P. O. W.

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  PRISONERS

  OF

  THE NVA

  “Come on, Colonel! You’re the leader… are you going to let your soldier die?” Van Pao demanded.

  Colonel Garibaldi’s lower lip trembled. He was ashamed, but he didn’t have the courage to take Spencer Barnett’s place.

  Spencer saw what the female NVA lieutenant was doing—she was going to kill him, but at the same time she was going to totally break the colonel.

  “Hey! Sweet Bitch! I won’t let him take my place!” Barnett screamed. “Damn you, sir! Don’t you fall for this shit! You know the game she’s playing!”

  One of the guards kicked Spencer in the side to shut him up and he yelled all the louder.

  “Colonel! You’ve got to live for both of us!”

  Lieutenant Van Pao barked orders to the guards, and they picked Spencer up and placed him directly over the sharpened bamboo stake…

  Also by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Survivor of Nam: Baptism

  Survivor of Nam: Black Market*

  Survivor of Nam: Court-Martial*

  Published by

  POPULAR LIBRARY *forthcoming

  Copyright

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1988 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Popular Library® and the fanciful P design are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Popular Library books are published by

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56681-0

  Contents

  Prisoners Of The NVA

  Also by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE: A Rum

  CHAPTER TWO: Project Cherry

  CHAPTER THREE: Black Cong

  CHAPTER FOUR: Da Nang

  CHAPTER FIVE: Run! Run!

  CHAPTER SIX: Fool’s Gold Escape

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Philippine Mock-up

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Hero, Traitor, Deathmaker

  CHAPTER NINE: Gray Justice

  Epilogue

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  Things have been quiet for a while and I’ve actually gotten some time to catch up on my letter writing—not that there is anything really new. In fact, after a while being a soldier is just like any other job, except maybe that you carry a gun… and you don’t get to go home at five o’clock.

  Reggie said to say thanks for the clothes for the kids. He’s almost finished making arrangements to send them home to his folks. Both of them are so cute, you almost would believe that they didn’t know there was a war going on, but they do. Kids are kids.

  Love,

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Rum

  She flicked out her tongue and instantly sensed the change of temperature between the air and the warm rock she was lying on and moved her coils so that the bottom of her long body could enjoy the heat coming from the sun-warmed surface. A flash of light from the side of the mountain on the opposite side of the river registered in her slow-to-function brain as something different, but not threatening to her safety. It had been ten years since anything had even tried bothering her. There was no way for her to know that she was the largest living reticulated python in the world. She was a little over thirty-six feet long and had a girth of thirty-nine inches.

  Lieutenant Van Pao held her field glasses up to her eyes and watched the iridescent skin of the large python flash in a beautiful rainbow of colors. The snake had just come out of the water and contrasted with the sand-colored flat rock she had crawled on. Lieutenant Van Pao looked at her watch; this was the fifth morning in a row that the python had come out of the river onto the rock. The North Vietnamese lieutenant was sure that it had a burrow near the basking place and used the sun-heated rock to raise her body temperature before going hunting along the fast-flowing mountain river.

  * * *

  The area around the prison compound had been cleared of underbrush, and a twenty-foot circle of pungi stakes separated the camp from the Bru Montagnard village of A Rum in Laos. The pungi stakes weren’t very effective as a fence, but they issued a clear warning to the villagers and to the prisoners of war that any attempt to cross the open ground would result in their being shot by one of the NVA guards.

  Corporal Barnett carried the bundles of freshly cut bamboo poles over each one of his shoulders. He dropped the load off his right shoulder first and then leaned to his left side so that the bundle could roll off his collarbone to the ground.

  “What do you think they’re building?”

  The Air Force colonel looked up from tying two of the poles together with a long piece of split bamboo. “You’ve got me, Spencer. It could be another POW cage….”

  “Naw, I don’t think so, they’re building it too low for that.”

  “Maybe it’s for short Vietnamese?” The colonel joked but Barnett was concentrating too hard on the purpose of the new cage to catch the pun.

  “They’ve always kept the South Vietnamese prisoners separate from us Americans.”

  “Well then, the only thing we can do is wait and see!” The colonel reached over for another one of the long poles Barnett had just delivered and spaced it with the others that had already been tied to the frame of the cage. “It is a little unusual to have the bamboo spaced so close together, and putting the gate on top of the cage doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  A guard noticed Barnett and the colonel talking and yelled over to the prisoners to get back to work.

  Barnett went back to the edge of the camp, where an NVA soldier was using a machete to cut and trim the bamboo poles. The NVA soldier was sweating and angry; he had been detailed for the hard labor because he had been caught sleeping on guard the night before. Barnett felt the flat side of the wide knife-blade against his shoulder and jerked away instinctively. The guard curled his upper lip and pointed to the pile of bamboo. Barnett looked down at the ground and then went over to assemble another load. The week before, he would have glared at the young NVA guard and been beaten for his insolence. The Air Force colonel was teaching him how to survive in the NVA prisoner-of-war compound, but it was against everything Barnett believed in to subjugate himself to other humans, especially the young guard who had just hit him with the machete.

