by David Drake
The inner ring of the defensive array vanished. Bits of metal and plastic dribbled down with the columns of gritty mud the penetrators had lifted.
"Have we got 'em?" Rudisill called. "Have we got 'em all?"
Sanger was reloading his rifle. He paused in mid motion when he noticed Lermontov for the first time. Sanger was a veteran. When the shooting started, he must have rolled into position and fired by reflex, ignoring every part of the equation except what was in his sight picture . . . .
The head of a Gerin wearing an armored battlesuit rose just above the surface of the pool. It fired up at the cliff. The Slime was using what by human standards was a light cannon. Rock crumbled around the bright orange shellbursts.
Minh yelped over the radio and a rifle went flying, but there was no body in the mini-avalanche which bounced down the cliff in response to the blasts.
"They killed the captain! They killed the captain!"
Rudisill fired at the Gerin. The angle was hopelessly bad, but his bullets sparked and splattered on the rocks across the pool. The Slime ducked back beneath the surface and Heatherton, on the cliffs above it, churned the water again with a vertical burst.
Minh still had his MARS. He launched the heavy rocket into the pool while Heatherton and Moschelitz kept the Slime down with rifle fire.
Rocks and steam spewed even higher than previously, because the water level had been dropped by the first warhead. The cliff was black where water darkened the dun stone.
More steam belched from the cave. Shadowed figures moved beyond the bars. Rudisill thought he heard shouts and crying.
"They killed the captain!"
Even in an armored suit, the Gerin couldn't survive a direct MARS hit. Rudisill's left hand stung. He looked down and noticed for the first time that his left little finger was missing. The automatic laser had—
"That must've got the—" Heatherton started to say.
The Slime rose from the bubbling water of the pool and raked the cliff top again with explosive shells.
Heatherton screamed with frustration. He triggered a wild burst as he lurched back from the spray of grit and shell fragments. Rudisill fired also, nowhere near the target that ducked away anyhow, back under the water—
"I know where it's going!" Rudisill cried. "The pool connects with the cave, so the Slime gets out of the water and clear of the shockwave!"
Moschelitz fired his rifle into the pool.
There was a thump! as Sanger launched his MARS, the only rocket left in the commando. Its backblast slapped Rudisill like a hot, soft pillow.
The warhead detonated with a yellow glare that filled the interior of the cave. The half-open gates blew out in a tumbling arc. They splashed to the ground between Sanger and the sectioned hostage who'd tried to escape him.
The pool burped a gout of steam. No question now about it and the cave connecting . . . .
The Gerin staggered from the mouth of the cave. It was amazing that the Slime survived even wearing armor, but it'd lost its weapon in the blast.
Rudisill, Heatherton, and Moschelitz emptied their rifles into the creature. A few of the bullets spanged and ricocheted from its battlesuit, but only a few. The corpse wasn't even twitching by the time Sanger snatched up his rifle again and reloaded.
Sanger fired off his whole magazine anyway.
The silence that followed was broken only by the ringing in Rudisill's ears.
Rudisill stood up, loading a fresh magazine by reflex. The spotting table was still attached to his helmet. He jerked the leads out, careless of whether he damaged them. He walked over to Sanger and Lermontov, a few steps and a lifetime away.
Nothing moved within the cave except whorls of smoke.
Sanger cradled the captain's head in his lap. Lermontov's helmet had fallen off. His pale blue eyes were open and sightless.
Rudisill knelt and put his arm around the shoulders of the living trooper.
"The bastards," Sanger whispered. He was weeping. "The bastards. I swear I'll kill 'em all!"
Rudisill figured he meant the Slime, but when he looked toward the smoldering cave he wasn't sure.
Rudisill wasn't sure that he cared which Sanger meant, either.
Firefight
"Christ," Ginelli said, staring at the dusty wilderness, "if this is a sample, the next move'll be to Hell. And a firebase there'd be cooler."
Herrold lit a cigarette and poked the pack toward his subordinate. "Have one," he suggested.
"Not unless it's grass," the heavy newbie muttered. He flapped the sleeveless flak jacket away from his flesh, feeling streaks of momentary chill as sweat started from beneath the quilted nylon. "Christ, How d'you stand it?"
Herrold, rangy and big-jointed, leaned back in the dome seat and cocked one leg over the flamethrower's muzzle. Ginelli envied the track commander's build every time he looked at the taller man. His own basic training only four months before had been a ghastly round of extra physical training to sweat off pounds of his mother's pasta.
"Better get used to it," Herrold warned lazily. "This zippo always winds up at the back of the column, so we always wait to set up in the new laagers. Think about them—pretend you're a tree."
Ginelli followed his TC's finger toward the eight giant trees in the stone enclosure. It didn't help. Their tops reached a hundred feet into the air above the desolate plain, standing aloof from the activity that raised a pall of dust beside them. The shadows pooling beneath could not cool Ginelli as he squatted sun-dazzled on the deck of the flame track.
