Shadows of War

by Larry Bond

  “You must know him pretty well.”

  “Well enough.”

  “He your boyfriend?”

  Mara laughed. “Oh, God no.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you laugh.”

  “That’s okay. If you knew the Million Dollar Man, you wouldn’t even ask.”

  “He’s rich?”

  Mara explained where the nickname had come from. Josh told her that he had never really followed wrestling.

  “Really?” said Mara. “I used to watch it all the time when I was little. My brothers got me hooked. Triple H, Batista, Rey Mysterio, all those guys.”

  “Why would you watch wrestling?”

  “If I have to explain it, you won’t understand it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’d you do? Watch The Magic School Bus?”

  “I loved those shows.”

  Mara laughed. She’d loved them, too.

  “Science was a way for me to deal with the world,” said Josh. “It kept things … ordered.”

  “And you wanted that.”

  “I needed that.”

  He leaned closer to her. Mara waited for him to explain what he meant, but instead he stopped short.

  “Is that the airplane?”

  She stopped and listened. For a second, she thought it was. Then the sound became much more distinct.

  “The helicopters are coming back,” she said. “Let’s get into the trees.”

  The helicopters were ninety seconds from landing when the infrared operator raised his hand, signaling Jing Yo over. “There’s something about two kilometers south of the village, near the road but in the jungle. Warm bodies.”

  Jing Yo leaned down, looking at the blur. He’d already told the pilots to land, and had given up his headset so he could jump quickly from the chopper.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ll have to get closer to find out. It may be another tiger or some other animal. Or a person.”

  “Not in the village?”

  “We’re still a little far away.”

  “Let me see the village.”

  Jing Yo waited while the technician readjusted his screen. He was starting to feel tired, worn down by the last several days.

  If he felt that way, then his men would feel even worse. But they had a mission to complete.

  “Here, Lieutenant. This is the village.”

  The screen looked similar but not exactly the same as it had earlier. The technician explained that the fires, having mostly burned themselves out, were continuing to cool, and so looked different to the sensors.

  “Wasn’t this building on fire before?” said Jing Yo, pointing to the southernmost barn in the center of the hamlet. It was the one they had searched earlier.

  “Uh, I’m not sure.”

  “It was mostly intact, remember?” said Jing Yo. “There was heat on one side, and you thought the fire was spreading up the wall. But now the wall is not burned down.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s cold. Why would that be if there had been a fire there?”

  The operator shook his head. Jing Yo went to tell the pilots to change course.

  The jungle was so thick and the night so dark that Josh simply couldn’t see where he was going. He carried M with him as he pushed slowly ahead, partly guided by Mara’s tug. The helicopters were getting closer.

  “Which way are we going?” he asked Mara finally.

  “We just have to get distance from the road.”

  They pushed on, stumbling between the bushes and trees. M, her face pushed tightly into Josh’s shoulder, groaned as the branches slapped across her back.

  “Once they’re on the ground, they’ll have a hard time finding us. Even if they have night glasses. Goggles won’t be able to see through all of this brush. We’ll get in deeper and keep moving toward the drop area. Just be calm.”

  “I’m calm,” he told her. “You stay calm.”

  “I’m calm,” said Mara. Her voice was a tight rasp.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Josh told M. “We just keep moving. We’ll make it.”

  “There!” Mara stopped short.

  “What?” asked Josh.

  “That sound—hear it? It’s the MC-130,” she said, pointing to the south. “With the SEALs. Come on, let’s go.”

  Jing Yo grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat, steadying himself as the helicopter turned sharply over the jungle.

  “The trees are too thick near the road to land on here,” the pilot told him. “The best we can do is the edge of that field a half kilometer away.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  “Lieutenant—there’s a plane—it’s just ahead,” sputtered the copilot.

  “A large plane.”

  “Evasive maneuvers!” yelled the chopper pilot, jerking the aircraft hard to the left.

  “Get us down,” said Jing Yo. “Get us down now!”

  26

  Northern Vietnam

  Ric Kerfer’s rucksack hit the ground about a quarter second before he did, telling the SEAL lieutenant he was about to touch down. The warning was just enough to relax Kerfer’s leg muscles in time to avoid serious injury, but the landing still hurt—he rolled on his right shoulder, hitting at exactly the angle that a linebacker had taken to smack him down in high school some ten years before.

  Which hurt.

  The linebacker had gone on to the NFL; Kerfer had lost out on a possible athletic scholarship to college and ended up going to Navy ROTC, became an officer, and joined the SEALs. He figured that he had gotten the better end of the exchange. Still, it hurt goddamnit, and put him in a lousy mood.

  Then as now.

  “Come on, you sissy boys,” he growled, jumping to his feet and unsnapping his parachute harness. “Stevens, take the point. The Commies are in those choppers there. Move!”

  Within seconds, one of his team closer to the road began firing toward the helicopters. Kerfer slipped on his night goggles, then got his bearings. As the last man out of the plane, he had hit farthest from the road; the other seven members of the squad—there were two fire teams—were scattered ahead, between him and the two Chinese helicopters that had been prowling the area.

