Finn felt the familiar tightening in his chest. He gave the thumbs-up sign to Bucky, who returned it.
Once more into the breach, dear friends!
“Y’hear that?” Dickerson asked.
Jim Carmichael nodded. The faint, far-off whopping of blades.
He just hoped it wasn’t too late. The signal shots had been getting closer and closer. He estimated that the trackers, now probably accompanied by a sizable reaction force, were no more than a hundred or so meters behind them.
“Think you can keep going?” he asked Jerry.
The sergeant nodded grimly. The morphine had long since worn off, and he had refused more, feeling more of a need to keep his wits about him than for relief from pain.
“Keep moving then,” he instructed them.
For a second Dickerson looked like he was going to object.
“All I’m gonna do is leave ’em a few little surprises,” he said. “Then I’ll be right behind you.”
Both Dickerson and Hauck looked doubtful, but knew better than to object. It was obvious that one of them would have to stay back long enough to keep the bad guys off their asses, and Captain Carmichael had seized the initiative. All they could do now was waste time by arguing.
They shuffled off, Dickerson supporting Jerry Hauck as he hopped on one foot. Jim noted in passing that the bandage was getting very bloody—something had broken loose.
No time to worry about it. The pursuers were getting very close. He’d once been on his own Bright Light, had come so close to rescuing a downed F-4 pilot he could see the man’s expression when the North Vietnamese took him away. The pilot hadn’t returned during Homecoming. It had broken his heart.
That wasn’t going to happen this time, he vowed. Dirty Dick and Jerry were going to get back. He’d promised that.
As for himself…
“You stay here and secure the LZ,” Finn told Bucky. “Keep commo with the command ship. We get these guys, we’re gonna need those choppers back in here fast.”
Bucky Epstein recognized the tactical soundness of the command, though he would have liked to have been the one going with the recovery party. He cast a practiced eye around the clearing. The chopper had been forced to come straight down, testing the ability of the pilot as it had probably never been tested before. As it was the tail rotor of the second ship had chewed up some branches before the pilot corrected it.
The problem was a stand of young trees off to one side, like a green wall closing off the clearing from a slightly smaller one to the side. Get those out of the way and this would be a two-ship LZ.
He shrugged out of his rucksack, started pulling out the roll of detonating cord and the extra claymore he carried there. The Thai squad leader saw what he was doing, ordered his own men to divest themselves of whatever they were carrying that might make a big bang.
“We make a boom?” he asked, grinning.
“We make a goddamn big boom,” Bucky replied.
Finn and his squad moved out in the direction they’d been told the evadees would be coming. Suddenly there was a burst of fire, and it didn’t seem all that far away. His practiced ear told him that the sound was that of an M-16. Not more than a half-second later he heard the return fire from AK-47s. A lot of AK-47s.
All thought of stealth was abandoned as they moved to the sound of contact. He realized his palms were sweating profusely, wiped his gun hand on his pants leg, looked over at the Thai nearest him and was glad to see that the man’s eyes were about as big as he suspected his own were.
It didn’t really matter how many times you did this. The movement to contact was always tight-asshole. You had confidence in yourself, and in your troops, but you realized that all it would take would be one lucky shot. The odds simply were against you. You recognized early on that this wasn’t the way to survive, that your chances grew smaller and smaller with each passing day, and you might console yourself with the thought that since you’d consigned yourself to death you didn’t have to worry about the final act.
Which was, of course, bullshit. You still worried about it. Dreaded the thought of the bullet that would rip everything you had away from you. Woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, having dreamed once again that awful dream wherein you were fighting against impossible odds, and the bullets you shot seemed to have no effect on them, and they just kept on coming.
Finn shook away the thought. Concentrate! A noise to the front. Someone moving, and very clumsily.
The point man gave the closed-fist signal, and the squad immediately stopped and took advantage of whatever cover and concealment the surrounding trees and rocks offered. Finn brought his rifle to his shoulder, sighted at the point of vegetation whence the noise came. Finger tightened slightly on the trigger. A couple more ounces of pressure and a bust of 5.56mm bullets would shred whatever it was that was coming.
“Don’t shoot!” he commanded, seeing two Americans, one obviously wounded, come out of the jungle.
He showed himself, saw on the face of the unwounded one the immediate sense of relief. He sat down, clearly exhausted, forcing the wounded man with him, then immediately set himself to checking the bandage on the wounded man’s foot.
The Thai squad immediately set up a hasty perimeter as Finn approached the Americans.
“Dickerson,” the black man said. “And this here’s Jerry Hauck. And we’re sure as fuck glad to see you.”
“Where’s your other man?” Finn asked.
There was another burst of fire, and this time it was even closer.
“I expect that’d be Captain Carmichael,” Dickerson said.
“Not Jim Carmichael?”
“One and the same,” Jerry said. “Now, you gonna go help him, or do we need to go back there?”
Finn grinned. “Feisty little fucker, ain’t you?”
In Thai he instructed the squad leader to detach two of his men to help get Dickerson and Hauck to the LZ.
