They’d also established caches of food and ammunition at various spots along the trails they took, so the group ate as well as could be expected. Lots of sticky rice and dried fish, but it was a hell of a lot better than starving.
At one point they had, after first assuring the Americans that the enemy was well out of hearing, dropped a grenade into a pool of still water connected to the Xe Pong River, happily scooping up the fish that popped to the surface. They ate well for a couple of days after that.
And now, Jim thought as he observed farmers on the other side of the Mekong going about their business, it was almost over. It seemed almost anticlimactic. So much had gone on, so many battles and skirmishes, the loss of his friend, the deaths of so many of the others.
He didn’t allow himself to think, For what? He’d done that after his final tour in Vietnam, crawling into the bottle to escape and very nearly killing himself. Now he had something to live for.
Alix, he thought. Soon.
Chapter 25
“Nature calls,” Jerry announced.
Without a word Jim handed him his last packet of C-ration toilet paper. He needed to go too, but with any luck and a strong sphincter he could hold off until tomorrow, at which time he expected to be doing his business on a real flush toilet in Nakhon Phanom.
They’d stopped for the night, the smugglers maintaining their own small camp and the three Americans sitting back to back slightly off to the side. They’d come to trust the Laotians over the last few days, as much as you could trust anyone over here, in any case, but that didn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful.
The plan was to attempt the crossing of the Mekong sometime in the early morning hours, before it got true light. During the monsoon season the changes in temperature at that hour often produced a ground-hugging fog here close to the river. It would shield the boats that were to come from the other side to pick them up.
Jerry left the perimeter to do his business. The sergeant had little of Jim’s distaste for shitting in the field, saying on more than one occasion he thought Jim’s habitual bad mood was purely because he was always full of shit.
Jim settled down to try to grab a couple of hours of sleep, worming his buttocks into the soft ground, stopping for a moment to remove a branch that got entirely too friendly, then lying back on his rucksack. Dickerson was already asleep.
He heard a muffled explosion from somewhere in the direction Jerry had gone, followed by a low moan of pain. Dickerson, hearing it too, was already shrugging out of his rucksack, straining his eyes to see through the stygian darkness.
“Jerry?” Dick whispered.
Nothing.
Jim could sense the sergeant looking at him in question. He touched Dickerson’s arm, pushing it in the direction Jerry had gone. Dickerson quickly moved out, Jim right behind. The only thing he could see was the glow of the fluorescent tape sewn to the back of Dick’s boonie hat.
Dick followed the moans, louder now. In only a few seconds, though to Jim it seemed much longer, they reached Jerry Hauck.
Dick touched Hauck’s shoulder, was rewarded with a soft-spoken stream of profanity, part of which was Jerry cursing himself for being so stupid as to step on a goddamn toe-popper.
At that point Carmichael decided the hell with operational security and switched on his flashlight. He sucked in a deep breath when he saw Jerry’s mangled foot. The boot had been blown completely away, as had his heel and a major portion of the instep. Worse, the leg was turned around so far the remains pointed backward. He was bleeding profusely.
“Pressure,” he instructed Dickerson, who quickly found the pressure point behind Jerry’s knee and pressed down on it. That slowed the blood flow somewhat, but certainly didn’t stop it. Jim hated to put a tourniquet on the leg, because given the fact that evacuation was obviously impossible in the short term, anything below the tourniquet was going to be lost.
But, he consoled himself, there would be no saving that foot anyway. He pulled a cravat bandage from Jerry’s own pouch, tied it off as close to the wound as possible, and used a stick to tighten it. After a few turns the bleeding slowed, then stopped.
Only then did he cover the wound as well as possible with both Jerry’s and his own field dressings.
He checked Jerry’s vital signs—strong and steady.
“How about some drugs?” he asked.
Jerry, gray with pain from the injury itself and Jim’s rough ministrations, indicated that he thought he might like just a touch of morphine. Jim injected him with a quarter grain, then stuck the needle of the syrette in Jerry’s collar, bending it over to affix it there. While he didn’t think there was any worry of another medic getting to Jerry anytime soon and giving him more morphine, old habits died hard. More than one man had died of an overdose when nobody knew exactly how much morphine had been given.
“Well, ain’t this some shit!” Jerry said. Jim flashed the light in his eyes, saw his pupils pinpointing nicely. His face had relaxed from the grimace of pain, indicating the morphine was taking effect.
“Do anything for a little excitement, won’t you?” Dickerson said.
“Fuck you, Dick,” Jerry replied, his voice already taking on that dreamy tone that indicated that the drug was coursing its way not only to the pain centers, but to all the other parts of his brain as well.
“I think we’d best try to move,” Jim said. “Whoever put that here is probably gonna be wondering what hit it. Go get our escorts, have them rig up a litter. We’ll head for the river.”
Dickerson moved off. Jim checked Jerry again, making sure the tourniquet hadn’t worked loose. He was glad to see that the field dressings looked dry.
“Gonna lose my foot, ain’t I?” Jerry asked.
“’Fraid so.” Jim didn’t see any reason to lie about it, give him false hope. Jerry Hauck had seen the results of too many of these to be fooled.
