Mafia III E-Book

Jeff Mariotte

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 395

Beschreibung

New Bordeaux is a city on the edge of the bayou—and on the edge of chaos. A hazy, fictional re-creation of New Orleans in the 1960s, New Bordeaux is the kind of town where violence is the only way to survive and crime is the only way to get ahead. When gang warfare pushes the city to the brink, its citizens will discover that the bayou can swallow a lot of secrets. And a lot of blood.This novel, modelled in the style of detective "pulp" novels from the 1960's, will expand upon the world of the hit videogame Mafia III in vivid detail. Featuring characters and locations from the game, and a brand new original storyline full of intrigue, suspense, passion, and violence, Mafia III: A Pulp Detective Novel is a great read for fans of the game and genre hounds looking for another intriguing story to delve into.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

JEFF MARIOTTE ANDMARSHEILA ROCKWELL

Mafia III - Plain of JarsPrint ISBN: 9781785657290E-book ISBN: 9781785658624

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark StreetLondon SE1 0UPwww.titanbooks.com

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Published by arrangement with Insight Editions, PO Box 3088, San Rafael, CA 94912, USA. www.insighteditions.com

First edition: November 2017

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©2017. Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. 2K, Hangar 13, The 2K Logo, the Hangar 13 logo and Take-Two Interactive Software are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software.All rights reserved.

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THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO ALL THE VETERANS OF THE VIETNAM WAR AND TO THOSE WHO DIDN’T MAKE IT HOME.

1

Vietnam, December 1965

The man walking point went down first.

Next was a kid from Springdale, Arkansas, nineteen years old. Two nights earlier, he had tried to interest Lincoln Clay in a reel-to-reel tape of a country and western singer named Porter Wagoner. Lincoln hadn’t heard anything in Wagoner’s tunes that spoke to his life and asked the kid if he had any Marvin Gaye or James Brown.

Now Lincoln was flattening himself on the muddy path, wearing the kid’s blood on his face.

Sustained fire erupted from the jungle darkness to his left, the south side of the pathway. At the first burst, everybody had hit the dirt, but some, like the kid whose name Lincoln couldn’t remember, hadn’t dropped fast enough. The heavy, continuous thumping sounded to Lincoln like BARs, no doubt stolen or bought from the ARVN soldiers to whom they’d been issued. American advisers and South Vietnamese troops returned fire, some of the Vietnamese pumping grenades at the ambushers from their M7 grenade launchers.

“Where’s that mortar?” someone called. “Thompson!”

“Thompson’s hit!” someone else shouted back.

The mortar crew had been a couple of men behind Lincoln in the line. Lincoln emptied his M16’s magazine, ejected it, slammed another one in, then slithered through the mud. He found Thompson there, with the lower right quarter of his face shredded. Behind him, a skinny black guy cowered, tears glistening in the flickering light of the illuminating rounds, his arms wrapped around the mortar.

“Jenks,” Lincoln said. “We need that mortar.”

“Thompson’s hurt b-b-bad,” Jenks said.

“He’s dead,” Lincoln said. “Come on, give it here.”

The mortar crew’s third man was just called Breeze, for reasons Lincoln had never known. He was a white kid from Oregon or Washington, someplace like that, and he was just about always high. He was facedown in the mud, his arms thrown over his head. Alive, Lincoln figured, but checked out.

“Come on, Jenks,” Lincoln said again. “I’ll handle it.”

Jenks stuttered something unintelligible, but he let Lincoln pry the mortar from his hands. Lincoln slipped off the path with it, jammed the base against a tree, and slotted the mortar tube into the base plate. “Give me your towel!” he said. Jenks shoved a rag into his hands. Lincoln wrapped it around the tube.

“Round,” he said.

With quivering hands, Jenks passed him one. Lincoln shoved it into the tube and directed the tube more or less at where the fire was emanating from. He triggered it, then shielded his eyes from the explosion that followed. Jenks handed him another round, and Lincoln rammed it home, only the towel protecting his hands from the heat of the tube.

By the fifth mortar round, the gunfire from the jungle seemed to have tapered off. “WP,” Lincoln said.

Jenks fumbled in Thompson’s pack for a few seconds, then came up with a white phosphorous round. Lincoln triggered it, and a wall of white heat sprouted where the ambush had originated, illuminating the jungle to near-daylight levels. Heat and the mingled smells of burning flesh and foliage washed over him.

“That’s some good mortar work, Private,” someone said from behind Lincoln. He turned to see Captain Franklin standing there, his hands on his hips and a big grin on his ruddy, open face. “Where’d you learn that?”

Lincoln didn’t want to admit that he’d been practicing with homemade explosives since childhood, alongside his adopted brother, Ellis. Wilson Tubbs was their father’s explosives genius, back home in New Bordeaux, and Sammy Robinson didn’t object to Wilson’s giving the boys lessons in the finer arts of making things go boom.

“I just pay attention,” Lincoln said. “Guess I got lucky.”

