Carter poked his head around the tree’s bulk and stared into the shadows inside the abandoned temple. It certainly didn’t look occupied. At least not for the last hundred years. He motioned his men forward until they had flanked the building’s entrance. Then Carter moved forward, his gun muzzle trained on the darkened doorway. The three soldiers came together and, with his RPD still aimed at the shadows, Carter made a motion and Kane stepped up through wall-rubble and entered the temple. The darkness swallowed him as if he had never been there at all. McBride followed him and duly disappeared, fading into the darkness. Carter brought up the rear.
Carter’s eyes took a few moments to adjust to the low light. He cursed himself for forgetting to try the night vision gear, but he figured it wouldn’t have worked. Slowly details became clear. The temple was destroyed. Half the roof had caved in and a matting of vines had thatched the hole like a chaotic spider’s web. Shade-craving plants had grown between the indoor stones as tenaciously as their sun-loving kin in the courtyard. It was obvious that no one had called this place home in an impossibly long time. Not home or temple or even shelter.
The mission was a bust. Carter had to wonder for the hundredth time about the intel on this one. Or had Pearson, the DOD’s favorite spook, been playing them all along for some twisted voodoo experiment?
He lowered his rucksack to the stone floor.
“All right, fuck this, I’m calling in an extraction,” he said.
Carter’s voice echoed in the empty shrine.
“Hey, Kane. Mac? Hey, where the hell are you guys?”
He whirled, his gun trembling in his hands. Suddenly it was so heavy he wanted to drop it. He lowered the muzzle and shuffled around the floor, on which the moist remnants of dead leaves clung, forming a mucky slurry.
Hell, there aren’t even any footprints outside of mine.
How could it be?
“Kane! McBride!”
He stumbled back out into the gloaming. Night was settling in quickly, and the crimson sky had turned a deep purple, like a bruise on the universe.
And he was alone.
“Kane! Mac!”
Carter walked the perimeter of the courtyard in jagged steps, calling out to his missing men. An increasingly loud chorus of insects, nocturnal birds, and animals answered him from the edge of the flat mountain, where the jungle resumed its dominance, but there was no other answer.
The shock of his complete isolation shot a sudden chill through him, and he shivered like a man with the ague. He turned in a staggering circle, aiming his RPD at the phantoms. The machine gun was heavy again, and the muzzle drooped as his muscles could no longer hold it upright. He dropped the gun with a clatter that echoed loudly and drove birds from their perches and caused something else to rustle in the thick vegetation.
If this was the enemy, he was now unarmed.
“Mac?” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Kane?”
The jungle fell abnormally silent, as if it were also listening for a response. Paranoia washed over him in a sudden wave. Carter felt the eyes on him, watching. But it didn’t feel like a person hiding behind the tree line observing him, but more like the jungle itself was just a reflection and behind the mirrored glass something scrutinized his every move.
He stumbled back from the jungle’s edge and into the temple proper, dug the radio from his sack, and called for a Huey slick. When his trembling finger released the chunky push-to-talk button, static was the only reply.
Static and something... something he couldn’t define.
A sudden gentle breeze stirred the clearing and behind him Carter heard a tinkling sound, like muffled windchimes and light creaking in the one tree’s branches, and something else...
It was a child, laughing.
He spun around.
It took a long moment to register, but the bush-like tree in the courtyard had changed. All of its leaves had fallen to the stones below, where the breeze stirred them in tiny circles. They had been replaced on the bare branches by dog tags, thousands or maybe millions of them, jingling in the wind.
Carter blinked rapidly. Suspended from two of the thicker branches were Kane and Mac, hanging by their necks, vines wrapped around them. Their eyes were bloody holes.
Stumbling forward in a trance, he tripped over his abandoned RPD, landed on his knees and barely felt the pain.
He looked up, blinking again. Now he could see the bodies of the Montagnards suspended in the same way.
He cried out, a single strangled scream that died before it had completely escaped his throat.
