The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  I went to take a look. They were all American weapons—M-ls and M-3s and Armalites. I began to get very nervous. Tan questioned the head man about how the weapons came to be there, and the man avoided answering by breaking into broken English, saying Americans here, Americans here. Tan was getting this look in his eye; he could recognize deceit in an Oriental far better than the rest of us. I palled Prather and Morrosco back to me, and Jackson joined us from where he had gone to try his luck with the radio. It was whistling and carrying on, but it would not lock onto a frequency. It was a normal backpack

  radio with a phone clip on the back. And the phone clip was missing. I began to think that it had been stored in parts; we had the body; the rest was hidden. We kept questioning the head man, but we could not get a straight answer. We had to look for the rest of it. This radio was our biggest break on the entire mission.

  We tore the hut apart, but we could find nothing. The head man kept shrugging his shoulders, as if he did not know what we were looking for. We had been in the village half an hour now, and I was growing more anxious by the minute. I sent Wiley and Morrosco to the river to keep watch.

  I interrogated the head man through Tan, and I got the impression he was trying to string it out, to keep us there as long as possible. I had him order some village men to bring up the weapons we h^d found. Then I changed my mind. I took the radio and the head man down to where the weapons were lying. The man started betraying a strange apprehension.

  There were twenty or thirty weapons scattered everywhere with ammunition mixed among them. We sorted out what we needed. Jackson took an M-3, so that he could carry more clips without having to strap them to his bad leg. The rest of us took new Armalites. Wiley and Prather came running up, shouting that they had seen activity in the river. I told Wiley to arm himself and keep the villagers under close observation. The people had brought food out by now, but we ignored every friendly overture. I went to the river.

  We saw a large force moving in our direction, too far away to be identified positively, but they were moving in a military column. I heard a commotion from the village. I took a mental picture of how far away these people were, then ran back.

  Wiley was standing over a man he had killed. Prather and Tan were up on the veranda, their weapons trained on the villagers.

  "What happened?"

  "That woman over there is wearing a fatigue shirt with a Green Beret flash on the shoulder. I went over to take a look at the shirt. Something funny was happening, so I ducked in this building. This guy was inside, wounded. He was trying to rest a rifle on the window ledge."

  "For God's sake, did you have to kill him?"

  "He needed killing."

  I was sick. The guy could have told us what was going on. But that was the frame of mind Wiley was in. If we were going to learn anything now, it had to come from the head man.

  Tan dragged him down to where I was standing. I hit him in the mouth with my fist, then Tan questioned him about the man Wiley had killed. Tan was in midsentence when he broke off and walked over to the dead man.

  "This is a fucking Cambo," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "This is a fucking Cambo," he repeated. "A goddamn Cambodian mercenary."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because he looks like a Cambodian, that's how I know."

  He was dressed as a peasant, but he must have been a mercenary, because no other Cambodian would be that far north. He was armed with an American carbine. It all started to fit into place. This village had been used by Americans who were now probably buried in the bush.

  We took the head man and the four villagers who had brought us in and lined them up against a dwelling. We gathered food and some clean clothing to make bandages. I gave the head man one last chance to explain. He kept saying Americans here. Then Wiley found more American uniforms in another hut.

  I lost my patience. I knocked the head man down. I pulled him to his feet by the shirt. His shirt tail flew up, and I saw the mouthpiece from the radio tied around his waist. I yanked it off and stared at it

  - .

  in my hand. The head man realized the game was up. And he started to smile.

  Wiley and Prather ran through the village but found nothing more. We herded the villagers together in the clearing. Jackson stood on the veranda covering them with his M-3. He was very nervous. He looked ready to shoot them down.

  I knocked down the head man. I wrapped the mouthpiece cord around his neck and jerked him upright. Without taking my eyes off the head man, I yelled to Tan to tell him he had his one last chance to explain what was going on. I knew by the courage and substance of his resistance so far that I was dealing with a dedicated communist. He had an ideal to back him up. He was leading a village that had turned over, or had never been what the Americans thought it was. Now they had wiped out an American unit. I was filled with loathing.

  Holding him by the cord around his neck, I pressed the head man back against the veranda steps. Tan shouted at him to tell us what we wanted to know. The man's smiling demeanor broke and he began to scream. And he did not scream exactly what I wanted to hear. Tan translated for us.

  "Communist troops are on their way here now. We'll be dead in an hour. If we kill him, we only make our own deaths that much worse."

  I heard the word "Cambodian" more than once; there were Cambodians in the area. But the man kept breaking into English with this strange "Americans here" business. It made no sense. He had this cunning way of looking at us, as if we were bandits in the final hour of our existence.

  I kicked him in the groin. As he went down, I held up his head by the cord and pulled it as hard as I could between my hands. I killed him.

  Weapons were breeched all around me. I told Tan to forget about the headphone. We had to get out of there. I sent Jackson and Prather toward the river where the party was advancing on us.

  "Shoot those four guys," I said to Tan, pointing to the peasants who had brought us in. "Lob a couple of grenades into the hut where the weapons are."

