‘Come on, come on!’ he muttered viciously between his teeth. For nearly two minutes he had been unable to make contact with Grainger. It could be Grainger had simply become separated from his PRC-25. Or it could be that Grainger was dead.
By now they were receiving the support they needed from the patrol boats. Mortar fire was deluging the sampans and silencing all returning fire from that direction. The main remaining danger was from the North Vietnamese who were on the water-logged banks, spraying everything that moved with AK-47 fire. If they once got away from the bank and spread out, they’d never be able to get the bastards.
‘Don’t let them get away from the bank!’ he yelled across to Drayton. As he raced forward, firing as he ran, he could see one of the Vietnamese from Van Binh local militia, standing, feet apart, machine-gunning from the waist. ‘Move!’ he shouted across to him. ‘Let’s get the bastards!’
One minute the darkness was so full of fireballs and smoke and screams and shouted obscenities that he was both blinded and deafened, and the next there was silence.
He had been flat on his stomach, half submerged in water, firing, firing, firing at the remaining North Vietnamese. He raised himself up on one knee, looking around cautiously. From a distance of a mere three yards a wounded North Vietnamese was struggling to lift an AK-47 into a firing position.
‘Oh, no, you don’t, sonny boy!’ Lewis said between clenched teeth. He lifted his M-16 with speed and unloaded six rounds into the North Vietnamese’s chest. The moon was bright enough for him to see the expression of horror on the soldier’s face, and then his body sagged, collapsing in a sea of blood.
The silence was broken by the pounding of approaching helicopter rotors. They were arriving and they were too late. They no longer needed two gunships, they needed a dust off.
Of the twenty-four men who bad set off from Van Binh, six were dead and four were injured. Even before Lewis had splashed across to the canal’s far bank, he had known that Lieutenant Grainger was dead. All the men he had designated to that position were dead, their M-16s still in their hands, their faces toward the enemy.
He was well trained enough, and well adjusted enough, not to consume himself with guilt. He had planned the operation to the best of his ability, and in his superiors’ eyes it would be considered a success. An American and five South Vietnamese had died, but so had two dozen crack North Vietnamese troops. And a convoy of supplies for the Viet Cong had been thwarted. But Grainger’s death weighed heavily on him.
‘I am sorry about Lieutenant Grainger,’ Tam said to him with touching sincerity, and then she added fiercely, ‘But if it was fate that an American must die, then I am glad that it was Lieutenant Grainger, Dai uy, and that it was not you!’
Despite Tam doing her best to cheer him, Lewis brooded miserably over Grainger’s death. Grainger had been short, like himself, with only a few weeks to go before his tour of duty was over. And now he was dead. As each day passed, Lewis could feel himself becoming more taciturn and more sombre. And for the first time he found himself counting the days until he would shake the soil of Vietnam from his boots for good.
Ten days after Lieutenant Grainger’s death a report came in that a handful of North Vietnamese troops were holed up in a remote village. Whether they were troops who had escaped from the fight that had taken place on the canal bank, or they were fresh troops who had perhaps brought in a replacement convoy of supplies, he had no way of knowing. Either way, he had no reason to think that hunting them down would be any different from a score of previous such operations.
It was Tam who was filled with sudden, dreadful premonition.
‘Do not go, Dai uy,’ she said urgently.
He had smiled at her affectionately and told her not to be a silly girl, but she had persisted in pleading with him, and in the end he had said a little curtly, ‘That’s enough, Tam, you’re behaving as if I’m your husband or your father!’
She had stared at him as if he had slapped her, and then had said quietly, ‘Not my father, Dai uy.’
He had been putting maps into his map case. Very slowly he finished what he was doing, the blood drumming in his ears. Surely she had not said what he thought she had said. And if she had, surely she had not meant it to sound the way that it had sounded. His own remark had been stupid enough. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why he had said the word husband. What he had meant to say was that she was fussing around him as though he were a member of her family, a brother or a father. And instead he had said husband. One look at her face, and the expression in her eyes was enough to tell him that she had meant exactly what she had inferred.
