Ghost War

by Maloney, Mack;

  With a map, a “shopping list” provided by Hunter, and a set of steel balls, Geraci and each of the other torchers were cutting away in the dark on the scattered hulks of the wrecked planes that littered the length of the Khe Sanh runway. They were on a treacherous and deadly scavenger hunt for parts—parts that they needed, parts that all their lives would depend on.

  It was a nerve-wracking job. Working at night with all this equipment would have been a dangerous proposition, even under the most ideal circumstances. But these conditions were far from idea. In fact, they were almost impossible.

  Still, he and his crews in the field were making headway. Personally, he had already managed to cut free six separate parts on his list: a leading edge panel from the tail of a Lockheed P-3C Orion, a starboard aileron from a Fairchild C-119G Boxcar, and four propeller blades from an old, C-130 Hercules.

  Each of the cannibalized parts was carefully lugged to the entrance of Magic Mountain by a squad headed by another of Geraci’s officers, Captain Roy Cerbasi. Once there, the parts were whisked inside where eighty of Geraci’s engineers, taut, tired and hungry, began work on them, painstakingly assembling the building blocks to Hunter’s Big Plan.

  All of the torch crews in the field were having success getting their assigned parts, so they kept Cerbasi’s men hopping between the runway and the front of Magic.

  But there were many more parts to get. And the constant stopping to haul ass and take cover from the mortar explosions, and the hot shrapnel whizzing around only added to the madness.

  And even as their arduous task continued in the field, Geraci was well aware that a third team of base defenders was hard at work inside the sandbag cocoon surrounding NJ104. They too were using acetylene torches to cut-through bent and twisted pieces of metal. They too were sending a stream of parts, both useable and not, back to the men inside Magic Mountain.

  And they too knew that the work done by all on this endless night would go a long way in determining their chances for survival.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The next morning

  THE SUN’S EARLY MORNING rays cut through the thick morning fog and somehow reached Lieutenant Twang’s closed eyelids.

  Still asleep, Twang smiled at their warmth. He was dreaming about a tropical island, far out at sea. The ocean waters surrounding this island were so clear they were green. There was a warm, pure white beach, and nearby, a high cliff. On the cliff, there was an airplane, surrounded by candles and covered in smoke.

  Oddly, the airplane was painted pink….

  Suddenly, Twang’s eyes popped open. He instantly felt a wave of panic wash over him.

  Had he fallen asleep, on duty, again?

  He was quickly up on the lip of the spider hole and was relieved to find that he was still alone and undetected. But this relief soon turned to utter revulsion. The hole was surrounded by the corpses of his comrades, killed in the titanic battle the previous day. Twang felt paralyzed just looking at them. Some were missing arms, legs, heads. Others were horribly blown apart, stomachs, intestines, bowels strewn around them like huge hideous worms. Still others seemed perfectly fine. Their bodies were intact, their eyes open, their faces pulled back in involuntary smiles. They looked as if nothing was wrong with them—except that they were dead. They seemed to be beckoning to Twang. They seemed to want him to join them.

  Twang slid back down into his spider hole. Soon enough, he feared.

  He looked at his hands and realized they were covered with dried blood. Then it came back to him—the big battle the day before, his comrades’ suicide charge, the enemy’s massive rocket barrage, the chunk of something that hit him on the head and knocked him out. The terror of being buried alive and his frantic efforts to get back to the surface and breathe again rose again in his throat. His lungs were still filled with those first breaths of air; his tonsils still burned of the cordite; his nostrils still seared with the smell of the dead. He felt for the wound at the top of his head, and found a clump of puss, blood, and matted hair. He was instantly sick to his stomach—he was sure he looked worse than some of his dead compatriots lying outside the spider hole.

  He slumped further down into the hole, feeling as if life itself was draining out of him. He closed his eyes and was surprised that he saw many spots—like those caused by camera flash bulbs or strobes. Was this a symptom of impending death?

