Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  Gotcha, motherfucker, Jim mouthed as he pressed the acquisition button, heard the growl inside the missile that indicated target acquisition. He pressed the firing button, was rewarded with a spray of unspent, still-burning rocket fuel in his face as the missile jumped from the tube.

  Glad I got this goddamn mask on, he thought. The Soviet missiles weren’t as user-friendly as was the American Redeye.

  It seemed impossible that the missile, its spent fuel showing a trajectory that spun like a bottle rocket, would hit anything. But at this range it simply couldn’t miss. The heat seeker in the nose homed inexorably in on the hot turbine exhaust, the force of the rocket driving it deep before the explosives went off. Not much of a bang, really. Less explosive than was in a claymore mine.

  It was enough. The wrecked engine seized, the rotor stopped turning, and the chopper had all the flyability of a large rock. Its forward momentum carried it into the trees at the edge of the perimeter where it burst into a fireball, the sounds of rockets and small-arms ammunition cooking off like a firefight all its own.

  Jim dropped the useless tube, was ready to go back to the bunker to get another, saw that there was no need. The Montagnard gunners had fired at least six more missiles, four of which had found their targets. The surviving chopper, a command and control bird by the look of it, had turned tail and run.

  Won’t be the last of it, Jim thought. He turned to the sounds, clear even over the continuing explosions from the burning choppers, of someone in dire pain in one of the bunkers.

  He dreaded what he would see.

  “Glenn Parker’s dead,” Petrillo said.

  Bentley Sloane shook his head in sorrow. Poor bastard, he thought.

  At the same time he couldn’t suppress a niggling sense of relief. He ought to feel ashamed of himself, he knew, and maybe someday when the pressure was off and all this was just an unpleasant memory he would.

  But right now it made the mission vastly less complicated. Ever since the message informing them of Parker’s injuries from yellow rain he had wondered just how the hell they were going to get the injured NCO out of there. Even after Parker had recovered enough to walk he was still blind. Walking the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of kilometers necessary to exfiltrate was hard enough for someone in good health, with all his faculties. You got hit by a superior force and you could always split up to join up again later. How was a blind man supposed to accomplish that?

  “The chemical settled in the low places,” Petrillo continued, choosing to ignore the conflicting play of emotions on Sloane’s face. “Carmichael and his crew were busy fighting off the choppers, ’Yard nurse taking care of Parker managed to get a mask on him, but he tore it off. Apparently the yellow rain had some extra shit in it. VX, Sarin—we won’t know until we get some samples. According to the nurse, he took a deep breath, next thing she knows he’s drooling, goes into convulsions, stops breathing.”

  For a moment the two officers were silent, reflecting on a man who had known just how much of a burden he was to his friends, and who had chosen to remove that burden.

  Greater love hath no man…

  Sloane brushed the thought away angrily. What horseshit!

  Carmichael and Dickerson stood over the freshly closed grave, Jim wishing he remembered more of the sermons to which he’d been subjected as a boy, before he’d become a thoroughgoing agnostic. A prayer seemed appropriate, but for the life of him he couldn’t come up with one.

  Dick was humming something, so softly Jim had to strain to hear. “Rock of Ages.”

  At the moment Jim couldn’t even remember the words to the old hymn.

  “Good sonofabitch,” he finally said.

  Dickerson cleared his throat. “Damn good,” he agreed.

  Jerry Hauck came back over. He had been busying himself with taking polar coordinates of the grave site. They’d picked a spot that would be easy to find again, with readily identifiable terrain features from which to take back azimuths and distances. An outcropping of karst that looked like a dog’s head served as one marker—seventeen degrees at a walked-off distance of 753 meters.

  The other feature was a characteristic bend in the river where it washed up against an outcropping of rock, forcing a change in direction. Two-five-oh degrees at a distance of 512 meters.

  You tried to pick out features that would be there forever, or at least long enough for you to come back. Trees weren’t good. They died, rotted. Or were vaporized in bomb blasts, as so many had been on the Trail. Hilltops looked much the same, particularly when the foliage took back over.

