The probing teams had so far found no more tunnels, leaving only the one Sloane had reported. Finn and Driver’s team headed through the trench complex to the north side, hearing the crack of sniper bullets as a steady drumbeat marking their passage.
Halfway there, the way was blocked by a group of Montagnards huddled around one of their own. It was immediately obvious there was nothing to be done for him. He’d obviously been unwary enough to expose himself for just a fraction of a second too long. The round had taken off the top of his head as neatly as one would use a can opener on a container of brains. The brain itself looked surprisingly undamaged, but Finn knew that beneath its seemingly unmarred surface the blood vessels would have exploded from the overpressure. The man had been dead before he could hit the ground.
Bobby yelled at the Montagnards to get the hell out of the way and they obeyed in stunned silence.
It was often that way. One moment you were standing there talking to a man, the next he had essentially ceased to exist. No matter how many times you saw it, it always came as a shock. If you were yourself engaged in combat you could continue to function, your survival instincts taking over and protecting the organism. Only sometime later would you have to face it, often when you least expected it.
That was the pernicious effect of snipers. There really wasn’t a lot you could do, other than to take cover and face the realization that it could have been you, lying there with your brain steaming in the air.
“Get this body out of here,” Finn instructed. “Tell the rest of them to dig this trench deeper. And to keep their goddamned heads down.”
In truth the trench was probably deep enough, but only in action could the thrall be broken. It was easy to destroy morale, and thus fighting effectiveness, if you just stood there and did nothing. The mind did terrible things.
One of the Montagnards yelled back at Bobby, getting up in his face. Both were gesticulating wildly, seeming ready to come to blows. Good, Finn thought. Anger is good. Anything was better than the apathy that came over you at such times. He knew. He’d been there.
That matter finally resolved after much shouting, they hurried on down the trench. Another sniper round struck close, showering dirt down on them, this time answered by the heavy boom of a weapon somewhere inside the camp. Finn smiled. Obviously Bucky Epstein was at work.
Finn came around one of the corners in the zigzag trench, finally seeing a group of Montagnards gathered around a hole. “Ask them where Trung Ui Sloane is,” he told Bobby.
Bobby chattered for a moment in Jarai, a look of astonishment suddenly coming over him. Bobby had sized up the lieutenant much earlier on, judged him to be like so many he had seen—a know-nothing who by virtue of rank still tried to command people like him. Who would fall apart at the first real crisis. But the ’Yards were telling him that the lieutenant had gone down in the hole. Alone. He was either very stupid or very brave. Bobby would have bet the former.
Finn cursed when Bobby told him. “That boy’s trying real hard to be a hero. Too damned hard. Elmo, you want to go down there and find out what’s going on? Be careful. Asshole’s likely to be a little trigger-happy.”
Chapter 7
Bucky Epstein drew in a deep breath, let half of it out, and settled the crosshairs of the scope on some vegetation whence he had seen a telltale spurt of fire. He was aiming at a point some 325 to 350 meters away. He knew this because of the range cards he had so laboriously prepared over the last six months, in which he had noted specific landmarks and physically walked the distances to each.
Each heartbeat caused the scope to jump, ever so slightly. Such a jump, at this distance, would move the strike of the bullet as much as three inches, enough to miss something as small as a man’s head.
He timed his heartbeats, making sure the scope was exactly where he wanted it in the tiny interval in between each beat. Everything else was zoned out. He did not hear the chatter of the Montagnards in the trench below his sandbagged position. The red dust that blew across the camp with a sudden gust of wind affected him not at all. There was nothing except the slowly tightening tension of his trigger finger.
The recoil of the weapon came as a surprise, as it should have. Quickly he settled the scope back on the target, was rewarded with the sight of a body flipped over by the impact of the bullet, his uncamouflaged face clear in the excellent optics of the Leatherman.
In the long watches of the night, when you and the other American on duty had nothing to do but try to keep awake long enough to make the periodic checks of the perimeter, he was sometimes asked how he felt about such things as this. People back in the States, he knew, regarded the Green Berets as hardened killers, incapable of feeling. That was anything but true. No man killed another without feeling something, even if it was only a momentary sadness.
