The Hades Project

by

Justin Gustainis

Prologue

Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam

May 24, 1971

The village of Do Lac lay stoically underneath the merciless afternoon sun. It was a small place -- fifteen bamboo hootches and a corral containing three tired-looking water buffalo.

From a distance, Do Lac appeared to be deserted, apart from the broken-down livestock. There were no children running around yelling; no village elders gossiped or dozed in the shade outside the huts.

From certain places in the jungle, it was possible to get a clear view of the village's fields and rice paddies. Such observation, aided by a good pair of field glasses, would show the paddies to be unattended, the fields deserted.

A reasonable man might have concluded that Do Lac was uninhabited, just another abandoned village in a land ravaged by war. The men watching from the jungle, who were not reasonable, thought they knew better.

Then the screaming started, and they were certain.

The anguished sounds came from one of the hootches -- the biggest one, which was probably used for communal purposes. The screams, unmistakably those of a man in mortal agony, went on for a long time.

The six watching men were lying prone just inside the jungle's edge, about 180 yards from the closest hut. One of them, the big American with close-cropped blond hair, took the field glasses from his eyes and blew out his breath in a soft whistle. "Well, he's in there," he said quietly.

"Not much doubt, is there?" the other American said. He was smaller than the blond, with dark hair and eyes and slightly swarthy skin. Even the Vietnamese on the team, to whom most round-eyes looked as alike as grains of rice in a bowl, had no trouble telling the two Yankees apart. Size and pigmentation aside, they were distinguishable in another way the four Vietnamese knew well -- the big, blond American was dangerous; the smaller, darker one was lethal.

Neither one had yet reached his twenty-first birthday.

The dark-haired American glanced at the Rolex diving watch on his wrist. "Full dark in about four hours," he said. "We go in then, before moonrise."

The blond looked dubiously at him, then back at the village. "Sounds like he's pretty busy in there, man. Havin' too much fun to worry about watching his back. Shit, we go in now, we can be on top of him before he even knows we're there."

The other American just shook his head.

"Come on, Mike," the blond said. "Let's get in, get it on, and get it over with. I'm tired of trackin' this motherfucker."

"You tired of living, too?" The smaller man's voice was patient. "We never did figure whether he operates alone or as part of a team, right? Hell, this might even be his home base. Could be a couple dozen of Victor Charlie's finest in those hootches, Chops. We'd never know it until they lit us up like a Christmas tree." He shook his head again. "Fuck that shit. We wait until dark."

He made a summoning gesture to one of the Vietnamese. Like everyone on the team, the man who crawled over was wearing tiger stripe jungle fatigues, patched and faded and sweat-stained. Coming up to the American named Mike, he whispered, "What happens?"

"We're going in after dark, about four hours from now. You and the other guys grab some sleep, if you can. Me and Chops will handle security."

The Vietnamese, whose name was Tran Van Dinh, looked at the one called Mike thoughtfully. "Wait for darkness is safer, yes?"

The American nodded.

"So we wait," Tran said, "even if some poor bastard getting his guts torn out, inch at a time, yes?"

"Yeah, that's right. Orders are to take this fucker alive, if possible. We got a better chance to get close in the dark. So we wait."

"Good. Many 'Mericans sentimental assholes. Get people killed that way."

"Not me," Mike said grimly.

"Me, either. Wake me in four hour."

###

The dark came down swiftly, as it does in the jungle, covering the land like a black velvet cloak. Even with the night to hide them, the six men had been leery about the open ground that separated the village from the bush. The cleared land could be mined, or booby-trapped in some other way. Or they might be halfway across when someone in the village decided to send up a flare, leaving the team exposed, discovered, and in very bad trouble.

Fadeout they called it, at the Royal Jungle Tracking School the Brits ran in Malaysia. "Fadeout's what happens when the blokes you're after get after you instead, on account of you fucked up." The instructor, an SAS Sergeant Major named Callan, had looked sourly around at the group of students before going on. "And just you remember this, mates: fadeout is generally followed by rigor mortis."

So, using the jungle for cover during the last half-hour of daylight, they made a cautious semicircle around the village. When darkness fell, they came in through the rice paddies, on their bellies. Their bodies were almost submerged, but they were careful to keep their weapons dry. Vietnamese farmers use the dung from their water buffalo as fertilizer. The odor is both distinctive and unpleasant, but the six men were prepared to put up with an awful lot of buffalo shit if it were the price of staying alive.

