I was waiting for my court-martial, and they were taking their own sweet time about it. I knew they were planning something special for me. The first clue came when they put me up in this rat-infested hotel, rather than the cell where I belonged. The door wasn’t even locked. After all, where could I go? I was famous now. Everyone knew my face. Where could I go, who would have me, who would hide me, after the awful thing I’d done? I was told to wait, so I waited. The Army wasn’t finished with me yet. I wasn’t surprised. The Army could always find work for a monster, in Viet Nam.
They finally came for me in the early hours of the morning. It’s an old trick. Catch a man off guard, while he’s still half-drugged with sleep, and his physical and mental defenses are at their dimmest. Except I was up and out of bed and on my feet the moment I heard footsteps outside my door, hands reaching for weapons I wasn’t allowed any more. It’s the first thing you learn in country, if you want to stay alive in country. So when the two armed guards kicked my door in, I was waiting for them. I smiled at them, showing my teeth, because I knew that upset people. Apparently I don’t smile like a person any more.
The guards didn’t react. Just gestured for me to leave the room and walk ahead of them. I made a point of gathering up a few things I didn’t need, just to show I wasn’t going to be hurried; but I was more eager to get going than they were. Finally, someone had made a decision. The Army was either going to give me a mission, or put me up against a wall and shoot me. And I really wasn’t sure which I wanted most.
I ended up in a cramped little room, far away from anything like official channels. My armed guard closed the door carefully behind me, and locked it from the outside. There was a chair facing a desk, and a man sitting behind the desk. I sat down in the chair without waiting to be asked, and the man smiled. He was big, bulk rather than fat, and his chair made quiet sounds of protest whenever he shifted his weight. He had a wide happy face under a shaven head, and he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He could have been a civilian contractor, or any of a dozen kinds of businessman, but he wasn’t. I knew who he was, what he had to be. Perhaps because one monster can always recognize another.
“You’re CIA,” I said, and he nodded quickly, smiling delightedly.
“And people say you’re crazy. How little they know, Captain Marlowe.”
I studied him thoughtfully. Despite myself, I was intrigued. It had been a long time since I met anyone who wasn’t afraid of me. The CIA man had a slim gray folder set out on the desk before him. Couldn’t have had more than half a dozen pages in it, but then, I’d only done one thing that mattered since they dropped me off here and bet me I couldn’t survive. Well, I showed them.
“You know my name,” I said. “What do I call you?”
“You call me ‘Sir.’” He laughed silently, enjoying the old joke. “People like me don’t have names. You should know that. Most of the time we’re lucky if we have job descriptions. Names come and go, but the work goes on. And you know what kind of work I’m talking about. All the nasty, necessary things that the Government, and the People, don’t need to know about. I operate without restrictions, without orders, and a lot of the time I make use of people like you, Captain Marlowe, because no one’s more expendable than a man with a death sentence hanging over him. I can do anything I want with you; and no one will give a damn.”
“Situation entirely normal, then,” I said. “Sir.”
He flashed me another of his wide, meaningless smiles, and leafed quickly through the papers in my file. There were photos too, and he took his time going through them. He didn’t flinch once. He finally closed the file, tapped the blank cover with a heavy finger a few times, and then met my gaze squarely.
“You have been a bad boy, haven’t you, Captain? One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children, including babes in arms, all wiped out, slaughtered, on one very busy afternoon, deep in country. You shot them until you ran out of bullets, you bayoneted them until the blade broke, and then you finished the rest off with the butt of your rifle, your bare hands, and a series of improvised blunt instruments. You broke in skulls, you tore out throats, you ripped out organs and you ate them. When your company finally caught up with you, you were sitting soaking your bare feet in the river, surrounded by the dead, soaked in their blood, calmly smoking a cigarette. Was it an enemy village, Captain?”
“No.”
“Did anyone attack you, threaten you?”
“No.”
“So why did you butcher an entire village of civilians, Captain Marlowe?”
I showed him my smile again. “Because it was there. Because I didn’t like the way they looked at me. Does it matter?”