Jason Frost - The Warlord

"Fallows!"

"Maybe, but there's no proof. Gus reported some threats last week. Someone wanted him to take a walk at a certain time, leave the office unguarded. He refused."

'That's Fallows all right. Probably intended to plant a bomb."

"That's what I figured. So I had a guard put on my home."

"Better get a different one. Yours stinks. Any of Fallows' men could spot him a block away. They'd slit his throat before he even knew he was dying."

"I can't send my family away like you did, Eric."

"Why not?"

"Because this isn't the first time we've been threatened. Every so often I get a case in which somebody thinks they can scare me off. Believe me, I'm easily scared. Threats make me constipated. Worse than cheese." The grin fell from his face, replaced by a worried frown. "If anything happened to my family because of my stubbornness, I don't know what I'd do. But I can't pack them away every time some nut shouts boo at me."

"Fallows is no nut, Luther. He's crazy, but not a nut."

"I know."

"Do you? Let me tell you something about him, Luther."

"I know all about him. I read the transcripts of the court-martial. At least, what was left after they cut out all the classified information. It was sickening."

"Yeah, well even unclassified that transcript didn't tell half the story. I haven't even told Annie everything. If I had, we'd both be waking up in a cold sweat every night."

Luther leaned back into his chair and clasped his bony fingers together. He'd gotten to know Eric pretty well during the two months of this trial. They'd lunched together almost every day. And Eric had come over for some of Trudi's home cooking at least twice a week. But there was some distant part of himself that Eric had always kept locked away. Oh, he was polite and friendly, charming as hell-there wasn't a woman in the place, including Trudi, who didn't let her eyes linger a little wistfully on Eric's hard physique and rough-hewn good looks. But he wasn't the kind of man to spill his guts at the drop of a hat as seemed to be fashionable these days. Luther looked into Eric's flat reddish-brown eyes that had grown flatter and colder during the course of the trial, and waited for him to speak. Though Luther had been in Nam for only six weeks before taking a Cong slug in the leg and being shipped back home, he knew that when a man like Eric was going to talk about the war, then that was something special.

"You already know some of this," Eric said, staring out the dirty window as if he were watching it all being replayed on videotape. "I mean about my parents and all."

Luther said nothing, listened intently.

"I grew up in Arizona, the part that looks like a Hollywood set for post-nuclear war America. The main agricultural product was sand. My dad was an ex-marine, complete with tattoos of snakes and dragons and naked women on each arm."

"Sounds tough," Luther said.

Eric laughed. "Yeah, he was tough, but not mean. He was short, barely qualified for the service, but strong as hell. Even his ear lobes had muscles. Tried a lot of different jobs. Car salesman. Beer-bottling factory. Even tried prospecting. Just wasn't cut out to make much money. Took him a lot of years to figure that out, though. Was almost forty before he found out what he really was."

"A politician?"

"No. An artist. Yeah, shocked the hell out of him too. Soon as he realized that, he married, had me, and started in carving the mountains into giant sculptures of Indian chiefs. Mom taught archaeology at the university, then drove home after classes. Every night he'd take us hiking up to the mountain to check on his daily progress. Never looked much different to me, just a lot of jutting rock, but the two of them discussed it for hours until it got so I could see it too.

"We lived right near the Hopi reservation. Since Dad was carving a Hopi chief, they were pretty friendly with us. I grew up with their kids, learned a lot about their customs, rituals, beliefs. Their chief, Big Bill Tenderwolf, used to take me on long hikes and teach me about the desert. How to survive. Find food and water. Fight. I never thought too much about it until I got drafted into the army during the war."

"I thought you'd enlisted."

"No way. My father would have killed me. You know the story, 'Don't make the same mistake I did, son.' Anyway, his health wasn't very good anyway, so I took a year off after high school to help him carve his damn mountain. Twelve hours a day on the business end of a jackhammer and you start to wonder if you've done some permanent damage to your privates. That's when I got drafted. After an armload of tests, some hotshot loaded down with medals and ribbons came around and lectured me on the Green Berets. It sounded more interesting than what I was doing so I volunteered. Only I washed out after two months."

Luther looked surprised. "You washed out?"

Eric snapped the rubber band in his hand and smiled. "A discipline problem. Oh, it wasn't their fault. They bent over backwards to keep me in. Practically let me shove broomsticks up their noses. But it just didn't work out. Seems I didn't like people telling me what to do. Hell, I was only nineteen and I'd had my fill of the military just listening to Dad's stories. I got surly, 'rebellious' is the word they used, whenever some fat-assed sergeant would tell me to give him fifty pushups because I didn't drink my coffee fast enough. So they transferred me to another outfit." He paused, his face darkening. "Something called the Night Shift."

Luther's throat went dry. After only a couple days in Nam he'd heard some men whispering about a special squad of men even more highly trained than the Green Berets. They were especially ruthless, given jobs that no one else could do. Hell, no one else would do. When orders came through that were especially suicidal, the standard line among the men was, "Save it for the Night Shift." Or when they marched through some enemy camp and found a hundred dead Cong scattered around the ground in puddles of blood, then someone would say, "Looks like the Night Shift cleaning up again." No one was ever pointed out as being one, no one ever asked. They were around somewhere, and you felt better knowing they were on your side.

"We were a strange group," Eric nodded, his lips drawn thinly into something like a smile. "The best of the worst. Hardcases. Guys who didn't like to follow orders, like me. Guys who could kill you with the flick of one finger and then build a portable radio from parts of your body. We were trained in every possible skill there was, from flying to diving to mountain climbing. And they were pretty lax about giving orders. For awhile. Until they plucked us out of our training camp in Florida one Saturday during the World Series and dropped us in the middle of some Vietnamese jungle. Then our new C.O. told us his policy: either follow his orders or he'd leave us to die. One of the new men, a joker named Kelley, thought he was kidding and snickered. The C.O. spun around and clubbed him with his rifle butt until he was unconscious. Then he moved the rest of us out and left Kelley lying there to die."

"I read Kelley's testimony," Luther said. "You carried him all day until camp was made."

Eric shrugged. "If it had happened a month later, I might not have been so eager. Still, the C.O. had me stand watch all night for a week because of it. That was my first run-in with Col. Dirk Fallows. The rest of the war was more of the same. Hit and git, Fallows called it. We'd swoop into a camp and kill everything that moved, then mutilate the corpses to scare the rest of the Cong. That was Fallows' brainchild," He took a deep breath, fired the rubber band against the window. "We were pretty successful, though we lost a lot of men. Still, we hurt them and hurt them bad. Fallows was the best jungle fighter I'd ever seen, and after awhile the men would do anything he said. The ultimate discipline is to turn your men into disciples. And we were."