by Ted Wood
I stood and thought it all through, working out my plan. The first consideration was their perimeter defense system. If they were serious about teaching these guys how to fight, they would have set up trip wires and booby traps around their camp. Maybe they would even have explosives wired up, something to get their people used to the nerve-shattering noise that's a part of every contact with the enemy. It wasn't likely they'd be using claymore mines. They didn't want their recruits dead, just smarter. But even a nonlethal charge would be fatal to me if I set one off. They would be all over me like a cheap suit.
In the end I did the wise thing. I waited, hidden among the thickest part of the brush that I could worm my way into. First I went back to the water's edge and drank my fill. Then I snake-crawled under the brush and lay there waiting for daylight. Slowly I let myself relax, and finally, in spite of my intentions, I slipped off into sleep.
Reveille came a little before dawn. Not a bugle call but a sudden explosion of gunfire and shouts. I jolted awake and lay listening, checking the direction and distance. A quarter mile on, I judged, at the apex of the lake. I sat up, resting my back against a tree trunk, and listened to the male roaring. It sounded like Wallace cursing out some recruit.
"You're dead, asshole," he shouted. "If I was the enemy, you'd have holes through your head. Where's your weapon?" Familiar sounds to anybody who has ever been through military training. The recruit must have tried to answer, but he was shouted down, and then a chorus of voices rose in a chant that made my hair prickle. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" they shouted like good little robots, and then changed it to a formless roaring as they ran for thirty seconds, which ended when the lake exploded with activity as they hurled themselves into the water.
I edged out of my hidey-hole and went to the water's edge to look at them. Eighteen men in the water, two on the rock. They were too far away for me to make out faces, but one of the men on the rock had a swagger stick under his arm and colorless hair. The other one was bending from the waist, shouting and clapping his hands like a swimming coach, swearing at the swimmers. Wallace, I guessed, with Dunphy playing his role of colonel.
Wallace kept them in the water for ten minutes, letting them out and ordering them back in three times before he formed them into two ranks and doubled them away over the rocks and back to their camp.
It was my cue to move. I figured they would be eating breakfast, shaving and hitting the latrine for the next twenty minutes. After that it would be soldier games that could send them out into the bush. If I moved now, I could be close enough to check which way they went and even to see which was young Michaels's hooch. I took out a few biscuits for breakfast, then moved up the side of the lake, gnawing as I went.
The trees opened up as I approached the head of the lake. It was difficult to stay in complete cover, but I kept low and moved from tree to tree as carefully as ever I had done in 'Nam. In one way the terrain favored me. The duff was a thick brown carpet. If anybody had grubbed down through it to dig a foxhole in the sand underneath, they would have thrown up a gray pile that would have stood out like a flower bed in the middle of a living-room rug. Another factor in my favor was timing. The recruits would not be looking for outsiders. Even this early in their training they would know that the only person out to ambush them was Wallace. At this moment, breakfast time, they would be relaxed, thinking he was getting his chow. But I kept my eyes wide open for booby traps. I'd seen my share of them in 'Nam and avoided them all. I wasn't about to make any mistakes now.
At last I saw them, and I was impressed. About eighty yards ahead, on a slight rise among the trees, there was a cluster of hooches, one-man shelters made from militarystyle ponchos strung over poles, about eighteen inches high, each protected by a twelve-inch pile of loose rock stacked around it. Wallace hadn't made them dig foxholes. It was impossible where they were sited because of the rock. Instead, they were camped high, but blending into the background. If I hadn't been searching carefully, I might have passed them by without seeing them. I stopped to unroll the hood of my combat jacket and throw it up over my head, lacing it loosely at the throat. Then I went forward, keeping an even closer lookout for wires.
The first one was about ten yards on, strung a few inches above the ground. I stepped over it carefully, then pushed on, down on my belly now, my rifle in front of me, checking for the second defense line.
It was about fifty yards out from the camp, and I stayed on the outside of it. There was no need to get closer. It wasn't close enough to recognize faces, but if Michaels appeared, I would probably be able to pick him out. I had to hope that when they started their exercises they wouldn't move out in my direction. It was possible but unlikely. They probably had a pathway through their perimeter that they would open by day and close at night. This wasn't the spot. I squeezed lower to the ground and waited.
Somewhere close by, the other side of the ridge where the hooches lay, I could hear men's voices, the cheerful off-duty voices of soldiers at their breakfast. And then there was the smell of good coffee, so alien to the forest that I could pick it up over the hundred yards or so from the cook fire. It made my mouth water, and once I smelled it, I knew my wait would soon be over. They would drink it and start their day.
Within minutes they had finished and were straggling back to their camp, lollygagging as they took the only minutes of relaxation they would have all day. I watched them, counting. Sixteen came back, all dressed in combat gear, with the high-top hats that had alerted Robinson's friend to the fact that they were military. They all carried rifles, automatic weapons that I recognized as the new British bullpup assault rifles, possibly the most effective infantry weapon in the world. My.308 and my pistol wouldn't cut it against them at short range. They had enough firepower to shred me.
