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

by Dennis Foley

  “Call it in,” Hollister yelled. “You did call it in?”

  “Yes. They’re on the way.”

  Trying to suck up the situation and retake the initiative, Hollister turned back around in the other direction. He could see three more members of Lopaka’s team on the ground returning fire blindly, toward where they thought the enemy fire was coming from.

  Hollister waved his arms and yelled, “Let’s go. Up their flank!” He stepped back, helped Ayers to his feet, and started off in the direction of what he suspected was the enemy’s right flank.

  Chapter 26

  ABLE TO GET HIMSELF, Lopaka, Ayers, and two others rallied and on line, Hollister led them toward the enemy ambush. They put out all the small-arms fire they could, only aiming down at the ground, hoping their fire would be effective and what wasn’t would skip, low, through the enemy positions.

  As they moved forward, they were unable to tell if they were taking any fire themselves or if their efforts were having any effect on the enemy gunners.

  They had moved only fifteen meters when they ran into a solid wall of live bamboo. It was twenty feet high and ran off to the left far enough to go out of sight. At its right end was the path the entire patrol had taken toward the stream. It was obvious to Hollister that the ambushers had selected it to act as a barrier to just what he was doing—trying to roll up their flank.

  In order for them to get around it, Hollister and his chargers would have to step out into the area that was the killing zone for the enemy riflemen.

  He dropped to a prone firing position, and Ayers followed suit. “Get DeSouza!” Hollister yelled.

  He was worried that DeSouza, only thirty meters away in the killing zone, would be dead or without a radio since Hollister had taken his other RTO, leaving him with one and no backup.

  “Here!” Ayers yelled back, stuffing the handset into the crook of Hollister’s arm.

  “What’s your situation?” Hollister yelled into the mouthpiece.

  “I’ve got one KIA and some wounded—don’t know how many now.”

  “Can you move? Toward me?”

  “We can try. When?”

  “We’re gonna pick up the fire—you make your move. Stand by for my call.”

  “Roger,” DeSouza said.

  Dropping the handset, Hollister got up to his knees and started pulling hand grenades out of the canteen cover on his hip. He held two up to show the others, who recognized his signal. He picked up the handset again and pressed the mouthpiece to his lips. “Now! Now!” he yelled into it before he dropped it again. In one motion he raised his other hand, gripping a grenade. He pulled the pin, rocked back on his knees, and hurled it up and over the top of the bamboo stand.

  The others did the same, and each man was soon throwing grenade after grenade. After the initial delay, the grenades starting going off as fast as they had been thrown. Hollister threw another and looked over to the right for signs of DeSouza’s team, then threw another one.

  “Sir! Hey!” Ayers yelled, trying to be heard over the shooting.

  “Not now!” Hollister yelled.

  “Gunships! Gunships!”

  “Fucking great!” Hollister yelled back, throwing his last grenade. He took the handset again. “Keep firing! Don’t stop! Shoot into the bamboo—low, low!”

  Hollister watched DeSouza drag a body into view as he led his team to a position to the right of Hollister’s element, making a straight line of LRPs facing what they assumed was the enemy flank, their backs to the stream.

  Hollister yelled into the handset, “Where are you? How soon can you …” He stopped, hearing the choppers to his rear, near their pickup zone.

  “Where do you want it?” gun leader Stanton asked in his normally calm voice.

  “Let me mark. When I do—fire to the west of my mark, close. They’re not more than two-five mikes away from my mark.”

  “Okay, partner,” Stanton said.

  Hollister unsnapped the single metal snap on the bottom of the nylon carrier that held his strobe light to his harness. It slid out into his muddy fingers. He tried to turn on the rubber-covered switch and found that his fingers slipped off the rubber.

  The enemy fire had shifted. It was now coming through the bamboo. The riflemen would be coming around one end or the other of the bamboo hedgerow soon. “Shoot to the flanks—the flanks!” he yelled as he extended his arms and pointed left and right

  He turned to Quintana, who was shooting an M79, and made a motion like he was shooting a free throw. “Keep dropping them over the bamboo.”