“And we’ll go help out Jimmy Boy,” he said. “Before your little friend here gives me a good talking-to.”
Jim saw two of the Pathet Lao soldiers trying to flank him on the right, shifted his firing position slightly, and waited until he had a clear shot. The first one folded like a cheap accordion when the burst of fire hit him. Jim shifted fire and was fairly certain he’d at least winged the second, who dropped out of sight.
Things were getting interesting. He’d tripwired a claymore but it had never gone off, suggesting either that it was defective or that these guys were savvy enough to avoid it. If the latter he was in even deeper shit than he had at first thought.
The PL, he had heard from veterans of the Laotian campaigns, weren’t particularly good soldiers, sharing the common attitude in the country that it was better to shoot in the air and scare the hell out of the enemy and then walk in after he’d left. That way nobody got hurt, except by accident.
Maybe these guys had been taking lessons. They weren’t running away and they sure as hell weren’t shooting up in the air.
He shifted again, low-crawling to a position he’d picked out earlier. To stay in one spot too long was to give them a target. And he would just bet that one or more of them was carrying a B-40 rocket. The trees and brush that he was relying on for cover wouldn’t stand up too well to a rocket originally designed to take out a tank.
Not that it was going to do him much good. They’d send out other flankers, and he wouldn’t see them all, and sooner or later one would show up where he was least expecting it.
He had a sudden pang of regret. He’d never see Alix again, never see the baby that should be coming any day now. And the baby would never know its father, other than in fading pictures.
Goddamn it! It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
You’ve been rushing toward this day for most of your adult life, Jim Carmichael. Now that it’s here, don’t minge about it.
Three soldiers burst out of the brush in front of him, firing into the position he’d just
left. He shot the first, moved to the second and pulled the trigger, only to feel the unresponsiveness that told him of a bolt locked back on an empty weapon.
Goddamn amateurish shit!
He punched the magazine release, the empty falling away even as he was clawing at another from his pouch. Not enough time. Not nearly enough. The other two Pathet Lao were no longer shooting at the empty position, were cranking off rounds that cracked by his head. They’d be on top of him in less than a second.
I’ll take at least one of you motherfuckers with me, he thought as he hit the bolt release and felt it slam forward, chambering a round. No need to aim, just point and shoot!
He had to look at his own gun to confirm the fact that he hadn’t shot a single round, but the two enemy soldiers were down, one writhing in agony, the other quite clearly dead.
A form slid down next to him, turned to grin.
“You about had enough of this fun, Jimmy?” he asked.
“Bishop? Where the fuck did you come from?”
“Why, heaven, of course. Now, would you like to go, or do you want to play some more games with these guys?”
While McCulloden, Carmichael, and the Thai Rangers were fighting an orderly delay against the Pathet Lao, Bucky Epstein was rigging the trees that unduly restricted the LZ with all the demolitions he could scrounge. To the biggest one he’d affixed two claymore mines wrapped with a dozen turns of detonating cord, with an M-26 grenade attached above the main charge, the fuse removed and replaced with another length of det cord. The idea was that the main blast would cut the tree, the M-26 going off milliseconds later would serve as a kicker charge, pushing the tree in the direction he wanted. The other trees he rigged with only one claymore, mainly because that was all he had, det cord and no kicker. Wouldn’t really matter what direction they fell. He’d just finished double-priming the whole circuit, using a length of det cord to tie it all together and the detonating caps removed from the claymores to set it off. He strung out the firing wire, was just about to hit the claymore clacker when he saw the two Americans and their Thai escorts emerge from the jungle.
“Might want to take cover,” he said, pointing to his handiwork.
“That’s about some jury-rigged bullshit,” Jerry Hauck said.
Epstein pretended insult. “And I suppose you could do better, you one-legged motherfucker,” he said.
Jerry grinned, turned to Dickerson. “That’s what I was looking for, some good old-fashioned sympathy. Blow the motherfucker! See if I care.”
Bucky squeezed the clackers. The resulting detonation sheared all three trees neatly off at about two feet above the ground. The one with the kicker slowly, majestically, fell exactly where Bucky had intended.
Jerry spat out a great mouthful of dirt, ran his tongue over his teeth, spat again. Grunted.
“Not too bad for a cut-dick, weapons-man puke,” he said. “How ya been, Bucky? Damned glad to see you.”
“Gonna be hot,” Finn said into the handset of the PRC-77 radio he carried. “Soon as we hit the LZ, ’bout five minutes nearly as I can figure, have the Cobras come in, try to suppress. Those Hueys will be sitting ducks, otherwise.”
He got a Roger from Bucky back at the LZ, turned to Jim Carmichael and smiled. “Just like the good old days, huh, Jimmy?”
“Wasn’t a goddamn thing good about them, and it wasn’t all that long ago,” Carmichael replied while changing magazines.
“Getting to be a cranky old fucker, ain’t you?”
Jim fired a burst at a flitting target, was fairly certain he’d hit nothing, but what the hell. Hitting someone was a bonus. What you tried to do was keep them off you, make sure you weren’t flanked, make them careful.
“And I suppose you’re always sweetness and light,” he said.