They came out of the paddies quiet as ghosts, one at a time, and slipped into the village. Silently and efficiently, they checked every hut in Do Lac before approaching the larger communal building. In almost every dwelling they found the mutilated bodies of villagers -- men, women, and children. They did not linger over the corpses, but even cursory examination showed that the mutilations had been carried out while the victims were still alive. The six men had some experience in these matters, and they recognized death by torture when they saw it.

After all of the hooches had been cleared, the team prepared to move on the larger building, from which the screams had only recently ceased. Using hand signals, the American named Mike quickly deployed the four Vietnamese as security at different points around the building. Then he and the tall, blond American took turns moving in on the entrance, one man providing cover as the other scurried closer to the objective. Finally, they were near enough for the final rush.

As usual, the smaller American had taken upon himself the dangerous task of breaching the door. Crouching behind the village well, the blond brought his Swedish "K" submachine gun to his shoulder and drew a bead on the door of the hut. "Fuckin' Mike. Gotta be the first one through the door, every goddamn time. Bet if he was six foot four he could give this shit a rest once in a while."

Seeing that his partner was ready to provide covering fire, the American named Mike took a firm grip on the shotgun he was carrying. He sprinted the last twenty yards to the hut, sent the door crashing open with one powerful kick, and dived through the entrance.

Outside, the one called Chops waited, the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears. The seconds ticked by in aching, empty silence. Finally, after more than three minutes, he decided that something was seriously wrong. He was just getting to his feet when the screaming started inside the hut, the voice different from the one heard earlier.

Then, a moment later, the roar and flash of a shotgun blast split the night wide open.

The big blond man was running now, flat out, sprinting toward the door of the hut, all the while sick at heart with the knowledge that whatever had gone bad in there, he was already too late to do anything about it.

Chapter 1

Michael Pacilio leaned forward in his chair and placed the videocassette on McGraw's desk. Sitting back, he said, "We can play it whenever you're ready."

McGraw glanced at the cassette then quickly looked away, the way some people do when driving past a bad accident. "Just what do these assholes think they were trying to accomplish, anyway?"

Pacilio looked at him and said softly "Did, not do, I think. Since they're all dead now, the past tense seems appropriate."

McGraw bowed his head briefly. "All right, past tense, then, and all due respect to the departed. But, what were they up to in that lab?"

"I really can't say. I've read the project file, just as you have, but I haven't got the scientific background to make much sense out of it. The only phrase of any importance that I recognized was space-time continuum, and I think that's because I heard it once in an old Star Trek episode. You're going to need someone with a physics background if you want anything like a useful answer."

"That's in the works even as we speak," McGraw told him. "I've got a couple of Ph.D.s with security clearances on loan from Georgetown. They're downstairs going over the file now. I told them I wanted a preliminary assessment before close of business today. Naturally, they have no idea of any connection between the file and . . . what happened in Fairfax overnight."

Pacilio nodded wearily. There were lines of strain and fatigue in his face that McGraw had never seen there before. Pacilio was a smallish man, no more than 5'8", with a slightly swarthy complexion. Although pushing fifty, he still moved with the economy and unconscious grace of a matador -- and, in Spanish, matador means nothing more than killer.

There was no bravado about Pacilio, no machismo. Sit next to this well-dressed, carefully groomed man on an airplane and you would have no idea you were coming across anything special -- unless you took a good look at the brown eyes, which, McGraw thought, contained all the warmth of a couple of pennies left out in a November rain.

He tried not to use Pacilio much. Most of what crossed McGraw's desk involved run-of-the-mill investigations of scientific fraud, and sending someone like Pacilio after a government-funded cancer researcher suspected of fudging his data was akin to using a leopard for chasing down runaway lab rats -- it offended McGraw's sense of proportion. But when he had been awakened by the telephone at 5:19 that morning with the first report of what had been found at the lab in Fairfax, McGraw had realized very quickly who he needed. He had called Pacilio at 5:33.

And now it was just past two in the afternoon and here was Pacilio sitting across from McGraw's desk and there, in the middle of the desk, was the videotape Pacilio had been instructed to make.

McGraw had asked for an oral report first, and Pacilio had provided one that lasted three or four minutes. While listening to the soft, precise voice, McGraw had experienced an odd physical sensation.

He was a big man, McGraw was, and about thirty-five pounds of it was fat. As a result, summer was hard on him. The excess weight meant that he was usually warm, even in air-conditioned environments. And here it was June, in Washington, even more humid than usual, with the cranky government air conditioning working erratically at best and Mcgraw was cold. Pacilio had been speaking for less than thirty seconds when McGraw had begun to feel as if ice crystals were forming in his bloodstream.

