by Eric Helm
“I know. But think about it. We took their weapons and ammunition, and Derek collected all their personal papers for analysis.”
“Which is what any military unit would have done. But nobody took their clothes or their boots, which is what bandits would have done.”
“I did.”
Gerber stared, aghast at his master sergeant. “You did what?”
“I took the guy’s boots off. Left them under a bush about fifty feet from where I hid his body. Did the same with his sun helmet. Figured if anyone did find the body, it would confuse them for a little bit. And I’d be willing to bet that Krung’s man is now sporting a modification in his anatomy, which is exactly what any military unit would not have done.”
“Yes,” admitted Gerber. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Sir, Master Sergeant Fetterman may be onto something,” said Kepler, warming to the idea. “I’m afraid I was too slow and my man tried to duck the blade. Got the job done, but made a bit of a mess of it. It wasn’t exactly a textbook kill. Add it all up, and it might be enough that those guys back there are wondering just who in the hell they’re following.”
“Gentlemen, the key word is following. As long as they’re still doing that, it doesn’t matter who they think we are,” Gerber pointed out.
“Granted, sir,” said Fetterman. “You agree then that we’ll have to kill the tracker?”
“Absolutely. And as soon as we shoot him, they’re going to know what they’re dealing with. Border bandits don’t carry M-16s. At least not yet.”
“Of course not. Neither do Viet Cong.”
“Master Sergeant, you’re not making any sense, and we don’t have time for long-winded explanations right now, so if you’ve got something constructive to say, get on with it.”
“Sir, we picked up two SKS carbines and an AK-47 from that trio we greased back at the river. It won’t have escaped your notice, I’m certain, that the clothing worn by our scout on this mission is standard issue to many VC units. One of the men we killed earlier was, in fact, dressed almost identically. Also, since the Viet Cong is an equal-opportunity employer, and as a general rule, the U.S. Army isn’t, I propose that we give Miss Brouchard the AK-47 and allow her to march Sergeant Kepler and myself up to the tracker and his two security men as though we were her prisoners. They’ll hopefully be lulled into a false sense of security by the appearance of an armed Co Cong with knowledge of this area and native-speaking ability, and by the fact that there are three of them, four counting Miss Brouchard, and only two Americans, who will look very dejected at having been captured. If the plan works, they’ll allow us to approach. When we reach them, Sergeant Kepler and I will kill them with our knives.”
“Kepler’s already admitted fluffing one kill today. What makes you think he won’t fluff another?” asked Gerber, then to Kepler said, “Sorry, Derek, nothing personal.”
“I have every confidence in Sergeant Kepler’s abilities, sir. His timing was a little off earlier, that’s all,” responded Fetterman.
“The odds would still be three to two.”
“The odds should be even, sir. I’m counting on Miss Brouchard to at least keep the third man occupied until we can deal with him. If she really has come over to our side, she ought to be able to do at least that much. With a bit of luck we ought to be able to kill all three and slip away before the rest of the squad shows up. If we can do it quickly enough, and quietly, it might even be some time before they realize they’re missing their point. It depends on how far out in front the tracker is working and what their contact schedule is.”
“And if the VC get suspicious before you can get close enough to knife them?”
“I’ll draw my pistol from beneath my shirt and shoot all three of them. Then we’ll run like hell.”
“Suppose you’re not fast enough to get all three?”
Fetterman looked offended. “In that unlikely event, Sergeant Tyme will be covering us with one of the SKSs, and he’ll shoot as many people as may be necessary.”
Gerber looked at Kepler. “Well, what do you think?”
The intel Sergeant shrugged. “Hell, sir, might as well give it a try. What have we got to lose but our lives.”
