The Kit Carson Scout: The Special Forces Squad has been sent to Cambodia (Vietnam Ground Zero Military Thrillers Book 6)

by Eric Helm

  “I think you should try less bullshit and more politeness, or I may just decide to eat alone and throw this Scotch right in your nasty face.”

  Maxwell actually chuckled, then looked serious.

  “Miss Morrow, Robin, look. We both know I’m not going to tell you anything about Gerber’s mission. I can’t. I can’t even confirm that I’ve seen or talked to him, although we both know that I have. That’s just the way it is.”

  “I already know they’re going to Cambodia and they took that so-called scout with them.”

  “So you say. As I said, I can’t confirm any of this.”

  “You don’t have to. It isn’t important. What is important is that something’s gone wrong. Very wrong.”

  Maxwell’s left eyebrow twitched ever so slightly, and he leaned forward a few millimeters in his chair. “What do you mean, something’s gone wrong? What’s gone wrong?”

  “Damn it, that’s just it. I don’t know. But I know something is wrong. I can smell it. I can feel it in my bones, Maxwell. Without even knowing what this mess is all about, I can tell you that it’s as rotten as a barrel full of year-old apples. I don’t care what Gerber and his bunch are up to. If the Agency is involved, the world’s probably better off never knowing. But what happens to those men is important to me. Especially what happens to Gerber. And there are a lot of things happening here that just don’t add up.”

  “Such as?” asked Maxwell, doing his best to look as if he really wasn’t interested.

  “Number one, that scout of yours. How much do you really know about her? How thoroughly was her background checked?”

  “She was given a clean bill of health by Military Intelligence,” said Maxwell. “We have no reason to believe that she is anything other than what she appears to be.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what Crinshaw told me. But what exactly is it that she appears to be?”

  Maxwell rolled his eyes and prayed for strength. “You spoke with General Crinshaw about the mission?”

  “Of course not. But I did ask him a couple of questions about this Brouchard woman’s background.”

  “And what did he tell you?”

  “The same thing you just did. She was cleared by Military Intelligence. Only nobody says who at Military Intelligence cleared her, and nobody gives any indication of how her background and story were verified. Frankly, I don’t see how they could be. Did you know she has a Russian-made knife?”

  Maxwell shrugged. “Why shouldn’t she? She was carrying a Russian-made AK-47 when she chieu hoied and came over to us. The woman was a Viet Cong soldier for over two years, for Christ’s sake. What do you expect? She should have the Statue of Liberty tattooed on her ass?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she had something tattooed there, but you’re missing the point. The Russian knife. Wouldn’t MI have taken such a thing away from her when she surrendered?”

  “That would be the normal procedure,” replied Maxwell.

  “Right. So even if it were reasonable for her to have a Russian-made knife, she shouldn’t have one now, right? And something else. She has no personal effects. No photographs of her family. No little mementos, nothing except that French translation of Tolstoy she was carrying when she came to the camp, and I never saw her open it once we got out to the Triple Nickel. It’s as though the woman has no past. She had a good pair of boots and all the web gear and equipment necessary for going out in the field, but she didn’t even have a change of underwear in the stuff she left behind in camp.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Morrow hesitated just a moment. “I went through her locker after they went out into the field.”

  Maxwell offered no comment on that.

  “I’m telling you, Maxwell, there’s something not right about the woman. There’s just nothing there. It’s as though she’d sanitized her belongings. Sanitized, that’s the word your people use, isn’t it? Remove anything that could be identifiable, right down to the labels in an agent’s clothes? The only problem is that the very absence of such things is noticeable in itself. The woman just doesn’t read right. It’s like looking at a silhouette instead of a person.

  “There’s something else odd, too. I went to Crinshaw to find out what I could about the woman. I expected he’d have to make some inquiries if he gave me any help at all. I didn’t really expect him to do anything. He’s always very careful not to alienate me, but since that court-martial business you mentioned earlier, he hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to assist me. Yet when I asked him about Brouchard, he not only bent over backward being polite and trying to assist me, he knew exactly who the woman was and that she’d been cleared by MI. In fact, he made a big deal about having no reason to question her loyalty, and then in practically the same breath he did exactly that, raised doubts about whether or not she could be trusted. Now doesn’t that strike you as being just a little bit odd?”

  It did indeed, but Maxwell was tempted to just write it off as Crinshaw straddling the fence on the question of Brouchard’s reliability, hoping to be able to cover his own ass if it turned out the woman was less than totally dependable. It was a typical enough Crinshaw move. And, of course, Crinshaw knew about the woman because he knew about the mission, a connection Morrow had apparently missed. Added all together, it still produced nothing but a sort of general uneasiness that something was amiss. Nothing, that is, until you added in two little bits of information Morrow couldn’t possibly know about.

  First, there was that bizarre insistence by Crinshaw that Gerber’s team was not to be extracted if they encountered trouble. It was a stupid decision, and Crinshaw had made such a big deal out of it that Maxwell suddenly found himself wondering if there was something more to it than just a childish whim followed by a general throwing a temper tantrum.

