“God, did it ever. Like a rock. Two, three months ago. There were pictures of helicopters taking off from a roof jammed with people, thousands of them trying to get a ride away. Some of them were giving their babies away to complete strangers, can you imagine? God only knows what happened to them all.”
“I must have seen the pictures somewhere. That would have been April?”
“End of April, right. There’s probably still a Time magazine around somewhere, if you want to see it.”
“That’s okay,” Allen said, and accepted the cup of coffee. The end of April, Saigon had been overrun by the NVA, shutting down the futile crusade that had taken the lives of Streak and T-bone and Birdman and deRosa, cost Chris his surfing legs, taken from so many others their sanity and their relationships with the world. That was the end of April; it was early May, so far as he could remember, that he’d tried to pound the wife-beater into his shag carpet. He burned afresh with the humiliation and outrage that had taken hold of him when he’d looked up in some bar and seen those laden helicopters on the television screen, relived the shame at having alone survived one of God’s huge, bitter jokes, all that death and torture and madness for nothing. But also, now, he could feel a trace of relief. His overreaction to the man’s abuse had been at least in part a reaction to the news, not a clear sign that he was losing his mind completely. Not that it made much of a difference, but it was nice to know. Made him feel nearly human.
Time, then, to start acting like one. Conversation, he thought; it’s what we humans do. He cast around for a topic, and cleared his throat. “You decided yet what you want to do, when you get out of college?”
“I’m going to be a cop.” The defiance in Jerry’s voice spoke volumes: He’d clearly been over this with their father.
Allen stared at him, seeing the number of police cars he’d so carefully avoided over the years, feeling on his arms the ghostly imprint of impatient, even brutal hands, hustling his ass into the drunk tank. “A cop, huh?”
“I’ve got to get off this island, Al. I feel like a rock, with moss creeping up over me.”
Allen couldn’t imagine his brother out of the islands. “You’ll come back,” he said.
“Christ, you sound just like Dad.”
“Sorry. But really, Jer, you love this place.”
“Okay, so I love the place. That doesn’t mean I’m not suffocating here. I was thinking of joining the Army for a stretch, and then finishing college. Like you did.”
Allen opened his mouth to protest: You don’t want to join up, little brother, believe me you don’t want to put on a uniform and go kill a lot of small brown-skinned people who are only trying to protect their own country. He teetered on the edge of spilling everything: deRosa, the heaped children, shame and a fatigue so great it went beyond the reach of sleep; the near-sexual release of standing with his platoon brothers and wiping out the ville; the lighter fluid boys under the bridge and the convenience store holdup (was it a dream?) and beating the wife-beater and everything—even that final thing, the perfect, solitary, gently rolling unpinned hand grenade—that he faced only in his dreams. But the thought of Brennan’s eyes hit like a bucket of cold water on the heat of the impulse. No way he’d wish those images on a person he loved. Besides, Vietnam was over, right? The Army was out of the business of jungle warfare, for a few years anyway. And Jerry had just said he wanted to be a cop. How could he go ahead with that plan, knowing his older brother was a person who’d broken most of the laws on the books? Bad enough their father’s lifetime of misdemeanors; Allen’s were of a different plane entirely. Jerry would understand, Allen knew that, but he would also be torn between loyalties.
Let one of us walk a straight path, he decided. No reason for both the Carmichael brothers to be pulled to shreds because of some distant war, over now.
“A cop, huh?” he said instead. “Man in a suit, the FBI maybe?”
“Oh, right, I can just imagine me in a skinny tie working for the feds,” Jerry answered him, willing to be distracted. “No, I’d like to be in a city for a while, just for the experience, and then maybe come back here, work for the sheriff’s department.”
“Well, I’ve got to say, Jer, you’ll look pretty sharp in one of those uniforms.”
The summer was idyllic, a calm place the world could not touch. Allen remained in the islands. Jerry spent his days at the marina and his evenings out on dates with girls local or seasonal, while Allen took over first the cooking, then the shopping, and even gave the house a more or less thorough cleaning. In early August he dug out the key to the boat shed and dragged out one of the small sailboats he and Jerry had used to explore their watery neighborhood when they were kids, and set to work scrubbing, painting, and refitting it.
Without either of them voicing either offer or acceptance, Allen made himself available to Ed De la Torre, a deckhand for Ed’s licit services or assistant for the shadier times when goods or people were moved across the border. On the days Ed did not need him, Allen ran the pretty little sailboat down into the water and spent long hours skipping up and down the islands. Under the influence of sun and canvas, wood and physical labor, Jerry’s cheerful conquests and Ed’s philosophical reflections—and of the cave, although he went there less often than he’d have liked, fearing the watchful eyes of summer boaters—the brutal images in his mind grew paler, and his mind and memory began to unclench enough to permit some reflections of his own.
For the first time since he’d shipped out for the war, Allen’s mind began to nibble at the idea of a future. What do I want to do with my life? he pondered one morning, steering the sailboat toward open water.
The answer was there: I want to sleep without nightmares. I want to have a purpose. I want to feel alive.
