by Eric Meyer
I inched forward, peered around the bend, and there was nobody there. It was the pit, camouflaged with thin branches covered with earth, and I paused for the others to catch up, pointing to the pit. I stepped over it cautiously and carried on walking. You wouldn’t call it walking. It was much slower than walking. Take one step, search everywhere, using your hands to feel for booby traps, and take another step. It took forever, and still there was no sign of the enemy, and no sign of Bao Ninh. I let them catch up with me again and told them I’d found nothing.
Sergeant Canh told me we were still not at the lower level where we’d find the enemy.
“We’ve reached about twenty meters below ground, so we have a way to go.”
“You’re sure they’re here?”
I was beginning to wonder if I’d got it all wrong, and maybe this place was abandoned. Bao Ninh was hundreds of clicks away, and he’d traveled in the exact opposite direction to what I’d guessed.
“They’re here.”
I carried on down the slope, going deeper and deeper, and wondering how people could ever have lived and worked in this place. The ones who built it were peasants, farmers, herders, and yet they’d chosen to live like moles. Then again, if fleets of aircraft were dropping hundreds of tons of bombs over their heads on a daily basis, I guess it made a certain kind of sense, although they had a choice. They could refuse to act as unpaid quartermasters for the Communists. Then again, Hanoi would have ordered their immediate execution. Under the circumstances, I guess it made sense for them to dig.
I walked a few more pieces and paused. Voices. They were close, and Ray came up behind me with Sergeant Canh. I pointed further along the tunnel. “You hear them?”
He nodded.
“A few men talking, I guess around ten.”
“The rest won’t be far away,” he muttered.
This was something we hadn’t planned for, something I should have envisaged. For some reason I had in my mind we’d find them in a single large group. One of the cops carried the M60. My plan was to pin them in one place with gunfire from the assault rifles, while he set up the machine gun and tore them into bite-size chunks. If there were ten men nearby, there had to be another forty or fifty further into the tunnels.
“Is there another way out?” I asked Canh.
“Yes, there are at least two more exits. They use them as ventilation shafts, but even though they are very narrow, they are just big enough for a man to wriggle through.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Prisoner interrogation.”
Despite myself, I shuddered, imagining what that simple phrase ‘prisoner interrogation’ meant in reality. The Vietnamese had been fighting this war for a long time, and there was little love lost between the two sides. I doubted a prisoner under interrogation stood much chance of living a long and happy life.
I started forward again, reached another bend in the tunnel, and constantly checked for booby traps. There were none, and unlike the Cu Chi tunnels, these were carved out of limestone, so it was easier to see if anyone had dug a pit or suspended a grenade from the roof.
The voices were coming from a doorway cut into the side, and I held my breath as I peeked around. He was there, Bao Ninh, haranguing other men in the space carved out of the limestone. It was large, around five meters on a side and two meters high. A substantial underground room, and they’d positioned corkboards on one side with maps and charts pinned to them.
Cozy, real cozy!
I was looking at a local operations center or command post, which was no surprise. This tunnel complex occupied a position of strategic importance, and they’d have used it to plan and launch countless operations against the South.
But it was one man who interested me, the assassin behind the attempt on the President’s life. The man whose mission had ordered the destruction of the aircraft carrying my fellow Army CID officers, and whose contacts in the government and military of South Vietnam had destroyed the careers of Van Le and Van Lam, as well as my own and put a question mark over the career of Ray Massey.
Hell, what was I thinking? Screw the careers, we almost died, and they sure did their darndest to kill us all.
I inched back and explained what I had in mind. The cop with the M60 quietly positioned himself on the floor of the tunnel. Another man knelt beside him with a new belt ready to reload. The trick was to keep it simple. Toss in a grenade, and force them to come out and meet a long burst from the machine gun.
I pulled out a grenade but had a last-minute thought. “Sergeant Canh, what time do the bombers come over?”
“Immediately after dawn. I believe the enemy come up for a few minutes of daylight, and the idea is to catch them while they’re still on the surface.” He grimaced, “Unfortunately the bombing is so regular, they know when they’re coming over, and they stay underground.”
“And the time now?”
He checked his watch. “04.30.”
“Dawn is around 06.30, so we need to be out of here and clear the area before then. Two hours, it’ll have to be enough. Provided we’re out of here. Lock and load, guys, it’s time.”
I pulled the pin from the grenade and started walking back to the entrance to the operations room. A second later the shit hit the fan. A man walked out of the room and almost bumped into me. His eyes opened as wide as saucers, and he dived back inside, screaming a warning. I let the lever fly from the grenade, counted two seconds, and tossed it through the doorway. More screams, and men were diving for cover. Two came through the entrance, and I popped them with a single bullet apiece, remembering just in time to dive for the ground as the grenade detonated in a massive roar.
More screams, sobs of the wounded and the dying, but there wasn’t time to go in and finish them; men were shouting orders from further down the tunnel, and they’d be on us in seconds. I raced back past the M60 and threw myself down as a hail of bullets whistled toward us. They’d reacted fast. Too fast, both the gunner and the loader threw up their arms and fell backward, and all of a sudden we had an unknown number of hostiles racing toward us, and the machine gun was silent.