He was appalled, appalled not by the emotion he could read so clearly in her eyes, but by his own, immediate, answering response to it.
‘I’m going, Tam,’ he said as indifferently as he could manage. Dear God in heaven! Why hadn’t he had the sense to see where their easygoing familiarity would lead? She would have to stop working for them. She couldn’t continue to clean the team house, not now that he had admitted to himself how very much she attracted him.
There was a half-written letter to Abbra on his desk, and he slid it into a drawer. Abbra. He had never imagined that he could be unfaithful to her, but he knew that for one swift instant he had been unfaithful to her in spirit. He would not be so again. Much as he would miss Tam, and he would miss her dreadfully, their close relationship would have to come to an end.
It was as if she had read every word that he was thinking. ‘I am sorry, Dai uy.’ she had said, her eyes holding his steadily. And then, with devastating candour she had added simply, ‘But I love you.’
‘You can’t love me!’ His voice had been choked. Sweet Christ, but how had he got himself into such a mess? The last thing on earth he wanted was to hurt her, and if he had set out deliberately to hurt her, he couldn’t have been more successful. ‘We’ll talk later, Tam,’ he said, knowing that Duxbery and Drayton were waiting for him in the compound.
She had said nothing, but her eyes had said everything – that she knew what it was he was going to say to her, that she wouldn’t be able to be his cleaning girl anymore, that he was never going to love her and take her back to America with him. In silent agony she watched him as he strode out of the team house and across the compound towards Sergeant Duxbery and Sergeant Drayton.
He didn’t look back. Together the three of them began to walk down towards the village, where the local troops were waiting, and as they did so, Tam began to search feverishly through the breast pockets of Lewis’s spare fatigues. The photograph wasn’t there. She couldn’t tear it up or burn it. Hot tears stung the backs of her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to fall in love with him. She had hated him and had been determined to continue hating him. But he wasn’t a man it was possible to hate. And now she loved him.
The faint put-put of engines could be heard, and she ran across to the door, hoping for one last glimpse of him. Because he had been wearing the same blue beret as his South Vietnamese troops, she couldn’t distinguish him. She leaned against the jamb of the door, pressing her hands hard against her stomach in an effort to quell the dreadful presentiment of disaster that was churning there.
The village where the NVA were rumoured to be hiding out showed no signs of them. Lewis was relieved. In his present disturbed state of mind the last thing he wanted was another confrontation with North Vietnamese. He ordered his men to search the surrounding paddy fields and dykes to make sure that the area was clean, and then ordered a return to Van Binh.
It was as their boats emerged from the narrower branch canal that served the village that the North Vietnamese struck. It was as neat an act of revenge as he had ever seen. In exactly the same way as they had ambushed the North Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese now ambushed them, raking them with blistering machine-gun fire from both banks, and sealing off the canal with a flotilla of sampans that he was sure were mined.
Duxbery was hit almost immediately, screaming out in pain and clu
tching at his chest. Lewis leapt towards him, and as he did so a bullet hit him in the shoulder, lifting him from his feet. He was aware of pandemonium breaking out all around him and of Duxbery staring up at him with dead eyes, and then, shouting for the South Vietnamese to do likewise, he threw himself over the side of the boat, striking out for the thick, concealing vegetation that lined the bank. Bullets plummeted into the water and he took a deep breath, struggling to dive deep. Chokingly thick vines and reeds foiled him. His lungs were bursting, and when he at last broke surface, it was to find a North Vietnamese standing waist-deep in the water, pointing an AK-47 at him. The North Vietnamese grinned. ‘Lai! Lai!’ he barked, gesturing with the machine gun for Lewis to wade out of the canal ahead of him. ‘Move! Move!’
Chapter Eighteen
For the next two months Kyle tried every trick in the book to pull a trip to Saigon.
