Shadows of War

by Larry Bond

  “He didn’t realize it was blocked?”

  “Apparently you can only tell that you don’t hear someone responding.”

  “They can do that?”

  “They’re using a type of ferret satellite.” Gina rolled the cursor arrow back toward the window with the technical data. “It’s kind of fascinating. They lock onto the bands the commercial satellite is using, and then selectively—”

  “You can explain it to me when we’re past all this,” Lucas said, starting to read the transcript.

  10

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

  Among the important first-night targets for the Chinese invaders was an army barracks just north of Lai Châu city. The two companies stationed there represented the only substantial Vietnamese force in the spearhead’s path. Defeating it was therefore important both tactically and psychologically, and Jing Yo’s platoon had been assigned to help secure the victory.

  After being transported into the area with the main force, the commandos would leapfrog the defenses, sabotaging telephone and electric lines as they proceeded to a point southwest of the city where Highways 12 and 6 split. They would secure a small culvert bridge on Route 12 just south of that intersection, holding it to cut off any retreat by the Vietnamese.

  The plan called for them to meet with three platoons of paratroopers, who were to have landed about five kilometers south and proceeded north along the highway. Because of the paratroopers—together the force amounted to about a hundred men—Jing Yo had been given only one of his squads, amounting to eight men, not counting him. The other was assigned to provide protection at the force headquarters, basically operating as bodyguards for Colonel Sun, who was traveling with the main body.

  Jing Yo hadn’t protested when the orders were first drawn up; the paratroopers were well trained, and the force was more than sufficient to hold the bridge. But while racing to rejoin the tanks, the paratroopers had not been able to take off due to problems with their aircraft. That meant he and his eight men, initially assigned as little more than advance scouts, were now expected to do the work of one hundred.

  Colonel Sun, of course, had not mentioned any of this when ordering him to rejoin the force. Jing Yo could only wonder if the colonel was purposely sabotaging him with an eye toward taking him down a peg or two.

  Or maybe he was hoping he’d be killed when his unit was overrun.

  Getting south past the column of rapidly advancing armor and trucks on the narrow Vietnamese highways wasn’t easy. In many cases the two lanes of Chinese traffic completely blocked the road, including the narrow shoulder. So by the time Jing Yo managed to meet up with the vanguard of the assault, they were almost within sight of the barracks’ perimeter. The infantry troops riding with the tanks had already dismounted, preparing for the attack.

  “Through the field, quickly,” Jing Yo told Private Ai Gua, who was driving.

  They veered across the ditch that ran along the highway. The land, tropical forest only a few years before, had been plowed under and turned into a wheat field. It was fallow at the moment; the season’s planting wouldn’t take place for another few months.

  While the moon was very strong, it was difficult to see obstructions in the field without turning their headlights on. Twice Ai Gua barely missed large rocks. When he came to what looked like a path between the fields but turned out to be an irrigation ditch, he was going too fast to stop in time. He tried plunging across. He made it to the other side of the embankment, but then stalled the engine. Jing Yo leapt from the cab and ran to the back, where Sergeant Wu was already mustering the men in an attempt to push the vehicle forward.

  There was only a small trickle of water in the bottom of the ditch, but its shallow sides were soft mud, and it took several minutes before the truck’s wheels finally caught enough hard earth to move forward. Ai Gua revved the engine, spattering mud over everyone, including Jing Yo, as he made it back onto solid ground.

  “Let’s go!” yelled the lieutenant, racing back to the cab.

  He heard gunshots in the distance, the low crack of rifle fire. The assault had already begun.

  “Turn on the headlights,” he told Ai Gua. “Let’s go.”

  Fifty meters farther on, they came to a dirt road that led back in the direction of the highway. They turned onto it, Ai Gua stomping the gas pedal for all he was worth. But the lane soon angled southward, away from the highway.

  “We need to go west,” Jing Yo told Ai Gua. “Cut across the field.”

  The private did as he was told. The vehicle jerked unevenly, climbing in the direction of the highway.