McGraw wondered if he would ever feel warm again.

He looked back to the videocassette that lay on his desk like a patient cobra. Something printed on the tape's cardboard sleeve caught his eye. "Did you buy the blank tape yourself? It's not department issue."

Pacilio shrugged. "I brought it from home. It had a couple of episodes of 'Nigella Bites' on it, but I've already watched them. I'll get reimbursed out of petty cash. Or, if you're feeling stingy this month, consider it my contribution toward the budget deficit."

"You always buy this 'EXP Hi-Grade' stuff?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Why?"

"Better picture fidelity. It's got more -- what do they call it? -- iron oxide coating than the cheaper tapes."

McGraw shook his head, pleased to be one up on Pacilio. "Not true," he said. "Saw an article in my dentist's waiting room a couple of weeks ago. In that place, the walls are so thin, you read anything just to keep from listening to the sound of the drill going in the next room. Anyway, this was in one of those consumer magazines. It said that they had run tests on the kind of picture you get from the various grades of videotape, and they found that the differences between the lowest grade and the highest grade of brand-name tapes were negligible and couldn't be seen by the naked eye. Can you believe it? Article said that these more expensive 'high grade' tapes were just a marketing gimmick to make more money for the manufacturers."

Pacilio nodded a couple of times and looked down at the carpet. "You're stalling, aren't you?"

McGraw was silent for several seconds. "Yeah, you're right. I guess I am."

"If you don't want to look at it, it's no skin off my tender parts. I can write you up a detailed summary, if that's what you'd prefer."

"No, it's good of you to offer, but we both know that won't wash. I've got a report to put together, and I've got a feeling it's going to prompt a lot of questions from upstairs that I'll have to answer later. If you could stand to make the fucking thing, I guess I can stand to watch it."

Pacilio shrugged. "Up to you."

"Go ahead and cue it up, will you?" McGraw's tone of voice was not very different from the one you hear in the gas chamber just after the warden asks "Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out"?

Against the far wall was a credenza containing a VCR and a 26-inch monitor. Pacilio inserted the tape cassette and picked up the remote control. He looked at McGraw as if giving him one last chance to back out. "Okay?"

"Sure. Play it again, Sam."

"My name's not Sam, Bogart never said that, and this is the first time it's ever been played."

McGraw's smile was thin to the point of emaciation. "Then I hope you remembered to take the damn lens cap off," he said. "Go ahead, you literal-minded bastard."

Pacilio pointed the remote control at the TV and pushed a button. The set came to life with one of those syndicated freak shows that have proliferated across the TV landscape the way algae takes over a pond. Six people, four men and two women, were seated in armchairs lined up across a bare stage. One of the men, an Indiana farmer with more tattoos than teeth, was trying to explain to the show's pudgy young hostess, amid jeers and catcalls from the studio audience, that incest wasn't necessarily bad in all cases; you had to look at the circumstances; you had to consider a person's needs. Pacilio pushed another button. The farmer disappeared and the tape started to roll.

On screen was a shot of a low red-brick building as seen from across the street. Pacilio said, "I'll give you a running commentary, all right? There's nothing on the soundtrack. Nobody in there was making any noise by the time I arrived."

"All right, fine." McGraw's eyes never left the screen. After a moment he said, "It looks more like a school than a lab under government contract."

Pacilio nodded. "Used to be a high school gym. Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, or something." A thoroughly lapsed Catholic, Pacilio was irreverent as a reflex. "The diocese closed the place down a few years ago, due to low enrollment. They tore out the bleachers, put in a bunch of interior walls over the basketball court, and rented it out to Uncle Sam."

The camera's eye had moved close to the front double door of the building, which was mostly glass reinforced by what looked like crosshatched chicken wire, when McGraw suddenly said "Wait. Run it back a little, will you, and then let it go forward again."

As the camera approached the door again, McGraw said "Stop. Go back just a hair and freeze frame. Okay, see that puddle on the concrete just to the right of the door? What is that? We haven't had rain all week."

Pacilio was looking at the floor again. "It's vomit," he said quietly. "A small pool of human vomit."

McGraw sat up straighter. "Did one of the victims get outside? Could it have come from one of the killers? Has it been sent to a lab for analysis?"

Pacilio sounded both irritated and embarrassed as he said, "No, no one got outside, as far as I can tell, and no, the puke has not been sent to a lab."

"Why the hell not? It might be--"

"Because it's mine."

"Yours"?

