Eagles Cry Blood

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Tong pointed his finger at Pellam’s face and yelled back. “You will have respect for me!”

  Lieutenant Bourne glanced around the open area surrounding the American teamhouse and noticed that there was a crowd gathering of armed Vietnamese soldiers. Over two hundred men were standing in loose groups around the building, including Tong’s special bodyguards.

  Paul stepped forward to stop the public argument between the two commanders. Paul was a good friend of the Vietnamese commander. He touched the Vietnamese on his shoulder to gain attention. “Sir, let’s go over to your house and talk.”

  The small Vietnamese turned and recognized the lieutenant with a friendly grin. “Lieutenant Bourne! Welcome back to Duc Co!” Paul had given Tong a respectable way out of the confrontation with Pellam, and the Vietnamese was taking it.

  “Get the hell out of here, Lieutenant!” Pellam’s voice cut into the conversation, filled with sarcasm.

  “Captain, you are a fool.” Tong’s voice carried a razor-edge threat with it.

  Captain Tong’s head snapped back from the force of the slap landing on his cheek. A shiver went down Paul’s spine. The camp became absolutely quiet. Captain Tong stood straight-backed, facing Pellam. Slowly the Vietnamese commander turned away from the American captain and faced his troops. The handprint was turning a deep red on his cheek. The embarrassed leader walked slowly across the open ground, taking long strides until he reached the door of his quarters. He turned around slowly and glared back in the direction of the American teamhouse. The company officers from the Vietnamese units followed their leader into his headquarters.

  “He’s going to cause us some grief for that slap, Captain,” Paul shook his head in disbelief over what had just occurred.

  “You let me handle that little son of a bitch!”

  Paul glanced over at Mills and detected the deep concern the sergeant had over the incident. Trouble would come, that was for sure.

  Sergeant Mills went over to his medical bunker to check on his patients and get some aspirin for the pounding headache he had from the booze he had drunk the night before.

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  Paul hung his gear up on the wooden pegs in his room. He felt hungry and went into the kitchen to find a snack of some kind before supper. Pellam was sitting in the bar pouring himself a half glass of whiskey. Paul made himself two Spam sandwiches and took them with him outside to eat. The only troops he could see were a few American artillerymen working on the how-itzers in their compound outside the Special Forces camp. When he had finished eating he went back to his room and lay down on his bunk. He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost instantly.

  For better or worse, Paul was home at Duc Co again.

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  4

  Lieutenant Bourne opened his eyes slowly. He listened in the darkness for any sound that would tell him what had pulled him from his shallow sleep. A shiver flickered along his spine and spread out over his scalp from the base of his neck. Two voices filtered through the bamboo matting of his wall facing the hallway. The sounds were coming from somewhere near the kitchen. Paul slid out of his bed and started toward the door. A strong intuitive urge to put on his battle gear nagged him. He shunned the impulse and slowly moved across the room in the dark. He stopped near the doorway and returned to the pegs on the wall where he had hung his battle gear.

  Paul whispered to himself, “I’m going to look like a total ass if there’s nothing wrong out there.” He slipped his BAR belt, which contained thirty-two magazines of ammunition for his CAR-15, around his waist and stepped out into the hall.

  The far end of the kitchen revealed Captain Tong standing naked under a bare light bulb waving a cocked .45-caliber pistol. Tong was talking in a deep, slow, and deliberate tone of voice to someone who stood out of sight from Paul’s hallway position.

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  “You have insulted me . . . No more! Son of a mutant pig! ”

  “Tong, go back to bed . . . You’ve drank too fucking much booze!”

  Pellam’s voice sounded tired. “I’m getting sick of your constantly being drunk.”

  “Do you think you can slap my face in front of my soldiers and live?”

  Lieutenant Bourne dropped down into a low crouch in the unlit hallway.

  He knew Tong couldn’t see him, because the single burning lightbulb in the kitchen was between Tong and Pellam. Captain Tong’s hand was gripping the handle of the .45 so tightly that the blood vessels in the small man’s forearm looked like rope cords. Foam began appearing at the corner of the Vietnamese commander’s mouth when he opened and closed his lips without speaking.

  Paul was sure the man had taken opium before coming over to the teamhouse.

  “You will die tonight . . . I die, too! See—I have removed my clothes so my journey through the world of the dead will be swift.” Tong’s mouth twisted from the hate he was feeling toward the American. “You, Pellam, shall die with your brains spread out on the floor! And then I am going to cut off the hand that insulted me!”

  Captain Pellam stepped away from the wall to where Paul could see part of his shoulder and his face. Sweat was forming on the American commander’s upper lip, revealing the fear that was beginning to gather in the pit of his stomach.

  Paul heard a muffled grating sound that came through the tightly woven matting that served as material for the walls of the teamhouse. A loud click followed the first noise. Paul’s mind tried deciphering the sound. It was too long to have been a rifle bolt sliding forward . . . damn! The bastards were setting up a .50-caliber heavy machine gun at the east entrance to the teamhouse.

