Special Ops Page 5

  “Did he?” Hanrahan said.

  “Well, since the subject of medals had come up,” Lunsford said, “I told Van de Waele about how Portet had come into the Immoquateur like John Wayne, his weapon blazing, dropping bad guys all over. . . .”

  “And?”

  “Van de Waele said he was pretty sure he could get Jack a medal, Second Class, and then some Congo colonel got in the act and said he was sure General Mobutu, the Congolese chief of staff, would want to decorate the both of us—”

  “Was this before or after you mentioned Jack wasn’t supposed to be in Stanleyville in the first place?”

  “Now that you mention it, that may have come up in the conversation. ” Lunsford paused, and met Hanrahan’s eyes. “It wasn’t all bullshit, what I told Van de Waele about Jack. He’s one hell of a soldier, General.”

  “Who, by his own admission, disobeyed a direct order to jump on Stanleyville.”

  Lunsford shrugged, and then he began to cough. His body shook with the effort, and when he finally stopped, his face was sweat-soaked.

  “Why aren’t you in Walter Reed?” Hanrahan asked. “For that matter, why aren’t you in the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt?”

  “Now that you mention it, mon général, it might be a good idea to call Walter Reed and tell them where I am. I think they might be wondering where I am about now.”

  “Goddamn it, Father! You’re AWOL from Walter Reed, aren’t you?”

  “In a manner of speaking, sir.”

  “Why the hell did you come here?”

  “When I looked out of the window of the Immoquateur and saw John Wayne here leading the cavalry to the rescue, I figured I really owed that guy, whoever he was. Then I found out who he was and what he had done, and I figured I owed it to him to do what I could to get him off the hook. So I came here.”

  “Did you see Colonel Felter over there, Father?”

  “Yes, sir, he was at Kamina.”

  “So he knows about Portet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And?”

  “There was an Air Force colonel flying the presidential Special Missions DC-9 at Kamina. Felter told him to get Portet to Fort Bragg by the most expeditious means. When we got to Washington, the Learjet was waiting for us, and we came here.”

  “Instead of you checking into Walter Reed, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hanrahan shook his head in resignation.

  “And did Colonel Felter have anything to say to you, Sergeant Portet?”

  “Yes, sir. He told me to report to you and keep out of sight until I heard from him.”

  “That’s all?”

  Portet hesitated, then dug in his pocket and came up with a set of Belgian parachutist’s wings.

  “He gave me these, sir.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing them?”

  “I wasn’t sure I was entitled to them, sir.”

  “You’re entitled to them,” Hanrahan said. “You earned them the hard way. The medals are something else. You need to get congressional approval to accept them.”

  “Colonel Felter told Colonel Van de Waele he didn’t think there would be any problem about that, sir,” Lunsford said.

  Hanrahan shook his head again.

  “Well, gentlemen, as I said before, welcome home,” he said. “Now, before I throw your ass in the hospital, Father, and bury you at Camp Mackall, Sergeant, is there any little thing I can do for either of you?”

  “I could use another little taste of the scotch, General,” Captain Lunsford said.

  “One more, Father, and that’s it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Jack?”

  “I’d like to call Marjorie, sir.”

  “There’s a phone in the kitchen.”

  II

  [ ONE ]

  Quarters #1

  Fort Rucker, Alabama

  1605 1 December 1964

  As Major General Robert F. Bellmon, sitting in the rear seat of his 1963 Chevrolet staff car, rolled up the driveway to the quarters provided for the commanding general, U.S. Army Aviation Center and Fort Rucker, he had a thought he frequently had under the circumstances:

  If I wasn’t the CG, I damned sure wouldn’t live here.

  It did not mean that he felt honored and grateful that the U.S. Army was providing him, as a token of its respect for him personally, or the office he held, with such magnificent living accommodations, but quite the reverse.

