But he had, and there it was. Nothing for it now.
Except continue the mission, and try to survive it. Glenn Parker was in no shape to travel, so getting him out before things turned thoroughly to shit was out of the question. So much for the mission. It would have to wait.
As to surviving, well, the options were limited. But not nonexistent.
“Shit,” he said to Korhonen. “We’re gonna do this, let’s do it right. I’ve got a couple of ideas.
The Finn broke into a smile. “You young guys always have ideas,” he said. “Sometimes they’re even good. Let’s hear it.”
Lieutenant Colonel Duong Tri Minh was getting impatient. He’d wanted to attack the Montagnard position immediately, but had been told to wait for reinforcements. Reinforcements! As if he needed them to annihilate the savages. Little did he care what his scouts had told him, that the position was well defended and that it was likely they’d lose half their number before they got through the first layer of the defenses. Defeatism! These men had been at war too long. Now all they wanted to do was go home, see the wives who probably had long since given them up for dead, embrace the children who would be children no longer. Who would probably not recognize the gaunt man in his ragged uniform as the plump young father who had left so long ago.
The colonel was not tired of the war. Far from it. He’d had very little chance to see it up close, an omission he intended to rectify.
Instead he’d been assigned to one of the many prisoner of war camps that dotted North Vietnam, where he had probably been more safe than anyone else in the country. The Americans knew where the camps were—it seemed like they knew practically everything. Not that it did them a great deal of good.
But they wouldn’t bomb their own people. So when the jets came sweeping across the compound he had often walked outside, showing his utter contempt for the roundeyes. And then he would go back inside and thoroughly beat one or more of the prisoners.
Punishment, he told them. For what you are doing to my country.
In truth, and he barely admitted this even to himself, he rather liked the beatings. Such power over another human being is seldom given. And if they died, as they sometimes did, well, that was just too bad. His reports would tell of the disease that had swept the camp. And of his heroic efforts to keep the valuable prisoners alive.
Then the Son Tay raid, and the prisoners had suddenly been shipped to Hanoi, leaving him without a job. He’d been reassigned to a coastal artillery unit, and suspected it was because his superiors didn’t really believe his stories. He’d been promoted regularly over the years, but now the promotions had stopped. Was it to be his fate to suffer in the middle ranks while the combat veterans, wearing the medals he knew he would also have earned, given the chance, came back and became full colonels and generals?
He had friends in Hanoi, people for whom he’d done little favors, like shipping them the expensive watches the pilots often wore. He campaigned tirelessly for a combat command. Few were available in the waning days of the war, and those went to experienced officers.
And when the command finally came it was to this backwater. Where nothing ever happened, where the extent of his combat was to overrun H’Mong villages whose men were all gone.
Now this chance. He would distinguish himself, that he knew. If only given the opportunity. Pull back and wait, indeed! Let the savages kill his men, as they had the unfortunate Lieutenant Trinh? And let the Americans get away?
He allowed himself to imagine the praise that would be heaped upon him when he returned to Hanoi with the prisoners trussed like so many pigs being taken to market. And the news conferences where he would be displayed prominently, perhaps even being allowed to tell the world about the lies of the Americans.
Still, he wasn’t going to disobey a direct order. To do so was tantamount to suicide. He would not attack. But if the enemy did something, he would have to protect his men, wouldn’t he?
Any good commander would. And he was a very good commander. Hadn’t the men who had served under him told him so?
Jim Carmichael wasn’t aware of the mettle of the men he would have to face, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been. The way he saw it, there was only one answer.
You had to draw them into a battle of your own choosing. On favorable terrain. And hit them with such force that they would become disorganized, fearful. A rabble.
A rabble was easy to fight. A cohesive unit wasn’t.
He could only hope what he’d seen when he’d been out with Bobby and Korhonen was typical of the enemy battalion. They’d been entirely too casual about their security. After all, the war was over, wasn’t it? What did they have to worry about here?
Besides, they’d won. Victors are often complacent.
A lot depended upon that attitude. The entire plan, in fact. He’d argued it out first with Korhonen, and after the old veteran had finally come around to his way of thinking, with Y Buon Sarpa.
Now it was on his shoulders. If it didn’t work, it was likely he’d never see another sunrise. If it did he still stood an excellent chance of getting killed.
But it was better than waiting there in the camp, knowing that at any moment the yellow rain might once again fall. Several more of the afflicted had died. Glenn was barely hanging on. He shuddered, thinking of the pain the ones still living had to endure.
Nope. This was it.
Talked yourself into it one more time, didn’t you?
Shut up, he told himself. Last thing I need is you giving me a ration of shit right now.
Lieutenant Colonel Minh was seething. Insubordination! He thought of himself as a tolerant man, but one thing he could not abide. How dare one of his junior officers question his decisions!
And it was a very good decision. The troops had to have water, did they not? Why, then, should they encamp far from a good stream? It was a lovely spot, reminding him of his home back in Vietnam. A cleared area suitable for the command post. Hills rising off in the distance, the tops wreathed in the clouds that told of the impending rainy season. Not only was the stream within easy walking distance, the sound it made as it tumbled over the rocks was immensely soothing.