But, he’d had to admit to his questioners, there was far less feeling at killing at a distance. It became a matter of trajectories, effect of wind and humidity, downhill versus uphill shots, control of the body. Almost an intellectual exercise, although one with all-important consequences.
The dead sniper on the hillside above would have felt about the same thing, if it had gone differently. Theirs was an almost gentlemanly war, fought at a distance, with none of the blood and shit and terror of the up close and personal.
“Trung Si Bucky,” his Montagnard spotter said. “Another one right two finger, up five finger.”
Epstein traversed his scope to the spot described. Early on, when he had been training his spotters, he had despaired of them ever learning distance measurement. The concept of feet, yards, meters, kilometers, or any other Western-oriented measurement systems was as foreign as would have been quantum mechanics. Yet among themselves they picked out spots to which other ’Yards were referring, quickly and accurately. Believing that it was far easier to use something they knew rather than try to drill them in something they didn’t, he began to use the same method of reference. He hadn’t been disappointed.
There! A piece of vegetation that was swaying slightly, even though the surrounding leaves were still. The NVA, and the Viet Cong before them, tended to interlace fresh vegetation on a wicker frame carried on the back. It was a good method of camouflage if you stayed perfectly still. On windy days you could get away with moving around a bit, since the surrounding vegetation was also moving.
But on a day like today, when the wind came only in gusts if it came at all, the slightest movement caused the leaves and branches to sway unnaturally, becoming a beacon to the trained eye.
His own position was deep within a bunker on the corner of the camp. He kept well back from the firing slots, not willing to expose himself by telltale muzzle flash or powder smoke. Unless someone was looking directly down the barrel when he fired, he was well nigh invisible. Still, he knew that to stay in the same spot for too long was suicide. He would engage one or two more targets, then move to another bunker.
It wouldn’t be as if he didn’t have anything to shoot at, no matter where he set up. It was, as they say, a target-rich environment.
He centered his scope on the spot.
“Captain, sir?”
McCulloden whirled to see Lieutenant Sloane, looking tired but triumphant. “How the hell…”
“You’ve got to come see this,” Sloane said. “You won’t believe it.”
McCulloden followed the lieutenant to a low building, most of which was underground. The sides were shielded with several layers of sandbags, and across the top was the standard sandbag/psp/tin roof. Trash littered the trench outside. Across the door was a painted plywood sign, warning in Vietnamese of the dire consequences that would follow, should any unauthorized person enter.
“LLDB supply room,” Sloane explained. “They wanted one of their own, said the ones we had the ’Yards could come and go at will. Steal everything.”
“And it never occurred to anyone that all the supplies came from us, that if we wanted to let the ’Yards steal things, we could?
”
It was a long-standing tradition in the A camps that a little “leakage” was an acceptable thing. If the family of a Civilian Irregular Defense Group soldier suddenly had new blankets to keep themselves warm against the highlands chill, was that a bad thing? After all, they didn’t get paid much, there were few sources of supply in the jungle, and they’d been moved out of their longhouses long ago. So who cared?
Sloane looked almost shamefaced. “Captain Koslov didn’t see the harm in it,” he said, his voice defensive. “I didn’t either, until now.”
McCulloden pushed his way through the opened door, was met by the sight of shelf after shelf of equipment and clothing. There must have been two hundred sets of tiger-stripe fatigues, cases of Bata boots, new-looking radios, crates of mosquito repellent, bag after bag of rice, the latter showing the handshake symbol of the United States Agency for International Development. Finn had seen many such bags in the caches he and his teams had raided over the years, finding it ironic that the rice farmers of Arkansas and Louisiana were helping feed the Viet Cong.
“Running a big-time black market operation out of here,” he surmised. “No wonder they didn’t want to let anyone inside.”
“Easy for them to do,” Sloane said. “Look at this.”
He led McCulloden to the back of the bunker, opened the door of a big teakwood cabinet. The steps leading down into the tunnel below showed Finn everything he needed to know.
“Sly bastards,” Finn said, almost in admiration. “Not only did they dig a goddamned freeway under the camp, they used our own electricity to light it.” He pointed out the wires leading from the lighting system to the outside, where he was sure they would be hooked into the camp generator.
“And we never knew,” Sloane marveled.