Beneath the tree, he saw a girl dressed in a chang-ao sitting on the back of a huge black tortoise. She was giggling, one hand almost concealing her childish smile. Carter was transfixed by her as the tortoise slowly ambled forward, scraping over the stones. The girl’s eyes seemed to glow with white light.
Though he didn’t initially notice, the tortoise somehow transformed into a crane and flew into the night sky with the child still on its back.
Carter watched them soar upward, the white feathers of the bird becoming brighter and brighter until he had to shield his eyes from the light. And he felt its wings beat down with hurricane force winds that blew through the tree and made the tags jingle.
Then the crane was gone, replaced by a bigger bird, a Huey gunship – its cold spotlight glaring down on Carter like a single cyclopean eye. It took him into its body.
* * *
Pearson, known as the spook behind his back at Da Nang Air Force base, stalked into the darkened room fresh from the helipad, a stack of tan files clutched in his hand. “Has he said anything?” he asked.
Colonel Denning glanced over his shoulder at Pearson and shook his head. “Still not a word.”
“So we still have no real idea what’s happening to him?”
“Nope.”
Pearson stared into the bright interrogation room through the one-way mirror. Sergeant Jake Carter was seated at a nondescript government-issue table facing them, a blank expression pasted on his face. Another soldier was in the room with him, on the other side of the table questioning him – a captain. There seemed to be no response from Carter, no matter what the captain said or asked.
“Has he been like this the whole time? Two months?”
“Yeah, more or less.” Denning waved a hand. The time no longer mattered, as far as he was concerned.
“Why are we here today?”
“Well, today he made a face.”
“A face? You got me here from Saigon because Carter made a face?”
“It’s considered quite the event among the medical staff,” the colonel said, frowning. “As if you cared.” Carter was one of his boys. He cared.
Pearson ignored the snideness. “What’s the deal with him again? Remind me.”
The colonel sighed. “The docs say it’s traumatic psychosis – dissociation disorder. He’s semi-catatonic. But there is something going on in there, in his brain. Something continuously traumatic. ”
Pearson looked in at the sergeant, who seemed to be staring at him through the glass. It made the agent uncomfortable, so he stalked to the other side of the room.
“I’ve lost four teams,” Pearson said. “His was the first, he’s the only one who came back, and we don’t know shit about why. Or what they saw up there.”
“With all due respect,” Denning said, displaying very little of it, “we lost the teams. You have lost control of your fucking mission. Maybe you and your spook buddies should just give up and move on to some other sampan on the river.”
Pearson ignored the tone; he was used to it. “That’s a good reason to send in another team, right? We need to find those missing soldiers and Yards.”
Carter’s stare from the other side of the mirror once again focused on Pearson. The agent nonchalantly moved around the room to avoid the sergeant’s burrowing eyes. They made him unaccountably nervous.
“What exactly are we dealing with, Agent Pearson?” Anger rose in
the colonel’s voice. “What the hell have your people been up to, on that mountain? I don’t think you care about the missing teams, not at all.”
Pearson looked away from the colonel and the glass partition, both. “We don’t know what it is, but the natives are scared shitless by it.” He combed his rough hair with a tanned hand. “We don’t need something like that falling into the enemy’s hands.”
“You’re assuming they saw a weapon?” Denning was incredulous. “That’s it?”
Pearson ignored him. He’d gotten good at doing the Company’s bidding, wielding rank and power, and ultimately dismissing the Army’s objections to every little thing.
“I’d say that’s quite enough, Colonel. We don’t need any new offensive tools used against us, and Charlie’s using his influence in Laos to aid the enemy. We damned well do assume it’s a weapon. It seems to be working on you.”
The colonel muttered a curse and turned away. He knew who swung the bigger balls, unfortunately. Anywhere else...
Meanwhile Pearson had noticed that in the other room, the sergeant’s eyes seemed to glow, surreal light shining from behind his staring irises. The spook kept pacing, trying to get out from under Carter’s zombie gaze.
