by David Drake
Sloane was radio watch this afternoon. The driver sat on the tailgate of the command vehicle with his feet on the frame of his cot. He was talking to the staff sergeant who would take over as CQ at 2000 hours. They fell silent when Schaydin appeared.
"Go ahead, Skip, get yourself some supper," the lieutenant said stiffly. "I'll take the radio for a while."
"S'okay, sire, Walsh here spelled me," Sloane said. He pointed at the paper plate with remnants of beef and creamed potatoes, sitting on his footlocker. "Go ahead and eat yourself."
"I said I'd take the radio!" Schaydin snapped. He was trembling, though he did not realize it. Sloane glanced very quickly at his commander, then to the startled sergeant. The driver lowered his feet from the cot and squeezed back so that Schaydin could enter the track. The two enlisted men were whispering together at the open end of the tent when their lieutenant drew the poncho shut, closing off the rest of the world.
It was dim in the solid-walled vehicle, dimmer yet when Schaydin unplugged the desk lamp. Radio dials gleamed and reflected from the formica counter, chinks of light seeped in past the curtain. But it would serve, would serve . . . .
The texture of the C-4 steadied Schaydin's fingers as he molded it. The high sides of the ashtray made it difficult to ignite the pellet. The hot steel of the lighter seared his fingers and he cursed in teary frustration; but just before Schaydin would have had to pull away winked the spark and the orange flare—
—and in it, the girl dancing.
Her head was flung back, the black, rippling, smokey hair flying out behind her. Schaydin heard the words again, "A Marie! Ici! Viens ici!" The radio was babbling, too, on the command frequency; but whatever it demanded was lost in the roar of the crowd. Passion, as fiercely hot as the explosive that gave it form, flashed from the girl's eyes. "Come to me!"
The flame sputtered out. Schaydin was blind to all but its afterimage.
The compartment was hot and reeking. Sweat beaded at Schaydin's hairline and on his short, black moustache. He stripped the backing away from the rest of the explosive and began to knead the whole chunk, half a pound, into a single ball.
"Battle Six to Battle One-Six," the radio repeated angrily in Colonel Brookings' voice. "Goddammit, Schaydin, report!"
The ashtray had shattered in the heat. Schaydin swept the fragments nervously to the floor, then set the lump of explosive on the blood-marked formica. A shard of clear glass winked unnoticed in the heel of his hand. He snapped his lighter to flame and it mounted, and she mounted—
—and she called. Her hands could not reach out for him but her soul did and her Hell-bright eyes. "Viens ici! Viens!"
The dancer's smooth flesh writhed with no cloak but the flame. Higher, the radio dials melting, the lizard-tongue forks of the blaze beading the aluminum roof—Schaydin stood, his ankles close together like hers. He did not reach for her, not because of the heat but because the motion would be—wrong. Instead he put his hands behind his back and crossed his wrists. Outside the curtain, voices snarled but the dragon-hiss of the C-4 would have drowned even a sane man's senses. She twisted, her eyes beckoning, her mouth opening to speak. Schaydin arched, bending his body just so and—
"Come!"
—and he went.
The poncho tore from Colonel Brookings' fingers and a girl plunged out of the fiery radio compartment. She was swarthy but not Vietnamese, naked except for smouldering scraps of a woolen shift. Neither Brookings nor the enlisted men could understand the French she was babbling; but her joy, despite severe burns on her feet and legs, was unmistakeable.
No one else was in the vehicle.
On October 14, 1429, the assembled villagers of Briancon, Province of Dauphine, Kingdom of France, roared in wonderment. The witch Marie de la Barthe[ag, being burned alive at the stake, suddenly took the form of a demon with baggy green skin. The change did not aid the witch, however, for the bonds still held. Despite its writhing and unintelligible cries, the demon-shape burned as well in the fire as a girl would have.
