The Five Fingers Read online

  He was short and, rare among special forces, very stocky. The rest of us were lean; our bodies were built for endurance. At first sight, I had thought he was overweight. But what might have been fat was muscle. Morrosco was a body-builder. There were no weights around now, so whenever he found something heavy enough, he would hoist it up and press it over his head.

  Morrosco looked like a soldier should look: the uniform clean and well pressed, the hair the right length. He had a swarthy complexion even deeper than Toliver's. His parents had immigrated to New York from Puerto Rico, and he often broke into Spanish when he was excited. He referred jokingly to himself as a wetback and a spic, though he never gave leave to the rest of us to do so.

  "Hey, kid," Jackson had said that first night. "What kind of name is Morrosco?"

  "A last name, Jackson," he had replied. "Just leave it at that."

  Pete came from a big family, from one of the poor sections of New York. He talked like I imagine tough New York kids talk. Violence was nothing new to Pete. Vietnam was just an extension of what he had known all his life. He was not married, and his pay went straight home to help support the younger children. 1 got the impression that he was a bit of a hero in his neighborhood. He planned on going to medical school when he got out of the Army.

  "Why do you want to be a doctor?" I asked him.

  "I been playing doctor since I was three years old, Kiwi. I was the most famous gynecologist on the block by the time I was ten. A man does what he knows best. Right?"

  A training program began at once. We spent all the next day studying the model of the impact area without coming up with a plan. It was not lost time. We were working together for the first time as a unit, establishing our work methods, sorting out our relationships to one another. Jackson set at once trying to stamp his authority on Wiley and Morrosco in a very rigid military way. He wanted it understood that he was the sergeant. They were both too good-natured to fight it this early on, but I did not believe Jackson would be able to maintain this posture in our unit. He must have been an excellent sergeant for the regular army, but a team like ours had to function as one mind. That could not happen in a strictly regulated military atmosphere. It was essential that we have a breakdown in discipline. Despite what we might call the major, there was no question of his authority. The trio would need the same relationship, if it was to function smoothly, both internally and with the rest of us. I was not concerned yet, because I could see that Jackson was a very capable soldier, and he worked well with Toliver.

  I had taken an instant dislike to Jackson. He became a sergeant the moment he walked in a room. He looked hard, and he looked mean. He was loud, but he had a reputation for getting things done. He was also a man with a tremendous amount of experience, which I respected.

  Jackson would have been about Toliver's age, in his mid- or late thirties. He was of average height and build. He was a well-turned-out soldier, his mousy brown hair short and neat, his uniforms impeccable. He had a thin face with jaw muscles that flexed when he was concentrating. He rarely smiled, and his face was lined by the strain of three years' combat in Vietnam. He had a quick mind and had absorbed the briefings with a minimum of questions. He was just as quick to absorb the data from Toliver and the colonel.

  That first day we rejected plan after tentative plan. We were working from a few fundamental facts, but

  we could not come up with the right combination. The conference would take place in an open-sided building facing a rising plateau which would be our obvious avenue of approach. All the prime targets, and hopefully most of the secondary targets, would be gathered in front of the hall to greet Giap when he arrived last. The attack would be initiated by my shooting Giap as he got out of his car. The prime targets were the responsibility of marksmen—Tan, Toliver, and myself. At the same time, the trio would blow the building with rockets, hopefully hit their targets, and create mass confusion among the defenders. They then would provide covering fire for our withdrawal. But no one came up with the right combinations to get us close enough to do the job thoroughly and give us half a chance to get away. We broke up without deciding anything.

  CHAPTER 4

  We spent the following morning at individual briefings on our targets, then went back in the conference room after lunch.

  "Fd like to suggest a plan," Prather said.

  "So you're back on the team," said Toliver laughing.

  "I never was off the team. I just wish someone would tell me I am meant to be on the team."

  The individual briefing that morning had really bowled me over. American intelligence accumulates an unbelievable amount of data. They had been observing Giap closely for five years, and they knew the man better than he knew himself. I was the last and potentially the only weak link in this chain of assassination, because I was the human link. When they got through briefing me, I would be as close to being a machine for assassination, a human computer, as they could manufacture. I would spend almost a month walking into a scene which might last thirty minutes, a month in which the climax would stretch over three seconds.

  I had to be more attuned than the Sahka to the target.

  I was the firsts man the colonel briefed individually, and when he came in the film room with a file twelve inches thick, and the projectionist began to set up his equipment, I knew what it meant. I got the thrill again of knowing that I was the very best man they could find for this job. I felt a rush of blood to my shoulders and to the back of my neck; I started to tune in, in a very high-pitched way, to what I was going to do. My target proved a very interesting subject for study.