"I took a walk through the place without the camcorder the first time. I wanted to know what I was dealing with. There might have been some kind of chemical or biological hazard -- how would I know? What you gave me over the phone was pretty sketchy. You said we had dead people, but nothing about how they died. If it was murder, maybe the perp was still on the premises. In any event, I wanted to be able to move fast if I had to, so I left the camera in my car."

"And what happened?" McGraw's tone was not unkind.

"It was murder, all right, and that's putting it mildly, but whoever did it was long gone. Once I figured that out, I went back out to the car to get the camcorder. On the way, I had my little accident just outside the front door. I could have made it to a restroom inside, probably, but I didn't want to contaminate the crime scene by tossing my cookies all over it."

McGraw tried to get his mind around the idea that Pacilio had encountered something in that lab that had made him vomit in revulsion. People like Pacilio weren't supposed to do things like that.

McGraw thought he had a pretty good idea about the sort of man Pacilio was; he'd known him for four years, and had access to his Personnel File, as well.

Even more important, McGraw had a son-in-law who had served in Vietnam.

###

Labor Day weekend, four years earlier:

McGraw, wearing a well-stained apron that says "Kiss the Cook" across the front, is gingerly placing raw hamburgers in rows across his hot barbecue grill. Without looking up, he says to the tall man leaning against the nearby deck railing, "You were with Naval Intelligence, weren't you, Jack, during the Late Unpleasantness in Southeast Asia?"

Jack Braithwaite, who is married to McGraw's eldest daughter, swallows a mouthful of potato chips and smiles slightly. "Yeah, it seemed like pretty good duty at the time they offered it, especially if you wanted to avoid getting shot at. But if I'd known up front about all the bullshit involved, I might've taken my chances in combat."

"While you were over there, did you ever run across a guy named Mike Pacilio?"

Braithwaite's eyes narrow, and the smile vanishes from his face. After a moment he asks, "Did he serve with the SEALs?"

"So I understand, yeah."

"No, I never met him." The tone of voice does not encourage further discussion.

"You say you've never met him, but yet you knew right away that he was in the SEALs?"

The younger man sighs a little. Then he shrugs and says, "He'd be mentioned sometimes in reports that would pass through our office." Braithwaite looks at his father-in-law. "What do you care about this guy, Mac?"

"The Department hired him last week, and he's been assigned to my office as a field investigator, starting Tuesday. I like to know about the people who work for me, so I had his Personnel File sent over."

McGraw fusses with the grill a little more. "Fella's had a varied career in government service, I'll say that much. Several years with DEA, back when it was the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Then the U.S. Marshals for a while, followed by ATF for three or four years. Most recently, he's been with that State Department outfit, the Diplomatic Security Corps."

"So, what's the deal with him? He keeps fucking up and getting canned?"

"Nope, he's never been fired, far as I can tell. He keeps transferring out. And, you know what? Every one of his supervisors write him great evals, really outstanding -- even while they're approving the guy's request for transfer."

Braithwaite shrugs. "If you've seen his file, what more do you need?"

"Nothing, I guess. But I got kind of curious when I saw that his service record had been expunged."

Braithwaite nods, as if he finds this unsurprising.

"I mean, there are a few bits and pieces that somebody missed," McGraw says. "A copy of an Honorable Discharge from the Navy, a couple of references to 'Overseas service, Republic of Vietnam,' and one passing mention of 'Navy special warfare units.' And that's about it."

There is silence between the two men that lasts long enough for McGraw to apply generous amounts of salt and pepper to the burgers he has grilling. Finally, Braithwaite says, "I'm not supposed to talk about that stuff, Mac. A lot of it is still classified, even after all this time."

"What stuff might that be, Jack?"

"Special Ops stuff. Like a lot of the SEAL missions." Three or four seconds go by before Braithwaite adds, "And like Phoenix."

McGraw blinks a couple of times. "I see," he says quietly. His war was Korea, not Vietnam -- but even McGraw has heard of the Phoenix program.

McGraw says nothing more about it, but during the meal that follows, he finds Braithwaite's eyes on him whenever he happens to look in his son-in-law's direction.

Later, McGraw is enjoying a post-dinner beer and watching his grandchildren tear-assing around the back yard when Braithwaite, carrying his own can of beer, wanders over. They stand side by side, watching the kids in a companionable silence.

Suddenly, Braithwaite says, "Your newest employee did two tours in-country, Mac. He volunteered for the second one, but that's not unusual among Spec Op types. They don't go through the hell of all that training just so they can sit around a Pentagon office, counting paper clips. They tend to be what you might call highly motivated."

