And of course it was in everyone’s best interest that the victorious North Vietnamese have as much trouble with consolidation of their gains as possible. Particularly now that they were threatening Thailand.
But the fact that someone was reading our mail had ramifications far past Southeast Asia. If you could read the message traffic between Southeast Asia and CINCPAC in Hawaii, it followed that you could read the traffic all over the world. Such an advantage would be of inestimable value if the hot war everyone feared finally came to pass.
Worth, then, the sacrifice of a few soldiers fighting in the jungles of Laos, if it came to that. At least that was what Sloane told himself when he woke up in the middle of the night, covered with sweat, the dream of shattered bodies all too real.
“They’ve pulled some of their best troops back,” Finn McCulloden told Sam Gutierrez. “And we can’t figure out why.”
He and Bucky Epstein had been closely monitoring the situation on the border, sending recon teams across the river when possible, gathering information from the fishermen and woodcutters trying to eke out a livelihood, who paid little attention to arbitrary lines drawn by strangers far away. The wads of baht pressed on them by the agent handlers loosened their tongues quite nicely.
“Artillery?” Gutierrez asked.
“Only the light stuff, the pieces they can break down and transport without trucks,” Bucky replied. “No heavy pieces at all, and none of the big antiaircraft guns we were worried about.”
Gutierrez shook his head. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The rainy season was upon them. By all rights the NVA should have attacked already. Now even if they had heavy trucks and tanks they’d get bogged down on the muddy roads that were all this part of Thailand had to offer.
Sam Gutierrez shook his head in wonder. Senator Macallan had told him, during a second phone call, that not only was the United States getting ready to announce “joint exercises” with the Thais, but someone somewhere had a plan that would give them the amount of delay they needed.
It appeared to be working.
He just couldn’t figure out how.
Chapter 24
“Why didn’t we bomb this damn thing, back during the war?” Jim asked Dickerson, passing the binoculars back to the sergeant. The lake shimmered in the dawn, lights from the little bit of sun that made it through intermittent clouds dancing off the muddy water. Soon the clouds would join and thicken, as they did every day during this period of the year, and the rain would fall with such force it felt like you were breathing underwater without the benefit of scuba gear.
“I’m told the ambassador in Vientiane wouldn’t let us,” Dickerson replied, focusing the binoculars on the guard tower that dominated one side of the earthen dam. In the distance the other tower still stood in the shadow of the trees. Four guards in the tower, and they looked alert. DshK machine gun. Dick couldn’t see them, but he would have bet a Yankee dollar that there were also a good stash of rocket-propelled grenades in the roomy tower. Tough nut to crack.
“Afraid it would wash out the rice farmers downstream,” he continued.
Jim grunted in derision. “Far as I know, there haven’t been any rice farmers downstream from this for the last fifteen years,” he said. “Ever since the Viets came in and started using them for porters on the trail.”
“Now, Cap’n, when is it you started thinking diplomats would be influenced by anything like the facts?” Jerry Hauck asked. He was lying on his back, enjoying the little bit of sun reaching them through the heavy canopy. They’d been wet for three days, ever since they’d started the march, in fact. Nighttimes they didn’t dare light a fire for fear of discovery. Jerry was sure that various kinds of fungi were finding hospitable places in every crook and cranny of his body.
Jim, who had already caught a glimpse of some of the heavy antiaircraft cannon sited on the high ground around the dam, suspected that the ambassador’s restrictions weren’t the only thing that had held the bombers back. Low-level bombing down this valley would be a clear case of suicide and murder. Suicide on the part of the pilot, and the murder of the back-seater who had little choice but to go along for the ride.
Dickerson was watching the changing of the guard. Little sloppiness. Even as far away as they were he could see that their uniforms were clean and well maintained, they marched with purpose, and he would bet that their individual weapons had not a speck of rust on them.
Good commander around here somewhere, he thought. Damn it.
He put the binoculars away before the rising sun flashed off the lenses, alerting anyone within eyesight that there was something out there in the jungle that there should not have been.
“So what’s the great plan, Dai Uy?” he asked.
“Plan? Hell, I thought you had one,” Carmichael replied.
Both of them looked at Jerry, who roused himself from a near doze to claim he had no sort of plan, either.
Jim Carmichael took the binoculars from Dickerson, shading the lenses from the sunlight with a piece of cardboard taken from their last LRRP ration. Satisfied, he turned to the others, gave an exaggerated shrug. He thought he might have seen an opening, but wasn’t going to tell the NCOs just yet.
“Guess we’ll just go for the usual,” he said. “Go in there, kill everything in sight.”
“Ya gotta love it,” Jerry said. “I guess brilliance like that is why they made an ossifer out of you.”
“That and my pretty face,” Jim replied. “Let’s go.”
In the end it proved almost disappointingly easy. Careful reconnaissance had confirmed Jim’s initial assessment, that the enemy had placed his defenses expecting someone to come from downstream or to either side of the dam. Carmichael had chosen neither.
Instead the force spent the day scouring the jungle for dry branches, which they bundled together and then covered with ponchos, making field-expedient rafts. The ponchos held no air, were meant only to keep the branches as dry as possible. As it was, by the time they drifted to the dam the sodden packets were barely keeping the dynamite loads above water.
