Condley sat back in the sofa, stunned into silence. It was washing over him, just as he knew it had chilled General Duncan in the middle of whichever long night the realization had come to him as well. The betrayal he hadn’t wanted to believe, much less remember. The nightmare that could be avoided only by constant motion or by going to sleep. The place in his mind where even now he didn’t want to go.

The hot, canopied jungle and the parched eyes of his forty-man platoon as it climbed three thousand feet up the steep, rock-strewn slopes, machete-hacking their way through the canopy with sixty pounds of gear on their backs, trying to link up with another Marine company that had been surrounded for three days in the caves and brittle ridges of the mountain’s crest. The hand grenades suddenly bouncing down the slopes toward them, a cacophony of terror and blood as dozens of them clicked and careened from rock to rock, exploding at their feet and in the air. Cringing in the cleavage of the rocks to avoid the shrapnel, trying to find a target up the slope to shoot back at. Then seeing two men standing behind a boulder on the crest, no more than fifty feet above them, one black, the other white, both wearing jungle utilities and carrying American M-14 rifles. Condley thinking that he might have read the map wrong, so that his platoon had walked into an outpost from the company they were trying to save. A Marine near Condley thinking the same thing, standing and waving at the two, yelling at them to cease fire, only to be shot immediately by both of them. Both of them. From fifty feet away. No mistake. The Marine crumpling over, dead. And then the whole ridgeline above them opening up with steady fire from a North Vietnamese Army ambush.

A very close, very effective, very bloody ambush.

And later on writing and then trashing the letter that he knew he could never bring himself to mail. Dear Mrs. Smith. Your son was shot by a white man and a black man who were leading a North Vietnamese unit in an ambush along the crease of two Marine Corps rifle companies in the Que Son Mountains. I am deeply sorry. I don’t know who they were. And I cannot think of a more ironic ending to a more ironic war.

Salt and Pepper. It had not been the first reported incident. They all had heard of these two men before. Some said they were an eastern European and a Cuban, operating as advisers to their North Vietnamese allies. Others said they were American turncoats. Some said there were several such teams. But one thing had become reasonably certain after the ambush of June 24, 1969. This one, this Salt, was American.

“You’re sure this is the guy?” asked Condley softly.