by Eric Helm
Now it was Gerber’s turn to look tired. “Yes, sir. It is that bad out there. The fact that the VC managed to sufficiently infiltrate the strike force to successfully take the camp proves it. And as for our ARVN allies, Captain Minh, the camp commander, is fully aware of the mines. In fact, he thought of it before I did. Sully Smith found the charges he’d laid while he was setting out the charges I’d ordered. At first I thought it might have been the VC, but when I presented the evidence to Captain Minh, he told me he’d mined all of the key bunkers because he knew he had VC infiltrators in the strike force but couldn’t prove who they were. All I did was have Sergeant Smith improve on the situation a bit.”
“Jesus!” said Bates. “Mack, you really do have a twisted mind. Either that or I really am getting too old for this shit. Maybe I’m just not unconventional enough in my thinking for this kind of outfit.”
“Colonel,” said Gerber, “unless I misunderstood everything they tried to teach us at Fort Bragg, being unconventional is what we’re supposed to be all about. If it’s wrong for me to take whatever steps are necessary to protect my men and safeguard my camp, maybe I’m the one who doesn’t belong — in Special Forces or the Army.”
“Take it easy, Mack,” said Bates. “I didn’t say you were wrong, exactly. Just a bit unorthodox. And you’re right, they did teach us to be unconventional at Bragg. I haven’t forgotten the lessons we learned there. It’s just that I need to be reminded of them once in a while.”
“You know, Colonel,” said Henderson slowly, “the idea just might be screwy enough to work.”
“There’s too much riding on being able to breach the east wall. You don’t know that those firing circuits are still intact.”
“We don’t know that they aren’t, either,” said Gerber. “Besides, there are other ways to open a breach. We can take in demolition charges with us. The Mike Force can bring in a 90mm recoilless. Hell, sir, we can have the Air Force bomb a stretch of the wall big enough for Henderson’s people to get through, if necessary.”
“Henderson?”
He shrugged. “Life is full of uncertainties, Colonel. If he’s willing to try it, I am. Besides, what choice have we got?”
“None,” Bates admitted. “Do you really think you can do it? Go in there and get those people out without getting them killed, and take the camp back?”
“We can try,” said Gerber. “I’m not saying there won’t be casualties. We’re going to lose some. But if everything clicks, I think we’ve got a good chance of rescuing Miss Morrow and the men in the team house. I’m hoping that when the VC suddenly find they’ve got a campful of Mike Force strikers and a force of unknown size outside the camp, they’ll be more concerned with saving their own skins than killing prisoners.”
Bates looked at his watch. It was nearly 0500 hours.
“All right,” he said. “Start putting it together. I’m going to go wake up my chopper pilot and get back to Saigon. You’ll undoubtedly need some coordination from that end, and in the meantime, maybe I can find somebody who can tell us just exactly who in the hell it is they’ve got captured out there. If it is Westmoreland, the shit’s going to start hitting the fan pretty soon now. I’ll leave the details up to you two. When will you want to go in?”
“About dawn tomorrow,” said Gerber. “We’ll need a day to get it set up and coordinate everything with the Air Force and the men we’ve got in the field. Also, sir, I’m going to need airlift to bring Bocker, Anderson and Washington in from the field. They know the camp, and I’ll need them to lead part of the strike teams. They’ll need to be here for the briefing phase as well. I’ll leave Sergeant First Class Tyme and Staff Sergeant Smith with Lieutenant Hung and his strikers.”
“All right. We’ll send my chopper out for them first. Anything else?”
“We could use a few more radios. We’re having a lot of trouble with the ones we’ve got in the field.”
“I’ll speak with the camp commander and see what can be arranged. Anything else?”
“Just one thing,” said Gerber. “I’d better stroll over to the commo bunker and give Lieutenant Dung a call.”
