by Tom Wilson
He sat gingerly in the stuffed couch she'd indicated, frowning at her face and tear-swollen eyes.
She went on the offensive. "I spoke with Pam at the Nellis Hospital, and she told me how you connived your way into getting the hospital commander to sign the medical waiver so you could travel."
"You mean Lady Dracula?" He sighed dramatically. "I guess I'll have to face her when I get there tomorrow."
"Don't worry about Pam. She's doing everything in her power to hold off the wolves until you get back. But she says the hospital commander is really mad. She had to fib and tell him you were doing much better than she thinks you really are."
"Lady Dracula?" he asked incredulously.
"Pam. Oh, you're impossible, Benny Lewis."
"Your eyes are red."
"Because I've been crying. Satisfied?"
His brows furrowed angrily. "Has someone been here?"
"No, and don't worry about me."
"C'mon, tell me. I'll kill the guy before I leave."
"It wasn't a guy. It was my mother, and she's in New Jersey."
"I'll fly out there and beat her up."
"Silly."
"Is she bigger than me?" He drew back in mock fright. Benny was solid and tough looking. Mal had told her he lifted 200-pound weights for exercise.
She giggled. "She's even shorter than me."
"Then I'll tear off her arms and legs."
Julie laughed heartily and he grinned back. He seemed a little different from when she'd seen him last. He'd been awfully straitlaced, almost too much the perfect gentleman. Always lovable, of course, but now he seemed to joke more at himself.
"It's so good to see you," she said.
"Let's get back to the tears."
She shook her head. "You don't want to know."
He cocked his head.
"Mom says that no matter what you guys say, the Air Force wouldn't call Mal Bear MIA if they knew he was dead."
He shook his head. "The Air Force isn't a they, Julie, it's just a bunch of guys like me. The Bear's not coming back. I talked to his cousin Billy, he's a pilot at Takhli now, and he agrees the Bear should be declared KIA." He started to add more, but stopped short.
"Mom says they have information you guys don't."
"There is no they." He looked at her narrowly. "Do you think I'd be saying it if I didn't know he was dead? He was like a brother. I loved the ornery bastard."
Her jaw quivered and she sniffed. Dammit, don't cry in front of him. She firmed herself up and whispered, "Let's change the subject."
"Good idea."
"I was just . . ." She looked at herself. "Oh, God."
"Something wrong?"
"I just got out of the shower and I've been crying and I look . . . terrible."
"You couldn't look bad to me, Julie."
She ran toward the bedroom, waving an arm toward the kitchen. "Booze is in the cupboard on the right. Fix yourself a drink while I change."
Twenty minutes later she emerged, freshly combed, made-up, and wearing a new maternity dress with yards of material to hide in.
He eyed her. "You look nice."
"Maybe better, but not nice. Sorry I can't reduce a bit around the middle for you, Benny."
"Guess you will in about a month." He peered at her stomach and grinned as he waved a tumbler of whiskey. "You look like you're carrying a beach ball in there."
"My mother says he's going to be a giant with big ears."
"He?"
"I want a boy, and if I keep saying 'he,' maybe it will be."
"The Bear wanted a girl."
"He was wrong," she said cheerily.
She poured herself a gin and tonic. "My doctor says I can have one ounce of alcohol a day," she said. "I got my first prenatal checkups at Travis, because I was spending so much time going over to see you there, but now I see a civilian doctor here in the city. A little Jewish guy who's funny and very capable."
"He'd better be."
"He served his internship in the Air Force, stationed in Germany. He was at Bitburg when I was a kid at Spangdahlem, just seven miles away." Julie had been a service brat, her father a senior Air Force NCO. "Small world, huh?"
"Yeah."
"I really like him." She remembered then that she hadn't eaten. "Hungry?"
"A little."
As she fixed sandwiches, they talked about Benny's trip to the war zone. He told her about a friend named Lucky Anderson, who had a badly burned face and was the most capable leader he'd met in the Air Force. Benny was troubled by what had happened, and she could tell he thought a lot of Anderson. She didn't know how to make it better, so she just listened.
After they'd eaten and she'd served him a snifter of Courvoisier, his eyelids began to droop.
"Days and nights are mixed up," he muttered. "My body-clock's screwed up."
"I'll get a couple of blankets so you can sleep on the couch," she said. "Be right back."
"No!" He said it so forcefully it surprised her.
She stopped and gave him a puzzled look.
"I'll get a hotel. I left my bag down in the lobby. Just call me a cab."
"You're a cab. Now stretch out on the couch."
"Dammit, Julie . . ."
"Dammit yourself, Benny Lewis, you are not going out to get a hotel room at nine o'clock at night. Period."
He gave her a stubborn look.
"No man I love is going to go out at this time of night and get a hotel room when I've got a perfectly good . . ."
He looked so startled that she paused. Then, softly, "You didn't know I loved you?"
"I . . . uh . . ."
"You are very, very dear to me, Benny Lewis."
He collected himself. "Like a brother?"
"Like someone I can turn to for help, and who's always there." Then she lightened up and laughed. "You're a good-looking, teddy bear of a guy. I'll bet the women in Vegas are lined up, waiting their chance at you."
