“Dai Uy,” he yelled, “over here!”
The man came running over. Stankow now recognized him beneath the camouflage paint, and the recognition came as a great relief. Finn McCulloden had a reputation in II Corps. A reputation for never, ever, leaving anyone in the lurch.
“That Billy Joe Turner under there?” Finn asked. “Goddamn, Billy Joe, you look like shit.” He grinned at Stankow. “Been too long since I was a medic. Think I lost my bedside manner. How many others you got, need to get out of here?”
“Had ten, before the rocket attack,” Stankow said. “Now I don’t know how many.”
“Get ’em ready,” Finn said. “Bastards didn’t shoot at us on the way in, can’t imagine why, but I ain’t gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. Billy Joe, you’re leaving right now.” He hoisted the sergeant by one arm, Stankow taking the other. Together they half-carried, half-dragged Turner to Cozart’s chopper. From every portion of the camp, it seemed, came a stream of wounded men. Within seconds the chopper was loaded to maximum, as was the second. Wes gave him a thumbs-up, pulled pitch, and was soon no more than a speck in the distance. Long before he had cleared the wire the second two choppers came in, spilling their loads and taking on new ones. McCulloden let his NCOs deploy the troops—hell, he thought, they’ve been doing this as long as I have—as he helped with the medevac.
The more seriously wounded were being carried out now, borne on improvised stretchers, many of them already with that gray look that told of impending death. Most wouldn’t survive the ride back to the launch site, far less make it to a hospital.
Didn’t matter. The people watching would know that every effort to help them would be made, should they be in the same shape. Finn thought he owed it to them. After all, he’d owed them his life, often enough.
The second lift took off, and right on schedule the third one came in. He allowed himself a small sigh of relief. There had, even now, been only sporadic and ineffective fire coming from the outside. Maybe this part wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
As they were loading the last of the wounded on the final bird, a Vietnamese in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Luc Luong Dac Biet (LLDB) came running up.
“I need go too,” he screamed. “I wounded!” He waved a bandaged arm at the crew chief, who seemed inclined to block him to let one of the more obviously wounded Montagnard soldiers ahead of him.
He screamed something in Vietnamese, roughly pushing the Montagnard aside.
Finn looked into his eyes. In there was the stare of a frightened animal. Nothing there except fear so overwhelming it swamped out all other human qualities.
“Let him go,” he told the crew chief. “No use to us, anyway.”
The young specialist fourth class shrugged, allowed the Viet to get on the bird, where he trampled one of the stretcher cases, eliciting a moan of pain from the downed man.
“Cocksucker,” the crew chief said, spitting the word out.
“Yeah, but he’s our cocksucker. Now get the fuck out of here,” Finn said. “Good luck!”
The crew chief snapped his smoked visor down, grabbed the spade handles of the M60 machine gun. “You too, Cap’n,” he shouted over the whine of the turbines. “Think you’ll need it more than I do.”
McCulloden and Stankow ran toward the command bunker, reaching it just as the telltale rush of incoming mortar rounds filled the air. Three of them erupted with a crashing roar near where they had been standing only seconds before.
“Guess they got tired of waiting,” Stankow said.
“Impatient bastards, aren’t they?” Sergeant Olchak said as he came sliding over the side of the trench. “Got first platoon on the south wall, second on the east, third gonna be a mobile reserve, keep ’em next to the ammo bunkers. That okay?”
“Weapons platoon scattered where they’d do the most good?”
“Way I figure it, Victor Charlie ain’t gonna come across the open ground to the north,” Olchak replied. “So I put ’em reinforcing first and second.”
“Sounds good. I’ll take a walk-around in a few minutes. Sergeant Stankow…”
Finn’s voice was drowned out by the roar of automatic weapons fire, most of it seemed directed at the last chopper, just now a hundred yards outside the wire. Tracers reached up like long green fingers all around it. At least some of the rounds had to be hitting it, he thought.