  Then I changed my mind. I made the four peasants carry the head-man's body into the hut with the weapons. We lobbed grenades in behind them. The building erupted. One man was thrown through the wall. Both his legs were missing, but he was alive. Tan shot him.

  Jackson stitched the ground very near the villagers. His eyes were darting wildly. He wanted them to break out, so he could shoot them down. I wanted it as well. He let off a second burst closer than the first. Several people went down, hit on the ricochet. They were screaming everywhere. I told him to knock it off. He and I backed out of the village.

  The men below had heard the explosions and were coming on the double. We stayed above the river so we could see anyone tracking us in it. We raced southeast all day toward Highway 23, which we intended to cross where the river passed beneath it. Getting on the far side of the highway and clear of this last village was both a psychological and geographical goal to aim for.

  Late in the afternoon, we were moving quickly through heavy bush. I was at point, Prather at my elbow, the others almost within reach behind us. I ducked a thick vine, then Prather chopped it aside with his machete. The vine flew skyward with a whooshing sound. I thought someone was coming down on top of me. Instinctively I fell to the ground and flattened myself. Behind me I heard a crunch, then bodies being flung about. A flock of wooden darts went whistling over me at waist level. The rushing of wood through wind and leaves ended as quickly as it had begun. Cautiously I raised my head.

  The others were tangled like a pile of dominoes. They began to unwind, until everyone but Morrosco was sitting up.

  "What happened?"

  "Morrosco caught the bow in the middle of the back. He knocked us all down. Hitting him flung the spears out prematurely."

  "How is he?"

  "Out like Lottie's eye," replied Jackson.

  Chopping the vine had triggered the simplest of booby traps, a tree limb bent backward with a cup on the end full
of what looked like giant toothpicks. The darts were about eight inches long and thicker than a propelling pencil. They would go through a man's body like an arrow. The trigger was in the direct flight path of the darts. When the limb struck Morrosco at the end of the line, the darts were flung out as if it had been at full arc. Morrosco had knocked the others out of the way, and I had been saved only because the arc had allowed me time to go to ground. A man could diagnose these pieces of luck until he went mad. It had not killed us, and that was that.

  This booby trap almost cracked us. It was the simplest thing in the world, a typical Cambodian cum Viet Cong device laid in the predicted path of any unit moving in the area. But this one was brand-new and well prepared. It must have been laid for us. No one spoke for a long while.

  We could not stop to bring Morrosco around. We grabbed him up and kept moving. He came around when we went into the river and dragged him through the water. The branch had gone up his back before slamming into his head. He was semiconscious and had to be carried for two hours. We crossed under the highway and went into high ground east of there, where we rested.

  We were exhausted. Carrying Morrosco and watching for booby traps had been an almost unbearable strain. While we stopped, Tan worked on the radio. He could still not get any sense out of it because he could not tune out the static. He reconstructed the mouthpiece in a bush way. The head man had ripped

  it out, and the pin plugs were missing, but Tan broke into the radio and twisted wires together, and he got life out of the microphone.

  I was only half aware of what Tan was doing, because I was thinking about the ever-increasing intensity of action over recent days. I no longer discounted the wildest theories about our predicament. I grew convinced we had been dangled on a string, and now the puppeteers were closing in on us. There had been a lull when we struck east because we had caught someone unprepared; they—whoever they were—expected us to hang on to the myth of a Mekong crossing. But that had been denied us so many times we had reached a point where we needed a new goal. A different way of thinking.

  "Does anybody know Ban Houaysan?"

  "The old air base?" Jackson asked. "I worked out of there several times before they closed it."

  "It's within four or five miles of the South Vietnamese border," I explained to the others. "It's a perfect place for us to be picked up. If we can get the radio working. Just moving that way, we have a good chance of running into someone. If we can't get picked up, we can cross the border, push on into South Vietnam."

  Tan was not getting any joy out of the radio by scanning the band without fine tuning. A couple of times we thought we picked up American units conversing, but the static was so heavy, we could not be sure.

  "Stick it on the Mode H emergency band," I told him, "and broadcast blind."

  Tan began fiddling with the dials.

  "Yeah, do that," said Jackson. "There must be somebody left in Indochina who don't know where we are. We got the Pathet Lao on our ass. And the VC and the NVA. We got the Cambos coming north. And maybe our people. The last time the phone rang, it wasn't exactly good news. Why don't we think about this a minute?"

  "If we're not going to use the radio, we might as well leave it here," said Tan.

  "Let's be sure we use it to help us then," said Morrosco.

  "Let's go to high ground, where we're protected, and get better transmission," I said. "We put out a code three, special forces emergency call. We don't say who we are. Only that we need help, we're east of Ban Houaysan and on our way there. We'll take a look at the next hamlet, try to figure out what it is, and transmit that we are east of there."

  "Are you really afraid to say who we are?"

  "Yeah."

  "You think we have been eyeballed for elimination?"

  "Is there anybody here who doesn't?"

  "Do you think they dare use direct action against us?"

