Phantom Leader Part 33

One year after the. Korean War broke out, and against Archie's loud protestations, Virgil had enlisted in the Army and gone to war as a private in the Infantry. "I need the combat time like you got. It'll make me a better lawyer."

Less than a year later Virgil had been killed on a frozen mountaintop.

When the Navy had tried to recall Archie as an enlisted diver a month later for Korean duty, Archie had said he was ready. When BuPers found he was a practicing lawyer, they'd offered him a direct Reserve commission as a lieutenant j.g. and a billet in Seoul with the joint commission on war reparations in the last month of the war. He'd accepted the slot. Anything to get away from the memories of Virgil in Georgetown.

After the Korean War had ended in a stalemate in June 1953, Archie had put in his papers to leave active duty and serve in a Navy Reserve unit.

The only openings at the time had been Dubuque or San Francisco. Archie had chosen San Francisco only because he knew more people there and could get his business started quicker. He'd pa.s.sed the California Bar and opened the West Coast office of Gant & a.s.sociates in March 1954. By 1965 he'd been a commander in the USNR, worth two million in tax-free bonds, divorced twice, and on retainer to several banks, construction companies, and commercial-real-estate barons. He had built his reputation and bank account on difficult and highly visible security fraud cases.

He had met Sam Bannister in 1960 on a retreat held by the Bohemian Club at The Groves on the Russian River in California. They had run around a bit and had gotten along well. By 1963 he was managing Sam's West Coast affairs of real estate and occasional minor indiscretions.

Sam had just called him about Lieutenant Colonel Wolfgang Lochert. Said he needed a favor and wanted Archie to defend the Special Forces colonel. Archie had the time to take the case but wasn't sure he wanted it. All he knew was what he saw on the TV screen, and it wasn't good.

Maybe killing a double agent in self-defense was justified, but throwing the dead man's body at a tree clearly was not, he told Sam. Further, the camera had caught Lochert's face in a rictus of hate that had burned itself into Archie's memory.

"I think he's a G.o.dd.a.m.n animal," Archie had told Sam Bannister. "What's he to you?"

"He's not an animal. I know him. He's a real soldier. In fact, he's an ex-seminarian. And a good friend of my son. It's so important to Court that he will pay the fee, but he doesn't want Lochert to know about it. Give him a hand, will you?"

"Ex-seminarian, huh? I'll think about it," Archie had said and hung up.

He stood at the window and looked at the OIL horizon. Vietnam. He had seen Europe at war, and he had seen Korea at war. Might as well see Vietnam at war.

He turned from the window. "Diana," he blasted into the air for his secretary. Diana Gear entered, notebook in hand.

She was in her forties, thin, dark hair pulled up in a bun.

"You could use the interoffice communicator," she said tartly, as always.

Gant ignored the comment, as always. "Get me a roundtrip ticket to Saigon. Depart tomorrow. Open return. Exseminarian, huh. Find out who Army Lieutenant Colonel Wolfgang Lochert's defense attorney is, tell him I'm coming over. You know, the Green Beret on TV that threw the body. Tell him there is no charge, that this is an interesting case.

That isn't the real reason, but make him think it is.

Find me a hotel there. No, tell LaNew to come in here.

Ex-seminarian. Kee-rist."

After Diana Gear departed, Michael LaNew, a tall, coffee-colored Puerto Rican in his early thirties walked into Gant's office. "Yes, sir?" he said.

"Dammit, LaNew, quit saying sir all the time. You're not in the Air Force anymore. What's a good hotel in Saigon?

You spent some time there."

LaNew had just been hired by Gant as an a.s.sociate lawyer in January. The first week in February he'd pa.s.sed the California Bar. Years earlier, when LaNew had received his law degree from Georgetown (Gant hired only Georgetown graduates), he had not been interested in returning to Puerto Rico. He had suddenly been broke and couldn't take a bar exam in the U.S. until his paperwork was finished. Fluent in Spanish, French, and English, he'd joined the USAF and been cla.s.sified as an interpreter for the Air Force Intelligence Service. He could not be a commissioned officer until he was a U.S. citizen. After three years, when he had had his citizens.h.i.+p, he had become a special agent in the Office of Special Investigation. When his four-year hitch had been up in December 1967, he'd taken his discharge in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and answered Gant's ad in the Georgetown Law Review.

Intrigued by Gant's international reputation, he'd gone to work for him.

After an exhausting interview (in which among other intimidating questions-Archie had asked LaNew why in h.e.l.l he thought a black lawyer could make a go in San Francisco), Michael LaNew had become the third a.s.sociate at Gant & Gant. Archie had started him at $14,500 per annum.