  “Another ditch ahead, Lieutenant,” said Ai Gua.

  “Try south. Turn left.”

  They did, but it was obvious that the ditch blocking their way wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Jing Yo checked his GPS. According to the device, the nearest road back to the highway was two kilometers farther south.

  “Stop here,” he told Ai Gua. He jerked open the door and ran to the back. “Take as much ammunition as you can,” he told his squad. “Leave the rucks. Let’s go, let’s go—we run from here.”

  Sergeant Wu began mustering the men. Jing Yo told Ai Gua to take the truck alone, find the road, and come back north.

  “Just me?”

  “Just you, Private. I know you can do it.”

  Ai Gua nodded. Jing Yo slapped the fender and he put it in gear, spitting up large clods of dirt as he drove away.

  “Could’ve just left the truck,” said Sergeant Wu.

  “I don’t want to lose it,” said Jing Yo. “And we can get there faster without the backpacks. He’ll be okay.” He raised his voice to what they had called in officers’ training a commanding shout. “Come on, men. The road is this way! We run together.”

  The squad fell in behind him, moving at a good pace over the field. The night had cooled, and after the long ride the sensation of blood and adrenaline pumping through his veins felt good. Jing Yo ran at about three-quarters pace up the gradual rise, until he came to a three-strand barbed-wire fence whose black wires stood out against the moon-painted silver ground beyond.

  He stopped and turned around, waiting as his men caught up. Sergeant Wu, the oldest of the squad—not to mention the heaviest smoker—took up the rear, wheezing as he ran. It would have been a better idea to let him take the truck, thought Jing Yo, but it is too late now.

  Private Chin removed a small pair of wire cutters from his tactical vest and cut the wires, which fell lazily against the ground. Jing Yo plunged back into the lead, running a little faster, until he began to tire and wondered where the road was. Finally the dark slick of macadam appeared ahead. He slowed to a jog, extending his hands to alert the others. Then he raced ahead to the drainage ditch flanking the road, flopping down against the side.

  There was enough moonlight to see the road, but the glasses’ magnification allowed him to see down it for about a kilometer. Once he was sure there were no snipers on the other side, he rose and ran to the edge, pausing to make sure he was still clear. Then he leapt across the road, landing on the opposite shoulder in two giant bounds. He slid into the ditch that ran along that side, once more making sure they weren’t running their way into an ambush.

  When he didn’t spot anyone, he stood and whistled; his team double-timed across the highway.

  “Where’s the bridge?” asked Wu, out of breath.

  “This is Route 6. We’ve got to go across that field, then up to our right,” said Jing Yo. “It should be less than a hundred meters.”

  “All right.”

  Jing Yo paused, listening. The gunfire he’d heard earlier had stopped.

  That didn’t make any sense. The assault should be well under way by now.

  Maybe the Vietnamese had thrown down their weapons and were fleeing. In which case, Jing Yo had best get his men into position quickly.

  “Let’s go,” he told his men, and once more began to run.

  Running
always reminded Jing Yo of the days before being formally accepted for training as a Ch’an novitiate, when he and the other boys under the monks’ care had had to prepare their bodies for the order’s grueling physical tests. The early-morning and late-evening sessions cleared his head and made his body work with his mind in a way that couldn’t be entirely explained in words; it was as if the exercise created new pathways between his muscles and his brain. Even now, running relaxed him, and though there were many things Jing Yo could have thought or worried about—whether the Vietnamese had wired the bridge for explosives, whether a unit had been assigned to protect it—his mind was an easy blank, filled only with the idea and sensation of running.

  The field climbed upward toward a small copse. Jing Yo ordered his men to rest as they reached it, planning to use the trees as a vantage point to scout for the road. But before he could climb one, Private Chin shouted.

  “There! The road is there, through the trees.”

  Their target was less than fifty meters away.

  “Chin, Bo, with me,” said Jing Yo, already starting back in motion. “Sergeant, stay with the others and cover us until we are sure it is clear.”

