Black Friday by James Patterson Page A

He’d known this—somewhere in the back of his mind
he’d known this was coming,
    “Reardon’d be a good choice. He’s a good company man. Good man, period.”
    “Arch, please cut the crap. You’re playing games with someone who’s known you thirty-five years.”
    Carroll frowned, and be began to cough in the manner of Crusader Rabbit. He felt like a real shit “Awhh, hell, I’m sorry Walter. I know what you’re trying to do.”
    “People
understand
what you’ve been through. I understand; please believe that Archer. Everybody wants to help… I
asked
for you on this one.
I had to ask “
    Carroll shrugged his shoulders, but inside he was hurt. He hadn’t known his reputation had slipped so badly, maybe even in Trentkamp’s eyes.
    “I don’t know what to say. Not even a typical Bronx Irish wisecrack. Nothing.”
    Talk to me on this one. Just talk to me, okay?… Don’t go it alone. Will you promise me that?” Trentkamp finally spoke again, a voice of reason and understanding.
    “Promise.” Carroll nodded slowly.
    Walter Trentkamp turned up the collar of his overcoat against the early morning mist. Both he and Carroll were over six feet tall. They looked like father and son that morning in Washington.
    “Good,” Trentkamp finally said. “We’ll need you on this nasty son of a bitch. We’ll need you at your best Archer.”

Chapter 14
    AT SIX O’CLOCK Saturday morning, December 5, a bleak Lexington Avenue subway train, its surface covered with scars of graffiti, lackadaisically rocked and rattled north toward the Pelham Bay station.
    Colonel David Hudson sat in an inconspicuous huddle on an uncomfortable plastic train seat. He was wearing clothes no one would look at twice. Uninteresting clothes that created a street camouflage of drab gray and lifeless, boring brown. He realized it wasn’t an altogether successful disguise because people had looked at him anyway. Their probing eyes invariably discovered the missing arm, the empty flap of his coat.
    A series of hot and cold flashes coursed through his body as the train hurled itself north. He was drifting in and out of the present, remembering, trying to accurately replicate long hours spent at a Viet Nam firebase perimeter listening post…
    Every one of his senses had been at its sharpest back then.
Head cocked:
listening, watching, trusting no one but himself…. He needed exactly the same kind of clarity right now, the same kind of self-reliance.
    From 14th Street, where he’d boarded the subway train, up past 33rd, 42nd, 59th Street, Hudson objectively contemplated the first days of his capture in Viet Nam.
    He was vividly remembering the La Hoc Noh prison now…
    La Hoc Noh Prison; July, 1971
    Captain David Hudson’s nervous system was a mass of fire. He felt each bruising, jarring bump, even the smallest stones underfoot, as four prison guards half carried, half dragged him toward the central hut at the La Hoc Noh compound.
    Through the white glare of the Asian sun, he squinted at the pathetic hootch, with its tattered North Vietnamese flag and sagging bamboo walls.
    The command post.
    What an incredible joke this all was. What a cruel joke all of life had become.
    Well-muscled once, clean-cut and always so perfectly erect, so proper, the U.S. Army officer was pitiful to behold now. His skin was uniformly wrinkled and sallow, almost yellow; his hair looked like it had been pulled out in great, diseased clumps.
    He accepted the fact that he was dying. He weighed less than a hundred and fifteen pounds; he’d had the yellow shits literally for months without end. He’d gone beyond there exhaustion; he lived in a shifting, hallucinatory world where he doubted his own sensations and ordinary perceptions.
    All Captain Hudson possessed now was his dignity. He refused to give that up, too.
    He would die with at least some essential part of himself intact; that secret place deep inside that nobody could torture out of him.
    The SNR officer, the one