Shadows of War

by Larry Bond

  Jing Yo stared at him for a moment before speaking. The captain was well fed, his belly hanging over his belt.

  “I am Lieutenant Jing Yo with the Special Squad. We are looking for an enemy aircraft that has been shot down. It is a crucial mission. You will help us.”

  “You are a lieutenant?”

  “I’m with the Special Squad,” repeated Jing Yo. “The commandos.” He took out his satellite phone, in effect dismissing the captain.

  “I don’t care if you are with the premier’s bodyguard,” shouted Captain Wi Lai. “You are a lieutenant. I am a captain. I have an entire company to care for. The rest of my men—”

  “If you care to take it up with my superior, I will let you talk to him when we are done,” said Jing Yo.

  Sun’s communications aide answered the call. There had been no new information on the aircraft; two gunners swore they had seen it crash exactly one kilometer from where Jing Yo was calling from.

  A jet boomed in the distance. The air force was closing in. Sun would not be happy if they got there soon enough to somehow take credit for shooting down the plane.

  He glanced up and saw the regular army captain glaring at him.

  “I have a captain who wishes to talk to Colonel Sun,” Jing Yo told the aide. “I borrowed one of his platoons and two vehicles. They will be useful in the search.”

  Captain Wi Lai grabbed the phone and began angrily demanding to speak to the colonel, complaining that he needed to keep his company intact. He was cut off in midsentence. Jing Yo heard the aide tell him that for the duration of the operation, Lieutenant Jing Yo was in charge and authorized to use his squad as he saw fit.

  Still not satisfied—and apparently not smart enough to keep his mouth shut—the captain began to bluster again, demanding to know whom he was speaking to.

  “Sergeant Lanna,” came the reply. And then Lanna hung up.

  “Lieutenants giving captains orders? Sergeants approving it? The army has gone crazy.”

  Jing Yo took the phone from the captain.

  “It will not be painful for you, Captain. If your squad does good work, you will certainly be rewarded. Best to accept reality.”

  Jing Yo began walking up the streambed. It was not the first time he had seen a regular army officer confront the realities of army politics and the commandos’ place in the unwritten order of battle, but usually such confrontations were not as satisfying as this one.

  Josh leaned on the fallen tree trunk, watching as the trucks continued to pass. He had kept count in the beginning, more in amazement than with a purpose. He’d never seen battle tanks before, and was amazed not only by how many there were, but at how fast they were able to drive on the road.

  He stopped counting when he reached thirty. The tanks gave way to troop and supply trucks, then were replaced by more tanks. He estimated that at least 150 vehicles had gone down the highway in the past half hour, and the procession didn’t seem likely to end anytime soon.

  The vehicles had characters and small red stars on their sides; some had Chinese flags. The Chinese were invading Vietnam.

  This is what a war looks like, Josh told himself. No big set-piece battles, no arrows on a map, no roving video cameras and super-serious television announcers—just vehicles rushing by, machine guns in the distance, soldiers chasing you through the woods.

  The Chinese were invading Vietnam. It was the start of World War III. And he had a ringside seat.

  4

  Northern Vietnam

  Mara grabbed the plane’s yoke, trying to help Kieu pull back to climb.

  Except that’s not what he wanted to do.

  “No, we’re diving. Push,” Kieu told her. “We get low. His radar will not be able to see us. Low.”

  Mara leaned forward, going with him. The airplane zipped downward, a direction it seemed enthusiastic about trying.

  “Look for the airstrip,” Kieu said. “It should be close. Or another place to land.”

  As Mara raised her head, a swarm of bees flew in front of the windscreen, moving so close together that they looked like inky water coming from a hose. They flashed red as they passed; only then did she realized she was looking at cannon fire.

  Her head began to float as Kieu dipped the plane hard onto its right wing.

  “Hold on, hold on!” yelled the pilot.

  The aircraft began to buck. Mara thought they’d been hit. She started trying to think of the best way to hold her body when they crashed.

  “Where’s that field?” Kieu yelled. “I can’t see it!”