Arclight
Grunting and snarling, the nineteen tracked vehicles of G Troop struggled into a night defensive position. From the road watched a family of impassive Cambodians. The track commander of the nearest vehicle, three-six, waved at them as his ACAV shuddered through a thirty-degree arc and prepared to back into its position in the laager. Red paint marked the track's flat aluminum sides with the name "Horny Horse" and a graphic parody of the regiment's stallion insignia. None of the stolid, flat-faced onlookers gave any sign of interest, even when the ACAV lurched sideways and began to tilt. The TC leaned out of his cupola in the middle, vainly trying to see what was the matter. Jones, the left gunner, looked out over the hole opening under the tread and waved frantically, trying to shout over the engine noise. The TC nodded and snapped to the driver through his intercom, "Whip 'er right and gun 'er, Jody, we're falling into a goddamn bunker!"
The diesel bellowed as Jody let the left clutch full out and tramped on the foot feed. The ACAV slewed level again with the left tread spitting mangled vegetation behind it. "Cut the engine," the TC ordered, and in the sudden silence he shouted to the command track in the center of the rough circle of vehicles, "Captain Fuller! We're on a bunker complex!"
The shirtless, sweating officer dropped the can of beer he was staring to open and grabbed his dirty M-16. No matter what you did, clean your rifle daily and keep it in a case, the choking dust kicked up by the tracks inevitably crept into it at the end of a day's move. And if they really were on a bunker complex, the move wasn't over yet. Everybody knew what had happened to E troop last November when they laagered on an unsuspected complex and a dozen sappers had crept out inside the NDP that night.
The hole, an irregular oval perhaps a foot along the greater axis, looked uncompromisingly black against the red laterite of the bare ground. Worse, the tilted edge of a slab showed clearly at the back, proving the cavity below was artificial. Everybody knew the dinks had been building bunkers here in the Parrot's Beak for twenty years and more, but the captain had never seen a stone one before.
"Want me to frag it?" someone said. It was the red-headed TC of the track that turned the bunker up, Fuller saw. Casely, his name was. He held his unauthorized .45 in one hand, cocked, and a pair of smooth-hulled fragmentation grenades in the other.
"Gimme one of them," growled Sergeant Peacock, reaching his huge black arm toward the younger soldier. Casely handed one of the grenades to the field first and watched him expertly mold a pound and a quarter stick of plastic explosive around it. The white explosive encased all the metal except the handle and the safety pin in a lumpy cocoon. "We'll try a bunker buster first to see if anybody's home," the sergeant said with satisfaction. "Better clear back." He pulled the pin.
All around the laager, men were watching what was going on beside three-six. Nobody was keeping a lookout into the jungle; but, then, the dinks didn't hit armored units in the daytime. Besides, the dozen Cambodians were still squatting in the road. Intelligence might be wrong, but the locals always knew when there was going to be trouble.
Peacock sidled closer to the hole, hunching down a little at the thought that a flat brown face might pop up out of it at the last instant, eyes glaring at him behind the sights of an A.K. He gagged and blinked, then tossed the bomb the last yard with a convulsive gesture and darted back away.
"Jesus H. Christ!" he wheezed, "Jesus H. Christ! That stinks down there like nothing on earth!"
"How's that?" Fuller snapped, nervous about anything unusual. The bunker buster went off, a hollow boom like a cherry bomb in a garbage can, only a thousand times as loud. Dirt and whizzing fragments of stone mushroomed upward, drifting mostly toward three-six and showering it for thirty seconds. The crew covered their eyes and hunched their steel pots close to their shoulders. Captain Fuller, kneeling beside the track under the unexpected rain of dirt, suddenly choked and jumped to his feet swearing. "My God," he roared, "which way's the wind blowing?" The charnel ree
k that oozed out of the newly opened bunker was strong and indescribably foul. The troop had found NVA buried in the jungle for months in the damp warmth, found them and dug them up to search for papers; that stench had been nothing to this one.
"Must'a been a hospital," Sergeant Peacock suggested as he edged upwind of the pit. He was covering his nose with an olive drab handkerchief. "Jesus," he repeated, "I never smelled anything like that."
