Mafia III

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Lincoln wasn’t sure anymore what his country had to do with any of it. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

  “Right,” Franklin said. “But where you’re needed isn’t here.” He ticked his head toward the west. “It’s there.”

  “But that’s Laos, you said.”

  “I did. And officially, we’re not in Laos.”

  “Then I don’t—”

  “I said officially. Like borders, sometimes what’s official isn’t what’s real. Laos is a neutral country. But the NVA and the VC are traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos—it’s their main shortcut into South Vietnam. The Chinese are there, too, and the Soviets. Officially, none of them are, but the reality on the ground is that they’re all over Laos. We need to step up our presence or lose the whole country to the communist bloc. If Laos falls, Vietnam is doomed. If Vietnam goes, say good-bye to Thailand, Cambodia, the whole of Southeast Asia. After that, Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii . . . no telling where they stop.”

  “I’m still not sure what you’re saying, Captain.”

  “I’m saying, you’ve made a mark, Corporal. People much higher up than me have noticed you. You take initiative. You don’t wait to be told what to do—you figure out what needs to be done, and you do it. You’re good at killing the enemy without getting killed yourself.”

  “That’s what the job is, right?”

  “That’s part of it. But any army needs most of its soldiers to be followers, not leaders. They want a lot of people who’ll take orders and a few who’ll give them. You’re not one of those people. That said, I don’t know that you’re officer material, either.”

  Lincoln didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet. Franklin didn’t seem to notice.

  “What you are is exactly what we need in Laos. Someone who’s self-sufficient. Who can determine what needs doing and figure out how best to accomplish it. Who doesn’t need to be told when to eat, when to sleep, when to piss.”

  “But . . . Laos?”

  “I can’t order you there, Clay. But Colonel Giunta can. He followed your training closely, at Bragg and at Benning. You surpassed everyone’s expectations, in case nobody told you. Most guys who go through the yearlong course don’t catch on like you did. He wants you in Laos, and if he wants you there, so do I.”

  “What would I be doing there?”

  Franklin grinned, like a fisherman who knows his hook is set firmly in his prey’s cheek. “There’s a joint Department of Defense/CIA task force going in to exfiltrate some high-value captives from a VC camp. Like I said, we’re not the only ones breaking the rules about Laotian neutrality. I’m not going to tell you who the captives are, so don’t ask. I’ll just say that if they’re transferred to North Vietnam, things are going to get ugly in a hurry. The task force is going to go in fast and hot, free the captives, and get out again.”

  “DoD and CIA? Really?”

  “Even that’s classified. Need to know, so don’t go repeating it.”

  “When would I leave?”

  Franklin looked at his watch. “You’re late already.”

  “Guess we better get going, then.”

  “I guess we’d better,” Franklin agreed. “The chopper’s waiting.”

  • • •

  The task force assembled at the B Team headquarters in Danang. There were eighteen men in all. A couple of them looked familiar, but Lincoln wasn’t sure where he might have seen them. Maybe in Green Beret training, maybe in the bush. Most of them seemed to know one another, and he felt like the odd man out. He kept to himself, listened but didn’t say much unless he was specifically addressed.

  They were mostly the typical warrior types: heavy on muscle and testosterone, with big, booming laughs and fixed opinions about everything in the world, Lincoln thought. They had all been issued black uniforms with no insignia, not even Made in the USA tags on the inside. They’d had to surrender all their identification, including dog tags, and were told they’d get everything back after the mission. The gear and weapons they’d been issued had been made in other countries, including France, the Soviet Union, and Israel. While they were in Laos, an officer explained, they would carry only things that couldn’t identify them as Americans.

  In the crowd of men dressed in black, the only one who really stood out was one guy, who—like Lincoln—seemed to prefer his own company. He was muscular, but slender compared to the rest. His blond hair was a little longer than most of the other men’s and was swept up off his forehead. Instead of a uniform, he wore a white, short-sleeved shirt with a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket and tan pants. He could have been watching a baseball game or sitting at a soda fountain waiting for a cold drink. He looked as casual as could be, cool in the Quonset hut while everyone else had sweat rolling off in rivers, but there was something in his relaxed posture that Lincoln noticed; he was coiled and ready to strike without warning. He smoked and seemed like he was barely listening, but his eyes missed nothing.

