Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  "Or broken down on that excuse for a road," Joe Parks suggested, "or taken sick on the way home and laying over in a village."

  "Might be just a busted transmitter," I added.

  "Ordinarily I'd risk driving," Slavin said, "but it seems inadvisable at the moment with all the activity in the province."

  Colonel Bennett rose. "Juddy, it's completely out of the question. Their place is far. They're practically in the next province."

  Slavin said, "The Viet Cong have a liaison committee for missionaries. Maybe I should try to contact them."

  I wondered anew just how chummy he was with local VC.

  Bennett glanced at his watch. "We've got helicopter assets tomorrow. If they haven't called in by morning..." He looked at Sergeant Parks. "Should we, Joe?"

  "Whatever you say, Colonel." Meaning No, but you're going to do it anyway. It's on you.

  "Okay," Bennett said. "Captain Rider, organize the first aid and medications. We'll go in two ships and evacuate the Baxters if need be."

  "May I come along?" said Slavin. "I'll stay out of the way and make myself useful."

  The colonel came around from his desk. "I'd appreciate it if you would."

  The meeting broke up. When we were out of earshot, Parks said, "I've got rumors coming out of two districts about enemy activity: Montagnard villagers pressed into work gangs to portage NVA supplies."

  "You think the Baxters ran into trouble on the way home?"

  Joe shrugged. "No telling. There's NVA regulars and VC all over the province. I'm running out of pins to mark the sightings."

  The Baxters still weren't responding to radio calls the next day, but our assigned helicopters were diverted for an emergency. We wouldn't get a bird for another twenty-four hours. I was duty officer and went to catch a nap before going on. A runner got me up an hour later. I put on a sidearm and my web harness and slung my M-16.

  Except for Mama-san Duc, our Vietnamese workers hadn't shown up for the second day running. Never a good sign. But the Yards who guarded us at night came in early, and I went out to the corner of the compound where they liked to build their small cooking fire and greeted them. I checked the perimeter and the gate, officially closing it at the 1800 curfew. Most of the rest of the evening I was down in the commo bunker. Rain inundated us around nine, and an hour later I draped myself in a poncho and went out again to check the perimeter. Coming back, I ran into Miser near the mess hall, his fatigues plastered to his body.

  "Sent Jessup the weekly update," he said. "No screaming yet."

  "Good."

  I trudged toward my quarters and dashed across the small patch of grass to the walkway. I let myself in, hoping to lie down for another half an hour. The downpour roared against the roof of the overhang and the bungalow. My pant legs were sopping from the short run. I dried my hands on the towel at the end of my bunk and reached for the field phone to let the commo bunker know where I was. I went to crank it, to generate the necessary electrical charge for the ringer, when I glanced down at the terminals connecting the commo wire to the equipment. Each post had an additional wire.

  I let go of the crank and brought the gooseneck lamp closer. The extra wires ran behind the rectangular green box and into the body of the phone. I uncased it and traced them back to a good-size wedge of explosive, molded like clay to fit the empty space inside. The wires attached to a pair of detonators sticking out of the plastique, just like the booby-trapped psy ops radios Grady had shown me at Mai Linh. The charge was large enough to eliminate me and the neighbors on both sides. The explosive probably came from our own modest ammo bunker.

  I removed the detonators and yanked out the deadly wires. Hands trembling, I cranked the phone to call Ruchevsky at his villa in town. Big John answered promptly.

  "Well," I said, voice tremulous, "at least you didn't blow up answering."

  "You okay? You sound shook up."

  "I am. I just neutered a bomb in our field phone. Watch yourself. Check anything electrical. Go over your vehicles too."

  A runner burst in, summoning me to the commo bunker. I grabbed my poncho and weapon and we jogged together through the downpour and down the steps into the underground room. Radio static filled the smoky air. Mai Linh was reporting a casualty. Their intel sergeant was down, seriously wounded by an explosive planted in the speaker of his tape deck. Ignoring the danger, the Berets were driving him in on a stretcher. Medic Ed Sprague wanted Roberta's help.