Three-six's diesel ripped back into life and brought the track upwind of the hole in a wide circle. Ten yards away, its nose pointing out toward the road beside the next vehicle over, it halted and Casely descended again. He still held his pistol. "God, look at that," he said.
When the bunker buster had blown, it lifted the roof off a narrow crypt some ten feet long and half that wide. It could not have been more than inches below the surface of the soil at any point. Relatively little of the rubble kicked up by the explosion had fallen back into the cavity, leaving it open to the eyes of the men on on its edge. Most of the litter on the floor of the crypt was of bones. All were dry, and many had been smashed to powder by the blast. One skull, whole by some mischance, goggled toward the north wall.
The idol glared back at it. It was about six feet high, cut out of streaky soapstone instead of the omnipresent laterite whose pocked roughness forms the walls and ornamentation of most Cambodian temples, even those of Angkor Wat. Though it stood on two legs, there was nothing manlike about the creature. A fanged jaw twisted into a vicious grimace, leering out over the beast's pot belly. One clawed arm rested on the paunch; the other, apparently the only casualty of the explosion, had been broken off at the shoulder and lay half covered by the gravel on the floor. The gray-on-black marking of the stone blended to give the image a lifelikeness it should not have had; Fuller blinked, half expecting blood to spurt from the severed arm. Over all lay the miasma of decay, slowly diffusing on the hot breeze.
Fuller hesitated a moment, peering over the edge. "Anybody see a door to this place?" he asked. None of the group slowly gathering on the edge of the crypt answered. The whole room had been faced with thin slabs of the same stone that formed the idol. Line after line of squiggly, decorative Cambodian writing covered their surface unintelligibly. Fragments from the roof of the crypt showed similar markings.
"That ain't no hospital," Sergeant Peacock asserted needlessly, wiping his palms on the seat of his fatigues. The light-green material darkened with sweat.
Jody Bredt, the undersized Pfc. who drove three-six, sauntered over with his gas mask in his hand. He took the war a little more seriously than most of the rest of the troop and kept his mask in the hatch with him instead of being buried in the bottom of his duffle bag. "Want me to take a look down there, Captain Fuller?" he asked importantly.
"Why don't you just put in for official tunnel rat?" his TC gibed, but the officer nodded appreciatively. "Yeah, go ahead. Be careful, for God's sake, but I think this may just have been an old temple."
Jody slipped his mask on, virtually blinding himself even in the bright sunlight. The lenses were dusty and scratched from knocking around in the track for months. A preliminary sniff had convinced him that the stench had almost dissipated, but he couldn't take the mask off now that he'd made such a production of it. Gingerly, he lowered himself over the edge. Sergeant Peacock knelt down to hold his wrist in case he slipped; there might be a mine under any of the delicately carven slabs. The gooks were clever about that sort of thing. Still, any mines down there should have gone off when the bunker buster did. He let his feet touch the ground with a little more confidence and ran his hand over the wall. "I don't see any swinging doors or anything," he reported. "Maybe they got in through the roof, huh?"
"Hell, we'll never know that now," Casely snorted. "Hey, Captain, I think the smell is pretty well gone. Let me go down there."
"Why?" Fuller grunted. "Want to take that statue back with you on R&R?"
The TC grinned. The captain knew his men pretty well. "Naw, too big. I did think one of them skulls would make kind of a nice souvenir if they don't check my hold baggage too close, though."
Fuller swore and laughed. "OK," he said, squatting down preparatory to jumping in himself, "go ahead, you found the place. But I want the rest of you guys back on your tracks. We're going to be leaving here in five, as soon as I get a look around myself."
"Hey, Red, throw me something," one of the bystanders begged Casely, but the captain waved him away peremptorily. "Go on, goddamnit, I don't want all of you hanging around here in case the dinks are out there." He hopped down into the cavity, joining Casely and the driver whose mask hung from his hand again. The air was thick but had lost the earlier noisomeness.
Casely picked up the skull he wanted for a trophy with a finger through each of the eye-sockets. When he had lifted it waist high, the bone crumbled to powder. What was left of the skull shattered unrecognizably when it hit the floor. "Goddamn," the TC swore, kicking angrily at the heap of dust, "why didn't it do that when the frag went off if it had to do it at all? Now I got my hopes up and look what happens!"