  Jing Yo’s right boot hit the pavement as the sky to the north turned white. An instant later, the first big shell from the tanks exploded as it hit one of the Vietnamese positions; a dozen or more followed in rapid succession. Even Jing Yo, who had been in combat several times before as a “mercenary” in Malaysia, stopped, his attention momentarily drawn to the thunderous assault a few kilometers away.

  But only for a moment.

  “The bridge is that way. Go!” he yelled. Then he turned back to Sergeant Wu, signaling for him to follow as he and the other two men ran north.

  Jing Yo sprinted until he saw the low white arch at the side of the road ahead. The bridge seemed much smaller in real life than on the map they had used to prepare—so much smaller that when he reached it he took two GPS readings to make sure he had the right place. It rose barely three meters over a small, rocky stream, and extended for only ten or twelve meters.

  “This is it?” asked Sergeant Wu, as always arriving at the rear of the pack.

  “According to the GPS,” said Jing Yo.

  “We should send someone north to make sure.”

  Jing Yo agreed, and chose Chin and Bo, telling them to make sure they weren’t seen by anyone. Then he inspected the area, looking for a place to defend the bridge from if they were attacked. A cluster of trees sat on the bank at the northwestern side; otherwise there was no cover at all, except for the bridge walls.

  “No explosives,” said Sergeant Wu. “They weren’t expecting us.”

  They divided up the men, posting two in the trees and the rest in spots under the bridge, where they had decent firing lines on the road. Jing Yo called the division headquarters, announcing that they had reached their objective. He stayed on the bridge with Sergeant Wu, waiting for the two men whom they’d sent up the road, and watching the flashes on the horizon.

  “I’d hate to be those bastards,” said Wu as a succession of explosions shook the ground. “Going against tanks at night. You never know what the hell hit you.”

  The Vietnamese had faced tanks before, Jing Yo thought, when they fought the Americans and French. They had quickly become experts on antitank tactics and weapons; indeed, he had studied some of the Vietnamese tactics while training to be a commando, and used a few in Malaysia, though there the biggest vehicle he had fought against was an armored car.

  “You think this is going to last long, Lieutenant?” asked Wu.

  Jing Yo shrugged. He hadn’t really given it much thought.

  “I think it will be over inside a week,” said Wu. “They’ll quit before we reach Saigon.”

  “I would imagine the Americans thought the same way.”

  Sergeant Wu laughed. “Yes, but we’re not the Americans.”

  One of the men below hissed. Someone was running up the road.

  “Hold your fire. It’s Bo and Chin,” said Jing Yo, recognizing the shadows. “Report.”

  “The Vietnamese are coming,” said Chin breathlessly. “They have armored cars.”

  “Shit,” said Wu, a little too loudly for Jing Yo’s taste. “Here comes hell.”

  “Get your grenade launchers ready,” shouted Jing Yo. “Wait until they are very close!”

  He took a step to run off the bridge, then realized that his men were watching and might misinterpret his haste. So he moved at a slow, almost relaxed pace up to the copse. Corporal Linn had already zeroed his shoulder-launched Type 2010 rocket-propelled grenade launcher on the road when he arrived.

  In its basic design, the Type 2010 was very similar to the RPG-7 model the Vietcong used much farther south against the Americans in the 1960s war. But in the particulars—charge and propellant—it was much better. The shaped charge could get past all but the largest main battle tanks; even then, a charge fired at the right angle and in the right spot could disable a Russian tank. Jing Yo knew this for a fact, since he had seen it done.

  The vehicles they were up against were not nearly so well protected. But they were not tin crates either. French-made Panhard Sagaie 1’s, they mounted 90 mm guns on their low-slung turrets. The trucks had wheels rather than traditional tank treads, which allowed them to move relatively quickly—Jing Yo estimated they were doing at least thirty kilometers an hour as they rounded the last bend before the bridge, about eighty meters from the trees.

  “Aim for the lead car,” he told Linn. “The ones behind it will crash.”

