The Throat by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online Page A

thought. First I see him being scalped, then I see him
coming at me.
    I thought of wet elm leaves in a gutter.
    The ghost of Captain Havens smiled at me. The ghost called me by
name and asked, "How'd you find out I was here?" When he came closer I
saw that the ghost was John Ransom.
5
    "Just a guess," I said, and when his smile turned quizzical, "I was
just following the road to see where it went."
    "That's pretty much how I got here, too," Ransom said. He was close
enough to shake my hand, and as he reached out he must have caught the
stench of the shed, and maybe the smells of whiskey and the 100s too.
His eyebrows moved together. "What have you been doing?"
    "I'm on the body squad. Over there." I nodded toward the road. "What
do you do? What is this place?"
    He had grasped my hand, but instead of shaking it, he spun me around
and marched me away from the empty-looking camp and into the spindly
trees. "You better stay out of sight until you straighten up," he said.
    "You should see what the rest of them are doing," I said, but sat
down at the base of one of the trees and leaned against the slick,
spongy bark. The man in the gray suit and sunglasses came out of the
building he had entered earlier and strode back across the grass to the
building he had left. He jumped up onto the stoop and touched his
breast pocket before he went in. "Johnny got his gun," I said.
    "That's Francis Pinkel, Senator Burrman's aide. Pinkel thinks he's
James Bond. That's a Walther PPK in his shoulder holster. We're giving
the senator a briefing, and then we'll take him up in a helicopter and
show him one of our projects."
    "You in some kind of private army?" He showed me the soft green cap
in his hand. "You're one of those guys in Harry Truman shirts who carry
briefcases and live out in Darlac Province, messing around with the
Rhades." I laughed.
    "Sometimes we're asked to fly in wearing civvies," he said. He
placed the beret on his head. It was a dark forest green with a leather
roll around its bottom seam, and it had a patch with two arrows
crossing a sword above the words De
Oppresso Liber . It looked good on
him. "How'd a lousy grunt like you learn so much?"
    "You learn a lot, working on the body squad. What is this place,
here?"
    "Special Operations Group. We ride piggyback on White Star when
we're not in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhade."
    "You really do that?"
    John Ransom explained that the CIDG program in Darlac Province had
been going since the early sixties, but that he had been assigned to
border surveillance in the highlands near the Laotian border, in Khan
Due. Last year, they had parachuted in a bulldozer and carved a landing
strip out of a jungle ridge line. While they looked for the Khatu
tribesmen he was supposed to be working with, his actual troops were
press-ganged teenagers from Danang and Hue. The teenagers were a little
hairy, Ransom said. They weren't much like the Rhade Montagnards. He
sounded frustrated when he told me about his troops, and angry with
himself for letting me see his frustration—the teenagers played
transistors on patrol, he said. "But they kill everything that moves.
Including monkeys."
    "How long have you been here?"
    "Five months, but I've been in the service three years. Did the
Special Forces training at Bragg, got here just in time to help set up
Khan Due. It's not like the regular army." He had begun to sound oddly
defensive to me. "We actually get out and do things. We get into parts
of the country the army never sees, and our A teams do a lot of damage
to the VC."
    "I wondered who was doing all that damage," I said.
    "These days people don't believe in an elite, even the army has
problems with that, but that's what we are. You ever hear of Sully
Fontaine? Ever hear of Franklin Bachelor?"
    I shook my head. "We're a pretty elite group in the body squad, too.
Ever hear of di Maestro? Picklock? Scoot?"
    He nearly shuddered. "I'm talking about heroes. We have guys who
fought the Russians