  He hated the place. He thought it was the sort of home in which a manager of the Farm Bureau Insurance Company would live; or the assistant vice president of a very small bank; or a moderately successful used car salesman.

  He knew where the commanding general of Fort Benning, Georgia, a fellow major general, hung his hat. Quarters #1 at Benning was “Riverside,” a charming old southern mansion. And he knew where the commanding general of Fort Knox, Kentucky, another fellow major general, hung his: in a very nice two-story brick colonial house with a very nice rose garden behind it.

  Quarters #1 at Fort Rucker was a single-story frame building built just a few years before. You had to look close to see that it was larger—only slightly larger—than the sea of officers’ quarters built nearby. Among the many other adjectives that frequently came to his mind when thinking about it was “pedestrian. ”

  But he was the commanding general, and he had to live in the commanding general’s quarters, although he would have much preferred to live elsewhere. There were a number of nice houses available on the civilian market in Ozark and Enterprise and Dothan, the nearest towns to Fort Rucker. And he could afford the rent. He was not a wealthy man, but he was comfortable; he didn’t have to live on his Army pay.

  There were two cars in the carport—the damned place didn’t even have a garage—and three more on the concrete pavement in front of it. And the driveway was inadequate. If, for example, Barbara (Mrs. Robert F.) Bellmon wanted to go someplace in her Oldsmobile 98, now in the carport, at least two of the other cars would have to be moved out of the way. The Oldsmobile had a blue sticker, an officer’s sticker, on its bumpers, reading FORT RUCKER ALA 1.

  Parked beside the Oldsmobile was a glistening, flaming-red Jaguar V12 convertible. It carried a red bumper sticker reading FORT RUCKER ALA 9447. Red stickers were issued to enlisted men; civilian employees of the post got green stickers.

  The Jaguar was the POV of Sergeant Jacques Portet, whom Barbara Bellmon referred to as “Marjorie’s Young Man.” Jack had left the Jaguar in Marjorie’s care while he was off on what was euphemistically called “temporary duty.”

  Jack had been assigned to Fort Rucker when he finished basic training. He was not the only young man with a commercial pilot’s license to be drafted—although as far as Bellmon knew, he was the only one with an Air Transport Rating (ATR) in multi-engine jet and piston aircraft—or to decide that two years’ service as an enlisted man was preferable to three years as a lieutenant, and some provision had been made to use their special talents.

  Not nearly enough provision, in Bellmon’s opinion. He regarded the army regulations that governed people like Jack as incredibly stupid, to the point where he’d written the assistant chief of staff for personnel about them.

  It would be a sound Army policy, he had written, to send young men possessed of a college degree and a commercial pilot’s license, with instrument ticket, before an officer selection board. If they got through that, they could be commissioned, sent to a short course in how to be behave as an officer, then another short flying course, to familiarize themselves with military flying, and then be sent to a unit.

  That would, he had written, provide the Army with experienced junior officer pilots in far less time than it presently took to train young officers how to fly. Based on what he called “an informal survey of such enlisted men” (by which he meant that he had sought out and spoken with the dozen or so at Fort Rucker), an “overwhelming majority” (by which he meant all but one of the men he had talked to) had
expressed willingness to serve as pilots, even if that meant service in Vietnam if the Army would permit them to do so.

  What they were not willing to do was serve more time in the service than other draftees. The Army, so far as Bellmon was concerned, compounded the original stupidity of not directly commissioning such young men by adding what they regarded as a punishment for having gone to college and knowing how to fly.

  If they accepted a commission, which meant they would have to serve three years in uniform instead of two, that three years would start the day they were commissioned, with no credit given for the time they had spent as enlisted men, which would be at least six months, and often longer. And then this stupidity was further compounded, should they volunteer to fly, by recomputing the three years’ service required to start the day they were awarded their wings.

  The reply to Bellmon’s letter from the assistant chief of staff for personnel said, in effect, and more or less politely, We don’t try to tell you how to run Army Aviation, please don’t try to tell us how to run our officer procurement programs.

