Phantom Leader Part 5

If you understand, nod your head twice. Nod your head twice. Make no noise when I release you. I am an American.

Nod your head twice."

Toby nodded twice against the cloth, which immediately was pulled away.

He realized he was being cradled in the arms of someone behind him. He felt a sawing motion, then his hands were free. He slowly pulled them in front of himself. The man spoke into his ear again.

"You are doing.just fine, just fine. I am an American. This is a rescue, do you understand?" Toby lay back in the man's arms like a woman encircled by her lover. He nodded his head. He saw absolutely nothing in front of him or over his head.

The man whispered again. "Nod your head twice if you can walk." Toby nodded twice. "Good," the man said.

"Now I am going to give you some water. Take three sips, then hand it back, only three sips." Toby felt a movement, then a plastic water bag was put into his hands. His hands felt numb and thick, and p.r.i.c.kly, as if on fire. He had difficulty, but he managed three sips of the purest water he had ever tasted in his life and handed the bag back.

"Very good, very good. You're doing just fine. Do not talk to me. Now listen to what we are going to do. Do not talk. We want to get you safely away from this camp without waking them up or alerting the guards. We are just here to get you, not to blow them away." The man whispered in Toby's ear very slowly, and with careful enunciation, as if talking to a young child. "Nod twice if you understand."

Toby nodded.

"Very good. Outstanding. You are doing just fine. When I tap your leg, I want you to crawl very slowly, very slowly to your left around the tree. Take ten minutes, take an hour, but go so slow you make no noise. Someone will be there, laying flat. Tap his shoulder three times. He will tap back twice, then reverse himself and start to crawl away. You crawl behind him, holding on to his boot. This will all take time, much time. Pretend you are in a slow-motion movie.

We must make no noise. I think you can do all this, don't you? I'm going to put my ear next to your mouth. Whisper to me what I just told you."

Slowly, as if in mola.s.ses, the man moved his head around Toby and positioned his ear next to Toby's mouth. He smelled faintly of pine or lemon, Toby wasn't sure which.

Then he realized the man's odor was the same as that of some of the plant leaves he had brushed by. The man's head felt greasy. Toby repeated the instructions. The man nodded, then put his lips back in Toby's ear. "If something goes wrong, and the place lights up, one of us will grab you and lead you away. We are all wearing black pajamas and we have camo stick on our faces. There are three of us, all Americans. You seem very sharp. Prepare yourself. You will do just fine. Here is more water. This time slowly take three medium swallows.

There will be plenty more later. Toby realized that the man was rationing him so he would not gulp down the water then throw it right back up.

Toby drank ah G.o.d it was like no water he had ever tasted before-and handed back the bag to the unseen figure. When the man tapped his knee, he moved an inch at a time up from the man's body where he had been lying. Big hands helped push him up. He felt around for his sandals and slipped them into a front pocket, then crawled around the tree. He tapped the shoulder of the figure lying there, waited while he reversed himself, then crawled behind him.

It seemed like an hour before they were at what he estimated to be the camp's perimeter. He heard no noise behind or in front of him. His knees hurt, but feeling was coming back to his hands.

The man he was following stopped and rose to his knees.

Toby could feel steel and webbing on his torso. From behind came a shout in Vietnamese, then a shot. In seconds there were more shots, then the beams of several flashlights waved about the area. More shots sounded, then rippling bursts of a.s.sault rifles. The man in front of Toby turned and gripped Toby's arm like a vise. He spoke in a low, hurried voice.

"Okay, stick with me. We got to make tracks to the rendezvous point.

Grab the back of my harness and hang on."

Toby slipped the sandals on his feet and started after the man, who walked crouched, elbowing his way among the growth, stopping every few minutes to peel back the cover of his fluorescent compa.s.s face and check his heading.

Back at the campsite the shots were scattered and not concentrated. Then an explosion that sounded to Toby like a hand grenade. There was silence for a while, then a huge explosion followed by cries and shouts.

"Hah," said the man Toby followed. "That was Ryder's Claymore. That means he's okay. Just a little while longer and we'll be at the re I ndezvous."

Toby's legs felt rubbery, and sweat was gushing from every pore in his body. His hands and arms had a dull ache, yet he felt totally exhilarated. The adrenaline of relief was flowing and he felt every milligram. They made the rendezvous, a point on a narrow streambed, and waited. There was no jungle canopy directly over the stream. Toby was able to see the bulk of the man by the faint glow of starlight.

"I'm Sergeant Lopez, Captain Parker, from the Special Forces Detachment at Lang Tri."

Toby was startled. "How do you know who I am?"

"You might not have known it at the time, but Hillsboro heard all your transmissions. They triangulated you to your crash site and notified us. Three of us went out in the bush and saw you come down and get captured. Nothing we could do against the patrol in the daylight. We restocked and have been tracking you almost from the beginning. Right now we're barely five klicks from Lang Tri. We'll hole up here for the night and make it to camp at first light."

"How about some more water?" Toby said.

