Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

They weren’t close, Taggart and his son, Ace, which would be the Chiefs preference, no intimacies, the son posted overseas to make sure that problems, if any, could be cut in triplicate and sent through proper channels to the chaplain’s office.

Maybe there was something in that, Thomson thought, thinking of Earl and Dom Lorso’s call. Not to care, to be free from that... Maybe you shouldn’t try to stay close to people, maybe your own needs were more important than those traps of responsibility and guilt. Any sensation, even pain of a certain kind, had become a surrogate to Thomson for sensual arousal, and now the ache in his stomach from Lorso’s call had settled disturbingly but also pleasurably to his loins as he watched the girls playing volleyball.

“We have your call, sir.”

Thomson took the phone and said, “Dom, I want the rest of it now. This line is hot, but say what you have to say, go ahead.”

“Okay, then. It’s this. They had dinner last night, Earl and Adele. This morning he was gone. It’s the call from that girl that’s bugging him, if you want my guess.”

Thomson heard a tiny click; Lorso had snapped his lighter to light a cigarette. “A cop stopped by yesterday to talk to Earl, a sergeant name of Wilger, some questions on the missing Porsche. That could’ve upset him too.”

“Did you talk to Slocum about that?”

Lorso hesitated. Thomson heard his labored breathing. “No, I asked the captain to check out Earl, make some inquiries. I don’t want him to roadblock a routine investigation. That could just draw attention to the car. You agree, Mr. Thomson?”

“Yes, of course.” The ache intensified in his stomach, the sensation pure tension and pain now, with no suggestion of distracting sexual excitement.

“The thing is,” Lorso continued, “when Earl gets in certain moods he doesn’t trust anybody, not even Uncle Dom.”

“Then you’d better find him. Slocum might talk to some of his friends around the state.”

“We’ll do that. But there’s one other thing. Adele isn’t leveling with us. I think she knows where he is. Earl’s one thing but Earl and Adele together — like they are now — that’s something else. Take care, now.”

When Lorso rang off, Thomson gave the phone to the captain and listened dully to the heavy stroke of his heart. Rain had started and the players were hurrying from the field, but they meant nothing to him now; the long-legged girls were little stiltlike figures running across the parade ground under low, gray skies.

The silver stars were as much a part of General Adam Taggart as his big raw-knuckled hands and narrowed eyes and sun-browned, weathered features. The proscenium spots glinted on those stars of rank and on his paratrooper boots and four rows of decorations, and on the wide balding head which narrowed sharply above the forehead, somewhat like an artillery projectile.

The general stared out across the unstirring audience, his flaring smile revealing strong, clean teeth.

“South Korea is probably as good a place to start as any,” General Taggart said, “because there was a kernel of something inside those North Korean slopeheads we couldn’t crack.”

Oblivious to a hostile stir in his audience, the general continued with a cool smile. “Starve ’em, freeze ’em, take away their privileges, none of that meant shit to them. On the other hand, give ’em cigarettes, booze or even a kinky Red Cross chick to sack out with, you still couldn’t touch ’em. They were soldiers, by God, sons of the army, and they’d stick a bayonet in you if they got the chance, and die happy with the guards pounding their asses into the mud.

“So we tried drugs on ’em, a mixture of barbiturate and euphoric agents we hardly had names for then.” The general paused there, loose-limbed and as comfortable with his rank as royalty. Taggart was seldom inclined to amuse or defer to his audiences, or excite them with dramatic narrative effects, but he enjoyed the shock he could generate by figuratively changing intellectual gears.

He did that now. “This might be the proper place,” the general observed, “to discuss certain moral issues that were involved in our decision. That was almost thirty years ago, remember. The North Korean POWs had information vital to our security. More than that, we needed that information to protect the lives of American soldiers.

“I am a soldier first, a scientist second, and according to my morality, which is the morality of the battlefield, I believed we had a right to secure that information any way we could.

“So, we began to shoot them full of drugs, experimenting with various combinations until we secured the necessary breakthrough.

“I called that first product developed in our battle-front laboratories a ‘shield,’ because that metaphor seemed to best describe its effects. A shield — the Latin word is ancile — a shield against memory . Ancilia One, our first breakthrough, lowered certain levels of resistance in POWs. Their angers and resolves, the adversary constructs that gave a cohesiveness to their character, even nostalgic thoughts of home and family, all that became shadowed and indistinct, less real and important. Under drugs, they lost their grip on things we could never get at to smash, that kernel of pride rooted in what their country expected of them.

“It was a selective, chemically controlled amnesia which permitted and encouraged those enemy soldiers to cooperate with us. But only up to a certain point. Their reactions to the drug were erratic, we couldn’t predict their responses as accurately as we needed to.

“Ancilia Two, our next breakthrough drug, was, however, a disappointment. Which is a classic understatement because, the sad fact is, it killed thirteen Korean POWs and left a lot of others with permanent brain damage. Unfortunately that fiasco leaked out to the inspector general at headquarters.

“A court-martial was convened in Seoul but we were able to confine its impact and control adverse stateside publicity. The charges ultimately were reduced to theft and insubordination and manslaughter and were limited to a handful of enlisted men and medics.

“Yet what we were up to in Korea only reflected what was happening everywhere else in the world.

“As you’re all aware, intelligence and chemical warfare branches of every major nation have been on crash programs for three decades to find some reliable method of controlling behavior. Call it what you like — brainwashing, mood manipulation, mental straitjacketing, induced chemical delusions, anything else in the way of sensory regimentation they could profit from. Everybody knew what they wanted to do, and they were determined to find a way to do it.

“A man or woman, as you know, no matter how strong or adjusted, no matter how deep the fundamental perceptions and most cherished values — right and wrong, time and space, what is possible and what isn’t — all that can be distorted by even a speck of LSD.

“The Russians are years ahead of the pack, at least judging from their funding and programs, and they’re drooling in anticipation of results.

“Since the Stalin era they’ve been selecting healthy people to send off to labor camps and hospitals to cure their religious and political problems with drugs and electric convulsive therapy. We never needed double agents to winkle that information out. Solzhenitsyn was our Baedeker there.

“At the same time, our own people, CIA, that is, seemed to be doing their asinine best to destroy whatever chance the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had to bridge the generation gap between Ancilia Two and Ancilia Three. They got a dose of publicity about as welcome as a turd in a punch bowl by turning some GIs in France into permanent epileptics with lysergic acid. And compounded that mess by using drugs on draft resisters, civil rights activists, college agitators and even on convicts and enlisted troops in ’Nam and Europe.