Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,120
advance of the Communists by assassinating their leaders. While it had some successes, it was in the end, a failure. The teams were disbanded, their members threatened with prosecution if they ever disclosed what they’d done during the last few months of their service.
I read on, absorbed in the futility of the operation, the needless deaths of good soldiers who’d joined the teams, angered by the perfidy of the intelligence agencies that were fighting a war they could not win, killing with no purpose other than to engage in a paroxysm of vengeful murder, >as if saying, “Yes, you beat us, but many of your leaders won’t live to enjoy their victory.” There was nothing about the massacre at Ban Touk. The only reference was that “a successful assault was made upon a refuge of senior Viet Cong commanders and two men from Team Charlie were killed in action.”
I reached the last page of the dossier. It was a list of names. All the men who’d been engaged in Operation Thanatos. “Shit,” I said, “Nitzler was the guy running the teams from Saigon.”
Jock looked up from the papers he was reading. “Yeah, it’s here in his file. He was what the military used to call a barnburner, a man on his way up. He was young to have the job, but he ran Thanatos. Apparently the operation lasted less than a year, and Nitzler came back to D.C. a hero. The fact that the teams didn’t accomplish a damn thing seemed to have no effect on his career. They killed a lot of people and that’s what was important. Vietnam was just a body-counting exercise and the figures were always inflated.”
“There’s more,” I said. “What?”
“Remember Opal? The team leader that Doc and the guys killed?”
“Right.”
“His name was Nigel Morrissey.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
“Damn,” said Jock. “That’s obviously Nigella’s dad. What are we missing?”
“We’re only missing one piece of the puzzle,” said Logan.
“How do you see that?” I asked.
Logan held up his index finger. “If we drop the one missing piece into the puzzle, we’ll see the whole picture. There has to be something that connects Nigella, Nitzler, and Stanley. Soupy and the Laotians are not a part of this. They were just part of the misdirection.”
“I think we can connect Nitzler and Morrissey,” I said. “They were both CIA and worked on Operation Thanatos. They were probably buddies, and now Nitzler is taking his revenge for the killing of his pal.”
“How does that connect Stanley and Morrissey’s daughter?” asked Jock. “And how are Nigella and Stanley connected to Nitzler?”
Logan was quiet for a moment. “I would guess that Nitzler has some relationship with Nigella. She’s the daughter of his buddy. I just don’t see how Stanley and his drug operation work into the picture.”
“Maybe DEA has something,” said Jock. “Delgado had all day yesterday to work on Stanley and Nigella.”
“It’s worth the call,” I said.
Jock phoned the DEA office in Tampa and asked to speak to Delgado. The conversation was short and mostly one-sided. Delgado did all the talking. Jock hung up. “He wants to see us as soon as possible. Says there’s a lot we need to know and he can’t talk about it over the phone. He’s also sending one of his guys to the bank in Sarasota to pick up that check with the thumbprint. It’ll be interesting to see who was cashing those checks.”
I looked at my watch. Not quite nine in the morning. “If Doc’s plane’s still in Marsh Harbour, can you square it so that he can bring it here to Opa Locka without worrying about customs and a lot of bureaucracy?”
“I’ll talk to some people,” said Jock. “You call Fred Cassidy. See if he’s left the Bahamas yet.”
“What about Nitzler?” I asked. “We’ve got to get to him.”
“Nitzler’s in a safe place. My agency guys picked him up on his way to the office this morning. He’s in one of our safe houses in Virginia. My director called the CIA director and told him that Nitzler was a security risk and that my agency would take care of it. Nitzler won’t even be missed at the office this morning.
I reached Cassidy at the airport in Marsh Harbour. He was about to leave for Atlanta. He agreed to fly directly to Opa Locka and pick us up. Jock handled the bureaucrats and by eleven o’clock we were in a taxi in Tampa on our way to the DEA offices.