Peacock, squatting like a black Buddha on the rim of the crypt, chuckled deep in his chest. "Why, the next dink we get, you just cut his head off and dry it out. How that be, Red? Get you a nice fresh head to take back to your wife."
Casely swore again. The captain was handling another of the bones. This one was a femur, sheared off some inches short of the knee joint. If the frag hadn't done it, the damage dated from the unguessable past. The bone was almost as dry and fragile as the skull that had powdered in Casely's hands. He tossed it up to the field first, shaking his head in puzzlement. "How old do you guess that is, sarge?" he asked. "I don't think I ever saw anything that used up before."
"This old guy is still in fine shape," Jody put in, rapping the brutal idol on the nose with his gas mask. "Frag didn't hurt him hardly at all, did it?" He kicked at the broken limb lying near the statue. The others, more or less consciously, had been avoiding the idol with their eyes. If you looked too closely, the crude swirls on the thing that were supposed to represent hair seemed to move by themselves. Probably the grain of the stone.
"Goddamn," Fuller said. It was not entirely blasphemous the way he said it. "Will you look at that."
The driver's foot had shaken the broken arm, paw, whatever out of the pile of rubble in which it lay. Previously unseen was the figure of the man—it was clearly a man—held in the monster's clawed grip. The man had been sculpted only a fraction of the size of the thing holding him, some thirty inches or so from foot to where the head would have been if it hadn't been broken off by the blast. Fuller looked more closely. No, the figure had been carved that way originally, limp and headless in the idol's claws. The beast-god's leering mouth seemed to take a further, even more unpleasant dimension. Fuller stretched his arm up to Sergeant Peacock. "Sarge, give me a hand. Come on, you two, we're getting out of here."
"Think the gooks been using this as a hospital?" Jody asked, scrambling up to the surface with a boost from Casely. Jody always missed the last word and didn't have quite the intelligence to supply it himself.
"I don't know what they're doing," Fuller grunted. "If there's one bunker around here, there could be a hundred though, and I'm not sitting around to find out. I think I'll ask for a B-52 strike here. God knows, they're flattening enough empty jungle they ought to be willing to hit a spot like this."
Casely picked up a bit of the crypt's roof and tossed it in his hand. "Hey," he said, "maybe some of those locals speak English. I'd like to know what these squiggles are saying."
"You're going to have to find them to ask," Peacock said with a shrug. "They must'a took off when the bunker buster went off."
"Umm," the redhead grunted. "Well, it makes a souvenir anyway." Around the circle of vehicles engines were starting up. One of the gunners signaled Casely with the radio helmet in his hand. "Come on, Red," he shouted, "'we're moving out." Casely nodded and began jogging toward the track. He wasn't s
orry to be leaving this place either. Not sorry at all.
Three-six had a full crew of four men, and so they split the guard into two-hour shifts from 2200 to 0600. The new location was a dead ringer for the one they'd just left, low jungle approaching the graveled length of Highway 13, but at least there didn't seem to be any bunkers. Or idols. Casely had last guard, a concession to his rank that meant he could get six hours sleep uninterrupted, but he couldn't seem to drop off soundly. The air was cool and misty, cloaking the tracks so closely that the Sheridan to the left in the laager was almost invisible. A good night for sappers. Casely could almost feel them creeping closer.
He glanced at his watch. Three o'clock, Jody's shift. The TC was stretched out on the closed cargo hatch of the ACAV while the two gunners slept inside on mattresses laid over the ranked ammo boxes. He should have been able to see Jody sitting in the cupola, staring out into the jungle. At first glance the driver wasn't there, and Casely sat up to make sure the little guy hadn't gone and done something unusually stupid. At the first sound of movement from behind him Jody gasped and straightened up from where he was hunched over the cupola's fifty caliber machine gun. "Jeez, Red, it's you. Jeez, you gave me a shock there!" he whispered nervously.
