He squirmed harder, wriggling like a snake that had something far too large for it in its mouth. Every snag, every outcrop, every jagged piece of Perspex grabbed at him. Clutching as if it wanted to hold him there.
Forever.
Let him go! his reptilian hindbrain screamed. Save yourself. You’ve done all that could be expected of anyone. You’ll do no one any good by dying here.
He felt something grab him by the ankles, and suddenly he was being hauled out of the fuselage so fast the snags that had held him up now took their revenge at his escape by chewing out large chunks of flesh.
He didn’t care. Get me out, get me out, get me out!
His head cleared the window, and he saw Sergeant Washington still pulling at his legs, his face purple with the strain.
“I got him, sir,” Becker, who had run from the commo bunker upon seeing the chopper go down, said. Gratefully, Finn released his hold on the still-unconscious aviator. Washington helped Becker pull him the rest of the way out of the cockpit, and together they slung his arms over their shoulders and hurried for the nearest trench.
Finn heard the rush of the next incoming and decided he might like to find a little cover too.
When Lieutenant Sloane woke again, he knew the explosions were no longer those of friendly artillery outside the wire. Dirt rained down; rats scurried from the broken sandbags and scattered, chittering down the corridor. Don’t want to be buried alive, do you? he asked them.
Smart guys. Neither do I.
He staggered to his feet, almost fell back onto the cot. Got to get out of here, he thought. If I have to crawl.
He made it as far as the makeshift operating room before running into Washington and Becker, carrying a much-the-worse-for-wear man in aviator Nomex.
“Put him down here!” Inger commanded, indicating a relatively clean operating table. The medic paid no attention at all to the artillery, which seemed to be coming closer and closer. Neither, Sloane noticed, did the two NCOs who had brought in the casualty.
Inger checked the stump, saw that there was no bleeding, slapped a blood pressure cuff on the aviator’s arm, and pumped it up. After a moment he shook his head, felt for the pulse in the neck.
“BP’s down,” he said. “Pulse weak and thready. Shock, I expect. Better get him stabilized. Cap’n McCulloden’d be real pissed off, he does all that good work and I let him die.”
Inger got an IV going, having to do a cut-down on the man’s collapsed vein to get a piece of polyethelene tubing inside after trying without success to do it with a needle. As Inger worked, Washington gave a running commentary about what had happened, how the captain had worked himself up inside the chopper, cussing all the while, cut the man’s leg off right there! Thought he’d be a goner for sure.
Sloane listened and raged. That should have been me out there! I’m the one they should be talking about with such obvious admiration. I could have done it.
Well, maybe not the amputation, he thought, looking at the stump of a leg and feeling distinctly queasy.
But all the rest of it!
The NVA obviously had their own forward observer somewhere out there in the hills. The artillery barrages were being adjusted as precisely as the inherent inaccuracy of the Russian-supplied weapons allowed, marching from one critical point to another.
The FO had apparently decided that the chances of nailing someone on the helicopter rescue were too good to pass up. After a false start, when the shells fell a hundred meters short, they were now pounding the wreckage into tiny pieces.
Finn knew he owed his life to pure chance. Perhaps the enemy forward observer had misread his map. Or had incorrectly estimated distances. Or maybe it was that the battery across the border hadn’t properly placed their aiming stakes, or it could be that the fire-direction-center people were slightly inexperienced.
Whatever it was, it meant that while he was cutting the aviator, whose name the pilot had told him but he’d already forgotten, free from the wreckage the shells were falling somewhere else. And by the time they’d corrected their mistake, he was gone. Otherwise they’d have had to pick him up with a broom and dustpan.
Of just such chances of fate he’d survived thus far. People like him often ascribed it to luck. I’m just a naturally lucky person, they’d say. Sonsabitches can’t get me, I’m too lucky!
Others attributed it to God. They were protected by their special relationship with the deity, no matter what that deity might be.
