Vengeance Is Mine

  Dear Readers,

  Vengeance Is Mine was written as a wake-up call to America.

  Like you, we’re scared as hell about the situation on the U.S./Mexican border.

  Thousands and thousands of illegals are pouring into the U.S. each and every day. Yes, many of them are honest and hardworking, in search of the better life America has to offer. But along with them are coming the scum of the earth—Middle Eastern terrorists are infiltrating the porous borders with one goal in mind: the destruction of the United States. Time magazine recently reported that al Qaeda, on direct orders from Osama Bin Laden, has been trying to smuggle nuclear weapons across the Mexican border—and in some cases they’re working closely with Latin American crime syndicates, according to some recent reports. Just as dangerous are the ruthless drug cartels that are flooding American cities and poisoning our children with their heroin and cocaine. And the border jumpers are more brazen than ever. Shootings, rapes, and carjackings of innocent, God-fearing Americans are daily occurrences. Border towns are becoming war zones. Ranchers, many of whom have worked the land for generations, are being slaughtered in their beds.

  Make no mistake—we are at war. And this time the enemy is bringing the battle to us. The Border Patrol is overwhelmed, outmanned, and outgunned. And our government is coping with the situation by doing what they do best: not a damn thing.

  We wrote this novel because, frankly, we were tired of poking our fingers into the air and crying, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” The horrifying events that befall John Howard Stark are all based on true incidents that have been occurring along the U.S./Mexican border. It’s our hope that Vengeance Is Mine will open America’s eyes to the crisis on our border that grows more perilous—to our friends and loved ones—with each passing day.

  Respectfully Yours,

  William W. Johnstone

  Fred Austin

  May 2005

  WILLIAM W.

  JOHNSTONE

  WITH FRED AUSTIN

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  BOOK ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  BOOK TWO

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  BOOK THREE

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  BOOK ONE

  Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.

  —Davy Crockett

  Then . . .

  The jungle smelled of death. Rotting vegetation, rotting animals—including man. But the odd thing was that it smelled of life, too, a rich, musky odor that proclaimed everything here was born anew, that the cycle of death and rebirth was ageless and unchanging.

  John Howard Stark loved land. Loved to plunge his fingers into the earth and lift out great sticky clumps of dirt and rub his fingers together, smearing it into his skin so that when he brought his hand to his nose and inhaled, he could smell the life there.

  John Howard Stark loved land—but not this land. Yes, the earth here in South Vietnam was fertile. It had supported its people for thousands of years and for that, he supposed, it should have been honored.

  But now this earth had been watered by the blood of too many of his friends for him to ever honor it. The smell of death was too strong. It overpowered the scent of life.

  Stark opened and closed his fingers on the stock of the carbine he held. They were out there in the darkness, waiting just like he was. He knew that. He supposed they were afraid, too, but he couldn’t be certain of that. Though he had tried, he was unable to put himself in their heads. A naturally empathic man, Stark was still totally unable to make himself think like one of the enemy. They were just too damn alien.

  The good thing was, you didn’t have to be able to think like them in order to kill them. All you had to do was pull the trigger when they came at you, silent wraiths in black pajamas.

  “What you think, John Howard?”

  The whisper came from beside Stark. He glanced over at his buddy Rich Threadgill, who was standing guard with him on this side of the camp. Threadgill’s face was blackened; he had even rubbed the stuff into the blond mustache that drooped over his mouth. But every so often there was a faint reflection off the glasses he wore. That worried Stark, but there was nothing he could do about it. Threadgill needed the glasses to see.

  “I don’t reckon it’ll be much longer,” Stark whispered in reply. He and Threadgill were both Texans, Stark from the Rio Grande Valley, Threadgill from Fort Worth, so it was natural they would be friends. Stark liked all the men in his marine unit, though. A few weeks in this isolated outpost north of Saigon had been enough to forge bonds between them that only death could break.

  And to tell the truth, Stark sometimes wondered if even death could accomplish that.

  Over on the other side of the camp were Jack Finnegan, a rich kid from Chicago whose banker daddy could easily have pulled some strings and kept his boy out of Southeast Asia, only Jack didn’t want to be “protected” from something he considered his duty; and Will Sheffield from Knoxville, Tennessee, who claimed he was going to be a writer someday and to prove it carried around a notebook in which he scribbled ideas for stories and such. Both of them good men, already seasoned veterans of this dirty little war, and Stark felt confident with them watching his backside.

  He was glad Threadgill was with him, though. Threadgill was bug-fuck crazy sometimes, but he was probably the best natural warrior Stark had ever seen. All you had to do was point Threadgill at the enemy, say, “Rich, kill!” and stand back to watch the carnage.

  A slithering rustle in the brush; Stark swung his carbine toward it. But it wasn’t Charlie. “Del Rio,” the newcomer hissed. Stark relaxed. Del Rio was the name of his hometown back in Texas. It was also the password used by the Vietnamese scout attached to their squad, Nat Van Linh.

