Take Back the Night: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 3)

by Dennis Foley

  “Great,” Hollister said. He adjusted the lip mike and shrugged. “Hey, could be worse, I guess.”

  “Yes, sir. So, where do you want us?”

  “Just stay above and behind the formation. I want to be available if the shit hits the fan.” He pointed down toward the Huey that held the C & C party. “We’ll just let Captain Thomas run the show for now.”

  Adams laid the cyclic up against his knee and put the tiny chopper into an ascending right turn. He looked out and up to make sure there was no one above him. “Third floor coming up.”

  The rain pounded against the windscreen of the loach. Hollister tried to orient himself by looking out the open left door and matching the terrain below to the plastic-cased map in his lap.

  Adams looked over at Hollister. “You guys sure do earn yer pay.”

  Hollister laughed. “Ever notice how the grass is always greener in your own job?”

  “Sir?”

  “Pilots would rather not be grunts. Grunts would rather not be Rangers. Rangers would rather not be door gunners—and so on.”

  Adams chuckled into the intercom. “I guess you’re right.” He looked out his door and down at the rain-soaked terrain below them. “But, damn, I just couldn’t see living in that kind of crap while yer surrounded by folks who would like to do really bad things to your body.”

  “This coming from a man who is about three hundred horsepower away from being down there himself?”

  “I try never, ever to run out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas, Captain,” Adams said—flashing a big grin.

  “I’m real glad to hear that, Chief. Let’s just hold that thought until we get back to Tay Ninh.”

  “Then what?”

  “I imagine we can count all the noses—unload weapons and find a cold beer for both of us.”

  “Good deal! I’ll go for that.”

  Hollister ran his fingers down the seam of the plastic map case and looked out ahead of the chopper through the ripples caused by the rain. He wanted to get the extraction over as fast and as safely as he could, but had to stand by and watch Thomas supervise the pickups.

  He reached down and adjusted the volume to his headset. He could hear Thomas’s side of the conversations, but Deming’s voice was weak.

  He pointed toward Deming’s pickup zone. “Let’s hold our orbit high and north of the pickup.”

  The responsive little chopper rolled over and took up a new heading. The compass on the instrument panel spun through three hundred and ten degrees and kept moving.

  Hollister looked down and ahead of the loach. The flight of ten choppers flew higher than normal altitudes, above possible ground fire, and fast to avoid the antiaircraft artillery.

  He realized the efforts were probably not as necessary with the bad weather, limited visibility, and gusting winds that served to cover their approach and reduce the effectiveness of enemy gunners.

  The weather over the landing zones was a random pattern of low clouds, ground fog, and occasional clear patches.

  They flew for another twelve minutes, taking a long, arcing route to the landing zone.

  “What did you call it, sir?”

  Hollister looked over at Adams. He was reaching down for the small knob on the tape recorder. “What did I call what?”

  “Loach music?”

  Hollister smiled. “Yeah, loach music. You got some more, Chief?”

  “You bet. Check this out.” Adams clicked the tape recorder to life.

  The popping of the record that the recording was taken from was the first thing Hollister heard in his headset.

  “It might be a bit different. It’s ancient, it’s classic—written before the first one of these babies ever took to the skies. But I think it’s loach music,” the pilot said. He leaned back and paused for the intra to the song to start.

  Hollister didn’t recognize the first few notes. It began with an Indian drumbeat followed by the distinctive strumming of California beach music. “Who is that?”

  Adams kicked the loach into an ascending spiral and punched the intercom button. “That, sir, is Hank B. Marvin of the Shadows. It’s ten years old.” He wiggled the cyclic a fraction of an inch from side to side with the beat of the music, and the loach became part of the rock instrumental. “But it’s flyin’ music.”

  Hollister laughed. He looked out and down and saw the gloved hand of the front seater in the lead Cobra come up in a wave. Then the gunship’s rotor disk tilted to the music.

  “What the hell are they listening to?” Hollister asked.

  “Same thing,” Adams said. “I’m pumping it over our company alternate freq.”

  Hollister gave Adams a look of disapproval.

  “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll shut it down before we get near the pickup.”

  “Just make sure we don’t confuse Ranger operations and disc jockeying.”

  Chastain was the last patrol leader to report arrival at his pickup zone. Hollister rolled his wrist over and noted the time. He was impatient with the process. Waiting for Thomas to go through the steps to extract teams on the ground made him anxious. Still, he was pleased with the ease with which Thomas was setting up the teams and the choppers for three coordinated pickups.

  He looked out at the continuing bad weather and then waited until Adams came around to check the approaching weather again.

  The clouds were layered and varied. The ones closest to the ground were thready and fragile looking, while the layers above them were full, dark, and threatening.

  “Some lightning headed our way—over the South China Sea.”

  Adams smiled. “Sir, I can fly around and between the lightning strikes in this baby.”

  “I’m not as worried about you as I am the slicks and gunships.”

  “Hell, they’ll be okay.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  “Lemme tell you, sir. If I was worried about getting my ass knocked outta the air by weather or ground fire …” He raised his left hand and pointed his finger out over the instruments at the other choppers. “… I’d sure like to have those guys around me. They can just about get me out of ’bout any trouble I could get into.”