  Or were they caused by something else?

  He had to struggle to remember—his head wound had caused a severe concussion, and quite nearly a fractured skull, so his memory was working slowly. But then it came back to him: last night. In the darkness. The enemy, armed with acetylene torches. They were cutting something….

  He was back up on the lip of the spider hole in an instant. In the fog, past the bodies, he could just barely see the base runway. Closer to him was the carcass of a rusting airplane; it was no more than fifty yards away, and he’d been staring at it since he arrived in the stinking spider hole.

  Now he strained his eyes to see that one of this dead airplane’s wings was missing parts of its wrecked propeller and engine, as well as the tip of the wing itself. Actually he could clearly see dozens of burn marks all over the airplane’s rusting silver skin.

  Next to this airplane was a smaller one—an old jet fighter, he thought. He could see that pieces of this wreck were missing too; the burn marks around its engine cowlings were very evident, and apparently its clear glass canopy had also been taken.

  It was all coming back to him now, in a rush so fast, it was actually painful.

  He had come to briefly during the night; long enough to see the enemy soldiers running around in the darkness, cutting up the dead airplanes with their torches, and dodging the barrages of mortar shells fired from his comrades in the hills.

  He had watched them—but for how long? Ten minutes? An hour? Two hours? He didn’t know.

  But now, he imagined he could remember events from the unconsciousness that had followed. Even greater flashes of light. Sounds louder than mortar blasts. A rumbling even more earthshaking than when the enemy moved one of their wrecked airplanes the length of the runway a few nights before.

  Had he dreamed all this? Dreamed it before he flew without wings to the tropical island, the one with the green waters and the pink plane on the cliffs?

  Again, he didn’t know. He stepped even further up the lip of the spider hole, cursing the thick morning fog, cursing his weary eyes, weakened by the knock on his skull.

  The thick mist was lifting, but not quick enough for him. As it dissipated, it revealed more of the nearby wrecked airplanes—and more evidence that they had been cut up during the night. Landing struts were gone here, tailplanes were gone there. All of the old wrecked airplanes within his view looked like they’d surrendered at least one part to the torches. But oddly, there seemed to be no rationale for the enemy’s nocturnal efforts, no discernable pattern. Why would the totally outgunned Caucasians choose to risk their lives and precious time cutting up old plane wrecks?

  It just didn’t make any sense.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Behind the lines

  One hour later

  ALL IT TOOK WAS one look at his valet for Commander Long Dong Tru to know the small war for Khe Sanh was all but lost.

  Dong stared at the man in his dressing room mirror as he arranged a set of medals on Dong’s chest. He looked simply ragged. His uniform was frayed, his eyes watering, his face gaunt and etched with newly carved wrinkles. He looked like an old man, though Dong knew the valet was actually quite younger than he.

  “When was the last time you had a meal?” Dong asked him.

  “Two days ago, sir,” was the man’s barely audible answer.

  Dong was authentically surprised. “Two days? I thought we had plenty of food on hand.”

  “We did,” the valet replied, never looking his commander in the eye. “But the front-line troops stole it all three days ago.”

  “Stole it? Why?�
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  The valet froze for a moment. “In order to eat it all before the last battle,” he replied finally.

  Dong was both startled and puzzled by the words. “But why would they do that?”

  The valet just shrugged as he smoothed the cuff on Dong’s uniform pants. “Because they knew they were going to die,” he replied simply. “They wanted to go to the hereafter with a full stomach. It’s an old superstition.”

  That’s when it hit home for Dong. For the first time he realized that his troops had recognized the futility of this adventure long before he had.

  There was no way that troops with that mind-set could prevail. No wonder the battle the day before had gone so badly. Even the new weapons and troops he’d purchased from CapCom had had little effect. The tenacious base defenders had somehow held on once again.

  The news from the front was so bad, Dong had refused to look at the casualty figures from the last battle—he didn’t have to see numbers on a page to tell him just how miserable a defeat it was.