  Nat was only a kid, fifteen years old as opposed to Stark’s twenty. But as with Stark, this war had made Nat grow up in a hurry, and he had lived with it a lot longer than Stark or his buddies had.

  “They’re coming,” Nat said. “Any minute now.”

  Stark nodded. “Get the rest of the camp awake.”

  Nat slipped off, moving noiselessly in the jungle.

  “Them little sumbitches gon’ get a surprise,” Threadgill said. “They figure to overrun us ’fore we know what’s goin’ on. But ol’ Nat, he sees ever’thing that goes on out there. Don’t nothin’ get by him.”

  “That’s enough,” Stark said. “Quiet down now.”

  Threadgill hushed up. He had been in so many bar and barracks fights since he’d joined the marines, had been busted back from his hard-won promotions so many times, that all the brass thought of him as nothing b
ut a troublemaker. They had never fought beside him, though. They didn’t know that far from being the arrogant, insubordinate bastard they thought he was, Threadgill really didn’t mind taking orders and being a team player, as long as he respected the man giving the orders.

  He respected Sergeant John Howard Stark, all right. Stark had earned that respect.

  The two men waited in silence. It must have been like this back home, Stark thought, a hundred years earlier when the Comanche moon rose over the vast Texas landscape and the settlers waited for the killing devils to come out of the darkness. When the hoot of an owl meant so much more, when savage death could strike with little or no warning. But if there was a Vietnamese moon floating overhead tonight, Stark couldn’t see it. The overhanging jungle was too thick for that. Shadows ruled this world.

  Shadows that suddenly lunged toward Stark and Threadgill, screaming and firing the automatic weapons that their good friends in the Soviet Union and China so thoughtfully provided for them.

  Stark brought the carbine to his shoulder and started firing, squeezing the trigger smoothly as he targeted the muzzle flashes of the VC weapons. Threadgill opened up beside him, equally cool under fire. Stark heard shooting from the other side of the camp and knew the pajama boys were all around them.

  They would hold their position or they would be overrun and die. Simple as that.

  A mortar thumped, and a second later a blast went off in the jungle a couple of hundred yards out as the round exploded. The roaring bursts of fire marched in a line through the thick growth. That was Henry Macon’s work, Stark knew. Macon was a black kid from Iowa, tall and gangling with the biggest hands Stark had ever seen. To look at those hands, you wouldn’t think that Macon could do any sort of delicate work with them, but he was damned good with a mortar, one of the best ordnance men around. He wreaked havoc on the enemy’s rear and contributed a great deal to breaking the back of the VC attack.

  But there were still all the Cong up on the front lines to deal with. That job fell to Stark and Threadgill and the marines who came rushing out of the camp to reinforce them.

  The chattering of automatic weapons, the sharp cracks of the carbines, and the screams of the enemy blended into an unnerving chaos. In the midst of such bedlam some men couldn’t take it and simply shut down, crouching there in the darkness, not firing, not fighting, waiting to either live or die. Stark didn’t hate or look down on men like that; he simply didn’t understand them. The survival urge was strong in him, and it was more than that, really. It was the victor’s urge, the need to win. He had known he had it when he was only a kid, the first time he had come up to the batter’s box in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the winning run in scoring position. Even with two strikes on him, he didn’t worry. He just waited for his pitch.

  Someone had once called that mentality the triumph of the uncluttered mind. Stark didn’t know that he’d go so far as to call his mind uncluttered, but it was certainly direct. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it. Tonight, deep in this damned jungle, he wanted to live and he wanted to kill the enemy.

  He emptied the carbine, rammed another clip home. Charlie was all around.

  Threadgill suddenly lunged over Stark’s back. Stark heard him grappling with someone. A thin, bubbling cry that ended abruptly told Stark that Threadgill had just rammed his knife into a throat and ripped it wide open. Threadgill came to his knees and tossed a grenade out into the jungle. The place was so teeming with VC that the blast was bound to take out some of them.

  But where there were so many, some were bound to escape, too. A couple of the black pajama boys came out of the shadows and crashed into Threadgill, knocking him backward so that he sprawled over Stark. Threadgill plunged his knife into the belly of one of them, but the other VC hit him with the stock of an AK-47 and stunned him.

  Stark poked the barrel of his carbine against the black-clad enemy’s back and fired, blowing Charlie’s spine in two. The VC flopped to the side and thrashed around in his death throes as Threadgill groaned, only half-conscious.

  Coming up on his knees, Stark twisted around to search for more of the enemy. He didn’t see the one behind him who kicked him in the back of the head. Stark’s helmet went flying as he pitched forward on his face. Fighting to hang on to consciousness, he forced himself to roll over so that he could try to defend himself.

  It was too late. The VC who had knocked him down now loomed over him, and the flash from a mortar round showed Stark an image he would never forget: the snarling face of the man who was about to thrust a bayonet into his belly and rip his guts out. At that instant Stark knew he was staring death right in the eye.

