Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  Several hundred meters ahead Y Buon Sarpa and Willi Korhonen finished emplacing their heavy weapons, then took their places in a hastily dug hole that would serve well enough for a command post. Their weapons were a hopeless hodge-podge, firing a dozen different cartridges. Some of the boxes the bullets had come in were so old they still bore the markings of the World War II antagonists who had first used the weapons—7.92 Mauser for the KAR-98s with which a long-ago CIA program had armed village defense forces, 7.65mm for the MAS-49 rifles left over from the French, 9mm Parabellum for the Schmeisser submachineguns and MAS-38s, .30 M1 carbine, .30–06 for M1 rifles and 1919A-6 machine guns, 7.62 NATO for the M-60s, 7.62x39 Kalashnikov for the AK-47s and RPDs, .45 ACP for the Thompson submachineguns and M-3 Greaseguns, 5.56mm for the M-16s and CAR-15s. And that didn’t count the pistols.

  Going up against a modern, well-armed and homogeneous force. A force, moreover, that had been hardened and tested in a dozen years of war. And which, by the way, outnumbered them.

  Korhonen, at least, was happy. “Just like when we fought the Russians,” he told Sarpa, for perhaps the tenth time. The Montagnard commander was getting heartily tired of the speech, but didn’t see a way, absent shooting the big Finn, to stop it.

  “Always outnumbered,” Willi continued. “But we hit them in the rear, on their flanks, confused them. Took out their leaders. They don’t fight well without leaders. Neither do the Vietnamese.”

  Neither, particularly, do we, Sarpa thought. Years of training under the Americans hadn’t completely erased the tribesman’s tendency to defer to the chief in all things. Even when the chief was wrong.

  Sarpa wondered if he was. Perhaps he should have been taking his people to refuge in Thailand, as so many others had, rather than sticking in his homeland. Becoming a thorn in the side of the enemy. Was it just that he hated them so much? Would not rest until the last of them was chased back to the lowlands where they belonged?

  He shook his head, almost imperceptibly, at his own thought. No. His people belonged here. They had been in this place longer than recounted in the tales told late at night by the old ones who were heirs to the tales told at night by generations of others. He knew, with a knowledge that came from the very core of him, that he would surely pine away and die should he be taken from this place. As would most of the others.

  Korhonen noted the tiny movement of Sarpa’s head. “You don’t think we can win?” he asked.

  “Of course I do,” Sarpa replied. “We must. We have no other choice.”

  And that’s just the problem, he thought. We have no other choice.

  They heard a burst of fire, muffled by the trees but still fairly close.

  “Jim Carmichael is still alive, then,” Sarpa said. He allowed himself a small smile.

  “Or was until just then,” Korhonen said, somewhat grudgingly. He thought it should have been him who led the Viets into the ambush.

  “Sometimes I think he is the only one who will survive this whole war,” Sarpa said. “Look!”

  Breaking through the trees by ones and twos were the Montagnards who had accompanied Carmichael. They were now at a dead run. Only open area ahead. Channeled by the river on one side and a field so overgrown by secondary growth that trying to move through it would take machetes and more time than anyone had. Such a place was a killing field. Only fools would try to make it through.

  Sarpa smiled again. Only fools, and a crazy American, who was just now emerging from the trees, taking a moment to turn and fire a magazine into his unseen pursuers.

  Lieutenant Colonel Minh heard heavy firing to his rear and had a moment of doubt about the wisdom of this course of action. It was hard to tell exactly, but it sounded like where he had left his headquarters.

  No matter, he told himself. Third Company can handle itself without me. Probably only a diversion to make me stop the chase.

  As if it would work! Up ahead he could see the quarry, trying to make their way across the open ground. Not a chance. They would be cut down long before they reached the next treeline. Already his men were steadying themselves, some in the kneeling position, others braced against trees to better their aim. The AK-47 was not particularly accurate, being meant more for volume of fire than preciseness, but at this range his men could hardly miss.

