One Drop of Blood Read online

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Holland

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTERand colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Kyoko Watanabe

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holland, Thomas D.

  One drop of blood / Thomas Holland.

  p. cm.

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Missing in action—identification—Fiction 2. Forensic anthropologists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.O48454O53 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2005056399

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8911-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-8911-0

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For MSH

  How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?

  —R. Waldo Emerson,Conduct of Life , “Fate” (1860)

  Prologue

  Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam

  THURSDAY, 6 OCTOBER1966

  He could smell them.

  When he first arrived in Vietnam, the old-timers said you could smell them, but he hadn’t believed it. He couldn’t. How could anybody smell anything? You smelled everything. And it was all the same: smoke, fish, rotting meat, decaying plants; sour—everything sour.

  Now Jimmie Carl Trimble was the old-timer. Eleven months in-country, nineteen years old, and an old-timer. Now he could smell them. The smoke and fish and decay were still there, but now his nose could tease out subtleties. The vinegar smell of sweat, the reek of fear, the sour musk of unwashed cotton clothing.

  You smelled it, or you died.

  And Jimmie Carl hadn’t died—at least not in Vietnam.

  The mission was supposed to be about as uncomplicated as it got, but it had screw-up written all over it. They were to helo in, make their way from some map coordinate here to some map coordinate there, and then wait for further instructions. Jimmie Carl had been on enough of these goat-ropes to know that the instructions were almost always the same—return to where you started and don’t ask any goddamn questions. And though they obviously were venturing into Indian country, the Intel guys had assured them that no bad guys were supposed to be between the here and the there, which, of course, is exactly where the bad guys proved to be. Bad and in strength.

  It was a little past midday. The men were all strung out—a few in more ways than one—as they snaked and looped through the waist-high elephant grass. They’d been walking for well over an hour and had cleared the available cover provided by a thick stand of eucalyptus and gum trees and were now exposed. The stinging sun and heat were already taking effect, and that worried Jimmie Carl. Worried him enough that he’d worked his way to the front of the column to talk to the lieutenant. As the medic, it was Jimmie Carl’s responsibility to watch the men closely for signs of heat stroke or dehydration or anything else that would fray the fabric of the platoon. He’d been telling the lieutenant that they needed to slow their pace and reform or they were going to be in a world of hurt. That’s when they got hit. The hammer fell in the center—snapping the already disjointed column into two writhing bloody clots of confusion. The tail-end stragglers, including the platoon’s senior NCO, were dead within the first thirty seconds.

  The young lieutenant had shown tremendous maturity under the gun, and with gestures and shouts and physical manhandling had managed to pull his remaining lost lambs into a loose defensive knot from which they could assess their situation. Only the tree line offered any hope of survival. The decision was easy. The lieutenant initiated a fighting withdrawal back toward their Landing Zone. He assumed the point in the hell-bent sprint across the open ground, and Jimmie Carl brought up the rear. That’s when Private Chester Orel Evans, running directly in front of Jimmie Carl, took a single AK-47 round near his belt line. There was a moist slap, like the sound of wet hands clapping, and then he collapsed as if his body had no momentum or inertia, as if the strings had been cut. He went down with all the subtlety of a bag of odd-sized rocks. The medic dropped to the young man’s side and surveyed the wound, probing it with his index and middle fingers.

  It was mortal.

  The single bullet had entered in his back, just below his right kidney. It was a small circular puncture that had already closed upon itself—hardly even bloody, but in the front, where it had tumbled out of a jagged hole to the left of his navel, the accompanying shock wave had liquefied everything in its path. Jimmie Carl jabbed him with a morphine syrette and looked into his eyes. Ordinarily, he’d have painted a big “M” on his forehead with Mercurochrome to alert the docs at the aid station about the morphine, but this time it didn’t matter. This one wasn’t going to make it that far. Jimmie Carl stuffed the wound with a thick wad of gauze and then stripped off his belt and cinched it tightly around Evans’s middle to try to at least hold his guts in till he could get him somewhere better to die.

