Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  Then he realized what it was. It was entirely too quiet. Almost deserted. A few years ago the air was constantly filled with the roar of jet engines, the whop of helicopter blades. Scores of jets took off at all hours, to streak their way across the jungle below and drop their loads of death on largely uninhabited forest. Those who went north came back with pieces hanging from them as the most concentrated antiaircraft fire ever known took its toll. There would be the occasional one limping in, trailing smoke and hydraulic fluid, barely making the runway. Ambulances wailing their way to pick up the wounded, and the dead.

  Now there were only a couple of Jolly Greens, and a black C-130 with the strange antennae on its nose that told Jim it was one of the Air Commando birds. The appendages weren’t antennae at all, but guides for the Skyhook. Skyhook was a system in which a man on the ground tethered himself to a large balloon and the plane came by and snatched the rope connecting him to the balloon, whereby he was reeled up into the rear of the aircraft. Ideally, that is. Sometimes the rope broke, usually just as the man attached to it was at the highest point, and he had a very long and fatal ride down.

  The Blackbird, as the C-130 was called, would be their ride into the operational area. It was jam-packed with electronic gear and could confuse and blind enemy radar, making it highly unlikely they could fix on it long enough to guide a missile to it. Jim hoped the patrons of the North Vietnamese, the Soviets, had not had enough time to analyze the electronics of the one they had captured and had not devised countermeasures. Otherwise this might be the shortest mission on record.

  It was also equipped with transponders capable of mimicking those of the commercial airliners that had, even in the days of the heaviest fighting, flown serenely overhead, leaving contrails that mocked with their very remoteness the struggles of those on the ground.

  “Come on,” Mark said, motioning toward the bunker. “Russian spy satellite comes by here in a little while. They say it takes good enough pictures to read your nametags. If you were wearing any.”

  “Lovely,” Jim said. “What about the birds out on the runway?”

  “Oh, they know we’re up to something,” Mark replied, waving it off as if it wasn’t important. “But they don’t know what.”

  Jim glanced at Jerry, whose frown eloquently spoke of what he thought of such slipshod operational security. “Jesus, Dai Uy,” he said in a whisper, “these fuckheads never learn, do they?”

  Inside the bunker were a number of people Jim didn’t know, and one he did: Bentley Sloane. He didn’t have a good feeling about that. Sloane might be a bona-fide hero, but what did he know of operations like this? Too often amateurs got their fingers into the pie, to disastrous effect. The fact that you’d gone to the Special Forces Officers’ Qualification Course did not automatically make you an accomplished clandestine warrior. It took years of experience, a great deal of listening to those who had gone before you, a certain amount of humility. Captain Sloane had not impressed him as having any of the above.

  He shook it off. Nothing he could do about it at this point. If he raised an objection they would just tell him that he was full of shit; that Sloane was there as an official observer, that was all.

  Besides, he’d come this far, and he wasn’t going to stop now. Too late for that.

  The briefing started immediately, officer after officer going to the situation map and providing information in his specialty. Weather, climatic conditions, terrain, enemy, concept of operations, logistics, communications, medical, command and control; each item of the familiar litany tolled by. The team had listened to hundreds of such briefings, each preparatory to going out and once again risking their lives for a cause in which no one really believed anymore.

  At least the briefers were professional. It was obvious, though they wore no insignia of rank or unit, that they were military men, and probably Special Forces. Jim didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t mean anything. In the heyday of Special Forces there had been over twelve thousand active members.

  At the end Mark Petrillo again took the podium and asked for questions and comments.

  Jim looked at the two sergeants, who shrugged. “I’ve got one,” he said.

  “Shoot.”

  “A few years ago, SOG was having a hell of a time getting anyone on the ground,” he said. “Teams shot out as soon as they touched down, lots of folks getting killed, some teams never heard from again.”

  “And your point is?” Captain Sloane spoke up.

