Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  At the noon break Jim checked beneath Jerry’s bandage, was pleased to see no more blood leakage. Haven’t lost my touch there yet, he thought. He gave the sergeant a couple more tetracycline pills, watched as he took them. What he was doing would be frowned upon by a surgeon. Giving antibiotics as a prophylaxis, they said, would make future generations of bacteria that much more resistant.

  Of course, those surgeons had sterile operating rooms, access to critical-care facilities, and the staffs of huge hospitals to back them up should the patient develop an infection. He intended to keep so many antibiotics in Jerry that the bacteria would have no chance to take hold.

  By nightfall they were all exhausted, and still at least eight kilometers from the objective. Jim started looking for a place to Remain Over-Night, RON as they called it back during the recon days. Someplace easily defensible, with escape routes should it become necessary. He finally found it in a slight depression between the trunks of three giant trees.

  Despite there having been no sign of any followers, he and Dickerson set out claymore mines to cover the avenues of approach. No use taking chances. They set out tripwires attached to flares to the outside of the mines. Anyone coming in would light up the area, whereupon the men inside the RON would blow them away with the claymores. No way for the survivors to pinpoint their position that way, and they could make good their escape. It was a technique worked out by recon leaders long ago, and had always worked well. No use tampering with success.

  They ate again, once more cold rations. Probably could have chanced heating some water over a piece of C-4, Jim thought. The burning explosive gave off tremendous heat and very little light, warmed a canteen cup of water in almost no time. Still, you never knew, and old habits died hard.

  Be as a ghost; move across the land like a wraith, leaving no trace of your passage. Not light, nor heat, nor smell, nor noise. Not for nothing had the NVA called the recon teams the black ghosts. You weren’t, you became a ghost for real.

  Just before dropping off to sleep Jim heard the monkeys howling above; even they were oblivious to the presence of the humans below. That’s the way it should be, he thought. Maybe I’m not totally out of practice, after all.

  Chapter 10

  He woke to a sound that brought him scrambling out of his poncho liner, weapon at the ready, eyes anxiously scanning the dank foliage. A quick glance over each shoulder showed Jerry and Dirty Dick similarly alert, weapons pointed outward, the three so close in a triangle their feet were touching.

  Jim cocked his head, looking up. There it was again.

  The unmistakable whop of the blades of a Huey.

  It passed over them, the sound fading now, reverberating through the trees.

  “After us, you reckon?” Jerry whispered.

  “Far as I know, there ain’t no friendly choppers around here these days,” Dickerson said.

  It had come to a hell of a pass, Jim thought, that the sound of a Huey, ordinarily something to be welcomed, was now feared. Must be how Charlie used to feel, he mused.

  “Whatcha think, Dai Uy?” Jerry asked.

  “Not necessarily looking for us,” he replied. “But we’re not too far from the rendezvous, which indicates our friend Sarpa may have a problem. This far over the border, that chopper must be almost at the limit of his fuel. Unless, of course, they’re using some of our old support sites for refueling stations.” The thought, and others, brought him up short. The NVA wouldn’t be operating under the restrictions the Americans had to suffer during the war. They could be damn near anyplace.

  Including on their trail.

  “Saddle up,” he said. “The sooner we get this done, the better.”

  They ate a hurried breakfast, this time using a couple of rolled-up pills of C-4 to heat water in canteen cups. Some things you can do without, Jim reflected. Hot coffee isn’t one of them.

  Just before leaving, Jim uncovered Jerry’s wound, was pleased to see that none of the stitches had broken loose. He wiped it with sterile gauze, inspected the cloth, and found only clear serum. The surrounding flesh was red, as it should have been, but not overly hot to the touch. So far, so good. He rebandaged the wound, gave Jerry a couple more tetracycline pills, watched carefully as the sergeant downed them. Within days the flesh would granulate, each side of the wound reaching for the other, and in a few days more would close off on its own. It would leave a hell of a scar, but somehow he didn’t think Jerry Hauck was overly worried about how he would look in a bathing suit.