  CIA, Lincoln was sure. Maybe he was the only agent on the so-called joint task force, or maybe there were others but they just looked like the GIs. Either way, this one man stood apart, and Lincoln thought he was a man worth keeping a close eye on.

  At the front of the room, a colonel who’d lost weight in the field but hadn’t had his uniform taken in stood in front of a map, holding a long wooden pointer. He was rambling on about the op. Lincoln tried to listen, but the guy had a droning voice that threatened to put him to sleep. Regardless, he would go where he was pointed and kill whoever got in his way; he didn’t need to know the details for that.

  He figured he would fly into Laos with these guys, they’d yank out whoever it was who’d been taken prisoner, and then he would be flown back to Lang Vei. Or at least back to Danang, and he would have to make his own way back from there.

  Then the colonel was finished and the door was opened and the men filed out. Their gear had been stacked outside, and each man grabbed his own pack and weapons on the way to a pair of waiting slicks—UH-1 “Huey” helicopters used for troop transport, without weapons pods—that sat on the tarmac, propellers swirling lazily overhead. Lincoln noted the lack of any military markings on them, but he didn’t question it. The less he knew, the better.

  He was the next-to-last man to board. The blond guy he took for CIA got to the door before him but hung back and ushered Lincoln ahead. “After you,” he said. His voice was as cool as his appearance, smooth enough for radio, Lincoln thought. He couldn’t detect any accent.

  “Thanks,” he said, climbing aboard. He took a seat in between two burly Green Berets, and the agent sat up front, beside the pilot.

  “Who is that guy?” Lincoln whispered to the man on his right, nodding toward the agent.

  “No idea. All’s I know is if he’s here, we’re about to wade into the shit. Cat like that don’t show up for just any old mission.”

  Lincoln didn’t answer, but he thought the man was probably right. Wherever they were going, whatever they were about to do, it was important to somebody at a pay grade way above his.

  8

  * * *

  Just before sunset, the Hueys touched down on an airstrip that looked to have been slashed out of the landscape with machetes. It didn’t look nearly big enough to Lincoln; as they were dropping toward it, he was sure they’d wind up tangled in the trees beyond the cleared space.

  But the first one landed with room to spare. Its passengers jumped out, ducking under the propellers, almost lost in the whirlwind of dust. Then it was airborne again, and Lincoln’s angled to the ground.

  He’d learned the names of a few of the men on the flight—he was sandwiched between Spearman and Blair, with Kuykendall and Steinberg sitting across from them. They had all earned their berets the old-fashioned way, so Lincoln kept mum about his accelerated course. Once the chopper had settled on the strip, the door opened and the men charged out, weapons at the ready in case of attack. Finally, the blond CIA agent strolled ou
t, hands in his hip pockets, still as cool as if he’d been taking a walk in a city park.

  As soon as the men were clear, the engine roared and the propellers picked up speed and the aircraft rose off the ground, tilted, and flew off.

  They were alone, somewhere in the middle of Laos.

  A first lieutenant named Kirwan was nominally in charge of the mission. He huddled over a map with the CIA guy for a few minutes, consulting a compass as he did. Then he rolled up the map and stuffed it into his pack, shrugged into it, and picked up his M14. Lincoln noticed that the CIA agent had an M14 now, too, as well as a holstered Colt Commander.

  Lieutenant Kirwan spoke a few words to the men and then started off into the brush. If he was following a trail, Lincoln could hardly see it, but they weren’t hacking their way through, so he figured someone had come this way before.

  Night fell while they hiked ever northward. Under the canopy of vegetation, moonlight penetrated only sparsely. Lincoln wasn’t sure how Kirwan knew where he was going. The nameless CIA guy had fallen to the back of the pack, but whenever Lincoln looked around, he was there, often visible only as the glowing tip of a cigarette in the darkness.

