The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  “But—Janine is a beautiful name,” Enid exclaimed.

  “You really think so? Well, great. So yizzle all call me Jenny.”

  Everybody got along fine after that. In fact, Weems and Gussow got along so fine they became lovers and passed by the Sunday afternoon sessions with the Chinese officers for the first couple of weeks. Nobody else passed the officers by. Whin had been scragging a little Japanese girl at Camp Tempura a little bit but when they got the news about the Sundays she switched back.

  A Major Cal Wong was the greatest among a stand-out team of all-time greats, every girl agreed. He belonged to some far-out Taoist sect which was so keen on sex that it had, since the second century, accumulated a six-foot shelf of sex manuals such as: The Manual of Lady Mystery, The Secret Codes of the Jade Room, The Art of the Bedchamber and Important Guidelines of the Jade Room, and Major Wong had memorized them all. Wong was a practical poet of sex. He showed them all of the dozens of variations from “The Dragon Turns,” which was the old-fashioned missionary position with which several of the American girls were familiar; “The White Tiger Leaps,” which was the woman taken from behind, which Weems worked on with her traveling dildo, making Gussow gasp and whinny with pleasure; “The Fish Interlock Their Scales,” the woman on top, which was how Winn thought everybody did it; “Approaching the Fragrant Bamboo,” both standing; “The Jade Girl Plays the Flute,” in which Wong was able to instruct them with incredible variations and which made Enid so homesick for Bart; “The Butterflies Somersault,” “The Seagull Hovers,” “The Rabbit Nibbles the Hair” and other popular favorites. Each girl took a turn rotating with Major Wong at the two screwing sessions set aside each week. “That Wong,” Winn said. “Like he’s gone turn me off little chicks forever. He gone make me hate to leave this camp.” Oddly not one of them got jealous or possessive.

  The food was just as good as the sex, Chelito said. It was a long way from Mandarin cooking; as indigenous as the western Chinese dialect. Most of the food, the mess sergeant said, came up from the moist and mild Chengtu plain where everybody eats hot, red peppers to keep out the damp. Fish were scarce, but everything else was in long supply. The hot pepper stimulated the palate and the digestive juices, opening a spectrum of flavors. After the hot taste passed, in came the mellowness of the many-tastes: all flavors at once: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, fragrant and hot; each one tasted separately yet all of them tasted at once. Though basically army food, it was largely made with seasonings and relishes: hot, cold, and piquant sauces, prepared so artfully that the food was delivered into the mouth as a single, manifold flavor. It was dry, chewy food. Even the flavors had to be chewed. The Peking food, which Enid remembered, was soft and gliding. Their food, because it was now definitely their food and would stay with them for the rest of their lives, was food for the strong; food for chewers.

  28

  May 1971–November 1972

  Bart haunted the Far East for twenty-five days before he could understand that he wasn’t going to find Enid. General Heller had worked like a demon for him, living on the telephone, commandeering planes, lending weapons, and disclosing a network of his intimate connections with the underworlds from Hong Kong and Vientiane to Jakarta. He had Bart taken to meet the co-leaders of the Five Passport organization, who permitted him to cross-examine them. These men put out a dragnet in the eight most active crime cities in the Far East to shake out the kidnappers. Bart flew to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, which was called the heroin capital of Asia and, through his own connections from the old days, talked desperately to Corsican, French, American and Thai criminals. The MACV checked the CIA who checked the British Constabulary who checked every exit from the colony, by air, by sea, and across the Lo Wu bridge connecting Hong Kong with mainland China. They were looking for one woman among 4,200,000 people on 398 square miles. General Heller even got Bart an appointment with a Mr. T’ai-shan, a Chinese banker of influence who amiably agreed to notify all authorities concerned with such matters in the People’s Republic, although he took pains to explain to Bart that the concealment of a Caucasian woman inside China would be impossible.

