The Birth of Bourne
Chapter 1: A Saintly Rescue
In his dreams he was back by the river. Back by the house. His family was swimming in the Mekong. His wife and children. Dao, Joshua and Alyssa. It was all so peaceful, so safe, so secure, so...happy.
And then it would happen again, as it had happened so many times before in his mind, but only once in the darkest realm of reality. For it could happen only once in reality. Death could rain down from the skies and claim its victims only once. After that there remained only blankness, a void...an oblivion in which the scene would replay itself over and over again until the mind would numb and the body would fail and the memories would...vanish.
Till then, he would have to hear the rattle of guns and see the bloodied bodies floating in the river and smell the stench of death...
"Hey babyface, time to fucking WAKE UP!" the loud crude voice came crashing through his ears and his consciousness.
With a nearly inaudible groan, his face dripping with beer from the tumbler that his head had overturned when it collapsed onto the bar counter, David Webb pulled himself up, or at least made a feeble attempt to. He was helped in this endeavour, not gently to be certain, by powerful hairy and muscular arms belonging to a repulsive bearded face that had suddenly filled his entire line of vision. The eyes were red, and the breathe stank of acute alcoholism, but the man, the beast before him was a hardened 'veteran' alcoholic, certainly by no means a novice, unlike the shattered man before him.
David rubbed his forehead and his eyes. Both were aching, along with the rest of his body. His head was throbbing with excruciating pain of the sort that was indescribable to all but those who had experienced it for themselves. His mind on the other hand was...blank.
He tried to marshal his resources, gather his faculties (whatever was left of them at any rate) and recall who he was, and perhaps more pertinent to the current situation, where he was.
The latter question seemed fairly simple to answer. He was in a bar somewhere in one of the seedier districts of Saigon, he couldn't precisely remember where or when. Nor could he remember how many tumblers of beer had he consumed since his arrival. Five? Six? More?
As for the first question, he didn't know and somehow, he didn't seem to care...
"What did I tell you, Burt" said the bearded man to the grizzled barman behind the counter. "This motherfucker can't take it. Shoulda' chucked him out after the first one. He don't look like he can get over his mornin' glass of freakin' orange juice to me!"
David, still trying to wipe the dizziness from his eyes, glanced at his reflection in the faded, cracked mirror on the other side of the bar. It was a face he couldn't recognise...the face of a drowning man. It wasn't him.
"One more", he muttered softly. Then, remembering what country he was in, he repeated himself in Vietnamese.
"Hey I'm a Yank, man. I don't speak that kinda horseshit. I leave it to the slants and the Vee-Bee's", the barman said.
"Hey for all you know, this spaz could be one of them Vee-Bee tramps!" the bearded man said.
"I don't know, Jeff. He sure looks Yankee to me", replied the barman, curiously peering at the very-drunk Webb.
"I said one MORE", David half-shouted, rummaging in the pockets of his torn pants for money, and shoving several hundreds in US dollars into the barman's hands without seeming to notice.
"Hey man, Jeff's right! You don't look like you can take any more", the barman said. "Now take your cash like a good boy and go home".
"Yeah, crawl back into the shitcan you climbed out of, asshole", a third occupant of the bar, a clean-shaven muscular blond man in his early twenties wearing a US Army uniform said, right before he downed down a glass of Scotch.
"Piss off", David muttered under his breath.
"Hey, what DID you say, asshole?!" the bearded man, Jeff, shouted, grabbing Webb by the collar of his shirt with one arm, while balling his other hand into a fist. "Looks like I'm gonna have to redecorate that pretty face of yours".
"Yeah, by the time he's done with you, there ain't gonna be no girl who'd so much as spit on you!" the blond private jeered. "You ain't seen Jeff here in action. He can sure be one mean son of a bitch! By the time he's done, even the slut you got back home on a retainer ain't gonna want nothing to do with you".
Whether it was the blond man's overbearing attitude or the insult to Dao that lit the fuse, David didn't know. All he knew was that in the next instant, he was on his feet, weakly trying to maintain his erect posture. "Take that back", he said, trying desperately to make his voice sound at least remotely menacing, but failing horribly in the attempt.
"Oh, will you get a load of this guys! Babyface here is gonna take on the Tiger! Or die tryin' anyways" said Jeff.
Three other occupants of the bar, one of them also dressed in a US Army uniform, had joined the two men in the centre of the bar, towards which Webb had taken a few hesitating steps, while struggling to stay on his feet.