  Mara pushed up in her seat. The ground was a blur filling the right side of her window. The left side of the window was blue.

  “Steer the plane!” she said.

  “I have the plane. I need a place to land.”

  There was a hole in the trees in the right corner of the window.

  “There—try there,” yelled Mara, pointing to it.

  The plane dropped nearly straight down for a few seconds, then leveled off. She struggled to relocate it, finally spotting it much farther to the left.

  The hole was black—a pond, not a field.

  “It’s water,” she told him.

  “It’ll have to do,” said Kieu.

  He let the nose slip down again, then pulled up so abruptly that the plane seemed to stutter in the air. Mara took the hand grip with both hands, straining once more to see the terrain. A shadow passed across the trees on the left, cast by the MiG that was pursuing them.

  “I think there’s a village—wait—can you turn right? Turn right!”

  Once more, the plane pitched on its wing. This time, Kieu misjudged either the maneuver or his ability to hold it; the wing spun around and the plane went into an invert, twirling upside down. It began in slow motion, then sped as the yaw turned into something dangerously close to a spin.

  By now they were barely a thousand feet above the ground, and Kieu had almost no room to recover. The biplane slid sideways through the air, a hockey puck gliding on ice. As it came over through the invert, Kieu managed to get it level.

  Mara, her brain scrambled, threw her hand out against the windscreen.

  And there was the field, right next to her thumb.

  “The field is there on the right,” she told Kieu. “Get us there.”

  “Okay, Okay. Hold on,” the pilot said, though he didn’t alter course.

  Either thinking the biplane was going to crash or simply not realizing that Kieu would try to land, the pilot in the MiG pursuing them took a lazy turn above.

  “Hold on!” yelled Kieu once more, and then he pushed the nose forward, setting up for his landing. But almost immediately he began to curse. The stick pulled and jerked, as if trying to wrestle itself out of his hands. Mara closed her eyes for a second, then decided she didn’t want to go out that way, if that’s what was going to happen. She bolted upright, facing reality with eyes wide open.

  The ground, now mere yards away, was coming at them a lot faster than she had thought possible.

  The biplane vibrated madly even before its wheels hit the ground. The first touch sent it bolting back upward. Kieu settled her down, holding the aircraft in a straight line as it ran down the old landing strip. He jammed the brakes. Dust flew everywhere. Pebbles and little rocks spit up so violently against the fuselage that Mara was sure they were being fired at from the air. But the MiG was moving too fast to get a shot in, and passed harmlessly overhead as Kieu finally got the plane to stop about three-quarters of the way down the field.

  “I knew you could do it,” Mara said.

  “Out! We have to get out!” yelled Kieu. He undid his seat restraints and leapt up, running through the cabin to the door.

  Mara followed. Kieu waited by the door; when he saw her, he threw the lever and pushed it open.

  “Go!” he yelled, pushing her ahead of him.

  Mara jumped to the ground. The MiG was starting a run above.

  “The trees!” she shouted at him, then bolt
ed forward, running on a diagonal toward the ditch at the end of the field about fifty meters away.

  The Chinese fighter began to fire its cannon just as they got there. The 23 mm slugs hit the ground with a thick thud, chewing up the hard-packed dirt like a road cutter drumming through asphalt. Mara jumped on her rump and slid down into the ditch, huddling against the side as Kieu came down facefirst.

  The MiG flashed by.

  Mara help Kieu get to his feet.

  “What did you do to my plane?” he said. “Why are they shooting at me?”

  “I didn’t do anything. It’s the Chinese.”

  “Look at my plane!” A look of shock come to Kieu’s face. He seemed a different man. “I have to save it.”

  He started toward the airplane before Mara could grab him. She scrambled up the slope, chasing after him as the MiG began another run. Mara lunged just as the Chinese fighter began to fire, catching Kieu by the back of his legs in an open-field tackle that would have done an NFL free safety proud.

