by Eric Helm
Fetterman came off the ground in a rush, took a quick step forward and launched himself at the man, wrapping his legs around the Viet Cong’s body and using his weight to throw the man off-balance and disorient him. He grabbed the tracker’s nose and mouth with his left hand, drew the knife from under his shirt with his right, reversed his grip and slashed twice, the razor sharpness of the old Case VS-21 severing both carotid arteries and the trachea. His blood sprayed into the air, but like many dying men he refused to recognize the fact. He somehow found Fetterman’s knife hand, and with surprising strength gripped the wrist. Fetterman found himself momentarily unable to pull free.
Kepler, meantime, had gone for the quick, certain kill, rather than a clean or quiet one. He’d dashed forward, drawing the Ka-Bar he’d loosely taped to the inside of his forearm, and knocked aside the man’s rifle. Kepler held the knife blade up, then drove it into the man’s abdomen just over the belt buckle with such force that it penetrated nearly to the spine. Then, seizing the hilt with both hands, he yanked hard, ripping upward, gutting the man like a deer until the blade finally lodged about halfway through the sternum. Transected intestines, liver, stomach and pancreas cascaded onto the ground with a terrible stench as the knife ripped diaphragm muscle, punctured the lower lobe of one lung and cut into the heart tissue itself. For a moment the man hung there on the knife, held up by Kepler’s adrenaline-enhanced strength. Then Kepler yanked again, pulling the knife clear and splitting the breastbone, opening the man clear to the throat.
The third VC was much harder to kill. He had spotted the swinging Kalashnikov a split second before Kit had connected it to the side of his face and had managed to roll with it. Otherwise the blow would likely have decapitated him. As it was, it broke both his maxilla and mandible, knocked out three teeth and loosened two others. There was a great sheet of searing, white-hot flame before his eyes, followed at once by a rapidly darkening gray. Yet somehow he managed to hold on to his consciousness.
Not wanting to shoot, Kit stepped forward and spun the assault rifle around to smash the buttstock down onto his larynx.
But the VC got a foot hooked between her legs and pulled her off-balance. As she fell, the VC rolled to one side, snatching the AK-47 and smashing it down across her neck as he rolled on top of her. He drove a knee up into her groin with enough force to completely disinterest a man from continuing the struggle and leaned forward, putting all of his weight behind the assault rifle, trying to force it down below her chin and strangle her with it.
Kit gripped the buttstock and forearm of the rifle and tried to push it away from her throat with all her strength, but the VC was too strong and had the advantage of having all his weight behind him to push downward with. He managed to work it past her chin, and she could feel the heaviness of the receiver at her throat, bearing down on her neck until she was struggling for air, her face purpling from cyanosis. Her arms ached as though they had a thousand pins and needles driven into them, and she could feel her level of consciousness beginning to slip away when at last she saw a hand take the VC by the hair and jerk back his head to expose the neck.
The point of the blade went in just below the mastoid sinus behind the ear, and the edge ripped forward across the throat, pivoting about the point and tearing out the front of the man’s neck, taking the right carotid, the right internal and external jugular veins and a good part of the esophagus and windpipe with it.
And then for Kit everything went black.
“Miss Brouchard. Kit. Are you all right? Can you speak?”
She recognized the voice, was a little surprised at the hoarseness of her own. “Yes, thank you, Master Sergeant. But something is wrong. I cannot see.”
She heard a ripping sound, felt someone wiping at her face with a rag, then heard Fetterman speak again.
“Try to hold your eyes open.”
The stream of water hitting her in the face made her gasp for breath. There was more wiping with the rag, more water and then suddenly she could see again.
Fetterman was leaning over her, his knife and sodden rag, torn from one of the VC’s shirts, in one hand, a canteen, and for some inexplicable reason, the two halves of a disassembled ballpoint pen in the other.
“You gave us a bad moment there when you couldn’t speak,” said Fetterman. “Thought maybe he’d managed to smash your trachea with the rifle. Sorry about all the blood. Are you sure you’re okay now?”
