Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  “Always we moved west and north. Crossed the border into Laos sometime in the early seventies. They started chaining me; short ankle chains during the moves, shackles at night. I asked why. The Americans are everywhere here, they told me. We have been told that to lose you would cost us our own lives.

  “All the time I had hope. Surely my own people would be looking for me. Of course we would have intelligence, agents within the ranks. The information would get back, there would be a rescue mission, and even if I died, it would be among my own.

  “It never came. Finally we came to the camp just south of the Plain of Jars. There were many others there. Pilots and crew shot down over Laos. Technicians from a radar site the Pathet Lao had overrun. Two SOG men. From them I learned what was actually happening in the war, not the propaganda my captors kept feeding me.”

  A wry smile had played on Korhonen’s lips. “And you know what? The news from my countrymen wasn’t much better. It was easy to see we were losing the war. It wasn’t as easy to see why.

  “And over the years many of them died. Starvation. Beatings. Executions. Diseases for which there were no medicines. At least none we were given. But I was never beaten, at least not badly. Sometimes the other prisoners became suspicious. Why is it, they asked, that you are being treated better than we? Why do you get a shred of meat in your rice, when the only meat we ever see are the weevils? Why, when you try to escape you are not caught and stood against a post to be used as target practice?

  “I didn’t have an answer. Not then.”

  Korhonen was silent for a moment. Jim took the opportunity to pump up the lantern, whose mantel had faded to a yellow glow. It brightened with the pressure, casting fantastic shadows on the inside of the bunker. The rats that had been coming ever closer under the cover of darkness scurried back to their burrows.

  “But you do now?” he asked.

  “I do now,” Korhonen confirmed. “About six months ago the camp had a visitor. By then there were very few of us left alive. Only Glenn, an Air Force pilot named Radke, and me.

  “The visitor was Caucasian. In civilian clothes. The clothes didn’t hide the truth. I knew what he was the minute I saw him. And for the first time, I lost hope. If they’re here, I thought, and know who I am, there is no chance.

  “Russian?” Jim chanced.

  Korhonen nodded. “Said he was happy to finally meet me. That he’d been following my travels with great interest. And that I should be prepared for another trip. That there were people very eager to meet me.

  “Now I knew why I’d been kept alive, when so many more were dead. They never forget. And they never forgive. I was to be transported to Moscow.”

  “Don’t suppose there was any chance of you being made a hero of the Soviet Union?”

  Korhonen laughed, an unpleasant barking sound.

  “Years before, I’d found a shard of metal buried where they placed my cage,” he said. “Sharp. A chunk of shrapnel from one of the bombs. I hid it. It wasn’t big enough to use as a weapon. It was my insurance policy. I always knew that if things got too bad, I could use it to open a vein. I already had picked the spot, had played it over and over in my mind. By the time they found me in the morning I would be past saving. How angry they’d be! To go to all that trouble, only to be cheated at the last moment.

  “And always it never got bad enough to use it. Even in the worst times.”

  “But you wanted to then.”

  Korhonen nodded. “I was ready. The Russian left, telling the guards to get me ready to transport. He would come back in two days. And what of the others? the Viets asked him.

  “I have no use for them,” he said. “Do whatever you want.”

  “To this day I have no idea if the camp commander simply got lazy, or if he decided it wasn’t worth it. When you live with someone so long, you stop thinking about them as the enemy. They are men, just as are you, suffering the same hardships, facing the same fears.

  “In any case, when Sarpa’s men came in the next night there were no guards around. We simply walked away from the camp.”

  Korhonen dug into a pocket, pulling out a cloth-wrapped piece of metal. He showed it to Jim.

  “I keep it,” he said. “You never know when you might need it again.”

  Chapter 21

  After the near-debacle of the extraction Finn McCulloden was instructed to send recon teams no farther into Laos than they could be pulled out without air assets. This meant in practice that the teams could range no farther than five to ten kilometers, at the outside. It was anything but long-range patrolling, but Finn really couldn’t fault the decision. Yes, they needed information about the North Vietnamese buildup, but at what cost? The few teams that did manage to get across the river and cover any distance at all reported that the NVA had massed antiaircraft guns so thickly there was simply no chance of getting a chopper there in one piece.

  The teams reported that they’d seen huge, long-barreled cannon that, upon identification in the Order of Battle book, Finn adjudged to be the hundred-millimeter guns that had formerly only been encountered near the Mu Gia Pass coming out of North Vietnam. Radar-guided, they were formidable pieces. Even the fast movers of the U.S. Air Force got shot out of the sky with astounding regularity. The slower birds the Thais had to work with wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Could SAMs be far behind? He’d tasked the teams to find out, hadn’t yet gotten any confirmed sightings, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Most infuriating, he could often stand outside the command bunker and see helicopters flying all over the place over there. Former South Vietnamese, for the most part, the yellow and red colors replaced with yellow stars. But a good sprinkling of Russian birds, including the Mi-28 Hind—bristling with rocket pods and guns and, he had read in a classified report, the crew protected by a titanium bathtub proof against all small-arms fire.