And still others subscribed to the notion that everything was preordained. It didn’t really matter what you did. You were either going to live or die depending upon how it had already been written in the book of fate. Just not my time to die, they would say after coming out of a situation wherein they, by all logic, should not have.
And finally, there were those who thought they were indestructible. That the world couldn’t possibly do without them, and thus couldn’t imagine their own demise. Ten foot tall and bulletproof.
Finn had gone through all those stages at one time or another. Thinking himself bulletproof had departed immediately upon his receiving his first wound. The bullet hit you, and of course the shock and pain were there. But worse was the realization that you could really die. That the round that entered your leg, the shrapnel that tore up your arm, the mine fragments that peppered you without really doing any serious or long-term damage, could very well have had an entirely different outcome.
Generally, the thought of being lucky departed at about the same time. The really self-deluded, however, told themselves that this was merely one more sign of their good luck. That had they not moved this way or that, the bullet that had hit them in the arm would have impacted directly in the middle of their chest.
Or was God guiding the aim of the enemy? The Montagnards certainly thought so. Few of them would go into combat without their Buddha amulets, generally clutched in their teeth. Buddha will protect you, Dai Uy, a long-ago Rhade sergeant had told him upon presenting him with an exquisitely carved jade Buddha on a gold chain. You must wear this, he had said. Always.
And Finn still did, although the man who had presented it to him was long-since dead, perishing in an ambush in the first burst of fire.
His own intellect would not let him believe that his fate was preordained. That no matter what he did, he would die or not depending upon how it was written. If so, he told himself, it doesn’t really matter. Attack or retreat, assault or hide in a bunker, it makes no difference. Death will find you. Or not. What was the purpose of it all, if this was true?
He’d had plenty of time to think it over. In his three combat tours. In the long, sweaty nights back in the United States, waking from tortured sleep. Trying to bury yourself in this or that bit of warm flesh, all the time knowing that as soon as it was over, the moment you dropped off, the dreams would again come. And alcohol did not the least bit of good, nor would, he suspected, any other sort of drug. Might put it off for a while, if you got drunk enough. But sobriety would again come, and so would the thoughts.
With hard-won understanding came resignation. It was nothing more than chance, pure and simple. A slight wind shift that moved the impact of a bullet. The involuntary flinch of a shooter. The fact that you were at the back of a column instead of at your usual point position when the claymore went off.
And with that came the realization that, sooner or later, chance would go against you. You improved your survival possibility by not taking foolish chances, by good tactical choices, by training those with you to use their weapons and brains and courage toward the success of the mission.
But you couldn’t beat chance, not forever. The more you were out there, the more likely it was that chance was going to go against you.
That realization had moved brave men to seek jobs in the rear, where chance had less of an opportunity to affect them. Had ruined soldiers he’d admired. Had sent heroes into gibbering insanity.
And, like all those who had served as he had, he held no
thing against those who couldn’t anymore. Sooner or later, it affected you. If you lived that long. He hadn’t reached that point yet, but couldn’t be sure when he wouldn’t be able to go on.
And it might just come right now, he thought as the barrage shifted.
There is little that affects an infantryman more than being trapped under artillery. You feel absolute impotence. Nothing you can do except hunker down, hope that the next shell doesn’t come right in on top of you, that the impossible noise of the explosions and the shrieking of shrapnel and the cries of the wounded don’t drive you right over the edge.
You make yourself into as tight a ball as possible, rock with the explosions, pray, curse God and the people who caused you to be here in the first place, and forget about patriotism and mom and apple pie and all those damned John Wayne movies that made it all seem so simple.
And if you had a part of a mind that was not reduced to chasing itself around like a rat in a cage, you counted the shells. Thanked whatever powers that were that the NVA seemed to have run out of shells equipped with time-delay fuses. That the Seabees who had built the camp in the first place had spared no time and expense in burrowing so far into the ground that even direct hits did nothing more than loose showers of dirt down on you.