He made up his mind. “Just send in another team, Colonel. That’ll come across your desk as an order within the hour.”
“Goddamn you, isn’t it enough...”
The colonel’s voice faded in and out as Pearson was suddenly entranced by Carter’s eyes, which grew brighter and brighter until he had to squint to avoid the painful glow.
Pearson felt a breeze blowing, and when he opened his eyes he was staring at a golden sunset as the wind fluttered the weeds on a flat mountaintop. Behind him there was a light ringing sound, like muffled windchimes clanking in the tree branches and, he would later swear, a child’s mocking laughter.
* * *
The staccato throb of the Huey’s rotors was deafening as the helicopter cut its path through the night sky. The insertion point was just ahead, south of Luang Prabang and east of the Mekong in central Laos.
They were going over the fence. Their escort, two gunships loaded for bear, flanked them.
Special Forces Sergeant Jake Carter, One-Zero of Recon Team Python, sat with the hundred round drum magazine of the Russian RPD Light Machine Gun resting on his knee.
He was staring out the Huey’s open door, past the ride-along gunner.
Below them an open field of elephant grass that the boys called the Golf Course stretched in all directions, illuminated by the glow of the nearly full moon.
He sighed and turned away from the door, refocusing his attention on the team. Kane and Mac and others.
In his memory, some windchimes and a child’s laughter seemed to play over and over, like an out of tune recording. It was a tape loop, and it was always out of tune.
A familiar flat mountaintop temple awaited him for the hundredth time, and he tried to remember his team members’ names.
Maybe this time it’ll be different.
He wasn’t sure what the voice in his head intended to say, all he knew was that he hoped so.
“Five minutes to insertion...”
Carter got ready to face it all again.
The Shrine
David W. Amendola
“All right, Schultz, stop here.”
The Mark III ground to a halt on the hill crest, engine growling in idle. Dust powdered the tank’s steel armor, subduing its dark gray paint and the black-and-white German cross on the side. The turret bore the white number 525. On the front hull was a yellow Y with two ticks – the emblem of the 9th Panzer Division.
Stretching to the horizon was bleak, empty steppe, tall grass rippling in the moaning breeze like an endless, brown ocean. The relentless afternoon sun blazed orange in a cloudless sky. About three hundred meters away, stark and alone at the bottom of a flat, shallow valley, stood a little church of white stone, its black onion dome topped by the three-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Sergeant Langer, the tank commander, stood in the cupola and pushed up his dirty goggles. He wiped his tanned, sweaty face and scanned the church with binoculars.
“Looks deserted,” he said into the throat microphone of the intercom.
The voice of Private Schultz, the driver, came over his headphones. “So what do we do?”
“Secure the area and wait, those are the orders. A special detachment is supposed to rendezvous with us.”
“I hope so, Herr Sergeant,” said Private Koch, the radioman, who sat below in the front hull next to the driver. “We’re way out of radio range now.”
“They needed someone here in a hurry and we were the only ones available,” said Langer. “Everyone else is pushing to link up with Guderian and cut off Kiev.”
“Lucky us,” said Private Hoppe, the loader, raising his voice so he could be heard above the engine noise. The tank was open for ventilation and he sat halfway out of the left turret hatch. “If Ivan decides to show up we’ll have problems.” Ivan was slang for the Russians.
That prompted a grunt of agreement from Corporal Meyer, the gunner, sitting in the right turret hatch. A grunt was his usual contribution to any conversation.
“Well, hopefully Ivan is more worried about Kiev right now,” said Langer.
“Hopefully,” said Hoppe.
“War’s almost over anyway,” said Koch. “In a month Stalin will be finished, we’ll march in a victory parade in Moscow, and then we can go home to Vienna.”
The crew was Austrian, like everyone else in 9th Panzer. After their country had been annexed by Hitler in 1938 it was renamed Ostmark, they were declared citizens of the Reich, and their military was absorbed by the German Army.
