The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  And then we left.

  Part 3

  THE HUNTED

  CHAPTER 14

  It was 1800 hours, and the light was fading fast. We had seen the weather changing for a day and a half. A cloud line hit us minutes after we pushed off. Though it was still light in the valley below, we came down the mountain in a smoky mist. By the time we reached the tributary stream, it was dark. We headed straight down the stream bed for the Red River. We had not seen a single patrol. When the riverbank cover grew thin, I stopped the men.

  "I'm taking point," I said. "Somewhere down the river in the next couple of miles, the Chinese are going to hit us with everything they've got. Let's give them all we've got."

  "I'm ready."

  "Let's get it over with."

  We followed the river downstream until we reached the ford where the previous day we had thumbed our nose at China. We all stopped and looked around, and a wave of bitterness swept through the unit. Prather started to speak, but Jackson cut him short.

  "Get sharp, Lew," he said.

  We all got the message. We ran across in the night, our boots clattering on the shingles. We moved very cautiously down to the bridge, then holed up for half an hour while troop transport passed overhead. A short time later, we arrived at the Red River.

  We decided not to follow the Red River as we had on the mission in, but to strike directly across and take a valley paralleling the one we had come up. It was a harder route, but quicker. From there we would head due south to the mangroves, then swing well east of Lai Chau. Our route up had passed a few miles to the west of Lai Chau; if they had established our route pattern, they would be looking for us there. From the mangroves, we would strike southwest to the Laotian border about thirty miles south of our departure point and link up there with our route out of M Ngoi.

  We crossed the Red River one at a time without incident. We had been in and out of China without identifying a single enemy soldier. We were just coming together on the Vietnamese side of the river, a hundred yards into the trees, when we stumbled onto a dirt track. Parked on it were three motorcycles, one with a side car; a jeep; and a strange-looking vehicle with a rear track and one front wheel, similar to something the Germans used in Africa. All the vehicles were empty. We could not see their occupants anywhere around.

  I left the unit in the trees and went forward alone. I could see or hear nothing. I went on across the road alone without bringing the unit up behind me. It was a foolish thing to do; fortunately, Prather saw what I had done and brought the others forward.

  I was poised on the far side of the road, peering into the trees, when I heard movement behind me. I whirled around. Standing on the road facing me were eight or nine men in North Vietnamese uniforms and two officers. Where they had come from, I did not know. For some stupid reason, they must have thought

  I was alone, because every eye was on me. One of the officers was pointing a pistol.

  Before I had completed my turn, I fired the shotgun twice and killed both officers. The roar of the shotgun panicked the others. Before they could recover, Prather led the unit in a charge across die road, and a free-for-all started. The NVA ran in every direction. When two ducked behind the vehicles, Wiley lobbed a grenade in on top of them. The motorcycles burst into flames and fell back into the trees. Bullets were flying everywhere, but we were doing most of the effective shooting. I saw one NVA get back-shot as he tried to run off the road into the trees. The noise was pounding in my ears ... the racket of their machine guns ... a jeep exploding . . . grenades going off. I was jumping and running all over the place, trying to reach cover. I saw a face and shot it, and I saw a body and shot it. I was fighting on instinct now. Then there were only two left, firing wildly from the far side of the burning vehicles. We could no longer see one another. They broke off and fled. We ran to scoop up weapons.

  "This damn stuff is useless," Jackson said.

  He handed me a shoddy gas-operated light machine gun. It looked like a Czech design, very poorly made. I threw it down and ran over to the officers.

  "Fuck me!" I said. "These guys are Chinese."

  Their Chinese uniforms were unmistakable. I did not recognize their ranks, but guessed them to be lieutenants. A small-caliber automatic was lying beside one of the dead men. He had probably intended to take me prisoner, but our reflexes were so acutely tuned that I had killed two men before he could get the words out of his mouth.

  None of us had ever seen a Chinese soldier before, so the others ran over for a quick look. The enlisted men proved all to be NVA. There was no catching the two who got away, so we struck for the hills on the double.