  Bellmon was very sympathetic to Jack Portet’s refusal to accept a commission, but he often thought that his mother and father—especially his mother—were spinning in their graves at the thought that Marjorie’s Young Man was not a commissioned officer and gentleman.

  What Jack would ordinarily have done at the Army Aviation Center was become a teacher of navigation, or radio procedures, or something similar in ground school, or find himself assigned to the Army Aviation Board, or the Instrument Examiner Board, where there were many places an experienced pilot forbidden to fly could make himself useful.

  Private Portet, because of his ATR, had been assigned to the Instrument Board. That raised the number of ATRs at the Board to two. The other belonged to Major Pappy Hodges, the president of the Board.

  When Private Portet opened a bank account at the Bank of Ozark, the teller on duty was Miss Marjorie Bellmon, on her first job out of college. Bellmon thought privately that his previously levelheaded daughter had suddenly lost her senses. His wife called it “love at first sight.” Bellmon thought of it as pure and unbridled lust at first sight, with Marjorie cooing like a dove, and Jack pawing at the ground like a stallion in heat.

  At first, Romeo and Juliet had thought, with good reason, that they were lucky. Jack had immediately been declared an “essential to mission” enlisted man, which would keep him from being stolen by other aviation activities who would kill to have someone with an ATR. That meant he would spend the remainder of his draftee service at Fort Rucker, which meant he would not be sent to the growing war in Vietnam as an infantry private.

  What Marjorie and Jack did not know was that Private Portet had come to the attention of Colonel Sanford T. Felter even before he had completed basic training.

  Felter was convinced the United States was about to become involved in the ex-Congo Belge. There were very few people in the Army who spoke Swahili. At Felter’s orders, records were scoured for anyone who spoke the language, and Portet’s name had come up.

  The situation in the Congo had grown much worse much more quickly than anyone, including Colonel Sanford Felter, thought it would.

  Thousands of square miles of the ex-Congo Belge, including Stanleyville, had fallen to the “Simba Army of Liberation,” commanded by Joseph Olenga. There was no question that Olenga was a savage, and there was considerable reason to believe that he was insane, as well. Neither was there any question that he was being supported to some degree by the Soviet Union.

  Sixteen hundred “Europeans” were being held hostage by Olenga, who regularly proved his willingness to execute them all if he didn’t get his way by murdering two or more a day in the Center Square of Stanleyville.

  The “Europeans” included the staff of the U.S. Consulate in Stanleyville, and sixty-odd other Americans, including Jack Portet’s stepmother and sister who had been caught there returning to Léopoldville from Europe with Ursula Craig and her infant son. Ursula’s husband was a Green Beret lieutenant undergoing flight training at Fort Rucker.

  The President of the United States had signed “a finding,” which meant that he had determined that a covert operation was necessary. Something had to be done about the Simbas, and not only because of the Americans the Simbas held captive.

  Covert operations of this type are normally given to the CIA. The President gave Operation Dragon Rouge to the military, and specifically named Colonel Sanford T. Felter as “action officer.” It was generally believed this was the President’s method of expressing his dissatisfaction with the CIA and its formal conclusion that there would be no trouble in the Congo in the foreseeable future.

  Felter had immediately taken several steps to accomplish his mission. The first had been to instruct the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare to prepare to mount an operation that would be landed by parachute to seize the airfield at Stanleyville. Brigadier General “Red” Hanrahan was advised that he would be sent a young man who knew the Congo, and Stanleyville in particular, intimately, to help plan the operation.

  The “essential to mission” classification of Private Portet at the Instrument Board fell to his being essential to the presidentially directed mission of Colonel Sanford T. Felter.