And what have I got to work with? he went on, tacking the channel between San Juan Island and Shaw. I hear voices and see dead men, and I’m paranoid as hell. On the other hand, like they say, it’s not paranoia if there are people out to get you. Physically I’m in decent shape—amazingly so, considering the shit I’ve put myself through. A little money, a college education, fair brains, loads of patience, lots of practice in doing without—without food, roof, freedom. I’ve got good jungle skills—for all kinds of jungles—and the experience to know where the enemy walks.
Actually, he reflected, bringing the little boat about to dance away from a lumbering ferry, a person might say that just being aware there was an enemy out there put him one up on a lot of the good citizens of this fair country, most of whom had no idea what waited in the shadows. And of those who had learned the hard way about the dangerous creatures that moved outside of the lights, most hadn’t a clue what to do about them, so that they either curled up and died, or wrung their hands and waited for someone to take over their rescue.
I am, he realized later as he lay on the sun-warmed beach of the Sanctuary cove, a soldier. Since the day I set foot on that baking airstrip in Saigon, I’ve never really been anything else. A fucking romantic, a soldier convinced that he’s Serving Right, that he could do something about the fucked-up state of the world. Like Jerry, he realized, astonished at the connection; that’s why Jerry wants to be a cop.
But Allen knew himself well enough to be certain that he would never wear a uniform again.
He was, then (this epiphany unfolded at dusk, while he was sitting at the end of the family dock, line in the water and bare feet dangling), both a romantic and a man willing and able to break the law, ferociously if need be. A loaded weapon, looking for a Cause.
Some vets in that condition became mercenaries, but Allen had seen enough of war to know that no side was right, and to pay a man to do your fighting for you made it even less right. He was not the man to become one weapon among many: On that road lay a heap of dead children and their mothers. No, what Allen wanted to be, he decided, was something less structured, more individual. Without the heavy restrictions a cop labored under, free to turn down anything he felt uncertain about. Sure
ly there had to be people out there who needed the services of a . . . what? A civilian mercenary?
Yeah, right, he jeered at himself. Might as well buy me a mask and a cape, call myself a Crime Fighter. You’ve really lost it this time, Crazy, he thought, yanking the lure off his line and tossing it into the gear box. You’ve gone right off the deep end.
He gutted his catch, rinsed the blood and scales from his hands, and took the fish off to the kitchen to make dinner.
But he couldn’t shake the conviction that somewhere, someone needed what he could do. That someone needed him. There would be some cause he could ally himself with that didn’t involve breaking down the doors of wife-beaters and letting the animal rage sweep over him. Some underground of the oppressed, if only he could find them. Something linked with the cave, and Ed, and with the sounds of children playing.
Thus, Allen’s summer gently passed. September came, and Jerry went back to college, but Allen stayed on, reassuring his brother that he’d drain the pipes and clean out the refrigerator before he took off. Before Jerry drove away, Allen hugged him hard, grateful that, if nothing else, the summer had brought him back to his brother.
September edged into October. The weather turned too rough to sail, so that the Sanctuary cave became hard to reach, but Allen stayed on. He split a mountain of firewood, repaired the front steps and a drooping gutter, spent the better part of a week sanding and finishing the bashed-up hardwood living room floor, all the while knowing that somehow the fractured pieces of his life were trying to reassemble themselves, that if he waited, in patience, he would know what he needed to do.
The solution came with a tiny event, a terse paragraph of newsprint in a thrice-read paper. In itself, it would have been nothing, but coming as it did after the summer’s two fundamental events—rediscovering Sanctuary and meeting the tattooed philosopher-boatman Ed De la Torre—it laid the first stones in the path of Allen’s life.
With Jerry gone and the islands settling into their annual liberation from the summer hordes, Allen had gotten into the habit of walking into town once a day to eat at a café frequented by locals. The woman who owned the place was a rangy ex–basketball player who led a troop of Girl Scouts. She had been in his class in junior high, and had never once asked him about Vietnam. He could have kissed her for that, and felt that buying a few meals was the least he could do to show his appreciation. Besides, she had the best pie on the island.
He tended to go when the place wasn’t busy, breakfast at ten or lunch at three in the afternoon, exchanging nods with the other regulars and taking a corner table (his back to the wall—some habits were unbreakable) where he would settle in with the Seattle newspaper that had come over on the morning ferry. This particular day he glanced at the headlines, turned to the sports without much interest, and skimmed through the section in which they stuck a variety of things like book reviews and human interest stories plucked off the wire service. This day’s paper ran one of the latter, the sad tale of a veteran’s widow whose second husband had recently run off with their three children, only the youngest of which was his, taking them to one of the many parts of the globe where a request for extradition was met with open hands and a decade-long delay. He read every word—like picking at a scab, it was painful and irresistible—then shook his head, finished his sandwich, and told the attentive waitress that he would have a slice of that apple pie she’d offered him after all, but only if she could wrap it in some tinfoil. He then paid and walked home, end of story.
Except for the mental click that came while he was watching some mindless variety show on the television that night. In two minutes Allen was in boots and jacket, wobbling through the pouring rain on Jerry’s bicycle, to pound on the café’s door and ask the startled woman who peered down from the second-floor apartment if she’d thrown out that day’s paper. The sleep-befuddled woman dropped the object from her upstairs window and pulled her head back inside; Allen ducked into the shelter of the café entrance to read the article again.