  Finally, they came to a halt in a small clearing near the top of a hill, and everyone gathered around Kirwan and the agent. “Okay,” Kirwan began. “The camp’s in the valley, at the base of this hill. We have to assume that anyone we find there is a hostile. Consider this a search-and-clear mission. We don’t know exactly where the prisoners are—hell, for that matter, they could have been taken from the camp any time since we landed. So keep your eyes peeled for them.”

  “How will we know who’s a prisoner and who’s not?” Spearman asked.

  The agent chuckled. “You’ll know.”

  “We also don’t know what else is in the camp. We think it’s lightly guarded—we’re thinking a patrol, not a company. We’ll be searching for anything that might provide actionable intelligence, anything like weapons storage—you know, the usual. We believe the VC use this camp—with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Pathet Lao—as a base to run missions into South Vietnam. So anything that’ll tell us what they’re up to would be good to find. But our main objective is to get those prisoners out. In one piece, please.”

  Lincoln didn’t remember seeing any mortars or other heavy armament, just automatic rifles and the like. He had a few grenades, but that was all. “We gonna soften them up with some grenades first?” he asked.

  The CIA agent spun around and fixed him with a poisonous stare. “Fuck no. You want to let them know we’re here? Give them time to spirit away those prisoners? No, we go in shooting and wrap this up before they know what fucking hit them.”

  Lincoln wasn’t sure how that would work. Chances were, there were sentries around the camp who had already seen them. Even if there weren’t, when they got close, there would be trip wires, and probably concertina wire they’d have to cross. He was pretty sure nobody simply walked into an enemy camp anymore, not since the invention of barbed wire. He hoped the agent’s impatience didn’t get them all killed.

  But these men were all Green Berets or CIA-trained killers, and each one, like Lincoln, thought himself practically immortal. They moved soundlessly down the hill. Soon Lincoln could hear snatches of Vietnamese coming from the camp—a couple of guards, smoking and shooting the shit. Lieutenant Kirwan and another guy drew suppressed MK 22 Mod 0s from their holsters—semiautomatic handguns that Lincoln had thought only Navy SEALs used—and closed in on the guards. With two perfectly timed shots, both the sentries went down, almost noiselessly except that one of them raked a hand across the chain link fence as he collapsed.

  Lincoln tensed, worried that that sound would alert the rest of the camp. It wasn’t much, nothing that a stiff breeze might not have caused. But in close combat, relying on luck could get a man killed.

  Two of the Green Berets rushed forward with wire cutters, snipping through the fence in seconds. Peeling it back made a little more noise, but the rest hustled through the gaps and were inside the wire seconds before they were seen.

  Those seconds weren’t enough to accomplish much. Vietcong soldiers—some in traditional black pajama–type attire, others in their underwear—burst from their huts, guns blazing. Lincoln and the others took cover and returned fire. Lincoln was on his belly behind a jeep wheel—scant protection against the rounds slamming into the vehicle’s body. One tore through the tire’s edge, almost hitting him and spewing rubber fragments into his face. Blinded for the moment, he blinked and rubbed at his eyes until he could see again.

  The first wave of defenders was small. Lincoln picked off a couple more, and the bursts of fire from that direction became more and more sporadic. Finally, quiet returned to the camp. He and his comrades had cut through the first wave of defenders quickly, but he knew there were more to come.

  “Spread out!” the CIA man ordered. “Find those goddamn prisoners.”

  Lincoln, Spearman, Blair, and Steinberg took off toward the east side of the camp. The place was mostly comprised of thatched huts, but Lincoln saw a few buildings that had been reinforced with corrugated steel, concrete, or both. A machine gun barrel emerged from a hole in one of those and sprayed a poorly aimed burst toward them. The rounds went high. Lincoln yanked the pin on a grenade and tossed it under the shack; then he and the other guys dropped and clapped their hands over their ears. The concussive wave rattled him and earth rained down, but the fire from inside stopped.