  Paul had missed most of the conversation between Pellam and Captain Tong. The young lieutenant tried figuring a way out of the pending predica-ment. His eyes began scanning the walls and roof beams with the intensity of a wild animal that had been caged. The four-foot-high wall of sandbags surrounding the teamhouse would protect them from small arms and shrapnel, but the large slugs from the .50-caliber machine gun could eventually knock a hole through anything, given enough ammunition and time. Paul removed a magazine from his BAR belt and shucked eight rounds into his hand. He slid the magazine into his shirt and moved pantherlike down the dark hall. Paul carefully opened each room door that he passed and threw a round of ammunition at each of the sleeping men. The moonlight seeping through the windows revealed Paul in full battle dress to the other A-Team members. The men didn’t need to be told that there was trouble.

  Paul eased down against the exit door at the east end of the building and squatted with his back touching the matting. He tuned his ears to the outside sounds.

  “. . . and now, you American pig . . . you die!”

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  Paul caught the last words of Tong’s threat and looked up in time to see the Vietnamese leader point the pistol directly at Pellam’s fear-filled face. Paul reacted. He tore a hand grenade from his webbing and pulled out the safety pin, using his boot to push open the door, and pitched the live grenade underhand over the sandbags. The lieutenant’s movements were fluid as he stretched out on the concrete floor, slipping the safety off his CAR-15 submachine gun and guiding the barrel up to Tong’s bare chest. The sounds of the .45-caliber pistol, the automatic weapon’s chattering, and the hand-grenade explosion all meshed together. Red spots appeared across Tong’s flesh. The man’s arm locked and a flash appeared around the muzzle of the pistol. Pellam’s body twisted around from the impact of the .45 round smashing into his left hand. Paul’s eyes focused on the brightly burning bare bulb in the kitchen and shot it out with a short burst from his weapon.

  Darkness engulfed the building. The whole sequence had lasted less than
five seconds, yet the action in Paul’s mind seemed to have lasted for minutes.

  The quiet pause between the last round fired from Paul’s submachine gun and the first volley of fire from Tong’s supporters was long enough for the other Americans to get out of their rooms and into the kitchen area with Captain Pellam.

  Paul crawled along the rough cement floor down the long hallway toward the rear exit. He figured that they would be smart enough to have another automatic weapon covering the rear of the teamhouse. Paul twisted his body around the corner of the kitchen wall seconds ahead of a stream of red tracers that occupied the space he had recently filled on the hallway floor. The sight seemed strange to Paul—there wasn’t any sound, just red streaks flashing down the corridor—and then the roar of the machine gun filled the room. He heard a scream come from where Sergeant Hellman had been crawling near the bar. Four more machine guns opened fire, accompanied by many rifles.

  The air three feet above Paul’s head was laced with ever-changing patterns of red and black. A signal raced along Paul’s spine to his brain. Pain flashed along his nervous system announcing that he had been hit. Paul reached instinctively for the Saint Christopher medal on its chain around his neck and placed the silver token between his teeth.

  “Damn it! I’m not going to die! I’m not going to die crawling on my belly

  . . . not like this!” Paul’s voice was drowned out from the sound of the weapons firing outside the teamhouse.

  “Lieutenant Bourne! I’m hit! I’m hit!” Pellam’s voice rose above the noise.

  “HELP ME!”

  A lull replaced the roar.

  “Over here, sir.” Paul waved. “By the wall.”

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  The Vietnamese outside the house heard the American voices and opened fire with a greater intensity. The area below the sandbags began to glow a pale pink from the tens of thousands of tracers.

  Pellam continued screaming for help. “Come here, Lieutenant . . . I’m hit bad!”

  Paul could feel the blood spreading along his side as he crawled along the cold cement floor leaving a trail of his own body fluid like a slug would leave on garden bricks. Paul reached out in the quasi-darkness and felt a boot.

  “That you, sir?” Paul rasped the words around the Saint Christopher medal he still carried in his mouth. “Where are you hit?”

  “Shit! The wrist . . . damn the pain!” Pellam had his injured hand placed between his knees and was lying on his side.

  The artillery battery located two hundred meters south of the A-Camp began firing illumination rounds over the team house so they could see what was going on inside of the Special Forces compound. Paul could see clearly from the additional light a red line below Pellam’s Rolex watch where the .45-caliber round had grazed him.

  “Lieutenant Bourne, I’m hurting too bad to get the team safely out of here.

  You have to get the men to the bunkers.” Pellam was rambling. “Or somewhere . . . just out of here!”

  Paul tried grinning, but lost the desire. “Yes, sir, I’ll do my best.” He sounded more confident than he felt. How was he going to get the team through the Vietnamese surrounding the teamhouse without being killed?

  Paul’s thoughts danced between quitting and fighting, and then he remembered the field telephone located in the corner of the kitchen. The telephone had been installed by the artillery unit so that they could check friendly troop locations before they fired their nightly harassment high-explosive rounds. Paul had started crawling toward the phone when an ear-shattering explosion pushed his face against the cement floor. The Vietnamese soldiers surrounding the teamhouse were rolling hand grenades off the tin roof. Paul pulled the telephone off the window ledge and turned the hand crank, hoping that the instrument hadn’t been shot. A voice at the other end answered.

