PHILIP STOOD IN the shadows where the faint trail he followed broke from the jungle into the long clearing. He hesitated there until he could see the seven black-clad guerrillas waiting for him at the long meadow’s opposite edge. He stepped into the sunlight and waved to them.
“Good timing,” the Frenchman said to himself, seeing his escort walk into the sunlight, too, waving at him. He took the brim of his straw hat with his fingers and lifted it onto his head, pulling the wooden slide up snugly under his chin. He waved to them again as he strolled forward, along the path that led across the clearing.
Birds sang in the forests at each side and now behind him, so Philip felt comfortable that no danger likely lurked there. An absence of normal wildlife sounds, no birds singing, quite often signaled the presence of a predator, which in wartime commonly meant men.
He paused a moment and lit his pipe, pulling the sweet smoke into his mouth.
The leather valise bounced lightly against his left hip as he strolled toward his comrades. He held the bowl of his calabash as he bit on the stem and waved again with his free hand, signaling all was well.
Suddenly, a powerful force struck the Frenchman’s chest with a loud bang. He saw his own blood gush and spray into the air around him as he was knocked off his feet. When his back slammed against the ground, Philip opened his eyes wide. He wanted to run. He tried to catch his breath. Then he realized a gunshot had mortally wounded him. His world went forever dark.
The crack of the rifle shot echoed across the tall grass that covered the long clearing, and rolled into the trees. Its surprise shattered the peaceful morning and the seven soldiers immediately fell to the ground beneath the grassy blind. They lay there a moment, listening for another shot.
Then the men crawled on their bellies, spreading out so that each rifleman was fifty feet or more from the next. Cautiously, the leader raised himself to his knees. He saw nothing and heard only silence. Not a bird sang. Nothing.
Suddenly, he heard the flutter of wings followed by branches breaking on the slope of the hill more than 500 yards in front of his patrol. He immediately raised his automatic rifle to his shoulder and held back the trigger, sending a burst of AK-47 rounds into the brush and trees.
His six comrades stood and joined his gunfire, as the sound of an approaching helicopter came from beyond the far ridge. Then a second Huey made a sweeping turn just above the treetops on a hill far to the left.
Machine-gun fire erupted from the second aircraft, sending dirt and grass into the air around the guerrillas. Several of them fired back at the helicopter while the leader focused his rifle on the two men he now saw running up the hill toward the first chopper.
He shouted at his comrades to direct some of their fire at the escaping men dressed in green camouflage, who also had themselves covered with leafy twigs and clumps of grass.
Seeing his bullets fall short of his target, the patrol leader raised his rifle’s muzzle high, arching his fire now onto the helicopter. He had emptied a second magazine of ammunition at the escaping men and their aircraft, and had just slammed a third banana-curved container into the well of his rifle when the second Huey tilted toward them and turned. A Marine leaned precariously out of the bird, laying his weight at an angle behind an M-60 .30-caliber machine gun that he had tied to the top of the helicopter’s door with long straps, and again opened fire on the Viet Cong.
The seven men dove for cover as the chopper raced down the slope and flew low over the clearing between the black-clad soldiers and the first helicopter, which now lifted away and disappeared beyond the ridge. Again the men fired as the second aircraft turned, swept up the hill, and disappeared, following the first.
Philip lay with his empty eyes opened wide, dilated, and clear. Their irises left only a thin brown line around the edges of their crystal black pupils. In them, the reflection of the sky and drifting clouds grew dim as the Frenchman’s tears dried and specks of dust settled on the now-sticky surfaces of his eyes.
The shadows of seven men spread over the dead man’s body. After a few moments, the shadows disappeared.
7
Spook Central
THE CRUNCHING OF heavy footsteps on the gravel walkway outside the Quonset hut door aroused Carlos Hathcock from his afternoon nap. He turned his head to see Captain Jim Land trudging toward the screen door, looking tired and dirty.