  We ran through the bush, expecting to meet people behind every tree; we leap-frogged one another, sound-

  ing off in whispers for two hours, moving over undulating terrain, around rocky outcrops, pushing through a low bubble vegetation. Then the going got far less restricted; we could move faster, with less effort. We were an hour past dawn now, beginning our third day without sleep.

  When we broke into a river and found a secure spot, we grabbed a couple of hour's rest. We were approaching the mangroves, and we were anxious to regain our old route through; we could move faster on familiar ground.

  "Well, they won't be looking for us in China," said Morrosco, referring to the bodies that marked our progress across the Red River.

  "Pity, that," said Prather. "Otherwise the Chinese might have maintained control of the operation. The communications and logistics delays would have given us a break."

  "I'm not sure we were meant to be found in China. We may have been allowed out," I said.

  "What do you mean?" asked Jackson.

  "Don't you find it odd that we never saw a soldier inside China and ran into Chinese officers the first five minutes we were back in Vietnam? They must have had pretty accurate co-ordinates on us in China. Who knows, maybe they were watching us the whole time. So they let us leave. Once outside China, then China is no longer the subject of the mission. The Chinese don't have to admit the infiltration, and the allies don't have to deny it. We're back inside the confines of the Indo-Chinese war theater now. They can kill us with impunity. And the war has not been extended across the borders of China."

  We moved out over rough hill country, traveling fast to intercept Highway 138 before dark. We were pouring with sweat by the time we reached it, dropping down into the roadway from the mountain above. I expected opposition, but we dashed across without seeing anyone; possibly I was overestimating the enemy's communications. Below the highway, we were

  boxed into a narrow valley with a hamlet just above it on the hill to the west. Beyond lay a wide plain where we hoped for easier going.

  We had been on the highway, which was little more than a track, for five minutes when Morrosco, at point, rushed into the trees without waving us down. We faded into the undergrowth and waited. Nothing happened. It was growing dark, so I decided to go forward before we lost one another. I crawled on my belly to where I had last seen Morrosco, but he was gone. I lay perfectly still for five minutes, then I heard him give a hiss. He was hidden under some brush no more than fifty feet away. I signaled the others to hold their positions, took out my knife, and crawled to his side.

  The body of a peasant man lay beside him. The man's head hung in a curious way; the neck seemed to be cut all the way around. I looked at Morrosco. He opened his left hand. It held a garrote—three strands of piano wire, each about a foot long, twisted together and attached to two small wooden toggles. I had seen these before in Vietnam, but I did not know Morrosco was carrying one. It had sliced through the man's neck like a cheese cutter, clean to the spine. I smelled the stench of the man's bowels.

  I started to raise up, but Morrosco pushed me down sharply. Then I saw three more men beating through the bush in our direction. They were peasants as well, and I thought they might walk past us. But they were looking for the man Morrosco had killed. They felt no sense of danger; they were just chatting, w
ondering what had happened to their friend.

  When they were within a few feet of us, one of them spotted a basket on the side of the road that I had not seen before. They got a bit excited, as if they might go back to the hamlet for help; they had started to think something was wrong, but they showed none of the fear to suggest they suspected something like us. A snake perhaps. They walked past us, and I decided we could not risk their turning back.

  "In the open," I whispered to Morrosco.

  We jumped up and ran out on the track, making sure they heard us so that all three would stand and fight. If we had stalked them, we might have killed two and lost the third. We charged them, Morrosco with his machete, me with my knife.

  They ran back a few yards and grabbed up something from the roadside. Then they turned on us. They were wielding wooden spades the peasants use to build up mud in rice fields, something like an ax handle with a flat wooden blade for turning the mud. Morrosco and I stayed close together to give them the encouragement of three on two.

  "Fun and games, you bastards," I heard Morrosco say.

  His voice was almost light-hearted. He had a lot of anger to release, and he was looking forward to this fight. For me, this was just another job, and I was conscious of having to spread myself across two men. I could not rely on Morrosco's help, nor he on mine.