Jerry thought for a minute, then said, “Well, it ain’t all bad.”
“How’s that?”
The sergeant grinned. “You won’t be runnin’ my ass up and down the mountains when we get back to Bad Tölz. At least not for a while.”
Jim thought that to be true. Particularly given the condition of the leg above the wound. Its position spoke of the bones’ being shattered. Jerry Hauck was in for some long, hard recovery time. He busied himself finding a stand of bamboo, cutting a length of it, and using it to splint the leg as well as possible. The bones inside would be sharp, and stood an excellent chance of cutting blood vessels and nerves if not immobilized.
He was just finishing up when he heard sounds of someone moving through the brush; killed the flashlight and grabbed his gun.
“Dai Uy?” he heard Dickerson’s familiar voice.
He relaxed. “Come on in,” he said.
Dick moved close enough Jim could see the whites of his eyes. “Where’s the others?” he asked.
“Ain’t no others,” Dick replied. “They’ve split.”
Well ain’t this just a fine how-do-you-do, Jim thought, unconsciously using a favorite phrase of his father’s.
Without help they’d have to carry Jerry themselves, rendering them practically defenseless if suddenly hit.
Worse, if and when they got to the river there would be no boats.
They were in deep shit.
“Best make commo,” he said. “See if the FOB’s got any more bright ideas.”
“I feel as bad about it as you do,” Sloane said.
Yeah, Petrillo thought, I’ll just bet your heart pumps purple piss about it.
They’d been arguing about courses of action ever since the message came in telling of the team’s plight. The first thing Petrillo had done was contact the Agency office in Bangkok and tell him of the smugglers’ betrayal, asking if there was any way he could get them back there to help Carmichael’s crew. Not likely, the man had said. The smugglers had probably gone to ground, there was no regular contact schedule, and even if he could reach them the likelih
ood was that they’d refuse the mission anyway.
Too bad, so sad, sorry ’bout that.
Petrillo had then asked the military mission for a helicopter, and had been flatly refused. No way the ambassador was going to allow a U.S. aircraft to fly into Laos, possibly sparking the war that, at the moment, seemed less and less likely but could still erupt, given the right provocation.
No consideration was given to the fact that the team now in trouble was directly responsible for the decreased likelihood of war, with the front-line NVA troops pulling back to combat the insurgency in their rear.
“Contact your boss,” he had then told Bentley Sloane. “Get someone in Washington onto this.”
“Won’t do any good,” Sloane had said. “This whole operation was built on deniability. Carmichael and his people get caught, they’re mercenaries. They knew the cover story before they went in there. They were willing to take the risk.”
“They’re fucking Americans!” Petrillo had shouted, so close to Sloane little flecks of spittle hit him in the face. “And I’m giving you a direct order.”
So Bentley Sloane had sent a message back to General Miller, and had gotten the expected reply. The team was on its own.
“The general says we just can’t risk it,” he said. “They’re on their own. God help them.”
Petrillo, calmer now, thought that God wouldn’t be doing much about it. But he would.
He turned on his heel, left Sloane standing there. Went back to the commo room.
“You still got the frequency and callsigns of those people we helped out over there?” he asked.
The commo man looked insulted that he would ask such a thing. Of course he had saved the information.
“Bring ’em up,” Petrillo said. “Time for them to return the favor.”
“The old man just called up,” Bucky Epstein said. “He’s about five minutes out. Wants to meet us on the chopper pad.”
Finn McCulloden looked up from where he had been reading the intelligence reports. The sterilized NSA intercepts received directly from Gutierrez’s office in Bangkok spoke of SIGINT indicators that the NVA was performing a massive pullback, something confirmed by the few recon teams he was still managing to send across the border. He didn’t know what had caused it, but was sure as hell glad. Also on his desk was the official announcement from the Pentagon that a massive exercise was being planned between the governments of Thailand, the United States, and the few allies, mostly Australians, that they still had in the region.
It was a clear shot across the bows of the would-be invaders, signaling that the United States hadn’t given up on Southeast Asia. Not at all.
Finn hadn’t thought the administration had it in them, wondered what had made them change their minds.
Not that it mattered at the moment.
“He say why he’s coming?” he asked Bucky.
“Negative.”
Gutierrez had been there just yesterday, delivering the reports. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been due back for another week or so.
So something was out of the ordinary.
Best find out what it was.
“Think you can get a Bright Light together?” Gutierrez asked as soon as he got far enough from the whining turbine of the helicopter to be heard.
A sudden jolt of adrenaline hit Finn. Bright Light was the code name for recovery missions run out of SOG back when recon teams got into trouble across the border. Since he didn’t have any recon teams out at the moment, that meant that someone else was in trouble over there.
“I expect so,” he said. “Just happens we have a platoon of Thai Rangers on stand-down at the moment, but we can get them cranked up in no time. Air assets are pretty skimpy, though. Enough Hueys for the lift, couple of Cobras for support. How many people over there?”
“Three,” Gutierrez replied. “And one of them is wounded. Nonambulatory.”