  The helos continued to press. Scumbags weren’t easily intimidated.

  Which kind of pissed him off.

  “Put a frickin’ grenade into the bastard,” yelled Kerfer. He pulled on his radio and began running forward, his Mk 17 ready under his left arm. The SCAR fired 7.62 mm rounds, nice fat slugs that could stop something rather than just whizzing through it as an M-4’s or even an MP-5’s bullets sometimes did.

  “They’re landing!” yelled Eric, up ahead on Kerfer’s right.

  “Ger-nay-dez, goddamn it!”

  The words were no sooner out of Kerfer’s mouth than a 40 mm grenade exploded near the landing zone.

  “About frickin’ time,” said the lieutenant, throwing himself down as a heavy machine gun began playing through the field.

  Jing Yo leapt from the helicopter as the door gunner went to work, pounding the far side of the field with his machine gun. The rest of the commandos were down already, having landed in the first helicopter.

  A grenade exploded on the ground nearby. The commandos were returning fire.

  Jing Yo tasted the dirt as he hit the ground, tripping on something in the darkness. Tracers ripped from the helicopter’s .50-caliber door gun, toward muzzle flashes maybe thirty yards away.

  A grenade exploded so close its concussion pushed his head down. This is hell, thought the lieutenant, zeroing his rifle on a shadow and pressing the trigger.

  Mara reached back and grabbed Josh as the gunfire intensified. Bullets crashed into the jungle behind them, but the firefight itself was off to their left, nearly a half kilometer away. If they kept moving, they would be okay.

  “Come on,” she told Josh. “We can get to the rendezvous point.”

  “Are those the guys that are helping us?”

  �
��Yes.”

  “Maybe we should help them.”

  “Just keep moving,” said Mara. “They can take care of themselves.”

  “Okay.”

  She pushed through the brush. Josh’s wanting to help spoke eloquently about who he was, but the impulse was also foolish—their real job was to get away.

  The SEALs would have fallen over laughing if they’d heard him. Not that Mara didn’t feel the same impulse.

  “This is just getting too thick,” said Josh. “We have to get closer to the road.”

  “You’re right,” said Mara, changing direction. “We can go right to the road—the SEALs have them tied down.”

  If the world were perfect, Kerfer would have been able to swing two or three of his men around the flank of his enemy while his main force engaged them in the field. They’d squeeze and the bad guys would go bye-bye.

  But the world wasn’t perfect. The Chinese helicopters and their machine guns made it hard to move up through the field. And the bastards on the ground weren’t exactly looking the other way either.

  The first order of business was to get rid of the helos.

  “Little Joe, I want you to put a grenade into that helo’s door. You got that, Joey? Just like you were trying to do to that whore you bought last weekend.”

  Little Joe—the SEAL’s real name was actually Riccardo Joseph Crabtree—cursed in response, telling his lieutenant that he could put the grenade in there himself.

  Music to Kerfer’s ears.

  Three seconds later, as the helicopter pivoted around the southern side of the field, the petty officer rose and pumped a 40 mm grenade from his EGLM launcher into the open hatchway of the chopper.

  “Pretty!” shouted Stevens over the squad radio.

  “I thought you were pinned down, point,” barked Kerfer in reply.

  “I am.”

  “Well stop gawkin’ and get your ass unpinned. Little Joe ain’t doin’ all the work.”

  The SEAL responded with a burst of gunfire.

  “Jenkins, time for your end around,” said Kerfer. “Run to the left. I’m going to be right behind you.”

  “Good. Copy.”

  “Any of you assholes frag me, I’m comin’ back as your girlfriend in my next life and giving you the clap,” said Kerfer, jumping to his feet and running to flank their enemy.

  Jing Yo saw the flames shoot from the helicopter as the grenade exploded, and knew instantly that the crew was lost. The helo disappeared into a fireball, sailing over the trees behind them.

  The second helicopter immediately backed off, leaving them alone in the field.

  These were definitely not Vietnamese soldiers they were fighting; they had to be Americans, come to fetch the scientist. There weren’t very many of them—a dozen maybe, or perhaps twenty. But they had his small squad outnumbered and outgunned.

  A foe this good would try to hold him in place while they sent men to attack the flanks. He had to withdraw temporarily, pick better terms for battle.

  Moving back in the face of a superior foe was not dishonorable, but it nonetheless stung to give the order.

  Josh nearly lost his balance as the thick branches gave way to the shoulder of the road. He jogged a few steps, swaying left and right as he struggled to stay upright. When he stopped, M slipped down from his arms but continued to cling to his leg.

  She was sobbing.

  “Come on now,” he told her. “We’re going.”

  “This way,” said Mara, a few feet away. “Come on.”

  Something exploded in the distance, louder than the grenades they’d heard just a few minutes before. M clung tighter to his leg.

  “One of the helicopters went down,” said Mara.

  “We’re going to be all right,” he told M. “Come on.”

  Mara picked up the girl. M tried to clutch him tighter, but Josh gently pried off her fingers. Then he put his arm around Mara’s back, holding M’s neck gently as they began trotting along the road.