“All right,” said Gerber. “Start putting it together. We’re going to go ahead and cross that open area right now, on the double. They’re sure to send the point across to scout it first, and we’ll take them as soon as they can’t be seen from this side. That way, if things do go sour, we’ll have a good field of fire to keep them from coming across after us until nightfall. They’re apt to be a bit cautious about crossing that open ground if we have to shoot a few of them trying it, and even after it gets good and dark it’ll take them a little while to work up to it. By the time they do, and get across, we won’t be around to be found any longer.”
“I’m not real sure I should feel honored, but thanks for the vote of confidence,” Kepler muttered to Fetterman as they hurried back down the trail from the outcropping. “I’d have thought you’d have wanted Krung with you on this one.”
“Krung would’ve been my first choice,” Fetterman admitted, “but he’ll be busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Covering our Kit Carson with the other SKS. He’s the only one I could trust not to hesitate. Being a Tai, he’s got no use for most Vietnamese, and he hates all Communists. If she betrays us, he’ll kill her first.”
They linked up with the others and moved immediately through the jungle toward the stream. Gerber briefing them on the situation as they moved. The stream was maybe fifty feet wide, but only three to four feet deep, and after Washington and Tyme had scouted the opposite bank, they forded it without incident.
Perhaps it was inaccurate to say totally without incident. Except for Anderson, who stepped into a hole a couple of feet lower than the streambed but wasn’t greatly bothered by it since his head stayed above the water, no one took a dunking. But a small radio transmitter carried by one of the indigenous personnel got too soaked to work anymore. Staff Sergeant Galvin Bocker, the team’s radio genius, could have dried it out and fixed it had he known about it at the time and been so inclined, but by the time he discovered the radio he couldn’t have fixed it even if he’d wanted to.
The trip across no-man’s-land was an altogether different kind of experience. They had emerged dripping wet from the blood-warm water of the stream, scrambled up the bank and double-timed through a couple of hundred meters of jungle to come to the edge of desolation. Fetterman decided he’d been wrong when he’d said the place looked like the end of the world. When he got a good, close look, it was more like a view of an alien planet.
Near the wasteland, green, reasonably healthy-looking trees had been scorched and blackened by the terrific heat, but where the dead zone itself started, there was only a fine, flaky gray ash, with randomly charred tree trunks sticking up out of the stuff. The ash was a good three inches deep and appeared relatively smooth and featureless, except for the occasional ripple pattern of a bomb crater. In fact, the area had been bombed so many times that the craters had tended to wash one another out, obscuring their outlines as they redistributed the ash.
“Christ, Fetterman, what is this place?” Tyme said when the two of them happened to bunch up close together.
“The captain says he thinks the CIA or somebody working with them tested a new kind of defoliant spray here. Looks like they waited until everything died, then dropped napalm and HE on the place. At any rate, something started things burning, and all the dead stuff burned up pretty quick. I guess the fire kind of petered out when it got to the living trees.”
“But why burn it if they were testing a defoliant?”
“Who knows? Maybe they were trying to destroy the evidence. Or maybe they were just trying to see how well the stuff would burn.”
Fetterman found the whole experience surreal. He was humping probably fifty-five or sixty pounds of equipment, weapons and ammunition through southeastern Ca
mbodia. He was soaking wet from the river crossing, and he was sweating from the heat and exertion, yet the landscape around him was like nothing else quite so much as walking through a new fall of snow. The slightest movement disturbed the powdery ash, which swirled about their feet, and when it settled you could tell that someone or something had come this way, but you couldn’t clearly discern the shape of the boot print. Bizarrely he kept expecting to see a skier or a snowman at any moment.
At the far side, where the jungle resumed again, Fetterman stood off to one side and let the others go past him, counting heads to make sure no one had gotten left behind. As the last of the strikers tumbled past, he turned back, and the toe of his boot kicked up something with a familiar shape from beneath the ash. He glanced down and saw that it was a small notebook, similar to the one he had removed from the body of the VC officer earlier. The canvas cover was scorched, and the edges of the pages looked singed. Against his better judgment, he bent over and tried to pick it up, but something seemed to be holding it. Mindful that the book might be attached to a trip wire and a booby trap, Fetterman didn’t tug on it. Instead, he reached down and brushed back the ash to reveal the object. Clenched tightly about the book were the charred, baked bones of a human hand.