  You also tried to get features that were neither too far apart nor too close together. Something 180 degrees out would result in a back azimuth that came close to paralleling, rather than intersecting at a sharp angle. Too close together and a thick pencil mark would blend together, again nearly paralleling.

  The idea was that sometime in the future you, or somebody like you, would come back here. Take a map and pinpoint the terrain features, draw lines on back azimuths, and where the lines intersected you would dig. If by some chance one of the terrain features had disappeared or couldn’t be located you could still find the spot, simply by taking a back azimuth on the feature you could find, mark the distance, and there would be the spot.

  You didn’t want to leave anything to physically mark the spot. No cairn of stones, certainly no cross or other grave marker. Jim and Dick had spent some painstaking time in camouflaging the site as well as possible, depending upon the weather to finish the job. An obvious spot would attract attention, perhaps causing the curious (or vindictive) to dig up the remains and move them.

  Jerry came back over to where the others were standing. “Too bad we ain’t got no bourbon,” he said. Bourbon had been Glenn Parker’s favorite drink. Mixed, straight, over ice. He hadn’t really cared. Nor had he cared about the quality, or lack thereof, of the drink. Glenn would drink Jack Daniel’s Black or Four Roses with equal appreciation.

  Jim saw Dickerson grinning, cocked an eyebrow in question.

  “Remember when the SAS came to Fort Bragg, back in the early sixties?” Dick asked.

  “Yeah,” Jerry said, now smiling too. “Brits tried to get Glenn started on scotch. Said bourbon was some goddamn redneck potion, not fit for man nor beast.”

  “Parker takes a sip, hauls out his dick, pisses in the glass,” Jerry continued, now laughing at the memory. “Takes a big slug.

  “This regimental sergeant major, big sonofabitch, mean looking. Asks, ‘What the fook did you do that for?’”

  “Glenn says, ‘Hell, sour mash that’s been run through once is better than the shit you were trying to feed me,’” Dickerson finished.

  They all laughed. Better this way. Special Forces funerals were often the scene of unrestrained hilarity as the good memories shoved away the bad.

  Another moment of silence.

  “Good sonofabitch,” Dickerson said again.

  “That he was,” Jim agreed.

  It was as fitting an epitaph as any.

  Chapter 23

  They got back to the camp, picked up their already packed rucksacks, and joined the last column to leave. The Montagnard position had to be abandoned. Not bad enough that the enemy knew exactly where it was, but the chemicals they’d dropped this time had lingering effects. This was shown when one of the ’Yards had picked up a weapon that looked perfectly dry, but which had thrown him into the same convulsions that had killed Glenn Parker.

  They’d decontaminated the equipment as well as possible in the nearby stream, but of course couldn’t be sure that the very ground they walked on wouldn’t kill them, so the decision had been made to evacuate.

  Carmichael avoided, barely, telling Sarpa and Korhonen that this was what he had recommended in the first place. They knew it, hence it didn’t need to be said.

  They were splitting up into smaller bands, each of no more than a hundred soldiers. Never again would they present such a big target. If a future target d
emanded more people than one band could supply they would rendezvous, hit the target, and once again split up.

  On the face of it, it might have seemed a foolish plan. How could you out-guerrilla the guerillas the rest of the world regarded as the best in the world, the ones that the entire might of the American army had not been able to smash?

  In truth, most of the actual guerrillas, the Viet Cong, had been annihilated during the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the campaigns thereafter. They’d been replaced by North Vietnamese regulars who increasingly had fought a conventional war. South Vietnam had fallen not to indigenous forces fighting against the government, but to North Vietnamese divisions invading in an entirely conventional campaign.

