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The Five Fingers

Page 22

by Gayle Rivers


  "Tan, Prather," I shouted. "Make for the high ground."

  They took off, and the rest of us spread our flanks to fight a withdrawal. I gave them four minutes, then we moved out behind them. We went into low shrub where we could not be outflanked because it was bordered on both sides by open ground.

  When I grabbed at my shirt for a fresh clip for the Armalite, I discovered I had only two left. The others must have been as short of ammunition as I was. We kept our pursuers off with sparing fire and fought an orderly withdrawal. It became a race for high ground. If they got above us, we were finished. They were moving in three parties in a semicircle be-

  hind us now. We were bringing people down, and we had not been hit, and suddenly I saw that we had stretched their right flank.

  "Hit the guys on the left," I hollered.

  We pivoted left. This drew their stretched flank even closer to us and put them on the double. They were convinced they were overtaking us. They broke into a run, strung out along the hill behind us. We led them onto a patch of low vegetation. We dropped off Jackson and Wiley and they went to ground. We kept going until our pursuers were clear of the tree line, then we turned into them. They thought we were making a last stand and charged right at us. We caught them in a crossfire and wiped out all nine of them in ten minutes. Then we pivoted right and drove the other two parties back into the trees.

  They would regroup and try to sweep us, but we had four minutes to breathe. We stripped the bodies of everything we could carry, then turned back east again and ran up the nearest slope. When we crested the first hill, I looked behind us. The NVA were in hot pursuit in a chase to which I saw no end. They had stopped firing now to climb more swiftly. It was hopeless trying to outrun them.

  "We've got to take cover," I said.

  We scrambled uphill until we found some rocks that were the only cover for several hundred yards. The NVA moved in below and began to harass us. They tried a frontal rush, hurling grenades, but they were throwing uphill, and we drove them back.

  There was sporadic firing for an hour, then they let off a sustained burst for a couple of minutes. The firing stopped. For five minutes we waited anxiously. Then three men jumped up off the ground less than a hundred feet below us. They nearly overran us; we killed the last man as he breached our defensive circle. They tried the same trick twice more, but we drove them off.

  Their officer was using his men quite effectively. I could not see us holding out after daylight. At first

  light we broke for the east and kept climbing. If we ever came back down, we would have to strike for another river that paralleled the Suong.

  The NVA followed us over the crest of a hill and down into the next valley. They tried to flank us; Wiley and Jackson moved into them off our flank, firing from the hip and throwing grenades. They managed to kill several of them. I was surprised to see how deadly effective we still were. Not one of us was playing the numbers game with automatic fire. We were taking out individual targets. We were rapidly diminishing their numbers and had not been hit ourselves except for a stone splinter or two.

  We played cat and mouse all morning, until we ran up against a river. The river was shallow, its bed flat, with a wide expanse of open ground between banks. The NVA were three minutes behind us, in the trees v just out of firing range. Tan, Prather, and Wiley sprinted across first; the rest of us followed in a body. We had just reached the trees when I heard the NVA burst out on the far bank. They were gaining on us rapidly. We had to fade out in the forest. I turned to look behind me and immediately changed my mind. These guys were being led by a major who was really determined to get us. He was shouting and waving his arms and counting us dead. But they were growing careless; they were spread out all through the trees, appearing singly by the river. There were still about fifteen in all.

  "Hit the ground," I called out. "Keep it quiet."

  Tan and Jackson crawled over close enough to converse with me.

  "They think we're still running," Tan said.

  "Jackson," I said, "take out the major as soon as he goes into the river."

  The major was getting excited as the kill approached. He lined his men up on the riverbank, then could not make up his mind how to send them across. Finally he ordered them to charge over in a bunch. They broke out across the shingles, practically running over each

  other. To my dismay, the major and two aides stayed on the far bank. Jackson held his fire. I kept watching for the major to fall. The guys were practically on top of us before I realized that Jackson was not going to shoot him.

  "Grenades," I shouted.

  Grenades landed everywhere among them. The explosions knocked them all down, but half jumped up and kept coming. The major started screaming, driving the men on. His aides charged into the river behind the others. I jumped to my feet and fired at the major with an open sight, and I saw what Toliver's adapted weapon could do. The bullet hit the major in the chest and just ripped him open, tore his body apart, and killed him instantly.

  I pivoted and took out an aide. There was firing everywhere. The grenades that had gone off on the shingles had stripped flesh right off the bones. But half of them had landed in the water and been muffled. The men who had survived were on top of us now. I stood up, and they ran right past me into hand-to-hand combat with the others. One man broke for Prather, who was sitting up with his M-3 propped between his knees. Prather drilled him full of holes.

  I kept my weapon trained on the opposite shore while trying to watch the fighting around me. I feared the major had been waiting for more men to arrive, so my eyes were darting all over the place while I covered our rear. I saw Jackson lose his weapon, then take one away from another man and shoot him with it. People were screaming everywhere. Wiley and Mor-rosco were fighting with their knives. I tried to draw a bead on the NVA setting into them, but these guys killed them with their knives before I had time to fire. One bloke hit Jackson under the eye with the point of his rifle barrel, then Morrosco killed him with a knife thrust into the kidney.