CHAPTER 12
U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES CAMP A-555
When she returned from Saigon around ten the next morning, Robin Morrow found Lieutenant Mildebrandt seated in the team house, looking as miserable as ever. He had a cup of tea, a warm Coke, a cold beer and a glass of water, all sitting in front of him next to a barely touched bowl of dry cornflakes. He was sweating profusely and had exchanged his copy of Playboy for a book with the improbable title of Ralph the Action Wonder Dog: #3 Hack Doberman’s Return. Morrow decided immediately that the Playboy would have made a much better fan, and probably a more interesting read as well.
“Miss Morrow. Well, hello. I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon. Did you find that information you were looking for in Saigon?”
He stood in a show of politeness, but Morrow quickly motioned him to sit back down. He did not look healthy enough this morning to be doing anything as stressful as standing up.
Morrow sank into the chair opposite him and shrugged. “You know how MACV is.”
“Uh, no. Actually, ma’am, I don’t. I haven’t been in-country long enough to know much about how anything is.”
“Sorry,” said Morrow. “I forgot. MACV is where everyone is very polite, but not very informative. Well, almost everyone is polite,” she added, remembering Maxwell. Although to be fair, he had bought her an excellent dinner and hadn’t seemed quite so much like an ogre after she quit trying to pump him for information.
“I take it then that you didn’t get the answers you were looking for?”
“No, Lieutenant, I didn’t. But a few things happened that lead me to believe I’m onto something. I just don’t know what it is yet. Say, are you feeling all right? You don’t look at all well this morning, if you don’t mind my saying so. Maybe you should see the team medic.”
“I’ve already been over to see Phil. He gave me something for my stomach and told me to drink more fluids, remember to take my salt tablets and try not to sweat so much. He says some people have a hard time adjusting to the heat and humidity, and I’m having a harder time than average. He says the condition is complicated by a lack of sleep, but that I’ll probably get better in a few days if I don’t get a lot worse.”
“That’s encouraging news.” Morrow smiled. “I saw Sergeant Yashimoto outside, and he looked a bit haggard, too. Did you guys have a rough night of it or something?”
“Actually, I slept better last night than I have in weeks. It was the alarm clock this morning that was a little hard to take. I was lying in my bunk when there were all these explosions outside. At first I thought the camp was under attack, maybe being mortared or something like that, but it turned out it was just Sergeant Smith helping Captain Minh deliver an early morning demolitions lecture to some of the troops. They hadn’t bothered to mention it to me, they said, because it was only my third night in camp, and they thought I looked tired from all the excitement. They said they figured I’d want to sleep in rather than help out with the lecture so early in the morning.”
“Very considerate of them,” said Morrow, laughing. “Is there any word from our people in the field?”
“Captain Gerber’s patrol, you mean? Not much. They sent the prearranged code message, indicating they had crossed the… oops! I think maybe I almost just said too much.”
“Crossed the border into Cambodia, you mean? Relax, Glen, I know that much already. I also know it’s not for publication. I was just curious as to whether or not they were having any problems. Captain Gerber owes me a night in Saigon, and I’d hate not to be able to collect.”
“I don’t know…”
“Look, just forget it. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. They wouldn’t tell me anything in Saigon. Why should you be any different?”
“Well,” said Mildebrandt, “we haven’t heard much because they’re operating under fairly tight radio security procedures. At one point they did indicate they were being followed by somebody and planned to take care of it. Later, they made no mention of any continuing pursuit. That’s really about all I know, and probably more than I should say.”
Morrow’s interest was instantly peaked. “Did they say who was following them? Do they know how they got onto their trail?”
Mildebrandt shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s really all I know.”