  The LRPs responded by shifting their fires, and the grenadier kept lobbing the HE rounds.

  Hollister wiped his muddy hand across his shirt and tried the strobe again. It turned on and began to light up the area around him. The sleeve was gone! He had somehow dropped the oval tube that directed the high-intensity flashing light somewhere in the brush around his knees.

  The flashing light marked his location for the enemy riflemen, and their fires came in even more accurately than before. Hollister quickly realized his mistake. He stood up, raised the strobe light behind his hip, and hurled it up and over the bamboo, hoping it would fall among the VC.

  Grabbing the handset he yelled, “Forget my instructions … fire on the strobe. Fire on the strobe. It’s in their position.”

  “Roger. You are to the east?”

  “Affirm. Fire on the strobe before they put it out.”

  Hollister could hear the sounds of the gunships firing rockets and miniguns before he could see them. Stanton had started his firing run hundreds of meters out and came across the front of the LRP’s position. In the dark the tracers and rocket motor flames looked much closer than they actually were, and the newer LRPs ducked from what they thought was certain death.

  As soon as the first pair of rockets hit, Hollister corrected, “Long! Drop two zero meters from your last pair. I say again. Drop two zero. Over.”

  “Rog,” Stanton said calmly.

  Two explosions threw Hollister onto his face as if someone had hit him in the back with a full swing of a baseball bat.

  He recovered and turned to see what it had been. Two enemy grenades had come over the bamboo and landed among them, wounding another man, whom he couldn’t make out, and killing another.

  The second gunship firing run came in right where Hollister wanted it—on the far side of the bamboo. The strobe went out. “Can you still ID the target?” Hollister yelled into the handset.

  “Yeah, got enough dry stuff burnin’ down there now to mark it,” Stanton replied.

  “Back up!” Hollister yelled to the LRPs around him. “Let’s head toward the rally point on the other side of the stream!”

  Those near him passed the word. Two figures stood and grabbed two bodies that lay dead behind their line and began dragging them toward the stream. Hollister wanted to tell them to leave the bodies, but knew better. A LRP who thinks he might be left behind is no good on any patrol. They had to take out their dead and wounded—it was their promise to each other.

  He realized there was still another KIA to be carried out—X-man. He grabbed Xinh by the wrist, pulled it up and over his head, and lifted the small man’s dead body up on his shoulders. The extra weight on his bad leg shot pains into his hip joint, making him bite his lip to keep from crying out.

  The gun runs continued. Flares filled the skies, helping the gun-ships see their target. Sangean tried to get Hollister on the radio, and Hollister put him off, saying they were moving and he would give him a SITREP on the other side of the blue line. His only message, passed through Ayers, was for them to be ready to pick up the team.

  RPGs—grenades! Hollister wondered what took the gunships so long to fire them if they had had them all along. The explosions were horrifying. Those standing threw themselves on the ground to avoid the fragmentation as the rockets detonated in the trees, mostly behind them.

  Tracers continued to pierce the wall of bamboo, but were now coming
down the trail with the RPGs. Hollister tried to gauge the distance to the landing zone in order to get the choppers in as fast as he could. He remembered the shape of the PZ from his chopper recon and the aerial photos he had studied before leaving Bien Hoa.

  It was shaped like a dumbbell or a figure eight. The team was going to reach the PZ at nine o’clock on the lower lobe of the north-south figure eight. The two loosely connected landing zones were joined by an opening that was easily thirty meters wide, so choppers could enter the top lobe and fly through the narrow part to the lower lobe where the patrol would be waiting—if they all got there.

  “Reptile, start walking your runs to the east. I say again, to the east—one hundred meters max. We have moved closer to the papa zulu, and you need to come my way. Over.”

  “Roger, your way, no more than a hundred. Keep your heads down,” Stanton replied.

  The lead chopper started pooping out grenades from its nose turret, thunking one every twenty feet as it crossed behind the assembling patrol. Each round landed on the far side of the stream bank, which the team had just left.

