by Dennis Foley
Rat stopped them and grabbed the edge of a large, leafy plant. Pulling it aside revealed a section of bamboo sticking out of the ground. He motioned for Deming to come closer—to look at the large piece of bamboo.
Deming leaned over and put his hand above the bamboo. Warm air rushed from the opening. He then waved some of it toward his face. It smelled of cook fires and rancid grease. Deming could also detect the distinctive, ammonialike smell of body odor allowed to develop over many, many days.
He looked over to Rat and nodded, then back to the others. He pointed down the breather pipe and then gave the others a thumbs-up to let them know they had struck pay dirt.
Once they got about seventy-five meters away from Iverson’s stay-behind element, Deming stopped and turned back to look for Iverson and the other three Rangers who waited near the vent pipe. Because he knew where they were, Deming was able to see the bottom of one of the Rangers’ boots. He pulled the handset from Keith’s harness and whispered into the mouthpiece, “Three-One, Georgia. I’ve got a visual on one of your folks. Tighten up your concealment. And good luck. Out.”
Deming, Rat, and the other eight members of Team Georgia continued on to another possible tunnel opening. Though the wind covered much of the noise they made, their movement was slowed by the discovery of more booby traps.
Rat suddenly reached out and grabbed Deming by the elbow.
Confused by the gesture, Deming followed Rat’s eyeline to the trail.
There, at the limits of his night vision, Deming saw a lone figure walking down the dark trail with a bicycle. He controlled the bicycle by holding on to a pole stuck into the end of the handlebar. He steadied a large load strapped to the seat and crossbar with his other hand.
Deming looked back at the others to see if they too had seen the solo figure. They all waited for a signal from Deming. He held up his clenched fist to reinforce their instinct to freeze.
He looked at the margin of brush separating them from the trail and realized they had few options. It was too far away to spring a prisoner snatch. And if he tried to move an element to the trail to attempt a snatch, they would either take too much time getting there, catch the traveler’s eye, or give themselves away by the noise they would make.
If he decided to fire on the bicyclist from their position, they would alert everyone in the area to their presence.
He turned back to the patrol and gave them a hand signal to stay down and hold what they had. They would just let the man pass and see where he went.
The cyclist moved slowly down the trail toward Deming’s patrol, unconcerned about his safety. He devoted much of his attention to keeping his load balanced and staying in the center of the path. The wind blew the bushes along the trail in gusts, and spits of rain promised more.
Deming raised his binoculars to his eyes and watched the figure pass immediately to his front. The clouds had moved across the moon, and the shadow detail was muddied. But he could make out a man in his thirties or forties and the large soft bags on his bicycle. The shape of the bags suggested rice or flour or salt, but not weapons or equipment.
Slung across the man’s back was an old bolt-action rifle. Deming couldn’t see more than that.
They watched as the man stopped, leaned his bike up against a tree, and knelt down. He pulled aside some loose brush and lifted a trapdoor made from an oil-barrel lid, which led to the tunnels.
Michaelson got to his feet and stretched, rubbing his back. “Damn, I’m just getting too old for this shit.”
Hollister looked up from the report he was drafting. “Wait ’til that news gets back to infantry branch. I’m sure they can find a nice, out-of-the-way job for you in the basement of the Pentagon.”
“I’ve done my time in the puzzle palace. I’m not ever going back there,” Michaelson said.
“Not good, huh?”
Michaelson lowered his voice. “You ever wonder where they breed the Valentines?”
Hollister dropped his face into his hand. “Please don’t blow my confidence in the system,” he kidded. “I was kinda hoping Valentine was more of a fluke than a cultivated crop.”
“I’m going over to the piss tube and then to the mess hall for some more coffee. Anyone want some more of that evil black substance?”
Caulter declined, and Loomis and Hollister raised their cups affirmatively.
“I’d go with you, but it’s about time for the sitreps to be called in. I’d like to be here,” Hollister said.
“Come find me if something jumps the track,” Michaelson said as he grabbed the large, metal mess hall pitcher and left.
Hollister watched Michaelson go through the door. The bad weather blew into the room, and Hollister caught a glimpse of the black night. Rain was coming down at a sharp angle, and the wind continued to blow. Michaelson just put his head down and charged out into it.
For a moment, Hollister wondered where he would be when he had as many years’ service as Michaelson did. He admired Michaelson and trusted him. He had been a tough boss when Hollister was a lieutenant and a good friend ever since.
What he liked most about Michaelson was his priorities. He never let his own needs or wants get in the way of taking care of the troops or accomplishing the mission—and in that order. Hollister hoped he could someday be more like Michaelson.
After several minutes, the rain began to fall and swirl in the strong winds. Deming looked around at the others. To a man, they were still and ignored the rain running down their necks into the collars of their fatigue shirts. He was pleased with the way they had been performing and hoped they would not soon tire and get sloppy. Skill and discipline were the only things that balanced the risks they were taking.
Private First Class Keith reached over and tapped Deming on the leg and directed his attention back to the tunnel entrance.
