by J. F. Holmes
Firing rose to a crescendo.
“Up!”
“Firing…Misfire!”
“Misfire!”
Over the sound of the firefight, someone started screaming the Hail Mary.
“Hail Mary, full of grace.”
It’s weird the things you hear in a firefight. Most people think all you can hear is what’s immediately around you—gunfire, explosions, the wounded screaming for a corpsman or their mother. I could hear all of that, and someone screaming the Hail Mary.
“Hail Mary, Full of Grace.”
There was a metallic scrape as Holmes, White’s A-gunner, pulled the dud round from the M67.
“The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women.”
Holmes slid a reload in and locked the breech with a clang.
“Up!”
“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
“Firing.”
CLICK.
“Misfire! Move!”
“Misfire!”
Something came charging through the jungle. White’s scream ended in a soggy thump.
“Huggins, Trahn, let’s go,” I said, rounding the tree we were behind.
My dad took me to a museum one time, when he was home between trips to kill strange things in faraway lands. They had a painting that showed cave men killing a wooly mammoth. That’s what we saw when we came around the tree—tiny humans trying to kill an unkillable beast.
I’ll give Holmes credit—he’d recovered the M67 from White and was trying to bring it back into action.
“Shit, Major,” Holmes said as I dropped to one knee beside him. “I told Sarn’t White that batch of ammo was crap. Some of it was green when we uncased it.”
“We’ll deal with that when we get out of here, Lance Corporal. Is the weapon serviceable?”
“Sight got knocked around a bit, but I can hit that,” he pointed at the elephant, “from here no problem. If the damn round will fire.”
“What about beehive?”
“Those were a different lot, sir, but didn’t do shit when we shot the first elephant broadside.”
I’d read H. Rider Haggard as a kid. He talks about killing African elephants, but the shot placement couldn’t be that much different on an Indian elephant.
“We’re going to have to get in close, and you’re going to have to put the shot right behind the front leg,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Holmes said, handing me his ammo pouch. “That should be all the anti-personnel rounds.”
It had been a while since I had functioned as an A-gunner, but needs must when the devil drives.
“How close, sir?” was all Holmes asked.
“Well, we don’t want to shove it up his trunk,” I said. “Missing his brain might be sub-optimal.”
“Yes, sir,” Holmes said with a laugh. “Two, three feet be close enough, you think?”
“Should be,” I replied as we worked our way around to the side.
“You want to load first, sir? Nothing personal, but if I miss at that range, I’m going to drop the tube and run. You might be in the way.”
“That might not be in our best interests, Holmes,” I said, opening the breech and sliding in a flechette round. “Up.”
Holmes closed to within three feet of the elephant before shouting, “Firing.”
THUMP.
SPLAT.
Usually flechette makes a sound like a disturbed beehive when fired—thus the nickname ‘beehive’. Holmes fired from so close the sound was barely audible before the flechettes struck. Twenty-four hundred steel wire flechettes at a range of three feet don’t make a hole, they scour flesh from bone like a fire hose hitting soft sand before eating away the bone in a similar manner. The round Holmes fired was a final protective round against human wave attacks. At three feet from the muzzle of the M67, the flechettes had just begun to disperse, so they struck the elephant as a solid mass rather than dispersed as they’d hit the other elephant.
Haggard had been right about shot placement. Destroy the heart, and the elephant will drop. Holmes had done more than destroy the heart. He’d eliminated it, along with the muscle tissue supporting the front legs. The elephant collapsed on its front legs, a dry shriek of rage its final complaint.
“It’s possessed,” Captain Trahn reported.
“Figured. The HEAT rounds for the M67 are no good. You have any suggestions other than closing to contact range and hacking its head off with a machete?”
“Simply immobilizing it leaves it here for Baird to reuse,” Trahn said. “One of my men used to work on a rubber plantation before the war. Let me ask him.”
“Before which war?” Master Guns asked as Trahn walked away with one of his soldiers.
Anderson, the corpsman, came over to report on White. “He was dead when he hit the ground, Major. Couldn’t have saved him in a major trauma center back in the world.”
“Right,” I said. “Let’s get him over to the LZ so we can get the body back to the World.”
White would get all the bells and whistles at home.
“Major, Vin says we can either hamstring the elephant and shoot it just above the ear, or just shoot it. I’d suggest cutting the head off with det cord once it’s safe to do so,” Trahn said after his quick consultation.
I looked around. “Baldwin, bring the Pig over here!”
Baldwin was a recent addition to the company, transferred from a line company where there had been a few ‘issues’—mostly minor incidents involving aggressive behavior towards ARVN and locals; he’d handled the impromptu ‘weird shit’ course we put people through in Da Nang well, but this was his first major field operation.
“Sir.”
“PFC Baldwin, this is Captain Trahn. One of his men is going to give you a very specific spot to shoot that”—I pointed to the elephant—”in. Do so, and we can get the hell out of here.”
“Aye, Aye, sir,” Baldwin replied before following Trahn and what I assumed was Vin over to a spot where they could get a good angle on the elephant’s ‘sweet spot’.
