And who were those guys caught in the middle of the massive nonstop barrage?
“They might be what’s left of an infantry outfit called the JF Group,” Seth Jones said after studying the broadcast for a few minutes. “They were lost in Indochina about two months ago—went down there to do some jungle-fighting job. Some rinky-dink thing and never came back.”
Dave Jones agreed with his brother. “I can’t recall exactly,” he said. “But I remember talking to some airlift guys back at the Pit who said they’d dropped supplies to a jungle-fighting unit and that they were in a hole in ’Nam getting their asses shot to pieces. Looks like JFG got caught out in the open, and that whoever controls those hills are playing with them—like a cat with a rat.”
Y sipped his brandy and pushed a button that gave them a fuzzy yet close-up view of the battlefield.
“Well, they’re not having a good day, that’s for sure,” he said. “But does this really affect us?”
The Jones boys just shrugged in unison.
“It’s where the V-man made his mark on the map,” Dave Jones said.
“So that’s where you want to go, right?” Seth Jones added.
Y just shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, I’m hardly an expert,” he said. “I mean how accurate is the burning finger of a ghost?”
“Very accurate in this case,” Zoltan suddenly piped up.
They all turned toward the psychic. There was some eye rolling in the process.
“I’m getting a very heavy vibe from this,” he was saying, reaching out and actually touching the TV screen. “Something we are seeking is there … or may have been there.”
The Jones boys joined Crabb and Y in a staring contest with the ceiling.
“‘Is’ there?” Y asked. “Or ‘was’ there? It’s a big difference….”
“Like the difference between getting involved in that mess, or moving on,” Crabb said.
Zoltan just shook his head. “I can’t tell,” he admitted after a few moments. “Something heavy was there. And might still be. The vibe remains. But what it is … I just can’t tell.”
“Well, let’s look at this logically,” Seth Jones said, nodding toward Zoltan. “If that’s not verboten?”
Zoltan nodded back. “By all means ….”
The Jones brother set the broadcast to slow frame—essentially freezing it.
“We are looking for the biggest muthafucker of a jet bomber ever made, correct?”
Those assembled nodded. Y sipped his brandy again and wondered what Emma would be wearing once he got back to his cabin.
“Well?” Seth Jones said. “Anyone see a plane anywhere in that picture?”
The unanimous answer was no—what they were seeing was a devastated valley with thickly jungled hills surrounding it. There was not an iota of evidence that the huge bomber had been there, had crashed there, or had even flown over the place. There was a runway in the middle of the valley, and it was fairly long. But it was also horribly cratered.
However, there was another geological formation nearby. It was a huge mountain. And that’s where Zoltan was now concentrating.
“Inside there …,” he said. “Something we want is inside that mountain.”
They all turned back to the screen. Y pushed a button and now they were looking at a close-up of the mountain. It was big—and if there was a cave inside, there was an outside possibility that the huge bomber could have fit inside. But this seemed as unlikely as the bizarre battle that was going on nearby.
But bizarre was the name of this story. Plus those crammed into the small combat-planning center had before them two supernatural clues: the hole in the map and Zoltan’s wobbling brain. Both pointed to this little bloody smudge called Long Bat.
One Jones boy just looked at the other, then they turned to Y, who was refilling his brandy glass and dreaming of Emma. Had he been more sober, he would have been dazed by the fact of how talk of going into a distant valley like Long Bat, and helping out a surrounded unit of hapless mercenaries, seemed so familiar to him.
But he was not sober.
“How close are we to Tonkin?” Seth Jones asked him.
Y scrambled to push the right buttons on his navigation screen in order to project the correct image of their progress at sea.
“If I’m reading this correctly,” he said, hoping indeed that he was, “I see us in the Gulf about six and a half hours from right now. About oh-seven-hundred hours.”
The twins got up, straightened out their flight suits in an identical manner, and put on their flight caps.
“OK,” Dave said. “We’ll leave at oh-five-hundred ….”
CHAPTER 17
THERE WERE SO MANY high-explosive mortar shells landing on the valley of Long Bat this morning, the combination of the flames and fumes was being sucked up into a convex of winds that created a huge mushroom-shaped cloud.
The besieged mercenaries had dug deeper this dawn than any of the previous twenty-five; it seemed the shells being used by the unseen enemy in the hills were packing more of an explosive wallop on this nightmarish morning. Every time a shell landed lately, it seemed to shake the ground with more terror; the flame and flash from each explosion seemed brighter, and the resulting craters seemed deeper.
Forty-five of the mercs had died during the night—the highest one-day toll since the first week of the nearly month-long siege. There were only 623 mercs left now. At this rate, they would all be gone in less than two weeks.
It was strange, then, when even above the sound of shells crashing every few seconds, the embattled mercs heard yet another sound. It was a high-pitched, slightly mechanical whine that was not as distinct as the double-reaction jet engines of the day.
Those mercs who dared, crawled out of their rat holes for a few seconds, and ducking the blizzard of shrapnel, looked skyward in search of what was making the odd sound.
Then a few saw it. It was a small aircraft flying very high above the desolated cratered valley. It was gray and green and looked like a gigantic bug ….