Sure enough, a cough of smoke came from the turbine, and the chopper soon started losing altitude. The firing died down; someone, Finn was sure, having given the order to let them come down halfway intact. That way there would be prisoners to take.
For a few moments they watched the chopper struggle to maintain altitude, and by sheer force of will and more capability than the designers of the bird had ever imagined, it seemed it was going to.
Not that it mattered. Maintaining altitude wasn’t enough. The camp was in a bowl, with mountains all around. Flying at the same altitude would only result in the inevitable crash.
Then, incredibly, a figure was jettisoned from one of the doors, thrashing and flailing all the way to the ground. The chopper, relieved of even that small amount of weight, fairly leaped up. Within seconds it was over the top of the lowest mountain, albeit probably by inches.
“Reckon that LLDB lieutenant sacrificed himself for the good of the others?” Stankow said, keeping his face perfectly straight.
“That’d be my guess,” Finn replied. “Come on, let’s see what kind of rat fuck we got going here.”
Son of a bitch not only didn’t say hello, Sloane thought, he didn’t even acknowledge I was here. Looked right through me.
His fury at the slight was complicated by his shame, the thought that the Mike Force commander was justified in his scorn. He had sat right there and allowed them to expose themselves to the terror of the open ground, carrying Turner to the helicopter so slowly that any halfway decent sniper could have taken their heads off at leisure.
He simply hadn’t had it in him to go once more into the danger. The deliberate bravery he’d shown in going out there in the first place had flown away like the leaves in autumn.
It reopened the deep, dark well of insecurity so skillfully built by his father over the years of his childhood. Was the old man right, after all? Would he never amount to anything worthwhile? General Sloane had constantly compared him to the great men he had known: Patton, Bradley, even that midget Texan, as the old man had called him, Audie Murphy. You’ll never come close to them, Sloane junior had been told, so many times he could have recited the speech verbatim. No one will. Their like shall not come this way again.
No! It won’t happen that way. I can’t let it. I’ll do what I set out to do. Just isn’t time yet. After all, wouldn’t make much sense to piss my life away before it happens, would it? Bide your time, Sloane, he told himself. It will come.
But now he faced the daunting task of reestablishing his authority, under a man obviously determined to ignore it. To do that he had to get up out of this trench, face the dangers once again. Sheer force of will got him to his feet, and a burst of automatic weapons fire directed at something nearby almost put him down again.
Which vastly amused Sergeant Andy Inger, who had been busy taking care of the more minor casualties with which the camp seemed to be filled and was now coming down the trench to see what he could salvage from the ruined dispensary. That boy’s a little gun-shy, he thought.
“You okay, Trung Ui?” he asked.
“About time somebody got over here,” Sloane snapped. “Come help me. There could be other bodies under this wreckage.”
Inger stifled the sharp retort that was just behind his lips. The lieutenant was obviously under some strain, looked close to breaking. He’d speak to Captain McCulloden about it later. Best now to do what he’d intended to do in the first place, which coincidentally coincided with the lieutenant’s demands.
He wormed his way past the collapsed doorway, to be met by the sight of Otis Matthesen’s body,
his blood—more than it seemed any man should carry—pooled on the hard-packed clay and already covered by flies. Matthesen had been one of his instructors in the Special Forces Surgical Lab, back at Fort Bragg. Back then Matthesen was a rarity, an SF medic who had never been in combat. This had earned him a reputation as a REMF, a Rear Echelon Mother-Fucker, and had even his students talking about him behind his back. What the hell does he know about gunshot wounds? they would ask. He’s never seen one.
It wasn’t his fault. Every time he’d volunteered for Vietnam, his request had been rejected. We need you here to teach the young medics, he had been told over and over. Besides, you’re a master sergeant, and if you got to Vietnam, you’d be stuck in a C team somewhere, way back in the rear. Only combat you’d see would be with the MPs down in the ville.
Matthesen had finally solved that problem, with the simple but elegant solution of punching out the next officer who told him that. Whereupon he had summarily been reduced in rank to sergeant first class and had then told the company commander administering the punishment that he would do it again to the very next person who told him he couldn’t go to Vietnam.