I swallowed quickly and strained to see their faces. All of them appeared young as far as I could tell from this distance. The oldest would have been around thirty. Then I recognized the youngest, Jason Michaels. At least he had the same general description his mother had given me, and I picked him out by his slouch. Two days' training hadn't made a soldier out of him, although he was carrying his weapon professionally. But he looked out of place. I guessed he was in deeper than he liked. Big, noisy men who couldn't be bullied with his money were making him work hard, and his body wasn't used to anything more strenuous than a session with a girl in some motel room. He went to his hooch and crawled into it. I swore under my breath as I watched. It lay close to the center of the cluster. It would be impossible to creep in and get him out at night without waking his companions.
The men stood or sat around and smoked, chatting to one another in low, growly voices. They weren't relaxed. They hadn't worked together long enough; they hadn't fought together. I was reminded of a ball club at training camp. They were all jostling for recognition, each man acting a little larger than life, hoping to be the one who pleases the manager better than the rest. It bothered me. Any one of them would hold me if he could, just for the pat on the head he might get from Dunphy.
I also kept checking for sentries. If this was for real, they would have left at least one man in their campsite while they went for breakfast. He would go down later. And there were two missing from my count at the lake. That might mean there were a couple of guys on KP, or it might mean they had scouts out. I hoped they weren't circulating in the woods. It occurred to me again that I would have been better off turning Mrs. Michaels down and sitting in Toronto drinking beer and missing Fred.
Then Dunphy and Wallace walked up onto the rock. Wallace bellowed an order, and they all stood at attention, first grinding out their smokes on the soles of their boots. Michaels was the last man to reach the group, and Wallace strode over to him and chewed him out in a low, sneering hiss. I watched the kid's back stiffen as he tried to stand up straight, tried to avert the evil eye. Wallace roared at him. "What's the matter, rich kid? Didn't the butler wake you up in time? Gimme ten." And then young Michaels was on the ground doing push-ups
. He did a quick ten and stopped. Wallace shouted again, and he did a further fifteen, growing slower and wearier with each one.
Then Wallace said something quiet that made everyone except Michaels laugh out loud. And finally they turned and doubled away over the rock and down the way Wallace and Dunphy had entered, chanting an exercise song as they ran. God. Boot camp one more time.
I lay and waited until their chanting had died away, then counted to a thousand, slowly, waiting to see if they had left a guard at the camp. If they had, he would move now, with the boss away, stretching himself and maybe grabbing a quick smoke before Wallace had time to come back and catch him at it. But no one moved, and so I slowly stood up, moved back, keeping as many tree trunks as possible between me and the campsite. I hopped over the trip wire on the perimeter and moved away to the west around the rock.
As I moved, I heard the sound of an aircraft, the same trapped bumblebee roar that Robinson's Cessna had made the day before, but far off and faint. I stopped for a minute, wondering if it was bringing in supplies or new recruits, but the sound faded in the distance. An overflight, I thought, somewhere to the west of me.
About a hundred yards past the rock I moved back to the east again, heading for the shore of the northern lake. The going was harder here; the trees were smaller and tighter together than I was used to in my own area, northern jack pine mostly. I found it hard to walk and ended up on hands and knees, keeping down under the worst of the branches. I wondered what the group's agenda was for the day. Would they be on an exercise, reds versus blues, one group stalking the other with blank ammunition? Or would they be getting weapons training? Whatever they did, I hoped it marched them away from their base. I had a little sabotage in mind, something that would save me a lot of trouble if I was seen.
About thirty yards north of the rock, in a clearing they had slashed from the trees, I found the messing area. They had built a fireplace of rock slabs, and beside it was a big supply tent and two smaller tents, two-man jobs. Wallace and Dunphy lived there, I guessed, with perhaps the two men I had missed on my recount. Perhaps those two were the group's cooks, inferior to the two principals but important enough to warrant separate accommodation. I waited for a couple of minutes within a hundred yards of the tents, but nobody stirred. They were all out together on the morning's work.
At six forty-five precisely, the shooting started. Riflerange practice by the sound of it. In every case there was a shout of command and then a crash of rifle fire, always in the distinctive triple-burst patterns. It sounded as if the men were being trained two at a time, each man firing a full magazine in those efficient b-b-bub bursts, then waiting for a report from the range officer.
The sound was coming from two hundred yards north of me. At first I wasn't sure of the direction in which they were firing. It figured to be away from their camp, so I was safe from stray bullets, but it was reassuring after a minute or so to hear the whine of a ricochet off a rock to the east of me. They were firing across the lake at targets set up on the far shore.
Now I had to work, carrying out the only project that would buy me time and safety if they saw me and started pursuit. I edged on down toward the water, and there, about twenty yards from the lake, tied to stout trees, I found their boats. There were three of them, inflatable rubber dinghies, each with a twenty-horsepower Mercury outboard.
I worked quickly, opening the cap of each fuel tank and tipping in a handful of sand, wiping the top of the tanks carefully so that there was no trace of the sand on the outside. It meant they would start and run for perhaps a minute before the fuel filters or even the carburetors choked up. With any luck they would be stranded out on the lake, paddling to beat hell while they swore and tried to clear the engine. It would give me a chance to get away in my canoe.
