New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  The boy could’ve been thirteen, though maybe younger. He sat in front of a burned hut. He had black hair and brown skin. He was drawing strange patterns in the dirt: intersecting lines, concentric circles, odd looping scrolls.

  “The hell’s he doing?” Gunner said.

  The boy didn’t look at the men. His fingers continued to describe weird shapes and configurations in the loose red earth. The men searched the wreckage but there wasn’t much to find. Zippo and Crosshairs dragged the burned man into some bushes and wrapped him in an old blanket. The boy drew more, his canvas spreading and growing; sometimes he smiled to himself, sometimes frowned.

  “Why’s he doing that?” Gunner said.

  “It doesn’t matter why, son,” Oddy said. “He just is.”

  Answer stepped past the boy, into the burned hut. “In here,” he said. The men went in and saw the bodies. An infant and an older woman and a younger woman. They were all badly burned and there must’ve been something wrong with the old woman’s legs because she was still sitting. She must’ve sat all the while, even as the flames consumed her.

  When the men dragged the bodies out, the boy kept drawing. In fact, he drew a bit quicker. He placed the palms of his hands against his ears, then over his eyes, then his mouth, each one in time, then went back to his odd task. His limbs were very graceful, his body tight and limber. What was he drawing; what was he trying to say?

  “The fuck’s he doing?” Gunner said.

  Tripwire offered the boy some M&Ms, which he usually saved for badly injured soldiers. The boy wouldn’t look at him. Tripwire scattered some candy on the ground near his legs, over the strange things he’d drawn. They looked very colorful against the brown earth and black soot. “C’mon,” he said softly. “Try them.” The boy traced circles around each M&M: a dozen multicolored eyes peering up from the ground.

  The men wrapped the burned bodies in blankets and fronds. There was nothing more they could do. “Let’s diddlybop,” Oddy said. The unit moved out. Zippo looked over his shoulder. The boy was still drawing, grinning, alone in the still-smoking hamlet.

  They marched for another hour and reached a bamboo thicket. Slash removed a machete from his utility belt and set to work cutting through it. The thicket terminated on the ridge of a deep, wide valley spread with breadfruit and other dark-leafed trees.

  “Hunker down,” Oddy said. “Chow.”

  The men unshouldered their packs. Zippo cleared a spot in the wet earth, lit a cube of incendiary C4, and set a pot of water atop the smokeless flames. They boiled rice and mixed it with tinned beef, Spam, or whatever c-rations they had. None of them could cook worth a shit and their dishes possessed all the flavor of wet napkins.

  “Tastes like ripe ass,” Gunner said.

  “What would you know?” Crosshairs said. “All the amphetamines you been jamming, I’d be surprised you got a tastebud left in your head.”

  “Gotta stay sharp.”

  Oddy slapped Gunner on the shoulder and said, “Keep jamming on those little pink pills and you’re gonna wind up sharp as a balloon.”

  The soldiers ate in defiance of the food’s flavor, needing the nourishment. Nobody talked about the dancing boy. Best to forget and move on. Memories like that didn’t do anyone any good.

  Afterwards, Crosshairs produced a deck of cards from his helmet’s webbing and he and Slash played poker by the light of the dying sun. Gunner and Zippo leaned together against a shattered tree trunk and talked of the haunts they would frequent on their next visit to Ho Chi Minh City, which whores they intended to fuck, and in which orifices. Answer sat on a decomposing stump far from the others. Oddy and Tripwire crouched near the valley ridge, smoking Luckies.

  “How far you think we got to go before hitting this village, Sarge?”

  “The Viet told Answer what—ten, twelve klicks?” Oddy said. “Getting close.”

  Tripwire said, “You think he might’ve been lying?”

  “You remember anyone feeding Answer a lie?”

  Tripwire chewed on it for a moment before saying, “I guess not, no.”

  “Boy could make Satan himself roll over.”

  Oddy lit a fresh Lucky off the butt of the last and passed the pack to Tripwire.

  “Does it make sense to you?” Tripwire said. “VC stockpiling arms in a pissant village miles from the hot zones?”

  Oddy rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Not to get overly philosophical, son, but nothing about this conflict has ever made much sense.”

  Tripwire nodded. It was all he could do when Oddy got in this frame of mind. “Logistically, though, it’s a mindfuck. Transporting the weapons alone…”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Oddy said. “Very un-Charlie. Then again, he’s always doing what’s least anticipated, uh?”

  They sat in silence, staring out over the Vietnamese landscape. Lush and vibrant, the valley’s green canopy etched in ebbing sunlight, the sky now a dull orange, a lingering band of copper tracing the Earth’s curve. The knowledge that he could call an airstrike and destroy acre upon acre of this beautiful countryside filled Oddy with a gnawing melancholy.

  Then, deep in the valley heart, a flash of light.

  “Gunner,” Oddy said. “Toss me your specs.”

  Gunner retrieved a pair of Bushnell high-powered binoculars and handed them to Oddy. “See something, Sarge?”

  Oddy put the binoculars to his eyes. The rest of the unit made their way over to the ridge. They squinted down into the valley, trying to spot what had twigged their Sergeant.

