CHAPTER EIGHT

Ft Bragg

January 3, 1971

"I think it's a bad idea," Major Downing said carefully. Facing the panel with Lieutenant Dyer on one side and Captain Goldman on the other, he stood at ease and yet every bit as tense as if he'd been staring down the enemy. "There is no precedent for putting a whole team together to collaborate their lie and hoping for the best."

"If they wanted to collaborate a lie," Goldman drawled, not bothering to glance over at his superior, "they had plenty of time to do it while they were hitchhiking back down to the DMZ."

"They may not have realized it was necessary then," Downing protested. "But they certainly realize it now. These are serious charges!"

"All the more reason we need to know the truth about what happened," the Lieutenant Colonel seated at the center of the long table declared. Downing had not known Lt. Colonel Jaxon for very long, and already he'd developed a firm dislike for him. He had been hoping for anyone else to be proceeding over this investigation. As luck would have it, this just wasn't his day.

"Precisely my point, sir," Downing replied evenly. "It is my opinion that by putting Smith, Peck, and Baracus together, we will be closing the door on any opportunity to get the truth from any one of the three."

"And what sort of progress have you made thus far, Major?" the thin, pale Lt. Colonel asked.

Downing choked on his response, but recovered as quickly as possible. "Smith refuses to make a usable statement," he admitted. "But I feel no statement at all is better than a false statement corroborated with the only other witnesses to the events."

"Giving a false statement is perjury," Jaxon pointed out in a gross statement of the obvious.

"With respect, sir, they're facing treason," Downing answered. "I don't think they care about perjury."

Jaxon glanced at Lieutenant Dyer and raised a brow. "You've been very quiet," he observed. "What effect do you think it would have on your report if the three suspects were to be placed in the same cell?"

Downing's jaw clenched. He could already sense where this was going. Dyer had neither the experience nor the intelligence to answer that question comprehensively.

"I don't know, sir," she answered, predictably. "Based on what little Lieutenant Peck has been willing to say, I don't think he has any intention of making any kind of statement regardless of what concessions we make."

"Then perhaps it is time," Downing said quickly, "to put someone with more experience in place to speak with him."

Dyer very nearly growled at him. "I can do my job," she snapped. "Thank you."

"Enough," Jaxon warned. His gaze shifted to Goldman. "You're in favor of allowing the three of them to interact. Why?"

"With all due respect, these men have spent the past several years in an active combat situation," Goldman explained carefully. "They survived a POW camp without succumbing to interrogation and we are fooling ourselves if we think that any traditional method of extracting information from them is going to be even marginally successful. They have to want to cooperate. And so far, the only thing they have asked for is to speak to each other. Given the nature of their team and the sheer amount of time they've spent with each other over the past few years, I feel it's a natural and reasonable request. The perceived need to be together is greater than their need for food, drink, or sleep. It is our singular bargaining tool."

Downing could see the look of acceptance forming on Jaxon's face as Golding presented his speech. Damn it, there would be no talking sense to the board now. Sure enough, it only took a brief moment of quiet collaboration between the five panel members before Jaxon again addressed Downing's team of three. "Place them together in the same cell," he ordered. "Major Downing, I am placing you in charge of the interrogation of all three prisoners. If you wish to speak to them together or separately, that is your call."

Jaw clenched, Downing nodded with practiced grace. For all the good it would do him, he would need every trick in the book to get cooperation from the prisoners now.

Vietnam

August 19, 1968

Cipher felt better, but Hannibal wasn't convinced that he was ready to drop. It was a level of caution Face hadn't really expected from the reckless-by-reputation colonel, but he wasn't arguing. Stationed now in Dak To, they were far removed from any bars or brothels even remotely worth visiting. If this was an attempt to speed Cipher's healing along, it was unlikely to work. Bored out of his skull, it had only taken a few hours before he had wandered away from the camp to one of the nearby Montagnard villages with Face in tow.

Neither of the two Americans even heard Hannibal's voice as he called up into the thatch hut. They didn't know he was there until he appeared in the doorway. In the flash of panic that followed, Face wound up on the floor and one of the two women in the primitive bed landed on top of him with a startled cry.

"What the hell?" It took Cipher a moment to see who had barged into the room. Once he did, his anger turned to concern instantly.

Face, still sprawled on the bamboo floor, sought a more dignified pose, using the bed for support as he pulled himself up. "What's going on?"

"Get dressed," Hannibal ordered firmly. "Now."

Both men struggled to untangle themselves from the sheets. Their haste made clear that they had far more regard for the tone of their CO's order than the young, non-English-speaking women who stared at Hannibal in bewildered, fearful confusion.