LaNew had thought the black question odd. He was Puerto Rican (with a strong Haitian background), not a black man.

Archie enjoyed telling the story at his private club of how LaNew had put him in his place at the interview.

"When I asked him how in h.e.l.l a black lawyer could make money in San Francisco, he said 'by letting his hair grow, wearing sandals, and working undercover in HaightAshbury for white law firms on missing-rich-kid cases."

"Mister Gant," LaNew answered, "there are three or four good hotels. The Astoria for privacy, the Caravel for the newsmen, the Continental Palace for the business crowd, and the Catinat for old French-style rooms and courtyards."

"Have Diana cable the Catinat. Have a file on the Colonel Lochert case ready for me when I leave. Get me all the visas I need and arrange immunization shots for me. Get moving."

1630 HOURS LOCAL, SAt.u.r.dAY 10 FEBRUARY 1968.

PAN American Ramp, TAN SON NHUT Ant BASE SAIGON, REPUBLIC of VIETNAM Red-eyed and crazed, Archie Gant sat in the first-cla.s.s section of the Pan Am 707 as it taxied to a halt at the Pan Am ramp. He wore a rumpled polo s.h.i.+rt and tan slacks. The last sixteen hours had been awful, the service surly, the food abominable. What had truly ruined his trip was his seatmate, a portly diamond salesman who'd gotten on at Guam.

Archie had booked, as was his wont, seats IA and I B for the entire flight, one seat for him, one for his briefcase. Overbooking by Pan Am at Guam had forced the man into Archie's consciousness. After the first thirty minutes of flight, as the man had wheezed out how lucrative it was to sell Cartier diamonds through the PX system to GIs, Archie had exploded.

"G.o.dDAMMIT, I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR OIL WRETCHED DIAMONDS. AND IF.

YOU SNEEZE, COUGH, OR FART, DO IT IN THE HEAD. I OWN YOUR G.o.dd.a.m.n SEAT.

DO WHAT I SAY OR I'LL BREAK YOUR f.u.c.kING SKULL.".

For the rest of the trip the man had sniveled and complained bitterly to the stewardesses. They in turn had glared at and ignored Archie Gant, who had so crudely broken the code of causing no stress for the dainty Pan Am girls who demanded their pa.s.sengers shut up and sleep. Archie had tried to bury himself in his battered 1951 copy of the Manual for Courts-Martial to refresh his memory of how things were done under military jurisdiction. The MCM contained all the numbered paragraphs telling how to administer military justice. Within the book was the UCMJ-the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for the application of justice for all members of the Armed Forces of the United States.

He studied again the file LaNew had put together on Lieutenant Colonel Wolfgang Xavier Lochert. In less than twenty-four hours LaNew had done an incredible job. A close OSI friend had dug up what he needed from Army files and dictated the information over the phone. The morgue at the San Francisco Chronicle Examiner had provided a copy of the photo taken at the Los Angeles terminal in December 1966. An amateur photographer had caught the exact instant Lochert had been splashed with red dye by hippies. In the photo with him were two Air Force officers and a Special Forces sergeant. Archie studied the picture. The sergeant was identified as James P. Mahoney. The two Air Force men were Courtland Bannister, son of actor Sam Bannister, and Toby Parker.

LaNew had located all three in case Mister Gant wanted to contact them.

Mahoney was at a Special Forces camp near Pleiku, Bannister was stationed at Udorn, Thailand, and Toby Parker was at Da Nang, South Vietnam. The Air Force men would make good character witnesses, Archie thought. The sergeant probably would also, but that would take some thought. SF sergeants had reputations as being fierce fighters but poor performers in front of the members of the press who would be sure to descend on anyone a.s.sociated with this case. Archie made a note to talk to Bannister and Parker.

The pilot shut down the engines when the big airliner bobbed to a stop at the ramp. Immediately the air-conditioning went off. Five minutes pa.s.sed as the temperature and humidity climbed in the long aluminum tube. When the front door was opened, an interminable time pa.s.sed as two Vietnamese in white s.h.i.+rts and black baggy pants slowly walked through the cabin from one end to the other, pus.h.i.+ng desultory poofs from spray cans of a foul-smelling insect killer in compliance with Vietnamese law that all incoming aircraft be decontaminated. Dripping and muttering, the pa.s.sengers jammed the aisle. Finally they were given permission to disembark and form up: military to the left, Vietnamese in the middle, all others to the right.

