by Eric Helm
“Never mind that,” said the loud, angry voice. “Just get me the American officer in charge here. And tell him I want him to get his butt down here right now.”
“It is regrettable that I no can do that,” said Dung. “Captain Gerber and some of the mens are not in camp now. I expect he return very soon. In meantime, I have my men escort you and your mens to the Americans’ compound. You wait there. Yes?”
“Like hell I will. I’ll wait right here. And as soon as Gerber gets here, you tell him I want to see him.”
“Most regrettable, but I no can permit this,” said Dung.
“You can’t permit it!” sputtered the loud, angry voice. “Just who in the hell do you think you are, mister, to go telling a general of the United States Army what he can and can’t do?”
“Please to excuse,” said Dung. “I no remember to introduce self. Permit me. I am Major Dung Cao Chiap of the National Liberation Front, and you, General, you my prisoner.”
For a moment, nothing. Then there was the sound of scuffling, and a single shot rang out. After that it got very quiet again. A few moments passed before Dung spoke.
“General, you will please to tell all your mens no to attempt any more foolishness. Already you get one of your mens shot. Maybe he die. Any more foolishness, my mens shoot them all. We control camp now, General. You all my prisoners. Take them to the Americans’ team house and guard them,” said Dung. “We must make ready for the others. They’ll be here soon.”
There was the sound of men marching away.
In the drainage tube beneath the runway, Krung slid back into the shadows to await the approaching darkness and wondered what it could all mean.
CHAPTER 8
THE CAMBODIAN–VIETNAM BORDER REGION NORTHWEST OF U.S. ARMY CAMP A-555
Major David Rittenour painfully awoke amid the wreckage of his U-1A Otter aircraft. He was thirsty and his head hurt.
Before he had thought only his head hurt. Until he tried to move his leg. The leg convinced him otherwise. If it was pain he wanted, there was plenty of it in the leg. He touched it carefully. Broken. In two places, from the feel of it.
Just fucking wonderful, thought Rittenour.
He probed his back and neck gently. Both were stiff and tender to the touch, but he couldn’t feel any deformities of the spine. Apparently the crash hadn’t broken his back or neck, after all. At any rate, he was still breathing, and he had sensation in all his extremities. In fact, at that moment he would have been a lot happier with a little less sensation in one of his extremities. The broken right leg, for instance.
Belatedly he thought to look around for his copilot.
Jones was gone.
In fact, the entire right half of the cockpit was gone. Rittenour twisted his head slightly. About fifty yards away, wedged among the tree branches, he could see what looked like part of the aircraft’s right wing. Nothing else was recognizable in that direction.
By twisting slightly in the seat, a movement that caused him considerable pain and took several minutes to accomplish, he was able to look behind him. The aircraft’s fuselage seemed to have broken completely in half. He could see most of the mangled remains of the passenger’s compartment, which was littered with papers. Apparently his one and only passenger’s briefcase had either been open when they crashed or had been broken open by the impact. Of the passenger himself there was no sign.
Rittenour took a moment to assess his immediate surroundings and ascertain that The Antichrist wasn’t in imminent danger of bursting into flames, then tried to recall the events of the crash.
They’d left Phnom Penh late last night but had to divert from their direct flight to Saigon because of a storm front that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Last night? What time was it?
Rittenour checked his watch. He’d been unconscious for nearly sixteen hours. No that wasn’t quite right. He had vague, indistinct memories of the long night and of awakening once during the heat of midday. Could a man be semiconscious for sixteen hours? Was that the right word for it?
He had dreamed. He remembered that much. Of his wife back in Maryland and of a girl he had dated in high school. Lydia was her name. He wondered why he’d dreamed of her. He hadn’t seen her in fifteen years and probably hadn’t even thought about her in the past ten. He wondered why he never had those kind of dreams about his wife.
Try as he might, he could not remember the crash itself. He could remember detouring around the storm front that shouldn’t have been there since this was the dry season, except up in I Corps, where the northeast monsoon was still keeping things damp. It was the southwest monsoon that normally fouled up flying in this part of Southeast Asia, and that was usually from May through September.