  They were all dead. We were near collapse. We had been in a running fire fight for a night and a day

  which ended in hand-to-hand combat; it had almost been too much for us.

  Jackson's face swelled immediately. When Morrosco tried to probe it for fractures, Jackson screamed so loudly we had to leave it. We were all torn and bleeding from the running, and the men who had been fighting with their hands looked like they had been dragged across a road on their faces. We had to finish off several guys in the river, and we were too tired to run down there. One had ducked under water when the grenades started flying. His brains had been scrambled. He was bleeding from every possible direction. I put a bullet into him and strolled over to the major. I had hit him just above the belt buckle, a much better shot than I could have hoped for. He and his aides wore a blue shoulder flash which I assumed meant they were some sort of special troops. These guys were carrying field rations, so we got little food but lots of ammunition for the AK-47s and some stick grenades.

  We could not use the river now. We had to go back to high ground. We threw caution to the winds and took off up a trail. We had not gone a mile before we spotted another NVA unit of fifteen men moving right at us. We ambushed them and killed nine, but six fled back up the path. We stopped to gather ammunition. There was a soft crump, and I was nearly blown off my feet by an explosion a hundred feet behind us.

  "They've got a mortar!"

  "Up the hill!"

  We could not go after these guys because we did not know how many we would find. We struck out through the undergrowth. Again we were being forced in a southeasterly direction, away from our old route. I was confused about our exact location; we were somewhere near Ban Houay Ket, but we saw no sign of the village. We climbed higher to look about.

  "There they are," Prather shouted, pointing behind us.

  This was not the sort of party we had encountered;

  this was one hell of a bunch of NVA movi
ng up the track where we had the mortars thrown at us. Forty or fifty men. I panicked. Jesus, I thought, there is just no way out of this. We had to keep moving because in ten minutes they should find our last action. A few might stop there, but the rest would keep after us. These guys looked very sharp. The officer in charge was debriefing his NCOs on the move; they were practically jogging, but very cautiously, and covering a tremendous amount of ground. Our only chance was to get over the hill, down the far side, across the road and river before they spotted us. They were only a couple of miles behind us.

  We sprinted up the hill and tumbled down the far side, gasping and spewing with exhaustion. We reached the river and cut it quickly, but there was no decent cover on the far side, so we had to keep going. We swept southwest of the village of Ban Hap Khouang and headed up a steep slope. We climbed a firebreak to the top of a mountain. We jogged up this thing until our lungs were bursting.

  Prather, Tan, and Wiley were moving like zombies. Wiley stopped to rest, then slumped to his knees. I kicked him and jerked him by his shirt to his feet.

  "You son-of-a-bitch," Prather said. "I'll get you for that."

  "Shut up, Prather, and keep running," I said.

  I had never seen such hatred in men's faces, but if we stopped, we would not move again. I drove thern on. We had been running and fighting for three days; only the mechanical functioning of our bodies kept us moving. At the top of the mountain, we pulled off the firebreak into the trees. The main body of NVA was moving off from our last action toward the north. They were still looking for us toward our original route. They had lost us again.

  We crested the mountain and looked down into a gentle valley, with a trail leading downhill from where we stood. It was tempting to take the trail, but it led toward rugged lowland in the distance. I wanted to get

  as fast as possible into even higher ground, where we could stop and consider our next course of action. We pushed off through heavy brush for two miles, then crossed a stream. We climbed fifteen hundred feet straight up the side of a hill; when we reached the summit, we had a view of the entire countryside. It was well past midnight when we lay down beneath the undergrowth. And faded out.

  CHAPTER 16

  I was the first to come around. It was midday, though whether the next day or the following I did not know. I had lost all track of time. How far were we out of China? Twelve days? Fifteen? Only night and day counted for us now.

  1 looked around, and despair hit my innards like a knife. The others were scattered like dead bodies through the grass. Half had fallen asleep before they could strip their packs off. I was trembling. It took me a moment to realize I was soaked through. We had slept without waking through a heavy rain. I was desperately cold for the first time on the mission, and I was too tired to do anything about it. I sat and stared at the others for a long time. They had nothing more to give.

  I walked out a few yards to a spot where I could observe the countryside. I saw the river we had chosen not to use. I followed its course as it bent south into a wide, inviting valley that led where we wanted to go.

  Ahead I saw a trail that would carry us to the Nam Khan, and I saw the rugged chain of hills that lay between us and the river. We were not far east of the Plain of Jarres. That was violent country that I knew well. I was trying to contemplate our situation, my mind still cloudy with sleep, when Jackson joined me.

  He sat silently beside me while I studied our maps. They were not greatly detailed here, because we were far adrift of our original route, but they showed the lay of the land. Enough for a good soldier to spot the danger points. I was still hoping to get south of Luang Prabang. Somewhere between there and Vientiane we must run into an American unit. I told Jackosn of my intentions.

  "Forget that, Gayle. Looky here."

  The valley behind us, where ten minutes before L had seen nothing, was swarming with Pathet Lao troops. A couple of hundred men were spread out on our side of the river, sweeping toward the base of the mountain we were sitting on. They were within four hours of closing.