“That’s what all my fans say,” Finn replied. He shouted at the troops on his left, told them to move, laid down a base of fire with a full magazine of 5.56mm, then grabbed a white phosphorous grenade, pulled the pin, and heaved it as far as he could in the direction of the enemy. The choking cloud of white smoke would mask their movements and also serve as a marker for the helicopters orbiting above. Anything on the opposite side of the smoke was to be regarded as enemy, and fair game.
“C’mon,” he said. “They’re waiting for us.”
Chapter 26
Deputy chief of staff for Intelligence General Miller met with the Army chief of staff Elmore Green in the latter’s office. The meeting was at General Miller’s request.
“Operation Playback is completed,” he said.
“And the POWs?”
“One dead, the other chose to remain.”
General Warren grunted. It was a less-than-satisfactory result. He’d had reservations about the operation from the beginning, feeling it far too risky for the results that were to be expected.
On the other hand, if the team hadn’t been at just the right place at the right time Bangkok might right now have been occupied by the North Vietnamese army. The ancient monarchy would have been replaced by some Thai Communist stooge, and America would have lost one of the few allies it still had in the region.
“So we can claim Korhonen is simply an AWOL, if he ever shows up again,” Warren said. “That’s technically true, isn’t it?”
“In that he refused repatriation when given the chance? Yes, that’s true. The team itself took one casualty. Sergeant Jerome Hauck stepped on a mine. They had to amputate the leg halfway up the calf. The others are okay. Exhausted, very much resenting the debriefings, but okay. Captain Carmichael is demanding to be reunited with his wife.”
General Warren’s head jerked up. “No one has told him yet?”
“We didn’t think it would be appropriate before the debriefing was completed.”
Warren shook his head. “Poor son of a bitch,” he said.
Miller agreed. “Decorations?” he asked.
“You know we can’t decorate someone for something that didn’t happen,” General Warren replied. “They’ve signed the debriefing sheets?”
“They have,” General Miller replied. The debriefing sheet was a warning that, should you divulge any of the classified information on the operation or anything to do with it to anyone at all, you would be prosecuted under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and would serve a term of not less than ten years’ confinement at the United States Military Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
“Keep a close eye on them,” Warren said. “Make damned sure nobody gets a snootful and starts talking about this operation they were just on.”
“They’ll be watched,” Miller assured him. “Now, as for the operation itself. As I had told you it was likely to be, it was compromised from the very beginning.”
“And there’s no possibility it was on the part of anyone assigned to it?”
“The people assigned to it were never privy to the operations of SOG, and the compromises appear to be generated from exactly the same source.”
“You put the tell-tales in the messages?”
“We did. And got them back verbatim.”
“Shit!” Warren swore.
Miller was silent. He knew the chief of staff was thinking exactly the same thing he was. That the compromise had to have come from somewhere in the classified message traffic from the FOB in Nakhon Phanom to CINCPAC in Hawaii. Just as the traffic from SOG headquarters in Saigon had been compromised, in the same route.
It meant that the chief of staff of the Army was going to have to confront the chief of Naval Operations and tell him that his precious codes had been compromised. It would not have been a pleasant task in the best of times, but since the new CNO and General Warren had a mutual personal distaste for one another that went all the way back to World War II, it was going to be particularly difficult.
But there was no alternative. Someone had been reading the mail, and had been using it to get a hell of a lot of good men killed. Those men were Army, and though they’d be
longed to what the general often thought of as the Goddamn Undisciplined Special Forces, they were his.
Like it or not, the CNO was just going to have to suck it up. And find out where the compromise was, before it caused a lot more damage than just the loss of a few good men.
“So when are you going to tell the captain about his wife?” he asked, as much to change the subject as from any real concern about a very junior subordinate.
“I believe they’re doing that right now.”
Chapter 27
He came back to Bad Tölz in the dead of night, taking the last train out of Munich. He wanted no one to see him. He was, in technical terms, absent without leave.
After extensive debriefings, first at the FOB in Nakhon Phanom, then at CINCPAC in Hawaii, finally in a nondescript office building somewhere in Arlington, Virginia, he had been told that he was to be assigned to the Military District of Washington, specific assignment to be named later.
There was no reason for him to return to Germany. His household goods had already been shipped to Washington, were sitting in a warehouse somewhere outside Fort Myer.
Think of your daughter, the chaplain had said, the one they’d sent in after, when he’d demanded to be reunited with his wife, the colonel who was his final debriefer told him, with all appropriate expressions of regret, that he was sorry to inform the captain that his wife had died while he was in Laos. Complications arising from childbirth.
He’d sat, stunned, and the chaplain had come in. Terribly sorry, you have to be feeling horrible, etcetera, etcetera.
He’d been too numb even to rage at the man, knowing that he was merely an emissary, that it would do no good anyway.
You have a fine, beautiful daughter, the padre had continued. She’s with your sister. Since your wife’s parents are deceased, and there were no other close kin, and you were away, we thought that was best. Our deepest sympathies. Would you like to pray?
And that was when he came very close to losing it.
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