  “The village is down there,” Oddy said. “Almost missed it.”

  He handed the binoculars to Tripwire and pointed out the village’s location. It was about one-thousand yards down-slope, in the base of the valley. A small circle of thatched huts, two outlying longhouses, a central fire pit. It seemed to be deserted: the fire remained unlit despite the evening’s chill, no smoke rose through the vents in the huts, nobody congregated in the village proper.

  “Where is everyone?” Tripwire asked.

  Oddy shrugged. “Could they be in one of the longhouses?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Crosshairs, give it a boo.”

  Crosshairs retrieved his sniper rifle, its Gewher scope much more powerful than the binoculars. “Nothing,” he said, scanning the village. “They could be inside, but…sitting in the dark?”

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” Zippo said.

  “Maybe they got their wind up,” Answer said. “They know we’re coming.”

  They retreated from the ridge. The soldiers took a knee, waiting on Oddy’s decision. Whatever choice he made, they would obey. Not out of fear or responsibility, but out of a deep and enduring respect. Even Zippo and Gunner, who hailed from states in which people of Oddy’s complexion were once lynched and still treated as second-class citizens, accorded Oddy their undying loyalty.

  “We could wait for daylight,” Oddy said. “But we operate best at night. Up to it?”

  Six heads nodded steadily.

  “Okay.” Oddy sketched a diagram in the dirt. “Zippo, Slash, Answer, I want you to flank around the village and set up on the far side. Gunner, Tripwire, Crosshairs, and I will move down the valley and string out along the near side. You boys on the far side, position yourselves to the left of the longhouses, we’ll take the right. That’ll prevent any crossfire. Wait for my signal before moving in.” He removed a Mossberg pump-action shotgun from his pack and said, “Gear up.”

  Crosshairs loaded a fresh clip into his G3SG/1 sniper rifle while Zippo checked the jellied-fuel in his flame-thrower’s dual tanks. Slash strapped a bandolier of fragmentation grenades across his chest. Tripwire filled the pockets of his combat jacket with explosives, blasting caps, insulated wire, and a detonating plunger. He sang his standard pre-combat melody: “My Boyfriend’s Back,” by The Angels.

  “That’s a fag-song,” Gunner said, rolling a lambskin condom over the barrel
of his Stoner M63A1 light machine-gun.

  “Hey-la, hey-la, my boyfriend’s back,” Tripwire sang, blowing Gunner a kiss. The burly Iowa native flipped him the bird.

  Answer smeared black Kiwi shoe polish on his face and hands and slammed a clip into his M16. The Magnificent Seven were ready to rock and roll.

  “Flanking team,” Oddy said, “take as wide a berth around the village as you can. I’d like to be in position while there’s some daylight left. You dig?”

  “We dig,” Zippo said.

  “So let’s do it to it.”

  Zippo, Answer, and Slash disappeared down the slope. Oddy gave them fifteen minutes before leading the remaining team members down a winding speed trail into the valley basin. Underneath the jungle canopy, everything was tinted chlorophyll-green. To his left, perhaps three-hundred meters, Oddy heard swift-running water. He asked Gunner for the acetate-covered map and unfolded it across the machine-gunner’s broad back.

  “That’s a major waterway,” he said. “A tributary of the Song-Hu river, wide and deep enough to support boat traffic.”

  “Think that’s how the weapons are being transported?” Gunner asked.

  “Could be,” Oddy said. “I thought they’d be air-dropped or slogged in on foot but—”

  “Charlie’s always doing what’s least expected,” Tripwire said.

  It was a sketchy situation, an ambush waiting to happen. Charlie, you fucking snake, Oddy thought, What are you up to? A B-52 Bomber passed low overhead, the force generated from its six engines vibrating the soldier’s bodies. Something in the Sergeant, a subconscious twinge, told him to pull back and assess the situation. But his conscious mind assured him the men were amped-up and raring to engage. He folded the map and tucked it into Gunner’s pack.

  “Can’t be far now.”

  The village appeared through a gap in the foliage. In the gathering dusk, the huts cast long shadows, their outer walls stained with dark slashes that could have been oil, or river mud, or blood. Embers shimmered in the firepit and pots were ranged on the hot rocks. The longhouses stood in darkness, not a hint of movement from within. It was as if the villagers had grown weary of their location and elected to abandon their homes, a mass exodus, leaving their possessions behind.

  Either that, or someone—something—had beaten them to the punch.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Crosshairs said.

  “On a nature hike?” Gunner said. He wasn’t smiling.

  Tripwire whispered, “Bad mojo, Mogumbo.”

  Oddy set the binoculars on the bridge of his nose and surveyed the left flank of the far longhouse. He whistled shrilly, the sound a fair replication of a jungle bird’s call. A reply came from the tree line behind the far longhouse. “They’re in position.”

  “Something’s righteously fucked here, Sarge.” The note of apprehension in Tripwire’s voice was jarring. “You think they’re waiting inside the huts—armed?”

