Balefires

by David Drake

  ***

  Lieutenant Worthington turned back to an angry soldier, scratching the brown hair that lay close to his scalp. On the card table in front of him were laid three sections of relief map, joined and covered by a layer of clear acetate.

  "Look, Casely," the officer said with ebbing patience," I know you're shook; we're all shook. And on top of that, I've got to keep this troop running until they get a replacement for Fuller out here. But I'm not going to send the troop back south to blow up a goddamn idol just because you have bad dreams about it. Besides, look here-"he thrust the map toward the TC, stubby finger pointing a long rectangle shaded in red crayon on it-"the location is off limits since six this morning until Sunday midnight. Somebody else is operating in there, I guess, and they don't want us shooting at each other."

  The redhead's hands clenched. "I'm telling you," he grated, his voice tight, "it's coming for us. First Jody, then the captain-hell, what makes you think it's going to quit when it gets Peacock and me? All of you were there."

  "Captain Fuller was eaten by a tiger," the lieutenant snapped."Now why don't you cut the crap and get back to your track?"

  "Goddamn funny tiger that doesn't leave footprints-"

  "So it jumped! Are you going to get out of here, or are you going back to Quan Loi under guard?" Worthington started to rise out of his lawn chair to lend his words emphasis.

  For an instant it seemed the enlisted man would hit him; then Casely turned and stalked off without saluting. Well, salutes weren't common in the field anyway, the lieutenant told himself as he went back to his job of sorting out the mess the captain had left for him.

  Under the tarp by the supply track, Sergeant Peacock sat at another card table sipping juice from the five-gallon container there. He looked up as Casely approached. First platoon had gotten back late from a convoy run, and a few of the men were still eating their supper nearby.

  "Can't you do something about him, Sarge?" the TC begged. His body, under its tan, had an unhealthy hue that the field first noted without comment. The younger man was about to crack.

  "Well, I guess he's right," the Negro said without emphasis. "I know what you're thinking, it was a bad dream-"

  "The same dream twice in a row!" Casely broke in, "and you had it too." He drew a cup of juice from the container, and the action seemed to steady him. "Jesus Christ, you can't tell me that's just a coincidence, not with the things that happened right when we were dreaming!"

  The big noncom shrugged. "So maybe we smelled something," he agreed, "and it made us think about that stinkhole we opened up the other day. It could do that, you know. Maybe some tiger was using the place for a cave and caught the smell from it. The dream don't mean anything, that's all I'm saying. If there's a tiger roaming around, we'll shoot it the next time."

  The redhead took a sip of his juice and sloshed it around in his mouth. He grinned wryly. "Sarge," he said, "I almost think you believe that. Even though you know damn well that the only chance for you and me and maybe the rest of the outfit is to blow up that idol before it gets us too. Stands to reason that if we see it dreaming with only one arm and if we blow the rest of it to smithereens, it won't be able to come for us at all."

  The sergeant chuckled."Well, you better hope you're wrong, son, 'cause they aren't going to let us go back and blow that thing up. Be a fine thing if the arvins ambushed us or we ran into a sheaf of our own one-five-fives, wouldn't it?"

  "God damn it, how do you stay so calm?"the younger man exploded. Sergeant Peacock looked him up and down before answering, "Well, I tell you, son, when I was about your age in Korea, my platoon was holding a ridge that the gooks wanted real bad. They came at us with bayonets; you know those old Russian ones, seventeen inches in the blade? There was one coming right for me and I swear he was the biggest gook I ever saw, bigger than me even. I had a carbine with a thirty-round box, and I shot that son of a bitch right through the chest. I mean I shot him thirty goddamn times. And he kept coming.

  "I couldn't believe it. There was blood all over the front of his uniform, and he just kept coming. I put the last shot into him from closer than I am to you, and then he stuck his goddamn bayonet all the way through my guts before he died. I said to myself, Mrs. Peacock, your favorite son isn't coming back 'cause the gooks got zombies fighting for them. But I was wrong both times. They fixed me up in Japan and had me back with the rest of the unit before the ceasefire. And that gook wasn't magic either; he was just tougher than anybody else in the world. Since then I just haven't let anything scare me-especially not magic, even when I could see it. That all went out of me when the bayonet slipped in."

  Casely shook his head in resignation."I hope to God you can say that tomorrow morning," he muttered. "And I hope to God that I'm around to hear you." He walked off in the direction of his track.

  Bailey and Jones sat in front of the cupola, playing cribbage and keeping a desultory watch on the surrounding jungle. Bailey was driving now that Jody was gone; that meant that only one of the machine guns in back would be manned in a firefight. Christ, why should he worry about that? Casely asked himself savagely. "Hey, snake," the others greeted him. The TC nodded. He climbed into the cupola and sighted along the barrel of the cal fifty. It didn't give him the comfortable feeling it sometimes did.