  Hollister relaxed a bit and nodded. “Guess you’re right, Chief. They’re getting pretty good at what they do.”

  “Too bad though.”

  “What?”

  “We all know when they finally slap the padlock on this war, we’re gonna see pink slips like confetti in aviation units.”

  “That the rumor?”

  “That’s the promise. They been postcarding lots of us,” Adams said, adjusting the size of his orbit above the first pickup zone.

  “Postcarding?”

  “The puzzle palace has been sending selected warrant officers postcards asking if they want to become RLOs—real live officers. All they have to do is sign the card and send it back, and they get their lieutenant’s or captain’s bars in the mail.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “Cockpit scuttlebutt is they’re going to slim down army aviation, and if you’re going to stay, you better be a commissioned officer and not just a warrant.”

  “Why?”

  “They can’t have everyone flying. So they’ll be alternating pilots from cockpit jobs to regular officer jobs and back. They can put an RLO into more ground assignments than they can a warrant officer.”

  “So who gets the postcards?”

  “We figure they are using a dartboard because of some a the assholes who got them.”

  “And?”

  “And we all know if we don’t get our postcard, we’d better start looking for jobs flying traffic choppers back in the World.”

  The conversation reminded Hollister about his own vulnerability. He still hadn’t found much security in the fact that he had been selected early for major. They could still let him go when the war ended.

  “Stand by. Your ride’s on short final,” Thomas said over the tactical frequency.

  Chastai
n’s voice came back without a pause. “Roger. We’re ready.”

  Hollister leaned out of the open door to see the two pickup choppers pull their noses up, slow, and settle onto the grassy PZ two thousand feet below the loach. Through the rain, it was hard to see details as small as Rangers running to their choppers. But he could see the gusts of winds blowing the grasses in wave after wave.

  He knew the buffeting would be heavy, but the choppers would benefit from heading into the wind. The added lift would help get them out of the landing zone and away from the crosshairs of any enemy gunners trained on them.

  “Coming up.” The voice was the lead chopper pilot’s.

  “Two coming up,” the trailing pilot announced.

  “We’re above and behind you five hundred feet in both directions,” said the pilot of the chase aircraft, empty except for its crew and First Sergeant Easy, riding belly man.

  The two pickup choppers looked as if they were going over on their noses as their pilots sucked all the lift they could into their rotor blades to regain the airspeed they had lost touching down.

  Their momentum and altitude increased rapidly, and the lead chopper crossed the margin of trees at the far limit of the clearing.

  The second chopper did the same, and Hollister let himself relax a bit. They were up. A little more altitude and airspeed, and their safety would be all but guaranteed back to Tay Ninh.

  “Ever get casual with this?” Adams asked.

  “Never.”

  “I’m not sure I’d take a commission as an RLO if they offered it. I’d rather fly than make the decisions you all have to make.”

  “I don’t know, Chief. If I were a Ranger on the ground, I just might like the idea of having the decisions made by an infantry officer who had already logged in thousands of hours of stick time.”

  Adams nodded. “You got a point. Maybe some other guy. I don’t know if I got whatever it takes to be down there in the dirt.”

  Hollister looked back at the pilot, his shaggy mustache half hanging over his lip mike. “My gut tells me you probably have it.”

  The flight of two that picked up Chastain’s team was reporting their landing back at the launch site just as the next two lift ships were approaching DeSantis’s difficult PZ.

  Unlike Chastain’s PZ, which was an oval of tall grasses in double canopy, DeSantis’s was a series of several overlapping bomb craters. During the early flyovers, it had picked up a nickname—Olympic. It came from its similarity to the interlocking ringed logo for the Olympic games.

  From above, the craters were distinguished from one another by the blue-green water pooled in their bottoms. The raw earth margins of the craters overlapped, blurring the distinction between them.

  As Adams brought the loach to a high orbit over the Olympic PZ, Hollister sat up and looked quickly at his map and then out and down at the PZ again. “Mud,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The muddy water has drained into the craters and changed the colors.”

  “That bad?”

  “Just tells you how wet it is for those Rangers down there.”

  As the pickup ships lined up to pluck DeSantis’s patrol and his prisoner from the craters, Hollister could feel a sense of discomfort. He had no reason to think that the pickup would be any different except for the tight and irregular size of the PZ.

  “Chief,” he said. “Let’s drop out of this orbit and take a look along the route out for the slicks.”

  “Roger that. Let me find out which way they are breaking, first.”

  While Adams checked with the lead pickup ship, Hollister reached down and pulled the set of binoculars from his claymore bag. He took one long look at the moderately forested area in front of DeSantis’s PZ. The trees were clumped in tight knots, with grassy patches between them and an occasional foot trail, reminding him it was very much a well-traveled area.

  “Got it,” Adams said. And without warning, he jerked the small craft over into a fast, descending right spiral that dumped altitude and picked up airspeed.

  The maneuver of the chopper made it impossible for Hollister to use the field glasses. He dropped them to his lap and held on to the leading edge of the open doorway for the ride down.

  “This is where we need loach music,” Adams said. He pulled in some collective to stop the extreme descent of the chopper.