  What had gone wrong? Dong wondered gloomily. Would he ever know? The enemy at Khe Sanh was small, weakening and desperately outnumbered. On the other hand, his troops had everything. All the ammunition they wanted, all the mortar rounds, all the weapons. And he had fed them well, too.

  But for some reason, it hadn’t been enough.

  He quickly dismissed the valet and called for his personal aides to bring to his office the large iron chest in which he kept his gold reserves. The aides soon appeared with the large steamer trunk chest. Dong was quick to notice they no longer struggled with its weight.

  They laid the chest on his desk and were dismissed. Dong himself worked the combination lock, springing it open on the third try.

  One look inside only depressed him further.

  He had but one hundred and twenty bags of gold left. This from the thousands he’d still owned even after purchasing his first army. The 120 bags were worth about $5 million, possibly a little more. Also inside the box was his ledger book, the one he had intended to use to bill CapCom for the overrunning of Khe Sanh and the securing of the strategic highway of Route 9 beyond.

  But he could not do that now. Khe Sanh was still in enemy hands. He could not present CapCom with a bill. And that was the crux of his present problem. If he couldn’t charge CapCom for the campaign, then he would not be reimbursed. No reimbursement meant that he was practically broke and out of the running when it came time to divide up the spoils of South Vietnam once the major campaigns began.

  Thus, Dong felt himself in a position familiar to many a businessman through the ages. He had made two large mistakes. He had foregone direct contact with his troops, preferring to look upon them as product, and he had cut corners at crucial times, thinking that saving money during the operation would mean more money once the operation was completed.

  In a word, he had been greedy. And now he was forced to pay the price.

  He had but one chance left to save his sinking fortunes. It would be a one-shot effort, something he should have tried long ago. If it worked, then he still had a chance to recoup some of his fortune. If it failed, then he would be completely broke again, left with no army, no prestige, no power.

  He shuddered at the thought.

  Draining the last drops from his cognac snifter, he punched a button on his radio phone, spoke briefly to a Minx communications unit approximately twenty miles away, who then patched him through to his intended party.

  The radiophone on the other end rang three times before it was picked up.

  Song Ly Air Base

  Captain Lo Ky answered the radiophone.

  It was just a coincidence, of course. He happened to be passing by the base operations desk, on his way to the mess for another jug of rice wine, when he heard the device started beeping and picked it up.

  The voice on the other end sounded panicky, almost as if his location was under attack. That was not unusual: the majority of people seeking help from the MiGs based at Song Ly were usually being shot at, or mortared, or bombed or shelled at the time of the call. That was, after all, the basis of the business of the MiGs at the base. They were purely damage control, called in to perform air strikes for various Minx commanders who for whatever reason found their balls in a vice and needed some untightening quick.

  But this voice that Ky was listening to sounded different—it was both anxious and depressed. As if the battle was already over, and the caller was simply going through the motions of calling in an air strike, just so he could, in the end, know that he had expended all his options before running up the white flag.

  Technically, Ky should have summoned one of the logistics officers at the base to take the call, get the coordinates of the potential customer, discuss price and method of payment. But Ky took down all the information himself—this way the logistics officer would not have to be cut in on the job, meaning more money for Ky and his three comrade pilots.

  The caller was one Long Dong Tru, commander of the Minx forces fighting at nearby Khe Sanh. Ky almost burst out laughing when the man finally identified himself. He and the other pilots at Song Li had been hearing about Dong’s troubles at Khe Sanh for days—it was, after all, just over the hill from them. On still nights Ky and his men could hear the massive fighting going on in the bloody mudhole just six miles away, while they lay in comfortable duck-down beds, drinking rice wine and fricking the local whores.