‘You’ve already pulled one three-day R and R trip to the big city,’ his operations officer said sourly when Kyle demanded to know when the hell he was going to be listed to fly a ship down to the Tan Son Nhut air base. ‘If you don’t quit carping, the next time you see it will be when you’re on your way out of this goddamned country – for good!’
‘For Christ’s sake, forget her,’ Chuck said in exasperation. ‘There’s free tail all over this country and you want to make life hard for yourself by paying court to a chaperoned virgin! It makes no sense.’
Kyle knew it wasn’t sensible, but despite his drunken visits with Chuck to the ladies of the nearest town, returning to Saigon and seeing Trinh again had become an obsession.
‘What about the little lady back home?’ Chuck asked as they flew troopers up to a landing zone that was reported to be cold.
Kyle grinned. Chuck’s phrase was completely inappropriate for Serena. ‘The little lady back home is a five-foot-ten blonde who is so wild herself she would make your hair curl!’
This time it was Chuck’s turn to grin. ‘She sounds like fun,’ he said, flaring steeply to slow the Huey ready for landing.
‘She is.’
His voice was so unequivocal that Chuck raised his eyebrows. He had Kyle marked down as a lot of things, but a devoted husband was not one of them. If he had been wrong, then the five-foot-ten blonde must be quite a girl. Kyle was the least likely devoted husband he’d ever seen.
For several days they ferried troopers into cold landing zones, spent hours laagering in wait for them, and then flew in to pick them up.
‘For chrissakes, this is boring,’ a fellow pilot said to Kyle as they sweated under a hot sun, waiting for the signal to crank up.
Kyle was in complete agreement. The tedium of waiting around for hours on end was far worse than the adrenaline-filled fear and excitement of flying into a battle zone.
‘Look at this shit,’ his companion said disgustedly, his finger stabbing at the magazine he was reading. ‘Antiwar protesters marching on the White House. What kind of Americans are those? Why the hell aren’t they marching in protest against Ho Chi Minh? And look at this fuckin’ photograph here! This one was taken in England! England for chrissakes! What do the fuckin’ English know about anything!’
Kyle looked across at the photograph with idle curiosity. A group of antiwar protesters had marched on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and had refused to disperse peacefully. Fighting had broken out and several protesters had been arrested. There was a vivid photograph of one protester, banner still in hand, as police manhandled him into a Black Maria.
‘Here, let me have a look at that!’ he said suddenly, his interest quickening. He took hold of the magazine and then let out a whoop of disgust. ‘Would you look at that! That moron is my brother-in-law, for Christ’s sake!’
Chuck, who had been lying in the shade beside his Huey with a paperback covering his face, now removed it and opened one eye.
‘No joke? That guy in the photo is your brother-in-law?’
‘No joke,’ Kyle said grimly. ‘Christ. Given the choice, I think I’d rather shoot him than a gook! Have you seen his banner? “Long live Ho Chi Minh.” I’d like to drop the prick into the middle of a battle zone being overrun by Cong and see if he’d still sing the same fucking song!’
Chuck sat up and reached across for the magazine, looking at it with interest. Lance’s hippie-length blond hair and slightly effeminate features could be seen clearly. Underneath the photograph, in small print, it read, ‘Viscount Blyth-Templeton being removed by police after leading a party of antiwar protesters with a petition to the American Embassy.’ Chuck didn’t know very much about English aristocracy, but he figured that if Lance Blyth-Templeton was a viscount, then his sister, Kyle’s wife, must be a lady or a viscountess or something.
He grinned. A five-foot-ten blonde, wild English viscountess must be quite something. Maybe he’d keep in touch with Kyle when their time in ’Nam was over. She was one lady he sure as hell would like to meet.
‘Just one maintenance R and R trip to Saigon,’ Kyle said pleadingly to his operations officer.
‘What’s the matter with you, Anderson? Aren’t the women up here good enough for you?’ his operations officer said bad-temperedly. ‘Why the fuck should I give a three-day trip to Saigon to a warrant officer when I have captains lining up for the pleasure?’