Hannibal didn't leave. He walked back to the doorway and, with one hand on the CAR-15 slung over his shoulder, looked outside - both ways across the village. "What's wrong?" Face asked again as he struggled to pull his pants on, nearly falling over in the process.

Hannibal glanced over his shoulder at the women, who'd huddled together in the center of the bed and wrapped themselves in the sheets. "Habillez-vous et courir," he ordered roughly.

Face paused, knowing exactly what that meant. The VC were coming...

"They don't speak French," he answered, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Hannibal turned to stare at Face incredulously. "You talked them into bed without even knowing their language?"

Face opened his mouth as if to answer, but had no reply and instead opted for a shrug. Hannibal shook his head as he turned to look outside again. He backed away suddenly and grabbed Cipher's arm as he passed, shoving the half-dressed man to the back of the hut.

"Go," he ordered.

Face, his shirt still unbuttoned, grabbed the two weapons from where they were propped against the wall and passed one to Cipher as he hurried behind. Instead of using the stairs at the front of the raised hut, they went out the window at the back and dropped the five feet to the ground, sprinting toward the trees as soon as their feet hit.

They hadn't quite crossed the open patch before the concussion hit. Face gripped his weapon close to his chest on instinct alone as he tumbled like a discarded ragdoll through the air and across the mud. Confused and disoriented, he heard voices calling to him through the blackness of complete shellshock. Someone was shaking him, pulling him up.

"Face, get up!" the voice ordered, jerking on his shirt collar. "Come on! Move!"

Stumbling to his feet on instinct alone, he struggled to make sense of his surroundings. There was pain, and someone, some familiar voice that he couldn't identify, was screaming at him through a long, echoing tunnel of blank pain was in his arm. Where was his weapon?

"Move, Lieutenant!"

Hannibal. The man's identity returned to his consciousness before the memory of how to walk and he nearly tripped on the first few steps. Utterly confused and disoriented, pushed and prodded by the man behind him, he was running through the jungle without the slightest comprehension. It was blind trust like he'd never known before; the man said run and so he ran. Ears ringing like sirens, grip tight around the rifle in his hands - how had he recovered it? - he struggled to put the pieces together. The sound of AK fire was enough to tell him he was being shot at, but that was all he knew.

He cried out in pain as he stumbled and crashed against a tree with his right shoulder. Muscles screamed in agony as he tried to lift away one of the branches that blocked his path. Bewildered by the sheer amount of pain flashing through the confusion, he looked at his injured arm and saw blood running all the way from his shoulder to his fingertips.

More gunshots from semi-automatic weapons - closer this time. He glanced back with blurred vision and saw Hannibal turned the other way, shooting into the trees. But a few seconds with his eyes off of the path ahead cost his footing and he crashed to the jungle floor again. Even more confused by the fact that his arm wasn't working, he tried to push himself back up.

Cipherseemed to appear out of nowhere, grabbing hold of his uninjured arm and hauling him up. "Watch where you're goin' damn it!The fuck is wrong with you?"

"What happened?" Face asked. This all seemed like a dream. So surreal...

Taking just a fraction of a second to stare at him with wide eyes, Cipher shook his head. "Jesus, Face, how close were you to that explosion?"

"Explosion?"

"Just move!" Hannibal yelled, backing toward them and still firing. "We don't have time for this!"

Finding his feet again, Face stumbled through the haze. Vaguely, in the midst of the dark fuzziness in his mind, he wondered what would happen if one of the bullets from the enemy's rifles hit its mark. Just as importantly, through the haze of adrenaline, he wondered when he had learned to trust orders from a man he barely knew when he didn't have the slightest ability to think for himself.

Fort Bragg

January 5, 1971

Face looked a little worse for wear. Dark rings under his eyes testified to the fact that he probably hadn't slept in days. But he was unharmed and alert, and that was reassuring. As Hannibal stepped into the cell, he jerked awake from where he'd been sleeping, sitting up, on the edge of the bed. Instantly, he was on his feet.

"Colonel," he greeted.

Hannibal waited for the guard to lock the cell behind him. As he walked away, Hannibal's eyes drifted over to BA. He looked anything but tired. There was nothing in his eyes or on his face but anger.

Without saying a word, Face gestured to the one, two, three listening devices hidden in the obvious places. Hannibal nodded his understanding. He'd expected as much, he just hadn't gotten around to deciding how he planned to use it.

"You guys okay?" he asked quietly.

"We ain't hurt," BA shot back.

That wasn't really the point in question, but at least it was an acknowledgment. He'd half expected BA to have busted knuckles by now, trying to put his fist through the guards or the cement cell blocks, neither of which would get him anywhere but frustrated.