“Well, thanks for letting me know. Like I said, I was just wondering how they were doing. If you’ll excuse me, I need to do some thinking. I’ve got three stories to file before next Friday, and right now I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write about. I’ll go see what great new ideas I can come up with, and you can get back to your breakfast.”
When Morrow had left, Mildebrandt eyed the cornflakes suspiciously. He poked them experimentally with the tip of his spoon a couple of times. Finally he poured the warm Coke over them and stirred them with the spoon. Cautiously he tasted them, deciding they weren’t half bad that way. Carefully he scooped out another spoonful and chewed the cornflakes slowly. It was a little like eating caramel-flavored popcorn. When he’d had another five or six bites, he decided not to press his luck. He scooped the remains of the cornflakes into the garbage, added the tea, put the barely sampled beer back in the refrigerator and bravely drank the glass of water. Then he went outside to check on the camp.
He made it as far as the latrine.
While Mildebrandt was divesting himself of the breakfast he’d worked so hard to get down, Morrow wandered about the camp until she realized she was getting in everybody’s way.
She returned to her quarters and dragged out her battered old Brother portable from its equally battered case, propped it up on a folding metal chair, fed a blank sheet of paper into the carriage and tried to think of something to type. When after twenty minutes no words had magically appeared on the page, she gave up, leaned back against the wall and jammed her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
Something was rotten somewhere. She was sure of that. General Crinshaw had been far too pleasant to deal with and had been very free with his uninformative answers. And something was bothering Maxwell, too. It was impossible to know what, but no member of the Saigon press corps had ever seen Jerry Maxwell drink more than one rum and Coke. Never. Until yesterday. A man with that kind of control didn’t drink unless something was really bothering him, and it took a lot to bother a man in Maxwell’s line of work.
Everybody involved with this big hush-hush mission seemed to be acting a little odd. Mildebrandt with his upset stomach. Emilie Brouchard with her backgroundless personality. Even Gerber had acted strained when she’d bumped into him at Tan Son Nhut. He’d been polite, but not friendly, strangely distant. At the time she’d been annoyed about it, but not overly upset; she’d put it down t
o the presence of the Brouchard woman and all the attention she was obviously showing Gerber.
Morrow eyed the wall locker containing Kit’s belongings. She considered searching it again, but what would be the point? She’d already gone through it once and nothing was there, with the possible exception of that Russian-made knife, which by itself proved nothing. Damn it! How could anyone’s personal effects be so utterly devoid of any past? The woman had to be hiding something, but what?
Morrow cast one last look at the typewriter and pushed it aside. It was the first time in her journalistic career that she could ever recall suffering from writer’s block. She had notes in her spiral-bound steno books sufficient to write four or five current what’s happening-in-the-war stories and at least three dozen human interest items. She just couldn’t bring any of it together. There was no point in forcing it. She might as well do something else for a while.
Morrow unpacked her bags, noting that the skirt and blouse she’d worn to Saigon, as well as the set she’d bought there, still needed a washing. She unwrapped her spare underwear and boot socks from around the bottle of Scotch she’d brought back from Saigon for herself, and the bottle of bourbon she’d brought back for Gerber, putting the Scotch in her locker. When she’d finished unpacking, she strolled over to Gerber’s hootch, intending to leave the bottle on his desk as a surprise.
For a moment, Morrow stood in the doorway, which was heavily sandbagged like all the other entrances in the camp except those in the dependents’ quarters, and looked at the room. It was at once both familiar and foreign. The folding metal bunk along one wall might have been the same one she remembered. There were still a couple of plastic webbing-covered lawn chairs, although she thought they were a different color than the ones Gerber had had before the camp had burned a few months ago. And the captain’s homemade desk, which he’d hammered together out of old ammo crates and scrap plywood, had been replaced by a spindly, unstable-looking folding desk painted an even uglier shade of green than the usual military olive drab. But technology was gradually coming to Camp A-555.