Jerry Hauck had primed the packets earlier—two blasting caps in each bundle, detonating cord crimped into the blasting caps, ends of the det cord left loose. When the teams converged at the center of the dam, the shadow of the great earthen berm shielding them from the watch towers, it was a simple matter to place the charges and tie the det cords together. Jim dove repeatedly as each charge was handed to him, embedding the explosive in the sodden earth six feet below the waterline. The weight of the water itself would serve as a tamping agent. Water is more dense than dirt, hence it would direct the force of the explosive where it would do the most good—against the dam. You placed an explosive charge without tamping and far too much of its force would be dissipated harmlessly into the surrounding air. This would produce a hell of a water spout, kill a bunch of fish, but most important, would drive the power of eight hundred pounds of dynamite against something that was never intended to withstand such force.
It took nearly two hours, and by the time the last charge was emplaced Jim was shaking with hypothermia so badly he could barely tape two more blasting caps to the exposed ends of the detonating cord. Into these caps were crimped lengths of time-delay fuse, and the fuse itself was inserted into military-issue fuse lighters. He finally finished, looked around to see that most of the Montagnards had already pushed their poncho rafts off and were headed back up the lake. He’d cut the fuse to burn for a half-hour before reaching the detonators. He hoped that would be enough time for everyone to get to the launch site where the rest of the group waited. If not, they were going to have a hell of a swim, trying to keep up with the contents of the lake as it poured into the valley. He allowed himself a bit of humor—while in Bad Tölz he’d gone kayaking in one of the Bavarian streams. Take a kayak here and you’d end up in Cambodia, he thought, letting his mind play on the sight of one of the thin boats skimming past half the North Vietnamese Army.
W
hen he was sure the others had a good head start he removed the safeties from the fuse igniters, pulled the rings, and heard the satisfying pop as the incendiary inside was activated. Another couple of seconds to watch the time fuse bubble, showing that the powder inside was burning as it should. He then buried the igniters and fuse lighters in the mud. The fuse was waterproof. No way to stop the burning unless you cut it ahead of the flame. If some alert guard happened to pass by all he would see, if he saw that, would be a few bubbles popping to the surface. If he was smart enough to dive down below and pull the fuse and caps off the charges…well, sometimes you just had to hope things were going to go your way for a change.
He struck out, a side stroke for the first couple of hundred yards, less splash. Then an easy crawl, enjoying the feel of the water. The exercise warmed him back up. He felt like he could have done at least a couple of laps all the way around the lake, but thought that probably wouldn’t be wise, given the circumstances.
He emerged from the water right where Jerry Hauck was signaling with a flashlight with a pinhole punched into the duct tape that covered the lens.
“Havin’ a good time, Cap’n?” Jerry whispered.
“Not too bad,” he replied, quickly shrugging into the dry camouflage fatigues he’d left on shore. “The others?”
“All accounted for. Gone to the rally point, just like they were supposed to.” Jerry turned his wrist, checked his watch. “Should be happening pretty quick,” he said.
As if in answer the ground shook, the tremors from the detonation reaching them even before the sound. Then a dull roar, and even in the dark they could see the column of dirty water reaching for the sky.
“Think it worked?” Jerry asked.
“We’ll know in a minute,” Jim said. He was intently staring at the waterline. The lapping of waves in the soft wind made it hard to tell, but was it receding?
“Look,” he said, pointing to a rock that had been nearly awash, but was now almost out of the water. There would be no great rush, at least not at first. The very size of the lake made sure of that. An inch of water on a body this size would represent millions of gallons.
“B’lieve it might have worked,” Jerry said, seeing that the rock was now completely out of the water, and that the recession of liquid seemed to be gathering speed.
“I think we might ought to go now,” Jim said.
“Before we can’t,” Jerry replied, seeing headlights coming up on the dam. That would be the reaction force, he thought. And they’re sure as hell gonna come looking for us.
They faded into the jungle.
Two days later Mark Petrillo was staring at the satellite photos, freshly delivered by courier. They’d sent before and after pictures for comparison. Where once there had been a town there was now a flat, mud-filled plain. Here and there the stronger structures—the province headquarters, a concrete rail house, a couple of houses that had the luck to be sited a little higher than the surrounding terrain—were still recognizable.
The Highway 9 bridge was completely gone. Worse, it had not only washed away the structure itself, but the revetments that anchored it on each side of the river. The rivers themselves, now neither of them being held back and the monsoon in full flood, rushed through the gap, eating away even more of the banks.
News reports being issued from Vientiane spoke of a great natural disaster and begged for aid.
They had a natural disaster, all right, Petrillo reflected. Jim Carmichael.
Time to bring the boys out. All Washington had asked for was a couple of months’ delay. This would last at least through the rainy season and probably four to six months thereafter. More than enough.
He left for the commo room to compose the message.
“We’re to head southwest,” Dickerson said. “FOB says they’ve got a plan.”
“Why does my asshole pucker when I hear that?” Jerry said.
Jim grinned. “O ye of little faith,” he said.
