Afterburn Read Free Page A

planes, the most advanced fighting machines ever built, did not have radar . It was fucking political. Some guys dropped ordnance anyway, claimed a rack malfunction. The Pentagon didn't appreciate the variables—the weather, the changing SAM sites, the uncertainty of MiG resistance. And the MiGs had a distinct initial advantage over the American planes. Smaller and not laden with ordnance, they turned much tighter circles than American jets, and could achieve the dominant six o'clock position—the position in which you would get banged up the ass by a Chinese missile. Hanoi had the most ornate local airspace defense system on the globe: hundreds of computer-linked SAM sites that could throw up a canopy of protection. On the city's outskirts 100-millimeter gun emplacements waved ten-thousand-foot whips of steel. The thought of it made him twist at night, made him feel he was digesting his own innards. He could get shot down. He could go from flesh to flame.
    But you weren't supposed to dwell on it—might make you tentative, weak. Yet how could he not? He'd flown over Hao Lo Prison in Hanoi, the Hanoi Hilton. The compound was laid out in a diamond, and much was known about what went on inside. Built by the French, Hao Lo served as North Vietnam's main prison and as headquarters for the country's penitentiary system. It occupied nearly a city block. The massive sixteen-foot walls were topped by thousands of shards of broken champagne bottles. Three strands of barbed wire, the top one electrified. No American flier had ever successfully escaped the Hanoi Hilton. Nonetheless, word about the inside had filtered out through CIA operatives working in Hanoi, via the ingeniously coded letters of airmen to their wives that the North Vietnamese sporadically allowed, and from the few "reeducated" prisoners Hanoi had released. He preferred to think about the American pilot who had appeared on Japanese television, which the U.S. monitored. The pilot, clean-shaven, dressed in fresh pajamas, had been forced to say he and other POWs were being well fed, supplied with cigarettes, and attended to by doctors. This the pilot did with odd pauses: When the intelligence people first looked at the films, they wondered if he had been drugged. In fact, the pilot hadn't been—he was just concentrating. The advisers realized he was flashing a message in Morse code with his eyelids: torture . Some CIA men had shown the film during a briefing on Hao Lo. In the prison, the Americans lived in one of four areas: Camp Unity, Las Vegas, Heartbreak, or New Guy Village. The rooms had names: the Meathook Room, the Knobby Room (the walls were studded with knobs of acoustical plaster to absorb screams), Rawhide, the Quiz Room, Calcutta. The North Vietnamese were effective torturers, having been so effectively tortured by the French.
    It was also known that American POWs communicated with two codes: the standard POW mute code, which utilized hand signals, and the "AFLQV" auditory code, first developed by American POWs in Korea, much faster to learn than Morse, and worth practicing for an hour each week, which he did—in case he might need it. Each letter headed a line of five letters in a twenty-five-letter square:
     
A B C D E
F G H I J
L M N O P
Q R S T U
V W X Y Z
     
    The letter K was dropped and replaced with the letter C. The first signal identified the row: Two quick taps, for example, meant the F row. The second signal identified the column. A tap, tap, tap . . . tap, tap meant M. The pause was longer between letters. A 3, 2—1, 1—3, 3 sequence spelled MAN. By this time shortcuts and adaptations for visual use had evolved, including scratching, coughing, spitting—anything to keep the North Vietnamese guessing. Anything to pretend to hope.
    He tried not to think about it. But being a POW was a chilling prospect. The North Vietnamese had signed the 1949 Geneva Convention treaty but refused to apply its prisoner-of-war edicts to captured American