“Luck, hell,” Franklin said. “You’re my mortar man now.”

Lincoln jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about them?”

“Thompson’s history. Breeze is stoned out of his gourd. Jenks can work with you.”

“Long as he carries the mortar,” Lincoln said. Making demands of officers was a good way to wind up on the wrong side of the people who could order you into a world of hurt. Still, if he was going to get anything out of the captain, now was the time. “I need my hands free for my weapon.”

“Deal,” Franklin agreed. “Just stay close to Jenks. He’s pretty shaken up.”

“He ain’t the only one,” Lincoln said, but the officer had already walked away.

* * *

“It don’t make sense,” Lincoln said. He was sitting in a circle with Jenks and four other guys, chowing down on C rations. Breeze was there, too, but only physically. In his head, Lincoln figured, he was off in Tibet or Timbuktu or some damn place. “We’re, what, four clicks from our objective? Why ambush us here? Why not concentrate their forces around the village? They gotta know that’s where we’re headed. And they gotta know we’re comin’ from three directions at once.”

“How would they know that?” The questioner was Ramos, a Puerto Rican kid from Spanish Harlem, someone Lincoln respected as a hard case who would give as good as he got in a fight.

“Man, ain’t nothing happens in this jungle the VC don’t know about. A lizard pisses under a bush, old Victor Charlie’s watching him. How do you think they knew where to set that ambush?”

“I didn’t think about that,” Jenks said.

Lincoln nodded toward the South Vietnamese strike force traveling with the platoon. “You got to figure at least a quarter of those guys are Vietcong sympathizers,” he said. “Back in camp, there’s more. The girl who does your laundry might have a boyfriend in the VC. The Buddhist priest who sits near your hut. You can’t trust anybody in this fuckin’ country.”

He tore into his second carton of rations. He had traded a favor, to be named later, with the guy who’d been the first to grab Thompson’s box. He figured it was a safe trade, because the chances that the guy would still be alive at the end of the mission were probably fifty-fifty at best, and if they both survived, Lincoln could simply deny any memory of the exchange if he didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t like the guy would be able to take the meal back later.

“Point is,” he went on, “if they know the village is being attacked from three sides, why not spend their time setting up defenses there? Booby traps and such. Then meet the attack with all they got, instead of sending out little ambush teams to get slaughtered?”

“I don’t know,” Ramos answered. “That makes sense to me.”

“If it was me,” Lincoln said, “I’d only do it to buy time.”

“How you mean?” Jenks asked.

“Look, they know we’re comin’, right? From the north, east, and west? So if they run anywhere, it’ll be toward the south, where we got most of our forces.”

“Right,” Jenks said, clearly not catching on.

“So maybe they just want to delay us a little. Give them time to get something out of the village they don’t want to be there when we show up.”

“Like what?”

“A weapons cache, some high-up VC muckety-muck, I don’t know.”

“You think they already moved whatever it is?” Ramos asked.

“Only one way to find out.” Lincoln abandoned what was left of his rations and went to find Franklin. The captain was sitting on the tree stump with a map unfolded across his knees, a flashlight in one hand and a pencil in the other. Lincoln waited until the man looked up, acknowledging him, then explained his theory.

“You could be right,” the captain said when he was finished. “But that doesn’t change our mission.”

“We’re coming in from the west,” Lincoln said. “Let me have a few guys and we can hook south, maybe cut them off before they di-di.”

“Lincoln, I need you. You’re my mortar guy.”

“I can leave you Jenks and Breeze.”

“They’re worthless.”

“Sir, if the VC are trying to hustle something out of that village, don’t it make sense that it’s something we want? They’ll boogie south for a while, then shift east or west until they’re clear of us, before heading north with it. We don’t have a big window here, and it’s gettin’ smaller all the time.”

Franklin studied him. “Now you’re a mortar genius and a tactician?”

Lincoln shrugged. No need to tell the officer that he just figured the Vietcong would do what he had done dozens of times back home. If the police—those who hadn’t been properly compensated ahead of time—showed up at your door, you did whatever you could to stall them while product was flushed or weapons were hidden or whatever they were looking for was otherwise made to disappear.

That VC ambush hadn’t been meant to eliminate the threat—they’d have used considerably more men for that. It had been a delaying tactic, nothing more.

And you didn’t delay the inevitable without a good reason.

Franklin bit down on the end of the pencil, then gave a nod. “Okay, Private Clay. The name of the game here in Vietnam is going to be unconventional warfare, and I guess there’s nothing more unconventional than letting an untested infantryman lead a task force on an entirely unauthorized side mission. Just remember this—if it goes south, you didn’t have my permission. You deserted. You okay with that?”

Lincoln considered only briefly. He could get with the program, stay with the platoon, and take part in the clearing of the village—ultimately, he suspected, to no purpose. Or he could take advantage of this rare opportunity to go off on his own, to risk his life but maybe accomplish something.

