Mafia III

by Marsheila Rockwell

  1

  * * *

  Vietnam, December 1965

  The man walking point went down first.

  Next was a kid from Springdale, Arkansas, nineteen years old. Two nights earlier, he had tried to interest Lincoln Clay in a reel-to-reel tape of a country and western singer named Porter Wagoner. Lincoln hadn’t heard anything in Wagoner’s tunes that spoke to his life and asked the kid if he had any Marvin Gaye or James Brown.

  Now Lincoln was flattening himself on the muddy path, wearing the kid’s blood on his face.

  Sustained fire erupted from the jungle darkness to his left, the south side of the pathway. At the first burst, everybody had hit the dirt, but some, like the kid whose name Lincoln couldn’t remember, hadn’t dropped fast enough. The heavy, continuous thumping sounded to Lincoln like BARs, no doubt stolen or bought from the ARVN soldiers to whom they’d been issued. American advisers and South Vietnamese troops returned fire, some of the Vietnamese pumping grenades at the ambushers from their M7 grenade launchers.

  “Where’s that mortar?” someone called. “Thompson!”

  “Thompson’s hit!” someone else shouted back.

  The mortar crew had been a couple of men behind Lincoln in the line. Lincoln emptied his M16’s magazine, ejected it, slammed another one in, then slithered through the mud. He found Thompson there, with the lower right quarter of his face shredded. Behind him, a skinny black guy cowered, tears glistening in the flickering light of the illuminating rounds, his arms wrapped around the mortar.

  “Jenks,” Lincoln said. “We need that mortar.”

  “Thompson’s hurt b-b-bad,” Jenks said.

  “He’s dead,” Lincoln said. “Come on, give it here.”

  The mortar crew’s third man was just called Breeze, for reasons Lincoln had never known. He was a white kid from Oregon or Washington, someplace like that, and he was just about always high. He was facedown in the mud, his arms thrown over his head. Alive, Lincoln figured, but checked out.

  “Come on, Jenks,” Lincoln said again. “I’ll handle it.”

  Jenks stuttered something unintelligible, but he let Lincoln pry the mortar from his hands. Lincoln slipped off the path with it, jammed the base against a tree, and slotted the mortar tube into the base plate. “Give me your towel!” he said. Jenks shoved a rag into his hands. Lincoln wrapped it around the tube.

  “Round,” he said.

  With quivering hands, Jenks passed him one. Lincoln shoved it into the tube and directed the tube more or less at where the fire was emanating from. He triggered it, then shielded his eyes from the explosion that followed. Jenks handed him another round, and Lincoln rammed it home, only the towel protecting his hands from the heat of the tube.

  By the fifth mortar round, the gunfire from the jungle seemed to have tapered off. “WP,” Lincoln said.

  Jenks fumbled in Thompson’s pack for a few seconds, then came up with a white phosphorous round. Lincoln triggered it, and a wall of white heat sprouted where the ambush had originated, illuminating the jungle to near-daylight levels. Heat and the mingled smells of burning flesh and foliage washed over him.

  “That’s some good mortar work, Private,” someone said from behind Lincoln. He turned to see Captain Franklin standing there, his hands on his hips and a big grin on his ruddy, open face. “Where’d you learn that?”

  Lincoln didn’t want to admit that he’d been practicing with homemade explosives since childhood, alongside his adopted brother, Ellis. Wilson Tubbs was their father’s explosives genius, back home in New Bordeaux, and Sammy Robinson didn’t object to Wilson’s giving the boys lessons in the finer arts of making things go boom.

  “I just pay attention,” Lincoln said. “Guess I got lucky.”

  “Luck, hell,” Franklin said. “You’re my mortar man now.”

  Lincoln jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about them?”

  “Thompson’s history. Breeze is stoned out of his gourd. Jenks can work with you.”

  “Long as he carries the mortar,” Lincoln said. Making demands of officers was a good way to wind up on the wrong side of the people who could order you into a world of hurt. Still, if he was going to get anything out of the captain, now was the time. “I need my hands free for my weapon.”