  “Camp? Is this the Special Forces camp?” The voice rose into a scream.

  “What in the hell is going on over there! Give me a damn report!”

  Uncontrollable anger entered Paul for the first time that evening. “A report! They’re trying to kill us and you want a fucking report! You dumb ass!

  Send some of your infantry guards up here to get the Viets off our ass!”

  “Who’s trying to kill you?”

  “Our counterparts . . . and you had better send some help soon or you can change ‘trying to kill’ to just plain ‘killed.’” Paul held the telephone that represented safety close to his mouth with both hands.

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  “Hold on. I have got to clear this with my higher headquarters before I do anything.”

  Lieutenant Bourne’s temper removed itself from all reasoning. “Get a clearance? We need help now! You damn fool! Now!”

  The voice on the other end of the line changed its tone. “This is Captain Neeb speaking . . . Who in the hell am I talking to?”

  “Second Lieutenant Paul Bourne.” Paul sucked in some air between his teeth to ease the pain coming from his side. “One person who doesn’t have much time to lie around bullshitting . . . Sir! ”

  “Listen, Lieutenant! Don’t get smart with me! I have to get some facts before I go calling my higher and have an ass made out of me.” Captain Neeb was having difficulty making a decision. He didn’t know what to do. No one had told him what to do in a situation like this. He was expecting the Special Forces camp to help him out in an emergency, not vice versa. The situation had the potential of ruining his very promising career, and he wasn’t about to make any mistakes.

  “Hey, Captain!” Paul yelled into the handset. “Are you still there?”

  Neeb heard the lieutenant but didn’t answer.

  “Forget the help . . . but listen to me, punk! We’re going to fight our way out of here to your position and then, son of a bitch! I’m personally going to kick your chicken-shit ass!” Paul heard a voice screaming over the receiver as he reached up to replace it in its cradle.

  “. . . court-martial you . . .”

  “Is he sending any help?” Pellam groaned out the words.

  “He’s rounding up a relief force now, sir.” Paul lied. He didn’t want to upset his captain. The American unit had washed their hands of the matter, and it would only be a matter of a few minutes with the Vietnamese lobbing grenades through the holes they had made in the roof before one of the olive-drab explosives would find the kitchen area.

  Lieutenant Bourne oriented himself back to the action surrounding the teamhouse. The firing seemed to have died down a little. The roof of the house looked like a giant screen. Paul unhooked two hand grenades from his web gear and pulled the first pin, counting to three before throwing it through one of the larger holes in the roof. He followed the first grenade with the second one.

  “We might as well fight back and kill as many of these bastards as we can before they get us,” Paul said to himself. “I never thought that I would be greasing our allies.” The thought made Paul chuckle in a Vincent Price accent.

  The other team members saw what Paul was doing and started throwing grenades through the holes in the roof above their positions. The onslaught of grenades coming from the Americans stopped all of the small-68

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  arms firing from the outside. The night became quiet. Paul heard the motor from an armored personnel carrier far on the other side of the camp cough and then roar to life. The sound increased in volume as if Lieutenant Bourne was turning up the speakers on a stereo headset until it was the only sound in the world. The side of the teamhouse shook and then collapsed, revealing the rear end of an olive-drab armored personnel carrier.

  The steel tailgate was lowered by the man concealed inside the fighting vehicle. Sparks flashed when the gate touched the cement floor, and the vehicle jerked backward another foot into the building. The we
apons carrier’s two mounted machine guns discharged a steady stream of death into the surrounding bunkers and buildings.

  “All right, men—move it!” Pellam came out of his shell of pain as soon as he saw the American armored vehicle. “Move it!”

  Two of the team members slipped out from under the kitchen table and joined Pellam, who had taken up a position by the fighting vehicle.

  “Where are the rest?” Pellam’s command voice lost part of its composure.

  “Lieutenant Bourne! Get your ass over here!”

  Paul heard his captain’s voice coming through what seemed like a long steel tunnel. He tried to get up on his feet but nothing would respond to his mental command. Bourne’s mind was working separately from his rebelling body. He lay on the cold cement floor and thought about death. He felt hands grabbing him by his boots and the rough cement grating against his cheek as he was dragged into the back of the APC.

  “Get the hell out of here!” Pellam screamed, holding his wounded wrist.

  “We’ve got all the dead on board!”

  The APC raced back toward the safety of the artillery camp with its machine guns chanting a death song to anyone foolish enough to raise their heads to listen. The armored personnel carrier entered the artillery position, through the same hole in the fence that it had made earlier. The driver pulled back on the left stick, locking one of the steel-capped tracks, causing the vehicle to spin around and brake to a rocking stand-still. Paul heard the engine stop and thought the vehicle had been hit, but the driver had turned off the huge diesel engine. Pellam’s voice reached Paul’s ears in the back of the vehicle, and he tried moving his hands, but they were weighted down with the dead body of one of his team mates. Captain Neeb’s high-pitched voice echoed against the steel walls of the carrier.

  “Hey, Pellam! Where’s that smart-assed lieutenant of yours?” Neeb waved his finger at Pellam. “I’m going to see that his young ass is court-martialed personally!”

  “He’s dead.”

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