Night Work: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 2)

by Dennis Foley

  Weather. Weather was Lopaka’s solution to the problem, but he couldn’t promise it. He was sure if they ran into another field-smart candidate for a snatch, bad weather would cover the sound of silence.

  Lopaka’s RTO called in for a weather forecast. Hollister was finishing a lunch of spaghetti LRPs when the RTO handed a note to Lopaka, who handed it on to him. It read: 1700 HRS TODAY TO 1700 TOMORROW—RAIN, WINDS OUT OF NE, 5-7 KNOTS. THNDR SHWRS POSSIBLE.

  Hollister nodded and passed the note around. This was a break. Bad weather was good news. When the note came back to

  Lopaka, he folded it and put it in his shirt pocket to make sure it wasn’t left behind.

  After moving back into it, Hollister felt as if he hadn’t ever left his trailside position at the snatch site. His leg throbbed. The weather and lack of sleep were kicking his ass, but as patrol leader he had to set the example. He sucked up the misery and swallowed hard. At least the position had a homelike feel to it. That could be good, but it could just as easily be bad—very bad.

  The rain came as predicted, and while it made them more miserable, the LRPs received it gratefully. They all were chilled after an hour at the side of the trail. Caps began shivering and reached down to rub his legs for some relief.

  The night wore on, and the rain continued. Instead of the steady rain they had been getting for days, it was blowing in sheets that rolled over them, dumped lots of water, and then let up for a few seconds before doing it again. The trees and brush whipped steadily back and forth, setting up a level of noise that would surely mask the absence of natural night sounds but could just as easily mask the sound of companions coming behind a man they might choose to snatch. And what if they were compromised already? What if they hadn’t left the site sterile and the enemy had come along and found some sign, then figured out their plan? Hollister tried not to worry. But it was hard sometimes.

  The LRPs just watched and waited. It was almost midnight when the sleep demon tried to grab Hollister again. He fought for consciousness with every trick he could remember until he finally gave in and went to his pocket for relief.

  Sergeant Rose had issued the teams pills to take if they couldn’t stay awake. Some of the troops referred to them as speed, but Hollister thought that was just talk. Speed was some kind of illegal drug, and the army would never issue anything like that. In OCS they used to gulp down packets of No Doz to stay awake—but they were legal. Hollister was satisfied that the issue pills were similar to No Doz and probably worked as well as the sleeping pills they had given him at the hospital, or the No Doz at OCS.

  He popped one into his mouth and swallowed it dry. Just the difficulty of trying to get it down without water was enough to wake him a bit.

  He adjusted his position, trying to find a less comfortable one. It was the easiest thing he had done all day. As he shifted, his binoculars slid down off his hip, where he had been balancing them off the ground. He caught them just before they hit the mud. He decided to make another scan of the trail. He looked up the trail to the spot where the soldier had spooked and withdrawn the night before. He saw nothing.

  At that moment he realized they were all watching the same spot. Half expecting the same soldier to return, he guessed. He spun the glasses around and looked down the leg of the trail that went off to his left front. Trying to be methodical, he started at the nearest point in focus and worked his way out and down the trail, moving the binos side to side in order to study every part of the trail as far out as he could see.

  The rain clouds had blocked the moon, and the visibility was severely limited. He could see almost nothing beyond fifty meters. But he did see something. He took his face away from the binos, looked at the same point—at the limit of his visibility. Then he put the binos back to his face.

  He was sure the night was playing tricks on him. He suspected that he was making up a figure on the trail out of the background colors and shapes. He remembered students in Ranger School hallucinating from lack of sleep and putting nickels in trees thinking they could get a cold drink out of them.

  He pulled his binos away again and rubbed his eyes. He was sure he saw the outline of a standing man. He started to reach over and tap Ayers to pass the information to DeSouza, but thought how foolish he would feel if it turned out to be nothing but trees, large plants, and his imagination.

  He looked again. Then he was sure. It was a VC with a weapon, and he was moving very, very slowly. Hollister tapped Ayers and Bui, who swung their attention to the other trail approach.

  DeSouza turned to Hollister for instructions. Hollister pressed his index finger to his lips to reaffirm the need for silence.

  They watched. The solo figure moved forward with his rifle at the ready—or at least at something approximating port arms. As he moved closer, it looked to Hollister as if the guy were wearing the same outfit as the man the night before. Could he be the same one? Did he pass down the trail during the day, and was he on the way back?

  It made little difference, except that the man was spooky about the same area. He took a few more steps and stopped. He stepped off to the left of the trail, looked, and men came back. He did the same on the right side of the trail. He was as spooky as the VC the night before, but not as timid.

  No one wanted to go through another blown snatch again. No one wanted to go through another day and another night of waiting.

  Some slight rustling caught Hollister’s attention. He looked over to his right and saw Bui moving around. He was naked from the waist up and was taking off his trousers. Before Hollister could reach out and stop him, Bui picked up his rifle and stepped out into the middle of the trail.

  The other team members were caught totally off guard by Bui’s move. They quickly looked down the trail to see the VC’s reaction. He seemed to be aware that something was different and stopped—freezing in place.