  “Deal,” Franklin agreed. “Just stay close to Jenks. He’s pretty shaken up.”

  “He ain’t the only one,” Lincoln said, but the officer had already walked away.

  • • •

  “It don’t make sense,” Lincoln said. He was sitting in a circle with Jenks and four other guys, chowing down on C rations. Breeze was there, too, but only physically. In his head, Lincoln figured, he was off in Tibet or Timbuktu or some damn place. “We’re, what, four clicks from our objective? Why ambush us here? Why not concentrate their forces around the village? They gotta know that’s where we’re headed. And they gotta know we’re comin’ from three directions at once.”

  “How would they know that?” The questioner was Ramos, a Puerto Rican kid from Spanish Harlem, someone Lincoln respected as a hard case who would give as good as he got in a fight.

  “Man, ain’t nothing happens in this jungle the VC don’t know about. A lizard pisses under a bush, old Victor Charlie’s watching him. How do you think they knew where to set that ambush?”

  “I didn’t think about that,” Jenks said.

  Lincoln nodded toward the South Vietnamese strike force traveling with the platoon. “You got to figure at least a quarter of those guys are Vietcong sympathizers,” he said. “Back in camp, there’s more. The girl who does your laundry might have a boyfriend in the VC. The Buddhist priest who sits near your hut. You can’t trust anybody in this fuckin’ country.”

  He tore into his second carton of rations. He had traded a favor, to be named later, with the guy who’d been the first to grab Thompson’s box. He figured it was a safe trade, because the chances that the guy would still be alive at the end of the mission were probably fifty-fifty at best, and if they both survived, Lincoln could simply deny any memory of the exchange if he didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t like the guy would be able to take the meal back later.

  “Point is,” he went on, “if they know the village is being attacked from three sides, why not spend their time setting up defenses there? Booby traps and such. Then meet the attack with all they got, instead of sending out little ambush teams to get slaughtered?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramos answered. “That makes sense to me.”

  “If it was me,” Lincoln said, “I’d only do it to buy time.”

  “How you mean?” Jenks asked.

  “Look, they know we’re comin’, right? From the north, east, and west? So if they run anywhere, it’ll be toward the south, where we got most of our forces.”

  “Right,” Jenks said, clearly not catching on.

  “So maybe they just want to delay us a little. Give them time to get something out of the village they don’t want to be there when we show up.”

  “Like what?”

  “A weapons cache, some high-up VC muckety-muck, I don’t know.”

  “You think they already moved whatever it is?” Ramos asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” Lincoln abandoned what was left of his rations and went to find Franklin. The captain was sitting on the tree stump with a map unfolded across his knees, a flashlight in one hand and a pencil in the other. Lincoln waited until the man looked up, acknowledging him, then explained his theory.

  “You could be right,” the captain said when he was finished. “But that doesn’t change our mission.”

  “We’re coming in from the west,” Lincoln said. “Let me have a few guys and we can hook south, maybe cut them off before they di-di
.”

  “Lincoln, I need you. You’re my mortar guy.”

  “I can leave you Jenks and Breeze.”

  “They’re worthless.”

  “Sir, if the VC are trying to hustle something out of that village, don’t it make sense that it’s something we want? They’ll boogie south for a while, then shift east or west until they’re clear of us, before heading north with it. We don’t have a big window here, and it’s gettin’ smaller all the time.”

  Franklin studied him. “Now you’re a mortar genius and a tactician?”

  Lincoln shrugged. No need to tell the officer that he just figured the Vietcong would do what he had done dozens of times back home. If the police—those who hadn’t been properly compensated ahead of time—showed up at your door, you did whatever you could to stall them while product was flushed or weapons were hidden or whatever they were looking for was otherwise made to disappear.

  That VC ambush hadn’t been meant to eliminate the threat—they’d have used considerably more men for that. It had been a delaying tactic, nothing more.