The shooting was still going on, but I didn't linger. Instead, I ducked back the way I had come, rounding their camp on the west side. Only this time I didn't pass it. I squirmed in close, checking again for guards, and when I didn't see anybody, I went into the center of it and flapped up the end of Jason Michaels's hooch. It had a pack inside it and his mess tin. I opened the lid of the tin and placed the photograph that his mother had given me inside it, face up. I wasn't sure how smart the kid was, but if he had any brains at all, he would know it meant his mother had sent somebody to look for him. It would alert him to be on the watch for me. It was a gamble, but it was one I had to take.
Then I was through for the morning. Now I had to wait for nightfall, keeping alert in case they started moving out around the camp on an attack-and-defense exercise. To be sure I wouldn't be spotted, I retreated all the way back to where I had spent the night and crawled under cover in my thicket. If they did play games, they wouldn't be looking for me. Their attention would be on the campsite.
The day dragged as I lay still, listening to every sound in the bush, expecting any moment for a man to come creeping through the trees and point his assault rifle at me. I've done it before, plenty of times, but always for real, armed and ready to kill if I was seen. This time was different. I was walking the very boundaries of the law, able to defend myself if I had to but not by killing. These men might be misguided losers, but they hadn't committed a capital offense, yet. I had the feeling they would if Dunphy caught me. I had humiliated him in Toronto, and with his record, I didn't think I would survive if I was captured.
As the hours slowly passed, I listened for activity of any kind. Around nine the shooting stopped, and the men doubled back into camp. I guessed they were stripping and cleaning their rifles, but I was too far away to see. Then, promptly at ten, they broke into another chant, which faded as they doubled away to the north. And then I heard the first sound that made me anxious. They ran down to the water, six at a time, carrying their rubber boats.
I listened as Wallace shouted instructions for them to splash out into the water and climb aboard. Then they started paddling. That was a relief. If they tried to use the motors, they would soon work out that they had visitors, and the rest of the day would be spent clearing the area. I would have to abandon my canoe and back off, going as far west as necessary to bypass the swamp I'd noticed on the map. Probably it wouldn't be possible and I would have to swim it—dangerous. But necessary. I'd be forced out and wouldn't have any other choice.
For hours they paddled up and down the lake. Every twenty minutes they would head for shore and make a mock attack, beaching their craft and crunching up through the bush. If they were practicing stealth, they were earning about three points out of ten. The noise they made would have alerted an enemy in seconds.
Through it all I could hear Wallace shouting, hectoring, keeping up the kind of DI pressure that makes recruits hate. He was good at his job, I had to say that much for him. Even his mother would have hated him. By late afternoon they had improved enough that I could no longer hear any splashing as they paddled, and I was shocked to find them coming ashore just a hundred yards south of me, on the point I had noticed on my map.
The crashing came closer. I swallowed quickly and waited, huddled tighter to the earth than I would have been under incoming fire, waiting for the shout of recognition that would alert me to get up and run, not sure what good that would do me, anyway. Then I heard a man swear, the angry shout of someone at the end of his patience. And then another man laughed. They were thirty yards from me, and I raised my head and checked them. One was holding his face, swearing over and over in a weary monotone while the other one said, "Why don't you look where you're goin', faggot!"
"Goddamn trees," the first one said. He took his hands down from his face, and I could see blood on his cheek. "Why're we working out here, anyway? We'll be in the jungle or rice paddies or something."
Then the second one said, "If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined." The standard soldier's response to trouble. And the youth in his voice made my neck tingle. It was young Michaels, weary but proud. It wasn't his face that had been gouged, and he was certain it was be
cause he was the better man. And he was only twenty-five yards from me.
I watched him as he stood stretching his aching back. Then the other man turned away, and Michaels called out, "Wait up. I'm gonna take a leak."
The other man was angry, following the party line. "Can't you do that on your own? Need the goddamn butler to undo your zipper or what?" Then he moved back the way he had come.
I lay still, breathing very shallow. I'd lucked out. Twenty guys in camp. Two of them had come close to me, and one of them was Michaels. If I could count on this kind of luck, I could clean up at the tables in Las Vegas.
Michaels unzipped and relieved himself, and I took my chance. I slithered out of the bush, coming up ten yards behind him. He was fastening his pants when I hissed at him, very low. "Jason."
He lifted his head and glanced around, not seeing me. He wouldn't have lasted a day in 'Nam. I hissed again. "Over here. Keep quiet."
Now he saw me, and he raised his gun. I left my rifle on the ground and held one finger to my lips. He stared at me, but he didn't cover me with his rifle, and I moved closer.
"I'm here to see if you're okay."
"Who are you?" Not the response I'd been looking for.
It sounded as if he had confidence in himself. That could be trouble.
"A friend of your family." I didn't narrow it down to his mother. That might have given him all the prompting he needed to raise his gun and hold me.
"How'd you get here?" His mother was right. He didn't take kindly to adult interference. Either that or he was bemused by his training. I began to wonder if I'd moved too soon.
"That's not important. I followed you to see if you're all right. If not, we can get out of here. I've got a plane coming for us."