"Three days straight of interrogation," Face offered. "With some very curious tactics. Still haven't talked to a lawyer."

"Yeah, I've noticed that," Hannibal replied, wandering to the third cot in the room and sitting down on the edge of it. But at least it was a cot in a room with his team. The separation had been far more unnerving to him than the questioning. After all, there were rules to be followed on this side of the ocean.

BA was up, pacing. The cell wasn't big enough for that, but he couldn't sit still. All that anger and fear needed someplace to go. BA would never say it - none of them would - but the memories of the last time they'd been put in a cage were simmering just underneath the surface. Hannibal could see them, feel them, as clearly as if the images were played out on the whitewashed walls.

"They don't care 'bout gettin' us no lawyer," BA said. "We the bad guys to them. They not gonna help."

He kept his voice low, but there was a hard growl in it that made Hannibal frown. BA clearly didn't have a lot of faith in the military system of justice. He'd already made up his mind about where this was going, and his previous run ins with the MPs probably wasn't doing much to bolster his confidence. Face was probably in the same boat. But Hannibal wasn't so sure.

"Bad guys or not," he said carefully, "we all want the same thing."

"A conviction?" Face offered sarcastically.

"The truth," Hannibal corrected, earning skeptical looks from both of them. They were wondering if he was playing to the audience, he could tell. It was in their disbelieving stares. But actually, he was serious. "The truth is on those orders," he reminded. "They will produce them, sooner or later, and then we will find out what this whole mess has been about."

"Let's hope it's not later," Face said dryly.

Hannibal had complete confidence in the fact that once someone actually did find the orders, there would be nothing but apologies heading in their direction. Whether his team had truly lost faith or the wait was just killing them, he couldn't be sure.

"They don't need to see orders," BA finally said, low and serious. Large hands wrapped around the bars, gripping them tight, like he wanted to pulled them apart. Hell, he probably did want to pull them apart. The walls were way too close in here. "All they had to do was just ask Westman or Morrison."

His words were delivered with an angry growl, but the look in those dark eyes plunged well past anger. BA was worried, and although it was extraordinarily uncomfortable to consider that his worry could be justified, Hannibal had to admit it didn't make much sense that they were still locked up in here. The failure of the chain of command and their arrest were playing over and over again in his mind. He was sure BA was hearing the same broken record. How had so many days passed without any word from the officers who knew full well what they were doing in Hanoi?

Hannibal looked away. Regardless of how this looked, how it felt, they all just needed to stay calm. This was a misunderstanding. The orders were out there. Hannibal had seen them with his own two eyes. He'd watched Morrison sign them. "I have no idea what's keeping Westman from making a phone call," he admitted. "But our orders are in black and white. They will find them."

For another long moment, there was complete silence, broken only by the occasional soft ping and thud of the ancient boiler system that heated the cell. BA's eyes never looked away from him. He didn't believe that the orders would be found. But he had complete trust and faith in what Hannibal said. Face, heaving a deep sigh as he lay down again, was less easily convinced. That was expected, and not necessarily a bad thing. He'd be the voice of reason if Hannibal's optimism became unrealistic. But whatever the outcome, Hannibal knew they would follow his lead without question. Right now, their best bet was to wait until they knew for certain how this mix up had happened.

And after all, they weren't going anywhere in the meantime. He smiled as he heard the footsteps in the hallway, accompanied by the familiar voice of Major Downing. It looked as though they wouldn't even be leaving their cell for the next interrogation session. Downing was bringing the fight to them.

Hannibal grinned as Face and BA both positioned themselves, ready for anything, on either side of him. He was actually looking forward to trading barbs with the straight-backed major who stepped into the cell and addressed them all with a cool, sweeping glance.

"Colonel Smith," he greeted.

Hannibal's grin turned to a full-blown smirk. "Major Downing," he replied.

"I'll be brief," Downing said, positioned near the door in a perfect at-ease stance. "You got what you wanted. Your team -" he gestured to Face and BA "- present and unharmed. Now I will ask you only once. Do you intend to cooperate with this investigation or not?"

"I've been nothing but cooperative, Major," Hannibal said lightly. "But I think what you really need is to find our orders."

"Your official statement, then," Downing concluded, "is that you were following orders."

"That's what we been saying all along," BA growled back.

Downing glanced at him, then at Face. "Orders from…?" he prodded.

"Colonel Morrison," Hannibal answered on Face's behalf. "Go find them."

The silence that followed stretched too long. Then, finally, Downing nodded. "Fine," he said definitively. "That should be a simple enough report to write. It's been a pleasure, gentlemen."

He nodded at the MP who hadn't even stepped away from the door, and it was pulled open again to allow him an exit.