At least Colonel Boyle was just as hot where he stood directing placements from the sandbagged deck of his vehicle. Hieu stood beside him as usual. You could always recognize the interpreter at a distance because of the tiger fatigues he wore, darkly streaked with black and green. Below the two, radiomen were stringing the last of the tarpaulin passageways that joined the three command vehicles into a Tactical Operations Center. Now you could move between the blacked-out tracks in the dark; but the cool of the night seemed far away.
On the roof, Boyle pointed and said something to Hieu. The dark-skinned interpreter's nod was emphatic; the colonel spoke into his neck-slung microphone and the two vehicles ahead of the flame track grunted into motion. Herrold straightened suddenly as his radio helmet burped at him. "Seven-zero, roger," he replied.
"We movin'?" Ginelli asked, leaning closer to the TC to hear him better. Herrold flipped the switch by his left ear forward to intercom and said, "OK, Murray, they want us on the west side against that stone wall. There'll be a ground guide, so take it easy."
Murray edged the zippo forward, driving it clockwise around the circuit other tracks had clawed in the barren earth. Except for the grove within the roomy laterite enclosure, there was nothing growing closer than the rubber plantation whose rigid files marched green and silver a mile to the east. Low dikes, mostly fallen into the crumbling soil, ordered the wasteland. Dust plumed in the far distance as a motorbike pulled out of the rubber and turned toward the firebase. Coke girls already, Ginelli thought. Even in this desert.
Whatever the region's problem was it couldn't have been with the soil itself; not if trees like the monsters behind the low wall could grow in it. Every one of the eight the massive stonework girdled was forty feet around at the base. The wrinkled bole of the central titan could have been half that again.
The zippo halted while a bridge tank roared, churning the yielding dirt as it maneuvered its frontal slope up to the coarse laterite. The ground guide, a bare-chested tanker with a beaded sweat band, dropped his arms to signal the bridge to shut down, then motioned the flame track in beside the greater bulk. Murray cut his engine and hoisted himself out of the driver's hatch.
Common sense and the colonel's orders required that everyone on a track be wearing helmet and flak jacket. Men like Murray, however, who extended their tours to four years, tended to ignore death and their officers when comfort was at stake. The driver was naked to the waist; bleached golden hairs stood o
ut wire-like against his deep tan. "Dig out some beers, turtle," he said to Ginelli with easy arrogance. "We got time to down 'em before they start puttin' a detail together." Road dust had coated the stocky, powerful driver down to the throat, the height he projected from his hatch with the seat raised and the cover swivelled back. Years of Vietnamese sunlight had washed all color from his once-blue eyes.
An ACAV pulled up to the flame track's right, its TC nonchalant in his cupola behind the cal fifty. To Ginelli's amazement, the motorbike he had seen leaving the rubber plantation was the next vehicle in line. It was a tiny green Sachs rather than one of the omnipresent Honda 50s, and its driver was Caucasian. Murray grinned and jumped to his feet. "Crozier! Jacques!" he shouted delightedly. "What the hell are you doin' here?"
The white-shirted civilian turned his bike neatly and tucked it in on the shady side of the zippo. If any of the brass had noticed him, they made no sign. Dismounted, Crozier tilted his face up and swept his baseball cap away from a head of thinning hair. "Yes, I thought I might find you, Joe," he said. His English was slightly burred. "But anyway, I would have come just to talk again to Whites. It is grand to see you."
Herrold unlashed the shelter tarp from the load and let it thump over the side. "Let's get some shade up," he ordered.
"Jack was running a plantation for Michelin up north when we were in the A-Shau Valley," Murray explained. "He's a good dude. But why you down here, man?"
"Oh, well," the Frenchman said with a deprecating shrug. "Your defoliation, you know? A few months after your squadron pulls out, the planes come over. Poof! Plantation Seven is dead and I must be transferred. They grow peanuts there now."
Herrold laughed. "That's the nice thing about a job in this country," he said. "Always somethin' new tomorrow."
"Yeah, not so many VC here as up there," Murray agreed.
Crozier grimaced. "The VC I am able to live with. Like them? No. But I understand them, understand their, their aims. But these people around here, these Mengs—they will not work, they will not talk, only glare at you and plant enough rice for themselves. Michelin must bring in Viets to work the rubber, and even those, they do not stay because they do not like Mengs so near."
"But they're all Vietnamese, aren't they?" Ginelli asked in puzzlement. "I mean, what else could they be?"
The Frenchman chuckled, hooking his thumbs in his trouser tops. "They live in Viet Nam so they are Vietnamese, no? But you Americans have your Indians. Here are the Montagnards—we call them; the Mountaineers, you know? But the Vietnamese name for them means 'the dirty animals.' Not the same folk, no no. They were here long before the Viets came down from the North. And the Meng who live here and a few other places, they are not the same either; not as the Viets or even the Montagnards. And maybe they are older yet, so they say."
The group waited a moment in silence. Herrold opened the Mermite can that served as a cooler and began handing out beer. "Got a church key?" he asked no one in particular. Murray, the only man on the track with a knife, drew his huge Bowie and chopped ragged triangles in the tops. Tepid beer gurgled as the four men drank. Ginelli set his can down.
"Umm," he said to his TC, "how about the co-ax?"
Herrold sighed. "Yeah, we don't want the sonafabitch to jam." Joints popped as he stood and stretched his long frame.