When it had come time to register for the draft, Sammy had taken him aside and said he could fix it so Lincoln didn’t have to go. Lincoln had appreciated the offer, but he knew most young men didn’t have that advantage. Something stirred in him when he thought it over—patriotism, maybe, some sense of duty to country and flag. Sammy had drilled into him from boyhood that the only loyalty that really mattered was to family, which in his case meant Sammy, who’d made a man of Lincoln; Sammy’s late wife, Perla; and his brother, Ellis; and beyond that, to the mob that Sammy ran.

Lincoln understood that, accepted it. But Sammy, Perla, and Ellis had been a tight-knit family. He had been an orphan, taken into their family but still somehow apart from it in small but genuine ways. The army, he’d hoped, would be someplace he would really belong, for once.

Anyway, he couldn’t bring himself to take the easy way out that Sammy offered. Besides, he had justified, maybe he would learn something in the jungles of Southeast Asia that he could use back home, in the swamps and alleyways of Louisiana.

Here, faced with a decision to bow to authority or to flout it, he made the obvious choice. “I’ll see if I can round up a few volunteers,” he said. “Ones who don’t mind bein’ called deserters if it turns bad. Or gettin’ killed, either.”

“You going to take some of the ARVN strikers?” Like everybody else Lincoln had met here, he pronounced the acronym for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as “Arvin.”

“Rather not.”

“It’s their war,” Franklin reminded him. “We’re just advisers.”

“Then I’d advise ’em to stay out of my way when my finger’s on a trigger.”

“Clay,” Franklin said, something like admiration passing briefly across his face, “you’re a shitty soldier, you know that? But you just might make one hell of a warrior.”

* * *

Ramos had been the first to hop on board with what Jenks was calling Lincoln’s “suicide mission.” Then O’Malley, a broad-faced Irish kid from outside Boston, had declared that it sounded like a good time to him. Rutt and Fisher had been next, and then, as if afraid of being left behind, Jenks agreed. Seeing that the rest of his “mortar team” was going, Breeze declared that he was in, but Lincoln told him the squad was full and he would have to stay with the platoon.

They left the mortar with Breeze so they didn’t have to carry it and took off at a steady trot. The streets of New Bordeaux generally made sense, but the swamps outside the city were without signposts or landmarks, and Lincoln had always managed to find his way through those, so he wasn’t worried about getting lost. He knew which way was north, and knowing that kept him on course.

The jungle held plenty of dangers that weren’t posed by the enemy—snakes, poisonous insects and plants, even the occasional tiger among them—but Lincoln didn’t have time to worry about those. If they were going to intercept whatever the VC were hustling out of the village, they had to move fast.

The worst part was that the regular din of the jungle—the birdcalls and monkey screeches, the constant rustling of huge leaves against rough bark—would have drowned out their progress, except that the sound of their movement alarmed those creatures sentient enough to know it signaled man, causing them to go still. In that way, sudden silence announced their presence more than anything else would have.

Lincoln guessed it would do the same for the enemy, though. His hearing was acute, and as he listened for the expected silences surrounding his own group’s progress, he also kept an ear out for any other gaps in the jungle’s night noises.

After about forty minutes, Jenks slammed his palms against a tree. “This sucks, man,” he said. “We’re runnin’ our asses off out here for nothin’!”

“You didn’t have to come,” Lincoln reminded him.

“I thought we was gonna shoot somebody,” Jenks said. “Ain’t nobody out here but us.”

“Shut up.” Lincoln was already sorry he’d brought the kid along. “I’m listening.”

“Listening to what?”

Lincoln shot him a withering look. Jenks closed his mouth and looked down toward the tops of his boots.

Listening to what? Lincoln thought. To nothing. No calling birds, no nighttime screeches.

Someone was on the move, and it wasn’t friendlies.

He held up a hand to keep anyone else from speaking. Concentrated. He heard night noises in the distance and focused on the direction, listened to where they stopped, where they started up again.

Convinced he knew where the unseen men were traveling, and how fast, he said, “Time to boogie.”

They double-timed, cross-country through dense foliage where every plant seemed designed to block their way, trip them, or snag them from above. Lincoln set an interception course, and soon the roving silences merged into one.

Lincoln held up a fist to halt his tiny squad, then motioned the men to squat in the brush, at the edge of a small clearing. “Just a couple minutes,” he said, his voice low and calm.

It took even less. Barely a minute later, he heard the distinctive rustle of men pushing through the jungle. He raised his M16 and waited. Only scant moonlight penetrated the overhead canopy, but there was enough to limn the VC soldiers, in their traditional black pajamas, as they broke into the clearing.

Using hand signals, Lincoln let the others know to hold their fire, even though he itched to squeeze his own trigger. His patience was rewarded; after a few moments, the entire party was visible. They were fourteen in all, and only one of them didn’t look Vietnamese.

He was the tallest of the group, a white man with short, swept-back hair, wearing fatigues with no visible insignia.

“Just target the VC,” Lincoln said softly. After nods indicated acknowledgment of his order, he sighted on the last man in the line and opened fire.