"Wait, that's it?" Face called after him.

"My work here is done," Downing snapped back. "I hope, for your sake, that you are telling the truth. And I hope they do find the orders. But without your willing cooperation, there's nothing more I can do for you."

The door closed again, and heavy boots fell on the cement walkway as Downing and the MP headed for the exit with only a brief, "Have a nice chat, gentlemen!" over his shoulder.

A bit startled by the brevity, Hannibal's smile fell into an exaggerated sigh. "I think we offended him," he observed in an overly hurt tone.

BA growled. Face simply rolled his eyes before lying down again on his cot, turned toward the wall. Grinning again, Hannibal settled in to wait for the conclusion of the story. They would find the orders. They had to. It was just a matter of time.

Vietnam

August 19, 1968

Face winced as Cipher dug around in his arm for the pieces of shrapnel that had embedded close to the bone. He was doing his best to hold his arm steady, fighting the reflexes that made him pull away every time the medic hit close to a nerve.

"Jesus," Face hissed through gritted teeth, eyes scanning the trees for any signs of movement. "Do we have to do this now?"

"You're leaving a trail of blood a blind man could follow," Cipher answered. "And I can't very well sew you up with big chunks of metal still in there."

Cipher was practically performing surgery on his arm. Face was wondering whether he should be more concerned about infection, blood loss, or how fast the VC would come running if he should fail to choke back the scream that pushed its way into his throat every time the man dug deeper.

"Well, I've got morphine," Cipher mumbled, clearly talking for the sole purpose of offering him a distraction as he latched onto the fragments with the end of the hemostats. Out of the corner of his eye, Face saw a wicked smile cross his face. "But you're not allowed to have any anesthetic or mind-altering drug without your commanding officer present, remember?"

Face growled, jaw clenched. "Fuck you."

The rule applied to all SOG men, and had to do with security clearance. Face's was so high, there was a clause to make sure he was not anesthetized and accidentally ended up spilling top secret information to the people around him. Of course, Cipher'ssecurity clearance was just as high. He was just being a smart ass. A distraction. Face should've been grateful.

Ciphersmiled, but his eyes remained perfectly serious and intent on his task. Finally, he let out a breath. "Fucking hell, you're lucky," he said, extracting his prize and holding it up to the light.

Face tipped his head back as he let out the breath he'd been holding, letting the tension ease out of his muscles. "Why's that?" he asked weakly.

"All the pieces are big enough to pull out," Cipher said, dropping the latest one into Face's lap as a souvenir, "but small enough not to rip your arm right off."

Taking a few deep breaths, Face remained silent as Cipher grabbed his arm again and pulled a pre-threaded needle from his medical kit. "Memory coming back yet?" he asked with a quick glance up.

Face shook his head. "Not really," he admitted. "I remember going to the village but everything after that..."

Silently and with shocking speed, Cipher stitched the gash the shrapnel had made when it entered. Then he wrapped the wound with clean white bandages and moved back as Face gingerly put his blood-soaked shirt back on.

"You want it?"

Face glanced up to see him holding up a small, clear bottle between his fingers. Morphine. After only a brief consideration, Face shook his head and Cipher pocketed the vial again.

"Let's go, guys." The first indication that Hannibal had returned from his brief patrol was the sound of his voice. "We need to find our way back to the base before Charlie finds us."

Face dragged himself up to his feet, holding his injured arm close to him.

"Glad I keep this stuff with me," Cipher said as he threw his meager medical supplies back into the small bag slung over his shoulder.

Face kept his head down as he trudged through the overgrown jungle, aware of his surroundings but not nearly as alert as he felt he should be. He was weak from blood loss, and still a bit confused.

"Hey, Hannibal, how'd you know?" Cipher asked. Face glanced up at him, and briefly at Hannibal as he answered.

"I guessed," Hannibal said dryly. He glanced first at Cipher and then at Face. "If you two had bothered to talk to anyone in the camp about this village, you would've known it was full of VC sympathizers."

"Among the Yards?" Face asked, surprised.

"Stranger things have happened, kid." Hannibal's eyes narrowed on them. "I don't know how things worked on your last team, but we move around too much to know the lay of the land. Anybody you meet could be working for the enemy and you wouldn't even know it."

The two men exchanged guilty glances, but neither spoke. Eyes down, Face flexed his fist and winced at the pain it caused all the way up his arm.

"This isn't going to happen again," Hannibal said firmly. It wasn't a question.

Cipher gave a half-smile, shifting his grip on the gun that was hanging from his shoulder by the strap. "Sorry, Colonel. Didn't mean to interrupt your evening."

"Don't let it happen again," Hannibal warned. "I don't need half of my team dead while we're on stand down."