  He buried the old bandage deep enough to discourage the forest scavengers from digging it up. Unlikely anyone would find it anyway, but you didn’t leave anything to chance. The minute you thought you were safe from something like that the fates played their cosmic crap shoot and you came up snake eyes.

  Dickerson had in the meantime been rolling up the claymore wires, removing the blasting caps and stowing mines and caps in separate pockets in the rucksacks. Again a precaution, but a necessary one. If a bullet hit the blasting cap it would explode it, producing a nasty little wound, particularly if it was close to your back. But if it was still in the mine and it went off there wouldn’t be enough left of you to provide positive identification.

  To the extent possible they sterilized the RON site, making sure there were no little scraps of paper, pieces of foil from the rations packets, anything that might tell someone that a team had recently stayed here. It wouldn’t stop a skilled tracker, but if they had a skilled tracker on their trail they were pretty much screwed anyway.

  Finally satisfied, they shouldered rucksacks, grabbed weapons, took a quick azimuth, and slipped back into the jungle. As nearly as Jim could figure they were about eight kilometers away from the rendezvous site and at the rate of travel they’d maintained the day before it would take slightly more than half a day to cover it. If no one was there the plan was to once again RON, wait twenty-four hours, then head for the alternate site. The alternate was almost thirty kilometers away from the primary—a hump none of them were looking forward to, particularly when it involved the crossing of a fairly major river.

  Just had to hope someone was going to be at the primary.

  By noon they were once again exhausted. The terrain closer to the river was cut up by ravines and washes, making for much harder going. Some of them they could cross, sliding down one side and scrambling up the other, the first man up pulling the others by main force. Others were far too deeply cut, the bottoms a jumble of rocks that made sure you weren’t going to follow them to the water. A simple solution would have been to follow alongside, but the lay of the land would, according to Jim’s calculations, have led them downstream from the RV site at least six or seven klicks. For one major ravine they had to backtrack almost two klicks until they could find a crossing point, then box back to where they would have been, only then once again taking up the correct azimuth. The eight kilometers to the RV site were quickly becoming more like ten or twelve.

  The one good thing was that they hadn’t heard the helicopter again. Maybe it was just a passover, Jim told himself, wishing he believed it.

  They flopped down, still maintaining some semblance of a defensive perimeter, but didn’t bother to put out claymores.

  The meal was once again reconstituted Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, LRRP, rations, eaten cold. Recon men called them lurps when they were feeling particularly charitable, ever increasingly obscenity-filled names when they weren’t. If you were out with the ’Yards you could always depend upon them to come up with the odd animal or plant to supplement the unappetizing mess, and Jim supposed that if he wanted to put himself out, he could do the same.

  But right now he was just too goddamn tired.

  Why shouldn’t he be tired? he asked himself. After all, he was getting to be an old man. Thirty-three years old. Five more years and he would be eligible to retire. Half pay at the rate of a major. That was, if the Army ever again unfroze the promotions. He’d been a captain for eight years now. Back during
the war captains were making major with two to three years in grade.

  Goddamn peacetime Army, he said for only about the millionth time.

  Although it wasn’t all that peaceful here, was it? The fact that it was quiet didn’t mean anything. At any moment an enemy platoon could come bursting from the jungle and they would once again be in a fight for their lives. With very damned little chance of survival, now that they couldn’t call air, artillery, evacuation, or any damned thing else.

  Gotta stop volunteering for this kind of shit, he told himself, again for about the millionth time.

  A few minutes later and an uncomfortable heaviness in the pit of his stomach told him it was time. He gritted his teeth. God, he hated to shit in the field! You were so goddamn exposed, so vulnerable, your butt hanging out to the breeze while you strained to get just one little turd out. Yeah, the others would be maintaining watch and you probably weren’t a damned bit more vulnerable than you were right now.

