Finn leaned out the door again, fired a magazine of 5.56mm at the bird above, thought he was probably hitting it, but the little bullets seemed to have no effect.
He dropped the empty magazine, pulled another from its pouch and slammed it home so hard the bolt released on its own, chambering another round. He took careful aim at a point ten feet ahead of the bubble nose, pulled the trigger.
The chopper shuddered as if it was in the grasp of a giant animal, pieces of it flying away, bullets striking sparks that quickly turned into flames as the fuel tank took multiple punctures. For a second Finn could only watch in wonder. Had he done that? It seemed impossible.
He quickly saw that it had been as he watched the Cobra gunship maneuver into position for another gun run. The nose-mounted minigun spat fire again, raking the enemy chopper from stem to stern. The tail boom cracked, separated, flung itself away from the bird. Absent the stabilization the chopper went into a spin, the pilot obviously fighting the controls trying to keep it stable.
It was a hopeless exercise. It went into the trees and moments later a great gout of flame marked its final resting place. Dirty black smoke rose to the skies.
Where the hell have you been? Finn soundlessly asked the Cobra. Not that we don’t appreciate your showing up when you did.
The other Cobra was having a little more trouble with the bird that had been chasing them. Its nose mount contained a forty-millimeter cannon, devastating in its effect but of a shorter range than the minigun, and firing much slower. It had to get closer, much closer to the target, exposing itself to the fire of the enemy machine-gunners. The enemy chopper once again slewed sideways to give its gunner better fields of fire, and that was its final mistake. The Cobra was a very thin target head-on like this, and the bouncing of the chopper in the air made for extremely difficult target acquisition. On the other hand, the Cobra gunner could hardly miss the huge target the side of the enemy helicopter presented. A ten-round burst, the shells flying so slowly Finn could see them, the first impacting at just about where the copilot’s head would be, the others smacking into engine, door gunner, fuel tank. One hit a rocket pod.
The enemy chopper suddenly exploded in midair, the force of the blast very nearly driving Finn out the door again. Where there had been a living, malevolent entity there was now only a cloud of dirty black smoke, pieces of the chopper spinning down into the canopy below.
Finn breathed a sigh of relief, realized he was trembling so hard his teeth were chattering. He looked out to see the lift chopper with the team riding on their strings off in the distance.
He keyed the mike. “How about we get the fuck out of here?”
Tienchai’s voice came back, as calm as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “I think maybe so,” he said. “Enough fun for one day.”
Chapter 20
The jungle telegraph was, Jim Carmichael thought, alive and well. Word had quickly spread about their victory, and there had been a steady stream of volunteers coming into Sarpa’s base camp. Montagnards from a half-dozen tribes, including those who had never before cooperated with one another, had sent representatives. Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade, Sedang, Stieng, Bru; all were there, speaking not only their own languages, barely comprehensible to anyone outside the tribe, but the bastard French they’d learned during the Indochina War and the English the Special Forces advisors had imparted.
All of them wanted to fight the Vietnamese, to carve out a homeland for themselves that would be free, for the first time in several hundred years, from outside interference. All they wanted was the instruments with which to do it.
Jim had organized a steady stream of resupply flights, the Blackbirds coming over in the dead of night dropping the freefall bundles full of weapons and ammunition, medical supplies and communications gear, mines and explosives upon which they would depend. He had been amused, upon breaking open the first bundle, to see that all of the gear bore the markings of Chinese manufacture. AKs, RPD machine guns, B-40 rockets, Semtex plastic explosive. Even the grenades were of foreign manufacture, though not the malfunction-prone stick grenades the VC and NVA had used. These were of Belgian manufacture, heavy as hell but, Jim suspected, quite reliable, as most of the things from that small but well-armed country tended to be.
The radio gear bore no U.S. markings, though, Jim noticed, it would net very well with anything the Americans had. German and U.K. manufacture, to NATO specs.
Some arms dealer was doing very well for himself, Jim thought. Wonder who the Agency’s got on contract these days. Early in the Vietnam War they’d bought all their weapons from a former U.S. Army NCO who had, as a part of his official duties during the occupation of Germany, managed to secrete an entire trainload of Nazi weapons in a warehouse in Spain. Thus the weapons that had armed the village defense groups and Civilian Irregular Defense Groups run by the Special Forces had been KAR-98 Mausers, Schmeisser submachineguns, MG-42 light machine guns, and Walther P-38 pistols.
Jim didn’t mind that the weapons were the same ones used by the enemy, thought it a good idea in fact. When the weapons reports sounded the same you didn’t know if someone had perhaps ambushed one of your patrols, or if it was just some unit testing their weapons. It gave the advantage of surprise, particularly when you were the ones doing the ambushing.
Still, he thought the emphasis on avoiding U.S. equipment altogether was just a little overdone. Was it not likely that the Montagnards, if they were acquiring the weapons from whatever source would sell them, as the cover story was supposed to be, would not also accept M-16s if that was all the supplier had?
Not that he wanted M-16s. The cynic in him said that sooner or later this support would stop, probably about the time he managed to get the former POWs out of there, and the ’Yards would once again be on their own. Their only source of supply would then be what they took from the enemy, and the enemy wasn’t using 5.56mm ammunition.