Taken by surprise, only a couple of the Vietcong were able to return fire at all, and that without effect. The white man they had been escorting tried to run, but Lincoln stopped him with a single shot to the back of the knee. The man dropped, cursing.

In a language Lincoln didn’t know but could only assume was Russian.

2

Ramos knew some basic first aid, though he was no medic. He wrapped the Russian’s wound sufficiently to stanch the bleeding, while Lincoln cut him a crutch from a tree branch. Moving at a considerably slower pace than they’d come, they made their way back to the village that had been the search-and-destroy mission’s original objective. It was reportedly a local haven for VC activity, and with the sun rising in the eastern sky, it was easy to find by the smoke billowing from burning huts.

When they arrived with their prisoner, Captain Franklin was overseeing the digging of an enormous hole in the center of the village. Stacked around it were the explosives that would go inside once he was satisfied with it. He saw Lincoln coming and stepped away from the men with shovels.

“We found a whole warren of tunnels,” he said. “Killed or captured more than a hundred VC. We’re going to blow the place.”

Lincoln ticked his gaze toward the women and children standing to one side, under armed guard. “What about them? Where will they go?”

“I guess they’ll have to find new digs,” Franklin said. “Maybe next time they won’t let Charlie move in with them.” He eyed Lincoln’s prisoner. “Who’s that?”

Lincoln grinned. “Brought you a present. I don’t know his name—haven’t bothered to ask—but he’s a Russian. We found him being escorted away from the village by a dozen or so VC.”

“A Soviet agent, this far south?” Franklin sucked air through his teeth. “Washington’s gonna have a field day with this. They’re not supposed to be anywhere near here.”

“Are we?”

“We’re just advising the army of our host nation. They asked for our help.”

“They pay for all those explosives?”

“We’ve been paying for this war since the 1950s, when the French were fighting it,” Franklin said. “Now we’re just more up front about it. Slightly more up front, anyway.”

“We have? I didn’t hear about that in school.”

“You didn’t hear it from me, either, Clay. Some things they don’t teach.”

“Maybe they should. I pay taxes like anybody else. Be nice to know how they’re bein’ spent.”

“What are you looking for in the military, Private?”

Lincoln dug the toe of his boot into the dirt. “Just, you know, doin’ my duty. Tryin’ to make it through each day.”

“You’re setting your sights too low. Man like you? You should be Special Forces. You want to be where the action is, right?”

“Special Forces? I don’t think I’m cut out for that. Don’t you need a diploma for that?”

“Just high school. You have that, right?”

Lincoln nodded. He had never considered the possibility of wearing the Green Beret. Even having this conversation felt like some strange dream. “Yeah,” he said.

“That’s what I thought. You could have a great military career ahead of you, Private Clay, but you’ve got to make the right moves. It doesn’t just happen—you’ve got to make it happen.”

Lincoln shook his head. He knew, from hard experience, how this went down. Guys like him, poor kids from Delray Hollow, were offered all kinds of things, only to have those chances vanish as soon as they got their hopes up. “I just don’t see it.”

“Clay, I’m not in the habit of blowing smoke up people’s asses,” Franklin said. “I think you could have a shot at it. If you want it. That’s the key. You’ve got to want it first.”

There had been plenty of things in his life that Lincoln had wanted. Some he had acquired; others had remained forever out of reach. But there was something about this idea he found appealing. “I’ve heard some stories about the Green Berets. They get to make their own rules. Go in where it’s hot and heat it up some more. Sounds all right to me.”

“Now you’re talking,” Franklin said.

“But I’m here. Doesn’t it take a year of training stateside to earn the beret?”

“Ordinarily, yes. But these aren’t ordinary times, Clay. This war’s going to ramp up fast, and we’re going to bear more and more of the burden, despite whatever Johnson and McNamara are saying on the evening news. We’re going to need good men. Let me see if I can pull some strings.”

Lincoln figured the man had some kind of angle, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be. People didn’t just offer to help each other out that way, not unless they got something in return.

“For me?”

Franklin put a hand on Lincoln’s broad shoulder. He had to reach up to do it. “Clay, you just found a Soviet agent ninety clicks from Saigon. If you’re not careful, you might get called to Washington so LBJ can pin a medal on your chest. And believe me, you don’t want to come to the attention of anybody in Washington. I’ll see what I can do to make sure your future is as a fighting man, not as a wooden Indian with a chestful of ribbons.”

* * *

Lincoln didn’t expect anything to come of the promise. He was just an infantry private who’d had a lucky break. And he still couldn’t see what Franklin would get out of it.

So he was surprised to find himself, two weeks later, on an airplane back to the World, as everybody stationed in Vietnam had taken to calling the US. As soon as Vietnam fell away below him, he was joined by a lean, rangy colonel whose raw-edged features could have been chopped from a log with a hatchet. He wore his beret at a rakish angle; bare scalp gleamed beneath it. He introduced himself as Philip Giunta. Lincoln could hear some Brooklyn in his accent, though it wasn’t strong.