That complicated things, but not so much that it couldn’t be done.
“Can they get to an LZ?”
“They’re about half a klick away from a clearing that’ll take one ship at a time,” Gutierrez replied.
Finn grimaced. That meant he’d have to land the Bright Light troops to secure the LZ piecemeal. Not the best of situations.
“Who are these guys?”
“Americans.”
“Thought we weren’t allowed to have any Americans over there,” Finn said.
“I’m told these are freelancers.”
And somebody up high enough to get to Sam Gutierrez is worried about some sorry-ass mercenaries in Laos?
What a bunch of bullshit! This smelled strongly of a black op that had gone to shit.
“These guys wouldn’t happen to be former SF, now would they?” he asked.
“Could be,” Gutierrez admitted. “I wasn’t told, one way or the other. Does it matter?”
Of course it didn’t.
“Gotta get back to Bangkok,” Gutierrez said, turning back to the chopper, whose rotors had never stopped turning. “Some friggin’ senator coming in on a boondoggle. Wants to see me personally.”
Finn grinned. “You in trouble again?”
“Could be. Couple of things we’ve done here, didn’t exactly ask for permission.”
Just like I’m not going to, Finn thought as Gutierrez turned and headed for the open door of the chopper. You’d turn me down if I did.
“Get the Thai reaction force cranked up,” he told Bucky. “And grab your own shit.”
Carmichael and Dickerson had moved Jerry Hauck well away from where he had been injured, figuring at the very least that the sound of the explosion would bring curious villagers hoping to take advantage of any animal big enough to have set one of the toe-poppers off.
Worst-case scenario was that the local Pathet Lao troops had sown the mines themselves, and were even now on their way to see what they’d bagged.
They were leaving entirely too much sign. It wouldn’t take a skilled tracker to follow them, but there was little they could do about it. No one to sweep the back trail. It was hard enough to support Jerry, who insisted on hobbling along on one foot supported by one or the other of them, maintain any semblance of tactical formation, and blaze trail through the thick forest.
Not that they could do anything about it. Their only hope was the cryptic message to move to the nearest LZ, that someone was coming to get them.
Not someone from the FOB, who would have recognized them. Instead they were given a set of contact instructions, including passwords and challenges. In Thai.
Right now Jim didn’t much care who was coming, as long as they were.
He jerked his head around at the sound of a rifle shot somewhere behind them.
Shit! Some tracker had found their trail and was signaling others.
Things were about to get very interesting.
Finn McCulloden sat in the door of the chopper, surrounded by grinning Thai Rangers. Everyone, including him, was loaded for bear. He carried a CAR-15 and six hundred rounds of ammunition distributed in pouches and in a small indigenous rucksack, eight frag grenades, two willy-peters, and a tear gas. Two canteens nestled on his belt, a claymore mine was packed in the rucksack, and a Browning 9mm pistol hung to his right side. Taped to the left side of his load-bearing suspenders was a K-Bar sheath knife, haft down. Where there was the least little bit of room he’d slipped field dressings, morphine ampoules, a pen flare and bandolier of flares, and a strobe light. No food.
They stayed across the border long enough to get hungry, likelihood was that they wouldn’t be needing any food, anyway.
Across from him, the choppers flying so close together it looked as if their rotors barely missed one another, was Bucky Epstein, similarly equipped. Bucky had flatly stated that if his commander was going to disobey orders, he should be able to as well.
“D’you think Colonel Gutierrez didn’t know you were going to do this?” he had asked after Finn had laid out a hasty plan. “That’s why he didn’
t tell you specifically not to.”
Finn reckoned that he was right. Gutierrez knew him entirely too well.
Besides, the thought of someone like Bucky Epstein beside him in a fight wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
Behind them were two chase choppers, empty except for the pilots and door gunners. If one of the lift birds was forced down, the chase birds would swoop down, pick up the passengers and crew, and bring them back to the launch site. As loaded as they were it would take the two birds to pick up both passengers and crew, and the mission would have to be scrubbed.
If both lift birds went down…
Well, shit, Finn consoled himself. You can’t plan for everything.
The plan was pure simplicity. The LZ would only take one ship at a time. He would go in first while the other bird orbited nearby, secure the clearing, the other bird would disgorge, and then all the choppers would head back to the launch site, sitting hot on the pad. Flying time was less than five minutes—better there than orbiting and using up fuel.
They were taking only two squads of the Thai Ranger platoon. More would have required more choppers, and they simply didn’t have them. The other two squads would be on standby if things went to shit, and could come in and reinforce if necessary.
Once the force was on the ground they would leave one squad to secure the LZ while the other went to find the people they’d come to rescue. They’d rig a field-expedient litter for the injured man—a jungle hammock slung on a pole—two soldiers would carry it while the others guarded them. With any luck at all the entire force would be out of there in no more than thirty minutes.
A time period that could seem extremely short.
Or the longest thirty minutes you’d ever had in your life.
The choppers were dropping altitude in preparation for crossing the Mekong. It would be nap of the earth until reaching the LZ.
Bayonet Skies Page 30