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puppets in Hanoi. Our
     own Katie Nelson is providing a live commentary, and we’ll be back with Mad Mike after this word from Budweiser …”
    “It’s very possible that Miss Nelson has such a scenario planned,” Vanderhoven replied. “However, I’ll leave it up to you
     to make arrangements with her. I recommend that you promise her whatever she wants. What you actually deliver would be your
     concern. I don’t care.”
    “Money?”
    “What will you need?”
    “For me alone, one million.”
    “I see.” Vanderhoven paused. His face was expressionless. “Very well. The full amount if you succeed, half if you fail.”
    “OK. I’ll also need a hundred thousand each for five men, plus another half million in expenses. That will include weapons,
     training, transportation, bribes, the lot. This kid will cost you a total of two million.”
    “Each of my seven wives has cost me twice that.”
    “Eric is all you have left?”
    “Right. One of my boys was drowned while still at school. The other, later Eric’s father, I tried to keep in school and out
     of the war with a student deferment. He was having none of that, particularly because the peace demonstrators had already
     begun to picket our factory that made napalm. I got him nominated to the U.S. Air Force Academy out in Colorado Springs. He
     was delighted—never saw that I was sticking him in school for four years anyway. He came out of there a second lieutenant
     four years later and the damn war still hadn’t finished. He was out there less than a year when his plane was shot down south
     of the DMZ.”
    “Missing in action?”
    Vanderhoven shook his head sadly. “Not even that hope. No, they found his body. He’s buried in Arlington.”
    “So are a lot of good men.”
    “My son was a better human being than I am, Campbell. Seems as though my mean personality must have skipped his generation
     and been inherited by this young fellow, Eric. You think that’s possible?”
    “I couldn’t say, sir. When I bring him back, you’ll find out for yourself.”
    The old man brightened. “You’ll go then? We’ve got a deal?”
    “A million dollars up front. I run everything, you ask no questions.”
    Vanderhoven offered him his hand and over their handshake gave him a crafty, jeering look. “Good luck, Mad Mike.”
    “Thank you, Old Bastard.”
    “You’ve put on weight, Harper.”
    “I’m fit as you any day, Mike.”
    They threw a few playful punches at each other, and the burly black man in a well-tailored business suit gestured to a cream
     and chocolate-brown Lincoln pulled up near the airport entrance.
    “Come on, before I get towed away,” he said to Mike.
    On the drive across Detroit along the Edsel Ford Freeway, Harper began to sound Campbell out. “You know I ain’t going to help
     some jive-ass white farmers in Africa because they claim the Zulus is communist.”
    “This is nothing like that.”
    “Better not be. Now that time we was in South America. That was OK.”
    Campbell laughed. “That’s not what I remember you saying while we were there.”
    “You’re right. We were lucky to escape out of there alive.”
    That mission had been the only one on which Campbell had persuaded his former sergeant in the Special Forces to go along as
     a merc. Harper could not be persuaded to go near the continent of Africa with a white mercenary group under any circumstances,
     although several other black soldiers who had served with them both in Southeast Asia had gone along.
    Campbell gave him a quick rundown of the mission, omitting all names and actual locations within Vietnam. If Harper agreed
     to go, it would cut his work in half. Had he thought it would make any difference, he would have offered him a higher cut
     than the hundred thou. But Harper was already a millionaire—the only one of the old unit who had hit it big moneywise after
     returning home. Campbell waited for his answer.
    “I want you to see my latest place,”