And then David struck the first blow. In his mind it was powerful and decisive, in reality it was not. The feeble punch barely pushed the blond soldier a few paces back. "All right buster", the 'Tiger' muttered. "You asked for it".
In a sudden move, the solider delivered a vicious chop to Webb's throat. Even before Webb reached the ground, he was kicked in the ribs by a booted foot.
"Take that, asshole!" said the soldier, but the other intoxicated patrons of the bar clearly weren't prepared to let the matter rest. At a time when war had engulfed their surroundings, they clearly weren't hesitant to seek their own sources of conflict, no matter how trivial it may be. War was a way of life for such men; violence was second nature, if not first.
And so it went on for ten minutes. Ten minutes which felt like ten hours for a living corpse called David Webb, who after the first two minutes, felt not the blows that were repeatedly struck all over his body by a tangle of arms and legs moving in tandem. Kicks, chops and punches seemed to strike with a seemingly rhythmic efficiency and the world around him collapsed, as it had before. And before long, he was back in the oblivion where he could hear the rattle of guns and the fires of devastation...and finally the rattle became a shot. One single gunshot.
The five men stepped away from their handiwork on the floor, their attention momentarily diverted by a figure in the doorway; a tall brown-haired man with a gun, a Beretta automatic, in his right hand, aimed collectively at all of them. His warning shot had shattered one of the glasses on a shelf in the other side of the bar.
"Step away from him", the authoritative voice that issued from the man's mouth said. "Slowly...make a single move and your brains are all over the floor before you can breathe...got it!"
"Who the fucking hell are you man?" the bearded Jeff shouted, evidently outraged until a second shot that missed him by a few inches subdued him.
"Oh well, if it ain't Saint Alex, the Langley spook!" said the blond 'Tiger', suddenly recognising the figure in the doorway, who now slowly walked into the bar, approaching the semi-conscious and drunken wreck of a man on the floor.
"You got that right, bastard", Alexander Conklin replied.
"Come to save your baby-faced buddy, have you?" asked the other soldier.
"Yeah, and you should know by now that I don't mind blowing apart your baby-brains in the process either" snapped Conklin. "All of you, to the other side of the bar. NOW!" he commanded, firing a third shot into the floor near them. The now frightened men hurriedly stepped back, as far away from the gunman and his friend on the floor as possible.
Conklin bent down, grabbed the now unconscious Webb by the collar, lifted him up to his shoulder length, and half carried, half dragged him out of the bar with his left hand, his right hand still steadily gripping the automatic until they had both exited the bar.
The faint light of dawn gradually stole over Saigon. Across the city ravaged, much like the world around it, by war, people were rising, men and women prepared to begin yet another day's work in contribution towards either peace or war, the latter becoming a likelier option with each passing day.
And David Webb yet again felt blows on his face. But these blows came nowhere close to matching the impact of those he had already endured, both physically and mentally. As his hazel eyes, blue in the sunlight, opened, he stared at the familiar face above him.
"Alex?" he said softly, trying to raise himself into an upright position.
"Easy now", the CIA field officer and strategist, and a friend of David Webb's from the embassy in Phnom Penh said, as he helped his friend raise his head from the seat of the park bench where it had lain since the two had arrived there nearly three quarters of an hour before.
"Where are we?" David asked, after taking a few minutes to look around and compose himself.
"We're in Saigon, David. A park a few blocks away from the Embassy, where we will be going in a short while to have the doctors have a look at you. I managed to stop the bleeding but a few of those bruises looked quite nasty. But I thought it'd be better if I made you snap out of it first. Don't think it will do your rep any good if I bring you in looking like some drunk tramp", Conklin said.
"What happened?" David said, struggling to shield his eyes from the glare of sunlight that had suddenly descended upon him.
"You were drunk, David. You were drunk and on the floor, getting the crap beaten out of you by a couple of juiced-up punks. You're damn lucky I happened to be passing through", Conklin replied.
"Thank you, Alex", Webb said.
"On top of that you gave our people in Phnom Penh quite a scare when you went AWOL earlier this week. The whole embassy went into a panic, our field men scattered all over the city looking for you...either you or a corpse. Even suicide wasn't ruled out. Hell, if I wasn't tied up here in Saigon, I would have flown down there myself to take charge, but then I happened to be going through Immigration records one day and just happened to come across your name. I knew it would be only a matter of time before I brought you in", Conklin continued.