By now – early September 1941 – they were veterans of Hitler’s wars. All of them had earned the Panzer Combat Badge for having been in at least three tank battles. They had fought together in the Netherlands and France the previous year, then in Greece and Yugoslavia last spring before the division was shipped east for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Langer and his men did not question the rationale for it all. The Führer commanded; they obeyed. Such was the way of things. And thus far they had seen only victories. Germany seemed destined to rule all of Europe.
“Headquarters sent us all the way out here to capture an old church?” asked Schultz. “What’s so special about it, Herr Sergeant?”
“The lieutenant didn’t say. Strange place for one though. According to the map there isn’t a village within a hundred kilometers.” Langer twisted around and raised his binoculars. “Looks like our colleagues have arrived.”
A gray column of vehicles rumbled up a dirt road behind them, brown-red dust rising in a choking cloud in its wake. In the lead was a sidecar motorcycle. It was followed by a heavy eight-wheeled 231 armored car, a Volkswagen field car, half a dozen three-ton Opel Blitz transport trucks, a communications truck, and an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a halftrack. A light 222 armored car brought up the rear. One truck had a Nazi flag spread over its top for air recognition.
Langer noted the double lightning-bolt runes emblazoned on the registration plates.
“SS,” he said. “Can’t tell which unit.”
“A sun wheel swastika is the Viking Division and a key on a shield is the Hitler Bodyguard Regiment,” said Koch. “Those are the two Waffen-SS units in the Ukraine right now.”
“I don’t see any insignia at all. Not even a tactical symbol. Odd.”
They watched the convoy pull up behind the hill. Their platoon commander, Lieutenant Krugmann, climbed out of his tank and walked down to the Volkswagen. He exchanged salutes with two officers riding in the back. They conferred briefly and Krugmann returned to his tank.
His crisp voice came over the FuG 5 radio. “Provide overwatch while the building’s cleared.”
The platoon’s five tanks stood ready on the hill as an infantry squad jumped down from the trucks. Each soldier was clad in the
field-gray uniform of the German Army but with the collar runes, cuff title, and sleeve eagle of the Waffen-SS. The cuff title would indicate their unit, but at this distance Langer could not read it.
The church had one entrance, a heavy, iron-bound wood door. There were no windows. The squad circled around the hill to approach it obliquely, an SS-Sergeant in the lead followed by a machine-gun team and several riflemen. Upon reaching it they edged along the front wall to the door. The sergeant kicked it in and charged inside, followed by the others.
Half a minute later he emerged and held up his weapon to signal all-clear, followed by shrill blasts on his whistle. In response the SS vehicles rolled up to the church and parked.
“Form a hedgehog,” said Krugmann. The tanks fanned out into a defensive ring around the valley, facing outwards. “We’ll be escorting the convoy back once they’re finished here. Everyone can relax in the meantime, but stay alert.”
Engines switched off. The silence was deafening as Meyers, Hoppe, Koch, and Schultz emerged, grateful to get out of the hot, stinking tank. Because of the heat they had stripped off their black wool jackets and just wore the gray shirts, sleeves rolled up.
The other tank crews were taking advantage of the lull to get fresh air, stretch cramped legs, and relieve themselves. Shadows lengthened as dusk neared.
Meyer munched on sausage. Despite being as skinny as a rail he seemed to have a bottomless pit for a stomach and never passed up a chance to eat. Schultz hopped on the rear deck and popped open a maintenance hatch. Grit was always getting into the engine and he fretted and fussed over his “Liebling.” Langer stayed in the cupola, observing the activity at the church through his binoculars.
“Who’s the fat one?” asked Koch. “He looks like he’s on parade.”
Langer focused on the Volkswagen. The two officers had stepped out. One was tall and lean and wore the collar tab of an SS Captain. The other was an SS Colonel, a rotund, spectacled man dressed in the prewar black SS uniform complete with shiny jackboots and red swastika armband. His bulging uniform looked crisp and new and boasted no decorations at all. He hardly seemed to fit the idealized SS image with its emphasis on physical fitness.
SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 26