He grinned. "Yeah. The cops complain because they're congesting traffic."
A few months before, he would never have joked like that. She liked the little, noticeable changes. It reminded her just a bit of . . . Mal?
"I'm going to phone downstairs to a couple I know and get the husband to bring your bag up," she said. "The exercise will do him good, and I don't want you lugging it up here."
He narrowed his eyes again and started to respond.
"No arguments."
She made the call, saying her brother was in town visiting, and he had a bad back.
When she hung up, he gave her a wry grin. "Brother? My name's on the bag."
"Half brother?"
He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "You love me like a half brother?"
"Maybe I do." She stared at him evenly, surprising herself but unable to stop. Finally she spoke in a husky tone. "No, not a half brother."
Their eyes were still locked. He muttered something about getting the hotel room.
"Say it one more time and I'll scream."
He was the one to look away.
She inhaled a breath. "I'm going to have the baby at St. Joseph's Hospital here in San Francisco. I'll give you directions while you're here. You promised to be there, remember?"
He nodded, obviously relieved that she'd changed the subject.
The downstairs neighbor knocked at the door.
Half an hour later, while Julie was getting him a second cognac, Benny fell asleep on the couch. She quietly poured the brandy back into the bottle and turned off the lamp. Then she waited a bit before straightening him. He did not wake up. She removed his shoes and pulled a blanket over him.
Satisfied, she stood back and stared at him for a long time before going to her room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Day 4, 0130 Local—Thud Ridge, North Vietnam
Major Lucky Anderson
The moon was perfect, enough to illuminate his way yet not so bright that he could be easily seen. He was holed up at the edge of a moun
tain village, waiting for them to sleep so he could pass through. Although the path had degenerated and his progress had become laboriously slow, it still presented the best route northward. To his left there was sheer rock, too steep to climb, and to his right were open fields, too near the populated flatlands.
It was not a large village. There were only nine or ten thatch mountain huts there, but he'd counted at least thirty people and knew there were more inside. Perhaps fifty of them? Certainly more than he wished to confront, so he lay at the edge of the clearing and watched as they went about their business in the flickering lights of their cooking fires.
No vehicles would come to the village, for there were no passable roads here. An ancient tractor was parked at the edge of the rock-strewn field below the village, a skeletal reminder of another time, but it was obviously inoperable.
His interest stirred as they brought out three yapping dogs on ropes, two midsized yellow ones and a small black pup, to the closest fire. He grimaced when they broke their forelegs with clubs and untied the ropes. Women emptied a fire pit and placed large round stones and banana leaves while children screamed with delight and watched the squealing dogs try to crawl away. Then a man deftly gutted one of the yellow ones while it was alive, and the noise was worse yet.
It was then, during their preparations for roast dog, that he felt there was sufficient noise and confusion. Bent over, he scurried to the next group of bushes, intending to go from that one to the next and on around the uphill edge of the village.
One of the men must have heard him, for he walked closer and peered into the thicket. Lucky flattened and remained still until the man left to berate two children who were beating one of the dogs senseless with sticks.
Lucky had misjudged the situation. He was too close, not twenty yards from the nearest fire, and found himself trapped in the small thicket with open areas behind and before him.
So, he reasoned, he would wait until the village slept.
When the gutted dog stopped struggling, the children danced about and pointed to another, and the man started on that one.
He wondered what the hell was giving them their insomnia. According to his watch's luminous dial it was now 0145. He'd passed other villages during his nightly treks, but they'd been dark and, except for a few noisy dogs, quiet. He'd assumed everyone had been asleep.
These were not the backwards tribesmen they'd been briefed about. They lived too close to civilization. Using the downhill path, which ran down the middle of the large field, it could be no more than a mile to the farms and heavily inhabited area beyond. They dressed in conical wicker hats and dark clothing, and only a few wore footwear.
He tried again to determine what was keeping them awake, but could not.
Two young women walked past his thicket, holding hands and whispering secrets. They stopped to talk in the area between him and the forest he'd emerged from.
Great. No way to move in either direction now. He groused about it for another moment, then settled in for a longer stay.
He thought about the day.
At 1400 he'd used a survival radio to contact a high-flying formation of Thuds. Not a long transmission, just enough to let them know he was alive and evading. After three days on the run it had felt good to talk with fellow fighter jocks. They'd asked for his position, and he had refused to give it, so they'd become suspicious. Maybe they thought he was a gomer with a captured radio, he guessed. He'd told them he would talk to them in a couple more days, and they'd proceeded on.
A couple more days?
Confident, aren't you? he joked with himself.
Damn betcha, he answered.
Each day he plotted his course for the night's travel. Tonight he'd planned to make it three miles farther, but since he was now caught in the middle of the village, he'd have to delay things. He disliked such surprises now just as he had when he was flying.
His map showed that a place to cross over to the western side of the ridge was only three miles ahead, beyond the 5,200-feet-high peak directly uphill from the village. He hoped the mountain pass was uninhabited, but there was no way to know. Small villages, such as this one, weren't shown on his map.