  The sound of soft laughter floated across the narrow clearing to where Barnett was working with the bamboo. He snuck a look out of the corner of his eye and saw Mohammed James sitting on the shaded porch of the Montagnard house. The sound of laughter increased when James saw Barnett sneak a look in his direction. He pulled the fifteen-year-old Montagnard girl closer to him and put her hand on his crotch. She giggled when she felt the bulge, and he laughed louder.

  “Hey! Barnett! Do you want to fuck my woman?” James yelled across the pungi-staked barrier. He had been drinking num-pah, a rice wine fermented in large, ten-gallon earthenware crocks and drunk directly from the crock with a bamboo straw.

  Barnett ignored James’s comment, picked up another load of bamboo poles, and started walking back toward the new cage.

  “Hey, you motherfucker!” James stood up and screamed at Barnett, who had turned his back to him. “Who the fuck do you think you are! Huh?”

  Barnett continued walking away.

  “I’m going to smoke your white ass! Do you hear me?” James heard the girl giggle and grabbed her by the arm. “You respect me! You hear?” He staggered into the dark longhouse the NVA had forced the Montagnards to build for him and pulled the girl behind him.

  The Air Force colonel had heard James screaming over at Barnett and was s
miling when the young soldier returned with his load. “That was smart, Spencer.”

  Barnett dropped his load and glared over at the colonel. “I’m going to kill that motherfucking traitor before I leave here!”

  “He’ll get his; you just stay calm and survive.”

  “It’s hard…” said Barnett, whispering under his breath.

  “I know… I know, Spencer, but you’ve got to tune him out.” The colonel fitted a piece of bamboo against the frame. “They’re looking for any excuse to make an example out of you… anything! There’s something they want from you, or they would have executed you the first time you tried to punch out a guard.” The colonel lowered his voice, speaking without moving his lips. “Do you know what they’re after?”

  Barnett kept busy stacking the poles near the colonel. “I guess it has to do with the seismic-intrusion detectors my recon team had planted right before we were ambushed.”

  “But you said that James’s team had planted six of them also… it doesn’t make sense.” The colonel stopped talking when the roving guard neared their workplace, waiting until the NVA soldier wandered on before continuing. “There has to be something else.”

  Barnett shrugged his shoulders. “Every time Sweet Bitch calls me in for interrogation, she asks about the green boxes we planted and where they’re located…. ‘I’ve told you everything that I know about those boxes, Colonel Garibaldi.…’”

  “I believe you, Spencer…. When I was working in the Pentagon, there were rumors that we had special seismic devices that could be air dropped. They were about two feet long and had antennae that looked like young saplings… that could easily have been changed to bamboo.” The colonel frowned, trying to recall something else from the top-secret briefing. There was something else about the detectors that he knew was very important, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

  Barnett left and went back for another load of bamboo. The colonel spent the rest of the afternoon trying to recall every detail from the briefing that had taken place years earlier.

  Lieutenant Van Pao returned to her office in the village right before noon. She was well pleased with the results of her engineers. The village of A Rum looked exactly like it had before they moved the POW camp and her headquarters into it. A great deal of care had been taken to blend the new longhouses and storage areas with the existing village. Aerial photographs would reveal only a slightly larger village, something that was common in the war-torn countryside where the Montagnards had gathered together for protection against bombings. The Americans refused to bomb the settlements as long as they remained Montagnard and there was no sign of NVA activity near them.

  The field telephone in her small office emitted a loud buzzing sound that startled her. She reached for the black handset and answered the direct line to division headquarters.

  “Lieutenant Van Pao speaking, sir!”

  There was a short pause filled with static, and then a deep voice spoke. “Lieutenant, when are we going to get some information on those sensors the Americans have placed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail?”

  “Sir! I have been working on the American soldier, but he has been very stubborn during interrogations.”

  “You mean to tell me that you cannot break one seventeen-year-old soldier?” The senior officer’s voice was filled with contempt. “Should I send a professional officer to your camp to help?”

  “No sir! I am sure that I can break the soldier and get the information we need!”

  “If the devices our friend Mohammed James showed us had been removed professionally, we wouldn’t still be waiting!” The old intelligence officer was angry with the woman because she had allowed the six seismic-intrusion detectors to be moved that the American named James had shown them before checking to see if they had been booby-trapped. All of the devices had special tilt mechanisms in them, so that once they had been implanted and turned on, they couldn’t be moved without a small explosive charge destroying the insides of the green boxes. “I want the other six sensors found before the end of this week! Do you understand me, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “We have already lost over five hundred replacements because of those sensors, as well as sixty trucks that cannot be replaced!” The officer’s voice was rising in anger. “If James didn’t know about the destruction devices, I am sure this other American doesn’t know about them either!”