  Second, Maxwell’s boss had been in Saigon for two days, coming in aboard a scheduled airline flight returning GIs from R and R in Hong Kong. He’d been in-country for more than forty-eight hours and had thus far made no effort whatsoever to contact Maxwell, a situation that could politely be described as highly irregular. What was more, one of Maxwell’s Vietnamese informants had told him that during that time, Maxwell’s superior had been seen going to General Crinshaw’s office on three separate occasions, twice for approximately half an hour each, and once for nearly two hours. That was a lot of time for anyone to be taking out of a general’s schedule.

  Maxwell’s boss was a man known within the CIA’s Asian bureau as Smiling Jack Jirasek because of a wound he’d once received that had severed some of the nerves in his face, leaving him with a perpetually gaunt grin. But Jirasek hadn’t always been known as Smiling Jack. In the late fifties and early sixties, at the height of the cold war in Europe, they’d called him Jack the Ripper.

  In those days Jirasek had been fast building a reputation within the Company, a reputation for tackling supposedly insolvable problems and rapidly resolving them. Those kind of results had insured Jirasek a spot on the management ladder, but it hadn’t won him any friends among the agents in the field. A characterizing trademark of those solutions had always been sudden, brutal resolution by means of overwhelming force, and Jirasek had never hesitated to be willing to spend a few friendly agents, or even a couple of his own people, setting the situations up. Jirasek had been a man for whom the end always justified the means. Moving inside to a desk after he’d received the facial wound on an assignment where he’d used himself as bait hadn’t apparently changed his attitude about getting the job done.

  In the first six weeks of Jirasek’s tenure as chief of the Asian bureau, there had been more resignations, reassignments, and terminations in staffing than in any other bureau in the history of the Company. Maxwell had survived the purge only because he got results in his station, and Jirasek valued results above all else. Maxwell had no doubt about what would happen to his career if he ever failed to continue producing those results.

  And Smiling Jack the Ripp
er Jirasek had once more left his desk and returned to the field. In Maxwell’s station. And after two whole days he still hadn’t bothered to let Maxwell know he was there, but he had made three visits with General Crinshaw, one of them nearly two hours long.

  Maxwell was beginning to think that maybe Morrow was onto something after all. He had to admit that things did seem to be just a little bit odd.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE CAMBODIAN JUNGLE

  From a small rocky outcropping near the military crest of the hill, Fetterman and Gerber looked down across six hundred meters of broad-leaved jungle interspersed at irregular intervals with huge pine trees.

  It still seemed strange to Gerber, even after spending more than a year in Southeast Asia, to see pine trees cropping up among the palms, teak and bamboo. He knew that conifers were among the oldest of trees and that they were found in virtually all climates in all parts of the world. But they were most prevalent in northern temperate zones, and he always associated them with such, perhaps because of their traditional use as Christmas trees, which reminded him of snowy winters back at his parents’ home in Iowa. Still, the greatest variety of species was to be found in eastern and southeastern Asia, and in the Mexican and Central American highlands, places one didn’t normally associate with Christmas trees. Dredging up old and seldom-used knowledge from his college major in botany, Gerber eyed the nearest pines and wondered whether they were of the subgenera Haploxylon or Diploxylon, but without knowing the precise species there was no way to tell without a microscope.

  A stream cut through the shallow valley floor below. Back in Iowa, Gerber mused, it might have been called a river. There were places in Appanoose and Wayne counties where the Chariton was less impressive than the stream below, and the Chariton was a pretty average-sized tributary of the Missouri, with a lot of interesting switchbacks and rapids.

  This stream wasn’t listed on his maps as a river, however. In fact, it wasn’t listed at all. Gerber knew that meant little. The maps had been drawn by the French cartographic service over twenty years ago and were notoriously inaccurate. Still, it obviously wasn’t just some seasonal runoff, and you would think they would have noticed something its size.

  So it could have been a river, but Gerber didn’t think so. Kit had accurately predicted they would find it when they reached the valley and had stuck to her prediction even after it was pointed out that there was no such feature indicated on the maps, but she had not been able to name it. To her it was just a “very big stream here,” that she had crossed while escaping from the Viet Cong. Since she had lived not all that far from it for over two years, building and then working at the training camp west of Phum Thant Peam, it seemed unlikely that she wouldn’t know the name if it was important enough to the locals for them to consider it a river. Gerber assumed it to be some minor tributary of the Prek Cham.

  “Jesus, sir, what do you make of that?” whispered Fetterman, indicating an area on the other side of the valley floor. “It looks like the end of the world.”

  Beyond the stream was a scene of utter, stark desolation. Shattered tree trunks stood dark and naked amid a crumbling black-and-gray valley that should have been a tangled mass of lush green. Even the pines had been stripped of their needlelike leaves. Running down the valley in a broad band roughly parallel to the stream was a dead zone nearly three hundred meters wide. The whole area was pockmarked with craters like the face of the moon, many of them superimposed on one another from repeated impacts. Yet no amount of mere bombing could have created such a no-man’s-land on its own, especially not one with such clearly defined edges.