  And you didn’t delay the inevitable without a good reason.

  Franklin bit down on the end of the pencil, then gave a nod. “Okay, Private Clay. The name of the game here in Vietnam is going to be unconventional warfare, and I guess there’s nothing more unconventional than letting an untested infantryman lead a task force on an entirely unauthorized side mission. Just remember this—if it goes south, you didn’t have my permission. You deserted. You okay with that?”

  Lincoln considered only briefly. He could get with the program, stay with the platoon, and take part in the clearing of the village—ultimately, he suspected, to no purpose. Or he could take advantage of this rare opportunity to go off on his own, to risk his life but maybe accomplish something.

  When it had come time to register for the draft, Sammy had taken him aside and said he could fix it so Lincoln didn’t have to go. Lincoln had appreciated the offer, but he knew most young men didn’t have that advantage. Something stirred in him when he thought it over—patriotism, maybe, some sense of duty to country and flag. Sammy had drilled into him from boyhood that the only loyalty that really mattered was to family, which in his case meant Sammy, who’d made a man of Lincoln; Sammy’s late wife, Perla; and his brother, Ellis; and beyond that, to the mob that Sammy ran.

  Lincoln understood that, accepted it. But Sammy, Perla, and Ellis had been a tight-knit family. He had been an orphan, taken into their family but still somehow apart from it in small but genuine ways. The army, he’d hoped, would be someplace he would really belong, for once.

  Anyway, he couldn’t bring himself to take the easy way out that Sammy offered. Besides, he had justified, maybe he would learn something in the jungles of Southeast Asia that he could use back home, in the swamps and alleyways of Louisiana.

  Here, faced with a decision to bow to authority or to flout it, he made the obvious choice. “I’ll see if I can round up a few volunteers,” he said. “Ones who don’t mind bein’ called deserters if it turns bad. Or gettin’ killed, either.”

  “You going to take some of the ARVN strikers?” Like everybody else Lincoln had met here, he pronounced the acronym for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as “Arvin.”

  “Rather not.”

  “It’s their war,” Franklin reminded him. “We’re just advisers.”

  “Then I’d advise ’em to stay out of my way when my finger’s on a trigger.”

  “Clay,” Franklin said, something like admiration passing briefly across his face, “you’re a shitty soldier, you know that? But you just might make one hell of a warrior.”

  • • •

  Ramos had been the first to hop on board with what Jenks was calling Lincoln’s “suicide mission.” Then O’Malley, a broad-faced Irish kid from outside Boston, had declared that it sounded like a good time to him. Rutt and Fisher had been next, and then, as if afraid of being left behind, Jenks agreed. Seeing that the rest of his “mortar team” was going, Breeze declared that he was in, but Lincoln told him the squad was full and he would have to stay with the platoon.

  They left the mortar with Breeze so they didn’t have to carry it and took off at a steady trot. The streets of New Bordeaux generally made sense, but the swamps outside the city were without signposts or landmarks, and Lincoln had always managed to find his way through those, so he wasn’t worried about getting lost. He knew which way was north, and knowing that kept him on course.

  The jungle held plenty of dangers that weren’t posed by the enemy—snakes, poisonous insects and plants, even the occasional tiger among them—but Lincoln didn’t have time to worry about those. If they were going to intercept whatever the VC were hustling out of the village, they had to move fast.

  The worst part was that the regular din of the jungle—the birdcalls and monkey screeches, the constant rustling of huge leaves against rough bark—would have drowned out their progress, except that the sound of their movement alarmed those creatures sentient enough to know it signaled man, causing them to go still. In that way, sudden silence announced their presence more than anything else would have.

  Lincoln guessed it would do the same for the enemy, though. His hearing was acute, and as he listened for the expected silences surrounding his own group’s progress, he also kept an ear out for any other gaps in the jungle’s night noises.

  After about forty minutes, Jenks slammed his palms against a tree. “This sucks, man,” he said. “We’re runnin’ our asses off out here for nothin’!”