  “My point, Captain,” Carmichael said, putting into the word a twist of tone that said you’re just a junior shithead who probably doesn’t know a goddamn thing, and you should keep your mouth shut until you do, “is that the operations were compromised. Someone was telling the bad guys exactly where the teams were going to put down. And we never found out who it was. What makes you think the same thing won’t happen now?”

  Sloane flushed in anger, started to say something, was stopped by a gesture from Mark Petrillo.

  “There’s no more of the old command and control structure from SOG,” he said. “All gone. Viets are either captured or on their way to the States. None of the guys here,” and he gestured to the men around the room, “were in it. No chance for leaks. Whole new slate.”

  Jim looked at the two sergeants again. Once again they shrugged.

  “Have to do, I guess,” he said. “We’d like to get to the equipment, take a look at what we’ve got, get it rigged. I’m sure there will be something that will come up. I assume that your staff will stand by in case we need them?”

  “Absolutely,” Mark averred. “They’re completely at your disposal.”

  Yeah, Jim thought, until I ask something embarrassing or something I shouldn’t know. Then we’ll see just how much at my disposal they are. Aloud he thanked them for a professional presentation and told them it would be a pleasure to work with them. Everyone knew just how much bullshit it was.

  In truth, the preparations for the mission were giving him no trouble at all. Everything had been covered; they had taken the sketchy operational plan he and the NCOs had worked out back in Germany and made it real. He had no doubt that when they checked the gear they would find all the things they had requested, and probably a lot more. It was the mark of a good operations officer to anticipate problems and come up with alternative courses of action, and the equipment to support those alternatives. And these men were certainly good. Mark Petrillo would surround himself with nothing less than the very best.

  No, no trouble with the preparations. The only problem was with the mission itself. It was a muddle typical of so many that had gone wrong, back when they had been fighting the war. There were essentially two missions: support Y Buon Sarpa and FULRO, keeping the North Vietnamese tied down in a guerrilla war within their own borders; and rescue two American POWs being held as bargaining chips by that same guerrilla movement. Which was the more important? No one had bothered to specify that. What would they do if Sarpa refused to give up the Americans? Were they expected to take them out by force? That would be a hell of a trick; rescuing two Americans who could be expected to be in terrible shape from their years of captivity, fighting off not only the Montagnard guerrillas but also the North Vietnamese, who would be more than happy to recapture the two and add to their stocks by getting three more.

  Or, and the sudden thought horrified him, were they to sacrifice the two Americans to the cause? Leave them there, to be used again and again? He knew he couldn’t do that, no matter what directives he might receive from Operational Base. No, the Americans would come out, one way or the other. I’ll just have to call in my markers with Sarpa, he thought. He owes me his life. And if he won’t go along with it, maybe I’ll have to kill him, and damn the U.S. government.

  After all, it wouldn’t be the first time he had disobeyed orders. Probably wouldn’t be the last. As long as he lived through it.

  “Tiger Six,” Dickerson said. “That used to be his callsign. Kept it, no matter where h
e went. Drove the communications security people crazy. The enemy will know who you are, they used to tell him. You need to change callsigns every once in a while, throw ’em off. And he used to tell them, hell, why would I want to throw them off? I want ’em to know the name, know who they’re up against. Want ’em to be afraid, know that they’re gonna die. Major Korhonen was big on that psychological stuff,” he concluded.

  Jim looked up from where he was taping a knife to the left shoulder strap of a STABO rig. There had been a selection of knives in the supplies: Air Force survival knives with heavy handles and sawtooth backs suitable for cutting through the skin of aircraft, Marine Corps K-Bars, even a couple of World War II era Commando knives. The one he had selected had been made especially for SOG during the war; a gray-blue blade shaped in the classical Bowie fashion, beautifully worked leather handle, wrist thong, brass pommel with a space in the blade for the index finger. It was made for only one thing—fighting. While he hoped he would never have to get close enough to anyone to have to use a blade, you never knew. Besides, it had a certain sentimental appeal.

  “You knew him well, then?” he asked.