  "Say, Red," Jones said, keeping his eyes on his cards, "you been looking kinda rocky. Just for tonight, Pete and I thought we'd cover for you and let you get some sleep."

  "No, thanks a lot, man, but no."

  "Aw, come on, Red," Bailey put in. "You're so beat you're gonna fall right off the track if you don't get some sleep. Hell, we can't have that happening to a short-timer with only twenty-seven days left, can we?"

  "Twenty-eight," Casely corrected automatically. God, that close to going home and this had to happen! It would have been bad enough to get zapped by the dinks now, but, hell, you figure on that…

  "What do you say, man?" Bailey prompted.

  "Sorry, I really do appreciate it. But I'm not going to sleep tonight. I know what you're thinking, but I'm right. If it gets me, it's going to get me awake. That's how it is."

  Below the TC's line of sight, Jones caught Bailey's eyes. The driver frowned and gave a shrug. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair for six," he counted morosely.

  The sky was beautiful. Cloud streaks in the west broke the brilliant sunset into three orange blades stabbing across the heavens to bleed on a wrack of cumuli. The reflecting wedges, miles high, stood like three keystones of an arch, more stunning than any sunrise could have been. Swiftly they shrunk upward, deepened, disappeared. The same clouds that had made the display possible blocked off the moon and stars utterly. It was going to be another pitch-black night.

  Jones stepped around to the cargo hatch and pulled three beers out of the cooler. He handed them up to the TC to open with the church key hanging from the side of the cupola. No pop-tops in Nam. Christ, little enough ice, Casely thought as he sipped his warm Pabst. What a hell of a place to die in!

  Footsteps crunched on the gravelly soil. Casely's heart jumped as he turned around to find the source of the sounds. Tiger, monster, whatever, the thing could be on you before you saw it in this darkness."How's it going?"Sergeant Peacock's familiar voice asked.

  The TC relaxed, almost able to laugh at his fright. "Not bad till you scared the crap out of me just now."

  "You keep cool," the sergeant admonished. He didn't attempt to climb onto the back deck; instead, he stood beside the ACAV, his head a little below the level of its sides. Casely climbed out of the cupola and squatted down beside it to see the big Negro better.

  "You could have gone back on the supply bird tonight," Peacock said, his voice low but audible to Jones and Bailey inside the track now as well as to the TC.

  Casely didn't care. He could live anything down, if he had more than a night or two to live. In normal tones he replied, "Didn't figure that was going to do much good, Sarge. We're at least ten klicks away from where we fo
und that thing, right?" The field first nodded.

  "Well, stands to reason that if it can follow us anyways at all, it could just as easy follow me back to Quan Loi. At least here I got a chance." His left hand reached out and patted the heavy barrel of the cal fifty, sticking more than three feet out from the cupola gunshield. "Oh, I know," the redhead went on, "the captain had a gun, and Jody was right here when it got him-but Christ, back at Quan Loi or Di An there wouldn't be a goddamn thing between me and it."

  The sergeant chuckled without much humor. Casely thought he could see the outline of a machete, buckled onto the pistol belt under the massive bulge of the black's stomach. The only other time the TC could remember Peacock actually wearing the big knife was the evening they got word that the firebase was being hit by everything from one-oh-sevens on down and that the NDPs could expect their share any moment. "Hey, you want a beer?" he questioned. "It's warm, but-ohChrist!"

  The younger man leaped back into his cupola. "What's the matter?" the sergeant demanded. Then his nostrils wrinkled.

  "Flares!" the noncom shouted at the top of his lungs. "Everybody shoot up flares!"

  "What the hell?"Jones blurted in confusion as he and Bailey stuck their heads up out of the cargo hatch. The bolt of the cal fifty in the cupola clanged loudly as Casely snatched back the charging handle. Across the laager somebody had heard the sergeant's bellow and obeyed enthusiastically with a pair of white star clusters. They shot up like Roman candles, drawing weird shadows with their short multiple glare and silhouetting Sergeant Peacock himself as he pounded across the dirt toward the command track. A horrible stench lay over everything.

  The flares burned out. The sergeant disappeared, black into the deeper blackness. Lt. Worthington lurched into sight at the flap of the command tent, his rifle in his hand. Then the sergeant bellowed, a terrible mixture of hatred and surprise that almost drowned out the hiss of another flare going up. In the cupola of three-six, Casely cursed with effort as he swung the squealing armor around and pointed the big machine gun in across the NDP.

  "Red, what in God's name are you doing?" Jones shrieked. The flare popped and began floating down on its parachute. Sergeant Peacock was between three-six and the command track. His bloated shadow writhed across the soil; neither of his feet were touching the ground. Casely pressed down the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The shattering muzzle blast pocked the sides of the command tent as the red tracers snicked out past it. The stream of fire was whipping almost straight across the laager, a long raking burst endangering everybody in the troop as it lashed the air just over Sergeant Peacock's head. The field first was struggling titanically with nothing at all; his right hand slashed the glinting machete blade again and again across the air in front of him while his left seemed clamped on the invisible something that held and supported him.

