"I'll send a staff car by," the dispatcher told him.

By the time he had had two soft-boiled eggs, toast, and orange juice in The Twin Bridges coffee shop, an olive drab Chevrolet was out in front under the marquee.

When he got to the Belvoir Army Airfield, the pilot of a Benning-bound L-23 was waiting for him in Operations.

"Where the hell have you been? And where's the big shot from the White House?"

"He couldn't make it," Finton said. "I'm going instead."

"If I'd known that," the pilot said, "I'd have been long gone, and you'd be sitting on your ass waiting for another plane."

"I'm sorry, Captain," Finton said.

There was no need for an apology. He was the big shot from the White House for whom a seat on the first aircraft departing Belvoir for Benning and points south after 0800 had been reserved. And he had arrived at 0755.

There was a staff car and a lieutenant colonel waiting for him at the Army Airfield at Fort Benning.

"I know where you came from, Mr. Finton," the Lieutenant Colonel said significantly, "but no one told me why."

"Sir, I want to-talk to a young man, Private Portet, Jacques E., who's in parachute school."

"If they'd passed that word down here, I would have had him here waiting for you."

"Sir, do you suppose it would be possible for me to get a car and then just go where he is?"

"Whatever you want, Mr. Finton," the Lieutenant Colonel said. "Would you like me to go along and smooth your way?"

"I don't think that will be necessary, Sir," Finton said. "Thank you just the same." The Lieutenant Colonel, who was the Deputy G-2 of the U.S.

Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, was naturally very curious why a chief warrant officer from the White House had come to Benning to talk to a lowly private soldier in jump school. But he knew enough not to ask. If they wanted him to know, they would tell him.

Twenty minutes later the sedan pulled up near the parachute towers. These are training devices essentially identical to the parachute-jump amusement ride at Coney. Island. Five-dollar-a-ride jumpers at Coney Island are strapped onto benches, which are then hauled to the top of the towers and released, after which they return to the ground, below already deployed parachute canopies.

At Fort Benning riders are strapped into standard parachute harnesses.

Frankly curious, Finton got out of the car and watched several minutes as parachutist trainees got their ride. Then a deeply tanned, crew-cutted young sergeant saw him out of the comer of his eye as he led a hundred young men in yet another sequence of fifty push-ups. The Sergeant continued the push-ups until the fifty had-been completed. Then he sprang to his feet. "Re-cover!" he barked. The one hundred would-be parachutists, many of them breathing hard and all of them with flushed, sweatyfaces, got to their feet and stood to attention. The Sergeant raised his balled fists=to the level of his chest and then double-timed to where the CWO stood. There he came to attention and saluted crisply. "Good afternoon, Sir!" he barked.

"Sergeant Tannley, Sir" Finton returned the salute as crisply as he could. He saw the Sergeant's eyes drop to his jump wings and, he thought, widen when he saw the combat jump stars.

"Good afternoon, Sergeant," Finton said. "I hate to interrupt your schedule, but I'd like to borrow one of your students for an hour or so."

"Yes, Sir!"

"But not if it means he'll have to drop back for missing something important."

"Which one, Sir?"

"Portet."

"He's one of the better ones," Sergeant Tannley said softly, as if to make sure Portet would not hear him. "I'm going to sweat their asses a little for the next couple of hours. It won't hurt Portet none. to miss that. He's in pretty good shape."

"Good," Finton said.

Sergeant Tannley did a perfect about face and bellowed "Portay! On the double, front and center, Harch!" Private Jacques E. Portet, who was at the left rear of the formation, balled his fists, raised them to chest level, and then double-timed over to where Finton and Sergeant Tannley stood.

He came to attention and saluted.

"You will go with this officer, "Sergeant Tannley proclaimed.

"Yes, Sir!"

Finton remembered that to instill a proper degree of respect for their instructors, aspirant parachutists were required to use "Sir," which was normally reserved for officers.

"With your permission, Sir?" Sergeant Tannley barked.

"Carry on, Sergeant," Finton said.