  I sent the runner to wake Lieutenant Lovell and had the radio operator call for a medevac on the sideband. Weather or no weather, we needed the bird. Lovell clambered down the stairs. I told him to warn the Special Forces teams at Phu Thien and Phu Tuc. They should immediately check possessions and equipment for booby traps, especially anything electrical.

  I inspected the field phone in the bunker and cranked it to reach the clinic in town while the radio operator pleaded with Pleiku for a chopper. Roberta came wide awake as soon as she heard what was coming our way. Pleiku confirmed a medical-emergency flight was airborne.

  "I'll meet you at the strip," she said.

  I took a backpack radio, smoke markers, and flares, and tuned in the frequency of the approaching Berets and the commo bunker.

  Westy was just going back to bed after checking his generators. I enlisted his help on the spot to commandeer the colonel's jeep. He jumped in behind the wheel and sped us up to the gate. Hump hurried to open it and passed Westy his pistol as we rolled by. The Berets were two kilometers out, approaching fast. Roberta's Rover passed us and we swung in behind her. She drove with only parking lights on. My taped headlights barely illuminated the road, but Westy knew the way blind.

  He reached the airstrip and drove us past the empty ARVN sentry box, onto the perforated steel planks. Roberta pulled next to us and we all killed our lights. The rain had let up but the sky was overcast and starless: utterly dark. I couldn't so much as judge the distance to the Rover as I got out and groped my way across.

  "Doc?"

  "You got a flashlight?" she said.

  I turned on my red-lensed light and held it over her medical kit as she hurriedly organized instruments, bandages, gels, and hypodermics and rattled off instructions about what to ask the Berets by radio about the wounded man's medical treatment so far. I left the Rover's door open so she could hear and went to the radio in the jeep to raise the Berets' medic. Sergeant Sprague acknowledged and I posed her questions to him. The answers were chilling. The man was comatose though breathing, pulse thready. The wound ... A chunk the size of a coaster was missing from his skull.

  Roberta stopped rummaging. "Ask Ed, can they see his brain?" she said.

  "Can you see his brain? Over."

  "Affirmative."

  I rogered the call and signed off.

  "How are you holding up?" I said.

  "Sleep deprived. And hungry." I looked toward the sound of her voice. "I stopped being scared recently," she said. "Don't know why."

  All we could do was wait. Westy announced headlights exiting the town. They passed our compound and made the turn for the airfield. A minute later their open jeep pulled up next to us, a stretcher with the wounded man laid out across the back. A second jeep, totally blacked out, stopped behind them. A soldier manned an M-60 machine gun mounted on a post in the back.

  The medevac chopper came up on our frequency, reporting its approach. Roberta worked in the dark, aided by three red-lensed flashlights. The chopper pilot would need a light to guide in on. Westy strode into the blackness. I couldn't see him, just heard his boots clanking across the perforated steel planks. Faint whomps drew closer. Westy struck the end of a flare, igniting the white magnesium tip, and held it aloft like a torch. Anyone could see it for miles—friend or foe.

  "Just don't let him land on my ass," Westy shouted.

  I alerted the pilot. He laughed and repeated the instruction: "Roger, no ass landing." The bird came straight in. When it was nearly on him, Westy tossed the flare aside and stooped.
The helicopter settled thirty feet away. The Berets rushed their comrade aboard, and it lifted away, the drone of its jet turbine engine receding rapidly.

  We all convoyed back into the compound, convened in the empty mess hall, and collapsed.

  "What are his chances?" I asked Roberta.

  "Zero to none," she said, "but he's breathing." She headed to our medic's room to crash. "He needs a miracle."

  Sergeant Durando and Joe Parks went around with flashlights and checked all the field phones, doors, bunkers, generators, firing positions, and the ammo bunker. A slab of C-4 explosive had been freshly cut. They examined all the vehicle ignitions too and sent Westy to check backup generators.

