Ben slipped the bracelet onto his left wrist, then he removed the rifle and mounted the smaller scope and the silencer. He loaded a magazine and snapped it into the underside of the rifle and attached the sling at both ends. He stood and walked outside. John followed.
Facing the vast open space, Ben knelt, raised the rifle to his shoulder, gripped the underside of the stock with his left hand, extended his right elbow from his body, and sighted in with his right eye. The sound of the rifle’s discharge was muffled. Ben grunted, adjusted the scope, sighted, and fired again. Another adjustment and another shot.
“What are you shooting at?”
“Cholla cactus, five hundred meters out.”
John slanted his glasses to obtain sharper vision but without success. “Dang, I can’t even see it.”
“Inside, in one of the other boxes-a spotting scope.”
John returned to the workshop and opened the other containers. Inside one were a knife with Viper etched into the shiny blade, two sets of dog tags, one for Brice, Ben, and the other for Dalton, Roger, a small machine gun with a shoulder strap, and the spotting telescope. John took his father’s dog tags and put them around his neck. He then removed the scope and ran back out.
Ben said, “Straight down the barrel, rock formation.”
John looked into the scope, adjusted the focus, and spotted the rock formation.
“Got it.”
“Beyond that, a cactus.”
“With the yellow flower?”
“Yep.”
Standing behind Ben, John figured the theoretical probability of hitting that flower from five hundred meters-1,640 feet-had to be one in a million, even in the perfectly still conditions, and particularly by a sixty-year-old… the thought crept into John’s mind… drunk. The rifle discharged; the yellow flower split off whole from the cactus.
“Dang, Ben, that’s awesome! You must’ve been a dead shot!”
From Ben’s expression, John knew he had said exactly the wrong thing. Ben stood and walked over to a big rock and sat; he stared at the dirt for a time. Finally he spoke.
“NVA officers didn’t wear insignia. You couldn’t tell a grunt from a general, so you’d sit outside their camp, maybe a thousand meters out, watching them through the binoculars until you picked out the ranking officer, sometimes just because he had more cigarettes in his pocket. Then you’d wait until he was sitting down, eating, and you’d put the scope on him. And when you did, you played God. You decided he’d never see his wife or kids again, or even the next day, that because he was born in Hanoi instead of Houston he deserved a bullet in his head. You observed the last moments of his life, the last smile on his face, the last drag on his cigarette, and you squeezed the trigger. And his life was over.”
He looked up at John.
“I didn’t kill for God or country, or for those medals, or even to defeat Communism. Well, at first I did, but at the end, when I knew the war was lost, I killed so fewer American boys would come home in a body bag. Like your father did. That’s why I stayed over there, John. That’s why I wasn’t here for you.”
John looked out on New Mexico and felt his eyes water. “I should’ve been there for Gracie. I should’ve hung up on Lou and gone to the concession stand with her. I should have protected her.” He shook his head slowly. “Ben, I just let her go.”
“No, son, you didn’t let her go. They took her.” Ben stood and was the colonel in the photos again. “And we’re fixing to take her back.”
After graduating from high school, boys in Henryetta, Oklahoma, either go to college on football scholarships, take up farming like their fathers before them, or join the Army. Jack Odell Smith was big and strong and played football for Henryetta High, but he got ejected from most games for unsportsmanlike conduct. And he never took to the plow. So, barely a month after graduating at the bottom of his class, Jack O. Smith had joined the United States Army.
Jacko was not your leader of men. But he was a loyal follower and kept his mouth shut, character traits much admired in this man’s Army. Those traits, along with his physical strength, temper, and ability to kill without remorse, earned him a spot in the Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg. There he had met Major Charles Woodrow Walker.
Jack Odell Smith had found his place in life.
Major Charles Woodrow Walker had always thought his place in life would be the White House. “Jacko,” the major had said, “the American people are sheep. In times of peace, they just want to graze off the land and feel fat and happy. But when the wolves are in the pasture, they want to feel safe. ‘Make love not war’ sounds good when the war is ten thousand miles away. But when war comes home to America, and it will, the American people will turn to a military hero to make them feel safe. They will turn to me.”
But then the verdict was read: guilty. War criminals don’t get to be president.
Jack Odell Smith would not call himself a thinking man. He had always left his thinking to the major. But now, driving back to their mountain compound with Ben Brice’s granddaughter in the back seat, he found himself thinking about how one event could change the course of history: What if Lieutenant Ben Brice had honored the soldiers’ code?
Viper team would have continued covert operations in Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam. The war would have been won by professional warriors. Soldiers would have come home to a hero’s welcome. No one would know about Quang Tri because no one walked away from Quang Tri. And Major Charles Woodrow Walker would be in the White House because on 9/11 the war had come home to America.
Now Lieutenant Ben Brice was coming home to Viper team.
Gracie had seen Ben’s tattoo many times, and he had even let her touch it, but he would never tell her why he got it or what the strange words meant. He only told her they were Vietnamese. Looking now at the same words on Jacko’s tattoo, she saw her chance.
“What do those Vietnamese words mean, on your tattoo?”
Jacko blew out smoke and said, “ ‘We kill for peace.’ ”
Gracie had often asked Ben about his war-she wanted to know why he was a drunk-but he refused to talk about it. “Honey,” he’d always say, “you’ll learn about the bad things in life soon enough. No need for me to hurry that day up.”
She sighed. That day had come.
“Did Ben kill people in his war?”
“Damn sure did. He was a sniper.” Jacko sucked on his cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said, “Your grandpa was a traitor, but I’ll say this for him: he was one helluva shot. He could put a bullet between a gook’s eyes from a thousand meters.”
Gracie fell quiet. Because now she knew something she wished she didn’t know, like when she’d read ahead in a book and find out the ending. She knew what Ben would have to do, and it made her sad to know it. She had figured out that he drank his whiskey to forget his war; now she knew he drank to forget killing people in his war. She didn’t want him to drink more of his whiskey because of her.
Jacko said, “Yep, damn shame he betrayed his team and now I gotta kill him.”
Gracie’s voice sounded odd, even to her own ears, when she said, “No, you’re not going to kill Ben. He’s going to kill you. And Junior, too.”
The two men didn’t say anything for a long while.
“I was still in ROTC at A amp;M when the Quang Tri shit hit the fan.”
FBI Special Agent Jan Jorgenson had just reported to her superior her latest findings on the Gracie Ann Brice abduction. Agent Devereaux was still in Des Moines. The boy abducted there had been found dead. A manhunt was on for his abductor, a convicted child molester out on parole. For the third time.
“I’m running searches on Major Walker,” Jan said.
“Why?”
“Because Colonel Brice served under Walker in Viper unit. Because he has a Viper tattoo and the man in the park had a Viper tattoo. Because those soldiers committed a massacre, Brice testified against them, and Walker said he should’ve killed Brice. Because you said you wouldn’t have closed the case.”