  Better to die?

  Jimmie Carl knew he should leave Evans and try to rejoin the other men now nearing the covering trees; Evans was dead, he just hadn’t stopped breathing, and there was nothing that was going to change that, but the lieutenant and the other men—however many were still alive—would be needing all the help they could get.

  Jimmie Carl knew all of this, but he also knew that it didn’t matter. This was his day of atonement. That moment, that one crystalline point of Time when you are granted the opportunity to put the mistakes of the past to rest and square your soul with God. Jimmie Carl wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t leaving Evans.

  Hoisting the young private onto his back and shoulders, Jimmie Carl recalled a series of bomb craters that the platoon had passed on its way in from the LZ, before they were hit. They offered the best cover. The only cover. They also were five hundred meters away—a stroll on a good day; a lifetime today.

  Jimmie Carl picked up the wounded Marine’s heavy M-14 and began running. As he did so, Evans bobbed up and down on his shoulders; each time the young private expelled a strained grunt of air, like some huge, human bagpipe. And each time the grunt grew quieter as more and more air was squeezed out and wasn’t replaced. Jimmie Carl ran in a straight line; the shortest distance to the end zone. Razor grass shredded his shins. The heat and wet were oppressive and sat on his chest like a sack of moistened concrete, and Evans, small as he was, was deadweight—wet, sticky, dying weight.

  Jimmie Carl could smell bowel, and his sunburned neck and back prickled and stung from bile and stomach acid that leaked from Evans’s shredded gut. The far bomb crater they had passed, the one closest to the tree line, the one that offered the best hope of survival, kept receding as he ran, farther and farther away with each step, and he felt like he was treading in waist-deep sorghum, and all the while, automatic weapons fire kept stitching a path in front of him.

  His lungs bursting, Jimmie Carl dove into the first crater he came upon, throwing Evans in before him. The wounded private hit the ground and lay still, no longer even groaning. Jimmie Carl quickly pried open one of the boy’s half-closed eyes with a muddy thumb; the iris had shut down and it was dark and unresponsive and clouding up like it had been buffed with steel wool, either from death or from
the effects of the morphine, yet he was still breathing. A wet, stuttering, bubbling sound percolated from deep within.

  Evans was a skinny black kid from a shotgun shack outside Greensboro, North Carolina. He stuttered and got tongue-tied when anxious, which was most of the time, and had opted for the Marine Corps only when it was presented as the option to another run at the state pen—three-to-five for grand theft auto. Three-to-five versus one-and-out in a place he had never heard of—the Republic of Vietnam. He’d chosen the unknown, but when the time came he reconsidered and went AWOL from the induction center. Two SPs had found him in a snooker hall four blocks away and educated him on the Marine Corps’ lack of a sense of humor in such matters. Things hadn’t improved much after that. The four months of basic training that followed had been one long, uninterrupted stretch of disciplinary guard duty, and then came the RVN.

  Evans had been universally disliked by the other men from the beginning. He’d been nothing but trouble to them since setting foot in Da Nang, and the lieutenant had been working on the necessary paperwork to get him transferred, but given personnel shortages and the ever-increasing mission tempo, the paperwork kept getting lost at headquarters. What no one in the unit could comprehend was why Jimmie Carl had befriended the boy; had sought him out when all others had turned a shoulder. It made no sense to anyone.

  Now, sitting in six inches of fetid red-black muck at the bottom of the shallow crater, Jimmie Carl inventoried his options: He had the boy’s M-14 with maybe a full clip of ammo, maybe less. He didn’t think Evans had gotten off a shot before he caught the stray in his gut. He also had his meds kit. Evans appeared to have two high-explosive M-26 grenades and an M-18 smoke canister clipped to his suspenders, and he also was carrying one of the unreliable hand-held PRC-6 “handi-talkie” radios that no one else in the squad had wanted to lug around due to the weight and so had foisted on the unpopular private.