  “Sir… he won’t talk about anything! He won’t even confirm his name!”

  “Get him to talk! Or you’ll be back in the field as an intelligence officer at Cu Chi!” The telephone went dead.

  She placed the receiver back in its cradle and went over to the open window that was covered with shutters to blot out the light at night and to keep out the rain during the monsoons. She knew that she had to do something fast about Spencer Barnett, for two reasons: her honor, and because she knew that she couldn’t survive living underground in the tunnels at Cu Chi. There you could live for six months underground without ever coming to the surface. She hated tunnels, and the intelligence officer at division knew that about her.

  “Sergeant!” She screamed the word through the open window. A small, chubby man in his late fifties popped into her office. He was a well-decorated NCO and had fought in some of the great battles for independence, including Dien Bien Phu. The years, plus being wounded eight times, had forced him to serve in a noncombatant role, and he was very unhappy.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “I want a detail platoon ready to depart tomorrow at dawn.” She turned her back on the sergeant. “Have them bring the fish nets and the large rice bags from my office.”

  “Do you want them to forage again this week?” The sergeant was slightly puzzled, because they had just foraged from two smaller Montagnard villages up the valley, and there was plenty of fresh meat in the village for the camp cadre.

  “No… we are going hunting for wild game.” She smiled and added an afterthought. “Make sure Dong Bec is a member of the detail. He was a professional trapper back home, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. He says that he’s even trapped tigers.” The sergeant’s eyebrows rose slightly.

  “Good! Make sure they are ready!” She left her office and strolled over to the hooch where the American lived with his Montagnard girlfriend.

  The water was cold, but not as cold as her burrow. She took her time entering the water and swam just under the surface with only her head above water. A view from directly overhead made her look as if she were floating in the air.

  The river water was crystal clear. A large garfish darted out of her way and hid under a rock overhang until she had passed. The river narrowed between two flat boulders and formed a short rapids that forced her to take to the land for a short crawl of less than a hundred meters before the river widened again and formed a series of large, deep pools. There her favorite basking place was on the surface of a house-sized flat rock, which was positioned near the edge of the river where it caught the earliest rays of the morning sun. She approached her rock from the river and took her time bringing all of her thirty-six feet of coils up on the dry stone.

  Lieutenant Van Pao smiled. She was on time as usual. A shiver rippled down the NVA lieutenant’s spine. The python was even larger close up than she had anticipated. One of the soldiers in hiding stifled a scream and tried backing up to get away from the huge reptile. None of the NVA platoon had been told what they were going to capture and take back to the camp. The python was absolutely huge, and the soldier was small for even a Vietnamese. The cold barrel of a pistol against the back of his head made him reconsider leaving his place in the semicircle that had been formed before the large rock. The fish nets had been spread out behind the rock just in case they were needed. Now that the lieutenant saw the snake up close, she wondered if the fine nets would be effective.

  Private Dong Bec swallowed hard. He had trapped many animals for zoos and private citizens during his life, but he had never even hea
rd about a reticulated python as big as the snake on the rock. He had traveled fifty miles as a young boy to see a python that had been captured in the rice fields west of Hanoi, but that snake had been only twenty-one feet long and much skinnier than the one he was looking at. The wet skin contrasting against the dry rock made her look even bigger. He knew the fish nets wouldn’t slow her down even a second if she decided on going back into the river. The only way to capture her would be to have the whole platoon grab her and stretch her out so that she couldn’t use her coils.

  Lieutenant Van Pao caught Dong Bec’s attention and nodded for him to start moving his capture team in from his side of the rock.

  She flicked out her tongue and sensed the air. A pungent ammonia odor forced her to clean her tongue rapidly and sense the air again. She had never sensed the ammonia odor of living animals as strongly as she was now experiencing. One time she had crawled into a herd of wild pigs, and an ammonia odor had reached her when several of the pigs urinated at the same time, but this was much stronger. She turned her head and sensed the upriver direction, and the same odor reached her. She raised her football-sized brain cavity and sensed with her tongue the green jungle wall behind her, and again the strong ammonia odor. The only direction that was free of the smell was directly over the river. She started to slowly slide toward the river, not alarmed, just very cautious because of the new smell.

  Dong Bec saw her start to move toward the water and knew that once she had even a portion of her mass in the fast-moving river, she’d be free. It would be suicide to get into the water with her; once she decided to, she could move very fast. He yelled for the rest of the platoon to follow and ran out on the warm rock in his bare feet.

  She sensed the vibrations but ignored the threat of the small beast running toward her on her rock. She continued slipping toward the water, not really in a hurry, just moving in that direction with the majority of her mass still coiled in a large, three-foot-high pile.