  As much as I wanted to think otherwise, they had to be looking for us. The Pathet Lao worked in small guerrilla groups; here they were being used quite openly like regular soldiers, sweeping the valley in a carefully co-ordinated way. Somebody was putting a lot of importance on us. I thought about the units we had wiped out. They may have thought we were a much larger party.

  There was only one way for us to go. East. If we could not get down to the Nam Khan—and I expected it to be obstructed—we would have to cross the mountains. This would take us so far east of our original route that for the first time I thought about finding another entrance into Thailand. I studied the map for twenty minutes. We would go south by southeast to Borikhan, a major communications center just north of the Mekong, then pick up a highway a few miles

  from there and follow it to Muong Poxan on the Mekong. We would steal a boat and paddle to safety in Thailand.

  This meant pushing off into unknown territory, abandoning all c>ur plans, forgetting everything we had been fighting for in recent days. But when I made the suggestion, Jackson accepted it with equanimity.

  "We got no choice anyhow," he said. "We're the target of a search and destroy mission now. That means our high command can pin us on a map. A movement that large," he said, pointing back down the valley, "don't go unnoticed."

  Jackson woke the others. We had a quick council of war and adopted alternatives. We would head for the Nam Khan. If we reached it, we would strike southwest again and try to find an American unit. If the river was obstructed, we would turn east, cross the mountains, then take the Nam Ngiap on to the plains and head for Borikhan.

  We broke camp slowly. We had the privilege of knowing how far our pursuers were behind us and where we were going. We were making for the south side of a forty-eight-hundred-foot peak which would carry us safely past the village of Houay Ket. We had to avoid being seen. Any village in the region would be sympathetic to the Pathet Lao; we knew that by the open way they were using the trails. We were moving into high ground by early evening. Farther east, mountains rolled ever grander into the distance. We felt a certain sense of protection because of the elevation and the open landscape. American units had been operating east and south of here, around Men Kuong. As a last resort, we could head there.

  We reached the Nam Hang and its junction with the Nam Khan before midnight. The Khan was a clean, swift-running river. We found a campsite a short distance from the river and broke for the night.

  There was no urgency now. No deadline. We had no reason to push hard, because we had left our

  pursuers behind. We just had to make it back. We decided to break our pace a little.

  We drank our first good water for days, fresh and clean. It had a fantastic effect on the mind and body. Water suddenly became a very thick and nourishing substance. I drank what seemed like gallons.

  I took off my boots and soaked my feet in the rushing stream. It was like no other luxury. The rest joined me. We stripped off our shirts and waded into the water. We beat our shirts against the boulders and rubbed them with sand, washing out two weeks of accumulated dirt and blood and sweat and scabs. We took turns washing one another's wounds. Our bodies were torn and swollen, and we were gentle.

  Tan and Morrosco speared some river Crustacea with their knives, while Jackson built a small fire in a sheltered area. They returned with their catch, and* Wiley cooked us our first hot meal in days. We knocked together some simple shelters, then sat down to dress our wounds.

  Prather was in far better shape than I had expected. His wound opened constantly as the bandages moved around, and it had been infected. The infection was subsiding now, the swelling going down. Morrosco dressed the wounds carefully with liniment.

  Tan was healing well. The bleeding had stopped days before, though the pain lingered. But Tan bore his pain in silence.

  I was in better shape than I deserved. I had been pretty messed over, because I had been bl
eeding and sweating and fighting the jungle and a blazing sun and going without medicine or enough to eat. But I was doing all right. We all were.

  "Things are not so bad, Kiwi," Wiley said.

  That was the first positive statement from him for days. We were all feeling good about the way things were going. A break like this—we had had extensive rest for two days now—sharpened everyone. We were showing more patience with ourselves and with each

  other. We could think a bit more clearly. We chatted around the campfire, looked after our weapons, re- j distributed the load.

  "Hey," Morrosco remarked, "we're talking in normal t voices."

  It was true. I could count on my fingers the times j we had been able to speak openly. For a month we had almost never exchanged words at an audible level. We had been in hiding, or too exhausted.

  By now we had grown used to the idea that we were forever blown off course. We had two goals: | survive and reach friends. This was what we were trained for. We would go about it very methodically, with far more experience than the people we might run up against. I could see the entire unit regaining its equilibrium simply because we were not being chewed up by fatigue and mental exhaustion. Now was the time for us to call on our endurance. We had that in ^ abundance. Endurance alone had kept me alive before. ;

  i

  It was late in the day. I was walking an old VC i supply trail, abandoned months earlier because of heavy bombing. Cramps hit my bowels like a pitchfork; I had been plagued with dysentery for days. I stepped I into the bush and squatted. As I stood to button my fatigues, twenty VC came around a corner in the trail, pushing bikes loaded with mortars and ammunition. I ducked back down before they saw me, balancing on the balls of my feet. I slid my shotgun up between my legs and primed myself for combat. I kept very} quiet. This is it, I thought. But I was not going out 1 in a blaze of glory if I could help it.

 

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