  The Berets at Phu Tuc reported the stock of C-4 explosive in their ammo bunker showed signs of pilfering. Ours looked nibbled at too. Possible VC suspects at the Special Forces camps were too many to count. But we didn't have a thousand Montagnard strikers and their families in our compound. I interviewed the sleepy gate guards and went over their logs, looking to see what outsiders had been in the compound the last twenty-four hours. With most of the Vietnamese workers hunkered down in Cheo Reo, the log was pretty bare. Other than Judd Slavin and some Special Forces people who'd come by for their mail, the list consisted of Mama-san Duc and the old Montagnards who came into the compound toward sunset to stand guard through the night. Hump confessed Americans weren't always noted in the log. Mostly just waved by. He couldn't remember who might have passed through without being recorded. The USAID reps from next door walked in and out all the time.

  Only one ship was available in the morning to fly us to the Baxters. Gidding assumed command of the compound while Slavin and the colonel and I set off for the airstrip.

  "Ted and Audrey are old Asia hands," the reverend said, sitting with me in back of the colonel's jeep. "High-school sweethearts from Missouri. They've got two teenage boys in boarding school in the Philippines."

  The sentry box was empty so we parked on the apron to wait. Two security guards and Macquorcadale arrived a minute later. The speck on the horizon turned into a helicopter. I went up on their frequency and made contact with the copilot. They landed quickly, had the six of us sitting on the pebbled deck in seconds and on our way at a hundred knots, the jet turbine above our heads whining. Colonel Bennett donned a headset and asked the pilots to follow Road 7 southeast so we could look for the Baxters' vehicle in case it had broken down on the way.

  We stayed on the deck and followed the unpaved dirt track, looking for their pickup. We saw nothing and no one. Every few kilometers the roadbed was interrupted: washed out, nearly grown over. When we reached the Baxters' district, the river led toward their village. There was no one on the banks bathing or washing or fetching water. Not even kids frolicking. Bennett and I exchanged looks. The door gunners leveled their weapons on the passing scrub and jungle.

  Our pilot buzzed the Baxters' house on the edge of the settlement. Neither Ted nor Audrey came out. We snapped our safeties off as we set down by the village, a short distance from their house. The door gunner yelled in my ear and flashed all his fingers at me twice like a fight referee: "You got twenty minutes, Captain. Then we're out of here."

  The prop slowed but kept churning. We exited rapidly and spread ourselves out, except Slavin, who stayed close to the colonel. An old woman approached from the village, complaining. She and her husband had been left behind, Slavin said, along with one young boy tending buffalo.

  Had the ARVN come and relocated the villagers, Slavin asked, and left her? No. The others.

  "Guerrillas?" Bennett said.

  Reverend Slavin questioned her and turned to us. "Chin guy. Army regulars. NVA. But she says a sunburned Vietnamese man with a heavy beard and filed-down teeth addressed the villagers in Rhade. Said they must all go work for the soldiers and carry their rice."

  "Your friend Wolf Man covers a lot of ground," I muttered.

  "They took the boy of a government militiaman," Slavin translated, "to execute him as punishment for his father serving in the Saigon army. The boy's mother talked them into taking her instead. They walked her into the forest near the grapefruit tree." The old woman looked toward the tree. "She didn't come back."

  "And where were the Baxters during all this?" Bennett asked.

  Slavin conveyed the question. She responded slowly. He turned to look toward the house.

  "What did she say?" Bennett asked.

  "They hid in their bunker, behind the house."

  "Were they taken too? Where are they now?"

  Slavin translated the questions. She gazed around and spoke.

  Judd Slavin looked puzzled. "She says they're in the bunker."

  The old woman walked with us to the house and around the side, leading us to the circular mound that was the Baxters' shelter against bombardments. I opened the straps on my musette bag. The bunker's entrance was a few steps down. Something wooden lay across one side of the rounded earthen top, flanked by some pots and pans and a bottle of cooking oil. I attempted to go in the entryway, which was partly blocked with boards and drifts of dirt on the steps.

  "Audrey?" Slavin called past me. "Ted?"

  Bennett yanked out the boards over the entry and flinched. He pulled the collar of his green T-shirt over his nose and ducked inside, Slavin behind him, handkerchief over his mouth and nostrils. They were in there only seconds. They exited amid a putrid stench. Slavin was pale. It clung to his clothes and hands. He seemed undone: mute and choking. Bennett held a kerchief to his mouth, coughing.

