Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  He moved forward. Another forty or so yards to the stream. He approached it from a different angle each time, never setting a pattern. If they stayed where they were much longer it was his intention to search out another water source. It might be farther away than this one, but the more you went to one spot, the more likely it was that someone could find you. He knew he was leaving sign as well, careful as he was. Any skilled tracker could find it.

  Close to the edge of the water he stopped once again. He hadn’t had a drink in the last half hour and the smell of water was tempting. Too tempting. Never rush into anything, one of his team sergeants had beaten into his head. That’s what they count on.

  He crouched behind a wait-a-minute vine, listened and looked for another half hour.

  Not completely satisfied, but deciding that if he was to get the water he was going to have to take a chance, he moved the last few feet to the edge of the stream.

  He never heard the explosion.

  Jim Carmichael was almost asleep when he heard the beeping from inside his rucksack. He pawed through it, finally finding the Motorola two-way radio he’d insisted the mission director provide them with. Why? Petrillo had wanted to know. You can’t make commo with us with these damned things.

  No, but we can sure as hell make commo with each other, Jim had said. The Motorolas were light-years ahead of the old squad radios he’d tried to use in his tours in Vietnam. The squad radios, some wag had said, were truly essential equipment. They made wonderful substitutes for bricks when you wanted to whack someone in the head.

  The only other radio that would have worked would have been the PRC-77, and it weighed at least fifteen pounds without battery. The battery not only added another five pounds of weight, it would have taken at least half a dozen of them to keep the radios going before they could be resupplied. With the weight the team was already carrying no one wanted the additional thirty or so pounds the PRC-77 would have represented.

  The Motorola was not authorized in the Army supply chain, of course. It was lightweight, relatively weatherproof, utterly reliable, and, if you didn’t have a lot of terrain between you and the recipient, made commo. The Army would adopt it, Jim was sure, after it had been re-engineered, had so many bells and whistles the Field Manual would weigh as much as the radio, and after it had long since been replaced by a model half the size, twice the range, and powered by sunlight.

  He pressed the push-to-talk switch, said, “Go ahead.”

  “We got a problem,” Dickerson replied.

  “Nature?”

  “Two-zero hasn’t come back from the water run. And I heard an explosion in that direction.”

  Jim swore under his breath. There could have been a number of explanations for Jimmy Hauck’s absence. None of them were good. He could have stepped on a piece of unexploded ordnance. God knew there were enough of those around. This section of Laos had been heavily bombed for a number of years. A number of those bombs had been cluster bomb units, CBUs. Some of them exploded like they were supposed to, but a heavy percentage didn’t. Weatherproof, virtually indestructible, they lay in wait for the unwary. Oftentimes you could pick one up, throw it, and it wouldn’t go off. Jim had come back to camp one day in 1966 to see one of the Vietnamese LLDB shooting at one he’d stuck up on a rock. Luckily he was a terrible shot.

  All too often, however, the slightest jar and they would explode. The exterior was constructed of a thin metal shell; inside was a matrix of steel balls embedded in resin surrounding a chunk of military explosive. The bursting radius, the circle in which anyone unshielded would suffer at the very least a debilitating wound, was twenty-five meters. So you didn’t stand much chance if you kicked one.

  Or it could have been a toe-popper, left there by some long-forgotten recon team, in which case Jimmy would be lying there badly wounded.

  Or it could be that they hadn’t been as lucky avoiding the enemy as they’d thought.

  Whatever it was, he had to get out there.

  “Roger,” he said. “I’m gonna send somebody out to guide you into the camp. You need to take care of Glenn.” He quickly described the condition of the patient, told the sergeant what to do in his absence.

  “Set up the radio, get SFOB, get an operational immediate resupply. Coordinate with Sarpa as to the drop zone.” He reeled off a list of medicines and equipment they would need to treat not only Parker but the other victims of the yellow rain.

  “Then stand by,” he said.

  After a moment he added, “And by the way. I don’t come back, you continue the mission. Do you roger?”

  Dickerson, who had intended to protest that it was he, instead of the captain, who should have been going after Hauck, recognized the tone in his commander’s voice. His arguments would have fallen on deaf ears.

  He rogered the last transmission.

  And God be with you, he breathed.

  Jim shrugged back into his web gear, grabbed the CAR-15, and headed out of the bunker, to see Willi Korhonen standing there with a squad of Montagnards.

  “We heard an explosion,” Korhonen said. “Getting ready to go check.”

  “May be one of mine. I know where he’s supposed to be. I’ll lead.”

  “With all due respect, Captain,” one of the Montagnards said, in English that would have done a teacher proud, “we know the area. I was on RT Texas, out of CCN.” He pointed to two others in the squad. One was armed with a cut-down RPD machine gun, the other had an M-16 with an M-203 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the handguard.

  “These men, also, RT Texas. All that is left. The others here were II Corps Mike Force.”

  Jim grinned. “Then I’m in good company,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They headed back out the way Jim had been escorted in. The troops maintained a healthy distance between men, alternated weapons from side to side, and once they entered the jungle outside the perimeter the drag man started walking backward, covering their rear.