There was a headquarters of sorts for the mercs’ position.
It was a command post made of sandbags and concrete chunks and old shattered timber, dug twenty feet into the battered bloodstained earth. Inside was the CO of the merc brigade, a Frenchman named Jean Zouvette LaFeet.
He was beside his bunk, on his knees, praying—a position he could be found in up to twenty-three hours a day—when two merc messengers toppled into the command bunker.
“Sir,” one cried. “A development of which you should be aware.”
LaFeet turned and smiled at them. He was quite mad by this time—and had spent the last few hours or so believing that he was the only one left at Long Bat and that the unseen enemy in the hills would soon attack, and all five thousand of them would take turns bayoneting his dying but not yet dead body.
How long would it take for him to die in such a horrible manner? One hour? Two? Ten?
It was things of this nature that LaFeet prayed constantly to avoid.
Now he looked up at the two mercs, and the smile faded from his face. If there was only three of them here, that meant it would take three times longer for the enemy in the hills to finally do their savage work on them.
LaFeet then planned to ask the two men to shoot each other, so he would be the last one here and then the bayoneting he was expecting would take only the three or four hours he’d prayed for.
But the looks of their faces stopped the words from coming out of LaFeet’s mouth. These two men. Their eyes appeared a little less vacant. And there was, dare he say it, something more than hopelessness etched in the creases of their dirty brows.
“A development?” LaFeet asked them, rising from his knees for the first time since early the previous evening. “What kind of development?”
“There is an aircraft overflying our position,” one reported. “It is hovering actually. It’s been there for quite a while.”
It took a few moments for t
his news to sink into LaFeet’s addled brain. “What kind of aircraft?” he asked.
“It appears to be a jetcopter,” the other merc said. “What some people call Bugs.”
LaFeet stretched his creaky legs—his pants had holes right where his knees were.
“Does it belong to the enemy?” he asked.
The two mercs shrugged. “We don’t know,” one finally replied. “But that might be unlikely. The enemy has never displayed any sort of air assets before.”
LaFeet nodded—this was true.
“It seems to be waiting for something,” the other merc said. “Perhaps a signal from us that it is allowed to land.”
LaFeet felt his eyes open a bit wider.
“You mean a supply drop?” he asked. “I thought that …”
The two mercs were shaking their heads vigorously.
“No, sir,” one said forcefully. “This is not a supply plane. They might want something else.”
LaFeet stared at the holes in his knees for a second. What else had he been praying for? He couldn’t recall.
“Well, if that’s the case …,” he started to mumble.
But the two soldiers didn’t even wait for the end of his sentence. They were quickly scrambling out of the bunker, running along the deep trench to the remains of what was once the unit’s supply bunker. Here they found the last electrical torch in the unit’s possession. They turned it on and looked skyward again and were heartened to see the strange aircraft still hovering about five thousand feet above their position.
The two mercs began flashing the beacon madly. It took awhile, but then finally they saw the strange green flying machine start to descend into the nonstop mortar barrage.
Ten minutes later the Jones boys were being escorted into LaFeet’s command bunker.
The AirCat commanders had seen a lot of combat sites in their time, but nothing compared to the situation at Long Bat.
The scramble-in through the trenches after their hair-raising yet successful landing was graphic enough: Destroyed equipment. Caved-in gun positions. Dozens of skeletons, some picked clean by the myriad of insects infesting the valley, still at their positions, their weapons still raised. Warriors in a ghost war, waiting for that one last charge.
If anything, LaFeet’s place was even more depressing. It, too, was overflowing with insects; the walls were moving with them—patiently waiting to consume the bunker’s last occupant.
The Jones boys snapped to attention and saluted LaFeet, even though they outranked him. LaFeet returned the salute as crisply as possible. Then he asked the two men to sit down.
The rain of mortar shells outside was frequent; the noise blurred into one long, loud drone. LaFeet pulled his chair close to the two men. He had to yell to be heard. “What brings you here?” he asked them.
“We are here to save you,” Seth Jones replied.
“Save us?” LaFeet asked. “From what? We are holding our position here quite well.”
Both men contemplated LaFeet for a moment—they didn’t have time to go into any psychotherapy at the moment.
“OK, we are here to assist you in your current situation,” Dave Jones told him. “How can we best do that?”
LaFeet’s face brightened considerably.
“Well, I have a theory on how we can defeat these savages in the hills,” he began.
“Let’s hear it,” Seth Jones said.
LaFeet looked off in the distance for a moment, collecting whatever thoughts he had left in his head.
“Well, I think what we should do is fly three hundred miles to the north,” LaFeet said.
The Jones boys just stared at each other. “What?”
“And bomb the Bank of Hanoi,” LaFeet replied.
The Jones boys were baffled.
“You see,” LaFeet went on, “I believe that if we could just bomb the place where the money is held, from which these soldiers in the hills draw their pay, then their command structure will go bankrupt. Then it will trickle down the ranks until these bastards realize they’re not getting any money and then they’ll all go away and we can leave here with some dignity ….”
The Jones boys had no time for this.
They got up, and Dave put a heavy hand on LaFeet’s shoulder.