And the commander of his First Company had the effrontery to tell him the position wasn’t tactically sound! That they should be seeking the high ground and avoiding any cleared areas.
Why? The enemy didn’t have aircraft. And the savages who were their only possible opponents couldn’t stand up to his battalion—one rush and they’d run away like the cowards they were.
No, the captain had spent too much time fighting the Americans. Such things might have been important then. They were not now. It was only that the man was so highly decorated that kept him from being relieved on the spot. Perhaps in chains.
He settled in for the evening. His tent had already been erected and his aide had gathered enough moss to make a very nice mattress for his bed. His belly was full.
As he drifted off to sleep he could, he thought, faintly hear the cheers of the crowd in Hanoi when he brought back the captives.
Chapter 17
No more recon teams came in that day, nor on the second. On the face of it that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The prisoner snatch had been planned as a quick in-and-out, where most of the other teams had been given road watch and area recon missions. You carried enough supplies to last you six to ten days, and sometimes you even got to stay in that long.
Far more often you were compromised and the mission was scrubbed, the extraction helicopters coming in to snatch you from the jaws of the troops enclosing your team. And sometimes the choppers didn’t come, or if they did were shot down and you not only had to worry about your team, but the survivors of the crash. Oftentimes SOG missions had grown into battalion-sized operations as troops and aircraft kept being thrown into the fight.
Finn had to hope that wouldn’t be the case here. The Thais were good troops, tough fighters, but simply didn’t have the wherewithal to
fight a pitched battle across the border. Close air support was limited to a few helicopter gunships and Northrop F-5 fighter planes, the “Freedom Fighter” the U.S. government was fond of forcing its allies to take. It was a good bird, very maneuverable, easy to fly, but simply didn’t have the ordnance capacity or loiter time to make it an efficient close-air-support vehicle.
At least there was only one team with which they’d lost contact. That could have been due to any number of factors: failure of both radio and backup, the team being so close to the enemy they didn’t dare make contact, the team leader simply exercising his option not to get on the radio but to wait to be fully debriefed once safely back at the FOB.
Or it could be that they were being chased. Or that they’d been detected upon insertion, the NVA choosing to wait until the helicopters were back over the horizon before attacking.
Such things had happened all too often to the SOG teams. RT Idaho had simply disappeared, and it was as if the world had swallowed it. A recon team sent into the point of insertion of Idaho had found exactly nothing, and the team had never been heard from again. Neither of the two Americans had been turned over during Operation Homecoming, either. But then, no one had expected it. The NVA troops hated the recon teams who could bring down death and destruction with a simple call on the radio, and weren’t likely to let any of them survive.
The other teams were sending in a wealth of information, and none of the news was good. The Vietnamese had massed at least two divisions in addition to the troops of the Yellow Star. One team had almost stumbled across an artillery emplacement equipped with 105mm howitzers, within easy reach of targets across the border.
Another team had affixed a wiretap device to a landline they’d come across, the device now transmitting a stream of information that was being translated as quickly as possible. The people using the phones were speaking in code, but given the fact that the military attaché was transmitting the information back to the National Security Agency as quickly as it came in, there was no doubt the code would soon be broken.
Finn could only hope that it wouldn’t be moot. It was obvious from the reports coming in that the Viets could mount a major attack within days, if not hours.
Finn chafed at his own inactivity, but supposed that the orders to stay put were, all in all, correct. Across the border he’d be just another team member. Here he could at least coordinate, or try to, the support the teams would need if they got into trouble.
Sam Gutierrez had been up that morning, getting firsthand the reports that flowed in.
“Any word from Disneyland East?” Finn had asked him.
“Secretary of state’s trying to get together a meeting of the SEATO nations,” Sam replied. SEATO stood for the South East Asia Treaty Organization, conceived as a counterpart to NATO. It committed its signatories to come to the mutual aid of any one of their number attacked by an outside power. SEATO was intended as a bulwark against Red China, as NATO was against the Russians. But where NATO had helped deter the Soviet threat, SEATO had dissolved into a fractious forum where the only thing that got done was an endless round of meetings.
“Bet they’ll have some really good lunches,” Finn said.
“And a nice dinner at the end where they’ll all drink champagne and congratulate themselves on the strong warning they’ll deliver to Hanoi,” Sam confirmed. As the military attaché, he’d gone to any number of meetings of the sort.
“Which will be written on really soft paper so Le Duc Tho won’t hurt his hemorrhoids when he wipes his ass with it.”
“Probably,” Sam said. “More to the point, the Joint Chiefs have decided to send a battalion of Marines to ‘exercise’ with the Thais down at Pattaya.”
“Where they’ll be easy to evacuate when the NVA overruns the country.”
“Gotta send a signal, you know,” Sam said, his smile not very successfully hiding the bitterness of his tone.