“Thanks for agreeing to this assignment,” Giunta said, once the introductions were done.

“Did I agree to something?”

“According to Tom Franklin, you did. He made a strong case for you. It’s unusual, to say the least, but Tom has friends in high places.”

“Where exactly am I goin’?” Lincoln asked.

“Fort Benning, Georgia.”

“What’s at Fort Benning?”

“Jump school,” Giunta replied. “You’ll spend a week there, jumping out of airplanes under every condition you can imagine. Then it’s off to Fort Bragg for an abbreviated session of Special Warfare School. I understand you’ve already improvised some guerilla combat techniques, but they’ll teach you how it’s really done.”

Lincoln was confused. “Don’t I have to try out? Pass some kind of test and a background check?”

“You’ve already tested in, Private. And passed your background check. There were some findings that were, let’s say, concerning, but like I said, Captain Franklin was pulling for you, and he’s got connections I don’t even have. I’ll be honest—I don’t like ignoring protocol this way. I feel like if rules have been established about these things, it’s probably for good reason, and we ought to follow them.

“But the truth is that we’re going to need good Special Forces operatives faster than the school can turn them out. Every indication is that we’ll be in Vietnam for a while. The president sees Southeast Asia as a tipping point. If it falls to the commies, then we’ve lost Asia altogether. And he doesn’t want that to be his legacy.”

Lincoln knew that President Johnson had passed civil rights legislation, but he had thought it mostly applied to black folks like himself. He hadn’t given much thought to the president’s relationship with Asians, and he wasn’t sure Johnson had, either. “So now he’s concerned about the yellow man?” Lincoln asked.

“I can’t say for sure what’s driving him,” Giunta answered. “He’s a politician, so I’d guess he’s worried about being reelected, like the rest of them are. All I know is that we’re going to be committing more Special Forces to the region for the indefinite future.”

Lincoln wondered how in-depth the background check had been. His mother had abandoned him when he was two, and he’d been raised at Saint Michelle’s Home for Colored Boys until he was thirteen, when the city had decided that foster families were a better way to bring up orphans. Little black kids always seemed to be the last to be fostered, and he had occasionally doubted that he would ever have a family until Sammy and Perla Robinson had taken him in.

He had been in trouble with Father James at the orphanage now and again—fights, the occasional theft, drinking, a little pot. He’d been big for his age even then, and small kids weren’t the only ones bullied and picked on. And there was the fact that he was a black kid, growing up in the 1950s American South. Using the wrong water fountain or trying to swim in the wrong pool could earn a kid a beating, or worse. Father James had protected his charges from that sort of abuse, as much as he could, but he wasn’t always around when Lincoln was tearing about the city.

And even the most cursory background check would have revealed Sammy’s history. He came across as a successful businessman, but one didn’t have to dig very deep to see that much of what he earned came from running numbers, selling dope, pimping, and worse. Franklin’s contacts must have been impressive, indeed, to make the authorities overlook Lincoln’s role in those enterprises.

“So, what’s my security clearance?” he asked.

Giunta grimaced a little but tried to hide it. “Top Secret,” he said. “That’s standard for Green Berets.” He shifted in his seat, turning to face Lincoln. “Tom Franklin put his ass on the line for you, Clay. So did I, for that matter, by backing Tom up. I trust his judgment, and if he thinks you’re fit to wear the beret, then so do I. But I need to know you’ll honor it—honor the trust Tom and I put in you, and that the nation will put in you. We’ve got about twenty more hours before we land at Fort Benning, so you don’t need to answer me right now. But by the time we touch down, I’ll want to know if you’re in or not. If not . . . well, there’s always another plane heading back to ’Nam.”

He left Lincoln sitting alone and disappeared toward the front of the aircraft. The plane was largely empty—Lincoln had the impression this wasn’t a regularly scheduled flight, rather something that had been put together for his benefit. A few other GIs were scattered around, most lost in their own thoughts but some engaged in quiet card games or conversation. There wasn’t much else to do except sit, listen to the roar of the propellers, and think.

Truth be told, although he didn’t mind thinking, he thought doing too much of it was overrated at best and maybe harmful. Instead, he moved around in his seat until he was as comfortable as he could get, closed his eyes, and drifted off to sleep.

* * *

The evening air on the tarmac at Lawson Army Airfield was heavy and damp and smelled of diesel and exhaust. Lincoln was used to humidity; it was a staple of New Bordeaux summers, and Vietnam was more of the same. Despite the heat, he was hardly sweating as he walked toward the waiting trucks with his duffel bag in his hand.

Colonel Giunta strode up beside him. “What’s it going to be, Lincoln?” he asked. “There’s a Jeep over there that’ll take you to your barracks, if you’re staying. If not, there’s a plane sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off. Your call.”

“I’ll stay,” Lincoln said. “Might as well, right?”

“That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”

“I mean, the food here’s got to be better than the C rations I get back there.”