Outside helicopters flew nonstop, beating their whirling wings through the humid evening air, churning a rhythmic whomp, whomp, whomp, while cargo planes, running up their turbine engines for takeoff, droned in the background. The Marine sniper found it curious that with all that noise he could still hear a man walk across pea-size rocks that covered the path outside the hooch where he and his partner slept.
When Hathcock and Burke had returned to the air facility this morning, they had immediately taken advantage of the hot-water showers, located in a concrete-block head facility behind their Quonset hut. Clean and refreshed the duo then found an all-ranks, all-services club of sorts in a nearby hooch.
There, a civilian-looking pilot wearing khakis and a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap had shown them his gratitude for eliminating the Frenchman by giving the two men a six-pack of cold beer he had taken from a decal-covered, gas-operated refrigerator with Playboy’s 1966 Playmate of the Year taped to its door. It stood next to a Formica-topped, plywood bar, also festooned with decals that ranged from Flying Tigers Airways to the Dallas Cowboys.
By three P.M., both Marines had finished the six-pack and used up the dollar’s worth of games the man had left on the pinball machine. With no money and no beer remaining, they returned to their soft beds in the Quonset hut where they slept until the sound of crunching gravel awakened the sergeant.
“Sir, got some showers out back, and these racks feel mighty good,” Carlos said to his captain in a sleepy voice.
Burke leaned on his elbows and said, smiling, “Skipper, we ought to move down here, they have lots of room. We could cover the whole TAOR1 by just jumping on one of these choppers outside. They could drop us off, we shoot some VC, they pick us up, and we kick back here. What could be better!”
“Not a thing, Lance Corporal Burke,” Land said. “Take advantage of it while you can. However, I have to head back tomorrow morning. You two need to get going as well, once these people here finish with you. So enjoy.
“For now, I’m going to take advantage of the showers and those racks.”
Carlos waited for his captain to disappear to the rear half of the hut, where he had located a bed and a locker. When Hathcock heard the screen door at the other end of the hut slam shut, he smiled at Burke.
“We play our cards right, we might squeeze a couple of extra days here,” he said.
“I could hear those wheels turning as soon as the skipper said he was leaving tomorrow,” Burke said with a smile. “What do you have in mind?”
“We go back to that club tonight and listen to what the boys here have to say,” Carlos responded. “I’m hoping that some of those spooks will be in there, and we can let them know we are in no hurry to take off, if they have some more business for us. Skipper has plenty of snipers up at 263, anyway.”
“Besides,” Burke said, grinning, “we might get some more free beer.”
“I have a feeling that even if we did have money, we still couldn’t buy a drink there,” Carlos said cheerfully.
JIM LAND HAD just begun snoring when Hathcock nudged him.
“Sir, we’re going over to a hooch a few doors down and check out this pool table they got there, if you need to find us later,” Carlos said.
With a groggy moan, Land acknowledged the sergeant’s report, and quickly fell back to sleep. Later that evening, the captain awakened and recalled what Hathcock had said to him.
“Bet I could get a cold drink there,” Land said to himself as he tied his boots and walked outside. He stood a moment and looked both directions. Then he heard the sound of the Beatles singing Love, Love Me Do, co
ming from a green-painted sea hut with a rusty tin roof, three doors down.
When he stepped inside, he saw Hathcock and Burke seated at a round table with two in civilian clothes drinking beer and playing spades with a dog-eared deck that featured a naked woman spread-eagled on the cards’ backsides.
“Skipper,” the man with the mustache and bush hat from the morning’s mission called to Land. “Let me buy you a drink.”
Land smiled and walked to the bar where the field agent popped open the door to the old Survel refrigerator.
“Name your poison and keep your money,” the man said. “It’s no good here.”
Carlos looked up and smiled at the captain.
Land shook his head, grinning back. He could almost read his two men’s minds. “See what we got you?” he thought.