  We squared off for two seconds, then one guy swung at Morrosco. He ducked, but slipped. He jumped up, and he and the bloke started circling. Another rushed me with a wild chopping blow. I stepped inside it and brought him into me. I went down on my back and took him over my head, sticking him with the knife as he flew upward.

  I rolled off him to take on the second man. But I could not see him. A crushing blow caught me in the small of my back, like being hit with a cricket bat. I fell to my knees and toppled over to one side. The spade came crashing down on the ground beside me. I tried to stand, but my legs would not work. My back was throbbing, and pain was shooting up and down my legs like an electric shock. The guy saw that he had me. He started to finish me off, then saw that Morrosco had just killed his companion. He hesitated a second, then broke into an indecisive run into the bush. I grabbed my knife and heaved it at him, and it clattered harmlessly against the ground. The guy looked back, and I saw from his expression that he knew he

  had made it. The guy turned, Jackson stepped from behind a tree, and the guy just ran into his mouth. He was dead in a fraction of a second. Jackson strolled to where I was lying on my side.

  "Well, you two screwed that one up, didn't you," he said.

  He had seen what was happening and anticipated the result, so he slipped through the trees and cut off the man's retreat. I was on my feet almost instantly, but my back and legs were swelling quickly. I recovered my knife, and we moved out. We had to leave the trail, because these people would be missed. I forced myself to run. We had a compelling sense of urgency to flee these scenes. We were lucky, because five minutes later a mobile unit came down the track, moving very quickly. We struck out across country, avoiding all the trails. Every rogue wind seemed to be blowing us off course now. We stopped talking about specific routes, about making landfalls, about time and distance projections. From now on, we would make our way however we could to M Ngoi, move as far and as fast as we could, rest when we had an opportunity.

  We marched nonstop through the night. It was still dark when we broke out of the thick undergrowth into the flaxen grass that preceded the mangrove swamp. We reached the mangroves by the time morning was well established, and we were deep inside by mid-morning. At the beginning, we were in a less inhospitable swamp than before; the streams were better defined, the ground between them firmer. But the trees overhead were filled with bats. Our voices panicked them; they fell out of the trees almost to ground level and then screamed their way back to their roosts, their wings flapping and beating with a roar in our faces on their erratic flight skyward. We could see vultures through the cracks in the canopy of foliage, but they were not following us. When the trees closed overhead, it was pitch black around us though the sun shone brilliantly above. The heat grew stifling. The leeches

  found us again. A tree limb moved. Unseen things slipped through the watery floor beneath us.

  "I heard there's a baboon in here that will pull a man's ear off," said Wiley.

  "Bullshit," Jackson replied to that.

  Dragonflies three inches long rose off the stagnant water and swarmed around our heads, seeking the salt in our sweat. They clogged our noses, filled our ears with buzzing. I thrashed wildly at a snake, severing its head as it swam between my legs.

  "Hey, Wiley," Jackson said, "there's a beetle in here that gets in your ear and eats its way right through your brain. There's no way to get them out. I've seen guys go crazy, run down a hillside screaming. Shoot themselves."

  "Now that's bullshit."

  "Maybe. But I'm puttin' cotton in my ears."

  When we saw Jackson stop, we all did the same, plugging our ears with wadding. We were struggling now, sweating out more water than we had brought with us. Fighting off sleep. Every step was agony for my legs and lower back from the blow I had received. We had to hack a path with our machetes.

  Tension was an added drain on our reserves: we had to be on constant alert. We could not get caught out because of preoccupation with the environment. It was hell. It was jungle warfare we could not be trained for, we could not prepare for, because there was nothing like it, and we were in it until we got out.

  The jungle grew too thick to penetrate with our machetes. We moved into the stagnant streams. They were filled with rotting vegetation and foul water life, but they were shallow, and we could push along them. It was terrifying. Everything that moved or brushed against us was a snake. The mosquitoes swarmed on our upper bodies as we walked waist-deep in water. It was difficult to find our way; the vegetation closed over us, and the rivers seemed to disappear in the undergrowth. We would hack our way for a hundred

  yards, and we would be back in an open stream. Snakes and water animals dropped into the water all around us, then disappeared.