He could remember the sudden, unexpected loss of power from the engine and the instantly impossibly heavy controls, a sudden downdraft, but no more. The actual impact had been blanked from his mind.
After that there had only been the dreams. First there was the strange conversation with his wife about the bizarre hat she had bought, made even more strange because Madge never wore hats. That dream merged into a different one with Lydia MacIntire’s warm, wet, passionate lips touching his teenage body in places and ways he had only read about in the kinds of books and magazines his parents didn’t approve of. He could still recall the excitement and feelings of lust and hunger for her firm young body that he had never before imagined possible and had experienced only seldom since that very special prom night.
And then had come that other dream. The unsettling one. Filled with gunfire and explosions and the screaming of men in pain and dying. And then a long awful, oppressive silence. Thank God that had only been a dream.
It had, hadn’t it?
Yes. Of course it had. What other possible explanation was there? But not a dream. A nightmare. Only why then… why did it seem somehow more real than the others? More real even than the soft touch of those incredible lips he had experienced so long ago? Why did he imagine that after that long dreadful quiet he heard other explosions and a sound like that of great trees being uprooted and crashing to the ground amid shouts of “Fire in the hole!” And why would anyone shout “Fire in the hole!” anyway? You were supposed to shout “Timber!” when a tree fell. And why did he imagine that he had been awakened by the falling tree and that he could smell cordite and nitrocellulose and smoke in the air? Could you smell in dreams?
And then suddenly it dawned on him. He could smell something in the air. A faint hot smell, like woodsmoke, acrid and vaguely metallic. Was the aircraft burning after all? Not after sixteen hours surely.
Then he heard it. The soft, distant popping of rotor blades and the almost imperceptible whine of a turbine engine. A helicopter.
Rittenour tried to sit up straighter in the seat and nearly passed out again from the pain in his leg.
For several seconds he listened, straining his hearing, until he was sure the helicopter was drawing closer. He struggled with the closure on the pocket of his survival vest, and then he had it, the UHF emergency radio. Quickly he connected the antenna and switched it on, but to his dismay, the transceiver remained silent. Not so much as a crackle of static escaped the unit’s tiny speaker. The damned thing wouldn’t work. He didn’t know if the battery was dead or if the radio had somehow been broken during the crash. It didn’t matter. The thing was useless, and without it he had no way of contacting the helicopter.
The helicopter, although still some distance away by the sound of it, was clearly heading toward him. Frantic now lest it should veer off in another direction and miss seeing him, Rittenour dug through the various pockets of his survival vest for the tiny Penguin Industries flare launcher. Using it would entail a certain element of risk, of course. If there were any VC in the area, they were about as likely to see it as the aircrew. If they did, Rittenour probably wouldn’t get the opportunity to find out whether the aircrew had seen it.
When Rittenour at last succeeded in finding
the launcher, the sound of the helicopter was very close, perhaps a klick or less away. His fingers closed about the crosshatched surface of the fountain-pen-sized metal tube, and he pulled it from the pocket of the vest, the launcher’s lanyard trailing out behind it. The tape bandolier, which was attached to the lanyard and held the ten small flares for the launcher, snagged on the zipper and caught. He tugged on it, but it held fast.
The noise of the turbine and rotor blades was very loud. Abruptly the sound decreased in pitch and volume. To a pilot with Rittenour’s years of experience, there could be no mistaking the meaning. The helicopter was landing.
Whether it was dropping troops off or picking some up, Rittenour didn’t know. He knew that sometimes Green Beret teams operating in remote areas ran patrols in the rugged country along the border, and there were rumors that they also sometimes sent small teams of trail watchers into Cambodia to keep track of Viet Cong movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There were even rumors that the Green Berets employed the Khmer Serei and Khmer Kampuchea Kron for such surveillance missions and perhaps other more secret operations against the VC inside Cambodia. Maybe the helicopter was deploying or recovering such a team.