  “It’s beginning to rain,” said Josh, feeling the first drops.

  “Let’s hope it does. It will make it harder for them to find us.”

  “It’ll also make us wet.”

  Mara laughed.

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke,” said Josh. “People are trying to kill us, and you’re laughing.”

  “Crying isn’t going to help,” she said, laughing even harder.

  Kerfer was almost to the road when he realized that the Chinese had decided to withdraw.

  Ordinarily, that would have pissed him off—how dare the mothers run away before he had a chance to properly kick their butts?

  But given that his job was to grab the spook and the dweeb with a minimum of fuss, he was almost happy to let them go. He told his men to hold their positions while he and Jenkins looked for stragglers or snipers.

  “Where the hell are our bicycles?” he asked.

  “Blown to pieces, Cap,” said Stevens. “I’m standing on them.”

  “Stinking reds,” said Little Joe. “Now we gotta fuckin’ walk.”

  “Walkin’s good for you,” said Stevens. “Work off your beer gut.”

  “Hey, Cap, who ordered this rain?” asked Mancho.

  “Yeah, his dress is gonna get wet,” said Stevens.

  “Screw my dress. I’m worried about your perm.”

  “All right, girls. Cut it,” said Kerfer. “Let’s get to Baker Point with a minimum of bitchin’ and lynchin’.”

  “What fun would that be?” said Jenkins beside him. Jenkins was a black guy from Brooklyn, New York, who spoke in a voice so high he sounded like a girl. No one made fun of it though, because he was sensitive about it. Ordinarily that would only have encouraged razzing, but Jenkins stood six ten in his bare feet, and weighed so much it took two guys to balance him in the chopper.

  No one made fun of it except Kerfer, that is. He was the only person in the platoon Jenkins wouldn’t hit or sit on.

  “Come on, Squeaky, I’ll race you to the road. Let’s see if we can get there before your voice changes.”

  The rain was torrential by the time they reached the slope below the spot where Mara and the mercenaries had slept. Mara, still holding M, put her right hand over her eyes to shield them from the worst of the downpour. She couldn’t remember being this wet, not even in the ocean.

  Josh, walking a few feet ahead, stopped.

  “Global warming, right?” she said as she caught up.

  “Not exactly.” He reached out and took M. The girl was so tired she simply couldn’t walk on her own. “This is the way it’s always rained in Vietnam. The aggregate is different, but if you look at the individual episodes, this is well within parameters.”

  “I keep forgetting you’re a scientist. How long is it going to rain?”

  “To know that I’d have to be a meteorologist. Or a fortune-teller.”

  “Come on,” she said, tugging. “The intersection is only a half mile away.”

  “The infrared can’t see through the rain, Kerfer. You know that.”

  “You Air Farters are always making excuses,” Kerfer told the major who was handling the interface between the SEALs and the Global Hawk UAV supplying them with intel. Equipped with a powerful infrared imager, the drone had been flown into position specifically for the mission, but the heavy cloud cover and rain rendered the sensors useless. “If it was a nice day you’d tell me there was too much glare.”

  “Fug you and the airplane you flew in on.”

  “Any time, Major. I can always use some R & R. Call me back when you have something to contribute.” Kerfer killed the transmission and turned to Stevens. “Are you sure this is the intersection?”

  “Spooks marked it on the GPS.”

  “Screw the GPS. Let me see the paper map.”

  Stevens pulled it from his ruck. He switched on his pocket LED light, crouching low to the ground and cupping his hands to contain the glow.

  “Why this intersection and not that one?” Kerf
er asked, pointing down the road about half a mile.

  “This is the one they marked, skipper.”

  “Get on the horn with Lucas and find out if he can read a fuckin’ map. Little Joe, you’re with me. We’re going to check out the next bus stop down the line.”

  Josh pulled the sat phone out and looked at it as it started to ring.

  “Answer it,” said Mara. “Go ahead.”

  “Hello?”

  “Josh?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Peter, Josh. Are you where you’re supposed to be? Your friends are looking for you.”

  Josh looked in Mara’s direction. They were less than three feet apart, but he could barely see her.

  “Are we where we’re supposed to be?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Lucas. “I have it now.”

  He hung up.

  “The line’s dead,” said Josh.

  “The SEALs must be close,” said Mara. “And the Chinese, too.”

  Kerfer and Little Joe walked along the shoulder of the road, moving as quickly as they could despite the darkness and steady rain. The road had become more stream than highway. The muck sucked at their boots and made it hard to keep their balance. Kerfer, who’d taken point himself, pushed himself to stay ahead of Little Joe—if the big man fell forward on him, it would hurt more than being shot.

  A hill rose on their right. The road angled to the left. The intersection was coming up.

  He heard something and immediately took a step left, grabbing Little Joe and pulling him into a crouch.

  “Think it’s them?” asked Little Joe, kneeling next to him.

  “Hope so.”

  Kerfer listened. The rain was falling so hard he couldn’t be sure of anything.

  “Hey,” he said finally, his voice soft. “Goldilocks—this is the Big Bad Wolf. That you?”

  Mara’s heart jumped when she heard the voice on the road.