“You should spend some time in Saigon,” Giunta said. “The French taught those people how to cook. You can get some delicious Vietnamese food, and their French restaurants are as good as any in the world.”

“I’ll get there one of these days, Colonel. For now, I think I’d rather be where the action is.”

Giunta looked at him searchingly. Lincoln got the feeling he was waiting for something else—maybe some sort of declaration of patriotic altruism. But he’d gotten all Lincoln was going to give him, and he’d have to be satisfied with it. Giunta seemed to figure that out after a moment, because he gave a little half-shrug and turned away.

“Trust me,” he said, leading Lincoln toward a waiting Jeep. A soldier sat behind the wheel, one arm dangling casually outside. “You’ll definitely see some action after you earn your beret. Maybe more than you’re banking on.”

And Lincoln wondered, not for the first time, just what he was getting himself into.

3

Jump school was pure hell.

Despite Father James and the sisters at the orphanage, Lincoln mostly made his own way on the streets of New Bordeaux during his childhood. Physical exertion and punishment weren’t new to him, but this was punishment on a different level. It was compounded by the fact that he had to squeeze a three-week course into a week, which meant that when others in the morning session got to use the afternoon to recover, Lincoln had to attend another session. After that, he got an hour for dinner and “recuperation,” then another four hours of individual instruction from the jumpmaster. He spent the first few days learning the principles of jumping from airplanes and performing practice jumps—seemingly hundreds of them—from platforms of varying heights. Once he had demonstrated that he knew how to pack a parachute, how to land, how to roll, and how to disentangle himself, he started going up in planes for the real thing.

His first jump was at the comparatively low altitude of 1,500 feet, barely allowing enough time for the chute to open—but plenty of time to worry about what would happen if it didn’t. He survived, so the jumps became higher and more challenging—he was weighted down with ever more gear, and he had to jump at night and into forests, swamps, mountainsides, and other difficult terrain.

Despite his doubts, he lived through it all and was declared a paratrooper. Then he was flown to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for the next step in his sudden advancement: three classes offered at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. He had most of a day off between landing at Bragg and starting school, and he had arranged for Sammy and Ellis to travel up from New Bordeaux for the occasion.

The men were escorted to the barracks Lincoln would occupy for the duration of his training. The building was empty but for Lincoln. Dust motes danced in sunlight slanting in through the windows, and despite regular cleaning, the air was thick with the smell of sweat from men who worked hard, then slept in hot, humid conditions.

Lincoln rose from his bunk when he saw his father and brother enter. The first thing Sammy did was hold out his arms and wait for Lincoln to come into them. After a long embrace, the old man backed off, patted Lincoln’s upper arms, and said, “You’re looking good. Strong.”

“I think I’m just shorter. All the jumping I’ve done the last few days has compressed me by at least three inches.”

“He’s right, Lincoln,” Ellis said. “You do look different.”

Lincoln hadn’t really noticed the changes, but looking at Ellis now, he realized his face was leaner than it had been back home, his stomach flatter, more cut.

“Guess it’s all that shitty food,” Lincoln said with a laugh. “I tell you, there’s no food like New Bordeaux food. I haven’t had dirty beans and rice or a po’boy in months.”

“They said we could take you out,” Sammy said. “Fayetteville’s no New Bordeaux, but they got to have some decent restaurants, n’est-ce pas?”

“You’ve always been able to pick ’em, old man,” Lincoln said. “I’ll follow your nose.” He turned to Ellis. “How you doin’, man? You got a girlfriend yet?”

“So many I can’t keep their names straight,” Ellis shot back.

“Any keepers?”

Ellis shrugged. “You know, just chicks from the Hollow.”

“Man, if it’s left up to Ellis,” Sammy said, “I’ll never be a grand-père. That’s another reason you got to hurry home from this war, Lincoln.”

“One of these days, brother,” Lincoln said. “One of these days, you’ll meet the right girl.”

“With any luck,” Sammy added, “she’ll be blind.”

Ellis’s jaw dropped open and he started to frame a retort, but Lincoln burst into laughter that precluded any response. “Come on,” Sammy said. “We got to find us some sustenance. Growing boys got to eat, non?”

* * *

“Business is okay,” Sammy said after the dinner dishes had been cleared and drinks poured. “Same ol’, same ol’, you know?”

“Business is in the shitter,” Ellis countered.

“Hush, you!” Sammy snapped.

“No. Why you want to hide the truth from Lincoln? He’s a part of this family; he ought to know the real deal.”

“Lincoln has bigger things to worry about.” Sammy sipped his brandy, made a face, drank some more. When he put his glass down, he said, “Boy’s going to be a hero.”

“I don’t know if there are any heroes in this war,” Lincoln said. “Not me, anyway.” He fixed Ellis with a steady gaze. “What’s going on at home?”

“Lot of heat from the Haitians,” Ellis said. “Feels like they’re thinkin’ about makin’ a play for some of our turf.”