  Linn waited another half second, then fired. The rocket spit across the night, its whistle thin against the sounds of the battle in the distance.

  The nose of the armored car flashed white and it stopped dead in its tracks. As Jing Yo had predicted, the second vehicle ran into the rear of the first with a tremendous smash.

  A second grenade, this one fired by one of the men near the bridge, hit the lead vehicle just below the turret’s muzzle. The charge penetrated the metal, and turned the inside of the tank red hot in an instant, not merely frying the occupants but setting off several of the thirty-odd charges for the gun. A fireball leapt from the open hatch at the top of the car, its red light cascading across the night sky.

  Remarkably, the second car was able to back away from the wreck. As it moved, its gun began to rotate in the direction of the trees.

  “Take it,” Jing Yo told Linn.

  But the private was having trouble reloading his weapon and wasn’t ready. The muzzle of the armored car flashed, and Jing Yo felt his breath involuntarily catch in his chest.

  It has missed, he thought, if I can feel this.

  The shell had missed, whizzing through the trees several meters above them. The gunner in the armored car immediately began to correct; his next shell passed only a few centimeters away.

  Linn’s grenade hit the front corner of the truck before he could get another one off.

  The grenade happened to strike at a bad angle for penetration, and rather than sinking into the armor, it exploded outside of the vehicle, pushing it a few feet back but doing comparatively little damage. The explosion did throw off the gunner’s aim, shoving the muzzle upward as it fired.

  Jing Yo leapt from behind the tree and ran toward the road. It was not a logical thing to do, nor was it entirely prudent. Yet he knew instinctively that he had to do it.

  Racing across the road, he took one of the grenades from his tac vest and thumbed off the tape holding the fuse closed. He circled around the front of the burning armored car, swerving to avoid the flames as they shot out from under the turret. As he did, the gun on the second car swung in the direction of his men on the hill. Jing Yo grabbed the thick iron rail at the rear of the car’s body and leapt onto the Panhard, feet sprawling over the rear. Then he rolled upward and climbed to the top of the turret just as the car’s commander popped through the hatch and reached for the machine gun.

  Jing Yo had not expe
cted to have such an easy chance, and for the briefest moment—a fraction of a fraction of a second—he hesitated. Then he dropped the grenade through the opening. With his left hand, he grabbed the Vietnamese soldier and pulled him with him as he leapt back off the armored car. The grenade exploded with a dull thud, the vehicle rocking and then hissing as smoke rose from the open hatch.

  Jing Yo dragged the Panhard commander across the road. The man was dazed, unable to comprehend what was going on, let alone resist. By the time Jing Yo’s men came up to help him, Jing Yo had already taken his pistol and trussed his hands behind his back with a thick plastic zip cord.

  “You took quite a risk,” said Wu.

  The launcher at the base of the bridge had not had a clear shot at the second tank, and it would have taken Linn nearly another minute to fire a third grenade, during which time the armored car’s gunner would surely have found his target.

  Did he have to explain that to Wu? What was the point?

  “What needed to be done, I did,” he said. “There was no other option.”

  Sergeant Wu laughed softly, shaking his head.

  The Vietnamese armored car commander was a sergeant, who was either too shell-shocked to say anything useful, or a very good actor. Jing Yo brought him under the bridge, removing the man’s boots. He used the laces to bind his feet.

  “If you try to leave, my man will shoot you,” Jing Yo warned, first in Vietnamese and then in Chinese. “You’re not worth the trouble of chasing.”

  Back up on the road, Sergeant Wu had climbed into the second armored car. With help from Linn, he cleared it of its dead crew, restarted it, and managed to back it up off the road. The main gun seemed to have been damaged during the fight, but the machine gun at the top was still working, a fact Sergeant Wu demonstrated with a few bursts in the direction of the curve to the north.

  “We’ll catch them by surprise,” said the sergeant.

  “If our tanks arrive, the surprise will be on us,” Jing Yo told him. He sent Private Chin back up the road to act as a lookout, then checked in with division to see how the assault was progressing.