  “I think good flying is all we need lots of right now.” Hollister watched Adams skillfully maneuver the falling chopper into a terrain-hugging overflight of the exit route selected by the slick pilots.

  “Can you help me count the snakes?”

  “What?”

  “I need your eyes. These guys are watching the trees, and we are watching the trees. If we don’t keep an eye on the gunships, we could mesh rotors and fuck up our whole day.”

  Hollister looked out and behind the chopper. The Cobras were prowling the margins of the pickup zone, looking for any threat to DeSantis or the slicks. Each run ended on the far end of the PZ where they would jerk their choppers up and back for another loop over the PZ. “They’re about six hundred meters behind us and getting farther away.”

  “I just want to know where they are all the time.”

  “Don’t blame you. I’d hate to have to explain bumping into one of those guys.”

  “Is there something special down here you want to look at?” Adams asked.

  “Just a hunch. I can’t put my finger on it. Just don’t want to lose a Ranger or a chopper because you and I were up in the stratosphere listening to rock and roll.”

  “Roger. I’ll just poke around down here—along the route out,” Adams said, pulling the chopper into what would almost be a hover.

  “Short final,” a voice announced over the radio.

  Hollister looked back in the direction of the PZ. He could see the Cobras prowling and the lead chopper clearing the trees to settle into the PZ. Above and behind that, he could make out the chase ship and Thomas’s C & C.

  He leaned back into his seat and looked out and up. The rain was still falling. He pressed the transmit button and called Thomas on the Ranger freq. “You got us down here in the loach?”

  “Roger that. You find something?”

  “Negative. Just want to make sure you don’t.”

  “We’d all be happy not to have any surprises. Thanks,” Thomas said.

  “We’ll be out of your way in a second here,” Hollister said, looking over to Adams for an acknowledgment of his statement.

  Adams nodded and came to a dead hover over a large tree. He moved the cyclic in a tiny circle, which translated to a wide sweeping and fanning motion that caused the branches of the tree to thrash violently. It allowed Hollister and Adams to look through the tree at the ground below—normally hidden by the large, lush growth.

  “Anything?” Hollister asked.

  “Negative,” Adams said. “It was just a great place to hide a whole NVA football team.”

  “Got to agree with you. You could hide a lot under there.”

  “Coming out,” the lead slick pilot announced. It was the signal to all that DeSantis’s patrol was loaded without complication and the choppers were lifting off of the Olympic PZ.

  Hollister looked back over his shoulder to see the first rotor disk tilting out of the pickup zone, several hundred meters behind the loach.

  Adams rolled out of the hover and crept along the edge of an earthen ridge that formed the steep bank of a small, intermittent stream.

  “Hold it!” Hollister yelled. “Come back around.”

  Adams looked over at what Hollister was looking at and snapped the chopper into a maneuver to overfly the area he had just covered.

  “What you got?”

  “Footprints,” Hollister said.

  “There,” Hollister said, pointing out the open door at a raw spot in the grasses where the earth had eroded through from the rains. In the center of the red-brown split in the earth two long footprints clearly marked a spot where someone ha
d lost his footing on the slippery slope and slid for several inches. The edges of the muddy skid mark were still sharp and distinct—not yet smoothed by the rain and runoff.

  “Got it. Let’s get the snakes over here,” Adams said. He reached for the radio toggle switch.

  Hollister and Adams saw the enemy gunner at the same moment—just as he steadied the large bull’s-eye front sight on his antiaircraft gun on the nose of the chopper.

  Plexiglas, metal, and debris showered the inside of the loach. The unmistakable klunking sounds of machine-gun rounds hitting the fuselage of the tiny chopper drowned out any other sounds.

  “Hold on!” Adams yelled—unaided by the intercom.

  Suddenly the trees in front of the chopper and the enemy gunner disappeared in a blur as the chopper began to violently spin to the right and lose altitude.

  Hollister heard the first few words of Adams’s Mayday call, telling the others they were going down, when several feet of tree branches came through the open door of the chopper. He heard the sharp cracking of large tree limbs shearing off under the falling chopper.

  From somewhere in the chaos, Adams’s left hand came across the chopper to grab for Hollister. The kind of move a parent would make for a child in the midst of a car crash.

  Hollister looked to his left and saw the tree branches give way, exposing the ground below. The chopper was on its left side and falling through a large tree, heading for the slope of a grassy hillside below.

  The impact was so violent that Hollister temporarily lost his orientation, sight, and hearing. He pulled his right hand toward his face, away from the large, leafy branch still inside the cockpit, and slid it down his chest to search for the quick release on the four-point seat-belt assembly.

  CHAPTER 31

  AS QUICK AS IT happened—it was silent. The only thing Hollister could hear was something dripping and the ticking of hot metal cooling and changing shape. He could only guess it was somewhere in the turbine engine only inches behind his head.

  “Chief?” he said, unsure if he was whispering or yelling. All he knew was his breathing was restricted by the tightened grip the safety belts had taken during the fall. And all he could think of was fire. He had seen choppers burn before and wanted to be as far away from the crashed loach as he could before something ignited the aviation fuel.