Anything else aside, Baldwin was an artist with the Pig. Two quick three round bursts, and the elephant shuddered and fell over on its side. One tusk held the head off the ground.
“Good work, Baldwin,” I said. “Lt. Fox, throw a couple loops of det cord around that thing’s head and blow it in place.”
“Sir.”
I turned back to Trahn. “Anything else?”
“Major, let’s get the hell out of here,” Trahn replied. “I’m starting to think we need to exorcise this place with an Arclight strike.”
“Captain, I was thinking the same thing.”
* * * * *
The afternoon rains had started by the time we had gotten the LZ cleared. When it stopped raining, a ground fog rose, obscuring the site.
“Aviation reports extraction is a no go due to conditions on the ground, Major,” Wilson said, shrugging.
“Ask them if they’ve got a hook up there,” I replied. “We can march everyone out, but I’d like to get White’s body out of here.”
“Sir.” Wilson held a brief conversation with the air traffic controller, I could hear his O-1 Bird Dog circling above the trees.
“Yes, sir, one of the Sea Knights has a jungle penetrator and a hook. They’ll drop it in the middle of the clearing.”
You could tell when the big, twin-rotor Sikorsky started hovering—the downbeat from the blades stirred the gelid fog in strange patterns. Anderson and Trahn carried the bag with White’s mortal remains to the hook and rigged it so the helicopter crew could recover the body. They winched White into the fog, and after a few moments, the Sikorsky flew off, leaving us to the gentle ministrations of the Tokay lizards.
I called a quick meeting of the platoon leaders. “We’re thirty miles the wrong side of the Laotian border,” I said as something exploded in the processing shed; they were burning nicely. I pulled out a map sheet. “We’ve got enough food for two days, three if we st
retch it, and most of the ammo. We’ve got to get from here to here.”
The second here was the alternate LZ, a good day’s march away from our current position. “The only issue is, we don’t know where Baird is,” Major Trahn said. “We’ve destroyed his base, but he could be anywhere out there with his remaining…call them troops.”
“Sir, the men have been reporting things moving in the fog,” Lt. Fox reported.
“Things?”
“Yes, sir. No one has gotten a good look at them, so ‘things’. Could be humans, could be rock apes,” he replied.
“Right. Keep your eyes open, people. We’re going to move in ten. Fox, your platoon has point.”
“Yes, sir.”
Five minutes later, we found out where Baird was.
All I can figure is that he had sent the elephants in as scouts—if they’d returned to him, he’d have known it was safe for him to come back to the site. Instead, we killed them, alerting him that someone was in the area. He probably closed the range to observe—daemon-controlled elephants might not make the best scouts, after all, they can’t report back what they’ve seen—and we blew the site into low earth orbit just as the rains started.
You want to know the best part of the whole thing? Intel, going over the maps and crap we’d seized before blowing the plantation up, determined that the alternate LZ was where Baird was picking up supplies smuggled upriver to him. Based on the things we found in between the plantation and the site, he’d probably taken his giants and other daemon-controlled workers down to the river to pick up supplies while we’d marched in from the other direction to destroy his body farm. This job is a crapshoot on a good day. Missions like this are why MAC-V (SU 13) members drink, heavily.
Coonts, a runner from Fox’s platoon, came up while I was going over the final preparations for extraction.
“Sir, there’s a man standing on the trail leading to the alternate LZ with a white flag.”
“Master Guns, Captain Trahn,” I said, following Coonts back to Lt. Fox.
When we got back to Fox, there were two figures waiting a hundred yards down the trail. One, holding a stick with a white flag on it, was black—not African black, but a shiny, lacquered black, as if he’d been weatherproofed to prevent rot—his features were European, and he was barefoot, wearing the remnants of a French legionary uniform topped with a local smock. The other figure had the mellow skin and melded looks that indicated mixed Asian and European ancestry, looked like he had just stepped out of a 1950s Great White Hunter Film—he was wearing brown knee-high boots and khaki trousers, topped with a khaki bush jacket. Completing his ensemble was a light tan slouch hat with a wide white ribbon hatband. I could see the barrel of a rifle sticking up over one of his shoulders, its wide leather sling crossing his body at an angle.
“Is that Baird?” I asked, handing Trahn my binoculars.
“Yes, Major, that is Doctor Jean Baird,” Trahn replied sadly. “I can speak with him if you’d like.”
“We’ll both go, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Guns? You have a handkerchief on you? Mine are all green.”
Master Guns had been thinking ahead of me—he handed me a branch with some white gauze tied around the end of it. I handed it to Captain Trahn, and he and I started down the trail, coming to a stop at what C.S. Forester described as ‘half pistol shot’.
“Trahn? Is that you?” Baird asked after a polite half second. “Did the government let you form your Tho san ma?”
“Yes, Jean, on both counts. They also sent me to put a stop to what you are doing.”
“Why? I’m helping them win the war, aren’t I?”
“Possessing people with daemons is farther than even the government in Saigon is willing to go to win the war with the Communists,” Trahn said with a sigh. “The only way you could see to win this was necromancy?”
“When the idiots in Nguyen’s orbit laughed at my other suggestions, yes. You don’t know the powers involved, Trahn.”