  Bob Bellmon’s reaction to the sudden transfer of Private Portet to Fort Bragg was relief. “Out of sight, out of mind” occurred to him, and he had never believed that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  The next thing Bellmon had heard about Private Portet was from a very upset Marjorie, who returned from a brief weekend visit to Fort Bragg to announce that Jack was now a PFC, having qualified as a parachutist in a “special course” and was looking forward to becoming a sergeant, which would take place immediately on his graduation from a Special Forces “special course” at Camp Mackall.

  “What the hell’s going on, Daddy?” Marjorie, torn between fury and tearful concern, had demanded. “They can’t do that, can they? Doesn’t it take four weeks for jump school and a year to get through Special Forces training?”

  The reply that came to his lips and nearly escaped was “Nothing those crazy bastards do surprises me anymore, honey.”

  What he said was “I’ll see what I can find out, honey.”

  There was a grain of reason in the madness, he found out, by making an en-route-to-Washington fuel stop in North Carolina, and cornering his old friend Brigadier General Hanrahan in his quarters.

  “You’re not supposed to know anything about Dragon Rouge, Bob, and you know it, and I have never even heard the name. But hypothetically speaking, do you really think that if there were such an operation, I would send a kid—he’s a really nice young man, by the way, and Marjorie’s really gone on him, isn’t she?— on it?”

  “It would appear that way. You were saying, Red?”

  “If there were such an operation, and we both know there isn’t, but if there were, and your expert about the landing zone was a private soldier, would you pay as much attention to him as you would if he were a Green Beret and a sergeant?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Three master parachutists gave him a thirty-six-hour course that taught him more than he would have learned in four weeks at Benning. And now he’s getting the same sort of training by one of my A Teams at Mackall. He’ll come out of Mackall trained, and qualified to wear a beret. When he talks to people, they’ll listen to him. But he’s not going anywhere near where this hypothetical operation we’re talking about is going down. He probably won’t even leave the States.”

  When Major General Robert F. Bellmon walked into his living room. Marjorie was sitting before the television, but not seeing anything.

  “How goes it, honey?” he asked.

  Until today, there had been very little about Dragon Rouge in the newspapers or on TV, except that an action to rescue the Europeans was under way. No journalists had been permitted to accompany the parachutists, and Joseph Kasavubu, the President of the Congo,
had imposed an embargo on any news of the operation that had been lifted only twelve hours before.

  “Did you find out anything for me?” Marjorie asked.

  “No. I told you I have no need-to-know, and I know better than to ask. If something had happened to Jack, we would have heard. Sandy would have got word to us.”

  “No news is good news, right?” she said sarcastically. He chose to let it pass.

  “If I had to make a guess,” he said, “Jack is probably on Ascension Island. That’s as far as they would let him go. And the C-130s probably didn’t return that way; their mission was to get the people rescued back here as quickly as they could. So he’s out there waiting for transportation.”

  He handed her The New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution.

  “I asked somebody to get these for me,” he said. “For you. They’ll have more in them that that goddamned Dothan Eagle.”

  The same picture was on the front page of both newspapers, over the caption “Bloody-Bandaged, Battle-Weary, Belgian Paratrooper Tenderly Comforts Rescued Girl In Stanleyville.”

  Marjorie glanced at the picture and started reading the story.

  “They killed that doctor,” General Bellmon said.

  “What?” Marjorie asked, and looked up at him.

  “I said they killed that doctor, the missionary? Carlson? It’s in there. Just shot him down in cold blood, as the parachutists were taking the town.”

  “Oh, my God!” Marjorie wailed.

  General Bellmon looked at his daughter in surprise.

  “What?”

  “Look at that!” she said, thrusting the Constitution at him.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “That’s no Belgian paratrooper,” Marjorie said, tears running down her face. “That’s my Jack! I can tell by his eyes! And that little girl is his sister. I’ve seen pictures of her. Oh, my God, he’s been shot in the face!”

  General Bellmon examined the photograph carefully.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I think that’s Jack, all right.” Then he raised his voice. “Barbara! Come take a look at this!”