There, the pajama-clad bicyclist emerged from the tunnel with two others. They went to the bicycle and unstrapped the three bags and took them back to the entrance. The bicycle man said goodbye to the others and stood by while they disappeared back into the tunnel. He then covered the entrance behind them and got on his bike. In only seconds, he pedaled back up the pathway and out of sight.
After several minutes, Deming moved to the far side of their perimeter—as far from the tunnel as he could get without moving the patrol. Satisfied he was far enough away not to be heard, Deming got on the radio to call the other teams to look out for the bicyclist moving in their direction.
He instructed them to snatch him if they could without compromising the major effort to grab someone from the tunnels. Otherwise, let him pass.
The report of the sighting and locating another access to the tunnel was good news back at operations. Hollister looked at the message he had heard over the speakers after Loomis finished writing it in the log. “Call over to the pilots’ hootch and tell them what we know. Call Lieutenant Gannon and tell him to relook at his fire support plan and slip on his jungle boots. Call the forward air controller and tell him we may need him up within the hour. Tell him that I can’t wait. If I need air force birds over the objective—I’ll need them on a short rope, and I’ll need a FAC there first. Oh, and give them all the latest weather forecast for here and the objective area.
“Things are about to happen,” Hollister said.
Deming had pulled the patrol back from the tunnel entrance and briefed the small element, headed by Sergeant George, that would stand by to drop CS into the second tunnel opening. Satisfied George understood, Deming moved on.
Rat led the remaining members of the patrol toward another tunnel entrance. The fact that Deming had his twelve-man patrol broken up into three elements bothered him. If they made contact or were compromised, the distance between elements would cause endless complications. Deming had drilled and drilled the team members and the subelement leaders on immediate actions if they were hit while split up, and hoped he had done enough.
It began to rain harder.
“Jesus! I h
ope the hell we don’t make contact now,” Michaelson said. He came back through the door, soaking wet, his free hand protecting the open top of the coffee pitcher from the rain.
“How bad?” Hollister asked.
“Bad enough that I don’t think we could lift these choppers off right now.”
Hollister walked over to the shuttered window and pulled the plywood away. He looked across the compound to the airstrip.
“Hell, I can’t even see the choppers. Are we sure we still have them here?”
Caulter laughed, got to his feet, and filled his coffee cup. He raised it a bit to Michaelson. “Thank you, Colonel. I’ll get the next jug.”
Michaelson looked at the graying sergeant. “What do you think?” he asked, nodding toward Cambodia.
“Well, sir, I think they got a real good chance of grabbing another VC groundhog if their luck holds out. They been running good, getting breaks, and moving smart. But that could all go to hell real fast, and they’re in a bad place with bad weather.”
Deming watched as Rat tried to explain the location of the third tunnel entrance by pointing at bushes and the safe approach to it.
The entrance was very different from the other opening and the vent pipe. Instead of being a hole in the ground camouflaged with vegetation, it was tucked into a rock outcropping next to a bank of the main stem of the river.
Deming raised his field glasses to his eyes and strained to see the details. A simple cluster of rocks concealed an entrance just inches above the swelling river. He soon realized they might have been able to paddle right up to the entrance had they not already destroyed and buried the boats.
Without the boats it would mean that all or some part of the remaining members of Team Georgia would have to work their way upstream, get into the water, cross the stream, and then float down to the entrance.
At the entrance, they would place the CS, arm the timing device, and then reverse the process to get back on the near side of the bank—to move back north to link up with the others.
Deming wiped the rain from his forehead and eyes again to clear his vision. He would follow the same routine, placing a team at the third opening to the tunnels.
He decided to take himself and Keith forward with Rat and let the other two cover their movement from the near bank. He had trusted Rat to show him the final tunnel opening. If all went well there, they would be able to emplace the CS grenades inside the tunnel opening and get away—upwind.
Deming waited for the three remaining Rangers to move to him. Once there, he leaned over and whispered over the rain and the rushing water, “According to our man there, this hole is only a backup escape. It hasn’t been opened in several weeks and isn’t booby-trapped. That’s good. They just might panic and use the damn thing.”
The others nodded to let him know they heard him and understood.
“Okay,” Deming said. He raised his wristwatch to his face and looked at the radium hands. “I’ve got four zero minutes to get over there and back. If it hits the fan—leave me and Keith. Go to the rally point. We’ll find you there.”
Jimmy Ray gave Deming a thumbs-up and helped Deming slip his light pack off his back.
CHAPTER 29
THE GROWTH ALONG THE bank of the small river slowed their movement to a crawl. Vines tangled around their feet, and the thickets tugged at their already wet uniforms.
Deming had to guard against fatigue setting in. They were getting very tired, and it showed up in a stumble now and then or a distraction. Deming noticed it when Keith forgot what he was doing. Rat stopped for a moment, causing Keith to do the same. But when Rat began to move forward again, Keith just stood there, confused and disoriented.
Deming turned and walked back to Keith. “Okay?”
“Yes, sir,” he whispered. The contact seemed to bring him back into focus.
Deming patted him on the shoulder—reassuring him—and then returned to the point position to lead them to the tunnel entrance.