  Hollister was sure the impact was either hitting the VC or was between them and the VC. Either way, it was suppressing the enemy fire and gave him time to consolidate his hasty perimeter and count heads. He put X-man’s body down next to the other two.

  “Lopaka,” Hollister yelled at the top of his voice over the gun-ships. “Give me a count!” He then turned in the opposite direction and yelled the same to DeSouza.

  Lopaka’s RTO tapped Hollister again and passed him the handset.

  “We are staged. You think you can get out in the clear for a pickup?” Sangean asked.

  “Stand by,” Hollister replied. Then he yelled again, “Well? Give me the fucking numbers, damnit!”

  “I got one KIA, one WIA,” Lopaka yelled from the nearby shadows.

  “DeSouza! What is it?” Hollister yelled, the pressure mounting.

  “Two KIA, two minor WIA. You got Ayers with you?” he yelled from a point out of Hollister’s view.

  Ayers? Hollister spun around. Ayers, where the hell was he? He had been behind Hollister crossing the stream. There was no sign of him. Security was shot anyway, so he yelled, “Ayers. Sound off!”

  No reply.

  He yelled for him again and looked over at Lopaka, shrugging in question. Lopaka shook his head, indicating he had not seen him.

  No answer.

  There was not much choice. He had to delay the pickup until he could account for Ayers. “Six, I got three kilo and three whiskey india alpha. But I’m still missing one. Stand by.”

  Sangean clicked twice.

  For a fleeting second, Hollister recognized how happy he was to have Sangean as a boss. What he lacked in personality, he made up for in control under pressure.

  “DeSouza! We got to find Ayers. Give me two men,” Hollister yelled.

  “Sir …” the other RTO said, holding up the handset. “Ayers. It’s Ayers.”

  “What?”

  “On the horn.”

  Hollister grabbed the handset and broke radio procedure. “Ayers?”

  “Affirm” was the weak reply Hollister got over the radio.

  “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know where I am.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “No, sir … I’m blind,” the soldier said. Hollister could hear the sobbing rising in the soldier’s throat. “I been hit … rocket. I can’t see, sir. I don’t know where I am.”

  The report spun Hollister’s brain. The choppers were orbiting, he had a blind man wandering around somewhere, and he was down to fifty percent effectives plus one prisoner and still hadn’t even heard his ammo status.

  He had to make a decision, and his options were poor. He could try to drag the wounded to the choppers. If he could find Ayers. And he still didn’t know if his men and the gunships had been able to do any real damage to the damn VC, whom they had not even seen yet.

  The gunships! The thought chilled Hollister. “Break. Reptile Six, check fire on the guns. We’ve got a man out there.”

  “Rog. We’re breaking off,” Stanton said. “You need us to look for you?”

  “Maybe. Stand by. Thanks.”

  Just at that moment a single VC soldier stepped around the left side of the bamboo stand and leveled an RPG toward the LRP perimeter on the other bank of the swollen stream—just thirty meters away. Before Hollister could make a sound or even raise his rifle, the soldier took three hits in the chest and face and went down. The tracers that felled him were green. Hollister followed them back to a point only a few feet to his side and saw Bui standing there with his AK47 still at his shoulder.

  “All right, Bui,” someone yelled.

  The enemy soldier’s aggressiveness was the decision maker for Hollister. It told him the enemy wasn’t backing off and would continue to be a real problem to a crippled team trying to get out. And then there was Ayers, wherever he was. Hollister grabbed the handset. “Six, we need someone to come in here. We can’t safely get our own on the PZ and the choppers. I think we need the Sabers.”

  “Can you hold on till we get them out there?”

  “Got no choice. Just keep me supplied with guns and some red-leg and I can make it—I think.”

  “You got it. Break. Houston, you copy?”

  Vance’s voice came over the radio handset from Operations. He had been at the radios since the first shot was fired and had the Cav troop reaction force on the pad waiting to be picked up. Hollister didn’t need to hear any more now that the wheels were turning. But he needed the frequency.

  He interrupted. “Six, I need this freq to find my missing man. Can you move to the alt freq?”

  They cleared the net for Hollister.

