Once a Noble Endeavor Read online

  “You were just playing with that mountain monkey,” Planner said with an even bigger smile.

  “My dead guy was probably just there for security—this is the guy who knows what the hell is goin’ on,” Brennan said to his colleagues. Both linguists chuckled and looked back at their prize.

  The NSA agent, while armed, was dressed in military fatigues without military insignia or rank designation. Most NSA representatives were treated as officers due to their place on the civilian pay scale, which ran parallel and equivalent to the military. While NSA agents stayed in officers’ quarters and were entertained in the Officers’ Club, they never pulled rank or showed any arrogance towards ASA enlisted soldiers. They knew that ASA troopers were the intellectual equal of their NSA counterparts. In fact, most ASA commissioned officers were not trained intelligence specialists and deferred to the ASA senior sergeants, sergeants, and talented enlisted members in matters involving intelligence collection and analysis. While the NSA agent held a rank comparable to a commissioned officer, the ASA linguist was just an enlisted man.

  “What was this guy up to?” the ASA linguist asked.

  “Calling in mortar fire on the north and west side of the base—he was trying to hit the ammo dump, I think, but he got real lucky and hit a couple of hooches and a shithouse,” Brennan said, smiling with his trademark big grin. The interrogators thanked Nick and John and prepared to get to work. Nick wanted to stay, but John insisted they leave to let the interrogators “do their thing.”

  As the interrogation began, Planner and Brennan bade farewell and headed for the enlisted club for cold beer, popcorn and cigarettes. “I hope that guy talks,” Planner said with a devilish look, “because I heard the NSA just throws dead-end POWs from an ARDF helicopter at about a thousand feet—that really screws up their next Tet celebration.”

  ****

  The next morning, Planner and Brennan reported to the secure compound to meet with the Non Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) Sergeant First Class Dan Stark. As they approached Stark’s trailer, they could hear a briefing occurring inside. Respectfully, Planner knocked on the office door softly and heard the good sergeant say, “Come in if you have a goddamn need to know, otherwise get the hell out of here!”

  “Planner and Brennan, Sergeant,” John yelled back.

  “Come on in,” said Stark with a distinctive Arkansas twang.

  Stark was a big, burly career NCO with a matching big heart. At about 6’2 with a barrel chest and a forty-inch waist, he took up the whole entranceway as he opened the door. He loved the soldiers who worked for him and tolerated the officers for whom he worked. With starched fatigues, Dan, weight notwithstanding, was a large and imposing figure. A quiet, patriotic guy, he spoke of honor, not money or power. “Goddamn it, give me a big friggin’ hug, Brennan, you magnificent son of a bitch—who loves ya, baby?” said the sergeant, feigning a New York accent. With his arms outstretched, he was grabbing at Nick, who was resisting the affection by turning his head to the side and putting his arms across his chest.

  “Great job, I’m putting you in for a star—take it to the bank, you incredible New York bastard.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant, but don’t make more of this than it is, I just did what I had to do, and John and those soldiers were a lot more courageous just moving in on that guy.”

  “Yeah, sure, but I’m gonna draw up the papers today and you are going home a goddamn decorated soldier.” Smiling broadly, he said, “Look, right now I have to finish this briefing. Come back in about twenty minutes and I’ll have a job for you guys.”

  When Planner and Brennan returned, Dan met with them in his office on the far front of the trailer to the left of the doorway—a dark, small, tidy space, but it got the job done.

  “John, we have some important communication gear we have to get down to the Delta—it is real voodoo shit—it’s so secret they won’t even tell me about it, but whoever moves it has to have a top-secret crypto clearance, an ASA clearance, and you guys could use a day or two in Saigon, so after yesterday you get the job,” Stark said with a smile.

  “Great, we’re ready, Sergeant. What’s the deal?”

  “You both fly down to Tan Son Nhut. Go to the Saint George with the gear, get a jeep, and go to Tan An, a town south of Saigon. You are going to meet some NSA reps there and they are going to get the gear down to the Delta—a real chip shot!”

  “What time do we gotta leave, Sergeant?” Nick asked.