  Some bad shit coming down here, he often thought. He just couldn’t figure why they were waiting so long. The recon team he’d rescued had identified elements of two more divisions, both first-class combat units.

  He’d studied his Giap, and thought the wily general probably was just building up his forces, until such time as he had overwhelming combat power, able to overrun the entire country in a matter of days. Before the Americans could mount a response, even if they were inclined to.

  Personally he didn’t think they would. Certainly Sam Gutierrez hadn’t been encouraging on that point. It was all still being debated by the administration, Sam had said. Which meant that some of the president’s advisors would be adamantly against it, others for it, but probably not as adamantly. Meaning, of course, that the former would prevail. True believers always did.

  Still, the delay had allowed him to emplace the equipment that had been coming through in a steady stream from God knew where (but Billy Craig obviously did). The FOB itself now had more M-60 7.62mm and M-2 .50-caliber machine guns than did most U.S. infantry battalions. Finn had personally supervised their emplacement, bunkering them in so deeply it would take a series of direct hits with the heaviest artillery the Viets had to take one out.

  Supplementing the machine guns were four 106mm recoilless rifles with stocks of high explosive (HE), high explosive antitank (HEAT), and beehive antipersonnel rounds. Bucky Epstein, for whom the 106 was a weapon so familiar Finn imagined it featured prominently in his dreams, had sited them for mutually supporting fire, each weapon being backed up by at least two others. The HE would be used against troop concentrations, thin-skinned vehicles, and the enemy’s own direct fire weapons. The HEAT rounds would punch through the armor of the NVA T-55 tanks, immolating the crews inside. And the beehives would be held in reserve until the assault troops got close, whereupon they would be chewed up by the thousands of finned flechettes released by the rounds.

  Craig had also managed to get them a TOW missile launcher and twenty rounds. Finn doubted that the American troops facing the mass of Soviet armor at the Fulda Gap in G
ermany had as many rounds for each weapon. The rounds were so expensive that only the honor graduate of each TOW class got to fire one. Finn had expended four, training his own Thai crews. The missile was wire-guided, responsive to the slightest correction of the gunner, who kept his sights trained on the target until impact. A good gunner could take out a tank moving laterally at maximum speed.

  Finn didn’t fool himself by thinking that it would be enough. They’d delay the enemy divisions, at most, a few hours. There were simply too many of them, the border with Laos was too long to effectively guard, and there would be no reserves upon which to call. Most of the Thai army was being concentrated around Bangkok and a few other major cities.

  Not for the first time he wondered what he was doing, fighting other people’s wars for them.

  Because their wars are your wars, he told himself. Fight them here, fight them at home. Better here.

  Now he just wished Bucky would get back. They had things to talk over.

  First Lieutenant Epstein was, at that moment, wondering if he was engaged in a huge waste of time. They’d found exactly nothing, except several Thai woodcutters and a couple who had sneaked away from the nearby village to consummate their lust. His point man had come across them, had motioned the patrol forward where they watched for a while until the snickers of the troopers alerted the embarrassed lovers to their presence.

  It had been Epstein’s idea to patrol around the FOB to look for enemy reconnaissance units. Certainly he would have had his own patrols out to scout the target long before any planned attack. Grabbing up one of the enemy patrols might give them vital information on time and place for the assault.

  Besides, he’d been going about half crazy sitting in the FOB. They’d done about all the work they could with regard to fortification and weapons siting. Now it was just endless days standing around, wondering if this was the day the troops would come storming through the cleared zone, the tanks and artillery on the other side of the river providing support, the sappers blasting holes through the wire.

  He shuddered at the thought. He’d had that experience before, and had no desire to see it repeated.

  Finn McCulloden had raised no objection to the idea, and hadn’t even bothered to clear it with Bangkok. After all, the restriction was against Americans’ accompanying patrols across the border into Laos. Why would anyone object to their going with the Thais in their own country? Hadn’t they been doing just that while training the Border Police?

  Now that mission seemed to be from another life, even though it had only been a few weeks before. Then he’d only had to worry about the stumbling and bumbling recruits they’d saddled him with. Even the graduation exercises, when they’d been transported to the far north of the country to patrol one of the few areas in which there was still a threat from remnants of the Communist terrorist organization that had once been so strong it had threatened to sweep the country, didn’t offer much in the way of danger. A couple of firefights useful in acclimating the students to the feel of it, the occasional casualty on one side or the other—now it seemed like some game they’d played.

  No games here. If they ran across a North Vietnamese recon unit the encounter was likely to be bloodier than anything they’d encountered in many a year.

  Of course the troops he was out with now weren’t barely trained Border Police. These were Thai special forces, initially trained by the 46th Special Forces Company in Lop Buri, then blooded in hundreds of encounters throughout the region. They’d been a vital, if unacknowledged, part of the Thai contingent in Vietnam, had conducted highly successful operations against the aforementioned Communist movement in Thailand, and had provided the backbone that had kept the campaign against the Pathet Lao alive long after it would otherwise have collapsed into a devastating shambles. Tough, hard little troopers, they were as good as or better than any he’d worked with in service with two armies.