  They’d all heard horror stories of headstrong units charging into seemingly safe situations only to be surrounded and torn to shreds by disguised enemy troops, or sometimes even villagers with single-shot Chinese rifles and pitchforks.

  “Give it a few minutes,” Oddy said. “We got nothing but time.”

  A massive raven settled to roost on the peaked roof of the central hut. It preened itself with a hooked beak, digging ticks and other parasites from its molting plumage. The walls of the hut rattled. The startled raven took flight, leaving a drift of black feathers on the thatched roof. A smell wafted across the village grounds to where the soldiers were hunkered.

  “Jesus,” Crosshairs gagged. “The fuck is that?”

  Nobody could liken it to anything they had ever smelled before—except Gunner, who, as a teen, had worked in his uncle’s hog-butchering pen. The smell reminded him of standing above a vat of rendering hog fat, the fumes thick enough to achieve a nauseating, buttery physicality beyond mere scent, forcing itself to be felt and tasted.

  “Something’s not kosher here.” Oddy’s extremities had gone numb for some unexplained reason. “So we’ll sit tight and see what happens.”

  The sound of a choppy motor in the distance. It was near dark, and Oddy had to squint through the binoculars as he focused on the waterline. A pair of NVA gunboats beached on the sandy shore. Soldiers offloaded long wooden crates.

  “We got company,” Oddy said. “Ten-twelve NVA with a shitload of crated firepower.”

  The Viet soldiers made their way up the gradual grade leading from the shore to the village. Two-man teams carried crates on their shoulders, or by the hemp handles hung on each side. Their cigarette tips bobbed in the darkness, easy targets for Crosshairs or any member of Team Blackjack, all competent marksmen. Their officer, identified by his yellow armband, called out. When nobody answered, he ordered his men to search the huts. Soldiers entered and exited two huts without incident. Then they entered the third, central hut.

  And all hell broke loose.

  The soldier’s screams were unlike anything Team Blackjack had ever heard: high and blood-curdling, the screams of small children caught in savage traps. Pieces of meat spewed out of the hut’s tombstone-shaped entryway, resembling wet rags or scraps of fat.

  More screams. This time they were worse. Much worse. They wailed out and out, as if the soldiers’ lungs had been soaked in napalm and lit.

  The remaining Viet soldiers were of two minds: some of them drew their weapons and stood firm, while others fled towards the boats. Another sound emanated from the darkened hut: the sound of giant, clattering teeth, or threshing steel gears.

  The NVA officer detonated a percussion grenade and rolled it through the entryway. It exploded in a starburst of white light and Oddy saw, for the briefest second, shapes hanging from the hut ceiling.

  Long slack shapes. Muscle-corded and tendon-strung shapes. Bright red shapes.

  A soldier was thrust from the doorway. He appeared uninjured until he spun in a drunken circle to reveal the flayed tableau of his back, spine torn down to the hipbone, hanging between his legs like a freakish segmented tail. He toppled forward into the fire pit, dead before the embers began to sear his flesh.

  Oddy wasn’t sure who the enemy was anymore.

  Charlie was a savage motherfucker.

  But at least he was human.

  The NVA officer pulled his .38 service revolver and aimed it at the entryway. He squeezed off a shot, knowing his men were dead, not knowing who or what had killed them. The gunshot echoed into silence. Oddy waited, poised, listening.

  A pair of eyes, blood-red, stared from the blackened hut.

  There was nothing human in those eyes. Nothing at all.

  For the first time ever, The Magnificent Seven were in way, way over their heads.

  — | — | —

  Excerpted from the Slave River Journal,

  April 12th, 1986:

  Search and Rescue Team Sent to Find

  DNR Researchers Now Missing

  “Nothing to Worry About,”

  — RCMP’s Spokesman Says

  By Michael Fulton

  Fort Simpson, NWT: A ten-man search and rescue team headed by Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski, the elite RCMP tracker, have gone missing in the area surrounding Great Bear Lake. Communication between the search and rescue team and their base of operations ceased on April 10th at 3:30 a.m., and no further contact has passed. The team, sent to find three-member Department of Natural Resources research crew of Carl Rosenberg, Bill Myers, and Lillian Hapley, had been checking in at three-hour intervals.

  “There is nothing to worry about,” cautioned RCMP spokesman Sid Grimes at a hastily-held news conference. “The magnetic pull of the poles is strong up there, and has probably fouled up their communication link. I have the utmost confidence that Mr. Rabidowski’s team is safe, and will be in contact soon.”

  In the meantime, another ten-man team is being put together to search out Rabidowski’s missing crew. The new team, headed by Earl Trigge
rs, will follow in the missing team’s footsteps, and hopefully find clues as to…

  — | — | —

  III.

  Reconnoiter

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

  December 5th, 1987. 4:05 p.m.

  Oddy Grant acknowledged the stewardess’s chirpy “Enjoy your stay in Toronto,” with a sober nod, then moved down the tube connecting the Douglas DC-9 to the main concourse. Snow pelted the tube’s shell, which swayed slightly with the wind. An overweight Canada Customs agent with a beery face and shellacked hair gave his passport a cursory glance while an equally obese agent inspected the contents of his duffel bag.