Sammy wagged a finger at him. “Now, you know we put that down, Ellis. Don’t be telling tales out of school.”

“Put it down for now,” Ellis admitted. “But for how long? Seems to me when it takes a show of force to get someone to back off, eventually they forget what you showed ’em and they come back for more. Plus the Dixie Mafia’s been making noises about expansion, too.”

“Turf wars are always gonna happen,” Lincoln said. “That’s all Vietnam is, really. A turf war, just on a bigger scale.”

“I don’t want you to worry about us, Lincoln,” Sammy said, banging his brandy snifter on the table for emphasis. “You got to have a clear head out there. We’re fine, really.”

Ellis made a scoffing noise, but a glare from Sammy silenced him. Lincoln didn’t like it. Sammy had always been straight with him, whether the news was good or bad. There had been plenty of the latter, from Perla’s death to the ins and outs of the family “business.”

He had never tried to hide the nature of that business from Lincoln, or apologize for it. Yes, he admitted, he was a crime boss. But the reasons for that were complex, and mostly beyond his control. In the American South in which Sammy had grown up, opportunities for men of color had been limited at best. He could have toiled at a menial blue-collar job like a janitor or garbage man, or worked in some white farmer’s fields, or he could have joined the crew of a fishing boat.

But Sammy had been born just more than a half century removed from slavery, and his own father had been a sharecropper. He wasn’t interested in an occupation that smacked of that evil institution in any way. The occupations whites had decided were good enough for the descendants of slaves were meant, he believed, to keep black men in their “proper” place and to limit economic advancement and the choices that came with it—choices like where to live and with whom to associate.

Sammy didn’t want to be limited in those ways. He wanted to take what he could, and if it meant breaking the white man’s laws, that was a bonus as far as he was concerned. So he had turned his back on those “acceptable” professions and instead used his wits and his cunning and an occasional ruthless streak to make his own way in the world. Now he was one of the wealthiest black men in New Bordeaux, with legitimate businesses—like Perla’s Nightclub, the jazz club he owned in the Delray Hollow district—that he ran alongside his illegal ones.

Lincoln remembered the first time Sammy had explained these things to him, with a solemnity resembling that with which Lincoln had heard some parents explained the mysteries of sex. He had taken Lincoln into his study and sat him down in a chair that dwarfed the boy, and he’d explained that there were activities, like lotteries, that were frowned upon by white society, even though when nobody was looking just as many white folks were drawn to them as black folks. The Robinson family fortune had, Sammy explained, been made by catering to those desires. He was quick to stress that there was nothing wrong with that. “We don’t have anything to do with products that hurt our own,” he’d said. “Putting down a dollar in hopes of making a thousand, well, that’s not gonna deprive a family of a roof over their head or food on the table. Might just put more food on the table, in fact, and patch some holes in that roof in the bargain. Some men got the urge to gamble; some got the urge to cat around. As long as none of our own folks are getting hurt, we help them enjoy those things they’re gonna do anyway.”

Lincoln had learned, as the years passed, that the business was a bit more complicated than that. In that first conversation, Sammy hadn’t said anything about taking a competitor who’d dared to tread on Black Mob turf into a neighborhood slaughterhouse and feeding him through the meat grinder. Then again, those parents describing the wonders of human reproduction never went into detail about the nuts and bolts of it, either.

When the evening ended, Sammy and Ellis dropped him off at his barracks. Special Warfare School would begin the next day. He would take abbreviated classes in unconventional warfare, psychological warfare, and counterinsurgency—classes designed to make him the kind of soldier the Army needed in the decidedly unconventional landscape of the Vietnam conflict.

But that night, he hugged the only father and brother he had ever known. Both squeezed him tight, and Lincoln saw a tear in Sammy’s eye when he said, “You take care over there, Lincoln. Like I told you from the start, we need you back home. If wearing that Green Beret means you make a little more money and get back sooner, that’s okay, but I don’t want you taking any foolish chances. I hate having you over there in the first place.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Lincoln said with a chuckle. “I’ll get home just as soon as I can.”

“In one piece, I hope,” Ellis added quietly when he embraced his brother. “I’m not worried about you, but he frets like an old lady.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lincoln muttered. “He’ll whup you just to prove you wrong.”

Ellis and Lincoln had laughed at that, and then Sammy and Ellis were gone and Lincoln turned to walk into a barracks full of men he’d never seen before and who might well resent the fact that he was there for a few months instead of a full year.

4

Because he was traveling solo instead of with his unit, he flew back to Vietnam on a commercial flight, aboard a Pan Am jet that landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport on a hot evening with a steady rain. He crossed the tarmac with his gear in his arms, feeling the rain splash against his face and breathing in the unique blend of jet fuel, garbage, and night-blooming flowers that would always say Vietnam to him.