"Yes, Sir!" Tannley barked. "Airborne, Sir!"

Finton knew that there was an expected response to that, but he had no idea what it was. He searched his mind desperately for a moment and came up with nothing.

"Right!" he barked.

Sergeant Tannley gave him a look of surprise and wonderment and finally, Finton thought, of suspicion. For a moment he was afraid the Sergeant was going to challenge him, or at least his authority to take one of the trainees committed to his charge off somewhere. But then he looked behind Finton and saw the staff car with its sergeant driver and the HQ Ff BENNING tag. He did another about-face and double-timed back to his trainees.

"What was I supposed to reply when he said 'Airborne'?" Finton asked Portet very softly.

"'All the way!'" Portet said. He was still at attention, but he was smiling.

"When I went through here," Finton said, "Sergeant Tannley took his nourishment from a bottle, through a nipple. That's new to me."

"I'm afraid you disappointed him, Sir," Jack said. "That 'Airborne-All the Way' business is very important to him."

"Oh, stand at ease," Finton said. "And then we'll go take a little ride."

"May I ask what this is about, Sir?"

"I think you better get in the front, with the driver," Finton replied.

When they were in the car, the-driver looked over his shoulder for directions.

"Where could we go where I can talk privately to Portet?" Finton asked, "and maybe get some lunch, too?"

"Rod and Gun Club has a snack bar, Sir," the driver said.

"Hamburgers, fries, that sort of thing."

"And a place to talk privately?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Then the Rod and Gun Club." When the car was moving, Finton took a small leather wallet from his blouse pocket, opened it, and tapped Portet on the shoulder with it.

It was the credentials of a Special Agent of the Counterintelligence Corps, a gold badge and a plastic-coated identification card with Finton's photo on it. Colonel Felter had obtained the credentials for Finton, who was not and never had been in the CIC. They came in handy in situations like this or when it was necessary for him to go armed. If necessary he would have shown them to Sergeant Tannley if Tannley had challenged his bona fides. There were a lot of CIC agents around the Army. There were very few warrant officers equipped with Finton's other credentials-a reduced photocopy of a letter on White House stationery signed by both the President's Chief of Staff and Colonel Sanford T. Felter, stating that CWO Finton was engaged in carrying out special missions for the Office of the President of the United States and that any inquiries regarding his activities should be directed to one of the two signatories and no one else.

"You're in uniform," Jack Portet said. It was a question.

"What's wrong with that?"

"The last one of those I saw," Jack Portet said, "was shown me by a guy I suspect was a Spec-4 who desperately wanted me to think he was either a civilian or an officer in civilian clothes." Finton chuckled.

"What you see is what YDU get," he said. "Just a tired old warrant officer."

"He thought I was a spy," Jack said. "Is that what this is all about?"

"No," Finton said. "We know you're not a spy, Portet. I had a look at the roughs of your investigation yesterday. Except for a certain tendency to ignore the thou-shalt not commandments about adultery and coveting your neighbor's wife, you seem to be a pretty decent fellow."

When they got to the Rod and Gun Club snack bar, the driver said, "If you don't mind, Mr. Finton, I'll eat with a buddy of mine."

"Fine," Finton said.

When they were seated at a small table in a Corner of the room, Finton took a bite of his hamburger, nodded his approval, and then took a swallow from a half-pint waxed cardboard container of milk.

"There was a story in the Reader's Digest," he said, "that said that there's nothing wrong with hamburgers. They give you a balanced diet."

"I suppose," Jack said.

"I know all there is to know about you, son," Finton said. "So we can save a lot of time."

"Fine. What's this all about?"

"You have something the Army wants."

"A strong back and a weak mind?"

"There's an old saw that you get out of the Army what you put into it," Finton said. "Oddly enough, it's true."

"I don't think You're here to tell me I really should apply for OCS or flight school."

"You know a lot about the Congo. Right now I'd say there are few people in the Army with your knowledge Of the Congo." Jack looked at him curiously but didn't reply.