As he’d thought. The name of the decorated vet the bereft widow had once been married to was given as Connor Rychenkow.
Streak.
Seventy-two hours later, Allen Carmichael crouched at the foot of a neatly trimmed privet hedge in a suburb east of Los Angeles, waiting for the ranch-style house on the other side of the street to go dark. It was, he reflected, one of the oddest jungles he’d patrolled yet. The woman who lived there had visitors—a sister, guessing from the resemblance, with the sister’s husband and two small kids. Kids they would surely want to take home and tuck into bed, he urged, before some neighbor walking their dog last thing at night came across the intruder in the privet hedge.
And there they were at last, one kid flaked out in Daddy’s arms, the other whining and half-asleep, being tugged along after Mommy. The sister kissed the woman who lived in the house, and the visitors drove away. The porch light went off, followed by the light in the front room.
Allen didn’t worry much; he doubted any woman whose kids had been taken from her less than two weeks earlier would be sleeping all that soundly.
He retreated to his car in the next block, stayed there until the golden Labs and the German shepherds had finished their business, then slipped back up the quiet sidewalks to the house over which he had been keeping watch. Sure enough, a light shone from the back of the house, which proved to be the kitchen. Through the door’s window he saw the woman, seated at the table with a mug in front of her, head in hands.
She jerked up at his gentle knock on the screen. Allen took a step back from the door, far enough not to seem a threat but near enough so the porch light would fall on him. When it came on, he held his hands out so she could see he wasn’t holding a weapon, then lifted one finger to his lips as a plea for silence. Through the glass the frightened face shaped the words “Who are you?”
He stepped forward so she could hear him. “I’m sorry to startle you, coming at this time of night. My name is Allen Carmichael. I knew your first husband in Vietnam. We called him ‘Streak,’ ” he added, by way of proof.
The door opened a crack, and she studied him. “So?”
“I think I might be able to help you get your children back.”
BOOK THREE
Jamie
Chapter 16
Twenty-six and a half years after the night he met Streak Rychenkow’s widow, Allen Carmichael was in a camper-topped tan Ford pickup, traveling the endless miles from central Montana to his island home above the hidden cave. Sometimes he felt that all he had ever done with his life was drive unending miles in unfamiliar cars, fly over vast spaces miles high in the air, sleep in strange beds, and look in the mirror at so many slightly wrong faces, men with dark hair or extravagant moustaches, men with obviously bleached hair and the trimmed beards of gigolos, men with nerdy glasses and protruding teeth. Twenty-six years; nearly half his life.
Over now, he reminded himself for the hundredth time that day. Each time the thought came, Allen felt the same jolt of relief and apprehension, as if someone had told a weight lifter he could let go of that enormous thing across his shoulders, but not told him how to get it off. And each time he had to reassure his apprehensive self that he’d be fine, that retirement didn’t kill a man, that he’d settle into a less active life with no problems.
His apprehensive self hadn’t believed it the first dozen times, and was little closer to accepting the reassurance now. But it would come, he told himself. He’d get the burden down, and after a while, he’d wonder how on earth he’d borne it so long. He would reshape himself around a future that did not actively involve him in the process of taking children away from violent adults. The cave’s foodstuffs, its generous supply of games, videos, and children’s clothing could be cleared away, its role of temporary safe-house for fugitives closed down. He knew he was probably going to take Alice up on her offer of a supervisory role, of making contacts with lawyers and shelters and document forgers, extending and laying down new co
nnections on their modern underground railway, but as for climbing trees and snatching kids, he was retired from that, for good this time. Alice had dragged him back from the brink once—and truth to tell, he was glad she had talked him into it: He wouldn’t for the world have missed his encounter with Jamie O’Connell. But that was over now. Jamie was safely stowed far away from his father, under the care of a good, strong, clever woman and her affectionate family.
The highway stretched out between the two hands on the wheel, unseen by anything but his automatic vision, the rest of his mind working to get itself around the idea of a new life. For twenty-six years, Allen had been a civilian mercenary in the service of abused children and their mothers, disappearing them from harm. Sometimes this required his services only as advisor or advocate, at other times as out-and-out kidnapper with his own ass on the line. His clients had been mothers with young children, and although he had occasionally helped a man disappear, there was less pleasure there, merely the satisfaction of exercising skills. It was transporting kids to safety that he treasured, the joy of watching a mother as it slowly dawned upon her that the burden she had carried for so long, the threat to her children that she alone had known was there, had been taken away. As thrills went, witnessing that expression was right up there alongside good sex. Almost as satisfying as seeing one of his clients, years later, strong and proud and transformed into steel by what she’d been through.
Twenty-six years of dealing with terrorized women and children, two and a half decades of keeping out of sight of both law enforcement and abusers, a quarter of a century of collecting, witnessing, and collating the most distasteful sort of evidence imaginable. How many hours of abuse had he watched, by means of his hidden cameras? How many whimpers and shouts had he heard through his microphones?