by Eric Helm
Krung nodded. “Not get close enough to see all that. Also not see too good men who come with it, but hear Dung call one general.”
“A general? Are you sure?”
Krung nodded again. “Him say general several times. Say ‘Good afternoon, General.’ Say ‘General, you my prisoner.’ And say ‘General, tell your men no more foolishness.’ Think maybe one of general’s men try something and they shoot him. Hear one shot.”
“Well, shit,” said Fetterman. “That’s just fucking marvelous. Did you see this general? Do you know who he is?”
Krung shook his head. “Not see, only hear.”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
Krung shrugged. “Tai soldiers seldom see or hear any general. Besides, all generals sound alike to Krung.”
“What did this general sound like?”
“Angry.”
“I’ll bet. Do you have any idea what they did with him?”
“Think maybe they take to American team house,” said Krung. “Not positive, but think so.”
Fetterman unsnapped the leather flap that covered the crystal and glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. He’d told Gerber he’d try to be gone no more than about two hours. His time had been up seven minutes ago.
“All right,” said Fetterman. “Looks like we’ll have to go have a peek at the team house. The redoubt’s only about five feet high. Maybe we can find a spot where we can get a look over the top without having to get inside. I’d hate to be trapped in there. Can you walk okay?”
Krung nodded, and the two men eased around the POL bunker and headed for the redoubt, Krung limping slightly.
At that moment Novak would have agreed with Fetterman that the redoubt was a lousy place to be trapped in.
Trapped seemed to be a pretty good description of his situation. The VC had finally figured out which bunker he was in, and although they’d made no move yet to root him out, there were at least a couple of Charlies outside to make sure he didn’t go anywhere. He’d discovered that when he’d tried to slip out just after dark and they’d sent a couple of rifle bullets past his head, just to let him know they didn’t appreciate his trying to leave without paying the bill. There was too much moonlight for him to squeeze out either through the narrow doorway or the low firing ports without being seen, and if it had been dark enough, it would also have been dark enough for them to slip somebody up next to the bunker and chuck a couple of grenades in on top of him.
Still, Novak rationalized, it beat hell out of sitting around with his hands and feet tied, waiting for that treacherous bastard Dung to come over and kick his teeth in.
Novak was a little surprised the VC hadn’t made some sort of move by now. It wasn’t easy for him to keep watch in all the different directions they could come at him from, and he couldn’t figure out what they were waiting for.
The far-fetched idea of putting the Chinese flag on top of the dispensary had obviously worked. He’d heard the flight of Chinooks veer off from their inbound course. A couple of Hueys had come in just before and apparently landed. He assumed the crews and passengers, whoever they were, had been captured, but the main group had got the signal and broken off their landing approach, so the VC had nothing more to gain by hanging around. He just couldn’t see them trying to hold the camp. Not when Gerber could call on air and artillery fire to level the place. It made more sense for the VC to raze the camp themselves, then before morning scoot back across the border into Cambodia, where they could sit around safe in their sanctuaries and proclaim their glorious victory for the Front.
And then it dawned on Novak why the VC hadn’t come to kill him and then run away, why they were so confident they had the time to wait him out, why Gerber couldn’t bomb and shell the camp into a smoking ruin.
Hostages. Even taking into consideration all the strikers who had been killed during the attack, the VC had to be holding upward of three hundred prisoners. And something over a hundred of those would be women and children, dependents of the strikers. Plus an American journalist. A female one at that, who conveniently happened to be Gerber’s girlfriend. The American and VNAF fighter bombers and gunships could make short work of the camp and the VC in it, all right. And then the Viet Cong could turn it all into a great propaganda victory, the massacre of innocent civilians and a working member of the press by the imperialist warmongering American dogs and their Saigon puppet soldiers. The liberal Western press would love it, and no one would give a rat’s ass that the Viet Cong had been holding them all prisoner and would have executed them, anyway. Captain Gerber, wherever he was, was faced with a no-win scenario.