  Bui raised his rifle over his head and called out to the man in Vietnamese. Hollister was baffled. A sudden thought went through his mind. Bui was giving them away! He was going back over to the other side. Should he shoot Bui? The others looked to Hollister for some kind of signal.

  Bui called out to the enemy soldier again and said several more words in Vietnamese.

  They looked back down the trail. The soldier dropped his rifle from the ready but still wasn’t sure who he was seeing.

  Bui took a few steps toward him. His terrible limp was very evident. He hardly looked threatening. The soldier dropped his guard a bit more and started walking toward Bui.

  Bui stopped, stood there a second or two, dropped his rifle barrel, a grip on the small of the stock, as the enemy soldier slung his rifle and walked toward him, talking.

  The language was not a problem for Hollister. It was clear the soldier was complaining about the weather and the fear that someone else had been waiting in the area.

  Bui laughed and squatted as if waiting for the approaching soldier to join him for a chat.

  The others figured it out. Bui had taken the chance to suck the soldier into the snatch area. The VC reached a point where he needed only one more stride to be able to reach out and shake hands with Bui.

  But before he could make that step, DeSouza and Caps hurled themselves from trailside in a two-man tackle. DeSouza hit him high, and Caps drove his shoulder into the soldier’s upper thigh.

  Before the soldier could react to what was happening, the two LRPs had shoved him across the trail, knocking him completely off his feet.

  The three of them went down in a pile on the low side of the trail. Bui jumped up, spun his rifle around, and had it in the eye socket of the downed soldier before he could make any move to resist.

  As quickly, DeSouza got the man in a headlock, his forearm across the man’s mouth. Caps squirmed out of the pile and sat on the soldier, holding him down. He yanked one arm up behind the soldier to a point where any additional pressure would surely cause damage to the shoulder socket. The grip caused him to freeze up as if to say he would not f
ight.

  It took only a minute for DeSouza and Caps to bind the man’s wrists behind him and stuff a single rolled sock in his mouth. Once the soldier quit gagging on the sock, Caps tied a cravat around his face to keep it in place.

  Quintana, Montford, Ayers, and Hollister had scrambled to their feet, picked up Caps’s and DeSouza’s weapons, and stood ready as the captors brought their prey back across the trail.

  Handing the tacklers their weapons, Hollister motioned them to start back toward the security element. He and Ayers dropped to one knee and watched their backs, one looking in each direction for any sign of approaching enemy troops.

  In less than ten minutes, the two teams had reached the rally point Hollister had selected. They stopped, set up a perimeter, and put out claymores. No matter what happened, it would be at least an hour before they moved out, so security was a high priority.

  All were resisting the urge to cheer and pat themselves on the back for pulling it off. Everyone had known or heard of snatch missions that had gone sour or not come off at all.

  Bui didn’t display the same enthusiasm the others were trying to stifle. He slowly and tentatively held up the VC’s rifle for Hollister to take. Hollister leaned over and whispered in Bui’s ear. “You know I ought to kick your ass!”

  Bui dropped his head in remorse. Then Hollister grabbed him and added, “But we wouldn’t have him if you hadn’t stuck your neck out.” He shook Bui in mock anger. “We gotta talk when we get back to Bien Hoa. You understand?”

  Bui nodded his head rapidly and sharply, showing understanding and obedience.

  The weather caused them difficulty with the radios. One was wet and didn’t work at all. Another had an intermittent short in the handset, and more swapping had to be done. All this delayed the full reporting of the successful prisoner snatch. Hollister was eager to get it called in, confirm the pickup time and place, and get on with an extraction.

  While the RTOs were screwing around with the radios trying to get a combination of handset and radio that would work, Hollister began to worry about security.

  If someone had seen or heard the snatch or if someone was already missing the captured soldier, time would be working against them. He looked at his watch. It was pushing two in the morning. That meant they would have enough time to move to the pickup zone, a thousand meters away, but they still had to kill the time until daylight.

  The plan had been to wait until first light to pull out any prisoner—unless something else forced them to do a night extraction. Extractions were hard enough to pull off in the daytime. Night wasn’t worth the risk if it wasn’t necessary.

  Hollister decided to send out a security party. He tapped Lopaka to pick three members of his team and make four shallow recons of the area just outside their perimeter. He wanted them to start from inside the perimeter and walk out and then back rather than walk around the perimeter. A team wandering around out in front of a perimeter became a liability to the perimeter in the event it took fire. The LRP within the perimeter would be reluctant to fire, not knowing the exact location of the team somewhere to their front.

  By sending a small party out to look for anything that might threaten the entire heavy team and then having them come straight back in, the perimeter was ready to fire. Each man on either side of the departure point would know the recon party was going straight out and would know where they could fire and where it would be threatening to the recon party.

  As the first shallow recon left the perimeter, Hollister felt a handset being pressed into his hand. Ayers whispered, “Six on the horn.”

  Sangean started by congratulating Hollister’s team for the successful snatch. He confirmed the pickup and they set a time—zero seven zero zero hours. They had to insert one team before first light and would pick up Hollister’s team on the back haul to Bien Hoa.