  “They’re good,” Jim said to Korhonen, who walked right behind him. The major was carrying an old Swedish K submachinegun—not a weapon Jim would have chosen to go up against someone who was armed with AK-47s, but that was his choice, wasn’t it? He had a feeling that Korhonen would more than hold up his end in any firefight.

  “I thought you came alone,” Korhonen replied.

  “I lied.”

  “Yah,” Korhonen said after a moment. “I would have too.”

  If there was such a thing as perfect patrol movement the Montagnards were achieving it. They had assumed the attitude of what Jim often thought of as relaxed alertness. If you stayed too tense you got tired too quickly, and your performance suffered. If you were too relaxed you didn’t catch the small signs that might mean the difference between life and death.

  They moved quickly and surely, through areas that, although they showed no signs of being well traveled, were clear enough of obstacles that Jim realized they were used as normal avenues of approach. Took a hell of a lot of work to do this, he thought. His appreciation of Korhonen and Sarpa went up a notch.

  Dickerson had given him an approximate coordinate where he had figured the explosion to be. As they moved Jim wondered how Jerry Hauck could have been taken by surprise, if indeed that was what happened. Jerry was one of the finest field soldiers he’d ever known. It wasn’t like him to fall into an ambush.

  Maybe we’ve just been away from it too long, he thought, and not for the first time. When you lived on the edge you developed senses that often defied logical explanation. Some called it gut feeling, a few of the newer guys had attributed it to extrasensory perception. Whatever it was, some had it and some didn’t. The ones who did tended to survive. The others were shipped out in body bags.

  He just hoped he wasn’t going to have to put another friend in one.

  Jerry Hauck stumbled and fell, only to be prodded back to his feet with the point of the triangular bayonet affixed to the barrel of the AK-47. He got up as quickly as he could, given
the fact that his elbows were tied so far behind his back they touched, and his wrists were similarly bound.

  He was falling less and less now, indicating that at least some of the equilibrium thrown off kilter by the explosion was coming back.

  He hadn’t expected to wake up. Had been terribly disappointed when figures swam into view, all of them pointing rifles at him. By that time he was already trussed like a hog, eliminating any thoughts of resistance. They’d stripped him of his rucksack, web gear, and weapon, and had obviously searched him quite thoroughly. One of them, Jerry figured him to be the officer, was examining the snub-nose .38 Special revolver he had carried concealed in an ankle holster.

  “Get up!” the officer had said.

  Jerry flailed his legs, acted even more addled than he actually was. Delay, he was thinking. Take as long as you possibly can. Make it a shorter chase for the people you know are coming after you.

  The bayonets disabused him of that idea. The one wielded by an NCO with the face of an ascetic drew blood, and Jerry knew he was scant inches from being run through. Yeah, they wanted a prisoner, but not bad enough to die for it.

  Professionals, these. He got up.

  Still, he’d had trouble walking, and they seemed to understand he would. For the first couple of hundred meters two of them had flanked him, supporting him when he stumbled, pulling him to his feet when he fell.

  But at last their patience had run thin, or perhaps they just knew he was faking it now. Now it was the bayonet again.

  They were moving at almost a trot. The tactician in him disapproved. Easy to walk into an ambush like this. He just had to hope that if someone was setting up somewhere down the trail they would recognize him as an American and at least attempt to avoid hitting him.

  More than likely a claymore would kick it off, and those were notoriously indiscriminate.

  This is what you’ve been looking for, all this time, ain’t it?

  Might have been, he told himself. But now that he was faced with the probability of his imminent demise, he found that he wanted very much to live.

  He only hoped that one thing or another happened, either he died or someone rescued him, before the torture started. He vowed that before that happened he would attempt an escape, as hopeless as that might be. Better a bullet than hours and hours of more pain than anyone could possibly endure.

  He stumbled again.

  The point man came across Jerry’s sign, held up a closed fist in signal to stop, dropped to the ground and inspected the faint prints, and then waved an open hand forward. He changed track slightly, now going at a forty-five-degree angle from their original azimuth.

  Everyone tensed slightly, knowing they were getting close. For all we know, Jim thought, they could be up there lying in ambush. A whole hell of a lot of them. And good as these folks are, we can’t go up against a whole hell of a lot of them. A squad-sized element fighting its way out of a battalion ambush might be a good scene for the movies, but John Wayne was nowhere around.

  Another hundred meters and the point man signaled a stop again. Then he waved the patrol leader forward. Carmichael and Korhonen followed.

  The leaves that covered this part of the jungle floor were churned by a number of feet. And close to the edge of the stream the patrol leader pointed out a scorched spot. There was no blood to be found.

  “Concussion grenade, I figure,” said Korhonen. “Knocked him out, took him, and they’re gone.”

  “How the hell did they know where to set the grenade?” Jim wondered.

  “I expect if you were to search this stream you’d find where they set them every twenty-five yards or so. We used to do the same thing to the Russians. No matter where they go, you can get them. They probably watched your guys, took a chance that they were going to keep coming to this stream, even if in different spots, laid it all out.”

  “Shall we follow?” the patrol leader asked.