A flicker of movement over near the American quarters caught Novak’s eye, and he eased the safety off the M-60. So far he’d avoided shooting at any of the occasional glimpses he’d got of the VC, figuring it was best to let sleeping dogs lie as long as they weren’t making a move on him. Charlie, in turn, had reciprocated by not putting any pressure on him and by keeping clear the section of the camp’s east wall that Novak could cover with the .50-caliber Browning. There’d been some movement over by the team house earlier, but he couldn’t see what that was all about because the corner of Gerber’s hootch screened his view of the entrance to the team house.
Anyway, that had been a couple of hours ago, and nobody had tried to rush him. Except for the couple of VC he knew were out there somewhere watching the bunker’s exits, there’d been no other sign of activity inside the redoubt until now. Now it looked as if Major Dung had finally gotten tired of waiting and was making his play.
Novak laid the three hand grenades out in a row next to the machine gun, where he could reach them easily when the time came. They might have him boxed, but by Christ he’d take a few of them to hell with him.
There was another flicker of movement as someone darted across the open space between the dispensary and the ammo bunker. Novak almost fired, but it was only one man, and by the time he could swivel the M-60 to cover him, the guy was under cover again.
For a long time nothing happened. The deathly silence seemed to stretch on for hours, although Novak knew it was a matter of minutes. Then right outside the bunker door he heard a faint shuffling sound. Novak grabbed one of the grenades and pulled the pin. He hesitated, trying to decide which direction to throw it.
“Well, Lieutenant Novak,” a familiar voice said in perfect English, “are you going to sit in there all night, or are you about ready to blow this pop stand?”
“Fetterman?” asked Novak. “Is that you?”
“You know anybody else who’d be dumb enough to sneak into a whole campful of VC? Coming in.”
“Come ahead.”
Fetterman slid into the bunker.
“Lieutenant, don’t you think it might be a good idea to put the pin back in that thing before you forget and set it down somewhere?” asked Fetterman, eyeing the grenade.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Lucky I didn’t toss it.”
“I’ll say. People keep trying to kill me this evening for some reason.”
“Uh, I meant the pin. If I’d thrown it away, I wouldn’t have had anything to put back in the grenade, just have to sit here holding the thing and looking stupid. I’d never have found the pin in here.”
“Can always use a bit of safety wire or a paper clip, Lieutenant.”
“Master Sergeant, I realize this may come as a terrible shock to you, but I don’t usually run around with a bit of safety wire or a paper clip in my pockets.”
“Gee, that’s funny,” said Fetterman, “I always do. Now do you want to get out of here before the VC come and find us or not?”
“I’m sorry to break this to you, Master Sergeant, especially after you did such a fine job of slipping in here, but there’s a couple of VC outside right now,” Novak told him.
“Not anymore. Right now the only person out there alive is Staff Sergeant Krung. I’d sorta like to bug out of this place while things are still that way.” Fetterman moved toward the .50-caliber.r />
“You found Krung? He’s alive?”
“We sort of found each other by process of collision,” said Fetterman. He checked the bolt and the bolt latch release lock, pushing down on the release and turning the buffer tube sleeve to the right.
“What are you doing?” asked Novak, stuffing his pockets full of magazines and slinging the two carbines.
Fetterman used the retracting slide handle to ease the bolt forward. He pulled out on the lock and up on the latch, and lifted the back plate up and clear of the receiver. “Pulling the bolt. No sense leaving the Cong a fifty in working order, and the damned thing’s too heavy for us to take with us.”
Novak snapped the grenades into the holders on his ammunition pouches, threw a couple of belts of 7.62mm ammo over his shoulders and released the M-60 from its tripod mount. “Well, this thing isn’t too heavy. Suppose we take it.”
Fetterman glanced over his shoulder, the Browning’s driving spring rod assembly in his hand. “Fine, Lieutenant. Just so long as you carry it. Try not to rattle too much when you walk.” He put the assembly in his pocket and jerked the handle, freeing the bolt from the barrel extension, aligned the shoulder on the bolt stud with the clearance hole in the bolt slot on the right side plate and removed the bolt stud. He slid the bolt to the rear and out of the receiver, being careful not to drop the extractor, and stuffed the assembly into the side pocket of his fatigue pants. “Let’s boogie.”