  “Don’t shoot the American,” he screamed. “I want him alive.”

  His shout was lost in the burst of fire. One by one they went down, dropping like stones and not rising again. He was shouting now, CEASE FIRE, CEASE FIRE! but it was doing absolutely no good.

  Then the American dropped, and his heart dropped as well. The idiots! He had not come this far only to fail because of a bunch of fools disobeying orders. For a moment he thought to take the pistol and shoot a few of them. That would show them the folly of disobeying.

  Then the last of them was down, at least a hundred meters away from the nearest treeline. The firing slowed, slackened, finally stopped except for a few stray shots.

  He was seething. “Go, go,” he screamed. “Maybe one or two of them is still alive. If the American is alive, and someone hurts him further, I will personally blow his brains out on the grass. Do you understand me?”

  The men closest to him nodded that they did. The ones farther away rolled their eyes at his foolishness. These men had killed their friends. Of course they had to die too.

  He strolled out into the open, squinted up at the sun. Was it still so early? It seemed a lifetime since the chase had begun. Ahead of him the men were moving cautiously, angering him the more.

  “Go, go,” he said. He was thinking that, if they let him bleed to death…

  The next thing to go through his mind was a match-grade .30–06 round fired through an M-1 Garand sniper rifle equipped with an M-82 scope. A weapon hopelessly obsolete, used extensively by the U.S. Army in World War II and Korea, long since superseded by the M-21 sniper system based on the accurized M-14 rifle.

  But it still did the job, Korhonen thought as he watched the Vietnamese commander’s head disappear in a pink mist. He sighted on the radio operator.

  The shot was the signal for the initiation of the two-hundred-meter-long ambush. A roar of fire as a hundred weapons opened up, each shooter having taken his aim at a specific individual. The exposed troops were cut down like wheat before a combine, those surviving the first burst of fire trying frantically to hide, find cover, return fire.

  Only to be caught by the crossfire of the men they thought safely dead, now emerging from the predug holes into which they’d dropped when the bullets from the treeline had gotten too close.

  Jim Carmichael methodically worked the M-60 machine gun that had been sited specifically for the purpose. Three-round bursts into one man, already moving to the next before the last round had time to hit. They flopped back, or dropped where they stood, or twisted as if they were trying to bore a hole in the ground. No theatrical flying through the air, even when grenade bursts from the 40mm M-79 rounds fired by the little Montagnard in the next hole over landed at their feet.

  They died, that was all. If you were to ask Jim Carmichael what he was feeling at the moment he would have looked at you like you were from another world. A world where it meant something to kill a man. Here it meant nothing at all. It was a job that had to be done, that was all.

  The ambush was set up in the form of a Z, if you straightened the upright. His troops were at the bottom leg where they could sweep the kill zone with enfilade fire. The main force was on the upright, pouring flanking fire into the enemy. At the top a holding force guarded against the enemy trying to flank the flankers.

  The kill zone had been picked with special care. The ground was almost perfectly flat and level, courtesy of some long-ago farmer who had undoubtedly spent years working on his fields. There were no folds, no dips, no hillocks behind which you could take shelter.

  You stood up, you died. You lay down, you died. The flanking machine guns were positioned to sweep the kill zone with interlocking
fire about six inches high.

  A few of the brave ones tried to assault into the ambush. They got no more than twenty feet before being cut down.

  And as quickly as it had begun it was over. The lack of sound was somehow shattering. Where before there had been chaos, now there was only the snap and creak of slowly cooling guns and somewhere out there the moans of someone not yet quite dead.

  Jim maintained position as the recovery teams swept the area, grabbing anything of value. Guns, ammunition, grenades, documents, maps.

  There was no more shooting. The wounded would stay that way. Jim had insisted on it, back when he’d laid out the plan to Sarpa and Korhonen. Not out of any particular sense of mercy—as badly as some of those out there were suffering it would probably have been a kindness to put them out of their misery.