Kit nodded, reached for the rag and wiped more of the Viet Cong’s blood from her face. “I’m fine. See to your friend.”
Tyme and Krung had emerged from the bushes and were checking the bodies of the VC. Not to see if they were dead. There was no question of that. It was just the routine search for papers, maps, anything that might prove to be of intelligence value. Normally Kepler would have been conducting the search, but at the moment he was busily bent over at the other side of the trail, decorating the Cambodian landscape with the contents of his stomach.
Fetterman walked over and put a hand on Kepler’s shoulder. “You okay, Derek? You did fine. Nothing to be upset over.”
Kepler tossed a derisive glance in the direction of the gutted VC and gave a snort of laughter. “Him? No. It’s nothing like that. I suppose it was all the excitement. Washington would probably call it adrenaline overload. Whatever strength I had, I used in the few moments it took to do him. I was fine until I saw how you and the girl had made out. But then I just couldn’t get the old organism calmed down. Pulse was so fast I could hear it pounding in my head like a jackhammer. Just couldn’t get my breathing slowed down. Next thing, I started feeling woozy, and then this. Kind of embarrassing, but not because of the standard Hollywood gambit. Christ, Fetterman, you know me better than that. He’s not my first, or even my tenth. Help me up, will you? We got work to do.”
Fetterman grinned. “Just checking, Derek. Some guys it doesn’t get to the first time. Or the fifth. Or the fifteenth. But it grows on them until one day there’s this little voice inside them that says, ‘Too much. I just can’t do this anymore.’ I was just making sure you weren’t hearing that little voice.”
He put out his hand to help Kepler to his feet.
“Just because I was a little slow yesterday and picked today to have a delicate stomach doesn’t mean I’ve gone soft, you know. I did the guy, didn’t I? I did both of them. This one and yesterday’s.”
“Don’t get excited. I said I was just checking. I’m the team sergeant, remember. I’m supposed to worry about all you guys.”
“Then why don’t you worry about something useful, like where we’re going to find a beer out here?”
Fetterman slapped the other man lightly on the back. “I’ll buy you two beers when we get back to camp. One for each hand. Right now I’d rather worry about getting out of here.”
“Hey, Fetterman, did you ever hear that little voice talking to you?”
“Fetterman, can you come here a minute,” called Tyme.
“Coming.”
“Sure,” Fetterman told Kepler. “I’ve heard it lots of times. I just learned to ignore it.”
When they had finished searching the three VC, Fetterman had them do it one more time, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. Then they dragged the bodies off the trail into the brush. They didn’t bother trying to camouflage them. These men would be missed soon, perhaps already had been, and would be looked for when the rest of their squad worked up the nerve to cross all that dead, open ground out there. A search of any sincerity was sure to turn up the bodies, so there was no point in spending a lot of time trying to hide them. The idea was just to make it not too easy. That way the VC might waste more time looking for the bodies than it had taken to kill and hide them. So Fetterman and Tyme stood in the path and kicked dirt over the bloodstains, then rejoined the others.
Anderson was making a considerable, unnecessary fuss over Kit’s condition. She still had a fair amount of blood on her face, which was beginning to dry, but none of it was her
s.
Fetterman pulled Washington, the team’s senior medical specialist aside, and had a word with him.
“You check out the girl?” asked Fetterman. “One of the VC tried to strangle her with a rifle.”
“Already done.”
“And?”
“She’ll live if she doesn’t die.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means she’s doing as well as can be expected for somebody who’s had the shit choked out of her. The tissues in the pharynx are pretty sensitive. Once they’ve been traumatized, edema frequently sets in. It can take anywhere from minutes to hours to a couple of days later. With the equipment I’ve got, which isn’t much, she doesn’t appear to have any swelling now. There’s no telling what it may look like by tomorrow morning. I’ve given her some anti-inflammatories as a precaution. I’ve no idea whether or not they’ll help.”