They slipped out of the bunker, sprinted across the open area to the ammo bunker where they found Krung, sidled around the bunker and hopped over the wall of the redoubt on the other side.
They held there until a cloud crossed in front of the moon, partially obscuring it and reducing the light, then made their way toward the spot in the wall between the east command bunker and the Tai quarters where Fetterman had slipped through the drainage tube.
Novak had a bad moment when he spotted the striker Krung had killed and left near the tube. He swung the M-60 up, ready to fire, but Fetterman stayed his hand.
“He’s dead. Don’t worry about it.”
Novak eyed the tube skeptically. “Christ, I’ll never fit through that. It’s too small.”
“You better shrink, then, sir, because there’s no other way out of here. Give me your web gear and jacket. I’ll go feet first and pull them through behind me. Krung, you take the point.”
Krung nodded, bent the grate up and disappeared into the tube.
“Wait a minute,” said Novak as Fetterman slid into the opening. “What about Miss Morrow?”
Fetterman shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do for her right now, sir. She’s in Dung’s quarters with half a dozen guys, and there must be another dozen guards standing around the place. We try to help her, all we’re going to do is get ourselves killed.”
Novak hesitated. Clearly he didn’t like the idea.
“Really, sir. I know what you’re thinking. I don’t like it, either. But we’ll help her a lot more by getting out of here and getting our information to Captain Gerber than by trying a three-man rescue in the middle of a camp chock-full of Charlies.”
“All right. Go.”
Fetterman vanished, pulling the lieutenant’s gear with him.
Novak waited a minute to give the others time to clear the tube, then checked the safety on the M-60 and shoved it into the mouth ahead of him. He was right. It was a tight squeeze.
“Damn,” said Novak when the others hauled him out the far side. “It’s a good thing I don’t have claustrophobia.”
Fetterman held a finger to his lips and pointed down the wall to where a faint red-orange glow atop the sandbags marked the location of a bored VC sentry having a cigarette. He handed Novak his equipment, and the three men crawled down along the wall, beneath the VC sentry and out along the cleared path into the minefield.
CHAPTER 11
OUTSIDE U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES CAMP A-555
Kepler touched Gerber’s arm, and he instantly awoke. He didn’t speak or move, nothing that might give their position away, but simply touched Kepler’s hand in acknowledgment and waited for the Intel sergeant to fill him in on the situation.
“Movement out there in the grass, Captain,” Kepler whispered. “About seventy meters off to the right, say two o’clock.”
Gerber rolled into position, readying his rifle, and scanned the elephant grass. “You get a count?” he asked softly.
“Hard to tell. Could be one man or a dozen.”
Gerber checked his watch. Nearly three hours had passed since he’d closed his eyes. “Fetterman’s overdue. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“These things take time, Captain. You can’t run a recon into a hostile camp by the stopwatch. I’d have awakened you in a few more minutes. Besides, I figured you needed the rest.”
“You were right about that.” It gave Gerber a funny feeling to hear Kepler refer to the camp, his camp, as a hostile one, but the Intelligence sergeant was right about that. Or at least probably right. They wouldn’t know for sure until Fetterman got back.
The silence stretched for several minutes, and then Gerber heard just about the last sound he had expected to hear coming from a sea of elephant grass in South Vietnam, the barking of a squirrel. He answered it at once with the call of an owl.
The familiar deep voice that always seemed too big to come from such a small body called softly from the grass. “Fetterman coming in. I’ve got Krung and the lieutenant with me.”
“Come ahead.” Gerber wondered where he’d found Krung and Novak.
The three men rose cautiously from the grass and moved forward. Gerber couldn’t distinguish Krung from Fetterman by their silhouettes, but there was no mistaking the giant hulking outline of Novak.