  Korhonen glanced at Jim, who already had his mind made up. If the patrol didn’t follow, he was going to. By himself. What he’d do when he found them, he didn’t know. What he did know was that he couldn’t leave Jerry Hauck in their hands.

  The people back at NKP had made it quite clear. The one thing the U.S. government couldn’t afford was to have the NVA waving a new prisoner of war, crowing about how it proved that the war wasn’t over, that the new administration was just as bad as the old.

  Not that he cared what the people who were running things wanted. He wasn’t going to leave Jerry Hauck. He’d left far too many people behind. Wasn’t going to happen again.

  Korhonen gave an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose so,” he said. Then he grinned.

  “Looks like about the same number of people we have,” he said, looking at the footprints. “Unfair. To them.”

  They quickly formed up again, the patrol members who had fanned out to form a hasty perimeter assuming their former positions and heading out. The trail wasn’t hard to follow—Jim thought that, even as rusty as his skills were, he could have done it. Their quarry was making haste, doing little to hide their sign.

  It was a battle between impatience and caution. On the one hand he wanted to get to them as quickly as possible, preferably before they linked up with a larger unit. On the other, it would do no one any good if they ran up on a booby-trapped claymore. He would have put one out to discourage any followers, couldn’t see why they wouldn’t too.

  At the moment Jim was almost glad that he wasn’t the patrol leader. He was far too emotionally invested in it. The thought of what they might be doing to his old friend would keep him pushing, perhaps far more than he should have.

  Not that they were going slowly. The point man was pushing out as quickly as prudence would allow. Jim sensed an eagerness in the men. It was almost palpable; perhaps a mixture of excitement, sweat, and testosterone. So must the earliest ancestors of man have felt, he thought, when they sighted the enemy.

  They came to a cleared area, all that was left of some Montagnard or H’Mong slash-and-burn farmstead, skirted around the edge of it, just as their quarry had done. The setting sun was just now touching the tops of the trees on the other side. It cast crimson rays into the sky.

  Like bayonets, Jim thought. Bloody fucking bayonets.

  Now he was stumbling again, and this time he wasn’t faking it. The man behind him pushed him, hard, and he fell face forward. With his arms bound he had no chance to break the fall and he felt a great whoosh of air as his chest hit the ground. For a moment he lay there choking, and then he heard laughter. The bastards thought it was funny!

  The lieutenant came back to see what was causing the commotion, spat a few angry words at the guards, who sheepishly picked Jerry up and set him on his feet again.

  The lieutenant started to turn away, then jerked his head, noticing something. He put out a tentative finger, touched Jerry’s neck.

  The finger came away coated with blood.

  The lieutenant again spat a few words, and this time Jerry caught most of it.

  He’s bleeding from the ears, the officer had said. He could die. We cannot allow that. Hurry! And if he falls again, carry him.

  Was wondering how come my neck felt wet, Jerry thought. Now I know. He concentrated on his head, trying to feel for anything other than the dizziness that spoke of inner-ear damage.

  Nothing. But that didn’t mean a hell of a lot.

  Had my head beat in more times than I can count, he thought. And now I’m gonna croak because of a goddamn concussion grenade?

  Didn’t seem fair somehow.

  Chapter 14

  It was well after dark when the point man stopped again. They had closed the column considerably—even with the strips of luminous tape affixed to the backs of their hats it was easy to lose contact. A momentary bit of inattention and half the patrol would be going one way and the other part a completely different direction. Getting lost could be dealt with. Stumbling into one another and getting into a friendly firefight couldn’t.


  After a moment a whisper passed down the line summoned Jim to the front. The point man and patrol leader were waiting for him.

  “Smell it?” the patrol leader asked.

  Jim sniffed. Sure enough he could smell something. Smoke.

  It could, of course, be the cooking fire of a H’Mong family that had somehow escaped the devastation that had been wrought on this area. Jim didn’t think so. Those natives who hadn’t fled the bombing had been herded up and moved by the NVA, afraid that they would provide assistance to the recon teams.

  Jim tested the wind with a wet finger. The smoke was coming from their left front at about ten o’clock. The smell was faint—either it was quite some distance away or it was a very small fire. Or both.

  “They’ve stopped,” he whispered to the patrol leader.

  Korhonen, who had soundlessly slipped up to join them, nodded in agreement.

  “They’re used to this being their backyard,” he said. “They were always chasing us, instead of the other way around. Makes for bad habits.”

  “Can you send a man to scout it out?” Jim asked the patrol leader. “All of us go up there, likely we’ll make too much noise.”

  He’d thought to go himself, then realized that even in his best days he couldn’t move through the foliage as silently as could one of the ’Yards.

  The Montagnard nodded, then held a whispered conversation with the point man, who quickly shed everything he was carrying, taking only a pistol. He slipped into the underbrush, and it was as if he had never been there.

  The rest of them assumed a close defensive perimeter as they waited. They didn’t bother to put out tripflares or claymores. The last thing they wanted was to alert any reserve force the NVA might have to their presence. If they were compromised they would simply melt into the jungle, to link up later at a predesignated rally point.