"Brought me in for what?" David asked weakly, wincing as he suddenly felt a jolt of pain shoot through his left arm.
"You need help, David", Conklin said gently, yet firmly.
"Oh these..." David gestured towards his bruised and beaten body, "...just minor cuts and bruises, I'm sure they'll..."
"I'm not talking about your body, David. The doctors can patch you up in no time. I'm talking about your head. To be more specific, your mind", Conklin said emphatically. "When I saw you after the funeral, two weeks back, I knew you simply weren't yourself. Hell, you could barely hold the shovel when you needed to bury the coffins and you nearly broke down on seeing the bodies before the coffins closed...you looked like a dead man, David. A corpse. There just wasn't any life, any light in your eyes. Your section head suggested therapy, but you rejected that option. You just wanted to be left alone. We left you alone. And since then, you spent every day by the river, just staring into the water sometimes, screaming your lungs out at others. People were getting worried. Some even said you were a candidate for the psychiatric ward. And then you disappear...and show up in Saigon, roaming streets where no sane man would roam, drinking yourself to an early grave, getting into beer brawls you can't possibly win..."
"I couldn't help myself Alex. That...bastard...he insulted Dao", David whispered softly.
"I can understand, David", Alex said softly. "But consider the odds. It was you, a drunken wreck, against five men, all of them stronger than you, at least two of them with combat training. You couldn't possibly have survived, circumstances being what they were..."
"Dammit, Alex", David suddenly shouted. "This isn't one of your stupid 'situations' in the 'field' spook. This is about my wife. Her honour is all that's left of her".
"I'm sorry", Alex said, deeply affected. After an awkward silence of a few minutes, he continued, "But you really need to pull yourself together. You need help. We have people here, or we could even have you shipped back to the States. There's this really good shrink I've heard off in Washington called Panov. He's done wonders for some of our soldier-boys and field ops. He can help you. We can't afford to have our best Foreign Service officer in the region out of commission for much longer..."
"I'm never going back, Alex" Webb said, with firmness in his voice that was missing mere minutes ago.
"David!" Conklin exclaimed.
"No I'm serious. I've realised now how futile the whole thing, this whole goddamn diplomatic charade is. We sit around conference tables; have meetings, discussions, talks, statements and so on and so forth but none of it does a damn to change the fact that people are dying out there Alex. I've seen it with my own eyes now. It's not the people with the fancy suits and limos with their diplomatic small-talk who can help now. It's the men with the guns who play by the enemy's rules", David said.
"But that doesn't do anything to change you, David, does it? You're not one of those men with guns".
"Goddamn it, I WANT TO BE!" David suddenly shouted, rising from the bench unsteadily, and turning on Conklin. "Give me a fucking gun and I'd gladly blow my head off, but I'd feel a bit better if I blew off some of their heads first!"
"You can't really mean that, David", Conklin said.
"They killed them, Alex. My wife and children. They slaughtered them. From the skies. Those filthy Red bastards murdered them. And God help me, I want to play by their rules", David said in a half-demanding, half-pleading tone. "That's why I came to this rotten country anyway. I wanted to find them and kill them. Or die trying. Don't you see, I have to kill them. I have to! It's the only way the images and the sounds will ever go away. I have to kill the bastards!"
"Well there's a lot of that going on around here", Alex muttered dryly, remembering at that moment that he was expected back at the embassy later that day to analyse some of the latest intel one of G-2's moles had smuggled in from the North.
"You need to help me Alex. Just give me a gun or two and parachute me or something into the North. I'll do the rest. I'll take out as many of the bastards as I can before they take me out. You need to make that happen!"
Conklin was about to open his mouth to suggest yet again that David definitely did need a psychiatrist, and he needed one ASAP, when an idea suddenly struck his mind. And after all, he thought, after this brainwave had flashed across his head, why not give it a try? The Monk always was lamenting the absence of any 'intellectuals' in the program.
He took a deep breath and said, in a somewhat changed tone, "Tell you what. Forget the shrinks for today. I'll take you over to my place and send a doctor, an old friend of mine, to look you over. After that you need to rest for a while". He paused momentarily, as though unsure to continue, and then added, "Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, whenever you feel better, I'll take you to meet someone".
"Who?" David asked, now curious.
"A priest", Conklin said with an ironic smile. "Though not the kind you're thinking".