  Still, it seemed like it. He knew he wasn’t alone in his aversion. Back in the war it had come to such a pass that the SOG recon teams had been issued a special pill. Something with an impossibly technical name, but which came to be known, quite naturally, as the no-shit pill. Take one of those little hummers and it tightened you up so close you couldn’t drive a tenpenny nail up your butt with a ten-pound sledge. Of course, when they finally wore off your intestines were so packed with hardened feces it felt like you were having a baby when you finally did go to the latrine.

  No use putting it off, he told himself. He told Dickerson what he was going to do, left the rest site, going only a few meters away and downwind, quickly scratched out a cathole, dropped trousers, and, holding his carbine across his lap, eyes anxiously scanning the jungle, took care of business. A quick wipe with the toilet paper included in the lurp ration bag, cover it all, and scrape leaves over the disturbed earth. Gratefully return to the rest site, secure in the knowledge that this particular task was taken care of for one more day at least. Next time it would be within the FULRO camp, the exposure factor far lower.

  That afternoon, luckily, because Jim didn’t think they would have made the RV site otherwise, the terrain cooperated. By four o’clock they were in the general area, confirmed by a quick terrain analysis.

  “Let’s find a hidey-hole,” Jim said. “Now we wait.”

  “Any word from the team yet?” Bentley Sloane asked Mark Petrillo.

  “Aside from the initial contact? No. Nothing.”

  Sloane frowned. “You don’t have them on a regular contact schedule?”

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  Now it was Petrillo’s turn to frown. What he wanted to say was, it’s none of your business, you freaking straphanger. But you had to be careful, very careful, when dealing with people like this. You never knew who had the real power. After all, the chief of staff for Intelligence hadn’t sent him here just to watch and learn.

  “Carmichael wanted it that way,” he said. “Said he didn’t have time to stop and set up an antenna every time somebody in the rear felt lonely. He’d contact us when he had something to report, and not before.”

  “And you let a field operative set the rules?” Sloane was acutely aware of his inexperience in matters of this sort, but still…if you let someone like Carmichael, who by his record was a notorious rule breaker, do as he wanted, how could you control him?

  “When the field operative is Jim Carmichael, yes,” Petrillo answered. “He knows what he’s doing. Besides, if he doesn’t want to make contact, how are you going to force him? What are you going to threaten him with? A bad OER? Send him back to Vietnam?”

  Petrillo was now smiling, and it infuriated Sloane. It wasn’t bad enough that someone was right, as he recognized the lieutenant colonel to be. But they always had to rub it in.

  “Speaking of something to report,” he said, “shouldn’t they have made contact with Sarpa’s people by now?”

  “We don’t even know if they’ve made the RV point,” Petrillo said, tired of the conversation and wanting to get back to work. “That’s some shitty terrain out there. Hard to move cross-country, especially when you’re snoopin’ and poopin’—not exactly as if they can call in an arclight if they get tumbled now, is it?”

  Privately he was thinking, bet you’ve never had to do that, have you, you little shit? He knew, of course, about Bentley Sloane’s war record. Had made the necessary phone calls to friends in the Pentagon who were happy to forward anything they could on the young captain. The fact that Sloane had been an A team executive officer, and that he had during the course of a very bad day won the Medal of Honor, didn’t really mean a lot when it came to things like this. The fact that you could be incredibly brave during a single action didn’t mean that you were automatically a good field soldier.

  Since he had been, of course, pulled out of active field service after winning the big blue, it was unlikely that he would ever get the chance to prove himself either. The Army didn’t like to risk its certified heroes. People like Lew Millett, who had won the medal in Korea by leading the last bayonet charge ever conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army, had been forced to fight the entire military establishment to get the opportunity to lead a combat unit in Vietnam. The people he’d pissed off during that effort had made certain that Millett would never reach flag rank. That, as Millett had once confessed to Petrillo during a long, liquor-filled evening, and the fact that he had a desertion on his military record. He’d been in the Army in 1940, had been so pissed off at our neutralism that he’d gone AWOL, crossed the border, and joined the Canadian Army, where he got the combat he was seeking. After Pearl Harbor he had returned home to an Army grateful enough to get anyone with any combat experience that his sins were forgiven. But the Army never really forgot.

