Finn struggled to understand the excited soldier, the Jarai speaking so fast that his guttural language was virtually incomprehensible. It didn’t help that in his excitement he threw in bastard French, American profanity, and even a couple of words of German learned from some long-dead Legionnaire.
“He say he goddamn be digging deeper, have hand come up from hell, try to take him back down,” Bobby the interpreter suggested, trying to be helpful.
“I got that much,” Finn said. “What the hell does it mean?”
Washington wordlessly pointed to the hole in the bottom of the trench. Shovel marks from the Jarai soldier’s entrenching tool marked the first couple of feet, disappearing into a hole that in its darkness seemed to reach down into the very bowels of the earth.
“He step down in hole,” Bobby said. “To see if it deep enough. Fall in.”
The Montagnard burst into another spate of excited shouting.
“Say the gods come to take him away,” Bobby translated. “He know this place is accursed.”
“Hush!” Finn commanded. A couple of words from Bobby and even the Montagnard complied.
From somewhere beneath them came the faint sounds of scraping.
“Shit!” Finn swore. “Washington, you find any shaped charges while you were looking around?”
“Whole bunker full of fifteen-pounders,” Washington replied, immediately getting the message. “Be back in a minute.”
While he and Inger went to fetch the charges, Finn explained through Bobby what was happening: “They’re digging under the camp. That’s why the artillery stopped. They got far enough, they were afraid of a strike collapsing the tunnel. Or tunnels. Bobby! Get around the perimeter, tell everyone to stop what they’re doing, listen. They’re going to have more than one of these.”
As Bobby scurried away to do as he was told, Lieutenant Sloane came up, eyes wide. “I heard,” he said.
“That’s what happens when you let ’em get too close to the wire,” Finn said, ignoring the look of hurt, almost as if he had taken a physical blow, that came over the lieutenant at the implied rebuke. “Find something to probe with—any long rods you can drive into the ground—start probing everywhere around the perimeter. Some of the tunnels are probably already finished—’Yards won’t hear ’em digging.”
Sloane stood there for a second, trying to formulate a response to the rebuke. His face had reddened, angry words building up like a fountain behind his tongue.
“You understand English, Lieutenant?” Finn said, his voice a low hiss. “Get moving!”
As the lieutenant hurried down the trench, Washington and Inger came up from the other side, the former carrying a wooden box filled with shaped charges, Inger lugging firing wire, a blasting machine, and a box of electric detonators.
“Blow me a hole right down the center of this,” Finn instructed.
Washington pulled one of the charges from the box. It was a tube of fiber, filled with fifteen pounds of Composition B molded into a cone shape at the bottom. At the top the cylinder tapered to another cone, with a firing well for the detonator. The shaped charge used the Monroe effect, named for the engineer who had discovered its properties. Demolitionists had long known that no explosion is instantaneous in all parts of the explosives they were using. Instead, the propagation wave moved from the point of detonation to the farthest reaches of the explosive at a rate equal to that of the detonation speed of the medium. It was, with modern explosives, faster than could be recorded by anything less than the most rapid of high-speed photography, but it was still there.
They had also known that the lines of force from detonating explosives were directed exactly ninety degrees from the surface of the explosive medium. Much explosives force was dissipated harmlessly into the air in this way. Monroe, a Scottish engineer, had discovered that, once the lines of force were on their way, they could be redirected. Two lines of force, if they collided at exactly ninety degrees, tended to cancel one another out. But if they intersected at a lesser angle of incidence, they actually added to the force of one another, pointing themselves in a direction that could be manipulated depending upon the angle of the original surface of the explosives.
What this meant in practice was that if you built your explosive into a cone shape at the bottom, and started the propagation at the top, the cone directed the augmented lines of force into a pencil-point of virtually unimaginable energy, the heat it produced almost as hot as the surface of the sun. This principle allowed relatively small antitank rounds to punch through several inches of homogeneous armor, and linear-shaped charges to cut plate metal so cleanly it looked as if it had been subjected to an acetylene torch wielded by a master.