“And if they don’t, what can you do for her?”
“Out here?” The medic shrugged. “Same thing you were going to try with your ink pen, if the swelling is high enough up. Tell me, you ever do a cricothyrotomy before?”
“Once,” said Fetterman. “In Korea. My machine gunner got buttstroked in the neck and bayoneted when the Red Chinese overran us. He was a good man. Saved my ass more than once by knowing what a machine gun was for and how to use it. I could tell the poor bastard was suffocating, and I had to do something for him.”
“What happened?”
“He died. But not because of anything I screwed up. Abdominal infection got him six weeks later at the hospital.”
“Great,” said Washington. “If she needs it, I’ll call you. I’ve never done one before.”
“So at this point, there’s no way to tell?”
“None at all. One thing about it, though. Either way we don’t have to worry about her loyalty anymore. Looks like she’s pretty well proved which side she’s on.”
“Yeah,” said Fetterman. “It sure looks that way.”
“May I see you a moment, Master Sergeant?” Gerber motioned Fetterman over. “I want you to have Anderson lay a mechanical ambush along the main trail back there fifty meters or so. Tell him not to get too elaborate. We don’t want to waste a lot of time on the project. That is if you can pry him away from our scout long enough to string a couple of claymores. All I want is something that will make those guys over on the other side of the dead zone think twice about following us in the dark when they come across it. If we move all night, we ought to be able to put a pretty fair amount of distance between them and us by morning.”
“Yes, sir. Direct route of march to the objective?”
“Let’s not make it too easy on them in case they’re persistent. Once we get into the next valley we’ll lay a false trail to the south, as though we were going to do an end run and cut back past them.” He held out the map. “When we get to this area here, we ought to be able to move onto this rocky ridge line and swing back to the northwest.”
“Right, sir. May I have a word with you privately, sir?”
Gerber looked puzzled. “Let’s step over here away from the others a moment. It’s the best I can do.”
They walked a few yards apart.
“Okay, Tony, what’s all this about?”
“Sir, is there anything about this mission you’re not telling me? I’m not asking you to break any confidences. I’m just asking you to tell me if there’s something more going on here than what we’ve been briefed about.”
Now Gerber was genuinely perplexed. “Tony, what are you getting at?”
Fetterman reached into the pocket of his jungle fatigues and removed something. He held it out to Gerber.
“Sergeant Tyme found this in the tracker’s knapsack, sir. It looks to me like some kind of electronic tracer, similar to the one we used in Hong Kong.”
Gerber examined the small black metal box. It had a simple toggle switch, a short, telescoping antenna and a horizontal line of three lights running across the top of it.
“Does it work?”
“I haven’t tried it, sir. It looks like a receiver, but I didn’t think switching it on would be a real good idea, since I didn’t know if it’s a transmitter.”
“Have you shown this to Bocker?”
“Not yet. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak to him alone.”
“All right. Get Anderson started on the mechanical ambush, then give that thing to Bocker. Tell him I need to know what it is, if it’s working and who it’s talking or listening to. You think they were using it to follow us,” he added suddenly. It wasn’t a question.
“That would merely be wild speculation until we have more information, sir.”
“But that is what you think, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve been pretty damned careful about covering our tracks, but twice we’ve picked up shadowers. Once can happen to anybody, but twice, and with a tracker who was probably good enough not to need this dingus the second time — it was in his pack, remember — well, sir, that’s the sort of coincidence that begins to stretch a man’s credulity.”
“It does, indeed, Master Sergeant. It does indeed.”
Setting the mechanical ambush was a straightforward matter. Anderson noted with distaste that it didn’t incorporate the sort of subtle variations that Sully Smith would have insisted upon, but it did have the distinct advantage of simplicity. At a slight bend in the trail, he set a claymore designed to fire directly down the pathway when its trip wire was triggered. That alone would probably have been sufficient for the task, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to improve it slightly and tied two white phosphorus grenades into the firing chain, using time-delay detonators, one with a twenty-second fuse, the other with full-minute delay. It would give any survivors of the claymore a little something extra to occupy their minds with.