  They’d almost finished their area reconnaissance mission, searching for a sign, any sign, that the Viets had crossed the border and were wandering around in proximity to the FOB. Bucky was about ready to give it up and go back in. The thought of a warm shower and a cold beer after five days in the field was almost impossibly alluring.

  Besides, it might be interesting to see what new goodies Sergeant Craig had managed to get his hands on. He supposed it would have been too much to ask to get a SADM. The Small Atomic Demolition Munition, the supposed backpack nuke that looked a lot more like a beer keg, had a yield of about a half-kiloton, would take out a half-mile or so, and could be transported and emplaced by one man.

  Wouldn’t that shock the hell out of the Yellow Star!

  As well wish for a benevolent God to bring down targeted lightning.

  They were running two-man teams out of a central patrol base, radiating out like the petals of a daisy. Two teams had already come back in, reporting that they’d seen nothing. As soon as the other six came in Bucky would form them up and they’d make the long march back to the FOB. Screw it, he thought. We’re just wasting time.

  Sam Gutierrez looked at the mass of information spread out on the conference table. Intercepts from the NSA. Agent reports from the few assets the CIA still had in place in Hanoi and Vientiane. Aerial photos taken by the high flying U-2s and SR-71s. Radio messages from Finn McCulloden—most valuable of all. The conclusion was inescapable.

  And yet the people in State were still in denial. The ambassador scoffed outright at the idea that the North Vietnamese might invade Thailand. Haven’t you heard? he’d asked Gutierrez. The domino theory isn’t valid anymore.

  Domino theory my aching ass, Sam thought. That was the problem with the eggheads who seemed to control policy. They dealt in clichés, and when a cliché was no longer in fashion the idea behind it, in their minds, ceased to exist.

  Even if faced with something like this. A show of force, the people back in Washington were saying. The Viets are having enough trouble consolidating their victory in Saigon, are still fighting in Cambodia. It would be foolish of them to take on another battle, at least right now.

  Did they never look at a fucking map? Sam had raged to no one in particular, frightening at least two secretaries so badly they went to their bosses and told them they’d never go back into Colonel Gutierrez’s office without escort.

  Taking control of the kingdom would put them next to Burma, a country more ideologically close to them, a country with a laughable military, a country whose own internal problems would ensure its not being a threat. To the south there was Malaysia, with a very short border anchored on both sides by water. Easily defensible.

  To the north there was only China, and China was supporting them. At least for the moment. Some of the reports coming back-channel to Gutierrez suggested that the wartime sponsors of the North Vietnamese weren’t too happy with that country’s evident lack of gratitude. That might be something that could be played, but not in the short term.

  And the short term was what they had to deal with. About the only reason Sam could figure that the NVA divisions hadn’t already poured across the border was that they hadn’t secured their logistics. The piss-poor roads and trails leading from east to west weren’t suitable for trucks and heavy equipment. Sure, they could do the same thing they had in the earlier days of the war in Vietnam and use an army of coolies to bring supplies across, using not much more than reinforced bicycles as heavy transport.

  Such measures worked when you were fighting a guerrilla war and the heaviest weapons you used were mortars and rockets. You could feed yourself by taxing the peasants in your area. If you ran low on ammunition you could always take it from the enemy.

  It would not work to support conventional operations. Any major assault had to be supported by artillery, to suppress enemy return fire, to eliminate fortified positions, to prevent reserves from being deployed. And heavy artillery required massive numbers of shells, not to mention the fact that the artillery itself couldn’t be disassembled and moved by bicycle. They
’d be using tanks, and tanks needed not only ammunition, but gas as well. The numbers of troops required for such an assault would quickly outstrip the local area’s ability to support them with forage. There would be evacuation and hospitalization requirements, and so forth.

  Anyone who thought that the logistics for such an operation were routine simply had no idea of what modern warfare required.

  Hence trucks, and lots of them. The NVA had the trucks. Their sponsors in the PRC had made sure of that.

  They just didn’t have the roads to put them on. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, a massive undertaking, had taken ten years to construct. Now the NVA didn’t have to worry about trail interdiction—at least not much of it—so the process could be considerably shortened.

  But not done away with. That bought the Thais some time. How much, who could tell?

  Maybe it would be enough. Sam Gutierrez had resisted bringing out his own big gun up to this point. You used it and there was no turning back. It would mark you for the rest of your career. Those whose heads you’d gone over would be furious, and they carried grudges.

  What the hell, he thought. I didn’t have much of a career anyway.

  He left the room, triple-locking the door behind him. Were there spies within the Embassy?

  There were spies everywhere. Anyone who thought his information was safe was an idiot.

  Sam Gutierrez was many things, but an idiot wasn’t one of them.

  When he left the Embassy he drove to one of the few U.S. military installations left in Thailand, a secure communications site close to Don Muang airport. The gate guard checked his ID, peered closely at his face, made a call, and only then let the officer inside. A four-star general had come there one day, intending to make an unannounced visit, and had been left sputtering at the gate when the guard had refused him admittance. You didn’t have an authorized reason to be in the facility, you didn’t get to go in, and that was that.