  Dong in fact had become a kind of laughing stock among the various Minx military units. While they were preparing for the massive offensives in the south, Dong, reputed to be a lowly truck driver who suddenly got rich, was having trouble defeating a small bunch of white men, who had holed up at Khe Sanh with few weapons, little ammo and practically no hope of survival.

  He was also reportedly running out of funds, so Ky made it quite clear to Dong that any services from him and his fellow MiG pilots would have to be paid for in advance. Dong did not put up a fight—he even admitted that he was down to his last money reserves. He agreed to dispatch a convoy to Song Li carrying the 120 bags of gold the MiG pilots required to attack the enemy at Khe Sanh. The money would arrive within five hours. Ky agreed that the air strike would take place at dawn the next day.

  He hung up on Dong and proceeded to get yet another jug of rice wine from the base fridge.

  “Stupid fool,” he thought, laughing again over Dong’s pathetic request for last-minute air cover. “‘Penny smart and pound foolish.’”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Aboard Bozo

  BEN WAS EXHAUSTED.

  He was sitting on the mid-flight deck of Bozo, trying to get the most out of a cold cup of instant coffee.

  He’d gone so long without sleep, he had lost his sense of time. He had no idea if it was day or night. Only a glance through bleary eyes at the cracked windshield in the forward compartment told him it was indeed nighttime, probably a few hours before sunrise.

  He could hear activity going on below him, the gun crews doing their best to patch up the weapons hold of Bozo. But it was a tall order. There wasn’t much left of the airplane. After the last great battle—the one in which Hunter saved them all by literally calling in a missile strike on their position—the fuselage had more holes in it than not. The wings were just about completely severed from the body, and the tailplane had collapsed. Many of the firing positions had to be readjusted because there was so much debris scattered around the battered C-5, it interfered with weapons aiming.

  But lack of firing angles weren’t the only problems. Bozo was low on ammunition, low on fuel for the generators, and therefore low on electrical power. The crew members were simply beat. Exhaustion was showing in all the faces, and though valiant, everyone seemed to be moving at half speed, or even slower.

  It was sad to say, but there was also a crisis of spirit rising among them all. Though the day had passed without a follow-up Minx assault, everyone realized they couldn’t withstand another large-scale attack. And even if they di
d, the one after that would surely be the death blow.

  Ben found himself staring out of the shattered cockpit window towards Magic Mountain. While conditions were bad on Bozo, he knew things were even worse inside the artificial cave. Eighty of Geraci’s guys had been locked up inside the mountain for what seemed like days on end. The task before them was so enormous, even Ben had doubts they could pull it off, no matter how much guidance they received from Hunter.

  The problem was time. Even the most skilled of engineers needed time in which to do their work. But it was clear that the clock was running out very quickly for them all.

  He turned back to Willy Rucker’s Jason Transponder Module. His present duty was monitoring the JTM, just in case it picked up any unusual activity around Khe Sanh.

  Ben didn’t know just how Hunter had figured it all out so quickly, but now the grid highlighted by the JTM’s orange light was clearly showing the area surrounding Khe Sanh. It represented a perimeter stretching about twenty kilometers or so out from the center of the battered base.

  Ben had been staring at the grid off and on for the past few hours, with absolutely nothing to report. Hunter—who was also holed up inside Magic working with Geraci and his engineers—had told him that any unusual troop movements would show up as bursts of static on the nine-inch grid; any unusual mechanical activity would appear as moving vertical lines. Should either one of those things happen, Ben could use the JTM’s abundance of tuning dials to triangulate the precise location on the grid. Then by consulting the maps given to them by Willy Rucker pinpoint the activity in the area surrounding them.

  And then? Then, Ben thought, they would have advanced warning of what would probably be their last day.

  He leaned back and tried to stretch, his muscles aching from lack of sleep. Though tired, he wished he was working inside Magic instead of watching the JTM’s orange screen. Though the conditions were undoubtedly worse inside the mountain, he would have preferred to pitch in on the really hard work, just to keep his mind off of what he considered to be the inevitable.