Shadowfires

what drew him to the
service was not duty or pride but the hope of promotion to a position
of real power, early retirement in just twenty years, and a generous
pension; he could talk for hours about military pensions and
benefits.
    He had no special passion for music, art, books, sports, hunting,
fishing, or anything else-except for himself. He himself was his own-
and only-passion. Though not a hypochondriac, he was certainly
obsessed with the state of his health and would talk at length about
his digestion, his constipation or lack of it, and the appearance of
his morning stool. Another man might simply say, “I have a splitting
headache,” but Anson Sharp, plagued by a similar condition, would
expend two hundred words describing the degree and nature of the
agony in excruciating detail and would use a finger to trace the
precise line of the pain across his brow. He spent a lot of time
combing his hair, always managed to be clean-shaven even under battle
conditions, had a narcissistic attraction to mirrors and other
reflective surfaces, and made a virtual crusade of obtaining as many
creature comforts as a soldier could manage in a war zone.
    It was difficult to like a man who liked nothing but himself.
    But if Anson Sharp had been neither a good nor an evil man when he
had gone to Nam -just bland and self-centered-the war had worked upon
the unformed clay of his personality and had gradually sculpted a
monster. When Ben became aware of detailed and convincing rumors of
Sharp's involvement in the black market, an investigation had turned up proof of an astonishing criminal career. Sharp had been involved in the hijacking of goods in transit to post exchanges and canteens, and he had negotiated the sale of those stolen supplies to buyers in the Saigon underworld. Additional information indicated that, while not a user or direct seller of drugs, Sharp facilitated the commerce in illegal substances between the Vietnamese Mafia and U.S. soldiers. Most shocking of all, Ben's
sleuthing led to the discovery that Sharp used some profits from
criminal activity to keep a pied-ŕ-terre in Saigon's roughest nightclub district; there, with the assistance of an exceedingly vicious Vietnamese thug who served as a combination houseboy and dungeon master, Sharp maintained an eleven-year-old girl-Mai Van Trang-as a virtual slave, sexually abusing her whenever he had the opportunity, otherwise leaving her to the mercy of the thug.
    The inevitable court-martial had not proceeded as predictably as
Ben hoped. He wanted to put Sharp away for twenty years in a military
prison. But before the case came to trial, potential witnesses began
to die or disappear at an alarming pace. Two Army noncoms-pushers
who'd agreed to testify against Sharp in return for lenient treatment-were found dead in Saigon alleyways, throats cut. A lieutenant was fragged in his sleep, blown to bits. The weasel-faced houseboy and poor Mai Van Trang disappeared, and Ben was sure that the former was alive somewhere and that the latter was just as certainly dead and buried in an unmarked grave, not a difficult disposal problem in a nation torn by war and undermined by unmarked graves. In custody awaiting trial, Sharp could effectively plead innocence to involvement in this series of convenient deaths and vanishings, though it was surely his influence with the Vietnamese underworld that provided for such favorable developments. By the start of the court-martial, all of the witnesses against Sharp were gone, and the case was essentially reduced to Ben's
word-and that of his investigators-against
Sharp's smug protestations of innocence. There wasn't sufficient
concrete evidence to ensure his imprisonment but far too much
circumstantial evidence to get him off the hook entirely.
Consequently he was stripped of his sergeant's stripes, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.
    Even that comparatively light sentence had been a blow to Sharp,
whose deep and abiding self-love had not permitted him to entertain
the prospect of any punishment whatsoever. His personal comfort and
well-being were his central-perhaps only-concern, and he seemed to
take it for granted that, as a favored child of the universe, he
would always be assured of unrelieved good fortune. Before shipping
out of Vietnam in disgrace, Sharp had used all of his remaining
contacts to arrange a short surprise visit to Ben, too short to do
any harm, but just long enough