“I’ve got faith in two things,” the sergeant replied. “First one is that you’ve got a habit of getting me into deeper shit than anyone I’ve ever known. Second is that you always find a way to get us out of it. Them other dickheads, I don’t know about.”
They’d rejoined forces with Y Buon Sarpa and Willi Korhonen after a hard three-day march. Jim’s feet felt like they were on fire, and when he pulled his socks off flesh came with them. The result, he thought ruefully, of spending several hours in the water softening them up, then jamming them back into jungle boots and walking at a pace that would have felled an Olympian.
He’d been doctoring them with tincture of benzoin, which of course burned like hell but was supposed to toughen up the skin, and was in the process of covering the worst of the abrasions with moleskin. Had hoped for a couple of days of rest. That, obviously, was not to be.
“They seem to think they have a route for us,” Dickerson continued. “Due west at about thirty klicks is old Highway 23, not much more than a dirt path, I’m told. Goes from Highway 9 down to Saravane. Agency apparently still has some assets down that way. We’re to link up with them, let them lead us toward the Thai border. FOB says the largest concentration of NVA troops will then be north of us. Nothing but some Pathet Lao and a couple of stiffener NVA battalions down that way.”
Jim pulled the map from his rucksack, saw that the 1:250,000 map (that is, one foot of map distance equaled 250 thousand feet of ground distance) didn’t even cover the section the FOB was talking about.
Dickerson handed him his own survival map, printed on silk so as to make as small a package as possible in case you had to drop everything else. Its detail left something to be desired, but at least it had the major roads and cities of Laos and the Thai border area.
“Nearly as I can figure, we’re somewhere around here,” Dick said, his big finger covering an area that was probably a hundred kilometers square.
“And we’re supposed to go down here,” Jim pointed. It was, he figured, at least a hundred miles to the border going in the direction indicated. Crossing four large and two smaller rivers, in the height of the monsoon. Avoiding contact at all costs, because the first time they got into a firefight it was going to bring down the entire goddamn North Vietnamese Army on them. All they would have to eat would be what they had in their rucksacks—three days’ rations—and what they could hunt or scrounge. As a minimum, over terrain like this, it would be a ten-day march.
“I don’t suppose they had an alternate plan?” he asked.
Dickerson shook his head.
“Guess we’d better get started, then. Willi, there’s no chance I can get you to change your mind?”
Korhonen just grinned.
“Thought so.” Jim had given up on the idea of drugging the former POW and sneaking him out. Wouldn’t have worked anyway, he thought.
“Anything you want me to tell anyone?”
“My family already thinks I’m dead,” Korhonen said. “Let’s leave it that way.”
Jim nodded, wondering about his own family. What about Alix? Does she think I’m dead too? He’d been gone much longer than the mission was supposed to take. Had anyone bothered to keep her in the loop? He doubted it. Frankly, he doubted that any word at all about the whole mission was going anywhere except some room in the basement of the Pentagon.
“So be it,” he said.
Y Buon Sarpa came over as he was packing his rucksack. “I am sorry for having to fool you, Jim,” he said. “But I did not know it would be you who they sent.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Carmichael replied. “Whoever they sent, it would probably have worked out the same way.”
“I think not,” Sarpa replied. “It has been a very good thing, fighting alongside you again. Now it is time for you to go home. I hope that you will remember us, and our fight.”
And your hopeless fight, Jim thought. You have absolutely no chance. None at all. You and all your soldiers are going to be killed, and no one will know the difference.<
br />
For a moment he wished he was staying there with them.
“I wish you luck, and may the Buddha smile on you,” he said.
Sarpa grinned. “I think we maybe need more than Buddha,” he said. “Tell your people to keep the supplies coming, and we will keep up the fight.”
Jim resisted the urge to tell the Montagnard commander that his people would, until it suited them not to. Then Sarpa and his men would be well and truly screwed, and nobody back in Washington would much care.
Sarpa surprised him by embracing him. The Montagnard had never been the most demonstrative of people, and the brief hug told him more than words ever could.
Fuck! Jim thought. I better get out of here before I start blubbering.
Nine days later they were in binocular distance of the Mekong. An escort of Sarpa’s men had stayed with them until they made contact with the small group of Laotian smugglers still being funded out of CIA coffers, and had hung back out of sight but not out of reaction range until Jim finally called them on the Motorola radio he’d left with the lieutenant in charge and told him it was okay to leave. It had not passed Carmichael’s attention that there was probably a fairly large reward waiting for anyone who turned the Americans over to the NVA, and if your only motivation was money…
The Laotians turned out at least to be honest thieves. When they were paid, they stayed paid. They also knew the area far better than anyone, either native or invader, possibly could. They’d been making their living off smuggling for generations, knew the back trails, the chokepoints, those places where the enemy might stay.
They were a happy bunch, laughing and joking in a mixture of Laotian and pidgin English, smoking cigarette after cigarette. This had at first bothered the Americans, before they realized that whenever the group came within range of either the Pathet Lao (who largely stayed to the villages) or the occasional North Vietnamese patrol (who didn’t), they became deadly serious and stealthy enough to satisfy even Jerry Hauck.
Bayonet Skies Page 29