  “I suppose,” Sloane said, barely willing to concede the point. Still, if he’d been running things it would have been vastly different.

  “Besides,” Petrillo said, “we’ve got more things to worry about than Carmichael not making contact. Signals intercept is picking up a hell of a lot of chatter from the NVA headquarters for that area. Coded, so we don’t know what they’re talkin’ about, but it’s worrisome.”

  “Any other explanation for it?” Sloane asked.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “So you think the mission might be compromised?”

  “Yeah,” Petrillo answered. “Just like the old days.”

  Just like the old days indeed, Sloane thought. With one big difference.

  They’d taken turns on watch—Jerry had the first shift from eight to twelve, Dickerson to four in the morning, now it was Jim Carmichael’s turn. Dick had woken him from a particularly good dream, where he and Alix were in a huge bed under a down coverlet as soft as a cloud, and she was touching him, and…

  Shit! he muttered, rolling out of the poncho liner and feeling the dampness and chill that characterized early morning in the mountains of Laos. Kept you awake, this. Stay rolled up in the warm poncho liner and likelihood was that you’d drift back off, easy prey for someone with a little bit of stealth and a sharp knife.

  It was still quite dark, wouldn’t be light for another couple of hours at the least. He dug in a side pocket of the rucksack, took out an infrared scope, scanned the surrounding jungle. The scope was obsolete, deservedly so. It put out a beam of infrared light that could easily be picked up by anyone with a passive infrared scope, but he had calculated that any North Vietnamese unit in this area wouldn’t be so equipped. Besides, the instrument had a couple of advantages. It was lighter and far less bulky than the AN-PVS 2 Starlight scope he had left in the equipment bundle. And, since it was obsolete, it could be obtained in any well-equipped army surplus store. Deniability, General Miller had said. Above all, we must have deniability. Your cover story, should you be caught, is that you’re on a private rescue mission, much like that already being run by a few veterans out of Thailand.

  Personally, J
im didn’t think the cover story would hold up worth a shit, and even if it did, the likelihood that the NVA would take any more kindly to civilians in their rear areas than they would to a military unit was slight.

  But it would allow the U.S. government to say, Who, us? Of course we didn’t authorize any such mission. Now, if you would, please return these people to our control, and we’ll make sure they’re prosecuted.

  Features jumped out in the eerie reddish light. The lump that might have been someone slowly making his way into the RON site resolved itself into a big rock. The crackle of noise was a very large civet cat, snuffling at the jungle floor in an unending search for food. Easy to get spooked out here. Nerves were on edge anyway, and imagination if let loose would conjure up demons, ghosts, and sprites—or NVA sappers making their inexorable way into your perimeter.

  He’d tucked himself against the trunk of a banyan tree, sat hunched with the carbine upright between his knees. That way if he did go to sleep, the moment his head nodded he would smack his forehead on the muzzle. Many was the time he’d returned from patrol with a big bruise right between his eyes.

  No problem with that this morning. His mind was far too active. Overactive. No one had been at the RV site when they arrived the evening before. What did that mean? Supposedly someone was going to occupy it for a month. Were they, in fact, somewhere around, observing, making sure that the people that came in were the ones who were supposed to be there?

  Worse, had they abandoned the site? There were many reasons for such an action. Enemy pressure was only one. If so, that might mean that the enemy was still in the area, hence the need to be even more careful.

  Or it could be, Jim, that you’re in entirely the wrong spot. Such things had happened before. No matter how good your navigation you could be off by several kilometers. One bend in a river looked very much like any other bend in a river. If the Air Force navigator had been off in his calculations they could have been dropped all the hell and gone away from where they were supposed to be, and without the right start point it didn’t really matter how good your navigation was after that.