Return to Sorrow

By John F. Mullins

Former SEAL Frank Whitman was forced to leave his badly wounded team leader, Mike Brophy, behind during a bloody battle in Vietnam and it has eaten at him ever since.  Never mind that he had no choice in the matter, that the only result had he tried would have been the death of both men. You just don't leave a man behind! 

His had always hoped Brophy had survived and ended up in a prison camp. His hopes were dashed during Homecoming, when the POWs were released and Brophy wasn't among them.  

Fourteen years later Brophy, under a different name, seeks him out.  It seems that his captors kept numerous POWs in smaller camps well after the war's end and bartered them to the highest bidder. 

Frank Whitman is drawn into a secret world where lies are told at the highest levels, American soldiers are routinely traded, and no one is the wiser.  Only his combat skills and a few friends stand between him and almost certain death.

Can you fight, and win a war against the entire establishment?

Whitman has to try.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Mullins
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201412456

John F. Mullins

John F. Mullins joined the U.S. Army in 1960 and served three tours in Vietnam with the Special Forces, initially as a medic and then as an "A" Team XO and CO, and as a SOG Operative after being commissioned in 1964. After retiring in 1981, he has worked as a "for-hire soldier," conducting security and antiterrorism operations in such hot spots as Bogota, Colombia, Beirut, and Belfast. He lives in Oklahoma.

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CHAPTER 1

Miami Beach, Florida

1995

I woke late, far from refreshed even after thirteen hours of fitful sleep.  Fucking dreams!  Why did they have to come back now?

Because, asshole, I told myself, things haven’t changed, twenty-five years after.  You’re still losing people, like some huge piece of bad luck for anyone who comes in contact with you.

For another hour I stayed in bed, trying without success to go back to sleep.  Gave it up finally when my back started hurting.  It always did when I stayed in bed too long.  Didn’t matter whether it was a badly strung hammock, a dug out piece of ground, or the luxurious accommodations at the Hilton.

An orthopedist had told me that it was a result of having fewer muscles on one side of the spine than the other, the souvenir of a piece of shrapnel taken in a long-ago battle.

Reluctantly, I got up, did some stretching exercises, then even more reluctantly, put on my running clothes.  God, I hate running!

The only thing I hate worse is being out of shape.  In my line of work that’s a sure ticket to the boneyard.

It took a couple of miles to get the kinks out.  Then I was running free and loose, the heavy air at sea level was a balm to my lungs.  Out past the early morning beach bunnies – some of whom waved – on to the end of the key, then back, my feet kicking up the sand, it pleasantly stinging my calves.  The run was something like five miles, I figured.  Not too bad for an old man.

Chest heaving, I finally stopped, stripped off shoes and shirt, and plunged into the warm water.  I floated on my back, body surfacing as I sucked in great draughts of air, sinking as I let them out.  The sea was like a soothing bath.  To an observer I must have appeared totally relaxed.

I wasn’t.

No matter how I relaxed the body the mind went on, never completely shutting off.  It was both a curse and a blessing.  As I floated I went over the events of the last month in Colombia.  I’d been working with the Colombian Anti-Narcotics unit, an outfit specially formed to combat the traffickers.  The men of the Anti-Narcotics unit were picked for their loyalty and incorruptibility, were segregated from the rest of the population so they could not easily be tempted, were paid extremely well, by Colombian standards, and checked-on frequently.

Personally, I wouldn’t have worked for a minute for the shit wages they got.  I got paid more.  A lot more.

But there was another aspect.  When I’d been recruited for the job I’d asked for advice from an old friend, and fellow special operations veteran. 

Just like the Phoenix Program, he’d told me.  Find men with a grudge.  My operators were men who’d had their families buried in the sand dunes outside Hue during the Tet Offensive.

My troops were good people, as good as anyone with whom I’d even worked.  We’d had our successes -destruction of almost a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine and cocaine processing labs in our first month of operation.  We’d also had our failures, and one of those had resulted in the death of twelve people.

Could the latter have been avoided?  Was there something I’d forgotten to tell them that could have saved their lives?

Reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that, No.  There was not.

We’d been returning from an operation, coming through the crowded town square of one of the little villages not far from Cali.  There had been hundreds of people in the square, the presence of whom was usually proof against danger.  Surely the narcos would not kill so many people, just to get at us.

I was wrong.

The explosives, over a thousand pounds packed in a car, had been set off by radio remote control just as the truck with First Squad had come even with it.  All of them had been blown to bits, as had nearly a hundred innocents from the village. 

How could you protect yourself from an enemy that did not care how many they had to kill just to get to you?  It was impossible.

There was only one answer.  Kill them before they killed you.

Maybe I wouldn’t be feeling this way, the great and almost overwhelming sense of the uselessness of it all, if I had any illusions that the cocaine we’d destroyed and the people we’d arrested and the others we’d killed would make a difference.  It wouldn’t, of course.  More labs would be built, more cocaine would be processed, more people recruited.  It was an unending battle.

But what the hell, I thought, taking refuge in the cynicism that sometimes seemed to be my only shield.  Look at the good side.  It keeps me in business.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc there had been few calls for my peculiar skills in anything but the drug wars.  Terrorism had faded, except for the sputtering war in what had once been Yugoslavia.  I had no intention of offering my services there.  I couldn’t tell which side I liked the least.

