by Eric Helm
A pessimist would have noted that Novak was alone, without communication and inside a camp held by a battalion, give or take, of Main Force Viet Cong, plus, say, the thirty or forty guerrillas who had infiltrated the strike force and who were now alert to the fact that he was running around loose and would very soon be coming to kill him.
Novak preferred to think of it another way. He was no longer a prisoner. He had a good, defensible position. He had a full canteen. And he had more weapons and ammunition than he was likely to ever get the chance to use. There were both a .50-caliber Browning and an M-60 mounted in the bunker, and he quickly repositioned the M-60 to cover the entrance to the bunker.
Both of the VC infiltrators had carried M-1 carbines, and he scrounged over a dozen magazines for those from the phony strikers’ bodies, along with three hand grenades. He had done what he could to warn the others of the impending trap, and from his position he could deny the enemy access to the main ammunition bunker. At least until they were able to sneak a sapper team in close enough to blow him out of his bunker. And with the two Morrow had killed and the five he’d taken out, the enemy now had seven fewer men to try to kill him with. In Novak’s opinion, things were looking up.
CHAPTER 6
SPECIAL FORCES DETACHMENT B-52 TOC, SAIGON
Lieutenant Colonel Alan Bates slammed the telephone handset down hard into the cradle and glared at the apparatus as if it was some evil monster he was about to crush. Bates was normally a no-nonsense, straightforward man but legendary among the Special Forces soldiers for his icy calmness under pressure. Right now he was anything but calm. It was the first time Bates’s executive officer, Major Pratt, could ever recall seeing Bates look angry, and right now his commanding officer’s face was positively florid. Bates shifted that terrible gaze to Pratt, and the executive officer felt his insides squirm uncontrollably.
“Just what the hell is this, Major? Some kind of plague? I go up to Qui Nhon for one day, just one single day, and when I get back, the entire war has gone to hell. Mack Gerber’s got his whole damned A-Detachment and two companies of strikers out beating the bushes on the Cambodian border looking for a downed airplane with some hotshot VIP on board, and running into a battalion of Main Force VC who aren’t supposed to be anywhere near the area. You say that he says he’s out there on orders from General Crinshaw, who, I might add, has no authority to issue such orders, and when I try to find out what the hell is supposed to be going on — a reasonable enough thing for me to want to do as the commanding officer directly responsible for Gerber and his men — you don’t know anything about it except what Gerber has told you.
“I try to call General Crinshaw, and nobody knows where he is. I try to call General Hull, and nobody knows where he is. I even try to call Westmoreland’s office, and nobody knows where he is. I’d call the President of the United States, but I’m afraid nobody would know where he is, either. Everybody’s missing. Nobody knows where they’ve gone, and nobody has any idea what in hell is happening out there. Now we can’t even raise anybody at the camp. I don’t suppose you have any additional light you’d like to shed on this subject?”
Pratt looked uncomfortable. “Sir, I’ve already told you everything I know. Captain Gerber contacted me early this morning, asking for confirmation of General Crinshaw’s orders. I told him that you were unavailable. I didn’t think I ought to be broadcasting over the radio that you’d gone to Qui Nhon with your sergeant major to pick up his nephew’s body. I told him I’d check with you immediately upon your return and get back to him. I also told him I’d contact General Crinshaw’s office and attempt to clarify the situation. I did that, but General Crinshaw had already left, and he didn’t tell the admin sergeant where he was going. He just muttered something about having a mess to straighten out and said he’d contact the office later.
“I tried to get in touch with his executive officer, Colonel DuBois, but he had an early morning tennis game at the racket club, and when I finally got hold of him, he didn’t have any idea what was going on, either, as he hadn’t been to the office yet. I called General Hull’s office but was told he was out and not reachable. I asked to talk to his exec, but he’s on R and R in Australia.
“By the time I got back in touch with the camp, Captain Gerber was already in the field. We did finally manage to establish radio link with him through an Air Force FAC — that’s how we got the Intel about the VC unit whose trail he’d run across. I arranged airlift back to the camp for him and his men and left word with the camp radio watch to have him contact your office as soon as he returned, since I assumed you would be back by then and would know what it was all about. After that we lost radio contact with the camp. I was just about to try and contact him via the choppers sent out for airlift when you returned. I can’t tell you any more because that’s all I know.”
“All right, all right,” said Bates, waving his hand. He seemed to be cooling down somewhat, and his color was beginning to return to normal. “I guess it’s not your fault. Go ahead and get on with it. Let me know as soon as you’ve established radio contact with Gerber again.”
Major Pratt got on with it.
Bates sat drumming his fingers on the duty officer’s desk in the tiny cubicle he’d commandeered for his conference with his executive officer. Bates realized he had been a little hard on Pratt. It wasn’t his fault. The whole mess was one of those situations that result when nobody is doing his job because everybody wrongly assumes that somebody is doing it for him. It was the kind of mistake that shouldn’t have happened because it was easily avoidable, but it had. That was what had Bates doing a slow burn. The situation had been avoidable.