The fifteen-pound shaped charges Washington was now setting up had been designed for the combat engineers and were used primarily for digging holes. If you wanted to destroy a road, you put the charges into a pattern, blew the holes, and then planted cratering charges made up of a much slower explosive into the resulting pattern. Exploding the cratering charges, whose ammonium-nitrate/fuel-oil mixture created a heaving, rather than the shattering effect of higher-speed explosives, dug holes that even the best-designed tank couldn’t negotiate.
And of course, the resourceful Special Forces demolitions men who had experimented with them had found all sorts of other uses. Buried upside down and command-detonated under a tank, they would send the turret spinning into the air like a thrown saucer. Washington had once built what he referred to as the world’s largest claymore, placing one of the charges on its side, in front of that standing a roll of barbed wire, and in front of that a fifty-five-gallon drum of fougasse. When detonated, the shaped charge ripped through the barbed wire, sending it out in whirling masses of white-hot shrapnel. The force of the shaped charge, barely attenuated by the barbed wire, then punched through the fougasse, igniting it into a roaring fireball that consumed anything in its path.
He’d had the chance to use it on an attacking VC squad, intent upon forcing their way into the front gate of the camp he was defending. There was little to pick up and bury the next day.
While Washington and Inger were setting up the charge, Finn stripped off his web gear, keeping only the Browning Hi-Power pistol and a couple of fragmentation grenades.
“You’re too damn big for that, Dai Uy,” SFC Elmo Driver, whose First Platoon had responsibility for this sector of the perimeter, said.
Finn looked down at the diminutive sergeant, who, some said, wouldn’t have weighed enough to open a parachute were it not for his enormous balls. Driver stood barely five foot four. Truth be known, he was probably slightly shorter than that, but a sympathetic recruiting sergeant had fudged the measurements slightly to allow him to get into the Airborne in the first place.
Legions of bigger men had found to their sorrow that Driver’s being small did not mean that he was a pushover. As one six-foot-four sergeant had said after a run-in with him at the NCO club in Okinawa, “It was like fighting a goddamn buzz saw.”
Wordlessly, Finn handed over the pistol and grenades. He hadn’t been all that eager to go down the hole anyway. Closed-in spaces had never been his favorite places. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t claustrophobic, but every time he had to go into a cave or down a tunnel it felt as if his diaphragm were pushing his heart right out his ears, where it thundered with each beat.
“Get clear!” Washington ordered, running the firing wire around a couple of jags in the trench. Finn and Driver went the other way, huddling down behind a substantial earthen berm.
“Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole!” Washington shouted. He twisted the handle of the blasting machine, sending enough current down the line to initiate the firing sequence in the detonator. The current was just enough to send a spark across the gap between two wires. That spark set fire to a mixture whose flash point was extremely low. The fire then heated the initiating mixture, a tiny amount of extremely sensitive explosive, usually lead styphnate, which contai
ned only enough force to begin detonation in the slightly larger intermediate charge, which then detonated the main charge. All this was contained within a slim cylinder of aluminum slightly smaller in diameter than a pencil.
The final detonation was powerful enough to begin the explosives propagation wave in the relatively insensitive Composition B that made up the shaped charge. Military explosives were by nature insensitive, since they were subject to all sorts of insult by bullet, flame, or just extremely careless handling. You didn’t want a truckload of explosives to go off just because someone shot a sniper round into it.
But all that was quicker than the senses could detect. The people close to it felt the earth shudder, the sound of the explosion muffled by the sandbags Washington had packed around it for tamping. A great black cloud of explosives smoke mixed with red dirt gouted up, covering Finn and Driver with a layer of grit.
They ran over to the hole before the last clods fell to the earth. Finn was glad he wasn’t going in. It looked distinctly uninviting.
