Rainfall

exchange.”

    “Why do you suppose the Keisatsucho is investigating a simple break-in in a Tokyo apartment?” he asked.

    “That I don’t know,” I said, although Tatsu’s involvement made me wonder. “Maybe Kawamura’s position in the government, the recency of his death, something like that. That’s the theory I’d go on.”

    He looked at me. “Are you asking me to dig?”

    I should have let it go. But I’ve been used before. The feeling that it had happened again would keep me awake at night. Had Benny put a B-team on Kawamura? I figured I might as well let Harry provide some clues.

    “You will anyway, right?” I asked.

    He blinked. “Can’t help myself, I guess.”

    “Dig away, then. Let me know what else you find. And watch your back, hotshot. Don’t get sloppy.”

    The warning was for both of us.

3

    TELLING HARRY TO watch his back made me think of Jimmy Calhoun, my best friend in high school, of who Jimmy was before he became Crazy Jake.

    Jimmy and I joined the Army together when we were barely seventeen years old. I remember the recruiter telling us we would need parental permission to join. “See that woman outside?” he had asked us. “Give her this twenty, ask her if she’ll sign as your mother.” She did. Later, I realized this woman was making her living this way.

    Jimmy and I had met, in a sense, through his younger sister, Deirdre. She was a beautiful, black-haired Irish rose, and one of the few people who was nice to the awkward, out-of-place kid I was in Dryden. Some idiot told Jimmy I liked her, which was true, of course, and Jimmy decided he didn’t like a guy with slanty eyes hitting on his sister. He was bigger than I was, but I fought him to a standstill. After that, he respected me, and became my ally against the Dryden bullies, my first real friend. Deirdre and I started dating, and woe to anyone who gave Jimmy a hard time about it.

    I told Deirdre before we left that I was going to marry her when I got back. She told me she’d be waiting. “Watch out for Jimmy, okay?” she asked me. “He’s got too much to prove.”

    Jimmy and I had told the recruiter we wanted to serve together, and the guy said he would make it happen. I don’t know if the recruiter had anything to do with it, in fact he was probably lying, but it worked out the way we asked. Jimmy and I did Special Forces training together at Fort Bragg, then wound up in the same unit, in a joint military-CIA program called the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG. The Studies and Observation moniker was a joke, some idiot bureaucrat’s attempt to give the organization a low profile. You might as well name a pit bull Pansy.

    SOG’s mission was clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions into Cambodia and Laos, sometimes even into North Vietnam. The teams were composed of LURRPs, an acronym for men specializing in long-range reconnaissance patrols. Three Americans and nine Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel, or CIDGs. The CIDGs were usually Khmer mercenaries recruited by the CIA, sometimes Montagnards. Three men would go into the bush for one, two, three weeks at a time, living off the land, no contact with MACV, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.

    We were the elite of the elite, small and mobile, slipping like silent ghosts through the jungle. All the moving parts on the weapons were taped down for noise suppression. We operated so much at night that we could see in the dark. We didn’t even use bug repellent because the V.C. could smell it. We were that serious.

    We were operating in Cambodia at the same time Nixon was publicly pledging respect for Cambodia’s neutrality. If our activities got out, Nixon would have had to admit that he’d been lying not just to the public, but to Congress as well. So our activities weren’t just clandestine, they were outright denied, all the way to the top. For some of our missions we had to travel stripped, with no U.S.-issued weapons or other matériel. Other times we couldn’t even get air support for fear that a pilot would be shot down and captured. When we lost a man, his family would get a telegram saying he had been killed “west of Dak To” or “near the border” or some other vague description like that.

    We started out all right. Before we went, we talked about what we would and wouldn’t do. We’d heard the stories. Everyone knew about My Lai. We were going to keep cool heads, stay professional. Keep our