‘Because I’ve been flying my ass off for two months, that’s why!’ Kyle retorted furiously.
‘Everyone flies their ass off. You aren’t the only one banging Lady Luck and walking away in the morning without so much as a thank you, ma’am.’
‘Look, this is real important to me. Just one three-day maintenance trip to Saigon.’
‘Only if you say please,’ his operations officer said without the least change in the tone of his voice or his facial expression.
For a second Kyle didn’t register what he had said. ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll …’ The words finally penetrated his brain. ‘Please! Please! Pretty please.!’ he yelled exultantly throwing his helmet into the air.
‘Don’t go overboard,’ his operations officer said with a glimmer of good humour. ‘It isn’t all good news.’
‘What’s the bad?’ Kyle asked, not caring.
‘I’m scheduling you to go with Wilson,’ his operations officer said, shaking his head in despair at his soft heart.
‘And who am I supposed to drink and whore with while you pay court to little Miss Goody Two-Shoes?’ Chuck said, disgruntled.
‘Drop in at the Sporting Bar and fall in with some Green Berets,’ Kyle said, opening his mail.
He had been surprised at how often Serena was writing to him. She wisely didn’t mention Lance, but she made him chuckle with her anecdotes of a visit to a country house and contents sale with Rupert.
‘For a wild woman, your lady at home is pretty good at putting pen to paper,’ Chuck said, sifting through his own mail and then throwing it to one side in disgust.
‘She’s probably high on the novelty of it,’ Kyle said with a carelessness he didn’t truly feel.
After their previous year of separation, when they hadn’t been in communication at all, he hadn’t expected her to write. Nor had he expected that if she did, he would feel so appreciative. His own letters back to her were far less frequent, consisting of hastily scrawled postcards written whenever he was drunk enough to be maudlingly reminiscent.
Kyle was well aware of the daredevil reputation he had carved out for himself. Both he and Chuck were regarded as halfway to being crazy because of the risks they took. Whenever anyone called him crazy to his face, he simply grinned and agreed with them. Of course he was crazy. Hell, he wouldn’t be there if he weren’t!
‘Those poor fuckers we’re leaving behind wouldn’t think you were quite so hip if they knew how you intend spending your three days R and R,’ Chuck said dryly over the intercom as they cruised south towards Tan Son Nhut at one thousand five hundred feet. ‘For Christ’s sake, what is it with you? Have you never met a woman who was off limits before?’
/> ‘Nope,’ Kyle replied, unperturbed. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think I have!’
Saigon shimmered in the heat below them, and he felt his stomach muscles tightening in nervous anticipation. Would she still be at the International? Would she remember him? If she remembered him, would she still agree to go out on a date with him?
‘I swear to God I can smell that town from here,’ Chuck said as they began to decelerate ready for landing. ‘Swamp and mildew, stale perfume, exhaust fumes, and nuoc mam.’
‘And sex,’ Kyle said with a grin. ‘Don’t forget the sex.’
Chuck gave a snort of agreement. ‘That town is so steeped in sex it reeks of it! And you, numbnut, are going to spend your time there holding hands, as if you were a bashful teenager!’
He didn’t even bother to check in with Chuck at the Continental. Instead, he made his way straight to the International, bounding up the steps and into the lobby, his heart in his mouth.
She was there. For one instant, as she looked towards him, not recognizing him, her smile was polite and impersonal, and then it widened, recognition flooding her eyes.
‘I’m back,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘We have a date, remember?’
His fatigues were still soaked with the sweat from his flight, a lock of dark hair fell untidily across his brow, and his electric-blue eyes were hot and determined.
A dimple touched the corner of her mouth beguilingly. ‘It is not quite so simple,’ she said, an undertone of laughter in her voice. ‘You must meet my sister first and meet with her approval.’
‘Lead me to her!’ His grin was splitting his face. He felt as Alexander must have felt after conquering Persia.
White Christmas in Saigon Page 32