  He got back up and kept going on his course, the other men just behind. Reaching the last hut before the fence, Lincoln slowed down, pressed himself to the wall, listened, then took a careful look around the corner. Two VC guerillas were hunkered down behind a metal frame of some kind, and they opened fire with semiautomatic rifles. Lincoln backed away from the corner as their rounds chewed through the hut. He motioned the other guys back.

  Using hand signals, Steinberg and Blair indicated that they would go around a hut two back from the end. Lincoln and Spearman stayed where they were, to keep the attention of the soldiers focused on them. Lincoln edged close to the corner again, then slid his M14 past it and opened fire, blindly. Answering bursts told him the men were still in the same area. He waited until he couldn’t see Steinberg and Blair anymore, then did the same thing, blind-firing toward where he thought the enemy soldiers were. This time, when their response came, it was cut short by the blast of a grenade. He peeked around the corner to confirm that both men were down.

  “All clear!” he called to his comrades. “Move out!”

  The four of them cleared that corner, checking each hut, then heard what sounded like a major firefight under way closer to the center of the camp. Lincoln pointed that way, and the others nodded their agreement. Before he had taken three steps, he felt a tug on his right sleeve. Thinking one of the guys was trying to get his attention, he started to turn his head that way.

  Blair shouted, “Sniper!” and shoved him to the ground. The next shot whizzed past where Lincoln’s head would have been, without Blair’s push.

  That was when his upper arm started to burn. He raised it as high as he could, angling so he could see the back of his sleeve. It was wet with blood.

  “You’re hit,” Blair said.

  Lincoln shook his head. “Just grazed me.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  “No time,” Lincoln said. He clenched his teeth together, biting back the pain. It was, he feared, worse than he was letting on. But his point about the time was true. He could still move, still fight. And they weren’t going to rescue those prisoners if they didn’t wrap this up in a hurry. “Anybody see where the shot came from?”

  “I didn’t even hear it,” Blair replied. “I just saw a spray of blood when it hit your arm.”

  Lincoln eyeballed where he’d been standing, before Blair pushed him. They were essentially at the far eastern edge of the camp, heading south-southwest. “Nobody there,” he said.

  “It mus
t have come from outside the fence,” Spearman said. All four men were hunched down now, blocked from the sniper’s position by the same metal framework—part of an ancient automobile, Lincoln realized now—that the NVA soldiers had used for cover.

  “Somebody stand up,” Lincoln said.

  “Are you crazy?” Steinberg asked. “That’s what he’s waiting for.”

  “Just for a second. Show him a target, then duck back down.”

  “Man, you’re fuckin’ nuts.”

  “One second,” Lincoln said. With a tight grin, he added, “Maybe two.”

  “I’ll do it,” Spearman said. “You ready, Lincoln?”

  Lincoln shook his right arm a couple of times, trying to keep it from freezing up. It was starting to really hurt now. “Ready.”

  Spearman nodded once and rose to his full height. He held the position for almost two full seconds, then dropped again. As soon as he started down, Lincoln shot up, M14 pointed toward the dark jungle outside the fence.

  The sniper took the bait, firing a single shot at where Spearman had been a moment earlier. Lincoln pinpointed the muzzle burst and opened up on that spot, raking his fire a few feet in either direction.

  There was no response, but there was no return fire, either. “I think you got him,” Steinberg said.

  “Got him or not, he’s not shootin’ at us anymore,” Blair added. “Good enough for me.”

  The firefight was still under way in the center of the camp. “We’re missing the action,” Lincoln said. “Come on.”

  “You should really dress that arm,” Blair said.

  “Worry about that when there’s nobody left to kill,” Lincoln countered. He took off first, trusting that his companions would follow.

  When they reached the site of the pitched battle, they found Kirwan and four other men pinned down fire from a tripod-mounted machine gun set up behind a wall of sandbags. Other VC troops were positioned in nearby bunkers and behind concrete walls. If Kirwan or the others so much as raised a helmet, a volley would follow.