Driver was grinning. “Alice ain’t got shit on me,” he said, then dropped down into the hole.
Chapter 6
Driver paused only long enough to extract two cigarettes from the pack he always carried in his blouse pocket, rip the filters off, and insert them into his ears as field-expedient earplugs. He’d learned his lesson on that early on. The first time he’d fired a pistol in a cave, down in War Zone C in III Corps, the noise and concussion came close to stunning him.
The tunnel was thick with explosives smoke, the acrid chemical burning his throat and nasal passages with each breath. But, he noticed, it was wafting away from him, indicating that the tunnel was unblocked in that direction.
He’d moved only a couple of steps before he came across the first body, partially covered by dirt from the explosion. He could see no marks on the flesh and concluded that the digger, who wore only a pair of black shorts, had died of concussion. A few feet farther and two more bodies, one who appeared to have been some sort of an official. He was dressed in khaki and had officer tabs on his collar.
It was completely silent in the tunnel, which, to his surprise, was fairly roomy. In tunnels down in III Corps he’d had to crawl and wriggle his way through. Here he could move in no more than a slight crouch.
Twenty feet from where he’d entered, a slight bend obscured his field of view. He cautiously approached it, pistol held close to his body. An old tunnel rat had shown him that trick. People tended, when they were frightened and wanted to be ready to shoot, to hold their pistols out into the firing position. Which meant that the pistol was the first thing to come around a corner, long before you could see what might be hiding there. The tunnel rat had demonstrated how easy it was to take the pistol away, grabbing it and the pistol hand, twisting sharply on one direction or the other. You were then confronted with the choice of trying to hold on to the gun and getting your arm broken, or letting it go. Neither was a particularly good option.
The moan, followed by a shuddering breath, hit his senses with a blow that was almost physical. He could clearly feel the surge of adrenaline shooting from the glands just atop the kidneys all the way through his circulatory system—like a river of liquid fire.
With an effort he slowed his breathing from the short, shallow gasps the adrenaline produced. Slowly he sidestepped, weapon covering each section of the cave as it appeared. Cutting the pie, it was called. The theory was that you could be ready to take out any adversary the moment he appeared, more quickly than he could react.
Driver had no idea if it worked or not, never having had to use it when actually facing an armed adversary. But it sounded good and was a lot better than the alternative, as far as he was concerned.
The alternative was the buttonhook, so named because you hooked your entire body around the corner, again depending upon your speed and your enemy’s slow reaction time. Both techniques had been taught by a British Special Air Service (SAS) operator seconded to the Tenth Special Forces Group at Bad Tolz while he was there.
And what if there’s more than one guy on the other side? The question had been posed by Sergeant Major Clive Howard, himself a veteran of OSS operations in World War II.
“Then you’d bloody well hope they’re all bad shots,” the SAS man had replied.
Driver didn’t think he wanted to trust his life to a lack of marksmanship training on the part of the North Vietnamese Army.
He saw first a leg, badly mangled, and as he sidestepped farther, the rest of the body. The man’s black, chop-cut hair was coated in red dirt; his eyes stared at Driver with the look of one who knew his time on earth was going to end with the sight of flame coming from the muzzle of the gun that was pointed unerringly at his forehead.
Driver saw no weapon, and the man’s hands were clear. A quick glance on down the tunnel showed no danger at the moment. He came to a snap decision, tucked the pistol into his belt, and grabbed the wounded man under his arms, dragging him quickly back around the corner and then to the entrance hole.
“Got a prisoner down here,” Driver yelled, seeing Captain McCulloden’s face appear quickly above. He handed an arm up, felt the weight being lifted as if the Viet were nothing more than a bag of straw.
Shit, he thought. Now I’m gonna have to go back and clear that section again. Probably should have slit his throat, kept going.
He justified his actions, at least for the moment, by thinking that perhaps they could get some useful information from the prisoner. But somewhere deep inside he knew the real reason was that he simply didn’t have the stomach for killing an unarmed man.