“Look, pops,” he began. “We ain’t got time for this. Now we’re going to run an air strike on this place. You dig? So get your men down deeper than they’ve ever been before and then just stay the hell out of the way until you hear from us again … OK?”
With that, they left.
The monsoon moved in over Long Bat early that afternoon.
The thunder seemed louder, the lightning more brilliant, and the rains more torrential.
It was a rare day when the firing from the hills stopped just because of a rainstorm. But that’s what happened this day.
Actually, the mortar barrage continued throughout most of the downpour—it was only after it appeared that the skies were clearing, that a halt came in the bombing.
Those mercs still alive peeked out of their trenches and rat holes and looked about. Why had the mortars stopped? Was this the long-anticipated ground attack they’d been dreading?
They peered into the hills and saw something very strange—there were muzzle flashes popping up here and there. But they were not pointing toward the embattled merc positions. Instead, they were pointing straight up into the air.
And then the other sound came ….
To the men in the trenches, it was a low droning at first—the sound of thunder, evened out and higher in pitch. It turned mechanical as quickly as the wind shifted direction. And now the last of the monsoon clouds were blown away.
And that’s when they saw it. Way, way up. At around 25,000 feet at least.
But coming down very quickly.
“What was I thinking?”
That was the question going through Y’s mind for at least the millionth time.
He was strapped into the reserve bombardier’s seat of the aptly named HellJet dive-bomber. There were six separate belts holding him in place. The huge jet was at the moment pointing absolutely nosedown. The ground was rushing up at him in a blur of green and yellow. The green from the jungle, the yellow from the small storm of antiaircraft fire they would soon enter.
Y was smiling—it was not from happiness, though. He estimated in his extremely anxious brain that he was feeling as many as eight g’s in this plunge. The airplane itself was rattling like a bucket of bolts. The pilots were grim, determined—it was obvious they had done this type of thing many times before.
In the bomb bay were no less than thirty thousand pounds of VHE/S—very high explosive/shrapnel. These killers were, as their name implied, a double whammy of high-explosive gasoline jelly in which thousands of tiny, jagged stainless-steel shards were suspended. When a VHE/S bomb exploded, the flame would wash over an area the size of a football field. Then the bits of metal were dispersed over an area ten times that size. In other words, anyone or anything within a half mile of one bomb blast was either incinerated or perforated. Ghosts who had died this way reported the preferred way to go was by flame ….
There were now thirty of these bombs in the belly of the diving HellJet.
They were passing through twenty-thousand feet at the moment. Their airspeed was an astounding 760 knots—way past the speed of sound and indeed, the terrain all around Long Bat was literally shuddering with repeated sonic booms.
Y knew actually their airspeed and the altitude because his eyes were fixed on the auxiliary bombardier’s control panels, where the devilish numbers were clicking off in maddening precision. The faster they fell, the higher their airspeed. Y’s grin only increased. He believed his bones were beginning to crack.
What was he thinking when he agreed to come on this most insane bombing run?
He wasn’t sure. In fact, the only thing he was sure of at this point was that he needed a drink.
Very badly …
To the mercs in th
e trenches—those who dared to look out of their hiding spots—the sight of the huge dive-bomber coming out of the retreating monsoon clouds seemed like a nightmare.
The HellJet was five times the size of a Mitchell B-25 bomber; its four jets screamed like banshees. It was dropping so fast there was a massive vapor trail following it down. Indeed, not knowing the intricacies of heavy dive-bombing techniques, the mercs were certain that this massive bomber was crashing. The only good part of this impending disaster was that it appeared the airplane was going to impact on the hills to the east, and not on the moonlike plain of Long Bat itself.
But then, just as the airplane passed through four thousand feet, huge extra flaps were seen rising from the trailing edge of its long extended wings. At this point the airplane seemed to come to a stop in midair. In the next microsecond, its bomb-bay doors opened. A second later thirty very black needle-nose bombs began falling out of the airplane’s belly. Another second passed, and the engines began screaming in an even higher pitch. The air itself began shuddering. The last sonic boom was deafening. The vapor trail caught the airplane, obscuring it for a few seconds, causing the mercs to lose sight of it for a few moments. When the fog cleared, they were amazed to see the airplane had somehow leveled off, and with a massive jolt of double-reaction power, was leaving the area at high speed toward the west.
The bombs hit three seconds later. They impacted on the side of the largest eastern hill, right on a spot that the mercs knew held a concentration of the mortar batteries. It was very strange because the witnesses thought they were imagining things. One second the hill was there. The next, it was gone. There was nothing left but a smoking hole with a crown of flames spreading out from it, like ripples caused by a rock dropped into a pond.
The storm of shrapnel came next. It was like horizontal rain. And it was only the quickness of the mercs, who fell facedown in their hiding places and let the flaming metal wave pass over them, that saved their lives.
Then there was nothing but silence. The hill looked like a volcano had suddenly broken free. The smoke from the thirty thousand pounds of bombs exploding rose like a mushroom cloud, much bigger than the one created by the nonstop mortar barrage earlier that day.
Tomorrow War Page 10