The door to operations burst open with a kick of a jungle boot. Hollister looked up to find First Sergeant Easy, wearing his combat gear, his face camouflaged, leaving only the blue of his eyes and the pink from his mouth exposed.
“Where are you going, Top?”
“Cross the fence. I’m riding belly on that young lieutenant’s chase ship. I may be old, but I’m still the meanest som’bitch in this man’s Ranger company.”
“I don’t know that’s true. But I do know you’re the best goddamn belly man that ever flew an extraction. Let’s just hope no one really needs you tonight.”
The squelch broke on a radio speaker. “Base. This is Georgia. We are to execute phase four in zero five minutes. Over,” Deming said.
Hollister picked up the mike and answered, “This is Six. Roger your last. Good luck and be careful.”
Hollister didn’t miss the background noise of the winds blowing at Deming’s end. He also knew the rain was coming down as hard there as it had at the launch site in Tay Ninh.
“Something wrong?” Easy asked.
“Not any more than the usual. I just wonder how long you and I can keep our fingers crossed in this business.”
“Long as we need to, to get ’em home,” Easy said.
Rat reached out and grabbed Deming’s shirtsleeve. He motioned for Deming to stop, and pointed at a place on the bank nearly twenty meters upstream from the rock outcropping on the other bank.
Deming took a breath, shrugged to adjust his load, and raised his rifle up to high port. He took one last look up and down the river and then stepped into the water.
It was cold and fast flowing. Deming had to widen his stance on the bottom and shift his weight upstream to keep from being toppled over. As he got to deeper water, the claymore bag carrying the CS and the timing devices began to float. It worked its way around Deming and found the downstream side.
Rat stepped into the water. Unlike Deming, he moved gracefully and with little difficulty. He had walked through streams his whole life on a daily basis. For him it was as easy as walking on dry ground.
Suddenly, a noise came from the trees on the far bank nearly two hundred yards upstream. Deming and Rat froze. It happened again. They quickly recognized a cough—as if someone was trying to spit something from his throat.
Rat waved his hand from side to side to let Deming know it was one of the Vietnamese from the tunnels. The fact that the man was hacking and coughing without fear of being heard was reassuring to Deming. No one who suspected an American patrol was in the area would act so recklessly.
They waited until the coughing stopped and then continued across the stream.
“Damn, she’s a really pretty girl. Ain’t she?” Sergeant Caulter said, spreading out the photographs on the table.
Hollister got up from the field desk, stretched, and walked over to the two NCOs. “What you got?”
Sergeant Young proudly pointed at the small photos on the table. “I had to test out the darkroom. So I stopped Jrae out in the company area and grabbed a few snaps of her. She looks pretty good, don’t she, Captain?”
Hollister spun one of the photos around. It was a shot of Jrae from the waist up. Her long black hair flowed undisturbed down her shoulder and the full length of her back. Her figure was flattered by the tight-fitting fatigue shirt, and her bright teeth were exaggerated against so much black and gray in the photo. “Got to admit. She’s a real heartbreaker.”
“She never saw her own photo before. She told me no one had ever photographed her,” Sergeant Young said.
“Did she like it?” Caulter asked.
“You ever see a Viet who wasn’t crazy about their own photograph?”
“She’s not a Vietnamese. She’s a Yard,” Caulter said.
“Well, maybe it’s because she’s such a pretty girl. She liked it all right. Promised her a better print as soon as I get some bigger paper in from field force,” Young said.
“Well, as long as you don’t start your own photo studio, I
guess it’s okay,” Hollister said.
Young held up another very flattering photo. “You want one for your scrapbook, sir?”
Hollister laughed. “No. I don’t think so. If I had a picture like that of her, I might let my mind wander.”
They all laughed.
The cover to the tunnel entrance was almost overgrown with weeds and matted deadfall. Deming pulled out his folding Buck knife. He slowly opened the blade to avoid making a loud snap as it locked into place.
He knew if the cover was booby-trapped and he tripped it, it could kill him and compromise every man on the ground. He looked up at Rat, who shrugged again—not knowing for sure if it was booby-trapped. There was no other way. He had to probe it the hard way.
Deming looked at his watch. He only had twenty minutes to find a way to set the CS and get back to the other side of the river and head back to their rally point.
He decided not to try to lift the cover. That would reduce the need for him to completely clear the circumference of the woven-twig cover that concealed the opening. He needed to find a small section of the cover that was clear of booby traps, dig enough dirt and rock away from it, and slip the CS grenades into the opening. He could then set the timer, cover the small opening with mud to keep the gas in the hole, and rejoin the others.
He gingerly slipped the four-inch blade of the knife under the edge of the cover and felt for anything that might be part of a trip wire or a mine.
Nothing.
He slowly withdrew the knife and did the same to the next section of the cover. He would have to do it several more times—without tripping a detonator before he was finished. The job was harder than usual because of the rain and the runoff of muddy water seeking the river’s edge where he stood.
Hollister ran across the compound to his hootch and tried to dodge the larger puddles. The sprint only took him nine long strides. Still, he was soaked by the time he hit the porch of the officers’ hootch.