  Bart’s body enclosed his memory; all else was gone. If Enid was not with him he lost contact with his feelings: he did not exist. Uncle Herbert was urging him to come home to prepare for his campaign for election to the Senate. Uncle Herbert was blunt: Bart must come home and face the great responsibility on which he had already spent so much to win his party’s loyalty. When Bart demurred, he was reminded by his uncle that there was no going back. Zombie though he had become, Bart loyally responded to the quaint threat. So, on the twenty-fifth day of his despair, Bart flew to Washington. He kept going on three downers a day; they numbed him nicely and interfered with his memory rather than his mind.

  When he had made his plans, he asked Marvin Karp to notify Mr. Palladino to meet him in New York at ten o’clock the following morning, rain or shine, on the sixth bench north of the marina at the river’s edge of the park on West 79th Street.

  “I want you to know I am sorry for your troubles,” Mr. Palladino said, all kindliness.

  “These are my Haitian projections for the first year,” Bart said, unable to talk about Enid. “It looks like a million one net on the casino action, six million three on our share of the Haitian foreign aid payments, about a million six on construction projects, nearly seven hundred thousand from prostitution and souvenirs and about seventy-four million six hundred thousand on the heroin you’ll turn out. Considering that there are no taxes on these items, it represents a good operation.”

  “It’s marvelous,” Mr. Palladino said. “I never saw a moneymaker like it. And watch those figures climb as soon as I can get the pharmaceutical line organized. My father used to think we were running the U.S. Mint when we had Prohibition, but that was nothing.”

  “I want to be very precise about the way you make the contributions to my campaigns, Mr. Palladino,” Bart said. “It is vital that my seven million three seep into my campaign coffers in an extremely careful, absolutely legal, grass-roots manner—so much so that I am going to supervise the whole thing myself. Therefore, in three days’ time please have all the money ready in one-hundred, five-hundred, and thousand-dollar bills, favoring the hundreds.”

  “Certainly. Of course. Sure.”

  “My people will break it down into envelopes and mail it in, first from different parts of Maryland, later from different states around the country, right after my first two television speeches.”

  “A real grass-roots reaction, hey? You want the cash in suitcases, a trunk, or how?”

  “Well, suitcases, I think.”

  Bart, Uncle Herbert, and Uncle Herbert’s two loyal secretaries who had been with him for twenty-seven years spent eleven days stuffing envelopes with letters wrapped around hundred-dollar, five-hundred-dollar and one-thousand-dollar bills. The letters were produced by two rented IBM MC82 typewriters and were sixteen different forms of grateful tributes from people whose names and addresses were listed in telephone directories who, presumably, would have wanted to contribute to Bart’s campaign if they had heard his two speeches from Annapolis. Sixty-four percent of the stuffed envelopes were mailed within Maryland boundaries but 36 percent were postmarked from outside the state, mailed by Family organizations whose cooperation Mr. Palladino was able to arrange. After a solid story in Human Events convinced Bart that people even farther away from the Delmarva area would have been able to respond to his appeals, Palladino’s funds were mailed to him by willing workers who saw no more than sealed envelopes (and who had had a lifetime of training at questioning nothing) from the Oranges in New Jersey, St. Petersburg, Florida, from the Sun Cities of Arizona, and from Anaheim and Pasadena, California. The press covered the great ocean of contributions as they poured in. Television covered The Candidate as, bemused and awed, he opened envelope after envelope to pull out thousand-dollar bills. He read letters at random as he plucked them out. The clip appeared on the A.M. America
show and inspired a lot of legitimate contributors to mail in a total of $327.80 from all over the nation. The newsmagazines pronounced that Bart had great charisma to account for the uncanny voter appeal “while not yet really saying anything.” Bart’s limp, his background as “a CIA planner-statistician” and his neat, dark dress worked for him. The grass-roots money promotion was so successful that Bart never did have to say much of anything in the campaign itself. Big industry in the state got behind him with Uncle Herbert’s help. Labor unions on all levels announced their support. Uncle Herbert herded the banks, the insurance companies, the church, the public utilities and the dairy industry into the fold. Bart announced a “realistic stance” on energy problems and won a large contribution from the oil companies. After a quiet campaign of mostly waving and limping, Bart was elected to the U.S. Senate with 67 percent of the vote, which proved that no one can screw all of the people all of the time. Nor would he want to. It would look bad.