And you hoped that sooner or later they would run out of shells. Or would see that it wasn’t doing much good and decide to save the ones they had for support during the actual assault.
Although that would be a mixed blessing. It would mean that instead of huddling down here in relative safety, you would have to be outside, firing into the masses of men who would be coming through the wire.
But at the moment that didn’t seem to matter.
He just wanted it to be over.
Chapter 9
Staff Sergeant Van Alexander of Recon Team Texas heard the booming of artillery and judged it not too far from his position. RT Texas was out of the Studies and Observations Group (SOG) base in Kon Tum called Command and Control Central. Two days ago they’d walked across the border into Laos to conduct a road watch mission. He’d chosen the walk rather than helicopter insertion because increasingly the recon teams were being shot out of the mission immediately upon hitting the ground.
Many, all too many, were never heard from again. The enemy was becoming adept at counterrecon operations, had all the likely landing zones covered, and upon seeing the telltale approach of a chopper could quickly summon up sufficient forces to wipe out the teams, which generally consisted of two to three Americans and four to six Montagnard Special Commando Unit (SCU) troopers.
SOG had begun to try parachute and HALO missions, but these too were being compromised. The parachute missions, of a necessity, would have been familiar to the Forestry Service back in the United States—in fact the jumps were made using the padded uniforms and helmets with mesh faceplates used by smoke jumpers. You couldn’t count on a cleared drop zone. Hell, if you had a cleared area big enough for a jump, the likelihood of its being compromised was even greater, therefore you had to plan on landing in the trees. And that could be a very unpleasant experience. The branches tore at you as you ripped through them, all too often creating more injuries than a hard landing on the open ground would have. These jumps, despite the danger, might have worked if the Viets, hearing the drone of the low-flying drop aircraft, hadn’t soon vectored in on the area where you’d landed—and the chase was on.
So, HALO—High Altitude, Low Opening. Fall out of the airplane way above the normal drop altitude, free-fall down to two or three thousand feet, open the chute, and still make a tree landing. The technique had been perfected as a method of infiltration behind the Iron Curtain—fly along trying to mimic an airliner, get out, and hope their radar wasn’t good enough to pick up the tiny signature of a human body falling through the night.
But even the HALO missions had been compromised. Too many people lost. Way too many.
Some thought there was a traitor somewhere in the chain of command, and there had already been a shutdown of operations while everyone who might have knowledge of where the teams were being inserted and a means for passing it on to the enemy had undergone lie detector tests.
And they had found exactly nothing. Since there was a pressing need for timely intelligence on the massive North Vietnamese reinforcement effort, and since air assets and sensors weren’t providing it, the recon teams had to go back in.
Alexander had not only chosen to infiltrate his area of operations by walking in, but had deliberately falsified the check and rally points he had sent back to Kon Tum. As a result, he had managed thus far to remain undetected. The only one who really knew his position was Covey.
Covey consisted of an Air Force lieutenant piloting a double-engine 0-2 Skymaster, with a SOG soldier, called the Covey rider, in the back. The rider was generally someone who had been wounded, wasn’t yet recuperated enough to go back into the field, but who knew firsthand what the teams had to face down on the ground. Thus he could be trusted.
He’d reached his overwatch position, a small hill at the base of the limestone cliffs, called karst, that characterized this part of Laos. The last part of the trip had been made literally inch by inch, the team moving with painful slowness, the knowledge that even the slightest noise might bring overwhelming force down upon them guiding their feet.
The information he had already passed to Covey should have alerted the brass down in Saigon to the depth of the problem. Not only were trucks stacked nearly nose to tail on the many offshoots of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he had seen the tracks of some sort of armored vehicle. PT-76 amphibious tanks, he suspected, though he had not yet managed to glimpse one. Until he did, he wasn’t going to report them. Saigon tended to dismiss as the effects of vivid imagination the reports of tanks on the trail. In one incident, infamous in the ranks of SOG, a team leader had actually taken a plaster cast of the track marks of one such vehicle. The analysts in Saigon had dismissed it as probably the track of a bulldozer.