  The air above them seemed to break in two: one of the tracers had found the biplane’s fuel tank, igniting the remaining fuel and vapors. The burst sent a fireball ricocheting upward from the plane, propelling the nose forward as shrapnel flew through the air.

  “We have to get out of here,” said Mara, getting to her feet and dragging Kieu backward to the ditch.

  Blood seeped across the back of his shirt. He began to moan.

  Mara reached the ditch, slid down, then tried to hoist Kieu onto her back so she could carry him into the jungle, where they’d be less of a target. But though Kieu was shorter and lighter than most men, and Mara was bigger and stronger than most women, she couldn’t get enough leverage to hoist him; she had to duck down and practically wrap him around her upper body before she had a good enough grip to move.

  By then, the MiG had banked again. Mara felt the ground start to shake. She ran for a few more yards, then felt Kieu starting to slip. She tried to keep him on her back by going down to her knees, but she stumbled. Her right arm scraped hard against the rocks as she sprawled forward, but she still managed to keep the pilot on top of her.

  The MiG passed, rising nearly straight up as it went. Mara pushed back to her feet and staggered a few yards, gaining momentum. The ditch opened into a shallow field on her left; Mara picked up speed as she ran through it, finally reaching the trees and safety.

  She let Kieu down off her back slowly. He collapsed like a half-filled sack of potatoes.

  “Don’t fuckin’ die on me,” she said, clawing at the back of his shirt to check his wounds.

  Blood oozed from two spots. One was below his left shoulder, where it seemed to be just easing out, almost by osmosis. The other pulsed in a small rivulet on the left side of his neck.

  Mara ripped his shirt off and wadded it against his neck, pushing as hard as she could.

  “Come on, come on,” she told him. “Stop bleeding.”

  Kieu groaned. She took that as a good sign. But when she tried slipping the shirt away a short time later, blood quickly began to ooze out.

  Mara twisted her body around so she could apply pressure with her knee and free her hands temporarily. Then she pulled off the rest of Kieu’s shirt. She tied it around his neck as a bandage, applying what she hoped was enough pressure to stanch the flow, but not quite enough to choke him.

  The bleeding slowed, and he continued to breathe, though the breaths were shallow. Mara shifted her position around, keeping pressure on the wound with her hand while taking her sat phone from her pocket.

  DeBiase picked up as soon as the call went through.

  “How are you, Mara?” he asked, his usual jaunty tone replaced by a somber seriousness that seemed almost foreign.

  “I’m okay. My pilot was hit by shrapnel. We’re at Nam Det.”

  “What kind of shape is your plane in—”

  “Pieces. A MiG caught us and destroyed it on the ground. Maybe he was mad that we got away.”

  “What kind of MiG?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was a MiG,” confessed Mara. “Is that important?”

  “It’s all right. Whatever details you can remember, that’s all right. If you can’t, it’s not a problem.”

  DeBiase was gathering intelligence, thinking about the bulletins he was going to send back to the States—bulletins he might even be sending as they spoke.

  She was just thinking of dumb little things, like saving her neck.

  “Did he fire missiles?” DeBiase asked.

  “No. Machine gun or a cannon.”

  “Okay. How many planes?”

  “One.”

  “Usually they work in pairs.”

  “I only saw one, Jess.”

  “Relax.”

  “Don’t tell me to relax.”

  “Listen, Mara. I’ve been in difficult situations myself. I can tell you from experience—”

  Mara didn’t hear the rest of what DeBiase said, not because it was a lecture about staying calm that she didn’t particularly need right now, but because when she looked up in exasperation, she saw four conehatted Vietnamese villagers staring down at her from the embankment.

  “Xin châo!” she said. “Hello.”

  They didn’t answer. She tried thinking of the word for help, but couldn’t remember it.

  “Ông, có bit ing Anh không?” she said, addressing the oldest man and asking if he could speak English. That, too, brought only stares.

  “He’s hurt,” she said in English, gesturing to Kieu. “Cáp cúu. Cúu hoa.”

  They didn’t move.

  “Mara?” said DeBiase.

