Time to Hunt Part 14

"Yeah. How the h.e.l.l did you see them?"

"The point man's canteen jingled against his bayonet. I heard it, that's all. Luck, man; it's better to be lucky than good."

"Who were they?"

"That's flank security from a main force battalion. That means we're getting close. They put out security teams when they move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the Number Three Battalion. I don't know what regiment or nothing, but I think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division. Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after after tomorrow." tomorrow."

"Is this some big offensive?"

"There's several newly Vietnamized units there; it'd do 'em a lot of good to kick all that ARVN a.s.s."

"Great. I wonder what they were saying."

"The first one says, Man, it's raining like s.h.i.t s.h.i.t, and his buddy says, Ain't no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back, Hey, you guys, shut up and keep moving."

"You speak Vietnamese?" Donny said in wonderment.

"Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let's get out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow. We kick b.u.t.t and take names. You bet on it, Marine."

CHAPTER E ELEVEN.

FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were pounding the s.h.i.t out of them so that he couldn't maneuver, and that main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he'd sent out Matthews with a four-man a.s.sault unit to take out the mortars and Matthews hadn't come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way back to Korea, had done everything-gone!

The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller's angry, angry brain.

This wasn't supposed to be happening. G.o.dd.a.m.n them, this wasn't supposed to be happening.

Kham Duc was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn't even bother with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he was up against hundreds, maybe thousands. And where the h.e.l.l had this weather come from and how fast could this big-a.s.s, tough-as-s.h.i.t battalion get down here?

Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us.

Puller's antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th Infantry Division, Fifth People's Shock Army. Puller had seen his picture, knew his resume: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo-French family and even a graduate of the ecole Militaire in Paris before deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of the Diem regime, he had become one of their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.

A mortar sh.e.l.l fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters of the command post.

"Anybody hit?" he called.

"No, sir," came his sergeant's reply. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds missed."

"Any word from Matthews?"

"No, sir."

Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action in Malaysia. He'd been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger, Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG. This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965 for more than a month, under serious bombardment. He'd been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which would kill most men.

He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the tactics of the old.

But what he hated most of all was that he had f.u.c.ked up. He had really really f.u.c.ked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his indigs that the NVA couldn't get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was happening to him. And n.o.body could save his a.s.s. f.u.c.ked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his indigs that the NVA couldn't get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was happening to him. And n.o.body could save his a.s.s.

The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still boiled from the ground, rising to mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a shambles as were most of the squad hootches, but a unit of VC sappers that had gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn't get hung up in the s.h.i.t as they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of crew-served weapons.

Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They'd move at night, but probably not attack. At least not in force: they'd send probers, draw fire, try and get Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets, but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No. 3 Battalion.

Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they'd try like h.e.l.l, and if they could get birds up, they'd get 'em up. But maybe the pilots were reluctant: who'd want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few more d.i.n.ks when the war was so close to being over? Who'd want to die now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the futility? He didn't know the answer to that one himself.

Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine, knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.

"Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick."

It was Sergeant Blas, one of his master sergeants who worked with the Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too many tours and also didn't deserve to get caught in a s.h.i.t hole like FOB Arizona so late in a lost and fruitless war.

Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter, crouching now and then when a new mortar sh.e.l.l came whistling their way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.

Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but at last a.s.sembled itself into a pattern and then some details.

It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews's head.

Three quicks and one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.

He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier's life: 1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People's Revolution.2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.5) Carry out other missions of the Army.6) Help consolidate internal unity.8) Preserve and save public properties.9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.

All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Duc, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before doc.u.ments were signed.

Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.

Slow plan.

Quick advance.

Strong fight.

Strong a.s.sault.

Strong pursuit.

Quick clearance.

Quick withdrawal.

He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.

Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under a.s.sault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.

The column moved in the cla.s.sical structure of an army on the quick, derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history since Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the world on that principle.

So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men units per flank; he had his second best people, also sappers, at the point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.

Fortunately, it was cool; the rain was no impediment. The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited because the weather was holding; low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white phosphorous. That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It meant nothing to them to burn his people like gra.s.shoppers plaguing a harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears nothing.

Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old. Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris: the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire; it was there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the French have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under the eye of G.o.d? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright Indochinese like himself from their yellowness?

But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had I known how hard it would be?

Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could understand no other way; he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and rescue them with their mighty airpower.

Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic G.o.d from them, moved south and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the G.o.dless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult's leader, Ba Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by Indochinese. It sickened him.

Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and beautiful women; it was a city of corruption, of prost.i.tutes, gambling, crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk, perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them as a vessel for carrying G.o.d's will. But his father never saw the politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants, the remove from the people.

Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems' corruption had begun to resemble that of a city destroyed in the Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution upon itself, as it had.

He was a humble private in the People's Revolutionary Army, he who had sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondis.e.m.e.nt; he, a major in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.

He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly, though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years, and his pa.s.sage in the west and in the south, after six months' strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to follow.

Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could stop him.

CHAPTER T TWELVE.

In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pa.s.s, a slant outside, and as he broke downfield all the blockers. .h.i.t their men perfectly, and the defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him. His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them, jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper G.o.d, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.

It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness that he was not there but here.

"Huh?"

"Time to work, Pork."

Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain, and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off making his arcane preps.

The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the valley.

In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light: vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn't at present raining, surely it would rain soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture. Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.

"Come on," whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn's ear.

Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above the An Loc Valley, near Kham Duc and Laos. It would be another wet day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.

"We got to get lower," said Bob. "I can't hit nothing from up here."

The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel, truing up the bolt to the chamber, gla.s.s-bedding the action to the wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.

Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive; he seemed a creature sprung from someone's worst dreams, some kind of atavistic war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to nothing.

"Here. Paint up and we'll get going," he said, holding the stick of camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.

It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels returning to earth. The fog would not break; it clung to the floor of the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it away, not today at any rate.

Now and then some jungle bird would call, now and then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye. Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly, frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high gra.s.s, in the center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or elephants or whatever.

From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny couldn't identify it and then he could; it was the noise of men, somehow-nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline-somehow become a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of quick march to the staging area for their a.s.sault.

Bob halted him with a hand.

"Okay," he said. "Here's how we do it. You got the map coords?"

Donny did; he had memorized them.

"Grid square Whiskey-Delta 51201802."

"Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you'll have line of sight to them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk 'em in. They won't have good visuals. You talk 'em down into the valley and have 'em plaster the floor."

"What about you? You'll be-"

"Don't you worry about that. No squid Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen up: that is your G.o.dd.a.m.n job. You talk to 'em on the horn. You're the eyes. Don't you be coming down after me, you got that? You may hear fighting, you may hear small arms; don't you fret a bit. That's my job. Yours is to stay up here and talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you're coming in, pop smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it's you and not some NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys up for a bit."

"What about security? I'm security. My job is to help you, to cover your a.s.s. What the h.e.l.l good am I going to do parked up here?"

"Listen, Pork, I'll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then I'll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they'll bring heavy s.h.i.t down. I'll try and do two, three, maybe four more from there. Here's how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain't moving back, I'm moving forward. That's why I want you right here. I'll never be too far from this area. I don't want 'em to know how many guys I am, and they'll flank me, and I don't want 'em coming around on me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit them. They may be right close to you; that's all right. You dig in and sink into the ground, and you'll be all right. Just watch out for the patrols I know they'll call in. Them boys we saw last night. They'll be back, that I guarantee."

"You will get killed. You will get killed, I'm telling you, you cannot-"

"I'm giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don't give me no little-boy s.h.i.t. I'm telling you what you have to do, and by G.o.d, you will do it, and that's all there is to it, or I will be one p.i.s.sed-off motherf.u.c.ker, Lance Corporal Fenn."

"I-"

"You do it! G.o.ddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that's all there is to it. Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you'll go to Portsmouth."

This was bulls.h.i.t, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It was all bulls.h.i.t, because if Swagger went into the valley without security, he was not coming back. He simply was not. That's what the physics of firepower decreed, and the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no appeal.

He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he'd never see. He knew it, had known it all along.

It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so inside him he knew he could not live without it; there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his fate, not dodge it.

"Jesus, Bob-"

"You got it square?"