The pagoda was on a square in the middle of the town and as it burned, it created a glowing circle of light in the black of the night. Just beyond the wavering flames the people of the town gathered in a large crowd and stood in the protective cloak of darkness. They watched in fearful silence as Mot’s soldiers methodically destroyed the relics of the pagoda, some of which were more than a thousand years old. Colonel Mot kept glancing cautiously toward the crowd, alert for any possible uprising, but no one showed any sign of resisting.
“Colonel Mot, we cannot find Vu Dinh Due,” one of the officers reported.
“Question some of the villagers,” Mot ordered.
“We have captured three who were attempting to hide a relic. I questioned them but they would say nothing.”
“Bring them to me.”
Mot had been leaning against his Jeep watching both the work of his men and the actions of the crowd that had gathered in the darkness. He walked to the center of the square and stood there, his feet spread apart, his hands on his hips. He looked at the fire and watched a piece of fire-blackened paper tumble crazily as it rode a column of heat and smoke high into the night sky.
“Here are the three,” the young lieutenant said pushing three sullen men in front of him.
Mot looked at them for a moment. Their hands had been tied behind their backs. There were marks on their faces from where they had been beaten.
“Do you know where Vu Dinh Due is?” Mot asked calmly.
“Yes, but we will not turn him over to dogs,” the one in the middle said.
Mot looked at the one who had spoken. He was taller than Mot. His features, combined with the look of pride and determination on his face, were a classic representation of the ideal Vietnamese folk hero. The man was young and handsome and his strength and virility moved Mot to an almost sexual ecstasy. Mot reached up and touched the young man’s face, letting his fingers caress his smooth features.
“You will not tell us?” Mot asked, and his question was delivered in a silken, almost apologetic tone of voice.
“No!” the young man spat. “Never!”
Mot pulled his pistol from his holster and pointed it at the man. He pulled the trigger without saying another word, as the pop of the .45 echoed through the square. The young man pitched backward and fell down dead.
“Will you tell us?” Mot asked the second of the two prisoners. His voice was agonizingly calm.
The second man looked at his dead comrade and then at Mot. His body began to jerk convulsively and his lips trembled but he said nothing.
Mot shot him, then turned his gun on the last of the three.
“I will tell! I will tell!” the third one began yelling. He cried and begged that his life be spared sinking to his knees in supplication.
Mot put his pistol back in the holster and looked at the lieutenant. “I don’t believe you’ll have any trouble now,” he said with an evil grin.
“Thank you, Colonel,” the lieutenant said, grabbing his prisoner roughly.
Colonel Mot wiped his hands with his silk handkerchief again, then returned to his Jeep to watch. A few moments later a group of Mot’s men returned, laughing and yelling obscenities at an old man. They had a rope tied around his neck. The man was around eighty-five, hollow-cheeked and extraordinarily frail. His skin had the texture of parchment and the hair of his beard was as fine as threads of silk. His eyes were downcast but he was not frightened as he stood before Mot.
“Throw him in the truck,” Mot ordered.
Vu Dinh Due was dragged to the last truck in the convoy and thrown on board. Then, his night’s work finished, Mot ordered the convoy back to Saigon.
When Mot returned to his villa, he went straight to his wife’s room, then kicked open the door and turned on the light. Le, suddenly awakened by the noise and the harsh white glare, sat up quickly, pulling a silk sheet to her chin. She didn’t normally share a room with her husband and his entry at any time was a rare occurrence. At this hour, it was unheard of.
Mot looked at Le and the expression on his face frightened her. He held his hands out to her. “I have blood on these hands,” he said excitedly.
Le looked at his hands in confusion. They were clean. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “There is no blood.”
“Smell them,” Mot ordered. He sat on the edge of the bed and thrust his hands beneath Le’s nose.
Le noticed nothing about his hands, but his clothes smelled of smoke.
“What a grand night this has been!” Mot said, his eyes looking just over Le’s head as if he were seeing something in the distance.