  “You didn’t have to come,” Lincoln reminded him.

  “I thought we was gonna shoot somebody,” Jenks said. “Ain’t nobody out here but us.”

  “Shut up.” Lincoln was already sorry he’d brought the kid along. “I’m listening.”

  “Listening to what?”

  Lincoln shot him a withering look. Jenks closed his mouth and looked down toward the tops of his boots.

  Listening to what? Lincoln thought. To nothing. No calling birds, no nighttime screeches.

  Someone was on the move, and it wasn’t friendlies.

  He held up a hand to keep anyone else from speaking. Concentrated. He heard night noises in the distance and focused on the direction, listened to where they stopped, where they started up again.

  Convinced he knew where the unseen men were traveling, and how fast, he said, “Time to boogie.”

  They double-timed, cross-country through dense foliage where every plant seemed designed to block their way, trip them, or snag them from above. Lincoln set an interception course, and soon the roving silences merged into one.

  Lincoln held up a fist to halt his tiny squad, then motioned the men to squat in the brush, at the edge of a small clearing. “Just a couple minutes,” he said, his voice low and calm.

  It took even less. Barely a minute later, he heard the distinctive rustle of men pushing through the jungle. He raised his M16 and waited. Only scant moonlight penetrated the overhead canopy, but there was enough to limn the VC soldiers, in their traditional black pajamas, as they broke into the clearing.

  Using hand signals, Lincoln let the others know to hold their fire, even though he itched to squeeze his own trigger. His patience was rewarded; after a few moments, the entire party was visible. They were fourteen in all, and only one of them didn’t look Vietnamese.

  He was the tallest of the group, a white man with short, swept-back hair, wearing fatigues with no visible insignia.

  “Just target the VC,” Lincoln said softly. After nods indicated acknowledgment of his order, he sighted on the last man in the line and opened fire.

  Taken by surprise, only a couple of the Vietcong were able to return fire at all, and that without effect. The white man they had been escorting tried to run, but Lincoln stopped him with a single shot to the back of the knee. The man dropped, cursing.

  In a language Lincoln didn’t know but could only assume was Russian.

  2

  *
* *

  Ramos knew some basic first aid, though he was no medic. He wrapped the Russian’s wound sufficiently to stanch the bleeding, while Lincoln cut him a crutch from a tree branch. Moving at a considerably slower pace than they’d come, they made their way back to the village that had been the search-and-destroy mission’s original objective. It was reportedly a local haven for VC activity, and with the sun rising in the eastern sky, it was easy to find by the smoke billowing from burning huts.

  When they arrived with their prisoner, Captain Franklin was overseeing the digging of an enormous hole in the center of the village. Stacked around it were the explosives that would go inside once he was satisfied with it. He saw Lincoln coming and stepped away from the men with shovels.

  “We found a whole warren of tunnels,” he said. “Killed or captured more than a hundred VC. We’re going to blow the place.”

  Lincoln ticked his gaze toward the women and children standing to one side, under armed guard. “What about them? Where will they go?”

  “I guess they’ll have to find new digs,” Franklin said. “Maybe next time they won’t let Charlie move in with them.” He eyed Lincoln’s prisoner. “Who’s that?”

  Lincoln grinned. “Brought you a present. I don’t know his name—haven’t bothered to ask—but he’s a Russian. We found him being escorted away from the village by a dozen or so VC.”

  “A Soviet agent, this far south?” Franklin sucked air through his teeth. “Washington’s gonna have a field day with this. They’re not supposed to be anywhere near here.”

  “Are we?”

  “We’re just advising the army of our host nation. They asked for our help.”

  “They pay for all those explosives?”

  “We’ve been paying for this war since the 1950s, when the French were fighting it,” Franklin said. “Now we’re just more up front about it. Slightly more up front, anyway.”

  “We have? I didn’t hear about that in school.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me, either, Clay. Some things they don’t teach.”