  And then, in the next heartbeat, before the poised bayonet could fall, the VC’s head blew up, blood and brains raining down around Stark in a hot, grisly shower. Rich Threadgill shoved the corpse with its shattered skull aside, motioned with the .45 he had just used to blow Charlie’s brains out, and said, “Come on, John Howard. Can’t lie around all night.”

  Stark pushed himself up off the soggy, blood-soaked ground. Threadgill had regained his senses just in time to save Stark’s life, but that didn’t change the fact that he had been only seconds from death. He had been close enough to feel the Reaper’s hand on his shoulder.

  And the memory of that bony touch would always be there.

  After so long a time—it seemed like hours but was probably only ten or fifteen minutes—the enemy withdrew and the shooting stopped. The marines remained alert for the rest of the night, unwilling to blindly accept that the fighting was over. Letting your guard down was the quickest way to get dead out here. Not until morning came did anyone relax.

  They sat around a cook pot, Stark and Threadgill and Finnegan and Sheffield, all of them except Finnegan twenty years old and he was only a year older. Red-eyed, haggard, and unshaven, but still alive, by God. Nat Van Linh hunkered on his heels beside the pot and cut up some meat into the stew. The Americans didn’t know what kind of meat it was and didn’t ask. Stark hoped it wasn’t long pig, but he was too tired and hungry to worry much about it.

  He noticed Henry Macon standing not too far away. Macon seemed to want to join them, but he hung back. Whether his reluctance was because he was fairly new to the unit, or because his skin was black and three of the five men around the fire were southerners and he didn’t know what to expect from them, Stark didn’t know. Didn’t care, either. He motioned Macon over and said, “Sit down. That was a hell of a job you did with that mortar, Macon.”

  Macon came over and sat down on a log. “Just doing what they trained me to do,” he said in his soft voice.

  “That mortar sure sang a sweet song,” Finnegan said.

  “Prettiest I’ve ever heard,” Sheffield put in.

  “You want some stew?” Nat asked.

  Macon nodded, and he was grinning now, feeling more at ease, like he belonged with these other men. And he truly did. Combat had seen to that.

  Once you go to war with a man, nothing is ever the same, and you never forget the lessons taught by the jungle and the night and the constant presence of death. You never forget.

  Even though there are times when you might want to.

  One

  Now

  Del Rio, Texas

  “Damn it!” John Howard Stark crumpled the newspaper and flung it away from him.

  “What is it?” his wife, Elaine, asked from the stove where she was frying bacon. “The Cowboys do something you don’t agree with again?”

  “Worse’n that. They found another of those damn mad cows up in Washington.”

  “Oh.” Elaine had been a rancher’s wife for over thirty years. She knew how something thousands of miles away, like in the Pacific Northwest, could affect life here in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Every time there was another outbreak of mad cow disease anywhere in the country, it made beef prices go down, and that hurt ranchers everywhere.

  Stark thought the smell of bacon cooking was just about
the best smell in the world. He also thought his wife, still slim and straight with only a little gray in her blond hair despite her five-plus decades on earth, was the prettiest sight. But neither of them could cheer him up now. There had been too much bad news for too long. No real catastrophes, mind, just a seemingly endless stream of developments that made things worse and then worse and then worse again. Stark was fed up. Why, for two cents he’d—

  He’d do exactly the same things he had done in his life, the rational part of his brain told him. Regrets were worth just about as much as a bucket of warm spit.

  Sitting around and moaning wasn’t a trait that ran in the Stark family. John Howard’s great-great-grandfather had been a frontier judge, a man who had dispensed justice just as easily with a six-gun as with a gavel and a law book. His great-grandfather had worn the badge of county sheriff until settling down to establish this ranch up the Rio Grande from Del Rio. He had faced down some of Pancho Villa’s men to keep it. The generations since had hung on to the Diamond S through good times and bad. John Howard himself had left the place for only one extended period of time in his life—to take a trip for Uncle Sam to a backwater country in Southeast Asia where little fellas in black pajamas shot at him for a couple of years. In the more than three decades since then, he had returned to his home, married his high school sweetheart, raised two boys with her, seen both his parents pass away, and taken over the running of the ranch. It was a hardscrabble spread and a hardscrabble time, here in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And Stark wasn’t as young as he used to be. Fifty-four years old, by God. He had gone to Vietnam at the ripe old age of eighteen, little more than a boy. But he had returned as a man.

  That was a long time ago now. For the first few years, Stark had sometimes woken up in the middle of the night shaking and drenched with sweat. He never could remember the dreams that provoked that reaction in him, but he knew they must have been bad ones. He had seen so many men that the war just wouldn’t let go of, so they tried to escape it with drugs and booze and God knows what all. Ruined past, ruined present, ruined future. He’d been one of the lucky ones. He had Elaine and his folks and the ranch. Later he’d had the boys, David and Peter. They all got him through the nightmare landscape that had claimed so many other men, and these days Stark seldom ever thought about Vietnam. When he did he thought not about the dying but about the friends he had made there.