Thank God for drugs, I sometimes told people, much to their shock.  They keep me off welfare.  When I’d left the employ of the government I’d had to struggle to get work.  What the Navy paid me in pension came nowhere close to meeting my fiscal needs.

I was just another highly trained and qualified individual in a world full of them, I had been told by a particularly tactless potential client.  I can have ten people just like you in my office with one phone call, he’d said.

I think I should be commended for not breaking his nose.

I’d lost just about everything, including the girl who had talked me into retiring in the first place.  She’d gone on to greener pastures, searching for someone who could keep her in the fashion to which she would like to be accustomed.  On the way out she’d scorned me as an indecisive buffoon who would never amount to anything.  I would never be rich, or famous, and she wanted both.

I hadn’t broken her nose either.

So I’d gone back to work for the government, except this time as a ‘consultant’ – they didn’t like the term mercenary.  And the government always had a need for a man of my talents.  Especially since I spoke Spanish.

Now I would never have to work again if I chose not to.  I’d been a very highly paid specialist in my own esoteric discipline for a long time.  I had little need for more money.  Most of what I’d made was stashed away in bank accounts, CDs, Tax exempt bonds.  Some of it was in the U.S., more was in offshore accounts.  Insurance, I thought, against the real possibility that someday some government bureaucrat would give me up to save him or herself.  Some of the things I’d done would not have stood up well to Congressional Inquiry, and I had no intention of going to jail.  Rather than that I would go someplace quiet, use one of the names under which the money was invested, and live off the interest.

But not yet.  There was the too real possibility that without an outlet I would sit on the end of my bed one night, put the muzzle of a .45 behind my ear and blow my brains all over the wall.

Too much trouble for the cleaning lady.  Might aw well let someone else do it.

I swam to the shore, collected my belongings, and went back to the condo.  The hot Florida sun dried me before I got there.  Something was nagging at me.

Answering service!  That was it.  Should have checked them last night.  Just too tired.

********

I’d gotten off the plane from Bogota at six in the evening.  It had been a long flight.  The aircraft had suffered, as usual, with mechanical problems, delaying the takeoff two yours and then necessitating a stop in Puerto Rico, where we sat on the ground for another hour.  The exit procedures in Bogota had been long and involved.  I’d been in and out of that airport dozens of times, but there was always some new procedure the petty bureaucrats had dreamed up, it seemed, for the express purpose of making travel difficult.

I could, of course, have flashed the credentials with which I had been provided by D.A.S, the Colombian equivalent of the CIA and FBI rolled into one.  I would have gotten preferential treatment, with officials almost bowing and scraping and asking, Is there anything I could do for you, Jefe?

Given what I had been doing in Colombia, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to draw attention like that.  Any one of the people who checked my papers could have been in the pay of one or the other of the many cartels.

Then as I waited in line for Customs clearance in Miami I felt the bone-deep fatigue that had for so long been a part of my life.  Maybe it’s old age, I told myself.  I looked forward to a good, long rest.

Spend some time in the sun.  Maybe go fishing.  A friend owned a little place on Key Largo.  It was on a canal and quite isolated.  Maybe I’d go there.  Or maybe I’d just sleep for a couple of years, or at least until it was time to go back to Bogota.  Or Peru, or Bolivia, or, God forgive, Paraguay, or wherever else they wanted me.

It had not taken too long to get to the head of the line at Customs.  That was one of the few good things to come out of the current troubles in Colombia.  Not too many people wanted to travel to Bogota these days, not unless they absolutely had to.  The 747 had been almost empty, allowing me to stretch out over several seats and doze.  The bad thing about it was that the airlines assigned their least reliable planes to the route, figuring that the inevitable mechanical delays would inconvenience the least number of customers.  So I supposed it all evened out.

The young customs inspector had eyed my documents closely.  Mr. Frank Whitman is that right? he had asked.  You’ve been to Bogota several times in the last year, Mr. Whitman. He watched my eyes as he had been taught to do, I was sure, in the Customs profiling classes.  He must have been disappointed when my pupils didn’t change.

Business, I said, not willing to waste a lot of time on yet another officious bureaucrat.

What kind of business?  Persistent little bastard, I thought.

I’m a consultant, I said.  "Right now I’m under contract to the government.  The U.S. government.

CIA, you could almost hear him thinking.  Wrong, buckwheat.  But I saw no reason to disabuse him of the notion.

He made a cursory check of my bags, completely missing the gun.  Not that it mattered.  I had more than enough credentials to take care of any questions.  But it amused me to not declare it and see if anyone was smart enough to find it.  Sort of a game.  Few things amused me anymore, so I indulged in one of life’s little pleasures.  So far it was forty to zip, in my favor.

I was not an employee of, or consultant to, the CIA, despite what the customs inspector might have thought.  I was a free-lancer.  And I was on contract, but not to the Agency.  I dislike the CIA intensely and turn down their proffered contracts.  This antipathy dated back over twenty years.  I regarded them as being lying, cheating, murderous, totally amoral sons-of-bitches.  That I could have lived with.  Lots of people fit that description, including the folks I was now working