Getting soft in your old age, Driver, he told himself.
“He say he just a digger,” Bobby translated. “Dig caves all over. Nobody every tell him why, they just say, dig. He dig.”
Inger glanced up from where he was applying bandages to the man’s leg. “Broken tibia and fibula, no major blood vessel involvement. He’s not going anywhere anytime soon. You think he’s telling the truth?”
Finn grimaced. “What difference does it make? We know he was digging a tunnel. We know they’re planning to attack this place.”
“We kill?” Bobby asked, already thumbing his holster open.
“No, you bloodthirsty little bastard, we don’t kill.” Finn looked at Bobby with real fondness. Despite his being a vicious little shit, he was a pretty good kid.
Bobby’s face fell. Then his habitual cheerfulness made its inevitable way back to the surface.
“Oh, well,” he said. “He probably die with all the rest of us, anyway.”
“And thank you, Pollyanna!” Inger said, finishing the bandaging and selecting a piece of wood for a splint.
Bobby looked mystified. What the hell was Pollyanna? The Americans were always making obscure references, using slang that never appeared in his Vietnamese/English dictionary. He never knew if he was being insulted or complimented. He resolved to find out at least what Pollyanna was. If he ever got the chance.
Sergeant Epstein came up, out of breath from running the entire way from the other side of the camp. “L-T Sloane found another one,” he gasped. “North side. Looks like a big one.”
“What’s he doing about it?”
“Resting right now,” Epstein said, grinning. “Been working his ass off.”
“Bobby, get four out of Driver’s First Platoon down there to back him up,” McCulloden commanded. “Andy, finish up with this guy and then turn him over to whoever’s commanding the rest of the LLDB detachment. Then come on over.”
Slats Olchak came up, bearing the news that they had found yet another, a hundred meters to the south of the one they were standing on.
“Busy little rats, ain’t they?” Finn said. “Why don’t you see if you can find us something that’ll make a big boom. I’m getting about tired of this.”
Driver was just getting up the nerve to go around the corner where he’d found the wounded man when he heard a noise behind him. He whirled—and wa
s faced with the gold-toothed smile of Nie, his Montagnard platoon sergeant.
“Dai Uy Finn tell us we come and help,” Nie said. “Bring Frick and Frack.”
Driver grinned, glad for the company, indeed. Nie was the most dependable man he had, veteran of a French groupement mobile, had been with the Mike Force almost since its inception. Frick and Frack were so named because they were twins and no one (even most ’Yards) could pronounce the names their superstitious mother had given them. They lived together, slept in the same hammock while in the field, and had never been known to consort with women, Montagnard or otherwise. But then, they didn’t do much socializing with the men either, being entirely self-contained, it seemed, within themselves.
What mattered the most was that they were good soldiers. Incredibly brave, quite smart, even innovative. In a just world they would have been on their way to at least field-grade rank. Here they would be lucky to make sergeant.
Driver pointed to his left rear, Nie automatically taking up position there, Frick and Frack slightly behind him, ready to provide covering fire. Once again Driver cut the pie, and this time the tunnel was clear.
He took a deep breath and inched his way down the tunnel. They had to be here somewhere. There had been plenty of time for them to recover from the explosion, set up an ambush, or form a raiding party. They’d spent too much time digging this thing to just give it up.
He felt Nie’s hand on his shoulder, stopped, and looked at the Montagnard, who was signaling that he heard something. Shit, Driver thought. He pulled the filter tip from one ear and could now hear it himself. Chattering. In Vietnamese. A lot of it. And it was coming closer.
He hurried to the next bend in the tunnel, flattened himself against the wall, took out a frag grenade, and pulled the pin. Beside him, Nie did the same. At Driver’s signal both let the spoon fly, the click of the striker hitting the cap so loud it seemed impossible for the people around the corner not to hear it.
Napalm Dreams Page 9