  “Tomorrow at 0530 hours, and be on time.”

  As they left the trailer, Brennan turned and asked John, “Hey, Johnny, was that local time 0530, or Zulu time Stark was talking about?”

  “Local time; remember whenever we are talking Zulu time we add ‘Zulu’ as a suffix—you know, at the end. If Stark had said ‘0530 Zulu’ then we are operating on the time in Greenwich, England—basically London time.”

  The NSA, and by extension ASA, generally used the time at the prime meridian in England at Greenwich just outside London for operational needs. Most communications used Zulu time so that the whole world of agents, analysts and operators and all their correspondents were working off the same clock and time zone.

  ****

  The next day in the gray light of morning, with the secret gear secured in a metal container, the duo began their journey. “Could it be a giant top-secret NSA decoder ring—you know, for the big shots at Fort Meade, Johnny boy?” Nick kidded while studying the compact package.

  “I would say you figured it out again, Brennan—how the hell are we going to win this war if you ever leave?” John said with his lips turned down, faking concern.

  The two bummed a jeep ride to the airfield. There they boarded a C130 propeller-driven airplane: a large-bellied craft with seats attached to the walls of the enormous inside cabin, which resembled a big open warehouse.

  As Nick and John watched out the plane windows, they looked down on a gorgeous country, from the hills in the west to the bright white beaches in the east. “Had one not known better, you would swear there was no war below,” Nick said. But as Nicky and Johnny knew, indeed there was a war being waged in those beautiful, lush jungles, in the rolling hills and on the sugar-white sand adjoining the aqua-blue South China Sea.

  The flight and landing were uneventful. The C130 taxied to a stop at the Tan Son Nhut Airport main terminal. The airbase was an old French facility built in the 1920s, but through the years it grew from an unpaved runway to the gigantic tactical center it became. All the US military services were represented there, and it was central to the American war effort during the Vietnam conflict. It had a large passenger terminal, a sparsely decorated bar room, rest areas, and an enormous cargo bed for a full array of transportation purposes. As the center of many important tactical activities, it was closely watched over by the military police on foot and in distinctively marked “MP” jeeps.

  Nick waited for their ride outside the main terminal building. It was likely to be a large multi fueler—an M35 2 ½ ton cargo truck designed and ordinarily used for big payloads. But today it would be used as a diversion, with Nick in the back flatbed with a concealed automatic rifle and the container and John armed riding “shotgun” in the front passenger seat to protect the secrecy and custody of the security device.

  Right on schedule a truck pulled up driven by an ASA soldier from the Saint George Hotel in the Chinese section of Saigon. While actually part of the city on the West bank of the Saigon River, all of the Vietnamese nationals referred to the district as Cholon—literally “big market”—as if separate from Saigon city proper. The trip into town took about 40 minutes.

  The hotel was several stories high, equipped with a long, dark, wooden bar near the main door, a large, brightly lit restaurant, a small casino filled with slot machines, a military mess hall, an orientation center, an intelligence operation center, and a myriad of small living quarters and hotel rooms. The front entrance was heavily barricaded with sandbags, a small M60 machine gun turret and
an MP acting as a sentry.

  The truck pulled up to the curb two blocks from the hotel. Nick jumped from the rear of the vehicle and handed John their “baby”—both knew they couldn’t waste a lot of time getting the important cargo to NSA in Tan An. Immediately, a buck sergeant came up to the two couriers from one of the side streets and escorted them away from the area near the front entrance and took them down an alley through an abandoned restaurant filled with empty tables, a musty smell and bare walls, finally leading into the Saint George Hotel. The aide pointed up a bright stairway and said, “The ops center is up there through the door.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” said John, looking up the stairs at the narrow corridor on the left.

  With John carrying the container, Brennan and Planner quickly produced their international badges to the ASA MP and were escorted through a small tunnel-like hallway without any lighting. Once inside the dimly lit interior, they reported to the NSA representative in the hotel’s heavily secured intelligence operations center.