Now, in that cosmic game of chance that combat often is, he had been unlucky enough to have been standing in the entrance to the bunker when the first rocket came in and hit directly in front of it. The Chinese-made 122s were notoriously fickle. Some never exploded at all. When they did, their cases generally didn’t fragment in any predictable pattern. You could be standing right next to the impact and, other than losing your eardrums from overpressure, suffer no more ill effects than that of concussion. The casing might break into two or three large pieces or split right down the middle and bury itself in the ground or, if the ground was particularly muddy, expend all its energy upward.
Or one of those huge, jagged chunks of metal, traveling at twenty-six hundred feet per second, could come straight at you. Lopping off a limb as quickly and effectively as would a red-hot guillotine.
Sorry ’bout that, Sergeant Matthesen, Inger silently told him. Hope you like it, wherever you are.
He heard the sounds of barely suppressed retching behind him, as if someone were having his breakfast come all the way up past the Adam’s apple and being swallowed, with effort, back down again.
Inger knew how he felt. No matter how many times you saw violent death, it always came as a new shock. What had once been a man was now an empty sack of rapidly decomposing flesh, all his hopes and dreams and plans now gone to who knew where?
All the assholes back in the world, he thought, who talk about the glory of war, the honor of dying for one’s country—they should see this. No glory. Certainly no dignity. Just sad.
To avoid embarrassing the lieutenant even more than he was already embarrassed, Inger occupied himself by taking his poncho from the indigenous rucksack all the Mike Force troopers carried and quickly covered the body. “We’ll pick him up later,” he told Sloane. “Get him out when all this is over.”
Sloane stiffened his face, realizing that he was being handled. But there was little he could do about it. What was he going to do, chew out the medic for doing something he should have done?
“We could shore up this entrance,” Inger continued. “Rest of the bunker looks okay. We may need the space before it’s over. Can you get me some of your ’Yards to help?”
Grateful for something useful to do, Sloane acquiesced. Outside the bunker he took in a great draft of explosives-contaminated air, then fell into a fit of coughing. Which then brought up the breakfast he had been trying at such cost to contain.
God! he thought. I hope nobody’s watching this.
“Stankow told me what happened,” McCulloden said. “Good shooting, Bucky.”
Sergeant Epstein acknowledged the compliment with scarcely a change of expression. He was still pissed that he hadn’t seen the sniper earlier, before Turner had got hit in the first place.
But he took some solace in the memory of a sniper rifle spinning slowly through the air, like the baton thrown by a twirler at a Fourth of July parade.
He’d occupied himself after that shot by sending round after round of high explosive at any target that showed temerity enough to put another shot into the camp. He was fairly certain he’d managed to hit at least one of the machine guns that had shot up the last chopper.
Now, he was fairly certain, it would be time to move the gun. The NVA forward observers had had plenty of time to see where the fire was coming from, would have registered the big guns on it, and would blast him right out of this bunker if he stayed there much longer.
He said as much to the Mike Force captain, who agreed with his assessment.
“I’m sure you have alternate positions planned?”
Epstein looked at him as if he had been insulted. Which, of course, he had been. He was a weapons man, for God’s sake! Even some dumb-assed demo man would know to do that, much less an eleven-bravo.
Ah, well, he told himself, dog-ass officers had to ask questions. Made ’em think they were important. Even mustangs like McCulloden, who, he had heard, was a pretty good guy. For a dog-ass officer.
“Four,” he said, deciding to humor the captain. “None of ’em have the fields of fire of this one. North side, partially masked by an ammo bunker. South side is so low, you can really only shoot in one direction. Leaves the one covering the front gate and the one on the east, covering that ravine.” He gestured toward a rift in the slope. “Figure that’s their best-covered and concealed avenue of approach.”
Finn nodded. “Need some help getting it over there?”