  “One-three Romeo, this is Three. Now, tell me what your situation is.”

  Ayers came on the radio, his tone hushed, his voice very shaky. “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know were I am.”

  “What can you hear?” Hollister asked.

  “Gunships, gunfire, and I don’t even know about that. My hearing is fucked in one ear, too.”

  Hollister swallowed hard and tried to give Ayers confidence: “Okay, pal. Now listen. We are okay. I want you to stand. Can you stand?”

  “I am standing.”

  “Which way are your feet pointing?”

  “What? … Straight ahead,” Ayers said.

  “No … now, take it easy. Remember basic night navigation? If your toes are pointing up, you are heading uphill. If they are pointing down, you are going downhill, and if your feet are on different levels, you are on the contour. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Up, they’re pointing up. Up.”

  “Okay, turn around. You have to walk down to the stream. Toes pointing down. You want to walk down to the stream. It’s the only low ground near us. Give it a try.”

  For some reason, the firing had stopped. The VC were either moving or waiting to see what Hollister had for them. Hollister hated the silence as much as the shooting. At least while they were shooting he had some idea where they were.

  A single round rang out. Hollister snapped his head around to see that one of Lopaka’s RTOs had dropped a VC soldier crawling toward them, not more than twenty meters away.

  “Ayers? You moving?”

  “Affirm. Down. Moving down.”

  The temptation to hurry Ayers crossed Hollister’s mind, then he dismissed it. He had to assume that Ayers was moving as fast as a blind man could move. Pushing him would lay too much on him.

  Hollister turned to Lopaka and held up an M16 magazine he had pulled from his own ammo pouch. Lopaka nodded his head. “Got at least two hundred rounds per man,” he whispered. Looking to DeSouza, Hollister did the same. DeSouza’s reply was “One hundred per man.”.

  “Good, get two mags per man from Lopaka,” Hollister said. “And keep your eyes open for Ayers.”

  Quintana, the other RTO, stepped up behind Hollister
. “‘Horse soldiers are off at Bien Hoa. Hang in there’ was Captain Vance’s message.”

  “Tell him we’ll be ready,” Hollister replied, but wasn’t that convinced himself.

  A splash off to the patrol’s right combined with a muffled groan spun two of Lopaka’s people at the ready. They waited.

  Hollister heard it, too. He walked downstream and tried to see what had made the noise. He grabbed the radio handset from Quintana and looked at him. “Which freq?”

  “The old tac freq,” he replied.

  “Good.” He raised the handset. “Ayers? You still moving?”

  “I found a stream,” Ayers said.

  The voice Hollister heard over the radio was echoed by a nearby voice. He dropped the handset and took two more steps downstream. “Ayers? You there?”

  “Here. I’m over here,” a figure said, trying to get up the mud-slippery bank.

  The two soldiers on the right flank got up and ran down the stream to Ayers, grabbing him by the arms, dragging and lifting him out of the water.

  As they carried him back to the patrol, Hollister wasted no time. “Okay, let’s move back. To the PZ. Lopaka, you take the point and watch out for the fuckers. They could be behind us. They are if they’re smart.”

  As they moved to the PZ, Hollister turned the gunships on again to cover their movement. The platoon of Cav reaction force troops landed in the top lobe of the PZ and started working their way down the tree line toward Hollister’s position.

  Lopaka sent two men up the tree line to make contact with the Cav troops and keep them from mistaking the LRPs for the enemy.

  While they waited for the linkup, Hollister moved to the center of their new and tiny perimeter to check the casualties. The bodies of Xinh, Caps, and Doc Montford were laid out alongside the wounded Ayers.

  Ayers sat up, allowing Lopaka’s assistant team leader, Spec 4 Green, to tend to his wounds. Green was one of the team medics trained by Sergeant Rose.

  “How you doing, Ayers?” Hollister asked. He could tell how he looked since daybreak had painted the perimeter with a heavy gray light, dissolving the shadows. Ayers’s face around the dressing looked as if he had been hit with birdshot. He was a maze of tiny puncture wounds.