The thought that the helicopter crew might actually be looking for him had occurred to him, given the apparently important nature of his mysterious passenger, but the fact that it was landing seemed to discount that theory. They wouldn’t do that unless they had spotted wreckage, and at the moment he was sitting in the biggest piece of wreckage around.
Whatever the reason for the helicopter’s presence in the area, it meant rescue. If he didn’t manage to attract the crew’s attention quickly, however, that rescue was going to slip away. Rittenour could hear the sound of the engine increasing in pitch and volume. The helicopter was taking off. He tugged again on the lanyard, but it was stuck fast. The helicopter’s whine grew into a howl. Desperately he yanked on the lanyard.
The zipper ripped out and the flare bandolier suddenly popped free, whizzing through the air. It dinged Rittenour squarely in the temple, and he saw stars as his eyes filled with tears. From a combination of pain, surprise and frustration, he lost his grip on the launcher, and it fell.
Dumbfounded by the catastrophe, Rittenour could only watch in fascinated horror as the flare launcher and its little bandolier of bright red flare rounds slid across the angled deck of the shattered cockpit and dropped to the jungle floor with a small, rustling thump. He could still see them lying there, so close yet so far — impossible to reach five feet away. It might as well have been fifty. With the busted leg there was no way he could climb down and get them.
The sound of the helicopter built into a roar as it lifted and chattered away in whatever direction it had come from.
For a long time after that there was silence in the tiny jungle clearing containing the ruins of the Otter.
A silence that was broken only by the sound of Rittenour crying.
CHAPTER 9
OUTSIDE U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES CAMP A-555
The air changed from cool to muggy to downright oppressive as the flight of CH-47 helicopters descended toward pattern altitude over the big mud, sandbag and barbed wire rectangle of U.S. Army Special Forces Camp A-555.
Gerber was leaning against the side of the cabin, his M-14 between his knees, helmet in his lap, eyes closed. He was beyond tired. He was exhausted. The lack of sleep had really taken its toll. Apart from that was the confusion and bitter disappointment over a screwball mission gone sour and the loss of the Tai strikers.
They had spent an entire day marching over difficult terrain to get to the search area only to have to break off the sweep because contact with an enemy sniper team had compromised their presence in the area to a probably numerically larger force of VC. The thing he’d feared most had happened, and without an adequate NDP and air support it had been too risky to remain in the area overnight. And, of course, there had been the fight — well, argument anyway — with Morrow.
Altogether it was just too much. He was beginning to wish he’d never agreed to the six-month extension of his tour. He’d be glad when it was over in a couple of months. His nerves were raw. He couldn’t sleep nights even when he wasn’t on patrol, and when he did manage to catch a rare few minutes’ rest, his dreams were haunted by the images of dead men, both enemy and friend.
The first had been Master Sergeant Bill Schattschneider, killed during a VC rocket and mortar attack while Camp A-555 was being built. Then Miles Clarke, the young demolitions expert, had been shot to death during the raid on the VC Political Cadre at Ap Tan. After that it had been Schmidt, the commo specialist too weird to last anywhere in the U.S. Army except Special Forces. Only Vampire Schmidt, as the men had called him, hadn’t lasted. He’d taken a crossbow bolt from a VC booby trap through the chest that had punctured both his lungs and heart. Steve Kittredge, the heavy weapons specialist, had been the next to go, calling artillery in on his own position when a VC company overran his patrol on a tiny hilltop in the swamp. And most recently Ian McMillan, the team’s senior medical specialist, had been killed in a VC ambush while leading a patrol.
But the faces that haunted him most were still among the living. Sean Cavanaugh in a complete state of psychoneurotic paralysis in the mental ward of Third Field Hospital in Saigon, if you could call that living. Karen Morrow’s face the last time he had seen her, like a very bad dream that just wouldn’t end, no matter what logic told him about the situation. And Robin. After that Chinese bastard had finished playing telephone with her in Hong Kong. And the icy cool exterior she’d projected ever since, smooth, untroubled, but hiding what was underneath, like the shell of an egg ready to crack, despite the denials. Why wouldn’t the damned woman go home to the States where it was safe, anyway? What was she trying to prove?