"Sure. Finish it off. You earned it." Lopez handed him the water bag.

Toby drank half, slowly and with great relish, and handed it back. He felt a wave of relief and grat.i.tude, and something else. Hot tears sprang to his eyes. He didn't know why, they just did.

"Better take these," Lopez said, giving Toby some pills.

"They're antimalaria and real stoppers for dysentery.

You're bound to get the trots after what you've been drinking." Toby gulped the pills, took another slug of water, and made himself as comfortable as he could. Then he remembered why he was out there.

"Do you have a map, Sergeant Lopez?"

"Of course. But if you want to see it, we got to get under my poncho before I'll put a flashlight on. What do you want to know?"

"It's not what I want to know. It's what I want to show you. There are PT-76 tanks less than ten klicks from here, and I'll bet they are headed for Lang Tri and Khe Sanh."

"Wait until the other guys get here. I don't want us under a poncho without a guard. Make yourself comfortable. I'll keep an eye out and wake you when they show. Then we gotta make tracks back to camp. Those guys were just waiting to hand you over to a bigger NVA unit that was going to run you up through the DMZ into North Vietnam. There are other big units all over the place. A big push is mounting and we're right in the middle of it."

Toby was keyed up. He had to talk. In quiet whispers he told Lopez the whole story of the tanks, the camera flight with Brackett, and the shootdown. "Yeah," Lopez said.

"We searched the wreckage. We got your pal out," Lopez didn't tell him they just had time to break the burned head loose from the body. There had been no dog tags. They had thrown the head in a body bag and sent it to Da Nang on a resupply helicopter, along with a piece of paper giving the location and type of aircraft in which it had been found.

That was standard practice on jungle-patrol body recoveries behind the lines. Generally there wasn't enough of a body to recover from crashed airplanes, not even the head. But when there was, they took only the head to save time and s.p.a.ce.

The teeth were all that could provide positive identification.

Toby finally wound down. When Lopez handed him a poncho, he rolled up, blinked once, and went out like he had been poleaxed.

Lopez shook him awake at first light, cautioning him to be quiet. Toby sat up. The poncho was wet with dew. Fog was overhead and hung in keep wisps in the trees. Lopez was hunkered down next to him. He was a broad-shouldered man, with a big square face showing generations of Hispanic bloodlines. His dark eyes matched his dark hair. He wore black pajamas and a floppy jungle hat. He carried an AK-47 slung under his right arm. In the early dawn he looked like a giant Viet Cong.

"G.o.d, you look good to me," Toby said with a wide grin.

Lopez grinned back. "Aw, I'll bet you say that to all your rescuers. Do you feel up to a bit of a trek?"

Toby slowly crawled out of the poncho. The swelling in his arms and hands had gone down, but his feet were like two open wounds, bloated and full of pus.

"Got to show you where the tanks are," he said.

Lopez spread out his 1:50,000 map. Toby pointed to XD67253875, a spot barely three kilometers from where the two of them sat.

"There have never been any tanks on the Trail before," Lopez said in a voice just short of total skepticism.

"There are now," Toby answered. "What's all that shooting I've been hearing the last days?"

"Nothing to worry about, just a major attack against the Marines at Khe Sanh," Lopez said.

"Well, h.e.l.l. Isn't Lang Tri just down the road toward Laos from Khe Sanh?"

"Yeah," Lopez said. "But we have it deal with the grunts.

They get attacked, we help them. We get attacked, they help us. If this wasn't a pilot-rescue mission we'd be out scouting the rear ranks of the NVA, seeing what they've got."

Toby nodded and tried to stand up. He sank back with a groan as pain arced up from his feet.

Lopez knelt and examined them, then pulled a medical kit from his pack and went to work. He cut away the dead tissue, lanced swollen parts full of pus, finally sprinkled sulfa powder on the bottoms of Toby's feet and bound them in bandages. Then he took a pair of canvas Bata boots from his pack and, by slicing them just right and using parachute cord, he fashioned a covering for Toby's swollen feet.

"Just before we start out," he said, "I'll give you a LOCAL shot to dull the pain so you can walk. If we hustle we can make the camp before noon." He gave a low, whistling warble. It was answered twice from opposite directions.

"That's Ryder and d.i.c.kson. Ryder's the guy who cut you loose last night. He'll be point. d.i.c.kson will follow up as tail-end Charlie.

Sorry we can't get you out of here by chopper, but first off, we're right in the middle of Indian territory.

Secondly, the weather's gone apes.h.i.t. The clouds are down to the deck and will be for a few days." He pulled a syringe from his pack and gave Toby a shot in each ankle. "You'll have d.a.m.n little feeling. It'll be like walking on two stumps, so watch yourself. You could tear a foot open and never know it." He waited a few minutes for the shots to take effect, then stood up. "So let's make like cowboys and hit the trail."

He gave one more low whistle, then moved into the brush, as silent as smoke. Toby lurched after him and immediately fell as he misjudged his footing. Lopez turned back and helped him to his feet.