Mot turned the palms of his hands up and looked at them. “There was one...a young man. He was beautiful, such well-formed features. And…can you understand? I wanted him…sexually…but not homosexually. I can’t put it into words, but when I killed him I felt as if I had just had a woman. I didn’t come but the sensation was there as if I had.”
Le had never seen Mot like this. It was terrifying. She moved across the bed to get away from him. “What are you talking about?” As Le moved, the sheet dropped down to expose one of her breasts. Mot, seeing this, grabbed the sheet and jerked it back so that Le was totally exposed. He smiled at her.
“Be the young man for me,” he said.
“What?”
“The young man I killed. I told you, I wanted him sexually. You can take his place for me.”
“No,” she said.
“You can’t deny me,” Mot replied. “I’m your husband. You can’t deny me. Pretend I am your American, as I am pretending you are the young man.”
Mot undressed quickly, then grabbed Le and pulled her across the bed to him, mashing his mouth roughly against hers. He squeezed her breasts savagely, raking his hands across her chest, leaving a trail of scratches.
At first Le tried to resist him, but then she correctly reasoned that that was exactly what Mot wanted. So she remained as passive as possible. When Mot forced her down on the bed, she obligingly spread her legs so that his entry would not be brutal.
Mot was lost in his own drive for fulfillment. He was not aware of Le’s reaction. He was insatiable. The only sounds in the room were the slapping of flesh against flesh and Mot’s animal-like moans.
He jerked and thrust against her with a savage fury, finally collapsing across her.
Le stayed beneath him for several moments, fearful that any movement on her part would activate him again. Finally, the raspy breathing in her ear achieved a steady rhythm and she slid out from under him. She looked down at him in total revulsion. He was on his stomach, his mouth was open, and a small string of spittle trickled onto the bed.
Le took a bath, making the water much hotter than she normally would, trying to scald away the unclean feeling. When she was finished she went upstairs to one of the guest rooms. She locked herself inside, then collapsed across the bed and cried until just before dawn, when she fell asleep from exhaustion.
Chapter Twelve
In his apartment over on Le Loi, Ernie was waking up at about the same time Le was falling asleep. It was still dark outside. It was too early even for the dawn people. Ernie would normally have been asleep but the section of Saigon in which he lived was experiencing one of the frequent electrical failures and the fans had stopped.
The heat began collecting in Ernie’s bedroom, enveloping him in its oppressive weight and bathing him in perspiration. With no breeze to keep them away, the mosquitoes began buzzing around him. They were so tiny that they could land, take several bites, then fly away before Ernie was aware of them. Their bites couldn’t be felt, but the anticoagulant toxin they injected was powerful and the irritation and itching of ten to twenty bites was maddening.
Ernie awoke with his nerves raw from the itching. He sought some relief by taking a shower. Then he took a bath in mosquito repellent, using two whole bottles. The repellent had an unpleasant odor and burned his skin but it kept the mosquitoes off.
Ernie tried to go back t
o bed, but there wasn’t a breath of air moving in his room. After a few minutes, he walked out onto the balcony of his third-floor apartment.
There was a slight breeze. Ernie opened a Coke and sat on his balcony naked, taking advantage of what little air there was outside.
By the time he had finished his Coke, the city began waking up, and the morning people had begun their rounds. Ernie watched the birth of the new day. Before the sun rose in Vietnam, the eastern sky was spread with a great palette of color, starting with purple and dark blue, then turning to red, orange, yellow, and finally the silver of day as the sun disk became completely visible.
Ernie looked down on the street and watched an old woman set up her portable sidewalk cafe on the corner of Le Loi and Tu Do. Le Loi, Tu Do, Duong Truoung Tan Buu, Cong Ly, Tru Minh Ky, Thru Ming Gaing—the streets of Saigon were as intimately known to Ernie as the streets of his hometown. In fact, Ernie chuckled to himself, Saigon was now more of a hometown than Jackson, Mississippi. The streets of Jackson—Bailey Avenue, Fortification, Poindexter, Capitol—were only names to him now. Try as he might, he could no longer match vivid images with the individual streets. Ernie left the balcony and dressed for work.
