Without remorse - Tom Clancy [255]
Casual enough, Kelly thought from several hundred yards away. Those two must get along fairly well. His scrutiny of the camp was relaxed now. His greatest fear was that the guard force might send out security patrols, as a line unit in hostile country would surely have done. But they were not in hostile territory, and this was not really a line unit. His next radio message to Ogden confirmed that everything was within acceptable risk limits.
Sergeant Peter Meyer smoked. His father didn't approve, but accepted his son's weakness so long as he did it outside, as they were now, on the back porch of the parsonage after Sunday evening dinner.
'It's Doris Brown, right?' Peter asked. At twenty-six he was one of his department's youngest sergeants, and like most of the current class of police officers a Vietnam veteran. He was within six credit hours of completing his night-school degree and was considering making an application to the FBI Academy. Word that the wayward girl had returned was now circulating through the neighborhood. 'I remember her. She had a reputation as a hot number a few years back.'
'Peter, you know I can't say. This is a pastoral matter. I will counsel the person to speak to you when the time is right, but -'
'Pop, I understand the law on that, okay? You have to understand, we're talking two homicides here. Two dead people, plus the drug business.' He nipped the butt of his Salem into the grass. 'That's pretty heavy stuff. Pop.'
'Even worse than that,' his father reported more quietly still. 'They don't just kill the girls. Torture, sexual abuse. It's pretty horrible. The person is seeing a doctor about it. I know I have to do something, but I can't -'
'Yeah, I know you can't. Okay, I can call the people in Baltimore and fill them in on what you've told me. I really' ought to hold off until we can give them something they can really use, but, well, like you say, we have to do something. I'll call down first thing tomorrow morning.'
'Will it put her - the person - in danger?' the Reverend Meyer asked, vexed with himself for the slip.
'Shouldn't,' Peter judged. 'If she's gotten herself away - I mean, they ought not to know where she is, and if they did, they might have got her already.'
'How can people do things like that?'
Peter lit up another. His father was just too good a man to understand. Not that he did either. 'Pop, I see it all the time, and I have trouble believing it, too. The important part's getting the bastards.'
'Yes, I suppose it is.'
The KGB rezident in Hanoi had General-Major rank, and his job was mainly that of spying on his country's putative allies. What were their real objectives? Was their supposed estrangement with China real or a sham? Would they cooperate with the Soviet Union when and if war came to a successful conclusion? Might they allow the Soviet Navy use of a base after the Americans left? Was their political determination really as solid as they said it was? Those were all questions whose answers he thought he had, but orders from Moscow and his own skepticism about everyone and everything compelled him to keep asking. He employed agents within the CPVN, the country's Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere, Vietnamese whose willingness to give information to an allу would probably have meant death - though to be politic about it, the deaths would be disguised 'suicides' or 'accidents' because it was in neither country's interest to have a formal breach. Lip-service was even more important in a socialist country than a capitalist one, the General knew, because symbols were far easier to produce than reality.
The enciphered dispatch on his desk was interesting, all the more so since it did not give him direct guidance on what to do about it. How like the Moscow bureaucrats! Always quick to meddle in matters that he was able to handle himself, now they didn't know what to do - but they were afraid to do nothing. So they stuck him with it.
He knew about the camp, of course. Though a military-intelligence operation, he had