“Ray!”
“I’m on it.”
He grabbed for the gun, found the trigger, and squeezed, firing a long burst that tore into the enemy. All of a sudden running toward the round eyes to fight off the attack didn’t seem such an attractive idea. I replaced the belt, the gun roared again, and we were out of bullets. But the Viets had fallen back, and we raced back to the scene of devastation in the operations room. Inside was a bloody mess, with bodies, groaning men, and blood soaking into the earth floor. Ray put a bullet into a VC who was trying to drag a pistol from his belt while I raced from body to body, looking for Bao Ninh.
I nearly fell for an enemy playing possum. As I walked past, he seized my ankle, trying to trip me up, and aimed a wicked-looking knife at my guts. I clubbed him with the rifle, and he dropped the knife, but he groped around the floor, searching for the hilt to pick it up and finish the job. I felt disposed to help him, so I saw it lying where it had fallen, grabbed it, and held it out. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
He tried to snatch it from my hand, but I plunged it down into his chest, rotating the blade to free it. He gasped, trying to suck in air, and as the blade came out, a loud sucking noise came with it, accompanied by a gout of blood. His eyes glazed over, and I continued hunting through the bodies. Twice more Ray put a North Vietnamese out of his misery and our misery, and when I came to the last man, he wasn’t there. The reason was obvious. On the far side of the cavern we came across a narrow shaft leading away to another part of the tunnel system. A ventilation shaft, an escape shaft, it could have been anything, but he’d used it to get away. The question was where did it lead?
The cops crowded into the room, and I pointed it out to them. “He got away. I’m going after him. Remember, the bombers come over just after dawn. We need to be a long way away from this place by then.”
I sw
apped my rifle for the pistol Sergeant Canh carried and prepared to go into that shaft. Although the Vinh Moc tunnels were nothing like Cu Chi, this shaft was just like them. A narrow, fetid space, and I felt an overwhelming sense of dread about going in there. But it had to be done.
“Ray, cover me, and make sure they don’t come in behind me. And don’t forget the bombers.”
“You’ll be back in no time,” he grinned, “Don’t worry about it. When this is all over, we’ll find the nearest bar and celebrate. Good luck, Carl.”
The girls echoed good luck, and I crawled into the narrow, terrifying space. The whole of Vinh Moc stank, but this was worse, and I assumed somewhere along this shaft I’d find their latrines or the waste food dump. Maybe a couple of corpses, the stink was that bad. At first the shaft was level, but after I’d been crawling for a half-hour it began to slope steeply upward. The stench was terrible, and I nearly fell into a perpendicular shaft that plunged straight down, the sewage pit, carrying the product of the bowels into the bowels of the earth.
I climbed over it and continued pointing upward, and after an interminable climb, I came outside and poked my head out into the blessed fresh air. After a cautious look around to make sure the assassin wasn’t waiting for me in ambush, I crawled out and began searching for the entrance to Vinh Moc to get back to the others. Time was running out, and we needed to be out of this place in less than an hour and a long way away. It took too long, and the minutes are ticking by when I finally found the entrance and went back underground.
The sound of shooting was loud, and it was obvious the enemy were fighting back. The M60 was silent, out of ammunition, but they were keeping up a good rate of fire with rifles, and I heard two pistols firing. That would be the girls, Le and Lam. I raced back down the tunnel, conscious of the minutes becoming seconds, and the seconds disappearing like water into a drainage channel. I shouted to tell them I was on the way and not to shoot.
The situation was grim when I reached them. Three more of the cops were dead, and only Sergeant Canh was alive and unwounded. Ray had a wound in the side of his stomach, and blood was leaking into his ODs, but he insisted he was okay to keep going.
“We have to get out of here. The bombers are due over any time soon, and if Sergeant Canh is right, they won’t be late.”
He nodded. “What about Bao Ninh?”
“He vanished, but there’s no time to worry about him right now. We have to get out of here before those bombers arrive, so start pulling back.”
“The police post,” Canh said quickly, “We will be safe there.”
We retraced our steps out of the tunnel and came to the exit. Behind us, the enemy was keeping up a strong barrage of fire, and we had to run to keep ahead of them. Occasionally, me and Ray turned to pop a few bullets toward them to try to slow them down. We reached the entrance, and ahead of us the open-air. We ran outside into a torrent of machine gun bullets, and we instinctively threw ourselves down on the ground.
“Where is he?” I asked Ray, who had a good eye for ground.
He was searching around, and eventually he pointed to a spot around one hundred meters away. One of the ventilation shafts, and they’d managed to get a light machine gun into position to cover the open ground, the trees and foliage flattened by the incessant bombing. The only way in or out of the tunnel, unless you knew the location of the shafts, was across that ground. And the machine gunner would pick us off before we made the first ten meters. Behind us the hostiles had stopped, sending the occasional shot in our direction to remind us they were still there.