“Did you hear?” Ernie was asked when he reported for work. “The Black Knight broke up the V.C. infrastructure last night. There’s going to be a major operation today that could break the back of the V.C. forever.”
“That’s a pretty bold statement,” Ernie said. “Break their back forever?”
“It’s a joint operation between the ARVN Special Forces and the American forces at Phu Loi.”
“At Phu Loi? Will the Gunslingers be a part of it?”
“I imagine they will, yes. Why? You going to go see your friend?”
“Soon as I can find a way up there,” Ernie replied.
“I thought you might. That’s why I saved you a seat on the press chopper. You better hurry, he’s taking off in about twenty minutes.”
“Gentlemen, the commanding officer,” the adjutant announced and all the officers who had gathered in the mess stood as Todaro entered the room.
Mike looked around at the other Gunslingers. Dobbins was a familiar face, so was Wilson and a couple of others, but there were lots of what the E.M. called F.N.G.s—fuckin’ new guys—mixed in with them assigned to replace those who had been lost during the attack on Widow’s Peak.
Many had yet to fly a combat mission and even the ones Mike called the greenest of the green were being paired with the F.N.G.s to provide some level of experience in every ship.
No longer would Mike have the luxury of flying with Dobbins. Dobbins, though still a W-l, had been in-country for six months and was given his own crew. Mike had to break in a new co-pilot and door gunner. Only Smitty was still with him.
“Gentlemen,” Todaro said, “please be seated.” Chairs scraped as the officers sat again. Most had coffee and cigarettes and they began drinking as they listened to the briefing.
“This is big, fellas, real big,” Todaro said. “Last night, Colonel Mot conducted raids against the very heart of the V.C. These are the people who give the orders and furnish the support for Charley. I’ve been told on very good authority that the raid was extremely successful...Now we’ve got a couple thousand V.C. running around out in the jungle like chickens with their heads cut off. They have no one to lead them, no idea of where to go. We can move in, mop them up, and wipe out the entire nest in one operation. After that the only way the North Vietnamese can continue the war is to bring down their army…and, gentlemen, that they are afraid to do. Why, we could end the war with this one operation.”
“Who are we transporting, Colonel? Americans or ARVNs?”
“The transport assignments have been carefully worked out. The Americans are being taken in by their own lift companies. That means we’ll take in the ARVN Special Forces. Gunslingers?”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Wilson answered.
“You’ll operate in fire teams of four helicopters per team. Team designations: Red, White, and Blue. Put your most experienced men, regardless of rank, in command of the fire teams.”
“Yes, sir,” Wilson replied.
“I’d like to see you and Mr. Carmack as soon as the briefing concludes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mike looked over at Mr. Morris, his co-pilot. Morris, a brand-new W-l, had just graduated from flight school and arrived in-country two days ago. He looked like a kid who got on the wrong school bus one morning and wound up in Nam, instead of Central High.
“Take care of the pre-flight for me, will you; Walt?”
“Yes, sir!” Morris answered eagerly.
Mike winced. “You really don’t have to call me ‘sir,’” he said. “Some second lieutenant might hear that and the next thing you know he’ll be wanting me to say ‘sir’ to him.”
“Okay,” Walt said. “Oh…uh…Mr. Carmack, everyone says I’m lucky to be flying with you.”
“Yeah? Did you ask Albritton?”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Just take care of the pre-flight.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Morris said, hurrying out of the room.
“God,” Mike said to Captain Wilson. “I was never...never...never that eager.”
Wilson chuckled. “I think you were born with a thousand hours,” he said. “Come on, let’s see what Todaro wants.”
“Well, Captain Wilson, Mr. Carmack,” Todaro said a few moments later. “What do you think about the new guys? You think they’re up to it?”
“It’s not the new guys I’m worried about,” Mike said.
“Well, what are you worried about?”
“The pilots we have with the new guys,” Mike said. “Colonel, do you realize that some of our ‘experienced’ pilots have no more than two or three missions under their belts? And they’re flying as plane commanders. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.”