The touch of Fetterman’s hand on his arm startled him, and he jerked back, banging his head on the side of the ship.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Sorry, Captain, didn’t mean to startle you, but there’s something funny going on down there,” said Fetterman.
“What do you mean, something funny?”
“Looks like the place has been hit while we were out. There’s a bunch of fresh craters on the runway, and a couple of the striker barracks have been burned. There’re also a couple of Hueys and a big conex up at the north end of the runway.”
“That is funny. I wonder what it’s all about? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. We’ll be landing in a minute.”
“That’s just it, Captain. I’m not so sure we should. Land, I mean. At least not without checking things out with Lieutenant Novak on the radio first. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”
Gerber sat up straight, instantly alert. In fifteen months he’d learned to put great faith in Master Sergeant Fetterman’s bad feelings.
“Explain yourself,” said Gerber.
“There’s just not enough movement down there, sir. No one moving around at all. There ought to be some work parties, loafers, some of the strikers’ families moving around, something. But nobody’s moving down there. You’d think the commo watch would have popped smoke for the choppers by now. Also, the base has obviously taken some mortar damage, but we got no word of an attack. Seems a little strange Lieutenant Novak didn’t relay word to us after we got a commo link with that FAC. I mean, what with the lieutenant being a new man and all, you’d think he might want to let you know about it ASAP. Also, there’s a bright red rectangle on top of the dispensary.”
“A big red rectangle?”
“Yes, sir. Can’t really make it out from this altitude, but it sort of reminds me of an NVA or Chinese flag.”
“Come on, Tony. Is that what’s got you going? Some piece of red stuff that reminds you of a flag? You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Master Sergeant. The Chinese guy is dead.”
“Yes, sir. Only I didn’t get to touch the body, sir. All I’m saying is I know trouble when I smell it, and something down ther
e stinks, sir.”
“All right, Master Sergeant. I’ll speak with the pilot and have him check it out with Lieutenant Novak, if that’ll make you feel better.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I’d feel a lot better.”
But he didn’t look it. Fetterman sat holding his rifle and staring out the tiny round window. He looked nervous.
And when Master Sergeant Fetterman looked nervous, that made Gerber very nervous indeed. He got up and went forward to the flight deck.
“What’re the odds on me having a word with the camp before we land?” shouted Gerber over the roar of the turbines after he’d gotten the pilot’s attention.
The nineteen-year-old warrant officer flying the big, twin-rotor helicopter shook his head inside his helmet and shouted back, “No can do, Captain. Can’t raise anybody down there. Your boys must all be asleep or something.”
“What? Veer off! Don’t land!”
“Whaaa? Why? It’s no big deal, Captain. We don’t need radio to—”
“Just do it! Quick! I haven’t time to explain.”
The pilot looked at Gerber for a second, then shrugged. “It’s your camp, Captain. You don’t want to land there, it’s fine with me.” He keyed the microphone switch. “Flight, this is lead. We’re going around. Break right, and we’ll orbit east of the camp.”
Fetterman pushed into the doorway of the crowded cockpit, a pair of binoculars in his hand. “Captain, it wasn’t my imagination. There is a Chinese flag on top of the dispensary, sir. Communist Chinese. Something is very wrong down there.”
Gerber nodded.
“Somebody want to tell me what this is all about?” asked the pilot, having completed his turn away from the camp.
“I know it’s a pretty far-fetched idea,” shouted Gerber, “but my team sergeant thinks maybe the camp has fallen to the enemy.”
The pilot looked astounded. “You can’t be serious.”
“I wish I wasn’t,” Gerber shouted back. “There’s unreported battle damage down there, there’s no sign of movement and there’s a Red Chinese flag on top of the dispensary.”