The two-story Tan Son Nhut terminal was a crowded arena of sweating, shoving, Asian and American humanity.

Long queues surged into Immigration. Archie's visa was accepted, stamped, and his name entered laboriously into a general ledger. Next was Customs. New to Vietnam but remembering Seoul, Archie used a folded ten-dollar bill to clear his bulging suitcase. He hired a porter to shoulder it to the area where throngs waited to greet arriving pa.s.sengers.

Archie spotted a tall Vietnamese holding up a sign with the word GANT printed on it. He made sure the porter was following and went up to him. The man had a badly scarred left arm.

"I'm Gant. You from the Catinat or MACV? Let's get going. What's your name? What happened to your arm?"

The man only nodded to Archie's machine-gun questions.

He led him to a black Citron sedan parked at the curb outside one of the terminal doors.

Archie sat in back, the Vietnamese man in front. The driver honked and wedged his car through the crowds of vendors, taxis, pedicabs, and motor scooters. Clouds of blue exhaust smoke rose to eye level in the streets of Saigon. The smoke smelled of the castor oil used in the two-stroke scooter engines. The Vietnamese finally spoke.

"Yes, sir, Mister," he said in good English. "I am from the Catinat. My arm was burned in kitchen-oil fire. I am Nguyen Tach. I and this car are hired for your movements."

"Movements? What is this, a_ rolling c.r.a.pper?" Archie smiled to himself, and decided Diana was on the ball to have arranged a car on such short notice.

The driver expertly wheeled the long car down Le Loi, turned right at Nguyen Hue, and nosed two pedicabs out of the way in front of the Catinat. Archie told Tach to pick him up at seven the next morning.

The lobby was past a courtyard full of flowers, tall palms in huge planters, and white muslin shade awnings. He checked in and was a.s.signed a suite at the top, on the fourth floor. Water in the large tiled bathroom was brown and tepid. He mixed his six P.m. scotch with water from a carafe and walked out on the veranda that looked over the Saigon River. Sampans, small boats, and rusty cargo vessels churned the muddy water. Archie breathed deep. The street sounds and smells were not as bad as Seoul, he thought. He looked down and saw the street vendors with rows and rows of flowers to sell, revealing why Nguyen Hue was called the Street of the Flowers. Looking up, he saw airplanes to the northwest, circling to land at Tan Son Nhut. Around him, the crowded profusion of roofs and chimneys s.h.i.+mmered in the late-afternoon heat.

Archie was going to beat the jet lag and torpor caused by the long flight. He took a shower, padded around naked to dry, downed a second scotch, made sure his mosquito netting was in place in the non-air-conditioned room, turned the cover back, and lay down on the double bed. He bounced up immediately and pulled the mattress from the sagging springs, threw it on the floor, rigged the net over two chairs, and fell asleep.

Twenty minutes later he was awakened by a discreet knock on the door. A smiling and bowing Vietnamese boy -handed him a cable from Diana Gear.

Archie tipped him with a dollar bill while reminding himself to buy some piasters in the morning. Use of American green was illegal in South Vietnam.

The cable said Colonel Lochert's trial would start tomorrow the eleventh at 1000 hours at MACV Headquarters.

Defense counsel Major Jay Denroe would meet with him there, 0800 hours in the JAG liaison officer's conference room. A pa.s.s would be waiting for him at the gate. Tomorrow? Jee-sus. Still naked, Archie fished the MCM from his briefcase, flopped onto the mattress, and began studying. An hour later he fell asleep with the book propped on his naked chest.

"What do you mean, the trial is today?" Archie foghorned at Major Jay Denroe when he was shown into the MACV conference room the next day.

"Jesus Christ, you can't DO THAT."

"Well, I'm glad to meet you, Mister Gant. I'm Jay-"

Archie thrust some notes at him. "I want these motions filed right away."

"You can't do that, Mister-"

"The first one is to quash the indictment on all appropriate grounds."

Archie pulled out a fat cigar and lit it.

"Sir, we don't have appropriate grounds-"

"Don't interrupt. Listen up. I learned a long time ago that litigation is a war, and I don't fight wars unless I can win.

And when I fight a war to win I throw every book I have at them, including all 101 volumes of CJS." CJS was the Corpus Juris Secundum, the Body of the Law, Second: a lawyer's encyclopedia.

"Look at the notes, G.o.ddammit!" Archie barked. "Lochert was placed in confinement on the third of February, served with his charges on the ninth, and is due to be tried today, the eleventh. This is in direct violation of Article 33 of the UCMJ, which clearly states the commanding officer shall within eight days after the accused is ordered into arrest or confinement forward the charges to the officer exercising general court-martial jurisdiction. It took them nine days."

