hilliard admonished.
“I know, I know. No maybes,” Keating responded defensively. “Where do we go from here?”
“Goose Jake,” Hilliard instructed. “It’s Langley’s responsibility. Set something up. Saturday. Oval office. Afternoon. Clear it with Cathleen.”
Now, President Hilliard and Chief Negotiator Keating sat in the Oval Office in the White House awaiting the arrival of Jake Boulton, director of Central Intelligence.
The President kicked back in his chair, put a foot against the desk, and propelled himself toward the window that overlooks the Rose Garden. When the chair stopped rolling, Hilliard swiveled, stood, and studied the bulletproof panes for a moment. The temperature outside was so cold that the inside surfaces of the five-and-one-half-inch-thick glass were lightly dusted with frost. Hilliard drew a face on one of the green-tinged panes with a fingertip — a circle for the head, three dots for the eyes and nose. He was about to draw the mouth when he took his finger from the glass and turned to Keating. “Before Jake gets here, run down the last couple of days for me, will you?”
“Well, it’s gone pretty much as we anticipated,” Keating replied. “All the NATO folks are eager as hell to get out of the deployment game, that’s for sure. But they want assurances. Thatcher still has daily antinuke marches in front of Ten Downing. Same for the Italian’s over the cruise installation in Sicily.”