Hooligans Part 1

Hooligans.

Wiliam Diehl.

HOOLIGANS.

"Make no mistake, these guys are cool. They're men's men. They prefer action to talk, but when they talk, it's tough, dirty, often funny and always realistic. . . . Diehl does a fine job of capturing that sense of male camaraderie, where a lot is expressed in a minimum of words. "

The Atlanta Journal-Const.i.tution.

"Diehl keeps the action at a suitably slam-bang pace, pushes it along with a great deal of hard-boiled dialogue, and flavors it with ghoulish four-letter humor. . . . it's tough to knock a guy who writes: '"Who are you?" he asked her. "Lark," she said. "That your name or your att.i.tude."' Both, as it turns out. The novel, too-it's another lark. "

New York Daily News.

"Some of the strongest pa.s.sages in the work are the Vietnam flashbacks. . . . a first-cla.s.s shoot-'em-up book."

Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

"This is Diehl's best book yet."

The Chattanooga Times.

"The fun here is in the antics of the oddball Hooligans, who are more fearless and exotic than the A-Team. . . . the author has Joseph Wambaugh's knack of sketching brain-scrambled cops and a clean, unfettered skill at creating suspense and dialogue. "

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

This book is dedicated to Virginia, who is the love of my life.

To Michael Parver, for his support and friendship through the tough times, and for Stick.

And to my father, the most gentle and loving man I have ever known, who died before it was completed.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS BRANCH.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

My thanks and grat.i.tude to my family and friends for their constant encouragement and support: to my mother, Temple, Cathy, John and Kate, Bill, Melissa and David, Stan and Yvonne, Bobby Byrd, Carole Jackowitz, Marilyn Parver, Michael Rothschild, Billy Wallace, Frank Mazolla, the Harrisons of Lookout Mountain, Mark Vaughn, Barbara Thomas, Jack and Jim.

To a true and trusting friend, Don Smith, whose wit and wisdom always help.

To my good friend, C.H. "Buddy" Harris, of the Treasury Department, for his selfless a.s.sistance and attention to detail, and to his wife, Joan, and daughter, Robin.

To Director Charles F. Rinkevich, Deputy Director David McKinley, Kent Williams, Charles E. Nester, Morris Grodsky, and the other officers of the Treasury Department's Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Brunswick, Ga., for their invaluable technical a.s.sistance.

To George Gentry and the many other men who served in Vietnam and shared their experiences and feelings with me.

To George, Bill, Bear, B.L., Nancy and Slavko, Sandy, Jim, Frankie and Jingle, Larry, Averett, Ted, Mike, Kurt, Richard, Ruth, Dayton, and all my friends and a.s.sociates of the late, great Higdon's on St. Simons Island, Ga., for sharing their names, friendship, time, and experiences with me.

To my editor, Peter Gethers, a man of awesome insights, and to Susan and Audrey, and the rest of his sterling staff.

To Marc Jaffe, for his continued faith.

To Irene Webb, my favorite wonder woman.

And to a treasured and lasting friend, Owen Laster, at once and always, a gentleman of the realm.

CINCINNATI TRIAD.

The fish trusts the water, And it is in the water that it is cooked.

-HAITIAN PROVERB.

PREFACE.

DUNETOWN.

Dunetown is a city forged by Revolutionaries, hammered and shaped by rascals and southern rebels, and mannered by genteel ladies.

Dunetown is grace and unhurried charm, azalea-lined boulevards and open river promenades, parks and narrow lanes; a city of squares; of ironwork and bal.u.s.trades, shutters and dormers, porticoes and steeples and dollops of gingerbread icing; of bricks, ballast, and oyster sh.e.l.ls underfoot; a waterfront place of ma.s.sive walls and crude paving, of giant shutters on muscular hinges and winding stairwells and wrought-iron spans; a claustrophobic vista where freighters glide by on the river, a mere reach away, and sea gulls yell at robins.

It is a city whose heartbeat changes from block to block as subtly as its architecture; a city of seventeenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and taverns; of ceiling fans and Tiffany windows, two-story atriums, blue barrel dormers, Georgian staircases and Paladian windows and grand, elegant antebellum mansions that hide from view among moss-draped oaks and serpentine vines.

Dunetown is a stroll through the eighteenth century, its history limned on cemetery tablets:HERE LIES JENIFER GOLDSMITH.

LOVING WYF OF JEREMY.

WHO DIED OF THE PLAGUE THAT KILED SO MENY.

IN THESE PARTS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1744.

JAMES OLIVER.

A FAST TONGUE AND HOT TEMPER.

DEAD AT 22 YRS. OF HIS AGE.

IN A DUEL WITH LT. CHARLES MORAY.

WHO SHOT QUICKER AND WITH KEENER EYE.

These are its ancestors. The survivors become the city's power brokers, the rulers of the kingdom, dictating an archaic social structure that is unchanging, and defined by its metaphor, the Dune Club, restricted to the elite, whose money is oldest, whose roots are deepest, and who, for more than a century, have sequestered it from time.