He had left Vietnam as Private Clay, but when he returned, he was Corporal Lincoln Clay, assigned to Detachment A-101, C Company, 5th Special Forces Group. Instead of returning to his unit, he was sent to a Special Forces Operating Base—an SFOB—near the 17th Parallel, which was the line that had been drawn to divide North and South Vietnam. The Special Forces troops at the SFOB were an A Team—officially advisers, not combatants, under the command of a B Team headquarters situated in Danang. He hitched a ride there on a helicopter carrying two government bureaucrats from Washington who, Lincoln guessed from their manner, had enjoyed their few days in Saigon a bit too heartily, and a reporter from the New York Times who ignored Lincoln in favor of badgering the hungover guys in suits.

Three days after landing in Saigon, he was on the ground at the Lang Vei Special Forces Camp in Quang Tri Province, seven kilometers down Route 9 from where the Marines were busy building a major base at Khe Sanh. The terrain was mountainous, and the blades of the helicopter that had brought him there whipped dense fog into a funnel as it ascended again.

The camp was a chaotic-seeming assemblage of thatched huts and concrete bunkers. The dominant feature was a two-story concrete tower that Lincoln would learn was the TOC, the Tactical Operations Center.

Lincoln stood there as a second lieutenant greeted the bureaucrats and led them toward the TOC. A sergeant did the same with the reporter. Finally, after several minutes alone, a corporal emerged from the fog.

“You lost?”

“I’m Corporal Clay.” He patted the pocket containing his orders, as if that would mean anything to the other soldier. “I’ve been assigned here.”

The corporal eyed him. He was a white guy who hadn’t shaved in a week or so and maybe hadn’t bathed, either. His shirt hung open, and a scar that Lincoln thought looked as though it had been made by a knife puckered the flesh of his sternum. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “You can still run, and I’ll pretend I didn’t see you.”

“Run where? All the way back to Saigon?”

“All the way back to Fort Bragg, if you know what’s good for you. Lang Vei is the shithole of Vietnam.” The corporal pointed north, then west. “Go any farther north and you’re in North Vietnam. Laos is just two clicks over there. It’s been pretty quiet lately, but that could change any time.”

“I guess I’m here to stay,” Lincoln said.

The other man shrugged. “I’ll show you the team house. Captain’s in the TOC, but he’s got guests so you can meet him later.”

“I flew in with them. They were looking pretty green.”

“Saigon will do that to you. Lincoln, huh?”

“That’s right. Lincoln, like the president.”

“I’m Stephens,” the man said. “Duncan, like the yo-yo.”

On the way to the team house, they passed more indigenous faces than American ones. Stephens explained that there were only twenty-four Special Forces soldiers at the camp, but the force included a whole company of Montagnard tribesmen and three South Vietnamese rifle companies.

“Twenty-three now, actually,” Stephens corrected himself. “Well, you make twenty-four, I guess. You’re replacing DuPage.”

“What happened to him?”

“He threw a grenade.”

The answer confused Lincoln. “He threw it?”

“It hit a tree and bounced back. Everybody scrambled, but he was too slow. Surprised that it came back at him, I think. Anyway, he was still standing there when it went off.”

“That’s some shitty luck,” Lincoln said.

“Bad luck for him, bad luck for you.”

“Me?”

Stephens shrugged again. “Everybody liked DuPage. You live long enough, maybe they’ll like you, too.”

“Or maybe not?”

“Chance you take,” Stephens said. “Sure you don’t want to run?”

“I’ll stay,” Lincoln replied. “I’ll take that chance.”

* * *

There were a half dozen guys in the team house. A couple were smoking on their bunks, one reading a paperback book. Three others played cards around a table laden with ashtrays and soda cans and a few beer bottles. One sat on his bunk in his underwear, strumming an acoustic guitar and mumbling the words to some song Lincoln didn’t know.

Lincoln suppressed a smile when he saw the table. Where there were booze, smokes, and gambling, there was money to be made. He would just have to figure out what the supply lines were and take them over for himself.

Everybody except the guitarist looked up when Lincoln trailed Stephens inside. Stephens pointed to an empty bunk, and Lincoln dropped his duffel onto it.

“That’s DuPage’s bunk,” the guitarist said. He hadn’t raised his eyes.

“I guess it’s mine now,” Lincoln said.

The guitarist shook his head slowly. “No respect for the dead.”

“What do you want me to do, sleep on the floor?”

“Or outside. It don’t make any difference to me.”

“I’m pretty sure DuPage won’t care.”

“You didn’t know him,” the soldier with the book said. He set it down on the bunk, pages down, spine up. “He was from Alabama. He didn’t much care for colored folks. Having one sleeping in his bunk—he might just come back to haunt you.”

“I’m not too worried about ghosts,” Lincoln said.

“This here’s Lincoln Clay,” Stephens said. “Lincoln, like the president.”

The guy with the book barked a laugh. “Anybody DuPage hated worse than colored people, it was Lincoln.”

“He sounds like a charming dude,” Lincoln said. “Too bad he’s gone; we’d probably be best friends.”

The men all laughed at that, except the guitarist, who picked a mournful-sounding dirge.

* * *