"Yes, he does have the mind of a wooden puppet." The American actor put on his most concerned intelligent face for the photographers. He also asked to be taken to the scenes of brutal American bombings.
"Americans have a right to know what their government has done in their name," he said.
Remo let the group go off, even though some official was pushing him to follow. He was getting quiet within himself.
Remo walked around Hanoi with Kathy and a guide all morning in what seemed like an aimless pattern. The guide, of course, was not a cultural "enhancement," as he was called, but a Vietnamese police officer.
One building among many, not an especially large building, gave Remo the sense by the way the people walked by it that it was a building of authority.
"You can't go in there," said the cultural enhancer.
Kathy gave Remo a nod. Even she could understand his sign that the building was important.
"How did you do that?" she asked.
"I just did it. You keep looking, that's all."
"Would you teach me?" she asked.
"Teach me how to use that camera?" asked Remo.
"You cannot go there. No, no, no," said the cultural enhancer.
"Remo, you put the carrot film into the bunny's mouth. You point the camera at the person and then you press the bunny's nose."
"I did that," said Remo. There was a tinge of hardness to his voice.
"No camera allowed in liberated country," said the cultural enhancer. "No camera. No talking. You go back to group to get real story of truth of Vietnam. Real truth. Real peasants with real truth. Our truth the good truth. You see. Good truth. Yes."
"I had trouble with the film," said Remo.
"I don't see how," said Kathy.
"Well, I did," said Remo.
"You go. Now," said the cultural enhancer.
Kathy shrugged and looked at the building. The man's real genius was going to show itself now. She sensed an uncontrollable excitement seize her, almost mesmerizing her, making her limbs weak, her body warm. She imagined all the people Remo was going to have to kill in a building like that, the one the guide had confirmed was a security place of the government.
"That place is big enough to house the beam in any one of its many rooms," said Kathy.
Remo moved toward the building. The cultural enhancer grabbed one of his arms, but his hands closed on air. Inside the building, a Russian with a microphone and a tape recorder commented dryly:
"He is coming toward us. Mark that the subject might be initiating action."
As he spoke another Russian was making notes. Halfway up the page was a comment that positive identifications had been made on the plane and reconfirmed at the airport. The female was Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell. The male was the American.
"We're not ready yet," came a voice from behind him. The man with the tape recorder looked around with contempt. He was also afraid. The microphone was becoming significantly moist in his hands. He had ordered many people killed in his life, but now he was actually going to have to see the results of his orders.
"It doesn't matter that you are not ready," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich. Field Marshal Zemyatin had told him to allow no special requests from his execution team.
Chapter 14
Pytor Furtseva had been primed to kill for so many years that when he was told the target was advancing on him before he was ready, he didn't even mind. He would not have minded if he had to kill the target with his teeth right in the streets of Hanoi. He had practiced with his teeth on cows, and he had made his execution squad do the same.
"Blood faces," they were later called, but rarely to their faces. At one training base in Byelorussia another officer had commented that the chef should throw away his carving knife and let the "blood faces" butcher the cows.
Furtseva killed that officer with his teeth. He killed him in the mess hall where the officer had made that comment and, with the man's throat still in his mouth, he went to every table and stuck his face next to every officer at every place in the hall.
No one peeped. No one left. Furtseva had stood there in that hall waiting to be arrested, to be tried and then hung. He did not care. Eventually one of his fellow officers had the nerve to carefully get up and leave. Then the rest left and he spit out the throat onto the ground. Shortly thereafter armed soldiers filled the hall, surrounding him. He spat blood at them from the dead officer's throat.
As Furtseva was escorted out of the mess hall, his execution squad cheered him. It was the proudest moment of his life. He was ready to die.
The court-martial was held the next day and the execution was scheduled for the following week. The presiding officers were split. Some wanted hanging. The others said he had the right to be shot.
It was unanimous, of course, that he would die.
Pytor Furtseva stood for the verdict. His head was high. He felt a sense of relief, as though nothing mattered anymore. The shame and burden of being trained for something and never used was over. It would all end with a bullet or a rope.
The chief officer at the court-martial read slowly, occasionally adjusting his glasses. The other officers sat with faces passive as sand.
It took twenty minutes before Furtseva realized that he was not being sentenced to death.
"It is the verdict of the defense forces of the Soviet Socialist Republics that you and your entire unit be punished collectively. You will march one hundred miles through the Siberian frost with only knives for protection. You will have minimum clothes. You will have no matches. No food. No water."
"What?" Furtseva said. He could not believe the verdict. The army would never let a recalcitrant officer live. The most important thing in the army was getting along. To bite out the throat of a fellow officer for an insult was perhaps the most extreme example of not getting along.
And then the strange punishment. Why should his unit be punished? He apologized to his men, the only apology he could ever remember making.
They had asked him before he was assigned to the execution squad why he had never apologized to anyone.
"To admit being wrong is to admit weakness. More than anything in the world, I fear weakness."
That answer was scarcely out of his mouth when his Red Army file was stamped:
"This man is never to be allowed near nuclear warheads or to undertake diplomatic missions."
That did not bother Furtseva. He had never met any officer assigned to nuclear weapons he had even mildly respected. They were uniformly phlegmatic, and none of them had ever had even a strange idea, much less a lust for life. Or death.
Still, his actions in the mess hall undoubtedly would get some of his men killed on that hundred-mile starvation trek through the deadly Siberian chill. And it was not his unit's fault. It was his.
So he called them together to explain the punishment. And then came the time for his apology.
"And because it was my fault, I am now saying I am..."
The word "sorry" did not come. He gave his pistol to a sergeant.