Black Market

His chest was pounding nonstop now. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, like a huge machine was inside there. Making ice or something equally noisy. He had to look back.

Oh, brother! Oh boy, oh boy!

Nobody was behind him.

Nobody!

It was completely quiet in the backyard. Nothing moved. His lunch box lay in the middle of the snow. It glowed a little in the dark.

Mickey squinted real hard. He was feeling pretty stupid now. He'd made it all up; he was almost sure of it… But he still wasn't going to go back and pick up his lunch box. Maybe in the morning. Maybe in the spring sometime.

What a little baby! Afraid of the dark! He finally went in the house.

Mary K. was in the kitchen dicing vegetables with a big knife on the butcher block. The TV was turned on to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

“How was practice, Mickey Mouse? You look beat up. Wash, huh? Di

“Oh, uh… I don't know how to do a stupid lay-up. It was okay.”

Then Mickey Kevin smoothly disappeared, slid like a shadow into the downstairs bathroom. He didn't wash his hands and face, though, and he didn't turn on the overhead light.

Very slowly, he lifted a handful of lace curtain. He stared out into the dark, very creepola backyard, squinting his eyes tightly again.

He still couldn't see anybody.

The stupid cat, their stupid cat Mortimer, was playing with his lunch box. There was nobody else. Nobody had really chased him, he was suddenly sure.

But Mickey Kevin couldn't see the real-life bogeyman watching the Carroll house from the darkened back lot. He couldn't see the fearsome Sten machine pistol or the man holding it, fingering it so expertly.

Washington, D.C.

It was just after five o'clock when Colonel Duriel Williamson strode into a windowless office hidden away inside the twenty-nine-acre concrete complex known as the Pentagon.

Arch Carroll was already waiting in the Spartan, bureaucratic green room. So was Captain Pete Hawkins, who had formally escorted Carroll from the visitor's pickup desk back through the dizzying grid of tightly interlocking Pentagon corridors.

Colonel Williamson was an imposing black man. He was in the full-dress uniform of the U.S. Special Forces-including a blood-red beret, cocked jauntily. His hair, a bristly salt and pepper, was regulation length and looked appropriately stern. His voice was starched but showed heavy hints of irony.

Everything about Duriel Williamson said “No bullshit permitted here. State your business, mister.”

Captain Hawkins made the introductions in a polite if strictly formal military fashion. Hawkins was clearly a career bureaucrat, a survivor.

“Mr. Archer Carroll from the Defense Intelligence Agency, on special assignment by order of the president… Colonel Duriel Williamson from Special Forces. Colonel Williamson is stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Colonel Williamson was David Hudson's immediate superior during both phases of his Special Forces training. Colonel, Mr. Carroll is here to ask you some questions.”

The Special Forces officer smiled amicably. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Carroll. May I sit down?”

“Please, Colonel,” Carroll said. Both men sat down, followed by Captain Hawkins, who would remain in the room for the interview, a matter of protocol.

“What is it you need to know about David?”

“The two of you were on a first-name basis?”

“Yes, I knew David Hudson fairly well. I should amend that, to be as accurate as possible. I spent some time with David Hudson. Not at or because of the Special Forces school. This was after the war. I bumped into him a few times. At different veterans affairs, mostly. We were both active. We had a couple of beers together a couple of times.”

“Tell me about it, Colonel. What was Hudson like? What was he like to have a beer with?”

Carroll controlled his eagerness to ask more probing questions. His mind was still clouded from the long morning at the FBI, but he knew better than to pressure a Special Forces colonel.

“David Hudson was stiff at first. Though he tried like the devil not to be. Then he was just fine. He knew a lot about a lot of things. He was a thoughtful man, extremely bright.”

“Colonel Hudson's army career seemed to disintegrate after Vietnam. Do you know why?”

Duriel Williamson shrugged. “That's something that's always troubled me. All I can say is that David Hudson was a very outspoken man.”

“Meaning, Colonel?” Carroll continued to probe carefully.

“Meaning he was capable of making important enemies inside the army… He was also extremely disappointed. Bitter, I guess is the better word.”

Bitter, Carroll thought. Exactly how bitter? He studied the colonel in silence.

“The treatment our men got after Vietnam made David Hudson a very angry person. I think it disillusioned him more than most of us. He considered it a natural disgrace. He blamed President Nixon at first. He wrote personal letters to the president, also to the chief of staff.”

“Just letters? Was that the extent of his protests for the veterans?” I need somebody, Carroll thought, with the kind of bitterness that would go well beyond letters. Hell, anybody could sit down and write a crank letter.

“Actually, no. He was involved in several of the more vocal protests.”

“Colonel, any answers you can elaborate on would be helpful. I've got all night to listen.”

“He called attention to Washington 's long string of broken promises to our veterans. All the betrayals. ‘The disposable GI’ was a phrase he liked to use… Let me tell you, Mr. Carroll, that kind of high-profile activity can earn you a fast assignment to Timbuktu, or to some Podunk reserve unit. That would put him in the Pentagon computers, too. Hudson was very active with radical veterans.”

“What about his training at the Special Forces school? At Fort Bragg?” Carroll then asked. “Colonel, please try to be thorough.”

“Some of this was quite a while ago. It didn't seem so important at the time. I'll try.”

For almost an hour Colonel Williamson painstakingly described a brilliant young army officer, with boundless energy, with small-town American enthusiasm and talent-a model soldier. Many of the epithets Carroll had read earlier in the 211 files, he heard again from Colonel Williamson.

“What I remember most, though,” Williamson said, “what stands out to this day about Hudson, is the time at Fort Bragg. We were instructed to push and drive him. Push him to his physical and emotional limits. We redlined David Hudson at Bragg.”

“More than other officers who were assigned to the Bragg program?”

“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Without any doubt we pushed him more. No punches were pulled. His POW experience was used to pump up his hatred for ‘our enemies.’ Hudson was programmed to seek revenge, to hate. In my opinion, he was a walking time bomb.”

“Who instructed you to do that, Colonel? Who told you to push Colonel Hudson? Somebody obviously must have singled him out for special attention.”

Colonel Hudson paused. His dark eyes didn't leave Carroll's face, but there was a perceptible change in him. Carroll couldn't quite read the change at first.

“I suppose you're right. At this point, uh, after all these years… I'm not sure I can tell you who, though… Isn't that fu

“But his training wasn't typical, not the regular course? His was different somehow?”

“Yes. David Hudson's training at Fort Bragg was beyond the established norm, which was demanding in itself.”

“Give me some idea, Colonel. Put me at the training camp. Can you make it come alive for me? What was the actual training like?”