"Captain Parker," he said, "you will just have to do better than that or I will personally jam this AK up your a.s.s and pull the trigger on full auto."

1815 HOURS LOCAL, SUNDAY 28 JANUARY 1968.

Room 27, BOQ T12, TAN SON Nhut AIR BASE SAIGON, REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM Major Court Bannister stood at the window of his secondstory BOQ room and stared through the night rain at the lights of the crowded Tan Son Nhut Air Base. He stood 6' 2" and weighed a dehydrated 175, down from his normal 190. His crew-cut brown hair had been bleached blond by the sun. He was dressed in red athletic shorts and a white T-shirt with the faded letters SOS 17 on it. Four days had pa.s.sed since he had awakened in the Udorn hospital. I Outside, the lights hanging from crossbars on poles bathed the streets in a yellow glow. It was early evening, not quite seven on Sunday, and the traffic was still heavy. Jeeps with their tops up and heavy trucks splashed water as they hissed by in both directions. Blue USAF buses carried men to and from wofk. A few bicycles ridden by airmen in ponchos threaded their way along the roads.

Fronting the thoroughfares of the busy air base, all the rows of windows of the two- and three-story camouflaged office buildings were lit up.

Inside, all was a bustle. Logistics, maintenance, administration, intelligence, communications, and operations people were on their usual twenty-four-hour schedule. The fact that it was Sunday meant nothing.

Somebody, somewhere in this war needed something, be it orders or supplies, people or airplanes, boots or bombs.

Bannister absently ma.s.saged his sore ribs as he thought back to a few days earlier, when he had had to get his backseater to help him land his F-4.

He remembered waking up in a hospital bed with an IV bottle hanging from a metal stand next to him, a rubber tube leading to a needle in his left arm. He had slowly focused his eyes on a man who stood at the foot of the bed reading his medical chart. He was a plump man, with a smooth baby face and wisps of blond hair on a balding scalp. He looked remarkably like Baby Huey in the cartoons. He wore a green smock. Court finally recognized his old flight-surgeon friend, Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Russell, M.D.

"In addition to dehydration, a temperature of 102, and a case of mild malaria," Russell had said, "your ribs have not healed properly."

"Did I get my fifth MiGT' Bannister had croaked.

"Not so much as an h.e.l.lo, or a good to see you again do I get," Dr.

Russell had sighed. He and Bannister had been close friends at Bien Hoa Air Base two years earlier, during Bannister's first combat tour. "Lad, I am your friendly flight surgeon, not your wing commander." He thumbed toward the door. "You'll have to ask him. He and a few others are at this very minute hovering outside, anxiously waiting to hear about your condition."

"d.a.m.n, Doc, it is good to see you. When did you get in?

Are you here PCST' He held up a hand.

"Noon. Yes," Doc Russell said in clipped tones, and managed a look of exaggerated indignation. They shook hands.

"Sorry, Doc. I'm kind of fuzzy. What did you say was wrong with me?"

"What it is, you're all poohed out." Doc Russell grinned.

"Next you'll say I need a rest."

"You need a rest."

"Come off it, Doc. You know what I have to do."

"Something about making Ace, I understand. Your backseater told me all about it. Said you're an Ivory Ace. But you've got to forget that for a while. As of immediately you are DNIF until I say you are not."

DNIF, p.r.o.nounced duh-niff, was "Duty Not Involving Flying." Court Bannister was grounded for medical reasons.

"I read your medical records." Doc Russell tapped the folder in his hand. "I see where you were shot down a few months ago and had to E&E for a few days in the wilds of Laos. When you were picked up, you had cracked ribs, a mild concussion, malaria, and dysentery from intestinal parasites. You were back flying in one week. Oh yes, you picked up a few medals at the same time."

Bannister took a deep breath. "Give me just one more flight."

"No. Enn Oh, no. You've got to take care of yourself.

Keep this up and I'll recommend you for permanent DNIF with duty as commissary inventory officer. You never should have been allowed to fly so soon after your shootdown. I know the guy you bamboozled into releasing you. He doesn't know a spatula from a spit stick."

Bannister threw up his hands.

"Watch that IV," Doc Russell warned.

"What do I have to do?"

"Three days' bed rest, lots of fluids and antibiotics, retape your ribs, followed by two weeks' convalescent leave and upper-body-muscle therapy, that's what you have to do.

Then we'll see."

"No flying? Not even in the backseat?"

"Not even in the backseat."

Bannister sighed and lay back. "Dammit. You know, I gave up an attack pa.s.s on a MiG and let my wingman have it. Wish now I'd gone ahead, then I'd have five."

"Why didn't you?" Doc Russell asked.

It just didn't look right. I might have hit an F-105 that was in the way."

"Court, you just answered your own thoughts. It was doubtful, so you didn't do it."

Court gave a bitter laugh. "Maybe I should have tried that one ...

well, h.e.l.l, if it went like my last flight, I'd have missed anyway. I am some snake-bit." He lay back. "Who did you say was outside the door?"