“I’ll just have a 7UP,” Land told his new friend who leaned against the open door of the beer-packed cooler, twisting the end of his mustache with his right thumb and index finger.
“Shit, Captain,” the agent said. “I thought you Marines were hardcore.”
“I have an early flight,” Land responded, “and I’ll need all the brain power I can muster to deal with the situation back there.”
“Your pilot’s probably sitting shit-faced in the corner, Skipper,” the man followed. “You sure you won’t have one beer?”
Land shook his head as he took the cold, dripping can from the fellow. Carlos and Burke laughed loudly as their two opponents threw down their card hands.
“Sniper team wins again,” John Burke exclaimed, writing down the score.
Against the wall an old Wurlitzer jukebox with red and blue lights behind chrome grillwork churned as it extracted another 45-rpm record from the two rows of plastic disks stacked inside it. A young pilot with shaggy hair punched in his selections.
As the sound of Paul McCartney singing Yesterday filled the background, Land settled onto an easy chair across the room, and quietly sipped his cold soda while watching his two men enjoy their respite from the filth and sadness of war. The melancholy Beatles song sent sweet memories drifting through the captain’s mind. He thought of Elly. He thought of his son. He thought about how time had flown so quickly since he had gotten here from Okinawa, and that now he looked forward to going home. Six months in Vietnam after a half-year on Okinawa made up this overseas tour. He loved his people here, and his job, too. But he loved his wife much more.
It was already well past ten o’clock, yet Carlos and Burke continued to laugh and play cards. Quite unusual, Land considered, since both snipers notoriously went to bed early and rose every morning long before the other men. He didn’t want to consider the possibilities, but he knew that the two Marines bore some watching.
“I am going to bed,” Land said to the snipers as he stood and tossed the empty soda can into a large metal trash container set on the floor at the end of the bar.
“Two points,” Carlos called to him. “We’re right on your tail, sir.”
“Take your time,” Land said.
“That’s okay, sir, we got to go hit the rack now, anyway,” Hathcock said casually. “That colonel here wants to talk to Burke and me first thing tomorrow. It’s really not much of anything, sir. Nothing you need to get concerned about. I’ll be sure to tell you if it’s anything at all important.”
Land smiled. He had already smelled the fish, and now began to consider delaying his return. The captain felt an obligation to be with his men if they were going to meet with a colonel. However, Brigadier General W. A. Stiles, commander of Task Force X-Ray, counted on Land’s prompt return and his status report at the operation’s headquarters on Hill 263.
“I expect to see you both or at least hear from you tomorrow before noon,” the captain said, walking out the door.
“Yes, sir! Don’t worry about us, sir. We’ll keep you informed, Skipper,” Carlos said a bit too happily.
He had taken the “. . . at least hear from you tomorrow . . .” part of Land’s instructions to mean there was some additional flexibility in his and Burke’s return time.
By seven A.M., Jim Land had rejoined his sniper platoon on Hill 263, and prepared to brief General Stiles while Sergeant Hathcock and Lance Corporal Burke sat at a conference table looking at several large photographs of three different Vietnamese civilians: an older man, balding with gray streaking his hair; a middle-aged woman; and a younger man, perhaps in his late twenties. All three had friendly smiles.
“One of these hotdogs is a spy?” Carlos said to the man with the thick mustache, who sat left of the colonel.
“These are the three government employees that our counterintelligence team at Tan Son Nhut Airbase has narrowed its investigation down to,” the agent said. “All three hold what we consider sensitive positions within the facilities engineering office there in Saigon. Each of them makes regular trips up this way every other week or so. Also, they all happen to be visiting family in Pleiku right now.”
The colonel interrupted. “You gentlemen don’t need to know many details other than we believe one of these nice, gentle-looking faces belongs to a spy. We want you to confirm for us which one. Or which two. Or maybe all three.”
“Why can’t you tell by just following them?” Burke asked.