  “Real well,” Dickerson said. “I was his radio operator back in White Star, in Laos. Later on he requested I be assigned to him in an A camp in the Delta. Everybody was scared shitless of him. Our side and theirs. Any battle you got in, you could be sure Tiger Six was going to be there, even if he might have been on R&R when the thing started. Wouldn’t exactly say he was fearless, but he was close enough it didn’t count. Smart motherfucker too. Knew just what to do. Never lost his head, found a way out of anything you got into.”

  “Till he got caught,” Jerry offered.

  “Yeah, and that’s the one thing I can’t figure. I would never have expected him to stay a POW all that time. Either he’d break out, or they’d kill him. Always expected him to come walkin’out of the jungle sometime. And when he didn’t, everyone said he must have been killed in an aircraft crash like the Army decided. Now we find out he’s not only been a POW, but is being held by another group? Real strange.” Dickerson finished packing the ANGRC-109 radio into his rucksack. The old radio was of World War II vintage, extremely heavy, well-built, and utterly reliable. It was for those qualities Dickerson had chosen it over the more modern equipment available. Besides, he had said, we’re gonna leave this stuff for the guerrillas, anyway. Best to have something they can work, and more important, repair.

  Jim, who knew he was going to have to carry the hand-cranked generator in his own rucksack, was less enthusiastic about it, but kept his silence. It was the job of the officers to carry the generators, which weighed about thirty pounds, from the time Special Forces had been organized. It pretty quickly weeded out the summer help from those who were serious about staying in Group.

  Besides, the Angry 109, as it was called, could make communications with anyplace in the world, given the right antenna and atmospherics. No reason to tamper with success. And Dickerson was the commo man, and what he decided was what was done. No Special Forces officer in his right mind argued with the expert.

  The only new piece of equipment that was worth a shit, in the mind of most commo men, was the burst device. It allowed you to key the message into a tiny tape recorder, which then spat it out at high speed when the station on the other end came up. A similar recorder on the other side took the message and slowed it down so it could be decoded. That way you didn’t have to stay on the air too long, and the enemy stood almost no chance of applying triangulation intercept on you. Two of these devices were to go along.

  “Who knows what happened to him?” Jim said, shrugging. “Maybe he did crash, had some bad injuries. The pictures don’t show much. Maybe he can’t do anything about it. Hell, maybe he doesn’t even know what’s going on.” He finished taping the knife, started attaching the ammunition pouches to the belt. Four of them, enough to hold sixteen magazines of twenty rounds of 5.56mm ammunition. Bandoleers containing another twenty magazines would go in the rucksacks. They’d been offered a selection of weapons and had been gently pushed toward the AK-47 that the opponents would be carrying. Each man had chosen, instead, a CAR-15; the short version of the M-16. For all of them it was almost an extension of themselves, they had used it so much. Besides, the ammunition was much less heavy than the 7.62 x 39mm the AK-47 used. It was more ammunition, by several orders of magnitude, than the normal basic load of the soldier. But they weren’t ordinary soldiers, couldn’t expect to be resupplied when their ammunition ran out. And they had learned, in firefights throughout Southeast Asia, that ammunition ran out very quickly when you were trying to get away from someone.

  The magazines were loaded with regular ball ammo, except for the last two rounds, which were tracers. Impossible to count your rounds when you were firing on full auto; the two tracers told you your magazine was empty and you’d better damn well be getting another one in, as quickly as possible. Besides, the immediate action drills devised after a hell of a lot of trial and error depended upon the visual signal. One man fired his magazine in the direction of the enemy, whereupon he ran to the rear of the formation while reloading, taking up a new position. The next man, when he saw the second tracer leave, opened up, then did the same thing. This way there was never a time when a stream of fire was not eating up the terrain around the enemy, which tended to make them keep their heads down. You had to have that steady stream of fire. The people they were fighting were professionals. The moment the fire stopped, they would once again be in pursuit. Nothing more deadly than a long pause while a group that had fired all its ammunition at once stopped to reload.