“Call the VC?” said Bates. “Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“When we spotted Lieutenant Novak’s signal and veered off, Dung radioed the choppers to ask if we were landing. I told him we had to divert here to help with a problem that had arisen and that we’d be back in the morning. Now I’m going to have to tell him the problem got worse, and we’ll be delayed a couple of days. Just as soon as I think of a plausible problem.”
Krung, who had remained silent until now, spoke up. “Captain Mack, why you no tell him Tai and Vietnam strikers get into big fight here and try kill each other. If Dung like most Vietnamese, he think very funny.”
Gerber looked at the others. “It could work. At least it’s a plausible reason for our having to stay here a few days until things cool down, dealing with a racial dispute.”
One by one they considered it and nodded.
“Good!” said Krung, drawing the blade of his knife across the sharpening stone a final time. “Then we go back and kill all VC. Big surprise for Major Dung.” He sheathed the knife. “Very good indeed.”
CHAPTER 13
THE CAMBODIAN–VIETNAM BORDER REGION NORTHWEST OF U.S. ARMY CAMP A-555
With the approach of dawn Rittenour came slowly awake. It would have been impossible for him to sleep unless he’d been in a coma. The morning air was filled with the screeching and chattering of monkeys, the call of birds and the sounds of animals crashing or slithering through the brush. Distantly he heard the roar of a tiger, or at least what he assumed was a tiger, and was glad of the caliber .38 special revolver in the holster sewn to his survival vest, although he mentally questioned whether the anemic, full copper-jacketed bullets with their low muzzle velocity would actually do the job if needed.
Rittenour was lying beneath what was left of the forward half of the fuselage, his leg bent and twisted at a curious angle. The five-foot fall from the cockpit floor hadn’t helped it any, even though he’d been able to take most of the weight on his good leg. Releasing the seat belt and allowing himself to drop out of the shattered aircraft with a leg broken in two different places had seemed like a lousy idea even when he’d done it, but there’d been no real choice in the matter. He’d heard a flight of helicopters come in from the south shortly after the single chopper had flown out. They were big ones from the sound of it, a whole bunch of them, and he’d needed the flare launcher to signal them. And the only way to get it was to let go of the seat and drop.
The only problem with that idea was that, when he had hit the ground, the pain was so bad he fainted. By the time he had come to, the jungle was dark and the helicopters were long gone.
Rittenour had spent an uneasy night where he fell. He’d thought of trying to build a fire, but that hadn’t seemed like a really good idea since he didn’t know who might see it. Besides, he’d have to splint his leg before he looked for firewood and that meant finding something to use for splints. Not an easy trick when he could barely see his hand in front of his face and had to crawl, dragging a busted leg behind him. The tiny first-aid kit in his survival vest held a few bandages, some tape and a bottle of water-purification tablets. There was no way it could hold anything usable as a splint.
So he’d spent a restless, pain-filled night in the darkness beneath the wreckage of the Otter, awakening twice to chase the rats off himself and getting back to sleep only when exhaustion overcame him.
And now it was morning. Time to fix the leg as best he could, see if he could find the big survival package with its canned water and tinned food that had been stored in the aft fuselage of the aircraft, assess his surroundings and try to find out what had happened to Jones and the passenger. They had to be around here somewhere, whatever was left of them.
Rittenour looked around for the flare launcher. There it was. He had to shift his position slightly to get hold of it, but he reached
it, finished unraveling the lanyard and looped it about his neck. There’d be no more losing that particular piece of equipment.
It took Rittenour about two hours to find a couple of fallen dead branches suitable for a crude splint. Even crawling about, it wouldn’t have taken that long if he hadn’t kept passing out.
There were all kinds of dead branches lying about, but most of them were the wrong size or the wrong shape or too rotted or riddled with termites to be useful. He finally found a couple long enough and solid enough to do the job, although he had to cut them to fit with the little cable saw from his vest. When he finally had them sized right, he used his nylon flight jacket to pad the leg and tied the splints on with his handkerchief, neck scarf and a couple of field dressings, immobilizing the injured leg below the ankle and above the knee.
