The Road to Gandolfo Read Free Page B

was just one more condition: to continue his work for the inspector general’s office for an additional two years beyond the expiration of his army commitment. By that time, reasoned the superior officer, the mess in Indochina would be turned over to those messing, and the IG caseloads reduced or conveniently buried.
    Reenlistment or Leavenworth.
    So Major Sam Devereaux, patriotic citizen-soldier, extended his tour of duty. And the mess in Indochina was in no way lessened, but indeed turned over to the participants, and Devereaux was transferred back to Washington, D.C.
    One month and three days to go, he mused, as he looked out his office window and watched the MPs at the guardhouse check the automobiles driving out. It was after five; he had to catch a plane at Dulles in two hours. He had packed that morning and brought his suitcase to the office.
    The four years were coming to an end. Two plus two. The time spent, he reflected, might be resented, but it had not been wasted. The abyss of corruption that was Southeast Asia reached into the hierarchical corridors of Washington. The inhabitants of these corridors knew who he was; he had more offers from prestigious law firms than he could reply to, much less consider. And he did not want to consider them; he disapproved of them. Just as he disapproved of the current investigation on his desk.
    The manipulators were at it again. This time it was the thorough discrediting of a career officer named Hawkins. Lieutenant General MacKenzie Hawkins.
    At first Sam had been stunned. MacKenzie Hawkins was an original. A legend. The stuff of which cults wereborn. Cults slightly to the political right of Attila the Hun.
    Hawkins’s place in the military firmament was secure. Bantam Books published his biography—serialization and
Reader’s Digest
rights had been sold before a word was on paper. Hollywood gave obscene amounts of money to film his life story. And the antimilitarists made him an object of fascist-hatred.
    The biography was not overly successful because the subject was not overly cooperative. Apparently there were certain personal idiosyncrasies that did not enhance the image, four wives paramount among them. The motion picture was less than triumphant insofar as it comprised endless battle scenes with little or no hint of the man other than an actor squinting through the battle dust, yelling to his men in a peculiar lisp to “get those Godless … [Roar of cannon] … who would tear down Old Glory! At ’em, boys!”
    Hollywood, too, had discovered the four wives and certain other peculiarities of the studio’s on-the-set technical adviser. MacKenzie Hawkins went through starlets three at a time and had intercourse with the producer’s wife in the swimming pool while the producer watched in fury from the living room window.
    He did not stop the picture, however. For Christ’s sake, it was costing damn near
six mill
!
    These misfired endeavors might have caused another man to fade, if only from embarrassment, but not so Mac Hawkins. In private, among his peers, he ridiculed those responsible and regaled his associates with stories of Manhattan and Hollywood.
    He was sent to the war college with a new specialization: intelligence, clandestine operations. His peers felt a little more secure with the charismatic Hawkins consigned to covert activities. And the colonel became a brigadier and absorbed all there was to learn of his new specialty. He spent two years grinding away, studying every phase of intelligence work until the instructors had no more to instruct him.
    So he was sent to Saigon where the escalating hostilities had blossomed into a full-scale war. And in Vietnam—bothVietnams, and Laos, and Cambodia, and Thailand, and Burma—Hawkins corrupted the corruptors and the ideologues alike. Reports of his behind-the-lines and across-the-neutral-borders activities made “protective reaction” seem like a logical strategy. So unorthodox, so blatantly criminal