That was shortly before PT-76 tanks had broken through the wire of the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, overrunning the camp and killing a hell of a lot of good men. Did the analysts in Saigon suffer for their mistake? Of course not. The blame had been laid back on SOG. Should have gotten photographs of the tanks, they had been told. Then we would have known for sure.
Now, Alexander suspected, some camp was in deep shit again. There would be only one reason for artillery to be firing over on this side. There were no other recon teams within the area, so it wouldn’t be directed at them. There were no CIA-sponsored Hmong guerrillas in the area. They’d been chased away from the trail a long time ago. No, the artillery had to be pounding some poor bastards hunkered down in ratty holes in the ground, somewhere across the border.
“Covey, this is One Zero,” he said.
“This is Covey. Go.”
“You see where those guns are? Over.”
“That’s a negative. We’re holding orbit at checkpoint Bravo Zulu, can’t see anything. Hearing traffic on air-to-ground from Boun Tlak. Getting the piss pounded out of them.”
Knew it, Alexander thought. There was little triumph in the thought, however. If Covey couldn’t see them, it was likely no one else could from the air, either.
“Roger. I can hear them. Sound pretty close. Request permission to go find ’em, call in a strike, over.”
There was silence for a few moments as Covey passed on the request to the forward operating base. Alexander occupied himself by trying to identify unit patches on the men below, who were now up and moving again after a delay caused by an air strike somewhere farther down the trail. Look like goddamn ants down there, he thought.
“One Zero, this is Covey, over.”
“This is One Zero. Go.”
“That’s a negative on your request. You are instructed to continue mission, over.”
Alexander had expected this response. Some asshole officer in Kon Tum would be too afraid to contact Saigon and request a change of
mission, so he wouldn’t even have passed the request along. So Team Texas would have to stay here, hope that no one stumbled on their overwatch position, and count trucks until their food ran out.
Stupid, but he was used to stupid decisions.
“Roger, understand,” he said. “But we’re gonna have to change position. Can’t see very much from here. We’ll be heading out on an azimuth of zero two seven, over.”
“Roger,” Covey said. “I copy zero two seven. Bonne chance, over.”
Within seconds the team was up and moving, this time away from the trail below. An azimuth of 027, Alexander surmised, should put them somewhere in the area of where they could still hear the big guns booming. Covey would know that. Perhaps even the launch officer back in Kon Tum would know that. But it covered everyone’s ass.
Everyone, that is, except his.
Mixed blessing, Bucky Epstein thought as the big shell impacted just twenty meters short of the bunker in which he was huddling. At least the snipers aren’t shooting, so I don’t have to raise my head to shoot back at them. I can just sit here, stare at the ’Yards—who stared back at his deliberately impassive face. Ain’t no big thing, he wanted to tell them. We’re deep, the bunker walls seem to be holding, all we got to do is sit it out.
He wished he believed it. If Charlie got his act together, dropped a few in the same spot instead of trying to waltz them all over camp, they’d soon start blowing away the overhead cover, burrowing ever deeper until inevitably one came through, or the tons of dirt atop them collapsed, or you just couldn’t stand it anymore and went bug-shit crazy and ran the hell out of there.
Bucky thought the latter was most likely. For himself as well as the ’Yards. He took small consolation that the 175s were still falling outside the wire, keeping the assault force down as well. If they were to come through the wire right now, there probably wouldn’t be anyone even to see them, far less open up with a machine gun.
Right after the shrapnel from each explosion stopped whining, he would pop his head up and take a quick glance out the firing ports, just to make sure. Not that he could see much. Between black explosives smoke and the thrown-up red dirt, the air looked alive. Swirling, malevolent, seeking out every nook and cranny, coating the lungs, crusting the eyes. If your imagination worked just a little bit overtime, you could see huge animals, creatures out of nightmares, lurking in the haze.
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