  I had never been afraid in combat. When I knew my enemy, I was ready to take on almost any odds. But the nerve-racking fear of the mangrove swamp was almost unbearable. The ground moved under me, and I thought I was being swallowed up by quicksand. I struggled to free my boots from the slimy, sucking bottom. Something brushed against my legs, and suddenly a thousand jaws were tearing at the flesh.

  "Piranhas!" I screamed.

  "Then we're really lost," said Prather, "because piranhas live in South America."

  We pushed on into the night making pitifully little progress. We fell over in the streams and tore our faces on the overhanging branches. When a tree blocked our path, one of us had to haul himself over and drop down on the far side, praying that the water was only waist deep.

  Wiley was getting knocked about constantly. When I dropped back to talk with him, I realized that his night vision was not as keen as the rest of ours. He was running into branches that we could see. His morale was crumbling. Crossing the swamp by night must have been the most frightening experience of his life. I said nothing about his eyesight. It was no good making people aware of weaknesses in a unit. Then they began to be allowed for, and the unit could take a certain action to which there were better alternatives. We had to deal from our strengths, not weaknesses.

  We left the mangroves in the early hours of the morning via a river, then joined a trail. We were shattered. We desperately needed rest, but I did not want to stop until we were across Highway 6, which we could see in the distance. We were within a day's march of the Laotian border now. If we could get past the highway and into the Nam Meuk, our chances improved considerably. Our only obstacle was a small

  hamlet blocking our exit from the valley ahead. We intended to skirt it by climbing the hills at the end of the valley.

  When we got there, we found the hamlet cutting* our only acceptable route. The hills to either s
ide were, steep and bare; we would have to go rock climbing,, and we were in no shape for that. We stopped outside r the hamlet. I was indecisive. The sun was rising now.. We could not stay where we were, and we could not, spend a lot of time planning a maneuver.

  The hamlet held some twenty houses laid out neatly against the base of the hill. We waited outside for an hour, growing anxious all the time because we were, not well hidden. Our maps had proved inaccurate for J the past couple of days. Earlier they had been so good we could almost count the fence posts in a village, this size, but they had not been interpreted correctly ] for this area. We could not afford to rely on them., Jackson and I crawled forward for a closer look.

  We lay almost totally exposed in the dawn light" at the edge of the hamlet, peeking from behind a pile* of rubble. I dared not even raise up to get a full view, j People were moving about, and we observed no signs j of a military unit in the hamlet. We were gaining. nothing by sitting there. I brought the others forward., The village men were gathering to leave for the fields.

  "We have to take this place," I said, "and we have to do it before the men leave."

  We dispersed around the hamlet and crawled up under the houses. I could see clearly now. The houses in these tiny villages were usually tidily placed in a ^ circle or a square; here they lay in two parallel lines with a clearing between and a steep hill behind. The track we wanted left the hamlet at the far end. There were fewer men gathering than I had expected, all old or very young. The rest must have been off somewhere playing soldier. As I waited for Prather and Morrosco to take up positions on the far side, I puzzled over the best way to handle this place.

  The peasant men began gathering their tools, so it was time for us to move. I waved. Wiley and Jackson ran straight across the clearing toward the second row of buildings. The men saw them and began shouting and sh ufflin g about in panic. I ran out and let go with two rounds of the shotgun into the hill behind them. It had its usual effect. Prather and Morrosco stayed hidden. Tan came with me, and the four of us started shouting and kicking people about to instill fear and confusion. We knocked two of the men down with rifle butts to show them we meant business. The women started screaming and ran into the huts. We kept the panic going for a while. The only way a small force can take and hold a large group of people is to terrify them. We were doing it pretty damned seriously. We split a few heads with our rifle barrels. We did not give a damn about these people. We were in bad shape, and we must have looked like the hand of death to them.