"Or maybe they're just crazy," McGraw says dryly.

Braithwaite doesn't smile. "Could be that they are. To carry out the kinds of missions those guys do, maybe being crazy helps." He takes a swallow of Coors. "Anyway, Pacilio's first tour was typical SEAL stuff: raids, ambushes, recon patrols -- the usual snake-eater shit. Then some spook from The Company talked him into Phoenix. He did his second tour with them, operating mostly out of I Corps."

"Was the Phoenix program really as sinister as the news reports made out, Jack? They made it sound like a military version of Murder, Incorporated."

"You don't believe those pinkos in the liberal media, do you?" Braithwaite's voice gives the words a light coat of irony. "Assassination was part of it, that's true. But it wasn't the whole ball game, not by any means. See, the basic idea was to fuck up the Viet Cong organization in the South. Sometimes, Intelligence would identify somebody who was a big wheel in the VC cadre, and a team would be sent in after him. Or her."

"What was considered a 'team?'"

"Generally two American Spec Op types, and three or four Viets. Pacilio was partnered with a Green Beret, name of . . . some Polack guy . . . Chopko, that's right, Carl Chopko. Him and Pacilio and four Vietnamese Rangers. Best team in I Corps, or so I heard."

"And these bad-asses would do what, exactly?"

"Whatever they were told to do. Sometimes, the mission was to locate the identified VC and take him out. That's where all that "Murder, Incorporated" crap comes from. But, other times, the orders would be to snatch some guy, bring him back, then turn him over for interrogation by our democratic and freedom-loving allies, the South Vietnamese National Police."

Braithwaite pauses, staring at his beer can as if the contents had suddenly turned bitter. "Tell you this much, Mac," he says bleakly, "no VC suspect who ended up in one of those little rooms underneath the Saigon Jail was ever heard from again, and the luckiest of those poor bastards were the ones who broke early."

McGraw nods acknowledgement in the silence that follows. Thinking that his son-in-law's tale is done, McGraw is about to thank him when Braithwaite suddenly says, "It was early in '71, I think, when the word came down from MACV about the new 'psywar offensive.' The people in Phoenix were assigned to play a major role in it."

McGraw's brow furrows. "Psychological warfare? Spreading leaflets around -- 'Surrender now, you will receive good treatment'-- that kind of thing? Why would they waste special ops guys on a pissant job like that?"

Braithwaite shakes his head. "There's all kinds of psychological warfare, Mac. What they had in mind for the Phoenix teams . . . well, when the other side did it, we usually called it terrorism."

McGraw's voice is carefully neutral as he says, "I see. Or, rather, I don't see."

"Look -- most Vietnamese are Buddhists, right? Even the VC, who were supposed to be good, atheistic Communists, still followed the old ways, most of them. You don't wipe out something like 3,000 years of tradition with a couple of decades of Marxist-Leninism, you know?"

"Sure," McGraw says. "Makes sense."

"So, Buddhism teaches that when somebody dies, you have to bury the body intact, with all of its . . . parts. Otherwise, the dead guy's soul can't find peace and it's doomed to wander the earth forever."

"The light begins to dawn," McGraw says. "So these Phoenix teams --"

"-- Would sometimes be sent after a particular guy, with instructions to go in at night, find him, hit him, and then leave the body near his village where it was sure to be discovered the next morning. And when the guy was found, he'd be missing some important organ -- usually the liver, for reasons I can't remember."

"And this stuff was supposed to help us win the war, somehow?"

Braithwaite shrugs. "It was supposed to send a message to the locals: Be careful how much help you give to the Viet Cong, or we might come for you some dark night. And if we do, we bring not only death, but damnation."

McGraw shakes his head in wonder. "Damnation. Jesus."

A few moments go by before Braithwaite says, "One more thing, Mac: you and me, we never had this conversation."

"What conversation?"

###

And so McGraw was well aware that he was sitting across from a man who was capable of breaking somebody's neck with his bare hands and then cutting the liver out of the corpse. Pacilio, who had done these things, and worse, and yet managed somehow to retain his sanity, had seen something in that building that had caused him to vomit in disgust. Mother of God, McGraw thought, I knew it was going to be bad, but if it made Pacilio throw up then it is so far beyond bad that I haven't got the words for it. I just know that I don't want to see it.

But he knew he had to see it.

And so, after a deep breath and a silent thanks to whatever gods there are that he had been too busy to have lunch, he did.