  29

  February 1972

  Major General Luther “Bosco” Beemis was the CIA’s plant for Pentagon operations. He reported regularly to his masters at Langley the progress of the Army’s penetration of China: i.e., that they had succeeded in planting an agent there, that they were conducting a full-scale secret investigation of all members of the American cadre whom the Chinese had taken inside, to try to uncover the American instigators and managers of the movement within the United States, and that they were waiting—and sweating—for their agent to get out of China so the agent could be de-briefed and the plot totally uncovered without any help whatever from any other governmental investigative agency.

  The Director of the CIA instructed his White House undercover agent to leak the information of the Army discovery upward through the White House. The CIA White House plant told an assistant legal counsel that he had heard on the cocktail circuit the night before that the Army had planted a man inside China. The legal counsel told his boss, Special Counsel to the President, who ran it straight in to the President’s Chief of Staff.

  “Im-possible!” the Chief of Staff said, waving the man out of the room. When the door had closed, he got the President on the telephone.

  “I have a crazy rumor on my desk that the Army has planted a man inside China. What do you want done about it?”

  “Check it out.”

  The Chief of Staff called the Director of the National Security Council. “The President wants us to check out a story that the Army have planted an agent inside China.”

  “Oh, my God! A newspaper story?”

  “No. Call it a rumor right now.”

  “This is terrible. Just when everything is going smoothly some crafty cluck has to pull a thing like this.”

  “Maybe it never happened, but he wants it checked out.”

  The Director of the National Security Council called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fleet admiral, and put the question to him.

  “How the hell would I know a crappy little thing like that? If the Army has agents they must move them around, right?”

  “Admiral?”

  “What?”

  “You have a choice—either spend the rest of the goddam week”—the Director’s voice rose in anger—“checking this story out—or if you prefer it that way, I’ll have the President call you and ask you.”

  The Admiral hung up on him, but he wasted no time in calling the head of Army Intelligence. “Do you have a plant inside China, Petey?” he asked.

  “Butch—if we did—and I did not say we do—that is the kind of operation I can’t talk about.”

  “You know how come I asked?”

  “How?”

  “The President told NSC to check it out.”

  “Why is he always interfering?” General Doncaster said wildly. “Why don’t these goddam civilians stay behind their desks and take their little goddam bows and let us run this country the way it should be run?”

  “Call the Chaplain-General, for Christ’s sake!” Admiral Melvin barked. “Do you have a plant in there or don’t you?”

  “Yas—YAS! We have a plant in there. The first American agent ever successfully sited in that country in twenty-seven years! The first! I mean the CIA with their billions couldn’t do it but we did it! The United States Army Intelligence Corps planted their agent inside a Chinese secret operation and now these civilian fuck-ups want to muddy the water before we can even begin to fish!”

  “I’m sorry, Petey,” Melvin said. “But we need these people. They provide the money we have to have to win.”

  “This is very, very delicate stuff. I say this—it better be between you and the President—for his ears only. Will you do that, Butch?”

  “I’ll try it on,” Admiral Melvin said.

  The agenda of the National Security Council meeting held in the Cabinet Room three months later at the White House was routine. The first twenty-eight minutes were devoted to Vietnam. All statutory members of NSC were present except the President. The meeting was chaired by the NSC Director, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs.

  The Director said he had something he wanted to read into the record. He said, “I have a lulu today. Wait till I tell you what took ninety days to turn up because it was put in a ninety-day file. The world isn’t crazy enough. Army Intelligence has succeeded in planting an agent inside China.” There was an instant rhubarb. Everybody tried to speak at once. The Director waited for quiet. “You have anything on that, Sam?” he asked the Defense Secretary.

  “Jesus, no.”