On the opposite side of Thud Ridge he would follow a mountain stream that flowed down into the small Dai River, which was possibly swollen by monsoon rains. After crossing the Dai, he planned to hurry into a group of hillocks called the Dong Luc on his map.
From the western edge of the Dong Luc, he would observe and create a plan for crossing the Red River Valley. There'd be villages and a thousand farms to pass, as well as dozens of small streams and canals and two wide rivers to cross. Thirty very tough miles from the Dong Luc to the western mountains. Some had come close, but no downed pilot had ever made it all the way across the valley. An American in a flight suit would stand out among the Vietnamese like a Doberman in a pack of terriers.
As he lay there listening to the loud squeals of the third and final dog, he began to list his inventory of critical items, and to wonder if there was not more he could leave behind to lighten his load.
There were the two detailed maps folded into his g-suit pocket. He'd covered them with protective plastic film and put them there the week after he'd arrived at Takhli; then he'd forgotten them. Now they were his most treasured possessions.
He had finished the second pemmican bar that afternoon, so there was no worrying about which food to keep. There was none. He'd found berries and nuts near his daytime hiding places, so perhaps food would be no problem. During his three survival-training courses he'd learned that man can go without eating for long periods, but that he must have water.
In the ever-present heat, and with the added exertions of travel, he consumed a lot of water, but with the predictable morning rains, clean water was plentiful.
So did he need all three eight-ounce baby bottles?
Probably, he thought. Rice paddies in Asia were fertilized with human and animal waste, and the streams would carry runoff from those. So . . . when he was traveling in the valley, he would be forced to use the cleanest looking of what he found. He didn't want a massive case of dysentery slowing him down, and that would likely happen if he did not have the bottles to carry him from place to place. He decided to keep them all.
He had three survival radios, two in his survival vest and another he'd taken from the survival kit. One of those could be sacrificed, smashed until inoperable and left behind.
He also had three lengths of nylon parachute cord that might come in handy at some time during his trek. They were light enough to keep.
Then there were other items, some useful, others redundant or unnecessary. For instance, he carried a Marine-issue bayonet knife as well as a standard survival knife. He'd keep the razor-sharp bayonet. He mulled through the items he carried, one by one, and the decisions were easy until he got to the firearms. There he had a problem.
Like all Thud pilots, he'd been issued a Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver and twenty-four rounds of ball ammunition. Like a smaller number of pilots, he carried a second weapon.
A few pilots carried a broken-down M-16. A very few carried an illegal .22 pistol with a silencer.
When he'd received his orders to go to Takhli, he'd taken the advice of a friend and ordered a Phoenix Special. A week later he'd landed at Luke Air Force Base during a weekend cross-country flight, drove into Phoenix to a small gun shop, and after a demo had paid his $200 and picked up a nondescript package.
The ex-Marine who owned the gun shop had served on a recon team during the Korean conflict and knew there were unique needs for fighting men in unique situations. He sold such wares only to military men who might have such a need, on their way to combat.
The Phoenix Special used the frame and most of the action of a Colt Woodsman semiautomatic .22 LR pistol, but half of the six-inch barrel had been replaced by a small canister filled with a mixture of raw cotton and steel wool. The automatic blowback feature had been eliminated, so each time you w
anted to fire it, you had to work the slide to chamber a round and cock the hammer.
When Lucky had fired the demo weapon, it had been so silent, he could hear the low tick of the firing pin, yet the single round had punched a two-inch exit hole in the dead rabbit hung up as his target. The ex-Marine had shown him how to repack the cotton-steel wool after each firing. He'd said if he did that, each barrel could be used four times before the noise became unacceptably audible.
The Phoenix Special had been dismantled, dipped in gel, and packed with an extra barrel and twenty rounds of low-velocity, lead-jacketed, cross-scored steel bullets, which splintered into four fragments when they hit a target.
Lucky decided to keep the Phoenix Special. Although he was a fair shot with the .38, and its effective range was much greater than that of the .22 LRs, there was no way he could survive a shoot-out with an enemy armed with rifles. The only real use he might have for a pistol would likely be at close range, and he could think of no reason to desire noise. He would bury the heavy .38 and its ammo with the other unnecessary gear.
The three dogs had been skinned and nested between large leaves in the fire pit, and a fire was being built on top.
But why now? It was 0215 and they were preparing for a feast? What the hell was it, he wondered, a birthday party?
At 0245 the villagers, rather than retiring to bed, began to gather in front of the largest fire and take turns with windy orations.
He sighed and wondered. Then he saw the shrouded shape of a body beside the fire. A wake? Women gathered, looking forlorn, and a man began pointing and gesturing. The orator became louder and sounded as if he might be saying nice things about the body. As more villagers gathered around, and more speakers spoke in loud voices, Lucky carefully surveyed the area about him. No one was between him and the forest to his rear.
He'd delayed long enough.
He carefully backed across the clearing until he was again in the forest, and after a few deep breaths of relief, began to make his way down the mountainside to circumvent the place. It would take time from his planned schedule.
As he listened to the diminishing sounds of the speeches, Lucky thought about Linda. She'd think all this "local culture" was interesting, maybe compare it to the Irish tradition.