“Perhaps so,” Colonel Todaro replied. “But there’s really nothing we can do about it now, is there?”
“No, sir, I guess not,” Mike said.
“At least we don’t have the guns at Widow’s Peak to worry about,” Colonel Todaro said.
“Why not?”
“Part of the operational orders,” Colonel Todaro said. “I asked the air force to take them out with napalm.”
“Colonel, why the hell didn’t you let them do it in the first place?” Mike asked.
“I’ll not be second-guessed by a goddamned warrant officer!” Colonel Todaro spat. “I did what I thought was right. That’s all anyone can do.”
“Yeah, well, I’d better get out to the flight line,” Mike said.
“Mike?” Colonel Todaro called, and there was a plaintive quality to his voice, the tone of one who was asking for forgiveness, if not understanding.
“Yes, sir?”
“Uh...good luck,” Colonel Todaro said.
“Thanks,” Mike answered.
Ernie stood out on the flight line watching the activity around the helicopters. Ships were being preflighted, guns were being loaded, gear was being thrown aboard. He saw Mike’s helicopter but didn’t recognize the gunner or the young warrant officer who was standing on the transmission deck looking at the rotor head. He started to look somewhere else when he saw Smitty.
“Smitty,” he called. “How are you?”
“Hey, Mr. Chapel, how’s it hangin’?” Smitty called.
“What’s all this?” Ernie asked, taking in the new gunner and young warrant officer.
“Me ’n Mr. Carmack are the only ones left from the old crew,” Smitty said.
“Where’s Dobbins? Albritton?”
“You didn’t hear about Albritton?”
“No.”
“He’s a crispy critter,” Smitty said.
Ernie winced. A “crispy critter” was the macabre term the men used for describing someone who had been killed in a fire.
“I’m sorry,” Ernie said. “I hadn’t heard.”
> “It happened last week,” Smitty said. “Five-oh-one was still on red-X from the Widow’s Peak mission. I was here workin’ on the ship, but Albritton, Mr. Carmack, and Mr. Dobbins took a slick to offload some slopes. One of them got hung up as he was jumpin’ down, and Mr. Carmack, he turned back to let him down when they run right into ground fire. The slick was shot down and Albritton and the dink were killed. No one else was hurt.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Albritton,” Ernie said. “But I’m glad everyone else got out.”
“Yeah, it’s hard enough breakin’ in a new copilot and gunner. I’d hate to have to break in a whole new crew. Oh, here comes Mr. Carmack.” Ernie walked out to greet Mike who smiled and returned his greeting.
“I hear you’re going to end the war today,” Ernie said.
“That’s the poop from group,” Mike said. “You want to go along?”
“You don’t mind?”
Mike looked at the new door gunner and copilot, then laughed. “Hell, no, I’d welcome the experience,” he said. “Get a brain bucket and get on board.”
“Mr. Carmack, the transponder’s out,” Morris said.
Mike looked at Smitty. “What happened to the transponder?”
“Avionics took it when we were down,” Smitty said. “They never replaced it.”
“I want it back. If you have to make a midnight requisition, I want it back.”
“Yes, sir,” Smitty said, smiling broadly. “I was kinda hopin’ you’d feel that way.”
“Thanks for letting me go,” Ernie said.
“Yeah, well, I can’t promise you any action today,” Mike said. “Captain Wilson just told me he wants me to keep my fire team on standby. We’ll just orbit the area and observe, unless we’re specifically needed.”
“You won’t get any complaints from me,” Ernie said. “This way I’ll have a good ringside seat for the action without having to get involved.”
Half an hour later, Mike and the three other helicopters of Blue team were orbiting over the area of operations with little probability of getting involved. Gunships from Gunslinger had raced back and forth pouring fire into the treelines around the little village but no one was reporting any return fire. When the slicks landed and the troops jumped off, not one round was reported. If they really were in the middle of a couple of thousand V.C., the V.C. were strangely quiet.
Dateline: Viet Nam: A Military Thriller Double Page 10