  “Kill someone, and they bury him,” he’d said. “Half-dozen grave diggers can do that for any number of people. Wound someone and it takes at least two people to carry him. Maybe four. And they’ve got to get him treated, which takes up medicine I suspect they don’t have a lot of. Then they’ve got to keep him in a field hospital, or evacuate him. Anybody up and down the line, they look at him and think, that could be me. Dead people they can forget about. Wounded ones, they’ve got to look at every day.”

  Korhonen had looked at him in new respect.

  “You’ve learned your lessons well,” he’d said.

  “I was taught by the best,” he’d replied. And now he looked at the carnage and thought that perhaps he’d learned a little too well.

  Worry about that later. Sarpa was giving the signal for withdrawal.

  They faded back into the jungle, the only sign they’d been there the empty brass littering the firing positions and the bodies left behind.

  Chapter 19

  Finn McCulloden surveyed his assets for the extraction of the team and reflected that, for a country not at war, Thailand wasn’t in bad shape. There were three Huey “slicks,” troop-carrying choppers armed only with M-60 machine guns on each door. One would act as the extraction chopper, one would be in reserve in case the first one got in trouble, and the third would act as command and control.

  Two Cobra gunships, armed with 2.75-inch rocket pods and miniguns mounted in a swiveling ball under the nose. The Cobras’ mission would be to suppress ground fire that might endanger the slicks. Long, skinny birds, they provided as little surface as possible at which to aim.

  Orbiting overhead would be a flight of F-5 fighters. The F-5s would provide bombing and gun support for the extraction, taking out targets that offered too much threat to the slower-moving Cobras. Two of the four fighters would be carrying napalm and the other two had 250-pound bombs. All had gun pods for close air support. Their dwell time was minimal and they had no midair refueling capability, so they’d be on hold until just before the actual extraction, then would take to the air. Inasmuch as the team’s position was only ten miles across the border, it wouldn’t take the subsonic fighters long to get there.

  Back in the old days the fighter support would have been “Sandys,” the A1E prop-driven fighter planes first used in the Korean War. Dump trucks of the air, some people called them. They carried an unbelievable amount of ordnance, could loiter over the objective for hours, and had pilots who loved to get down and dirty. But the A1Es were all gone.

  Except for those the Viets might have captured, Finn found himself amending. Be a hell of a thing, to find them on the other side.

  Of course, there would also have been a Covey, a light plane containing a pilot and a rider, the latter of which would have been a recon man himself. Covey would have been directing the action, communicating with everyone concerned, controlling the aircraft in a hugely complicated aerial ballet.

  No Covey. The Thais didn’t have anyone trained in the technique, even though they had a few of the older-model O-1 Birddog planes that Covey had used until they’d been replaced by the newer push-pull prop O-2s.

  No, command and control of this operation would have to be done from the Huey. And it would be done by Finn McCulloden and his Thai counterpart, Captain Tienchai.

  Finn had rationalized that he had been restricted from going on the ground in Laos, but no one had said anything about his being in the air. The idea had actually been posed by Lieutenant Bucky Epstein, who had of course intended to ride the C&C ship himself.

  And had been highly pissed when Captain McCulloden had pulled rank and had taken the mission himself.

  “Then why can’t I ride chase?” he’d asked.

  “Because we need someone here to take care of the rest of the teams,” Finn had said, reasonably, in his estimation. “Besides, I get shot down over there, I’d sure like an American voice on the other end of the radio. That would be you.”

  “Shit!” Bucky had said. He was even now sulking in the command center.

  The choppers were spooling up, the whine of the turbines filling the air, scattering a flock of birds at the end of the runway. They rose squawking into the sky, the red and gold of their wings beautiful in the sunlight.

  Finn looked to the east, saw the thunderclouds that had been worrying him all morning moving closer. The air weather officer in Bangkok had forecast a probability of rain, starting today and perhaps continuing through the near future. A typhoon was building somewhere out in the South China Sea.

  It was now or never. The weather closed in and the team would be well and truly screwed.