In the distance, we heard the drone of fighter-bombers getting closer, and in that moment we stared at each other, not voicing the obvious fact that was staring us in the face. We’d come this far and could no further. If we went back into the tunnels to shelter from the bombs, they’d rake us with automatic fire, and we wouldn’t get more than a few meters. If we tried to get away, that machine gun would rip us apart. And if we stayed where we were, the bombs would fall, and our chances of survival were so slight as to be infinitesimal.
Ray looked at me. “We’re fucked.”
The girls gave him looks of dismay. “Are we going to die?”
He nodded in my direction. “Ask him.”
“Carl, tell me there’s a way out of this,” Le pleaded, “There has to be something.”
I shook my head. “Ray’s right. We’re fucked.”
What made it even worse was to think those gooks were grinning at us. Laughing like crazy because the men who’d come to shoot up their cozy little tunnel system were about to die. They wouldn’t fall to enemy bullets but torn apart by their own bombs. A real laugh, hilarious, and right then I wanted nothing more than to give them a taste of Uncle Sam’s lead and show them it wasn’t amusing, not to us, not to them, not to anybody. But I was dreaming, we had minutes left to live. I looked across that open ground, one hundred meters away, and a man stood up.
Bao Ninh, and he was gloating, mocking us. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. The single word reached us, faint, but still audible.
“Checkmate.”
Chapter Eleven
Lieutenant Elliott Braun glanced through the Perspex, satisfied himself the sky was clear of immediate threats, and checked the target coordinates. Sighing to himself, once again he’d taken off from the carrier offshore in the South China Sea, heading for the place they’d pounded so many times before. The tunnels of Vinh Moc, and every Intelligence briefing he’d seen suggested the tunnels were cut deep into the limestone, so deep they were impervious to their bombs. And he was back, with a full load of ordnance strapped to the pylons, ready to drop onto empty ground, and every enemy combatant for several klicks would be safe, deep inside the tunnels.
Why do they time these missions the same every day? Why not come at random times and catch the bastards on the surface?
He’d asked that question several times in the briefing room, and each time he got the same answer, “Orders.”
He checked the rest of his flight, and his wingman was holding formation. Everything was looking good, and soon they could dump their bombs and go home. It had been too early for breakfast when they took off, and he felt a gnawing ache in his belly. Not long, and they could all toggle the bomb releases and go home. Another patch of South Vietnamese real estate dug over, and maybe they could consider planting. Potatoes, or something else different to the interminable rice they seemed to exist on.
The message that came into his headphones was a surprise. “Owl Flight, are you receiving me?”
That was a joke, because of his name. Braun. Not the same as brown, although some folks pronounced it that way.
Brown owl, very funny.
“This is Braun, loud and clear.”
“We have a target alteration for you. Abort your current mission. You are required to fly south to Binh An. A bunch of our guys are under heavy attack from North Vietnamese infantry, and they’ve requested assistance. Vinh Moc will have to wait for another day, Lieutenant.”
“That’s a crying shame, Control.”
“I’ll bet. When you reach Binh An, the forward air controller will take over and direct you onto target. Good hunting, Owl Flight.”
They were almost over the initial target, and he made sure the other pilots understood. “We’ll just fly down and say hello to the friendly residents of the Vinh Moc tunnels and give them a wave before we head south to pay a visit to their pals. Follow me!”
He pulled on the stick, and the nose pointed up in the air. He jerked the joystick over and kicked on the rudder to perform a flashy wingover. The rest of the pilots were a split second behind him. It was a maneuver they’d done several times before, more of a victory roll, but this time a raspberry in the face of Uncle Ho. He brought them back onto the straight and level, pushed the throttle forward to the stop, and roared away south.
* * *
We stared up into the sky, not believing the evidence of our eyes. "What the hell
!" Ray muttered, "What gives?"
I glanced at him and shrugged. There was no way those Navy flyers could have known we were down here, and yet for some reason they'd aborted the bombing attack and were flying south. Not back to the carrier, which would have been out in the South China Sea, but south would take them in the direction of… I got it then.
"They have to be heading for Binh An. The Marines are fighting a strong force of NVA, and I bet they changed the target to give our boys a hand. Jesus, I can't believe it. It's a miracle."
One hundred meters away, Bao Ninh was still standing, still looking up at the sky, and for several moments he stood rigid, and I could imagine what was going through his mind. It wasn’t anything good. His gaze dropped, and he was staring into my eyes. I could feel the metaphorical poison darts he was projecting at me. If this had been medieval times, he would have flung curses at me. But they weren’t medieval times, although parts of the country had scarcely advanced for hundreds of years.
Ray tapped me on the shoulder. “We need to get going, in case those fighter-bombers change their mind and come back.”
“I want him.”
“We all want him, Carl. But this isn’t the right time.”
We walked back the way we’d come, and Sergeant Canh led the way to his police station. We didn’t encounter any hostiles. No aircraft flew low dropping bombs or napalm. It was still early, but the sky was blue and the sun rising in the sky. A new day had dawned, and I saw none of the beauty. There was just the scarred face of South Vietnam after decades of war, the bomb craters lying close to the track, and when we reached the police post, the stone face of the building covered in scores of pockmarks from empty bullets.