The drops were going exceptionally well. They’d lost only one bundle and that because it had fallen into the river. The enemy was avoiding the area after having lost several patrols to Montagnard ambushes, so the recovery parties could search for lost bundles without worrying about getting shot.
Sarpa had carved out a de facto homeland, into which the Vietnamese came only at their peril. He’d even made contact with the remnants of Vang Pao’s H’Mong army, themselves abandoned by their CIA supporters after the NVA and Pathet Lao had overrun the country. There would be, he had announced in a joint communiqué, a republic of the native peoples of the highlands straddling Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He was already asking for diplomatic recognition.
Jim smiled at the thought. There would be no such recognition, of that he was sure. And he was also sure that the NVA was simply biding its time. Hanoi could ill afford this thorn in its side.
The attack would be coming. Best use the time to get ready for it, rather than sending out useless communiqués.
The very first bundle had also contained all the items he’d requested to treat the yellow rain victims. There was, unfortunately, no antidote, no magic pill. All he could do was to treat the symptoms, try to maintain life force, allow the bodies to heal themselves. Some were beginning to show progress. Many, all too many, either had died or were going to.
Glenn Parker was one of those showing progress. He no longer wheezed when he breathed, a sign that his lungs were healing themselves. The bundle had contained a thoracentesis needle and syringe, which Jim had used, inserting the needle just above the floating rib into the lung, first on one side, then the other, and had drawn off several hundred CCs of yellowish pus. The improvement in Glenn’s breathing had been almost immediate.
The skin lesions had been harder to treat. Areas of heavier concentration of the agent had formed huge blisters that broke and ran constantly. The skin then sloughed off, leaving patches of raw flesh that quickly got infected by the ever-present pathogens that infested this particular area of the highlands. Jim had to treat all the patients, not
just Glenn, with a cocktail of antibiotics, as some of the pathogens responded well to the standard penicillin-tetracycline regimen, while others didn’t. Chloramphenicol became the drug of choice. Of course, chloramphenicol had a number of undesirable side effects, not the least of which was bone marrow depression.
Inasmuch as one of the effects of the mycotoxins that formed the active part of the yellow rain also depressed bone marrow, too much chloramphenicol would throw the patient into irreversible loss of red blood cells. Wouldn’t do too much good to cure the infections only to have the patient die of acute anemia.
The eyes he could do absolutely nothing about. Glenn had regained consciousness two days after Jim’s return from the ambush, only to stare at the ceiling in incomprehension.
Glenn Parker was going to be blind, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. The mycotoxins had attacked the retinas, literally searing them from his eyeballs. All Jim could see when he retracted Glenn’s eyelids was a milky-white surface that bore no resemblance to a normal eyeball.
He’d bandaged the eyes and now kept them closed, telling Glenn during his increasingly longer periods of lucidity that it was just a precautionary measure. And when Glenn had asked if he would ever be able to see again, Jim had told him, somewhat truthfully, that he didn’t know. After all, he wasn’t up on the latest medical research. Maybe there was something out there that could replace retinas. He didn’t think so, but there was no use making Glenn Parker’s psychological state worse than it was already.
And though his patient was making progress, there was simply no way to get him evacuated. Jim had asked the FOB about helicopter evacuation, had been turned down flat. The directives straight from CINCPAC absolutely forbade it. They were not willing to risk having a CH-53, that being the only helicopter with the range necessary to get to them and make it back to Thailand without refueling, shot down over Laos. There was simply no cover story that could possibly hold up under such circumstances.
Glenn would, of course, not be able to stand the physical demands of a Skyhook extraction. As it was he could barely move enough to get off his soiled cot and make it to the chamber pot Jim had set up as his latrine. Many times he didn’t. The little Montagnard nurses who provided his care and supervision uncomplainingly cleaned up the mess, paying absolutely no attention to the American’s shame and distress.
Jim knew that he couldn’t have done without the ’Yard medics and nurses. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day for him to take care of Glenn and the other casualties and still supervise the air drops, the arming and training of the new recruits, and the construction of new fighting positions.
He’d suggested to Sarpa and Korhonen that, with the influx of volunteers, it would be best to design a defense-in-depth system, rather than depend upon the one camp. Reconnaissance of the surrounding hills had allowed them to pick out key terrain upon which to build other fighting positions, each mutually supporting the others. When they were finished any attacking force would have to take out several positions before they could make any headway at all, and stood an excellent chance of being channeled into killing zones covered by both direct and indirect fire.
Would it be enough? Jim had no illusions about that. When the North Vietnamese Army came, as it most certainly would, they would be there in such force that they would quickly sweep away the outposts, overrunning each in turn just as they had during the final assault through the Central Highlands that won, finally, the long war. They would take casualties, of course. Perhaps thousands of them. But they’d always seemed to be able to absorb horrendous casualties and keep coming. There simply was no point at which body count was going to be able to stop or even slow to any great extent their advance.