Thus the years have pa.s.sed Dunetown, leaving behind a treasure: an eighteenth-century serfdom whose history trembles with ghost stories, with wars and brawls and buried loot on s.h.a.ggy Atlantic beaches; whose people have the heritage and independence of islanders, their bloodlines traced to Irish colliers, Spanish privateers, to Haiti and Jamaica, and Cherokee reservations.

Its bays, marshes, and rivers still weave a city composed of islands: Alee, Skidaway, Thunderhead, Buccaneer, Oceanby, Sea Oat, and the wistful, Gatsby-like Isle of Sighs, a haunt of the rich, its antique houses serene against the backwaters of the sea, where one might easily envision a solitary and forlorn Jay Gatz, staring across the water at the solemn light on Daisy's pierThe past is everywhere.

If you listen, For that is not the wind you hear, It is the whispering ghost of yesteryear.

Reality, to Dunetown, is history to the rest of the world.

INTRODUCTION.

A Walk Through Dunetown.

J. THOMPSON, 1972.

PROLOGUE.

Sunday: Dawn The small trawler was heading north an hour before dawn on the eighth day out of c.u.man, Venezuela, when the captain of the four-man crew first spotted the red trouble light blinking on the mast of the sailboat. He made it a mile or so away when he saw it the first time. The trawler was ten miles at sea and thirty-five miles northeast of Fernandina, Florida, at the time. The captain watched the light for half an hour as his rusty scow drew closer.

In the gray light just before the sun broke, they were close enough to see the sailboat, a rich man's toy, dead in the water. It was a forty-footer, with a man on deck. The man had removed his shirt and was waving it overhead.

The captain, a deeply tanned man in his early forties wearing four days' growth of beard, stroked his jaw with a greasy hand. Two of the crew members watched the sailboat draw closer with mild interest. The mate, a black man with a scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, squinted through the dim light and then urged the captain to pa.s.s up the stricken boat.

"f.u.c.k 'em, man. We ain't got time to mess with no honky sailors," he said quietly.

But the captain had been a seaman too long to pa.s.s up any vessel in distress. Besides, the shirtless man was obviously rich; a soft, Sunday sailor, becalmed far beyond his limit and probably scared to death.

"No guns," the captain said softly in Spanish. "Just stand easy and see what they want. If gas is their problem, we can help the gringos out."

He turned on a powerful light and swept its beam along the sailboat from bow to stern. He steered the trawler close beside the sailboat and tossed the man a line.

"Habla espaol?" the captain asked.

"No," the sailor answered.

"What ees your problem?" the captain asked in broken English.

"Not enough wind." The sailor, who was wearing white jeans and designer sneakers, pointed at the limp sail. "And no gas. Can you sell me some gas?"

"I geev you enough gas to make Saint Simons Island," the captain said, pointing toward the horizon. "Fifteen, maybe twenty miles northwest."

"Thank you, thank you very much. Muchas gracias, seor." The man bowed and waved a thank-you.

The captain ordered one of his men to take a gas can aboard the sailboat. The man went below and emerged a few minutes later with a ten-gallon can in hand. He and one of the other crewmen scrambled aboard the sailboat.

The captain and the mate watched from aboard the trawler.

"Messin' with trouble," the black mate mumbled.

"No problem," said the captain.

The two crewmen had not quite reached the stern tanks of the sailboat when the hatch to the cabin suddenly slid back and another man jumped on deck from below. He was holding a submachine gun. The mate uttered an oath and reached for the pistol in his belt but he was too late. The man with the machine gun raked the deck and bridge of the trawler.

Bdddddddddddddt . . .

Bdddddddddddddd . . .

The windshield of the captain's cabin exploded, showering gla.s.s across the deck. The first burst blew away the captain's chest. He flew backward through the door and landed on his back on the bridge. His foot twitched violently for a few seconds before he died.

The second burst ripped into the mate as he clawed under his coat for the 38. It lifted him high in the air, twisted him around, and tossed him halfway across the deck. He fell like an empty sack, face down, most of his head blown away.

The remaining two crew members, the ones who had boarded the sailboat, turned wild-eyed toward the gunner. The shirtless man stabbed one of them in the chest with a bowie knife. He fell across the stern, babbling incoherently. The man with the submachine gun fired a burst into the chest of the last crewman, who dropped the gas can and flipped backward over the railing into the sea.

The shirtless man pulled his knife free, cleaned the blade on the dead man's pants, and tossed his victim overboard.

The shooter sent another burst into the light and it exploded into darkness.

It was all over in thirty seconds.

They worked very quickly, searching the boat. It took less than half an hour to find their prize. They transferred the three small, heavy bags to the sailboat, threw the captain and his mate into the sea, doused the trawler with gasoline, and set it afire.

The shirtless man cranked up the engine of the sailboat and guided it away from the trawler; then, setting the wheel, he joined the shooter and they checked out the prize.

"What d'ya think?" the shirtless man said, leaning over and staring into one of the bags.