“Nah. Me and my ’Yard crew, we got it down to a science. Ksor Drot!” Epstein yelled. A squat, little Montagnard sergeant emerged from the ammo bunker, where he had been inventorying the stock. Epstein rattled off a stream of Jarai, and the sergeant soon had a four-man crew disassembling the weapon and packing the pieces through the trench system. Two of them were bowed under the weight of the barrel, two others wrestled the folded-up tripod, and Ksor Drot proudly carried the sight.
McCulloden was surveying the ravine Epstein had indicated, his expression not at all happy. “Who the fuck let that place get overgrown like that?” he demanded.
Epstein shrugged. “LLDB told us to stop burning it off. Said they had complaints from Saigon, fires were getting out of hand, crossing over the mountain and getting into some Frenchman’s tea plantation.”
“Same LLDB lieutenant, took the header out of the Huey a couple minutes ago?”
“The very one,” Epstein said, smiling for the first time. “Trung Ui Tang didn’t like to upset the applecart around here.”
“Didn’t like to patrol much, either, I understand.”
“So I was told. Course, that kind of stuff ain’t the concern of us enlisted swine. So I was also told.”
McCulloden’s expression was grim. He had held himself back from bracing Lieutenant Sloane at the outset, had been glad for that decision when Stankow had told him of the lieutenant’s willingness to risk his own life to save that of Billy Joe Turner. Now Finn wondered if he had made the right decision. Might have been better to have relieved him on the spot, made him get on the chopper and face Sam Gutierrez’s wrath.
Everywhere he looked were signs of neglect. Neglect of the most basic kind. The overgrown ravine was only one part of it. Weeds had also been allowed to grow in the wire surrounding the camp, making it difficult if not impossible to tell if everything was still intact. The moat that marked the final protective barrier before the bunkers was half-filled with trash, and the bamboo punjii stakes that had once lined it were rotted and askew. Here and there were well-beaten trails through the wire where ’Yards, taking the path of least resistance, had been accustomed to making their forays into the surrounding jungle.
At least the NCOs seemed to maintain a modicum of professionalism. Sergeant Epstein certainly seemed to have his situation in hand. “Any beehive?” McCulloden asked.
“Ten rounds at each position,” Epste
in replied. “Figure, there’s so many of ’em they can get through ten rounds of that stuff, we’re shit out of luck, anyway.”
McCulloden agreed, though he couldn’t let his facade of false optimism slip enough to show it. Beehive rounds contained thousands of inch-long steel fléchettes, little finned darts. Unlike the old canister rounds, which were essentially large buckshot-dispersing devices that started spreading right out of the barrel, beehives stayed whole until a set distance, at which they would disperse in a patterned group. The resulting storm of high-speed fléchettes whining through the air sounded like a huge swarm of angry bees, thus the nickname.
The pattern ensured anything exposed or behind even light barriers in a cone that started at dispersal and going out as far as a hundred meters, and at its maximum extension reaching another hundred meters across, was going to be hit with one of the fléchettes. Probably a lot more than one. The first time McCulloden had seen it used, from another 106 recoilless, the assaulting force had from the front looked as if they had a bad case of measles. The fléchettes had the nasty habit of tumbling after penetration, however, and from the back the victims looked like so much raw hamburger.
Finn started to say something else, then paused to listen. “Out of here!” he screamed, leading the way at a full run down the trench.
Bucky Epstein, having heard the same sound, was right behind him. The far-off cough of artillery, and from a direction that ensured it wasn’t friendly. You don’t move your ass, he told the captain silently, you’re gonna have my boot tracks right up your back.
They’d made it perhaps a hundred yards, and more importantly, past two doglegs in the trench, before they heard the freight-train sound of the shells coming in. The first one hit, the impact shaking the ground under their feet, but strangely accompanied by no explosion. For just a moment McCulloden allowed himself to think that perhaps it was a dud, or maybe the gunners hadn’t set the fuses—wouldn’t that be funny!—and then it did go off, deep beneath the ground. The earth heaved around them, the trench collapsing in places where the sandbag revetments had rotted.
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