  The NVA troops they’d faced thus far, to Jim’s mind at least, proved the validity of the Montagnard tactics. Kill the officers and senior NCOs and the rest of the troops were lost, showing none of the initiative that characterized a good guerrilla. They stayed to the trails and roads, the land navigation skills necessary to move cross-country entirely absent. Several of the captured soldiers being herded away by another band of Montagnards had been caught when they became hopelessly lost, so pathetically grateful when the ’Yards materialized out of the underbrush that they immediately surrendered their weapons in exchange for food and water.

  Jim, Sarpa, and Korhonen had worked out a campaign wherein they would continue to harass the NVA supply lines, making life hell for the rear-echelon troops. The hope was that the campaign planners back in Hanoi would recognize the precariousness of the front-line soldiers out there at the end of a tenuous supply line and would pull them back from the border to secure the rear areas, at least in the short term.

  More than likely, Jim recognized, they would just send in more troops from the North and from the units no longer needed to pacify the former South Vietnam. They’d move more antiaircraft artillery in and the resupply flights upon which the Montagnard guerrillas depended would become more and more hazardous, until inevitably one of the planes would be lost. At that point the planners in the Pentagon would decide that the program was costing entirely too much, was too subject to compromise (particularly if one or more of the airmen were caught alive), and would pull the plug.

  Then the ’Yards would be left out there hanging, yet once again. They’d be slowly, inevitably whittled down. The survivors, if there were any, would be reduced to fleeing through the jungle, hoping they could reach Thailand.

  That would be, of course, if Thailand offered any sanctuary at all. Which it wouldn’t, if the North Vietnamese invaded.

  Which was why, when Dickerson had come to him with an idea earlier in the day, he’d been all too willing to listen.

  “Back during White Star,” Dirty Dick had begun, referring to the Special Forces mission in Laos in the early sixties, “I was on the team that was based out of Tchepone. Working with the Royal Laotian Army. Buncha worthless turds, but that’s neither here nor there.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “plan was back then that we’d cut the Trail by fortifying a corridor leading from the coast, up Highway 9, all the way to Attopeu. To do that we needed Nine for a supply road. Had the SVN repairing it up to the border, the Laotians were supposed to do the same thing on their side.

  “Problem was the monsoons. You know what it’s like. Little damn streams you could jump across become rivers eight feet deep and a hundred yards wide. Every time we’d get a section of the road done the rains would come and wash it out again. Lots of ’em got bridged, but some of ’em were so goddamn wide we couldn’t.”

  Jim tried to maintain his patience, though for the life of him he couldn’t see where this was going. What difference did it make that they’d had trouble with the rivers? That was true of all of Southeast Asia, particularly here where the streams started way up in the Annamese cordillera and came tumbling down the steep mountainsides, joining with other streams, and others, until finally they emptied into the mighty Mekong.

  “Anyhow,” Dick said, sensing Jim’s impatience, “the biggest problem was where the Nam Kok and Xa Ba Nghiang rivers joined, just north of the road. One of ’em we might have been able to bridge. Two of ’em together, no way. Then some bright engineer got an idea. Dam one of ’em up, control the flow. Let the water out in the dry season, catch it when it rained. Wouldn’t work completely when you got real big rains, but that only comes about once every ten to fifteen years. We figured we could live with that.”

  Over the last month the rains had steadily been increasing, to a degree Jim, even with all the time he’d spent in Southeast Asia, had never seen. The Montagnards had brought out the rope and bamboo bridges they’d stowed during the dry season, maintaining a network of trails that could be used to move quickly over and around the flooded rivers.

  “And you think this is going to be one of those years?” Jim said.

  “Looks like it,” Dick replied. “But even in a normal year the lake they formed with the dam across the Nam Kok is gonna be pretty full by now.”

  “And just where is this dam?”

  Dick produced a map, pointed to the spot with a twig.

  “Holy shit,” Jim breathed. “That’s right on the edge of Tchepone itself.”

  Dick nodded. “Blow that dam and you’re not only gonna take out the road and bridge, but about half the damn town itself. Including, if I don’t miss my guess, the headquarters of the NVA unit that’s building the road.”