That, and Crinshaw going outside the chain of command to order Gerber and his troops into the field, which clearly was wrong. But how do you tell a general officer he fucked up without losing your commission? Especially when you can’t find him to tell him.
Bates tried to put himself in Gerber’s position. What would he have done if he’d gotten such an order out of the blue from a brigadier general? Probably exactly what Gerber had done. So what if Crinshaw wasn’t directly in their chain of operational command? He was still a general officer, and when a general tells you to do something, as a general rule, by God, you’d better do it and be quick about it.
Bates would have tried to confirm the order through proper channels. That was exactly what Gerber had done, but he’d found those channels closed because everybody had hung up the out sign without telling anybody where he was going. In that situation Bates probably would have requested a written order, and then if the mission couldn’t wait, he’d have got on with it. That, apparently, was what Gerber had done. Bates hoped for Gerber’s sake that the captain had requested a written order and that there were witnesses to the request. This incident was the sort of thing that could hurt a young officer’s career. And Brigadier General Billy Joe Crinshaw didn’t exactly have a history of looking out for young officers’ careers. Especially Special Forces officers, and most especially Mack Gerber’s.
Bates tried to figure out what it all meant. A transport plane down along the Cambodian border. What was it doing there? Supposedly carrying some VIP to or from somewhere. But where? And why? And just who was this VIP who was so important that Crinshaw would hit the panic button and order half of Camp A-555’s personnel out to look for him? And if there was such a VIP missing, why didn’t Bates or anyone else know who it was? Well, Crinshaw apparently knew; hence, he had given his orders to Gerber. But why hadn’t anyone else heard about it? And just where in blazes was everybody?
It seemed as if everyone responsible for running the war had suddenly gone on holiday, just when the biggest operation of the war thus far was under way up north. And what in hell was that battalion of VC doing out there, anyway? Looking for the airplane with the missing VIP? Ridiculous. Who could be so important that the VC would put a whole battalion into the field to find him? For that matter, who could be so important that Crinshaw would go ape
and order Gerber’s team and two companies of the best strikers the Special Forces had at their disposal out to look for him? None of it made any sense at all.
And most important, why had they suddenly lost all communication with Camp A-555? There had been no hint of attack or other problems.
There was nothing that Bates could do until he heard from Gerber. Or Hull. Or even Crinshaw, for Christ’s sake. It galled him to have to sit and wait without knowing what was happening. For a moment he had the irrational thought that he was being kept purposely in the dark, like a mushroom, and that galled him even more.
Bates became aware that he was drumming his fingers on the desk and stopped.
“Damn it,” he sighed. “Whatever is going on, I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”
CHAPTER 7
U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES CAMP A-555
Trung Si Nhat Krung lay in the stifling heat and darkness of the corrugated metal drainage culvert and watched the dim outline of the snake silhouetted against the open tube mouth two meters in front of his face.
It was impossible to clearly identify what kind of snake it was because of the choking smoke that hung like a shroud over the camp. The thick swirls threatened to rob Krung’s tortured lungs of what little oxygen they were able to extract from the foul air normally present in the drainage tube. It did not appear to be a very large snake, though the way its body was bunched in coils could be deceiving in the poor light. It did not matter. Krung knew that the bite of a krait or cobra could be lethal no matter what the size.
Sergeant Krung had been supervising a work detail near the north end of the runway, filling some sandbags for a couple of new countermortar bunkers, when the VC had launched their surprise attack from both inside and outside the camp. The work party had immediately come under heavy fire from the treacherous Vietnamese strikers manning the northwest .50-caliber machine gun bunker. Most of the unarmed workers had been hit in the first burst. The big, full-metal-jacketed slugs had ripped apart the flimsy protection of the few sandbags that had been filled, leaving the survivors of the initial onslaught no place to hide. The remaining workers had fled across the open runway and been cut down by the murderous crossfire from positions along the north wall.
Krung alone had escaped.
Throwing himself behind a pile of sandbags when the northwest bunker had opened fire on the work detail, he had spied the open mouth of the drainage tube and immediately crawled inside, realizing it offered the best cover and concealment available. After that there had been nothing to do except continue to crawl through to the other side.
Krung had hoped that he might be able to reach the communications bunker once on the other side of the runway; the shallow drainage ditch that the tube fed into bent and ran along the edge of the helipad. It was just possible that it might provide enough concealment for him to be able to slip past the helipad beneath the line of fire of the guns on the north wall and make a dash for the communications bunker when he got close enough. If the communications bunker had not already fallen, it would provide a fairly good defensive position and the opportunity to call for help.
But all that had become problematic when he encountered the snake. The drainage tube was barely large enough for Krung to fit through. It was far too small a space to seriously annoy a snake in, especially since he didn’t know whether the snake was venomous.