"What we're thinking of doing is sending you back there," Finton said. "Assigning YDU to the Military Attache's office in the embassy in Leopoldville."

"Oh, Jesus Christ," Jack said, making it clear the idea had no appeal at all for him.

"Just off the top of my head, 1 would have thought, with the alternative being running around in the boondocks of Vietnam, with people shooting at you, that getting sent home to Leopoldville would seem like a pretty good deal."

"Do 1 have any choice in this? Can 1 appeal or something?"

"I don't know," Finton said. "There's an other old Army saw that you get assigned where you can do the Army the most good.

Oddly enough, that's often true too. YDU want to tell me why you don't want to go back to the Congo?"

"Because 1 live there," Jack said. "There's three kinds of white people who live in the Congo. The colons, the colonials, the Belgians who used to run the place for their own advantage. And are still running things because there's just no Congolese who can. . . . The Congolese hate them, and as soon as they're able, they're going to get rid of them. The second kind are the people like my father. Not only do we live there. .. 1- mean, we're not from Brussels, or someplace, working abroad. We live there. It's home. And we're in business with the blacks. And the third kind, the ones the Congolese really hate, are white men with guns and uniforms. The Belgian officers of the Force Publique; the mercenaries, when they were there; and the other. . .the military officers assigned to the embassies. The Congolese think-and maybe with reason-that they're just waiting for an excuse to take over again."

"And you're afraid that if you were assigned to the embassy, it would cause trouble for you when you get out?"

"It would," Jack said simply.

"Well, like 1 said, you get out of the Army what you put into it. For openers, you wouldn't be a private. I can get you a warrant officer's bar right away. When you're over there we can probably arrange to get you on flight status."

"No, thanks."

"We don't have to ask you, you know," Finton said. "All we have to do is cut a set of orders and put you on an airplane. As a private. You're in the Army. Privates do what they're ordered to do."

"You can put me on a plane to Vietnam tomorrow morning," Jack said. "As either a private, as a 'light weapons infantryman,' or to fly whatever the Army wants me to fly, and I'll go and do what I'm told to do. But the only way you'll get me back to the Congo in a uniform is in handcuffs. And the minute you take the handcuffs off, I'll desert." Finton looked at him for a moment, his face coloring.

"Bullshit," he said.

"No bullshit," Jack said.

"Let me put it this way. You're in the Army, Portet. And the Army doesn't really give a damn whether the Congolese get pissed, off at you or not. The Army is taking other nice young men like you and handing them M16s and sending them to Vietnam, where it knows a certain percentage of them are going to get blown away. Compared to getting blown away, having the Congolese pissed at you doesn't seem all that important."

"I don't think there much of a chance that some Vietnamese patriot is going to. sneak up to somebody's house in America and throw a gasoline bomb through the dining room window," Jack said" levelly. "Or catch somebody's stepmother or little sister at the supermarket and rape them, and/or hack them into pieces with a rusty machete."

"Your imagination's running away with you."

"Think what you want," Jack said. "I'm telling you how it is.

And that I am not going to the Congo." He's telling the truth, Finton thought. And this is a very tough young man who means it when he says he'll desert if that's what he thinks he has to do. And he realized that he was of two minds about Private Jacques Emile Portet. CWO-4 James L. Finton, U.S. Army, was torn between contempt and anger toward a young man who had sworn the oath and was now threatening desertion rather than obey an order he didn't like. As a Christian, as a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Finton approved of a young man who would rather face disgrace and imprisonment than put his family in jeopardy.

"Finish your hamburger," Finton said. "Then I got to find a phone."

"I think I saw one as we came in."

"I need a scrambler phone."

Twenty minutes later, in the office of Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Headquarters, the U.S. Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia, Private Portet was handed a telephone.

"Yes, Sir?"

"My name is Felter," a voice said to him. "Mr. Finton works for me."

"Yes, Sir?"

"Do I correctly understand your position to be that you would have no objection to providing, without reservation, any information you have, and that what you're reluctant to do is go to the Congo?"

"I refuse to go to the Congo, Sir."