  “I’ve got a feeling that it’s just the beginning of something else,” Gerber replied. “When Maxwell briefed me, if you could call it that, he mentioned a field test of some kind of new chemical defoliant being studied as a means of depriving the VC of cover along infiltration routes. Part of the mission profile calls for us to assess the efficacy of the project if we encounter any defoliated areas. Maxwell presented it as such a minor adjunct to the main mission that I didn’t think it worth mentioning.”

  “Well, I’d say from the look of that shit we’ve encountered a defoliated area and the stuff is damned efficacious. They must have sprayed the area first and then bombed it, unless they disperse it in bombs. Did Maxwell tell you what they’re calling this stuff?”

  Gerber searched his mind a moment. “No. I don’t think so. Like I said, he mentioned it almost in passing, as if it weren’t terribly important, just something that it would be nice for us to check on if we ran across it.”

  Fetterman eyed the powdery gray-black landscape, with its blackened, broken trees. The trees weren’t twisted or splintered by the obviously intense, repeated bombing of the area the way ordinary, living, green trees would have been; they were broken like old, brittle bones, and crumbling as though they were ancient plaster sculptures. Trees that had been dead long before they had been shattered, and then burnt into charcoal stalks with fragile, slowly disintegrating branches. He studied the area first through his binoculars, then through the eyepiece of the compact eighty-power spotting scope they’d brought along for detail work in their observations of the Trail network. Finally he eyeballed the whole area again. In all that vast expanse of denuded, blasted landscape nothing moved. Not so much as a single bird was visible to the eye.

  “Captain,” said Fetterman uneasily, “when Maxwell mentioned that minor little adjunct to our mission out there, he didn’t happen to mention anything about how safe it was to pass through one of these defoliated areas, did he?”

  “No. Something bothering you?”

  “Not really, I guess. Just a little spooky seeing that out there. Sort of like walking through a midsummer patch of forest and finding yourself staring through a doorway into winter. There doesn’t seem to be anything left alive out there, at least nothing’s moving. If that stuff is persistent, I’d sure hate to go stomping around down there without a protective mask. Wouldn’t want it to defoliate us, if you know what I mean, sir.”

  “I would think if Maxwell thought it might be dangerous, he would have said something,” Gerber mused. “Besides, I don’t see where we have much choice. Kit says the OP where we can observe the Trail network is still two ridge lines away. I don’t see any way for us to get around this area, so I guess we’ll have to cross it.”

  “Yes, sir. Are we going to wait for nightfall? I don’t like the idea of us crossing all that open terrain in daylight. Those burned-out and rotten tree trunks won’t offer much in the way of cover if someone spots us out there,” Fetterman observed.

  “Agreed. But I don’t much like the idea of stumbling through that area in the dark, bumping against those tree trunks and shaking God only knows what down all over us, just in case your uneasy feelings aren’t groundless, Master Sergeant. We’ll move down to the edge of the area and hold there, then cross right at dusk. We’ll make a little less of a target that way and still have enough light that we ought to be able to see to get across without bruising our shins and bumping our knees too many times. Needless to say, once we do get down in that area, I don’t want anybody stopping for any reason until we’re clear across. I’ll expect everybody to keep moving until we’re well clear of the area. We don’t want to be hanging around down there.”

  “Of course, sir. Shall I start moving the men into position now?”

  Before either of them could move, Kepler slid in alongside them, breathing hard.

  “Captain,” he said, speaking between gasps. “We got trouble.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “VC working our back trail,” Kepler wheezed.

  “What, again? How far?”

  “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops, if they keep at their present rate,” Kepler said, panting. “Say ten if they decide to be most ricky-tick.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Looks like a squad. At least seven, maybe more. I couldn’t get an accurate count.”

  “That many mus
t be point element for a company,” offered Fetterman.

  “You sure they’re looking for us?” asked Gerber.

  “Well, sir,” said Kepler, gulping air, “they’re sure as hell looking for somebody. They got a tracker out front, walking point with a two-man security team.”

  “Jesus! Where in the hell did those guys come from?”

  “Sir,” said Fetterman, “I don’t like to say this, but they must have found the bodies of that other patrol we neutralized. I thought we’d done an adequate job of concealing the evidence, but perhaps we weren’t quite as thorough as I thought we were. Maybe we should have buried them instead of just hiding the bodies.”

  “This is no time to be thinking about what we should have done, Master Sergeant. What we need to do now is think about what we’re going to do.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll have to kill the tracker, sir. It’s the only way we’ll lose them if he’s any good at all.”

  “He’s done all right following us so far,” offered Kepler.

  “I suppose it can’t be helped. It sure is going to blow our being here.”

  “Not necessarily, sir. The VC may not know what they’re onto yet. Those three we killed earlier we took out without firing a shot.”

  “So?”

  “So we didn’t leave behind any brass or other clues that would point to the job being done by us. Those turkeys could have been taken out by any three mean guys with knives. South Vietnamese smugglers, Cambodian border bandits, even other VC who had a grudge against them or were trying to defect to the South and chieu hoi like our Kit Carson did. So long as those guys tracking us didn’t find any of Anderson’s size thirteen triple E boot prints, all they know is somebody killed their buddies. They don’t know it was us.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Tony. Any of those other groups would have stripped the bodies.”