  Bennett looked stricken. "It's them."

  The Baxters were decomposing rapidly in the tropical heat. The old woman gesticulated as she spoke. Slavin listened and translated.

  "They took shelter in the bunker when the army men appeared. The red-star soldiers surrounded the bunker and summoned them. Reverend Ted came out. He scolded them in Vietnamese. The bearded man shot him twice, went up to the bunker with a grenade like a masher, and threw it inside. After the village emptied out and they all left, she went to the reverend. He was still alive. She helped him to the bunker, as he asked. His wife had lost an eye. She was mostly unaware, barely alive. They were finished, finished. They died in each other's arms."

  I turned back toward the bunker. Scratched faintly into the sides of the mound were symbols I had seen in the Jarai cemetery.

  "I closed it as best I could," the old woman said, through Slavin, "and took the cross they knocked down from our chapel to put on their burial house."

  Bennett stood on the bottom step and replaced the boards, adding the ones I handed down. The three security guards kept watch as the colonel and Judd Slavin hurriedly finished the job of sealing the bunker's entrance, Slavin mumbling Bible verses, voice trembling, face running with sweat.

  "'New gods were chosen, then war was in the gates ...'"

  His chest heaved as he labored, eyes tearing. They streaked the dirt on his cheeks.

  "'Then I saw the beast ...'"

  He was babbling from the heat and despair that clutched at us all, and maybe the knowledge that he had taken money from the hands that had killed his friends. Audrey and Ted Baxter had devoted their lives to helping others and proclaiming their faith. Their reward was watching each other die.

  Red dust and grit rose around us and stuck to our sweating bodies as we emptied sandbags into the entrance well. Slavin scratched their names into the wood of the cross and planted it firmly on the roof of their tomb.

  "'... and the glory of the Lord shone round them,'" he said to no one in particular. He didn't look like a duplicitous spook masquerading as a cleric. He looked like a guy who had just buried dear friends without a moment's ceremony at an isolated outpost in the middle of a jungle.

  The aged woman's husband appeared, hobbling toward us in a black shirt and a loincloth and speaking loudly. Slavin's eyes widened.

  "He says VC are approaching."

  Bennett ordered the guards to the chopper while we rushed to the modest two-room hou
se to retrieve the Baxters' personal effects. The rotors whined louder.

  Bennett took up a position at the door while Slavin and I raced around. I took a pillowcase and filled it with photographs of two blond kids, someone's elderly parents, the Bible on the nightstand, a hairbrush. I didn't know what to snatch up, what held meaning. Slavin added small sculptures, a figurine made by a child, a heart-shaped rock, an address book, two framed wedding photos. Bennett urged us to finish as I pushed objects into the sack and Slavin searched for a photo album—seconds to gather up a lifetime. I made for the bookcase.

  "We've got to go," the colonel said, and waved Slavin out. I grabbed a handful of volumes at random and ran after him.

  We had intended to look for the Jarai woman Wolf Man had executed by the grapefruit tree. No time. The old woman accepted Judd Slavin's rucksack of supplies and my two packs of cigarettes but wouldn't come with us. Slavin urged her husband to convince her, to no avail.

  "She says she isn't getting into our iron insect. Says she must look after the village until everyone comes back."

  The crew chief was frantically waving for us to hurry. My heart hammered my chest. We bade them goodbye and ran to the churning helicopter. The pilot lifted off the instant we jumped on board.

  Armed men stepped into the open as we rose. They hadn't yet seen the old couple nearing the far side of the clearing; they were all looking up at us. With a final glance skyward, the ancient woman and her man slipped into the undergrowth and disappeared.

  15

  THE HUEY STAYED on the deck as we flew back along Road 7 toward Cheo Reo, eventually climbing up to a thousand feet. Treetops sped by. Colonel Bennett cupped his headset to his ears, listening intently. He tugged me nearer the door and pointed down. In a short open strip of the road a flatbed truck lay half tipped over on the shoulder, its load of long hardwood logs spilling out. Four male figures lay prone around the vehicle: two civilians and two South Vietnamese soldiers in green fatigues stained dark with blood.