Jim had tried to convince Sarpa to abandon the fixed positions, to keep his army mobile. Keep the units small, no more than company size, stay to the jungle and the jumble of rock that made up the Laotian karst, coming together only to attack specific targets. Hit the enemy were he was the most vulnerable: his supply lines, headquarters, administrative and support staff. Without that support a modern army wouldn’t be able to keep the combat battalions in the field. Unlike in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong guerrillas had been able to live off the populace, there were few people in this area upon which to subsist and those were barely able to feed themselves. Not to mention that they were implacably opposed to the Vietnamese invaders.
Sarpa had rejected the suggestion out of hand. How can I claim to have a homeland, he asked, if I don’t have a homeland to point to? Just keep supporting us with supplies, and we’ll do the rest.
There being no choice, Jim did what he could to help. But it would not be enough. That he also knew.
Still, so far they’d been successful. Another month or so and Parker might be well enough to travel. Jim’s plan was to have Montagnard litter parties bear him west, getting close enough to Thailand over perhaps a month of travel to make it across the border.
No problem, he’d thought. I’ll only have to make it through a hundred miles of the roughest terrain in the world, occupied by about half the North Vietnamese Army and all the Pathet Lao, find a boat and get across a major river, and then hope we don’t get the hell shot out of us by the Thais.
At the moment that was probably the least of his worries.
The North Vietnamese were building a road.
The information had first come to them courtesy of one of the H’Mong bands. This particular group had, during the war, operated as a CIA sponsored road watch team in the area west of Tchepone, Laos. Tchepone had been the nerve center for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, had been the objective of the disastrous Lam Son operation conducted by the South Vietnamese army, and had been the unattainable goal of any number of SOG recon teams. There had at one time been more antiaircraft artillery around Tchepone than around Hanoi. But then, the little Laotian town had been more vital to the North Vietnamese war effort than had the capital city of North Vietnam. After all, if Hanoi became uninhabitable there were lots of other places to locate the high command. On the other hand, if the Americans or South Vietnamese had managed to take Tchepone they would have exerted a stranglehold on the Trail that would have subjected the troops in the south to slow starvation and death.
Jim had, during a short stint with SOG back in the mid-sixties, been inserted into an LZ ten kilometers south of Tchepone. He’d lasted exactly fifteen minutes on the ground, the NVA spotter teams quickly warning the hunter-killer units that swarmed the LZ like a herd of angry ants. It had only been due to the efforts of a hell of a lot of aerial support that he and his team had gotten out with nothing more than a few flesh wounds.
Now the forces around Tchepone, the H’Mong reported, had been drawn down to a mere shadow of their former strength. There was little need for the Trail now that the South had been conquered. The victorious NVA divisions were being fed off the huge stocks of food left in the warehouses, arming themselves with captured weapons, firing the ammunition that remained in the armories of the defeated South Vietnamese army. Instead of guarding the Trail, they were busy mopping up the last remnants of resistance, rounding up officials of the defeated government and shipping them off to re-education camps, pacifying a sometimes restive population.
All except the engineers and some skeleton guard forces, the H’Mong said. Who were busily working on an extension of Highway 9, the infamous road that passed through so many well-known battlegrounds—Khe Sanh, the Rockpile, Lang Vei, on across the border to Tchepone, and from there?
An arrow pointed right at the northern provinces of Thailand.
Jim hoped the Thais were getting ready for it. It didn’t take a military genius to figure out that once the NVA finished with the South they were going to start the march west.
And it also didn’t take much figuring to realize the only thing that stood in their way was a band of barely armed, ill-trained natives.
Sarpa not only wasn’t going to get his homeland, he was going to be swatted away lik
e the pest he was. Sure the Viets would take casualties. But they’d never seemed to worry too much about that before. Unlikely they would now.
The only thing he could do was make it expensive for them. In the long watches of the night he wondered if it would be enough.
Willi Korhonen, on the other hand, seemed not to worry at all. He’d thrown himself into the task with an energy that was a source of awe, particularly when you considered the fact that he was fifty-five years old, had suffered countless combat wounds, had been the host of tropical diseases known and unknown, and had for nearly ten years been a prisoner of war in the worst circumstances known to man. He’d been kept in a bamboo cage too short for him to stand upright for so long that he still walked with a hunched-over gait, much like the silverback gorillas Jim had once seen on a nature special.
Their initial antagonism dissipated through shared combat experience and a growing respect, Jim and he had started spending a lot of time together. During the day they trained the troops. At night they sat under the light of a hissing Coleman lantern and talked.
“They wanted me alive,” Willi had said one night to Jim’s question about how he’d survived.
“Not that I made it easy for them,” he continued. “Not that I could do much at first. I had two broken legs and my chest was caved in on the left side in the crash. They got me to a hospital in a cave down in the Parrot’s Beak, took care of me. As good care as they could give to their own, which wasn’t much. I wondered then why they were taking so much trouble.
“Later a guard unit picked me up, moved me further into Cambodia. I tried to escape seven times. Each time they caught me, brought me back, beat me. But not so much I was in any danger of dying. Again I wondered why.
“Then the years in the cage. Moving at least once a week. They fed me as much as they got themselves. Not much. I’d look at myself in the streams we crossed. I looked like a skeleton. But so did they.
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