  "Depends on who's behind it. If the decision to send us in the first place came from below high command, it will be done indirectly. This whole bloody nonsense could have been started by a colonel. Some maniac wondering how well we'd do. If that's the case, he must be pretty bloody surprised by now. He never expected to see us back knocking at his door. Well, he can't very well call in the B-52s on us without a lot of explaining. So he'd have to hire Cambos or something like that. Maybe this lunacy did start at the top. Either way, our embarrassment factor supersedes our importance. They don't want us home."

  "Yeah, well they can forget about that," Morrosco said. "Because we're going back. There's no stopping us."

  Our morale was very good in one sense; we had become, not survival-happy, but success-happy. If anyone were ever to survive a mission like this, we were the people. We felt as if we could go on getting away with things as long as we were a unit. Ended as a unit. We saw ourselves as the supreme test of man's ability to survive. And we were up to it

  Our loyalties to external forces had been shredded beyond repair. As soldiers ... as Americans . . . Koreans . . . Australians ... we were finished. We were flagless people now, which was an almost unimaginable reversal for someone like Tan, who had been the proudest Korean in Southeast Asia. Or Jackson, a soldier's soldier. Or Prather, whose loyalty to Britain had been beyond question. He swore he would expose the thing if we got back. If they knew us as well as they should have, they knew Prather would come to that conclusion sometime. Which was the same as Prather signing his death warrant. To a certain extent, we were all being judged by Prattler's frame of mind. By someone who knew we were alive. I was certain we were not meant to return.

  We moved out toward a populated area where we knew RFI units had operated. If we did not find any, we had agreed to keep moving until we reached South Vietnam. We had decided to expose ourselves to any allied troops we met and face the consequences.

  A strange, subdued atmosphere came over the unit. None of us expected to make it, though we would never give up trying. But the other thing did not worry us any longer. Hell, you can only go on fighting for your life for so long.

  We followed a river, then left it for high ground above the village of Ban Maloua to break the ice and try to make radio contact. There must be allied units somewhere about that would pick up our distress call. We ducked a well-armed VC patrol and kept climbing. We were within striking distance of highways 9 and 91, so our hopes of finding someone were not unrealistic. Tan set up the radio and switched it on.

  "Code three," he said, "code three. Do you read? Over."

  A voice responded.

  CHAPTER 22

  It was garbled. It was unintelligible. But somebody was responding to our calls. We all let out a shout. Tan continued transmitting, and every time he stopped, we were getting reception.

  "Mention Highway Nine," I prompted him. "Tell them we'll move along it toward Ban Maloua."

  Tan transmitted for ten minutes. The replies kept coming back indecipherable. Little by little deflation set in. I grew irritated, then enraged with frustration.

  "Fuck it," I said. "Say the lot. Tell them we've been to China. And if they don't want to hear that, they can come and pick us up."

  "Code three. China mission. Fingers Five. Five Fingers. Repeat. Code three China mission. Fingers Five. Five Fingers ..."

  Somebody must have been living through a nightmare somewhere, but I did not give a fuck. At least people knew we were still alive and intended to stay that way. If they wanted to shut us up, let them come and get us.

  We broadcast for another quarter of an hour, then headed out for Highway 9. We felt better. The radio was working, and we had been answered. It was so fuzzy with static, it could have been our imagination. Or we could have been listening to two other units converse. But I did not believe that.

  Our route brought us to Ban Maloua before we reached the highway. It was dark by now, and the tiny hamlet was quiet. We ran across no dogs. Nor chickens, which was even worse. We were all walking now. Jackson required even less help than I did. We were tired and h
ungry. I considered stealing food. In the end, we decided to take the place for a short while; that was always safer. Jackson and Prather went to the far side. Tan stayed with me. We crawled in under the houses, and the other two went to wake the villagers. I watched them mount the veranda of one of the huts on the far side of the clearing. They began shouting. There was the usual commotion: people rushing out to see what was happening, then dashing, frightened, back inside. Tan and I were making ready to surface when I realized there had been no reaction from the building above us. I had heard people awakening, but no one had rushed out, no woman had stifled a scream, no child had whimpered. I put my arm on Tan's shoulder and listened. We heard boots scuffling. Metallic sounds. Slow and deliberate movement. I signaled to Tan that I was going under the next building. I heard the same there.

  Wiley and Morrosco jumped off the veranda down to the ground. They were waiting for a call to action, and none of us had surfaced. They were momentarily confused, then realized what it meant. Wiley ran under the veranda, and Morrosco dashed beneath the next building. Tan rolled over and joined me. The buildings opposite were now full of hysterical peasants, the buildings above us occupied by people quietly shuffling about.

  I rolled out from under the building one way, Tan the other. I threw a grenade through the veranda

  window. It exploded with a tremendous roar and engulfed the dry thatch in flames. A band of VC came bursting out of the second building, and Tan shot two dead, then heaved grenades in behind them. That building too went up in flames. Burning bodies threw themselves through the walls, and Tan and I shot them down as they came. Morrosco and Wiley leapt up and ran together to back us up. There was a flash behind them. My face was hit by the roar of a concussion grenade. Morrosco and Wiley were snatched up by an invisible hand and thrown in our direction, their limbs flying like marionettes as they hurled through the air. They hit the ground, rolled, and stopped. Neither gave a sign of life.