  He and Captain Tienchai had already made arrangements to extract the few teams that hadn’t already crossed the border to safety. Those teams had moved to safe areas where the extractions should be relatively routine.

  The only wild card was this one. Their as-yet-unknown benefactors had been providing a steady stream of information through the URC-10 radio contact they continued to maintain. The team had broken contact a half-dozen times, only to be found again and again. Two team members had suffered wounds, though both could still function.

  They were down to no more than two magazines of ammo each, and very few grenades. One or two more contacts and it would all be over. The team leader had vowed never to be taken alive. It was get them now or try to recover bodies at some later date.

  That wasn’t going to happen. Not if Finn McCulloden could help it.

  He and Tienchai ran to the helicopter, fitted on the headsets connected to the big radio console mounted just behind the pilots, made commo check first to the pilots and the crew chiefs, then to the other choppers. Tienchai would do the work necessary for close air support; Finn would control the actual extraction. It was a division of labor that had worked in earlier field problems, Finn finding Tienchai to be a consummate professional. Never rattled, at least not in the exercises. Only time could tell what would happen when the bullets started flying.

  He didn’t think he had anything to worry about. The Thai captain spoke excellent English and had attended a number of schools in America, including the Infantry Officers’ Advanced Course just a couple of classes behind Finn.

  His only problem, as far as Finn was concerned, was that he seemed terribly worried that Finn remained unmarried. Tienchai had fixed him up a half-dozen times with what he called very nice Thai girls; no hookers, he insisted. One of them had been his sister, another a cousin.

  Not that Finn minded all that much. He wasn’t immune to the charms of the tiny girls with the merry brown eyes, had done his share of sampling the delights of Patpong Street while in Bangkok. But he thought that marriage, whether to a Thai girl or to anyone else, just wasn’t in the cards. He’d seen too much of the results of wives left at home while their husbands wandered the world, wanted no part of it for himself.

  Someday, he told himself, when I get tired of this shit and decide to settle down, then maybe.

  In the off-chance I’ll ever make it that far.

  “Feen,” Tienchai said, his voice tinny over the radio. “What you think?”

  Finn looked out to see the blades whirling on all
the choppers, the Cobras beginning to hover. Indications of readiness came over the radio.

  “Let’s do it,” he said. Tienchai keyed his mike and within seconds they were airborne, leaving the clouds of red dust where the rotor wash had churned it up looking like storm clouds below them.

  The door gunners flipped belts of ammunition into the feed trays of the M-60 machine guns, closed and locked the trays, put the weapons on safe. Ran their fingers down the belts to make sure there were no kinks, no bullets that had slipped either forward or back in the links, that the path of the belts would be smooth no matter which way the guns were pointed. The guns had full range of movement outside the doors, stopped only in the rear by the masking of the back of the doorway, in the front by a fabricated post that kept them from pointing at the back of the pilot or copilot’s head. Fliers did tend to get a little testy when they looked to the rear and saw the muzzle of a loaded machine gun staring at them.

  Finn inserted a magazine into his CAR-15, pulled back the charging handle, and let it go, chambering a round. He put it on safe, let it hang from the sling he’d fabricated from one that had come with an M-60. Long enough to allow him to bring the weapon to his shoulder, short enough to keep the gun from banging into things it shouldn’t. Like his knee when he tried to jump from the chopper, as had once happened. He’d spent a very long four days on patrol, limping on a knee that looked like a baseball and was very nearly as hard.

  Tienchai charged his own weapon, a FN-FAL 7.62mm assault rifle that was very nearly as long as he was tall. The Thai scorned the 5.56mm cartridge of the M-16s or CAR-15s carried by most of his countrymen. Little bitty bullet, little bitty hole, he said. Big bullet, big hole.

  The surprising thing was how well he shot it. The FN’s recoil was ferocious, particularly when fired on full automatic. Finn, who could in no way be called a small person, had trouble controlling it, seldom able to keep it in the target zone for more than a three-round burst.

  Tienchai had no such problems.