  “You, Butch?” the Director asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “I’m knocked out. I never heard of it. A ninety-day file? Why, for Christ’s sake, this is a historic event.”

  “When the memo crossed my desk,” the Director told them, “we sent out a query to all friendlies for any knowledge they might have picked up about camps inside China, and interrogations of captured PLO thugs, Japanese Red Army members and Tupamaros made clear that facilities do exist, as we have suspected, where Chinese are training not only people of many other countries, but also our own, including, ah, American women …”

  “Women! My God, Al! American women?”

  “We thought we should send Dr. Baum out to de-brief the captured PLOs and the rest”—everyone at the table looked uncomfortable—“and his transcript is unequivocal. The women appear to have reached the Far East by ship from South America. That’s all we know about them.

  “On the basis of the de-briefees’ information I asked for an overfly and we got photos of two identical camps about forty miles apart on Lake Kokonor. Army Intelligence knows only that their agent went in with six other Americans, some of whom were ex-convicts.”

  “Odd, you didn’t know anything about a thing as big as this, Al,” the Director, CIA, said.

  “It gets more interesting, gentlemen,” the NSC Director said. “Before the de-briefees—ah—before they died, they testified that they were graduates of a guerrilla training camp facility at Ssu-hsin, in Tsinghai, where urban—repeat urban—guerrilla warfare is taught. They told Dr. Baum that there is only one exception to these courses of study as laid down by the Chinese. Our American group is being trained under the plans of their own leaders in a four-year course, not an eighteen-month course as are all others.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, Henry! Who the hell would want to fight a war like that?”

  “The question is, what are we going to do about all this? And the first and most important thing to remember, gentlemen,” the Director said, “is that the President does not want the Chinese disturbed whatsoever. I can tell you that he was very, very touchy about the Army putting their agent inside China at all, this year. But, of course, he understands the need. I mean—that goes without saying.”

  “You mean our people can’t go and even talk to the Chinese about it?” the Vice President demanded.

  “I have an idea of what we can do,” the Director said.

  “Wha
t?”

  “We will give the Army Intelligence agent a nice present on graduation day.”

  As the meeting broke up, the NSC Director asked the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to meet him in his basement office in fifteen minutes. When the two men were locked in, facing each other, the NSC Director said, “In consideration of the enormous favor Army Intelligence was willing to do for the President in sharing with him the information that they had succeeded—a first in twenty-seven years for any of our agencies—in planting an agent inside China, I took the liberty of checking with the President before coming down here to see you, and he has instructed me to order you to tell me, so that I may tell him, whether or not the CIA has been able to plant an agent somewhere in that same grouping in China.”

  “Yes,” the Director of the CIA said. “I’m glad you asked me that. As a matter of fact, we have.”

  30

  1971–1976

  The United States Army’s agent inside China had had nightmares on the trip north, thinking about the merciless de-briefings to come. But fear was mastered because Dr. Baum had planted a slow, slow gain in the agent’s imagination that gradually brought total confidence that no Chinese de-briefing system could overcome the locks and balances of Dr. Baum’s system. And Dr. Baum was right.

  The agent watched and memorized. A new realization, much more encompassing than fear, took possession of the agent’s imagination. Dr. Baum’s design had been total. (Dr. Baum was a genius to whom the United States Army would owe far more than even the defeated German armies owed him.) What Dr. Baum had done with the agent was to plant a delayed realization, surfacing sixty days after the Chinese de-briefings: the agent was not to be governed by any orders planted by the Chinese briefings intended to make the agent into a revolutionary filled with murderous violence against the United States. This delayed realization worked to an extent, but pari passu with the Chinese brainwashing objectives. The agent was in a sense changed into a true schizophrenic; one part an agent of the United States Army, not only assigned to the task of saving the future of the United States of America but locked into that concept by Dr. Baum with neither voluntary nor involuntary means of evasion; the other part a convinced, cold-blooded, violently murderous revolutionary reeducated to help direct the execution of the Teel Plan against the United States. By the most advanced technological procedures of military psychology, the agent had been rendered insane.