“Jean, I do,” Trahn replied, opening the collar of his battle dress to show the white tab collar of a priest. “It’s not too late for you to renounce the powers you are allied with. Show some contrition, and you can die with a clean soul.”
Baird threw back his head and laughed, his hands on his hips. He looked like a tiny, khaki-colored version of the Jolly Green Giant. “Come crawling back to the light of the Church, in other words,” Baird said. “Pray that I be allowed the boon of heaven after what I’ve done?”
“Something like that, yes,” Trahn admitted. “Your penance won’t be easy, but you can die shriven.”
Baird looked at me. “Your part in this, American?”
The way he said ‘American’ showed he probably didn’t like us that much. I think if he’d been able to go back in time and keep the French from aiding the Colonies in revolting against England, he’d have been a happy man.
“Doctor, I was ordered to put a stop to a series of attacks against villagers and American forces in the northern area of the Republic of Vietnam. I’ve destroyed your base, and killing you lets me mark my mission complete,” I answered with a shrug. “However, if you are willing to release the daemons under your control and submit yourself to Captain Trahn, that would also be a successful end to my mission.”
“So, my choices are to surrender, give up my power and submit to the gentle ministrations of Mother Church, or die?”
“Something like that, yes,” I replied.
Baird drew himself to attention, giving me a French style salute. “Major, in good conscience, I cannot surrender. Therefore I will see you on the field of battle,” he said before turning and walking into the jungle.
“He’s kidding, right?” I asked Trahn as we walked back toward our position.
“No, sir. Jean’s father died at the hands of the Japanese when the Americans wouldn’t sell the French in Indochina supplies during World War II. Jean received a commendation from Ho Chi Minh during the struggle against the Japanese—it was only after Ho started openly preaching communism that Jean returned to the side of the French in 1949. He was at Dien Bien Phu with the Legion, and only escaped being interned in the North by virtue of having French papers.”
“So he’s rabidly pro-Vietnamese, and anti-everyone else?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wilson, platoon leaders meeting, now,” I said when we walked back into sight of the command party.
The one good thing about having spent most of the day destroying the plantation was that I knew where I wanted to dig in. Either most of the fires around the plantation house had burned out, or the rain had put them out, because otherwise it was going to be a stone-cold bitch to survive the upcoming fight.
I gave my orders as quickly as possible. We fell back on the plantation and dug in around the smoldering remains of the main house. We raided the lone processing shed still standing for tin, to line foxholes and to cover an aid station near the plantation house, before destroying the remains of the shed.
The short jungle twilight was on us before Baird made his first attack, which we destroyed. Short, violent and brutal as night fell.
“Captain, I don’t understand what took Baird so long to move against us,” I said, counting the remaining ammo for my shotgun by touch.
“You have advantages he lacks,” Trahn said.
“How so?” Of the hundred and fifty rounds I’d started with, forty-five remained. I’d been on the horn to Saigon, and they were laying a mission in to drop supplies on us in the early morning hours. Beans and ammo would be nice. Water was going to be a saving grace.
“You can tell me, Lt. Fox, or Staff Sergeant Davis ‘do this’ and reasonably expect the task to be completed, no?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Baird does not have that luxury. Depending on the size of his horde, he has either to lead them personally or hope that the daemons he’s placed in charge will follow his orders. That’s probably why he
had to create the giants.”
“You’ve lost me,” I said, taking a sip from my canteen.
“Daemons are vain, showy creatures. A Vietnamese body might be a fine shell for an imp. A daemon who leads imps, however, is going to demand a finer body, and so on and so forth. The giants probably house the equivalent of his lieutenants.”
“You’ve just said his forces don’t operate along the lines of a military hierarchy, but you talk of lieutenants?”
“Yes. Think of them more as enforcers. He cannot give them orders that they carry out independently. He can tell them ‘Force the minions to assault that hill’ and they will do so. Usually in the most brutal and efficient manner, but if something changes that would require backing off, the minions won’t, unless Baird is there to tell them to do so.”
“I think I understand. If we kill Baird, the whole thing goes to hell, then?”
“Literally. Baird is the key. All the daemons are tied to him through the spells he used to place them in the bodies of the slain.”
“He probably won’t show up on the battlefield then?”
“No, Major, there is a very good chance he will. He has to be there to direct his minions. He also has to be there to show them that even though he is a frail mortal, he has a greater personal courage than they do—otherwise they will turn upon him and rip his soul from his body to torment in a hell of their own devising.”
“That I understand,” I said.
*****
The night was quiet—if it hadn’t been for the Tokay lizards and their mating calls, I’d have said it was too quiet. Just as the ground mist was burning off, we could hear the sound of rotors beating the air into submission. Air Traffic Control was back as well.
“Major,” Wilson called. “ATC reports there will be at least one bird on site from now until we’re able to extract. They also state there’s a couple of fast movers we can call in.”
Colonel Conrad had to have called in some favors to get that kind of support. “What’re the fast movers carrying?”
“Mixed load of nape and five hundred pounders, sir.”
“Right. Tell ATC thank you, and we’ll put his birds to use as soon as we need them.”