  “There are four Vietnamese farmers, I guess, standing here looking at me.”

  “You used the word for fire brigade,” said DeBiase. “Tell them you need an ambulance. Xe cáp cú.”

  “You really think they have ambulances out here?” she told him. But she repeated the words.

  “Put me on with them,” he said. “My Vietnamese is better than yours.”

  Mara held up the phone and gestured for them to take it. Instead, the men began talking to themselves. Then the youngest turned and began trotting away.

  “Mara, what’s going on?” asked DeBiase.

  “I’m not sure. Stay on the line.”

  The three men continued to stare at her, their slack-jawed expressions similar to those Mara remembered from a photograph of people watching the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on store televisions. Behind them, Kieu’s aircraft had stopped burning; the black smoke that had followed the fire had dissipated. But the burnt smell still hung so thick in the air that Mara could taste it in her mouth.

  “The Chinese shot down our plane,” Mara told the men. “They’re invading your country.”

  One of the men turned to look behind him. Mara thought he had understood what she’d said, until he pointed and took a few steps away. The man who’d left a few moments ago was returning, with two teenage boys and a stretcher.

  “We have to be careful,” she said in Vietnamese as they ran down the slope. “Careful.”

  She put the phone back to her ear. “How do I say he may have a neck injury?” she asked DeBiase.

  He gave her the words, then stayed on the line a few minutes more, until they had Kieu up the embankment. Worried that her battery would start to run down—the charger had been in her bag, left in the plane and presumably destroyed—Mara told DeBiase that she would check back with him in a half hour.

  Hand pressed against Kieu’s neck, she walked next to the stretcher as they climbed up the slope and walked south to a barely discernible path at the edge of the field. The path twisted around thick clumps of trees, the jungle growing darker and darker until it seemed as if the sun had fallen. Finally, a pair of twists brought them to a clearing; a small village was visible at the far end.

  The hamlet consisted of a dozen small huts and two farm buildings. All but one of the huts were made of bamboo topped by a thatched roof.<
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  The exception was made of scrap metal and wood; some of the slats at the front had originally come from vegetable boxes and still had markings on them. The farm buildings were made of corrugated steel. Yellowish red rust extended in small daggers from most of the screws and bolts holding them together; the roofs’ white coating was peeling, and large flakes fluttered in the soft breeze.

  They took Kieu to a thatched hut at the very entrance to the settlement. The interior was larger than Mara had expected, and divided into several rooms. The front room functioned as a sitting room, with cushions scattered on the straw floor, and a brand-new Sony portable radio on a small table at the side. As Kieu and his stretcher were lowered, Mara knelt next to him, her hand still pressed against his wound.

  An old man came in from one of the back rooms. Gaunt and tall, he had a sparse goatee and a wreath of very fine white hair starting at the temples. He bent over the stretcher, stared for a moment, then retreated without saying a word.

  “Is he a doctor?” Mara asked the others, but they continued staring at her as if not yet sure she really existed.

  The old man returned with a purple cloth bag. He set it down opposite Mara, then slowly lowered himself next to the stretcher. He took a blue bottle from the bag and opened it; a bitter smell immediately wafted through the room. The next thing he removed from the bag was a gauze pad wrapped in sterile paper; he pulled it open, daubed it with the clear liquid from the bottle, then reached with one hand to Mara’s and gently pushed her fingers away from the shirt she’d used as a bandage. He pulled up the shirt, then began to clean the wound, very lightly at first, his strokes gradually growing longer and more forceful.

  The wound was nearly two inches long, but very shallow. A black L sat at its center. At first Mara thought it was a bone, but as she looked she realized it must be the piece of shrapnel that had caused all the damage. The old man studied it, both with his eyes and the tips of his fingers, probing ever so gently. Then he took the bottle and tipped a bit of liquid into the wound.

  Kieu jerked his body violently. The old man stopped pouring, waiting for him to settle. Then he poured again. Kieu jumped once more.

  “You’re hurting him,” Mara said in Vietnamese.