  The center was filled with transmitters, receivers, radiantly glowing animated maps, rudimentary computers, and grease pencil writings on large blackboards and whiteboards detailing what codes and encryption devices were in use. Posted in capital letters was a list of code-numbered targets sought by ASA, NSA and MI. The targets were generally enemy agents and specialized enemy units, with some effort put into tracking regular enemy military companies and battalions moving in and out of Cambodia and Laos.

  In addition to ASA and NSA, the center included representatives from MI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the CIA. Entry required an international badge issued only to the most highly cleared intelligence people engaged in the hostilities. Any information stored there required an absolute “need to know” with an absolute prohibition against a “need to share.”

  The NSA agent was of the GS14 civilian pay scale, and the equivalent of an Army Colonel, known only as Mr. Bailey—his real name, perhaps, or perhaps not. Bailey had on military fatigues without insignia; he was about 40 years old with thinning, fine dark hair and crystal blue eyes. It was obvious by the deference paid to him by all of the busy people in the center that he held an important position.

  Planner took the lead. “Mr. Bailey, we have been assigned to transport this container to the NSA representatives in Tan An—myself and Spec 4 Brennan are here to receive your instructions in furtherance of that mission, sir.”

  “Have you two soldiers done a lot of courier work?” he asked.

  “No, sir, some but not a lot, but just tell us what to do and we will do it,” John replied, standing “at ease”—with his hands firmly clasped behind his back.

  “It’s not that easy, Specialist. For ordinary secrets or even some tactical top-secret information I could simply give you the location of the delivery point, have you both armed and have you move out, but this equipment is of a higher order.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Nick asked while studying Bailey’s face.

  “It isn’t designed for use against a simple enemy like the VC or the NVA—it is designed for use against the Soviets and the chi comms—it is part of our larger strategic mission, not this tactical one here in Vietnam.”

  “Mr. Bailey, why have you chosen two soldiers from the highlands to move this stuff down to Tan An?” Brennan queried.

  “You guys are crossing into a questionable area of a need to know when we talk about all the tangential information related to this equipment and its movement…” Bailey cautioned as he paused to collect his thoughts.

  “For me to share all this info with you, I better have a pretty damn good reason— maybe I do, maybe not,” he said as he took a long breath and looked up in thought.

  “Let me explain a bit: The experimental equipment that should be inside that container has a signature, a fingerprint—that is when an enemy transmitter sends a voice or Morse signal we get an immediate fix on its location and by analysis we figure out who is using it and for what purpose. We can track our enemies in Asia or Russia or Burma. The signature is embedded deep within a radio component sold to the enemy in Hong Kong and Taiwan by what they believe is a disloyal Chinese Nationalist. They don’t know it tracks their movements.”

  “Okay, let me guess,” said John, “those embeds end up deep inside the commie bureaucracy. This crypto gear will travel within broad circles.”

  Bailey said nothing and looked down at the metal container and stood silent for a moment. “Actually, you haven’t transported anything today but a can full of junk,” he said as he used three keys to expose the contents. Inside were a large radio speaker, some wires, and a box of small batteries, a pad, pen, and a small stone brick.

  Brennan, completely surprised, confused, and trying to be caustically amusing, looking at the contents as they poured out on the floor, said, “Hey Mr. Bailey, not even a decoder ring. If you have any other shit you would like moved back to Pleiku, just let us know—that’s, after all, our specialty!”

  Planner quickly stepped in. “Look, Mr. Bailey, Nick is not trying to be disrespectful, and I like traveling as much as the next guy, it’s just that we have spent a long day protecting a box full of useless rubbish and the whole exercise seems a little silly, or perhaps even overly dramatic—you know, cloak and dagger.”

  Mr. Bailey again began to explain, “We have intercepts that indicate the Soviets and North Vietnamese agents have been cataloguing our people as they enter and exit this building and our other secure locations in and around Saigon. We don’t know the extent of their enterprise, but we have an agent inside Russia who claims they know we have a big secret and are going to give it a test run in Vietnam—they certainly don’t know what it is or even that they have already bought some of it. They can easily guess it will come from here or the Embassy.” He continued, “You guys are unknown here—that’s why Sergeant Handler took you in the back way. They can’t see in or photograph you when you come in that way, understand?”