  Options. Options.

  There were no options. In this case there was only one outcome—Jimmie Carl Trimble was dead and unlike the motionless Evans, he knew it. Even now, in the time that it had taken to examine the kid and survey his vitals, they had closed the distance.

  Above the oily pall of cordite and dust, above the leaking, mortal stench of Evans, he could smell them now—they were that close. In about five minutes Jimmie Carl Trimble, whoever he was, whoever he had become, would cease to exist. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing; maybe it was all for the best. Maybe it didn’t matter, but just as certain as his own death was the fact that ten minutes after that, maybe even less, two companies of well-trained North Vietnamese regulars would fall upon the fractured remnants of his platoon, and they too would cease to exist.

  Unless someone did something, fast.

  Jimmie Carl looked again at the radio slung around Evans’s shoulder. Maybe there was an option.

  “Dwayne, Dwayne, can you read me? Over.” The heavy, piece-of-shit PRC-10 on his radioman’s back snapped and hissed as First Lieutenant Dwayne Crockett reached for the handpiece to reply. He’d gotten his men well back into the trees and was establishing a tight perimeter that he hoped they could hold until the helos got there. The radio handpiece was packed with mud, and he had to smack it repeatedly against his thigh to clear it. He could tell from his medic’s tone of voice and minimal radio formality that things were going critical. The use of his first name on the radio rather than a call sign or code words; the raw desperation; it added up to a grab-ass situation, and Jimmie Carl wasn’t the type to panic without reason. Since arriving in Vietnam almost a year ago Jimmie Carl had proven himself pragmatic to the point of fearlessness. Dwayne Crockett keyed the microphone and responded with the same informal efficiency. “I’m here, Jimmie Carl, what’s your situation? Over.” He fought to keep his voice calm and even; to not betray his surprise that Jimmie Carl was still alive.

  “Up a creek…got Evans with me. Over.” Even with the hiss and static of the radio, the thick honey in Jimmie Carl’s slow southern drawl was discernible.

  “Hope your paddle’s bigger than mine, buddy. What’s your position? Over.”

  “That third bomb crater we passed on the way in from the LZ; the small one. It’s bad, Dwayne; Evans’s probably already gone. Poppin’ some smoke. Over.” Jimmie Carl flicked the smoke grenade over the lip of the crater. It sputtered momentarily and then began ejecting a thick stuttering plume of rust-colored smoke.

  “Got your position—break,” Dwayne Crockett replied as he craned his head over the tall grass. Over the last six months he’d allowed himself to get close to the quiet navy corpsman. He’d come to rely heavily on him, his maturity and sound judgment. Now as he watched the plume of smoke rise in the distance, he took stock of his remaining men, gauging what they were really capable of doing. He looked back over his shoulder—no sign of the incoming helicopters. He keyed the microphone again. “Sit tight, Jimmie Carl, we’re going to work our way back down the tree line and lay down a covering fire—you’ll need to come to us—break—leave Evans, I say again, leave Evans. Over.”

  “Negative, Lieutenant.” Jimmie Carl responded quickly. “There’s a whole lot of bad guys here that want to have a talk with y’all, and they’ll be crawlin’ up your skinny coon ass soon enough. Do not, I say again,do not advance this position. You read me, Dwayne? Over.” Jimmie Carl had no intention of letting Dwayne expose the remaining men to any more heat than was necessary for their own survival, and he also had no intention of leaving Evans, even if it would have made a difference. It was time to end the secrets and the lies and the sleepless nights. It was that crystal-clear moment.

  “I hear you, Doc. Maybe you got a plan I don’t know about? Over.” Dwayne rose up again to mark Jimmie Carl’s location as the smoke began to dissipate and drift away.