“Lieutenant. Good to see you again.” He noticed all the heavy hardware Novak was carrying. “Christ, Novak, I thought I told you not to pull any John Wayne stunts. What is all that shit?”
Novak started to protest, then realized Gerber was ribbing him. “Yes, sir. That’s why I brought the machine gun, sir. I’m doing Audie Murphy instead.”
“Murphy never lost an A-Camp,” Gerber reminded him.
“Yes, sir. I am sorry about that, sir. I’m afraid I got caught napping, and by the time I woke up to what was going on, Major Dung had a .45 stuck in my face. It didn’t seem like a good idea to argue at the time.”
“Major Dung?”
“Yes, sir. He seems to prefer his NLF rank to the one Saigon gave him.”
“Apparently you didn’t enjoy his company, however.”
“No, sir. I managed to give my guards the slip.”
“That must have been a bit tricky.”
“No trick at all, sir, once they were dead.”
Gerber’s opinion of his new executive officer immediately went up several notches. “Well done, Lieutenant.”
“Sir, I did lose the camp,” said Novak.
“Was there anything you could have done to prevent its loss?”
“No, sir,” Novak answered immediately. “The Vietnamese strike force was heavily infiltrated. They hit us from inside and out simultaneously. I tried to get to the command post so I could blow the bunkers on the west wall and radio for help, but Dung was waiting for me.”
“Does he know about the destruct charges?”
“I don’t think so, sir. If he had, he wouldn’t have infiltrated his people into all the key positions on the west wall. He’d just have taken the command post and blown the bunkers when the VC stormed the wall. My guess is he put the commo bunker out of commission and seized the command post because the backup UHF was there. I’m glad you got my message, sir.”
“You’re responsible for the flag on the roof of the dispensary, then?”
“Yes, sir,” said Novak, pulling out the NLF flag. “I was going to use this one, but the Chinese flag was bigger. I only had a couple of minutes before they found out I was missing, and it was all I could think of to try at the time.”
“You ge
t an A for inventiveness, Lieutenant. Where’d you get the flag?”
“Dung had it. I heard him tell one of the VC he’d promised a friend of his it would fly over our camp.”
Gerber felt suddenly cold. It was like a monster from some Vincent Price horror movie that wouldn’t die. Almost afraid to, he asked, “Are there any Chinese in the camp?”
“I didn’t see any, sir. I got the impression that Dung was doing it as a sort of favor or honor for someone who wasn’t there.”
Gerber breathed a ragged sigh of relief.
“That checks with what Sergeant Krung observed,” offered Fetterman. “He says he saw a couple of NVA officer types, maybe advisors or political cadre, but no NVA troops and no Chinese.”
Gerber turned to Fetterman. “All right, Master Sergeant, make your report.”
“Yes, sir. I crossed the minefield without incident using the E and E route and entered the camp through a drainage culvert south of the command bunker on the west wall. I then reconned the Tai compound and found heavy damage to several of the barracks and civilian quarters there. A thorough reconnaissance was impossible due to the presence of many VC troops in the area, mostly in the civilian quarters. Some of the enemy troops were dressed as strikers, but had a red armband about the left arm, presumably to identify them from the real strikers. The rest were mostly in green uniforms, indicating they were part of a Main Force unit, although some local guerrillas were present, as evidenced by their black pajamas or shorts. After that I crossed the runway and reconned the Vietnamese compound.”
“How did you cross the runway?” Gerber interrupted.
“I took an armband from a dead striker and just walked across. Security is pretty lax in there, sir. The key crew-served weapons bunkers are manned, but there aren’t many men on the walls. A lot of them are, uh, well, partying with the civilians, if you take my meaning, sir.”
“All right.” Gerber nodded. “Continue.”
“Yes, sir. I searched the Vietnamese compound. Once again a thorough reconnaissance was impossible due to the large number of VC present. They seem to be holding prisoners in several of the Vietnamese barracks. After that I crossed back across the runway at the north end and checked out those two Hueys.”