  “OK, so what do we have to do?” John asked.

  “Stay with me on this: You are new faces around here, get it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but what do you want us to do?”

  “First, you will be issued transport or courier letters which will be locked in a fireproof pouch—they will contain instructions to anyone who comes in possession of the communication gear on our side in the event something unfortunate should happen to you two. Remember, even a truck or jeep accident could affect your mission.”

  “Unfortunate—I don’t like the sound of that, Mr. Bailey,” Nick offered.

  Bailey went on, “If our Asian friends should get lucky and capture or kill either or both of you in some intended or collateral event, we are screwed—in that case, eventually the gear will be delivered to the Soviets and scientific analysis will reveal its purpose and expose our agent salesmen and their mission in Hong Kong and Taiwan. You see?”

  “Okay. I see,” John replied.

  Bailey continued, “Just the way we used the M35 as a diversion and precaution, we are going to have two of our better known couriers overtly take a secure container onto a helicopter and fly to the Delta—as far as our enemy agents will know, those couriers will have the secret gear, but actually you two will transport it by jeep to Tan An.”

  “Where do we bring it to in Tan An?” Nicky asked.

  “You can’t bring it to the intelligence center—the commies may be watching and waiting to strike. I will have one of our NSA people meet you out near our garbage dump complex outside Tan An,” Bailey said. “Don’t take any chances, and follow your gut when it comes to danger,” he cautioned.

  “The dump—the friggin’ dump. Mr. Bailey, what is it with you NSA guys and shit…the dump—that’s where they keep all the big shit, right?” Brennan quipped.

  “No, specialist, we keep all the big shit in the outhouses just like you guys!” Bailey responded with an affectionate smile.

  “You fellas will leave first thing tomorrow. Get some sleep.
No barroom until you return, OK?”

  “OK,” said Planner, “no bar tonight.”

  ****

  The morning air was filled with humidity and an early hazy sun—a hot day was sure to follow. As John and Nick secured the nondescript metal can in the back of the jeep, they looked at each other with a quizzical look. John handed Brennan the locked pouch containing the courier papers and both turned around and stared at the metal box.

  They stored both their rifles between the two seats, and Nick pulled away from the street near the narrow side entrance to the hotel where they had entered the day before.

  The thirty-mile trip required mostly travel on Highway 1, a dusty artery that essentially ran the length of South Vietnam. The southbound route took the pair past several installations and small villages. The road was heavily traveled and was notable for its slow movement of traffic and occasional ambushes. Nick steered carefully and moved slowly as he traversed the heavily travelled south country. While the road was paved, with all the traffic it still took more than two hours to reach the outskirts of Tan An. At that point Nick abruptly pulled to the side of the congested roadway. Taking out and unfolding a large laminated paper map, John studied it to find the location of the garbage dump.

  “Nicky, before we get to the town we make a hard right, westbound, then go about ten kilometers, make another turn to the left and the dump is right there.”

  “Zulu time, kilometers —where the hell are you from, Switzerland? Kilometers… Why do have to say how far we are going in kilometers? How the hell far is a kilometer anyway, and how far is ten kilometers?”

  “Okay, okay, 6.2 miles—make the right and go about six miles.”

  Nick pulled out quickly and took an abrupt and sudden right onto a narrow dirt path. As they proceeded, Nick made constant irregular and unstable moves around all the potholes on and off the roadbed, occasionally going off the road entirely—booby traps were always on his mind.

  The ride seemed more than six miles as they rode toward their destination. Finally, John saw the left turn ahead: a wide dirt intersection. As Nicky approached the turn, the dump came into view. As far as the eye could see there were mounds and mounds of American waste. Some of the piles were enormous and laden with metal, old furniture, clothes, paper bags, tin cans, file cabinets and rotting food. The perimeter of the heap was patrolled by a buck sergeant with an M16 rifle and a .45 caliber pistol, assisted by two or three other troopers.