By the time Anderson had finished with his destructive tendencies, Bocker had completed his analysis of the black box.
“It’s a pretty basic model, sir,” he told Gerber. “Receiver only. Single crystal, single channel. Frequency Modulation. I’d guess somewhere between 145.5 and 155.9 from the antenna and a general knowledge of the type. Impossible to say positively without test equipment. As you can see, it’s robustly built, indicating it was intended for hard field use. I confess, though, I’m a bit puzzled by why they didn’t put in a bearing indicator. The additional cost would have been minimal, and it gives you a much better idea of the location of the beeper than these idiot lights.”
“Is it operational?” Gerber wanted to know.
“Yes, sir. All you have to do is switch it on and it works. Runs off a standard transistor battery and four penlights. I checked it out, and the unit appears to be functioning normally, although it didn’t pick up the beeper.”
“Meaning?”
“Either the transmitter isn’t operating for some reason, or it’s out of range.”
“I see.” Gerber nodded thoughtfully. “Galvin, what’s your best guess on the range of this thing?”
“That would depend on the power of the transmitter, topography of the intervening terrain and atmospheric conditions. Assuming that the transmitter is about a third the size of the receiver and must rely on an internal antenna, which we infer from the obviously clandestine purpose for which such a device is designed, and known properties of the general type, I’d think we’re dealing with no more than one to three watts of power. In this particular configuration, that would suggest a maximum range under ideal conditions of perhaps fifteen klicks at the outside. I’d think that under conditions of surrounding terrain, a range of three to five kilometers would be much more reasonable. Go to the short end of that if you want any accuracy of reading, although, as I said, this isn’t really set up for accuracy. Pity. It could have been so easily.”
Gerber looked askance at the communications sergeant. “You’ll forgive me, Staff Sergeant, if I fail to share your enthusiasm over the aesthetics of this thing. What is it? Ru
ssian or Chinese?”
Now it was Bocker’s turn to look askance. “Neither, sir. I can’t speak for the hand that built it, but the components are all American. To be fair, the transistors were probably fabricated in Japan for sale in the United States, but it’s U.S. technology all the way. It’s not that either country couldn’t have built it. As I said, it’s a fairly simple unit. But the Russian mind has an absolute fixation for vacuum tubes, and most of the best Chinese work copies Russian equipment. If this were Russian or Chinese, it would be twice the size and only half as durable.”
“So what are a bunch of VC doing with an American-made tracking device?”
“Sorry, sir. I specialize in electronics, not clairvoyance.”
“Thank you for your analysis, Galvin. Keep this under your hat, will you?”
“Of course, sir. And, sir. I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, but assuming they were using that to track us, shouldn’t we search through everyone’s things? What I mean is, well, sir, somebody’s got to be carrying the beeper.”
“I know that, Galvin, but there are other factors to consider. First, we don’t know that they were using it to track us. Although I’d put my money on that as the most likely possibility, since we seem to keep picking up tails, it could be intended for tracking someone or something else. Second, you pointed out that it’s American-made. What would the VC be doing with an American-made homer? Maybe they just found it somewhere and it’s got nothing to do with us. Third, you pointed out that although the receiver appears to be working, it isn’t receiving anything. Which may mean that the transmitter is no longer operational.
“It could have been damaged in some way, or intentionally shut off or destroyed by whoever is carrying it, which means they already know or suspect we’ve found this thing, and they’ve already ditched the beeper so they won’t be incriminated. Fourth, if there’s another one of these things out there somewhere listening for the beeper to start talking again, I’m not so sure I want to find the transmitter. At least not yet. And fifth, we’ve spent too damned much time here already. We’ve got to move. Once we put some distance between us and the rest of that VC unit, we can start thinking about conducting searches.”