  The southern sky brightened, flickered. Not another flare, Jones realized, not thunder either as the sound shuddered toward him. Arclight, a strike on the area they had started to laager in two nights back.

  All around the NDP, men were shouting in confusion. The lieutenant had started running toward the field first, then collapsed gagging as he took a deep breath. Diesels rumbled, but no one else had started shooting. The barrel of Casely's machine gun was cherry red. You could watch tracers start to tumble in screaming arcs as soon as they left the burnt-out barrel, but the TC continued hosing the air. Sergeant Peacock gave a choked cry; his machete snapped, then dropped from his hand. At the same instant, the cal fifty came to the end of its belt of ammunition and stuttered into silence. The TC's despairing curses were barely audible over the rising thunder of bomb blasts raking the jungle south of them.

  There was an incongruous pop from the air beside Sergeant Peacock. The field first dropped to the ground, unconscious but alive. With a smile of incredulous hope etched on his face by the last glow of the flare, Casely staggered out of his cupola. His eyes were fixed on the rippling glare in the south, and he didn't seem to notice when Jones plucked his sleeve.

  "God bless the Air Force," the TC was whispering. "God bless the Air Force."

  Something Had to Be Done

  There's a mistake in this story which a fan who'd been a unit clerk called to my attention. I haven't corrected it for this appearance, but I want to point it out.

  A character is described as wearing "a Silver Star (medal) with V for Valor." The clerk explained that the Silver Star was by definition an award for valor; there was no additional V endorsement as there might be with the (lower-status) Bronze Star or Army Commendation Medal.

  I made the mistake because I based the description on a real soldier whom I knew with 2nd Squadron and whom I'd been told had been awarded a Silver Star with V for his courage at Fort Defiance. Obviously I was told wrong. My bet now is that the guy got a Bronze Star with V because he was a Spec 4 and, quite frankly, medals were more a matter of rank than of merit in Viet Nam. (I know of a lieutenant colonel who got a Silver Star for being so detested by his men that they shot down his helicopter when he flew over them on a road march. The loss was attributed to enemy action, of course.)

  But that brings up the question of truth, which is one I wrestle with a lot. I wrote these stories very close to the period of their setting, and they're as true as I could make them-but what the people on the ground "knew" isn't necessarily the truth.

  For example, there was a widely hated form of 90-mm ammunition, a shrapnel round called Green Ball (from the nose color) or Dial-A-Dink (from the fact that you rotated the fuse to detonate the round at a chosen distance from the gun; ideally just short of the dink, the Vietnamese, you were trying to kill). It was a complex and not particularly reliable round. We got a lot of it, and it was always the first thing tank commanders burned up during Mad Minutes when they were firing as many rounds as possible into the darkness for sixty seconds.

  The 90-mm gun of our M48 tanks had a T-shaped muzzle brake. I was told that Green Ball had a tendency to blow off the front half of the brake, and it was certainly true that many of the tanks had damaged muzzle brakes.

  Actually, the damage (I now know) had nothing to do with the type of ammunition. It was simply a result of guns firing thousands of rounds in jungle anti-guerrilla operations, when they'd been designed to fire hundreds of rounds (at most) during armored battles in Europe. Because we disliked Green Ball, we blamed the failures on the ammunition.

  So you can't depend on my fiction to tell you the truth… but as for how it felt and what we thought, that's real and I stand by it today. Writing short stories and writing novels are two different things-as different as writing prose fiction and scripting for television. There are people who do both superbly well (Arthur C. Clarke above all), but the ability to do one doesn't say much about the likelihood that the same person will be able to do the other. The marketplace today is geared to novels. That's fine, and it's by writing novels that I earn my living.

  But I came up through short stories, which necessitated me developing skill in writing tight prose. "Something Had to Be Done" is the best I've ever done at packing a story effectively in a brief compass. I'm very proud of it.

  "He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir," the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. "You can't mistake his face."

  Capt. Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men's room. "Sergeant Morzek?" he called.

  Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and a deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, "Yeah, be right with you." Richmond thought he smelled gin.

  "You the other ghoul?"the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeant's chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of service stripes tha
n the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant's breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn't toss many of those around.

  The sergeant's cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zippered AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict's; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity.

  The sergeant laughed starkly. "Pretty, aren't I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to."

  "Umm," Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. "Well, the car's in back… if you're ready, we can see the Lunkowskis."

  "Yeah, Christ," the sergeant said, "that's what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis." He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last.

  Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, "I take it Pfc Lunkowski was one of your men?"

  "Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks," Morzek agreed with a chuckle."Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?"

  "You were under heavy attack?"