  Giap was a vain man. He reveled in his role of public hero. In the films, he seemed genuinely to be enjoying himself, whether at a formal occasion like a parade or merely accepting the adulation of the crowd in more casual street scenes. I saw the same three films again and again. The first was a propaganda film in which he was reviewing a military parade in Hanoi. The other two were newsreel footage. One was of Giap directing military operations from a field headquarters. He was doing a field officer's job—counseling with his junior officers, congratulating his men, maintaining contact with the troops and battle-front conditions. The third film was of Giap on the streets in some city, probably Hanoi. He was standing on the steps of a military building, and the civilians were pressing forward to meet him. The film did not appear to be concocted and, boy, were these people carrying on. They were kissing his hand and bowing, and some just hung back, like it was too much for them, meeting him. He never stopped smiling. He was encouraging them.

  The films ran about half an hour each, but I would stop them and ask for certain shots to be reproduced and blown up for target recognition and character analysis. The films were silent; wBile they ran, the colonel fed me information about the man.

  I studied Giap down to the color of his eyes, even to learning that he did not wear contact lenses. If a

  man climbed out of the car and into my scope, and his eyes were not the right color, I might hesitate for half a second. Long enough to miss. I learned how he got out of a car, how he walked, how his aides walked with him. I studied the man's history, his personality, anything that would make that target grow and steady itself between the hairs of my scope.

  Regardless of the final plan, the colonel and I worked from a few basic premises. Giap, as the highest-ranking military official, would arrive last. Everyone else would be gathered in a reception party to greet him. He would arrive by car on the only road from the railway. We would be positioned somewhere on a hill to the south. This road came from my due right, or east, then turned northwest to about 2230 hours on the hand of a clock a hundred yards before the building. The car would stop with its left side facing us, but turned away at a forty-five-degree angle, exposing both sides of the rear of the car to us. Giap would be by the right rear door of the car, with an aide to his left. Another aide would accompany the driver in the front. The only safe time to hit Giap with everyone present was when he got out o
f the car.

  Unlike most men, Giap had a habit of putting on his hat before he got out of a car. Consequently, he bent lower than the average man, and his head was the first part of his body to exit a car. My first sight of Giap would be the round crown of his hat. I would have half a second to put a bullet through the crown, but it was very risky because that span of time would show almost no definite contour through the scope. Certain movements of certain colors give a very poor contour. I might shatter the side of his head and not kill him. One second later, I would see his profile, which would present far better definition. I could shoot him through the cheek and send the round through his head.

  Giap had something wrong with his right arm that caused it to hang stiffly at his side. It was thought to be arthritis or an injury of some kind, nothing perma-

  nent. When I heard this, I climbed out of a closed car a few times with my arm stiffened. I found I had to turn a bit farther out from the car to climb out, and once on my feet, I came to a complete stop before stepping off. If Giap responded likewise, it was another half second gained.

  When Giap's car came to a stop at the reception party, the driver would jump out and open Giap's door. He would exit the car from the right rear quarter to enter a building facing him. His aides would both be seated on the other side of the car. Intelligence told us that in this case, Giap always waited by the car door for his aides to fall in behind him. With luck, I was going to have a stationary target for four cr five seconds, when Giap would then be joined by an aide who was one of my secondary targets. My last target would be some distance away in the receiving line. Sometimes it almost seemed easy, sitting there in the film room.

  From where we assumed the car would stop and the reception committee assemble, I would have to move the rifle through a maximum arc of thirty degrees to get all three targets; it could be much less. Allowing two seconds for three rounds into Giap, then two rounds for each of the others, I should be able to hit all three targets inside ten seconds. There was no doubt in my mind that the first shot would kill Giap, but he got three bullets regardless. He would be hit in the head by an explosive shell, a 7-mm. crossed bullet. That would kill him. The next two rounds would take his body out and eliminate any chance that bone deflection or premature explosion or decompression of the bullet would let him live. Premature explosion occurred when the bullet broke up on impact, decompression, when it broke up just under the surface of the skin. In either case, the fragments could dissipate in the outer casing of the body rather than spreading through it. A 7-mm. bullet is not exactly small, and it could have more deflection on bone than a smaller

  round. Used right, it had a devastating effect. But the body can take a tremendous amount of punishment.

  It was my decision to put the first bullet into his head. Judging by the topographical model, the closest point with cover would be a rocky outcrop some 160 to 180 meters distant. I would be prone, with my pack as a gun rest, using an accurate rifle and a thirty-power horsehair scope. With luck, I would have a stationary target and could fire when ready. I could not imagine failing.

  The second and third shots would be far more difficult. The first shot would fling Giap clear of the car, but I did not know where he would land. The body has a high lever motion on impact. Giap was a short man, so I could take him out in the head. A short man will somersault; if a tall man takes a head shot, his body will move in a far wider arc, which makes it hard to enter the body shots. Where my secondary targets might be two seconds after I had fired off the first round was a matter of conjecture; it would depend on how quickly they could respond to the firing. I would have to decide at what moment I had Giap in my center of vision and know the others were exposed and close enough to move my shots on. That would be a decision of the moment.

  That afternoon we worked through Prather's plan on the model and, with some alteration, accepted it until we could run through it on the ground. There was messing about now; we were all edgy, feeling the press of time.