If he’d had help, he could have cut the branches extra long and lashed a crosspiece below his boot to make a rudimentary sort of traction splint and take some of the pressure off the fractures. He remembered how to do that from Boy Scouts, but he couldn’t do it without help. Still, when he’d finished, the splint worked fairly well, and without the broken bone ends grating together every time he moved, he found he could crawl about without fainting, provided he took things slowly. By the time he’d finished the splint and crawled back to the broken aircraft, it was nearly noon and hotter than the inside of a napalm strike.
The big zippered survival case was right where it was supposed to be, inside the aft cargo door. Rittenour almost wept with joy when he found it. He rooted in it until he found the military-issue pocketknife with the can opener on it, then guzzled down two of the dull gray cans of flat-tasting distilled water before tearing open the ration packets. He scarfed down two tropical chocolate bars, a handful of cardboard-tasting crackers and part of a tin of dehydrated beef, washing the meal down with most of another can of water.
Afterward Rittenour got sick. When he finished puking, he sipped the rest of the can of water very slowly and gnawed on a couple of crackers. It took a while, but by late afternoon he began to feel a bit better. He improvised a crutch from a forked branch, gathered some dry wood for a signal fire and stuffed a couple of day-night distress marker flares from the big kit into his pockets. Then he set out to explore his immediate surroundings.
About forty-five yards away, a short distance on the near side of where the right wing was hanging in the trees, he found Jones. The faintly pungent, sweet odor and the buzzing of flies gave away the location before he spotted the body.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. Jones’s head and upper body were almost black with flies. When Rittenour managed to shoo enough of them away long enough for a look, he instantly regretted it. The copilot’s right arm and about half of his head were missing.
Rittenour backed off a couple of feet and got sick again. After a while he pulled himself together and relieved the dead man of his survival vest, knife and pistol. He tried to take one of the man’s dog tags because he seemed to remember you were supposed to do that, but Jones wasn’t wearing any. Finally, because he had no shovel, he used the knife, the crutch and at last his bare hands to scoop out a shallow depression and cover the copilot with dirt. The grave might not be deep enough to keep the animals from digging him up, but at least it would keep the flies away and cut down on the smell as the body continued to decay.
Clumsily carrying Jones’s survival gear, Rittenour hobbled back to the aircraft and dropped the vest inside the door. He sat in the open doorway until he caught his breath, then picked up the crutch and worked his way around to the other side of the aircraft. A short distance away he found his passenger.
He didn’t smell quite as bad as Jones had, and there were fewer flies. Perhaps because there were no open, external injuries. The neck lolled to one side, grotesquely twisted, obviously broken.
An army-green, baseball-type cap with four white stars sewn to it, made familiar by the press and television news, lay nearby.
Rittenour rolled the body over and stared at the name tag above the right pocket of the jungle fatigues. It said Westmoreland.
Rittenour stared at the cap, the name tag and the face of the man. He had a real problem with that name tag, unless Westmoreland had suddenly become a thirty-year-old with close-cropped red hair and green eyes. Rittenour had seen Westmoreland’s picture plenty of times in the newspapers and on TV. He’d even flown him to Europe once.
He’d never seen this guy before in his life.
CHAPTER 14
OUTSIDE U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES CAMP A-555
After Bates’s helicopter had taken Bocker, Anderson and Washington back to Moc Hoa, Tyme and Smith had little to do.
Kepler had ridden out with the chopper to give Tyme and Smith a brief outline of the plan of action being formed. He’d promised them more detailed information later by radio and given them a sheet of code words and phrases he’d worked out, designed to help convey information to them while confusing any VC who might happen to be listening on the radio.