  Jim grinned. “I like it,” he said. “Infiltrate into probably the most closely guarded place in Southern Laos, sneak up to a dam, plant a shitload of explosives, which ain’t gonna do the least bit of good.”

  Numerous field exercises in both the United States and Europe had convinced Jim of the futility of attacking anything like a dam. The amount of explosives you’d have to carry to make even a scratch in the structure would dwarf the capabilities of a guerrilla band. The Brits had shown, during the bombing of the dams on the Ruhr, the difficulty of the mission. Even huge bombs, skipped off the water until they hit the dam itself, had barely touched many of the giant concrete structures.

  About the only way to successfully attack a concrete dam was to get down inside it, plant your explosives in a spot that would ensure their effectiveness through the tamping effect of the water outside, and blow it. The likelihood that his group could get into Tchepone, get inside the dam, and have time to blow it, without being discovered and annihilated by local security troops, was so small as to be nonexistent. It would truly be a suicide mission, and while Jim wasn’t completely opposed to that, he was opposed to the idea of getting himself and all the others killed to no purpose.

  He expressed as much to Dickerson.

  “I’d agree with you, Dai Uy,” Dick replied, “if the damned dam was concrete. It ain’t. It’s dirt.”

  Now Jim grinned for real. Get enough explosives into the waterline on an earthen dam and explode them and you’d cut a channel through which the water would come pouring. Within seconds it would cut a channel deep enough to collapse both sides, leading to a complete failure of the dam. The rush of mud and water would be irresistible. Jim mentally pictured the bridge being swept away, the terrified troops below seeing inexorable doom, trying pitifully to scramble out of the way of the onrushing flood.

  There was no worry that innocents would be affected. The innocents had long since been driven away from Tchepone. Anybody who was there now chose to be there. So be it.

  And that was why his group was now carrying, broken down into ten- and twenty-pound units, the eight hundred pounds of dynamite captured during the raid on the road crew.

  “So, what’s Carmichael’s plan?” Sloane asked.

  “The good Captain Carmichael is being quite coy,” Petrillo replied. “Can you blame him?”

  Sloane thought that, no, he could not. Particularly now that radio intercepts forwarded to the FOB by NSA scoops confirmed what the captured documents had indicated. The aerial attack on Sarpa’s compound had been ordered before the Montagnar
ds had initiated their campaign against the road crews. And the purpose of the attack was to keep them from doing exactly that.

  Now, there were only three ways NVA intelligence could have known about the campaign in advance. One: Someone in Sarpa’s camp gave them prior notice. Somehow Bentley Sloane didn’t think that possible. The only people who had known about it were Y Buon Sarpa, Willi Korhonen, and Jim Carmichael. Carmichael had assured them of that fact.

  Second: Someone in the FOB had alerted the Viets. That was flatly impossible. No one was allowed outside the compound, for any reason whatsoever. Besides, the only ones who had actually known about it were the radio operator who’d deciphered the original message, Petrillo, and himself. He damned well knew he hadn’t done it. It was his nature to be suspicious of everyone, but the likelihood that one of the other two had managed it without his knowledge was remote. He’d taken his own security measures, put into place slowly and carefully, and there had been no triggers tripped.

  That left only the third. Someone was reading the radio traffic back to CINCPAC. It could have been someone on the inside who was passing the information on, and since the info was so timely that was unlikely. Surreptitious communication with an agent handler was a necessarily lengthy process.

  Meaning that the messages themselves were being read by an outside listener. To do that you needed the codes. Someone, somewhere, was passing on the codes and the codebooks.

  General Miller had suspected as much, but had no proof. And when he carried his suspicions to the chief of staff of the Army, and that individual had carried the information to the chief of staff of the Navy, he’d been laughed out of the room. Our codes are secure, he was told. Always have been. Always will be.

  Hence the main purpose of Sloane’s mission. Sure, they wanted to get the POWs out, particularly since their very presence gave the lie to the prior administration’s assurances that all the prisoners had been returned during Homecoming in 1973—and subsequent administrations had been aware of the lie.