Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

“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.”

“I know, Jan, but you think Walker’s been waiting almost forty years to get revenge on Colonel Brice? And somehow finds his granddaughter living in a gated community in Post Oak, Texas, kidnaps her, frames Jennings, and takes her to God knows where?”

Now that she actually heard her theory aloud, it did sound pretty ridiculous.

“And even if Walker wanted revenge on Colonel Brice, how would he connect him to Gracie and how would he find her? And if he wanted revenge, wouldn’t he just kill Colonel Brice? Why would he abduct his granddaughter?”

“He wouldn’t. I guess you’re right, Eugene, but this Viper connection, that’s an awfully big coincidence.”

John hadn’t invited Ben to his MIT graduation because of that damned Viper tattoo. He was worried that someone important to his future business career might see it and learn his father had been in the Army and had fought in Vietnam: the prevailing thought back then among professors at elite Northeastern schools was that only Southern crackers, minorities, and losers had gone to Vietnam. He had feared that because his father was a loser, someone might think John Brice was a loser, too. He had never talked about Ben to anyone, not even Elizabeth. He had never told her about that damned tattoo. But she knew Ben Brice was a loser; and that her husband was a loser, too.

Now, looking over at Ben sleeping in the passenger seat as John R. Brice, billionaire, drove a new $53,000 Land Rover loaded with weapons like the freaking U.S. cavalry through the Navajo Indian Reservation in northwest New Mexico, red cliffs looming large in the moonlight, John realized that those professors had been full of shit. As he had been. As his wife was.