  It was a matter of who would put voice to the plan first. Jimmie Carl could delay until the helicopters arrived and hope that Dwayne and the rest could withdraw faster than the NVA could shoot at them. “Y’all need a head start—break—y’all got to buy some breathin’ room. Only one way to make that purchase, and you know it. Make the call, Dwayne. Over.”

  “Say again? Over.” Dwayne was stalling, and Jimmie Carl knew it. And there wasn’t time.

  “You heard me, Dwayne…make the call. Put it on my head. Y’all read that, Lieutenant? On my head. Over.”

  “Negative. We’ll figure something out. Over.” Dwayne continued to stall.

  “You heard me, Lieutenant. Nothin’ more to figure. Make the friggin’ call. For God’s sake, make the call, Dwayne—while there’s still some smoke for a marker. Over.”

  Dwayne found it hard to answer, but he knew Jimmie Carl was right. He knew what had to be done. The helos were still ten minutes out, the NVA maybe five. “Hold one. Break,” Dwayne finally responded. He spread the mission map out on his knee and used his finger to trace the map coordinates from the edges. He switched frequencies and made the radio call, and then two long minutes later he rekeyed the mic for Jimmie Carl, “Forgive me, buddy…Over.”

  “Semper Fi, Do or Die,” Jimmie Carl said gently. “No forgivin’ necessary, Bubba. Over.”

  Dwayne had no response. He gripped the handpiece tightly and scanned the sky for any sign of the incoming helos. The race was on. If only they’d arrive.If only.

  The radio popped and hissed for several seconds and then Jimmie Carl’s voice broke through again, strange and lacking the calm decisiveness that it had held moments before. “Dwayne?” It was hard to hear him. Already overhead was a vibrating roar, like a bed sheet being torn quickly in two.

  “Yeah, buddy, I’m here. Over.” Dwayne found himself shouting into the microphone.

  “Dwayne…ain’t no time to explain…been too long…I need to hear it again, Dwayne. You hear me? Can’t die this way. Aw, Jesus, Dwayne…you hear me? I need to hear it again. One last time…can you call me…”

  “Call you what? Jimmie Carl, call you what? Over…goddamn you, Jimmie Carl, call you what? Over.” />
  But Jimmie Carl Trimble never finished his sentence. He looked up just in time to see two silver-colored napalm canisters come tumbling in, ass over elbows.

  Chapter 1

  Split Tree, Arkansas

  FRIDAY, AUGUST12, 2005

  Split Tree was a simple town of great complexity.

  In the big, wide scheme of things, it had never seemed to rise to the occasion. Even in the boom days before imported cotton had bottomed out the local market, Split Tree hadn’t really amounted to much; just a flat, even-tempered, east Arkansas collection of ramshackle that even its most ardent bred-in-the-bone supporters sometimes had to admit was a waste of good dirt.

  And nowadays it seemed to have even less working in its favor.

  Dirt was actually the word most appropriately used when you needed something to finish a sentence that started with Split Tree. The whole town was like fine grit in the teeth. Grit and silt and dry, wind-blown floodplain clay.Dirt . In fact, the community gave the impression of having collected about the county courthouse in much the same manner that dirt and cotton lint seem to drift up around a tree stump in the middle of a field—not organization as much as lazy convenience.

  Like many southern river towns devoid of troublesome topography, Split Tree was organized like a checkerboard with a baseline that ran straight east to west, from sunup to sundown. The eastern anchor was the three-story red-brick and limestone courthouse, the seat of county political affairs for over 150 years; to the west, on Tupelo Road, was the Bell Brothers Cotton Gin, the seat of gossip and economic business for even longer. Long-fiber cotton was on the wane, and the Dew family—who’d purchased the Bell gin during the Depression but kept the name out of deference to tradition—had been forced to expand the business to one of general agricultural supply. It had even started selling Japanese-made tractors with long, funny names, but increasingly it was having a hard time competing against the co-op, and there was a persistent rumor of imminent closure.