Washington was famous for “sending signals.” We’ll bomb ’em, that’ll send a signal. Of course, don’t hit anything vital, wouldn’t want to piss them off too badly, now would we? Okay, that didn’t send the signal we wanted. Let’s stop bombing, that’ll show ’em we’re reasonable men. Maybe they’ll come to the negotiating table. They didn’t? Screw ’em, we’ll bomb ’em again. This time we’ll hurt ’em worse.
And the enemy regularly paid no attention whatsoever to the signals, unless it fit within his own strategic plan to do so.
“Be a better signal, they dropped the 82nd Airborne on Udorn,” Finn said.
“And you and I both know that’s not gonna happen,” Sam replied. In truth, he wasn’t all that sure how much good the 82nd would do, other than serve as a so-called tripwire, much as the 2nd Infantry Division was just behind the demilitarized zone in Korea. The thinking in higher government circles was that the American people wouldn’t stand for their sons being slaughtered wholesale, that before that happened they’d demand the really hard solutions. Which might or might not include the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The paratroops of the 82nd were very lightly armed, certainly not suited for going up against the tanks and artillery massing across the border. Besides, the rot that had set into the Army as a whole hadn’t skipped even the elite airborne unit. Drug use was common, officers and NCOs who tried to enforce discipline were often threatened with “fragging,” the desertion rate was twice what it had been back in the early sixties.
The truth was that the United States no longer had a lot of options in Southeast Asia. Armored units would take far too long to move. Besides, the planners and strategists in the Pentagon would be saying, What if this is just a feint? Intended to distract us, cause us to pull our reserves out of the States. Then the Warsaw Pact comes rolling through the Fulda Gap and we’ve got nothing to stop them with.
Such a doomsday scenario was by no means impossible. In such a case it would have to be met with nuclear weapons. You nuke us, we nuke you, and before long there’s nothing but radioactive glass where Moscow and New York used to be.
Sam had said as much to Finn.
“So we’re out here on the front line of the free world with nothing much more than our dicks in our hands,” Finn had replied.
“That’s about the size of it, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
“Why is it I suddenly feel the urge for a strong drink?”
But having even one drink was out of the question when you were running an FOB and had teams in the field. Someone had once compared it to conducting an orchestra. Finn thought it more like a ballet, with a stage measuring hundreds of square kilometers, including both the ground and the air above it, with stagehands sabotaging your every move and the audience throwing rocks.
It was later that afternoon when he got his first taste of it. It started with a radio message from an unknown source, but the voice was unmistakably American. The message came in on the secure band.
“You got some folks over across the fence?” the voice asked.
Finn was immediately on guard. No one except the military attachés’ office was supposed to have his frequency. Moreover, to be talking on this band at all meant that you must have similar equipment on the other end. But stranger things had happened. The NVA must have been able to capture any amount of secure radio equipment when Saigon fell, and an American accent wasn’t too hard to come by. And for all he knew one of the news networks might have invested in the gear and be even now looking for the scoop that would be career building for the reporter and career ruining for the interviewee. He could almost hear Walter Cronkite’s mellifluous tones announcing that evidence gathered by intrepid CBS staff proved that the Thai government was running illegal cross-border operations into a neutral county, and that the Americans were heavily involved in it.
“Cabrón said you might be a little suspicious,” the voice said.
Finn relaxed slightly. With his usual warped sense of humor Sam Gutierrez had assigned code names. Finn’s was Chingador.
“What you got?” he asked, knowing better than to press the man on the other end as to exactly who he was and from whence he was transmitting. Somewhere in-country at least. The secure radios they were using didn’t have enough range otherwise. CIA? Possibly. They still had plenty of assets in Thailand, and perhaps a few left across the border. DEA? An even greater possibility. The so-called Golden Triangle where Thailand, China, and Burma met was a drug hotspot.
“We heard something on the emergency freq,” the voice said. “Garbled, but what we got out of it was a team calling for emergency extraction. Speaker would switch back and forth between Thai and English, but what we could understand indicated they’re in deep shit. Team name is Mongoose. You got anybody out there like that?”
Finn indicated that they did, thinking furiously as he did so. Mongoose was the team that hadn’t reported in. That they’d fallen back on the emergency radio, an URC-10 handheld, meant that either the primary had failed, or the radio operator and equipment had been killed or captured. The URC-10 was air-ground exclusively, used only in last resort and with a lot of sometimes unrequited hope. It had been okay back in the days when the skies were filled with American airplanes—likelihood was somebody, somewhere would finally hear you.
That meant that whoever was on the other end of the line had air assets, and that they were fairly close.
And whoever it was would have the information necessary to contact Sam Gutierrez, get the code word and the frequency, and the clearance to talk to the FOB. Gutierrez would also obviously know who it was at the other end of the line.
Finn wondered what else his boss had neglected to share with him.
That was something he could take up with Sam later. Right now he had more important things to do.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a fix on them?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, we do. At least the coordinates where they were an hour ago. Took that long to get through to you.”
Bayonet Skies Page 21