He waved his cigar. "Secondly, they violated Article 35, which just as clearly states that no person against his objection be brought to trial before a general court-martial within a period of five days subsequent to the service of the charges upon him." Archie took a deep pull at his cigar. "ARE YOU LISTENING?" Denroe's eyes snapped up from the papers in his hands.

"Yuh ... yes . .

"SHUDDUP. Thirdly, read the interview printed on page one in the Feb.

ten Stars and Stripes. An Army public affairs officer said to members of the press that the result of the trial of Lieutenant Colonel Wolfgang X. Lochert was a foregone conclusion because the TV film so explicitly proved his guilt.

That was an officer from USARV, which is the command under which Lochert is being prosecuted. The PAO speaks for the commanding general, therefore the commanding general is promulgating Lochert's guilt without due process of law."

"But, sir "SHUDDUP. Fourthly, the law officer for the case was present and nodded a.s.sent at the words of the PAO. That clearly was in violation of Paragraph 42b of the MCM, which states that publication in the public press, radio, or television of the circ.u.mstances of a pending case may interfere with a fair trial and otherwise prejudice the due administration of justice." Archie drew on his cigar and grinned.

"But mainly there is failure of the charges to allege an offense."

"Failure to allege an offense-"

Archie looked at his watch. "It's nine. The trial begins in an hour.

You Army guys know how to make coffee?"

A bewildered and somewhat overwhelmed Jay Denroe led Gant to the tiny snack bar on the first floor of the MACV building. It was nearly bare.

There were no tables, only elbow-high stands and shelves along the wall to rest one's elbows or coffee. One did not dawdle at MACK They drew their coffee from an urn, paid the Vietnamese woman at the register. At a shelf, Archie pulled a silver flask from his briefcase, poured the cap full, and tossed it down.

"Want some?" he inquired politely.

Denroe shook his head, eyes rolling, looking for MPs. He took a deep breath to calm himself. "Sir, Colonel Lochert will be upstairs soon.

I'm sure you want to meet him."

Gant lit another cigar. "In a minute," he said. He blew a stream of smoke in the air.

"Where'd you get your law degree, Denroe? How many times you served as defense counsel? You think Lochert's guilty, don't you? Maybe you don't, but you act like you do.

I trust you won't mind if I take over as chief counsel for the defense.

Hurry up and drink your coffee so we can get back to work. I'm ready to meet Lochert."

Wolf Lochert's paw engulfed Archie Gant's small hand as he studied the man who stood a foot shorter and weighed fifty pounds less. Wolf had long ago learned from combat that size meant nothing.

"Say again why you are here, Gant." Though most Americans had read of the flamboyant trial lawyer from San Francisco in Sunday supplements or had seen shots of him on TV accompanying well-known personages, Wolf had never heard of him.

"Your case interests me. Vietnam interests me. I'm between major cases." The picture of Wolf's hate-filled face as shown on television unrolled in Archie's mind. He blinked it away and studied Wolf in return; noted the burly figure, craggy brows, the combat-worn face, the deep-set eyes. He studied Wolfs eyes. This was not a man who spent his life hating. He silently cursed himself for being taken in by one unfortunate clip of television news. "And, by Christ, you interest me."

Wolf flared. "Don't swear in front of me, Scheisskopf, " he growled.

"SCHEISSKOPF, " Gant bugled, his eyes wide in mock surprise. He barked a laugh. "Oh yeah, that's right. You're an ex-seminarian." He shook his head. "Scheisskopf. Jees ... He barked another laugh. "That's great. Let's not waste time. Let's get to work. I have only one question." He fixed Wolf with a beady eye. "Was whatzisname a double agent?"

He looked like a terrier barking up to a grizzled bulldog.

"I still don't know why you're here-"

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit, I just TOLD you."

"You swear again, I'll bust your skull."

"BUST MY SKULL. Oh, G.o.d, that's rich. He ducked and dodged when Wolf Lochert made a grab for him. Wolf tried again and Archie Gant moved out of his reach in a flash. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.

"LOCHERT," Archie trumpeted, "knock it off or I'll run through your legs and BITE YOUR b.a.l.l.s off."

Wolf stopped in midstride. His face started to break up.

"Bite my ... What are you, some kind of a PRE-vert? Bite my b.a.l.l.s off." RAHTAHA, RAHTAHA, RAHTAHA.