Once the actual operation began, there would be little need for continued radio security of such an extreme nature, and most of the code words would be dispensed with. They would then use normal operating codes and call signs. It wouldn’t matter, for instance, if Gerber was referred to as Captain Queeg or Zulu Six, his normal call sign, once he was inside the camp. By that time the assault would be well under way, and knowing that Gerber was in the area would provide no useful information to Dung and the other VC.
Kepler also brought them two sets of fresh batteries and an extra PRC-10, along with a bagful of the spare parts that Bocker had requested. The necessity for the repairs meant that the helicopter pilot had to drop Kepler off, then swing south and orbit outside the area for twenty minutes before coming back in for the pickup, but Kepler needed the time to brief them and get the latest Intelligence on movement in the camp, anyway. By the time he’d finished, Bocker had put three more of the PRC-10s back in operation, giving the two companies of strikers a total of six working radios.
When he was sure he’d wrung every drop of information he possibly could out of Smith and Tyme and made the proposed rescue operation as clear to them as he could with the data available at that stage of planning, Kepler called the Huey back in. He boarded with the other three, and the four men flew off to Moc Hoa, leaving the two Green Beret sergeants and two companies of strikers to watch the camp and ready their part of the operation.
There wasn’t much getting ready to do. The men were already in the target area and quite well enough armed to create the required diversion. Tyme noted that they were a bit light in the area of automatic weapons and ammunition for an actual assault on a fortified position, but since their role was primarily to create a diversion, what they had would do. Once all the assault elements were inside the camp, the men with Tyme and Smith would function as a blocking force to keep the enemy from escaping to the west, toward the Mekong River and Cambodia.
At least that was how it was supposed to work. Providing things didn’t suddenly go to shit on the strike teams and assault troops. Both Tyme and Smith knew from bitter personal experience that even the best-planned operations had a tendency to change once things got under way. Primarily because no amount of planning could eliminate the two variables that were always in effect — the human factor and a certain amount of plain dumb luck.
Tyme and Smith spent a quiet, boring morning taking turns observing the camp once Kepler and the others were gone. They would not move into position for the feint attack until after dark in order to preclude detection by the enemy, but they had shifted around a bit to be closer to the objective.
A platoon of strikers had been left behind to secure the LZ, in case it should be needed to fly in more equipment or supplies or for evacuation. Second Lieutenant Hung, on Tyme’s advice, had moved the rest of the strikers into a shallow ravine some distance behind the observation post. The ravine and its approach were screened from observation from the camp by the tree line where
Tyme and Smith had established their OP, and having the strikers there meant that they would have a lot less farther to walk when it came time to set up the diversion.
It was just past noon when Smith, who had been observing the camp through binoculars, touched Tyme’s arm. “Wake up, Boom-Boom, we’ve got troubles.”
“What sort of troubles?” asked Tyme, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from one eye.
“Something going on down by the south gate,” answered Smith, handing him the binoculars. “Take a peek. Looks to me like they’re getting ready to move some of the prisoners out.”
“Shit!” said Tyme. “That we don’t need. Let me see.”
He took the binoculars and scanned the area along the south wall until he came to the gate, then lifted them until he could see inside. The sandbags and machine gun emplacements surrounding the gate made it impossible to pick out any real detail, but he could make out a knot of men just inside the gate. Some of them were obviously carrying weapons while others didn’t seem to have any arms and exhibited strange, stiff postures, suggesting that perhaps their hands were tied behind them. As Tyme watched, one of the men walked over to one of the armless men and struck him with a rifle, knocking him to the ground. He lay there for a few moments, then struggled awkwardly back to his feet.
Tyme lowered the binoculars and turned to one of the two Tai strikers with them. “Go tell Lieutenant Hung I need twenty men with rifles, ready to move fast. Hurry.”
The striker slithered back into the trees until he couldn’t be seen from the camp, then got up and ran.
“What’re we going to do, Boom-Boom?” asked Smith.
“As soon as we see which direction they take, we’re going to try to get in front of them and hit ’em,” said Tyme.