Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [95]
Carroll got up from the mess of official papers and wandered around the research library room.
Okay—what did he have here?
A leader, a natural soldier, who somewhere along the way had fucked up royally.
Or maybe Hudson had been royally fucked?
There were probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of men like David Hudson across the country. Some of them went berserk and had to be removed to the “screaming floors” in VA hospitals. Others sat quietly in dingy, lonely rooms and ticked slowly, like time bombs.
Colonel David Hudson? … Was he Green Band?
Samantha Hawes reappeared with a pot of coffee, deli sandwiches and assorted salads on a tray.
“Getting into it, I see.”
“Yes, it’s something, all right. Odd, and absolutely mesmerizing. Hard to figure though.”
Carroll rubbed the palms of his hands in circles over his red-rimmed eyes. “Thanks for the food, especially the coffee. The whole file is extraordinary. Colonel Hudson especially. He’s a very complex, very strange man. He was so perfect. The perfect soldier. Then what? “What happened to him after he returned to the States?”
Samantha Hawes sat down at the FBI researcher’s desk beside Carroll. She took a healthy bite of an overstuffed sandwich.
“As I said, there are some really peculiar gaps in his military records. In all of their records. Believe me, I look at enough of them to know.”
“What sort of peculiar gaps? What should be in there that isn’t?”
“Well. There were no written reports on his special training at Fort Bragg, for example. There was nothing on his ‘Q,’ or his Ranger training. There was almost nothing on his time as a POW. Those should all be in there. Marked highly confidential if need be, but definitely there in the file.”
“What else is missing? Would there be photostated copies or originals anywhere else?”
“There should be more psychological profiles. More reports after he lost his arm in Viet Nam. There’s very little on that. He was tortured by the Viet Cong. He apparently still has flashbacks. All the backup data on his POW experience is conveniently missing. I’ve never seen a 211 file without a complete psych workup, either.”
Carroll selected a second, thick roast beef sandwich half. “Maybe Hudson took them out himself?”
“I don’t know how he could get in here, but it makes as much sense as anything else I read yesterday.”
“Like? Please keep going, Samantha.”
“Like the way they made him a cipher right after Viet Nam. He had very high level intelligence clearance in Southeast Asia. He was a heavy commander in Viet Nam. Why would they give him such a nothing post back in the States? The arm? Then why not write it up that way?”
“Maybe that’s why he quit the service,” Carroll suggested. “The second-rate assignments once he got back home.”
“Maybe. Probably, I guess. But why did they do it to him in the first place?… They were grooming David Hudson before he came home. Believe me, they had serious plans for him. You can see tracks to glory all over those files. In the early years, anyway. Hudson was a real star.”
Carroll jotted down a few notes to himself. “What would a more predictable assignment have been? Once he was back in the States? If he was still on the fast track?”
“At the very least, he should have gotten the Pentagon. According to his records, he was on an extremely fast track. Until the disciplinary problems, anyway. He got all these bush-league assignments before he did anything to deserve them.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Not yet, anyway. Maybe they’ll know something at the Pentagon. That’s my next stop.”
Samantha Hawes put out her hand to shake. “My sincere condolences. The Pentagon makes this