“We can’t follow them everywhere,” the civilian intelligence officer answered. “Besides, our watchdogs managed to spook the whole trio. They won’t make contact with the other side as long as they believe we have surveillance on them. So they will have to meet up with their VC controllers at a place where our tails cannot follow.”
The colonel pulled a fourth set of photographs from an accordion folder, and spread them on the table.
“Like this place,” he said, pointing to one of the color aerial photographs of a beige stucco house with a wide front porch, a tin roof, and green camouflage netting draped across much of the structure.
“Just tie a bell around the cat’s neck,” the man with the mustache said. “We do not want you to shoot anyone. Stay out of sight, both going in and coming out. Avoid encounters with anyone at all costs.”
DANG QUANG PHUNG sipped warm tea while reading a very thick book at a hotel in the center of Pleiku. The building sat diagonally across a large corner lot. It had a great curved front wall made of glass, above which Dang sat in its second-floor restaurant, by a window that overlooked a stone-covered patio built atop the lobby roof. From this vantage point, the young Vietnamese architect could see much of the city and watch Pleiku’s two main thoroughfares where they intersected in front of the hotel.
Although just twenty-five years old, Dang had designed the blueprints for much of the construction at Tan Son Nhut during the past two years. In that time, the French-educated artist had also studied the locations and structures of every building and bunker that the facilities office oversaw.
Occasionally, Dang looked up from his book and gazed casually at the streets. Below, he could see a police jeep and its two white-helmeted patrolmen parked near the corner, pretending to count traffic. The Viet Cong spy then observed two Americans with short-cropped hair, wearing sports shirts and slacks, who sat at a table, drinking 333 beer in the open-fronted bar across the street. Besides these four, Dang also noticed the Vietnamese man who sat near the restaurant’s main door, chain-smoking Winston cigarettes across the aisle from the bar, and watching him from the side of his newspaper. So Dang sat quietly and read the heavy hardcover volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that he had bought in Paris just before his college graduation.
As he sipped warm tea, this devotee of art, architecture, French literature, and Ho Chi Minh pondered the philosophical meaning of Proust’s phrase, “Les seuls vries paradis sont les paradis perdus.” The only true paradise is paradise lost. It was Dang’s favorite declaration from this French classic, the longest novel ever written.
Works such as Proust’s great novel and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables had impassioned him to oppose injustices beset on the poor, an
d to seek a greater share of power and wealth for common people. His Utopian, liberal passions had connected him to the idealistic pragmatism of Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir llyich Ulyanov Lenin. Thus, he came home to Pleiku a Communist, and convinced his older brother to embrace the philosophy as well.
WHILE DANG SIPPED tea and read, watching the people who watched him, Carlos Hathcock and John Burke sat on the wide-back bench of another gray helicopter. It was already afternoon.
Their chopper took a quick dip below a ridge, and touched down for a few seconds while the two snipers jumped off into a stand of shoulder-high grass. Quickly, the pilot turned the craft southeastward and flew away. It dipped twice more below ridge lines, and then many miles farther away it landed in a clearing and waited several minutes. The helicopter launched again, and flew eastward, and eventually home.
In the cover of the thick jungle that canopied much of the hillside where Burke and Hathcock had disembarked, Carlos unfolded the map section that would lead him to his objective, and to the two men’s return rendezvous point for their flight home.
“Gotta be Cambodia,” he told Burke. “We skirted Pleiku too far back, and there ain’t a thing I recognize on this map.”
“I have to tell you, Sergeant Hathcock, I feel funny about this whole thing,” Burke said. “Did you tell Captain Land?”
“Not about this,” Carlos said. “Besides, I couldn’t if I wanted to. It’s secret. All he knows is we hung back there for a little recreation and recovery.”
“So, the only people that we know for sure know about us being out here are the colonel and that CIA guy?” Burke asked.
“Far as I know. And those two pilots that dropped us off,” Carlos added.
“Skipper will sure be pissed if we get in trouble out here,” Burke said.
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