  All they had to do was keep the prisoner alive and wait out the pickup. Hollister would move the team to the PZ at zero five three zero. That would give them time to make the move and some slack in the event that they were held up by an injury or something unexpected.

  Time was available for a quick nap, but Hollister couldn’t sleep. The pill he had taken had made him jumpy and wide-awake. His stomach felt sour, and he couldn’t get comfortable leaning up against his rucksack.

  The prisoner completely caved in on them. Hollister saw that he had quit fighting the rope on his wrists and was calmly leaning back against a tree with his knees drawn up under his chin. All Hollister had to do was get him and the team out, and they could chalk up a successful snatch.

  The recon team came back into the perimeter after its third trip out. The leader of the party, Lopaka’s assistant team leader, shook his head in an exaggerated manner to let Hollister and Lopaka know they had nothing threatening outside the perimeter. He then led the small party out of the perimeter again to check out the fourth side of the circle.

  They had a little over an hour before they moved out.

  “We better be going, sir,” DeSouza said.

  The words made Hollister realize he had been dozing lightly, thinking he was awake. “’Kay,” he said. He looked at his watch. It was time to move. “Let’s do it.”

  DeSouza passed the word to Lopaka, and the two teams stood and peeled off, straightening out the circle of tired soldiers.

  The rain had stopped again, and the upper halves of the LRPs were drying out. Still, their trousers and boots stayed wet from the water on the brush they were threading their way through. The two team leaders were constantly reminding their people to keep alert and not move too fast. They knew it was normal for a team to want to rush the extraction when things were over. But they were still a long way from being out, and plenty could go wrong between War Zone D and the LRP compound.

  As they moved, they heard the choppers heading north to insert another team. To the team members without maps, this meant they must be getting close to the pickup zone since the insert wouldn’t take much longer.

  Trying to form a schematic picture of the terrain’s features in his mind, Hollister knew that before they reached the pickup zone they had to cross a small intermittent stream. He guessed that with the rain they’d had the stream would be anything but intermittent. Once they crossed it, it would be no more than two hundred meters to their PZ.

  Ayers silently pressed the handset into Hollister’s hand.

  “Three. Over,” Hollister spoke into the handset.

  “Six. We are beginning our first insert. You on schedule?”

  Sangean’s voice in the chopper wasn’t just a voice. To Hollister it was a sign that wheels were actually in motion—moving toward getting them out. “If you are not going to be here any sooner than three zero we are on schedule. Over.”

  “Rog. I’ll be back to you. Keep your head up. Out.”

  Realizing that three nearby LRPs were looking at Hollister for some sign of a change, he shook his head to let them know there was nothing happening.

  The file stopped. The word got passed back to Hollister, who was fourth in the line of march, that the point had reached the stream. He had instructed Lopaka to hold up and call him forward when they found the stream. Hollister wanted to take a look at the margin of the PZ and pick a point for the patrol to wait for the extraction. He signaled for Ayers to follow him, then started forward.

  The recon of the far side of the stream took only a few minutes. Hollister, Ayers, and two other LRPs crossed the muddy, knee-deep stream and looked around the opposite bank.

  Through the more widely spaced trees, Hollister could see the landing zone. There was room to call the team forward and set up a perimeter to wait for the pickup. He switched frequencies on Ayers’s radio and called back to Lopaka to bring the rest of the patrol forward.

  Less than five minutes later, Hollister spotted the movement of the lead man from Lopaka’s team crossing the stream. Hollister and Ayers were up the stream bank a few meters to provide some security for the crossing patrol, and the
other two from the recon party were downstream.

  As the patrol’s main body reached Hollister’s side of the stream, he pointed them in the direction of the new perimeter. He then left his position and walked back to direct the establishment of the perimeter when he was stopped—cold.

  The sound was unmistakable. A machine gun was firing on full tilt—long, twenty-round bursts. Then two explosions rocked the ground. Almost instantly, ten Ml6s were returning fire.

  Someone was yelling, “Ambush! Ambush!”

  The sounds of all the shooting pounding his ears while the rounds snapped by him in the trees made it clear he was in someone’s sights.

  Orientation was confusing Hollister. An ambush behind him? On the route they had just passed? How could that happen? Then it flashed through his head. They had waited until his patrol was split up—half on one side and half on the other side of the stream. He started back, toward the noise and the shooting.

  As he did a LRP standing just a few feet from Hollister shuddered as a spray of dark matter exploded from the back of his head. The man collapsed as if all the muscle tone in his body had disappeared at the same moment.

  Trying to turn off the burst of energy he had just sent to his legs so he could stop to help the fallen LRP made him start, stop, and start again once he realized he couldn’t help. He leaped over the body of the dead man, quickly realizing that it was X-man, Lopaka’s Hoi Chanh.

  Looking back up the new trail he had just broken, Hollister could see parts of DeSouza’s team on the ground returning fire off to his left at a furious pace. The incoming fire, generally going across his front, was chopping down the vegetation between the VC and the LRPs.

  What? He had to do something. Where was Ayers? Where was the radio? Hollister spun around in a crouch and yelled, “Ayers!”

  “Yo,” Ayers replied, from a point not more than fifteen feet behind him and to the right.