Don Pendleton - Council of Kings

"You shouldn't have risked coming here."

"I'm safer here," replied Bolan.

"Jesus Christ," muttered Winters as he scanned the papers. "You were the one who blew open this heroin thing?"

"They accused me of killing Jim Naiman in order to shut me up," Bolan said.

Winters read on compulsively. Bolan stole a glance behind at the officers' club. They might have been in Nevada someplace, from the looks of it — carpeting, lamps, pool table. In the next room a movie was showing.

Sentimental music sounded through the wall. Bolan listened to the dialogue. A woman was trying to dissuade her soldier from going to war.

Bolan ordered a drink. Who was the actor?

Henry Fonda? No, Ronald Reagan.

The voices were distorted as they came through the wall.

"You're a special man, Bill. You have courage. More than I do, I guess. Please stay."

"I'm not so special. I just fight for what I believe. As long as there's a bully to fight, I'll be there..." The music swelled; they were probably kissing on an airstrip or a ship.

Winters whistled and looked up. Bolan caught the faint breath of whiskey.

"This is a dirty business, isn't it?"

"As dirty as it gets."

"Look, my advice is don't get too hot about it. I've been hearing rumors about the CIA transporting raw heroin for the Laotians in return for raids on VC camps inside the Laotian border. Maybe we need that."

"We don't need what we're getting now. The VC in the Mekong get anything they want — weapons, supplies, anything. The so-called intelligence we've been going on is useless. Our boys are getting slaughtered. Buddy knew it on that mission."

Winters took a thoughtful sip of his drink.

"You're right about the intelligence. I could do better with a Ouija board. But we can't let the VC keep Laos as their supply depot. Anyway, it's too late now. The whole thing is under official investigation."

"Who's doing the investigating?"

"The CIA. Top level, here in Saigon. Putnam himself is heading the investigation."

"Putnam?"

"What's the matter?" Winters had seen Bolan's face freeze.

Bolan felt a sense of desolation sweep through him, of justice torn and shredded, scattered to the winds.

"Putnam is the one running the operation." Winters threw up his arms. "Listen, Colonel," Bolan said urgently. "You have to stash those papers away until I find a way to get around Putnam. I'm dropping out of sight. I'm going back to the Mekong."

Winters leaned forward and looked piercingly at Bolan. "Don't go back to the Mekong now, Mack. Anywhere but there. We're getting casualties way beyond anyone's predictions. It's a mess, a bloodbath."

Through the wall came heroic music. Must be near the end of the movie, Bolan thought.

Winters continued uneasily. "You've been too much at the front line, Mack. You're starting to get that look in your eye."

"You know how it is as well as I do," said Bolan. "There is no front line. The front line is everywhere."

Winters stopped Bolan before he walked through the door. "Mack, be careful you don't go over the edge. Nam does that to people."

Bolan knew now, standing in that officers' bar, just how Buddy felt when he was shaving his head. "I'm already over the edge," he said.

Mosquito netting hung diaphanous in the moonlight. Bolan felt the fatigue working on his mind as he stood over the bed. He must be careful now. For a moment Buddy appeared in hallucination, squatting on the floor with his knife at Bolan's feet.

Bolan pulled back the netting. Vu Quoc Thanh lay sleeping. The moon mumped him with a corpselike pallor.

Bolan sat on the edge of the bed. Thanh shot upright, feeling for his gun.

Bolan grabbed him by the wrist until he gained his senses. Thanh wiped the sweat from his neck and torso, finally his face.

"What is the Council of Kings?" whispered Bolan.

Thanh faced him, the moon behind him glowing on his shoulders. His face was in darkness.

"The Council of Kings is the name given to those who run your war."

"The Pentagon?"

"No. Intelligence. The people who sell the war to the generals and the money-makers. The people who give your country a reason to send its youth to their deaths."

"What do they have to do with the heroin?"

Thanh waved the question away with a bony white hand.

"The heroin is a minor thing, useful to the Council for making deals, making money. But you and your people are being lied to. Many times I tried to warn the American intelligence people that the VC were strong — stronger than they could imagine. But they would not listen."

"Why not?"

"They wanted to tell their people that they could win the war. Now they are finding out that I was right, but they cannot admit it. For years I told them, but they ignored me."

"We can win it. If we can only cut off the VC supply routes..."

"You don't understand. This country has been invaded and occupied by foreign armies for thousands of years. The people here have always driven them out, sooner or later. Don't you understand? The only way to win this war is to kill every man, woman and child."

Bolan did not know what to say. He looked mutely at the figure crouching beside him.

"You have already started to do that," continued Thanh. "Look at what you do in the villages. Are you making friends there? You give the Vietcong more supporters everywhere your army goes."

"But the camps — we get more and more people in our camps..."

"Simply because the people must avoid the American bombs. You cannot promise these people anything that the French have not already promised. Look where it got the French. We will always win."

Bolan sat rooted to the bed. There was a heaviness in his limbs he had never felt before. He had suckered Thanh with his talk, and the guy had fallen for it.

"Did you say "we"?" asked Bolan.

"No," said Thanh, reaching for a cigarette. "I didn't."

Bolan sprang. With one big hand he smothered Thanh's face, pressing down into the bed. He rose over Tharth and sank his knee into the smaller man's gut.

"You joined them, didn't you, Thanh? It was you who got to Buddy first."

Thanh looked up at the big bastard who held his life in his hands. Bolan saw that his eyes held fear, but no more than fear. He could see that Thanh had expected it to end this way. Had expected it since childhood.

Bolan gently took out his knife and cut into Thanh's throat, holding him until the body stopped jerking.

Then he ransacked the room feverishly. In his pocket Buddy's ear began to twitch. Bolan ignored it. He knew it was fatigue and not reality, but all the same he felt the ear jump as if it were alive. Thanh's bowels had let go, and the room had begun to smell of the foulness of death.

Nothing escaped Bolan's hand. He knew the thing was somewhere in the room, though he could not say how he knew. From the bookshelf he withdrew a worn copy of Les Misgrables.

Holding it by the spine, he let the contents fall from between the leaves. It lay there on the desk, downy and tattered like a piece of litter.

Buddy's map.

Bolan sat in a padded chair, looking at a picture on Putnam's desk of the man's family at Disneyland. They were stuffing their faces with cotton candy. Bolan closed his eyes against the image. Morning sun glared through the office blinds. The door opened for a senior bureaucrat looking well groomed in a gray suit. Maybe he was taking someone to lunch. He crossed the room and thrust his hand toward Bolan, the essence of ease and authority.

"Dick Putnam. You're Johnson?"

"That's right," said Bolan. "Phil Johnson."

"You know something about this heroin thing?" asked Putnam, settling himself into his chair behind the fortress of a desk.