  “That’s the case, we’re gonna have a hell of a time walkin’ him out of there,” Jerry offered. Jerry was busy checking one of the Browning Hi-Power 9mm pistols they had chosen to carry as backup weapons.

  “That’s why one of the first resupply drops we’re gonna get is gonna include a couple of Skyhook rigs,” Jim replied. “It becomes necessary, we’ll hook ’em both out of there. Situation on the ground allowing,” he amended. They would have to get to an area with no real air defense facilities to make the Skyhook mission possible. The Blackbird had to fly low and slow to hook the balloon and was a sitting duck to anyone on the ground. Failing that there were always the Jolly Greens flying nap-of-the-earth, using jungle penetrators if no LZs were available. Failing both, there was a hell of a long walk all the way across Laos, back to Thailand. Jim didn’t look forward to the last alternative.

  Jerry finished checking the Hi-Power, slipped it into the holster clipped to the web belt, then attached two canteens to the same. Contrary to what most people believed, water was at a premium in the jungle. They would carry not only the two one-quart canteens on the belt, but a two-quart bladder in the rucksack. He then put a couple of claymore mines into his rucksack.

  “You ever feel like a fuckin’ pack horse?” he asked, his expression implying that he didn’t find the prospect all that dismaying.

  “Shit,” Jim said. “Break down a goddamn packhorse, this would.” In addition to all the ammunition, mines, radio gear, and water, they also had to carry rations, emergency radio equipment, penflare launchers and the flares to go with them, smoke grenades, first-aid kits, serum albumin for restoring blood volume in case of wounds, compasses, maps, fragmentation grenades, 40mm grenades for the M-79 launcher Jerry insisted on carrying, and extra medical supplies for the M-3 Aid Kit Jim had chosen to take with them. In short, it was very similar to every recon mission they had been on; seventy to eighty pounds of extra weight. And that only after they had cut away every single thing that they might not need until after the first resupply drop.

  They’d already rigged the resupply: fifty more CAR-15s, PRC-77 radios for squad and platoon communications, several hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosives, claymores, M-21 mines, thousands of pounds of ammunition, enough medical supplies to equip a small dispensary, M-60 machine guns, more M-79 grenade launchers, and a couple of sniper rifles with scopes.
It would only be the tip of what was needed, but enough to give the enemy fits if it could all be used against him. If everything turned out all right there would be many more of these resupplies, dropped in the middle of the night from an aircraft flying at least thirty thousand feet overhead and guided into drop zones by very sophisticated homing systems.

  If everything went right. Hell, Jim thought, if it doesn’t, we’re not going to have to worry about it too much. Still, might as well get it right in the first place.

  “I understand you knew Glenn Parker pretty well,” Jerry said. “I heard he’s a pretty good guy.”

  “The best,” Jim said.

  “How did he get caught?”

  “Stayed after the truce, went to the JPRC,” Jim replied. The JPRC, Joint Personnel Recovery Center, was the unit designated to locate MIAs, the thousands of troops listed as missing in action, after the 1973 truce and subsequent return of prisoners of war. The JPRC excavated crash sites, investigated sightings, dug up graves, did everything possible to resolve the fate of those who had simply disappeared.

  “In ’74, according to an NCO who overheard it, he got a phone call, said he had word of an American deserter hiding out in Cholon. Went to check it out. NCO asked him if he needed any help, he said no, didn’t think bringing in some deserter would be all that much of a problem. He didn’t come back, and within twenty-four hours they were searching for him. White Mice found his jeep, parked next to the Saigon River. He wasn’t in it. No sign of a struggle. Nothing at all, in fact. Big investigation, inconclusive. Some said the deserter, or his friends, killed Glenn, threw his body in the river. Of course, nothing could be proved. So he joined the ranks of the missing he was pledged to recover.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Dickerson said.

  “Yeah. Hell of a thing.”

  “Took one too many chances, sounds like,” Jerry said. “Sounds like other people I know.”