Of all the work party members, Krung alone had been armed. Soldiers assigned to perform hard manual labor generally did not prefer to do it with an extra six and a half to eleven pounds of carbine or rifle hanging about their necks. But Krung, because of his injured foot, had been supervising the filling of sandbags, not holding the bags or swinging one of the shovels, and like the American Green Berets who had taught him, Krung never went anywhere without being armed if he could help it. Not even in a supposedly safe camp. You never knew when the enemy might attack or from what direction, as today’s events had so disastrously proven.
So although Krung had his carbine, he had wisely chosen the drainage tube rather than fighting, knowing that a man in the open, armed with a carbine, is no match for a group of men in a heavily fortified bunker armed with a .50-caliber machine gun.
At least it had seemed wise until he encountered the snake. Only a man interested in becoming suddenly, and perhaps permanently, deaf would consider shooting the snake in the confined space of the drainage tunnel. Besides, the noise might attract the Viet Cong, who would probably get around to checking the drainage tube soon enough, anyway. And to challenge the snake with his knife in such a place was a thing no sane man could seriously contemplate.
So there was nothing else to do but wait and watch. Krung watched the snake, who in turn took a kind of bored interest in him. They watched each other, Krung wondering with his mind, and the snake with whatever mental capacity it possessed, just exactly what the other one was and which one of them would make a precipitous move first.
As it turned out, it was one of the Viet Cong strikers that made the first move. He foolishly stuck his head into the mouth of the tube to see if anyone happened to be hiding inside, like Krung. The VC very nearly got a faceful of snake for his efforts. He obviously didn’t appreciate it, either, as he rapidly used the bayonet on his M-1 Garand to drag the snake out into the open, then emptied an entire eight-round clip from the rifle into the snake.
From Krung’s position the noise was considerable but not nearly as bad as it would have been if the weapon had been fired inside the tube.
When the VC had finished blowing the snake to bits, he reached down and flipped it over with his bayonet. The mangled reptile landed directly in front of the tube mouth, and Krung could clearly see it for the first time. The broad black-and-yellow horizontal striped pattern of the banded krait was clearly visible. Even with antivenin, a medical wonder of which Krung had never heard, the bite was usually deadly. Both the Vietnamese from the cities and towns and the Americans seemed to hold the krait in great fear because of this. But Krung, who had spent most of his life in the jungle or in small villages in the jungle, knew that the banded krait was an inoffensive creature, so mild mannered that the Tai peoples generally considered it harmless and a good meal. Yes, it could kill you, but it rarely bit anyone even if stepped on. This one had struck out at the VC only because Krung had been blocking its only avenue of escape.
The VC was apparently a city boy, however, as he lost all interest in exploring the drainage tube further after successfully killing the snake. Krung felt a curious sense of gratitude toward the snake. In a way it had sacrificed its life to save his. He promised himself that the next time he killed one for food, he would show it the proper respect and make an offering for its spirit.
Krung waited several minutes to make sure that no one else was going to investigate his hiding place, then edged cautiously forward for a look. The sound of firing had stopped, and some of the smoke was beginning to clear. Everywhere he could see men wearing the black pajama uniform of the Viet Cong, some of them in black shorts. Sprinkled among them were a few men in the tiger-striped jungle fatigues of the strike force. These infiltrators had red bandannas tied about their left arms.
Several small groups of VC and striker impostors were herding bunches of PF strikers who had their hands over their heads. Krung realized that the camp had fallen. There was nothing else he could do until nightfall; perhaps it would be possible then for him to slip out of the camp and escape. Until then he could only do his best to remain undetected, and the best hiding place available seemed to be the one he already occupied. Reluctantly he slid back into the shadows inside the tube.
It could not have been more than five or ten minutes later, although Krung had not thought to check his watch, when he heard the sound of helicopters, suddenly very loud overhead.
Krung was confused. He did not know if the others had returned and were walking into a VC trap, or if the helicopters were gunships coming to attack the camp now that the VC held it. Krung did not think the VC
had any helicopters. Yet, from the sound of it, the helicopters were landing. Krung slid forward again and risked a look.
He could see two Huey helicopters crowding the extreme opposite edges of the helipad. One of them had landed. The other was hovering and appeared to have a large metal box, camouflaged with green-and-brown paint, hung beneath it with cables. The box was set down at the edge of the helipad, and some of the men from the first helicopter came over to disconnect the cables. Then one of the men opened a door on the side of the box and stepped inside. He came back out in a minute and said something to another man who went back inside with him. As Krung watched, the two men carried something out of the box and set it up outside. Then they began running a heavy rubber cable from the thing to the box and started a small engine on the object. While they worked, two other men began fixing an assortment of antennae to the roof of the box.
In the meantime, the other helicopter had apparently landed at the extreme north end of the runway. The sound was above Krung’s head, but he could not rise to see what was going on without exposing himself to the VC gunners on the north wall of the camp. Finally the sound of the helicopters’ rotors died, and he heard a loud, angry voice demanding in English to know where everyone was.
After a minute or two there was the sound of many footsteps, and Krung heard a voice he recognized as belonging to Lieutenant Dung, the LLDB camp executive officer.
“Good afternoon, General. To what, please, owe us the honor of your visit?”