Crozier gulped the swig of beer still in his mouth. "Indeed not," he agreed. "Not here, especially. The area has a very bad reputation."
"That a fact?" Herrold asked in mild surprise. "At the troop meetin' last night the ole man said around here it'd be pretty quiet. Not much activity on the intelligence maps."
"Activity?" the Frenchman repeated with raised eyebrows. "Who can say? The VC come through the laborers' hootches now and again, not so much here as near A-Shau, that is true. But when I first was transferred here three years ago, there were five, maybe six hundred in the village—the Mengs, you know, not the plantation lines."
"That little place back where we left the hardball?" Ginelli wondered aloud. "Jeez, there's not a dozen hootches there."
"Quite so," Crozier agreed with a grave nod of his head. "Because a battalion of Communists surrounded it one night and killed every Meng they found. Maybe twenty survived."
"Christ," Ginelli breathed in horror, but Herrold's greater experience caused his eyes to narrow in curiosity. "Why the hell?" the tall track commander asked. "I mean, I know they've got hit squads out to gun down village cops and headmen and all. But why the whole place? Were they that strong for the government?"
"The government?" the civilian echoed; he laughed. "They spat at the District Governor when he came through. But a week before the Communists came, there was firing near this very place. Communist, there is no doubt. I saw the tracers myself and they were green.
"The rest—and this is rumor only, what my foremen told me at the time before they stopped talking about it—a company, thirty men, were ambushed. Wiped out, every one of them and mutilated, ah . . . badly. How they decided that the Mengs were responsible, I do not know; but that could have been the reason they wiped out the village later."
"Umm," Herrold grunted. He crumpled his beer can and looked for a litter barrel. "Lemme get on the horn and we'll see just how the co-ax is screwing up." The can clattered into the barrel as the TC swung up on the back deck of the zippo again. The others could hear his voice as he spoke into the microphone, "Battle five-six, track seven-zero. Request clearance to test fire our Mike seven-four."
An unintelligible crackle replied from the headset a moment later. "No sir," Herrold denied, "not if we want it working tonight." He nodded at the answer. "Roger, roger." He waved. "OK," he said to his crew as he set down the radio helmet, "let's see what it's doin'."
Ginelli climbed up beside Herrold, slithering his pudgy body over the edge of the track with difficulty. Murray continued to lounge against the side of the track. "Hell," he said, "I never much liked guns anyway; you guys do your thing." Crozier stood beside his friend, interested but holding back a little from the delicacy of an uninvited guest. The machine gun had once been co-axial to the flamethrower. Now it was on a swivel welded to the top of the TC's dome. Herrold rotated it, aiming at the huge tree in the center of the grove. A ten-foot scar streaked the light trunk vertically to the ground, so he set the buckhorn sight just above it. Other troopers, warned by radio what to expect, were watching curiously.
The gun stuttered off a short burst and jammed. Empty brass tinkled off the right side of the track. Herrold swore and clicked open the receiver cover. His screwdriver pried at the stuck case until it sprang free. Slamming the cover shut, he jacked another round into the chamber.
BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM
"God damn it," Herrold said. "Looks like we gotta take the whole thing down."
"Or throw rocks," Ginelli suggested.
Herrold cocked a rusty eyebrow. Unlike the thick-set newbie, he had been in country long enough to have a feel for real danger. After a moment he grinned back. "Oh, we don't have to throw rocks," he said. He unslung his old submachine gun from the side of the dome. Twenty years of service had worn most of the finish off its crudely stamped metal but it still looked squat and deadly. Herrold set the wire stock to his shoulder; the burst, when he squeezed off, was ear-shattering. A line of fiercely red tracers stabbed from the muzzle and ripped an ascending curve of splintered wood up the side of the center tree.
"Naw, we're OK while the ole grease gun works," Herrold said. He laughed. "But," he added, "We better tear down the co-ax anyhow."
"Perhaps I should leave now," Crozier suggested. "It grows late and I must return to my duties."
"Hell," Murray protested, "stick around for chow at least. Your dinks'll do without babysittin' for that long."
The Frenchman pursed his lips. "He'll have to clear with the colonel," Herrold warned.
"No sweat," the driver insisted. "We'll snow him about all the local intelligence Jacques can give us. Come on, man; we'll brace him now." Crozier fo
llowed in Murray's forceful wake, an apprehensive frown still on his face.
"Say, where'd you get these?" Ginelli inquired, picking up a fat, red-nosed cartridge like those Herrold had just thumbed into his grease gun.
"The tracers?" the TC replied absently. "Oh, I found a case back in Di-An. Pretty at night and what the hell, they hit just as hard. But let's get crackin' on the co-ax."
Ginelli jumped to the ground. Herrold handed him a footlocker to serve as a table—the back deck of the zippo was too cluttered to strip the gun there—and the co-ax itself. In a few minutes they had reduced the weapon to components and begun cleaning them.
A shadow eased across the footlocker. Ginelli looked up, still holding the receiver he was brushing with a solvent-laden toothbrush. The interpreter, Hieu, had walked over from the TOC and was facing the grove. He seemed oblivious to the troopers beside him.