  Our only reasonable approach to Ta shu tang was due north up a mountain pass from the Red River, some seventeen miles away. We would crest a hill, and Ta shu tang would lie on the far side of a shallow bowl, backed by a sharply rising contour of hills which rose rapidly into high mountains to the north. We would be hidden by a tree line to within three hundred meters of the hamlet; there the trees ended, and the land dropped away rapidly around outcrops, the

  closest of which were as near as 150 meters of the community hall. We would have to shelter behind them for fire cover.

  Ta shu tang was a typical plateau hamlet. At its center was a community hall surrounded by an ever-increasing circle of houses that contained in all a population of a couple of thousand. The houses were brown or gray stucco, very plain, some with pitched slate roofs, others with flat roofs for catching water. The community hall, which was to be the conference site, was a wooden structure about eighty feet by forty, open on all four sides but with slatted blinds which when lowered made a weather wall. The building was mi-decorated and had a flat roof, but I got the impression that it might once have been a Buddhist temple with a pitched roof. The hall was situated slightly above and separate from the village houses.

  Though the hamlet radiated out from the hall, most of the buildings were south of the area we wanted to gain, toward the railway line which we would have to cross. The houses that obstructed us numbered fifteen. A third were between us and the hall. Another ten, which we hoped to use for retreating cover, lay behind the hall. The houses in front were low and scattered enough to give us a clear view of the hall and the road leading to it. Every arable piece of ground around the hamlet was being farmed. There was one large rice paddy; the rest was vegetable gardening. There were some wandering livestock and domestic fowl. This was marginal farmland; the people spent most of their time in the fields. Away from the hamlet, it was pretty wild country. On our approach route from the south were the remains of a fortified perimeter, an old town wall. In some places, it had fallen down, in others it was being used as a water stop; the peasants had built the ground up on either side and farmed it. We could walk through and around the old wall without difficulty.

  Jackson had suggested early on that we set up be-

  tween the last houses and the community hall. The trio would fire mortars into the hamlet as well as their rockets into the hall, thereby creating mass confusion and allowing the four of us to go in and get our targets at point-blank range. It was not a bad plan, but it meant carrying mortars as well as rockets for three weeks. Tan pointed out that the security for the meeting would be oriented off the tarmac road south of the hamlet; there were likely to be heavy vehicles and armor. If they spread out to protect the hamlet, we would be forced to go north into the mountains rather than risk cutting their lines. None of us was keen on retreating farther into China. If we just hit the hall, security would come straight there, and we had a chance of circling around them.

  Wiley suggested as an alternative to Jackson's plan that the trio stay well south of Ta shu tang and hit the township with rockets just as Giap arrived. That would momentarily divert even the immediate security and give us the chance to get our targets from very close. The four of us would break out north for a few hundred yards, and the trio would fight their way southward to rendezvous with us as quickly as we could circle the hamlet. It was a sound idea, because it meant our carrying the minimum amount of gear into the fire zone; the balance could be left with the trio. But Prather and I objected to it, and Toliver rejected it because it separated the unit. If we got pinned down, we would need the others to help us, and vice versa. If one party got trapped, the other would never know they were dead. They could be pinned down and sieged out of ammunition. This mission had total closure. If any man stayed behind, we had to know he was dead.

  Prather pointed out that if we were going north of the hamlet, the rocket team could fire from there. If we set up our fire zone two hundred meters northeast of where we had planned, using parts
of the same outcrop for cover, the four of us would have our targets presented virtually in the same way. By putting the

  trio at our right flank, they would already be north of the hamlet.

  Tan would take the first position, I would move fifty meters to Tan's right, and Toliver another fifty meters beyond me. Prather would take a position about thirty meters behind me, where he could provide covering fire for all three of us. The trio would be grouped a hundred meters beyond Toliver, where they had a clear view of the hall over the tops of the houses.

  I would initiate the attack by shooting Giap at the most propitious moment. Tan and Toliver would already have their weapons trained on prime targets. By the time my second bullet was entering Giap, their first would be hitting their targets. Jackson would immediately launch antipersonnel rockets into the hall. The majority of the secondary targets would be inside or on the steps, we hoped standing in a line. It could present problems if they were in a loose group. Jackson's rockets would be devastating in the flimsy building. We would close on the trio by overlapping; Tan, me, then Toliver, each of us covering the others. Then all seven of us would hit the building. With everything. Small arms. I would carry my shotgun. Everybody would bring down canvas dobie bags of explosives. With the charges primed to go off on a four-second delay, we would chuck them into the building from all directions. Go in behind the explosives if we recognized any targets still standing.

  The secondary targets were rather more than a luxury. Some of them were security officials or local army commanders, the people who would organize the pursuit. The rockets should kill everyone inside and around the buildings, but it was worth our while to make sure. We were relying on maximum surprise and maximum impact. Spreading panic would be the principal objective to secure our getaway.