“One thing we do know. The LLDB didn’t do this by themselves. It had to come from the outside. I think we need to pay a little visit to their team house, don’t you?”
Olchak had just delivered the wounded sapper to the LLDB. The senior NCO, in charge now that the LLDB lieutenant had fled the camp, smiled and thanked him and offered him tea, or perhaps the Trung Si would like a beer?
He’d refused, of course. He took an instant dislike to the oleaginous little man, seeing in him the same characteristics as he had in so many of his countrymen. Smile at you to your face and slip the knife through your ribs when you turned your back.
Slats Olchak had little use for the Vietnamese, even less for the Laotians with whom he’d had to serve on his first tour in Indochina, on the old White Star teams. Someone had once asked him, if he’d had his way, how he would have fought the war.
I’d take all the good Vietnamese and put them in a boat, he’d said. Wouldn’t have to be a very big boat. Then I’d go back and nuke the country until it was a fused-glass parking lot.
Then I’d go out and sink that damned boat.
“Slats!” he heard Captain McCulloden call, just as there was the report of a pistol from within the LLDB bunker.
Cursing, he drew his own pistol, slammed through the door of the bunker just in front of the captain.
The LLDB sergeant was standing over the now dead prisoner, a wisp of smoke still coming from his pistol barrel.
“He try to escape,” the Vietnamese stammered. “Had to shoot!”
“Drop the gun!” McCulloden commanded. Behind him, Sloane slipped through the door, flattening himself against the wall and covering two of the LLDB, who looked as though they might want to go for the rifles hanging on the wall.
The Vietnamese sergeant was smiling again, the very picture of cooperation. “I tell you, he try to escape,” he said again. “Very bad man.”
Olchak paid no attention at all to his words, looking instead at the eyes. Somewhere in the depths he saw movement swimming, just as the sergeant twitched the gun toward him. Olchak fired, the trigger finger working before conscious thought could tell it to. The heavy slug caught the sergeant high in the chest, the thump of the bullet loud even in the aftermath of the report.
Suddenly there was a roar as Sloane’s pistol went off, hitting a Vietnamese who had pulled his own pistol from beneath the bunk he was sitting on. After that Olchak couldn’t really have told who shot whom, knowing that the battle was over only when his slide locked back.
The room was heavy with powder smoke and the stench of death. Six Vietnamese lay in sprawled disarray, one of them still moaning.
Calmly, Olchak extracted another magazine from his pouch, reloaded the .45, and shot the man in the head.
“I’m hit,” Sloane said, suddenly slumping against the bunker wall. He’d felt a hammer blow to the side of his head, so hard it crossed his eyes. He reached up to feel blood streaming down the side of his face. My God, he thought, I’ve been shot in the head. He felt dizzy, wanted to sit down. Perhaps to wait for the end to come.
McCulloden crossed over to him, closely inspected the wound, took a field dressing from Sloane’s own pouch, and quickly covered the wound. He pressed down hard, sending a shot of pain right through the lieutenant’s head.
“Scalp wound,” he said. “They bleed a lot. Don’t think it was close enough to the skull to do any internal damage. You’re going to have a hell of a headache for a while, though. Here, hold this while I tie it off.”
Sloane did as he was told, pressing the bandage as hard as he could against the streaming wound. He didn’t care about the pain. He wasn’t going to die!
McCulloden tied the ends of the bandage securely around the lieutenant’s skull, then took an Ace bandage from his own kit and wrapped it around and around until Sloane looked as if he were doing tryouts for a mummy movie. After a few moments the blood stopped flowing, leaking only slightly through the combined bandages. Sloane was lucky in that the bullet had missed the temporal artery, otherwise, McCulloden thought, he’d have to be rummaging around in the wound with a set of forceps, trying to pinch it off. This way elevation, pressure, and Sloane’s own clotting process would soon stop even the seepage.
Olchak had busied himself by searching the team house. He drug several cases of fragmentation grenades from beneath one of the bunks. “What do you reckon they were going to use these for?” he asked.
McCulloden looked up from where he was working on Sloane. “My guess would be they were going to go around and toss them into the bunkers. I expect that the ones with Americans inside would get first priority. Classic VC strategy, get someone on the inside, take out the critical points, confuse and disorient the defenders. The guys coming through the wire do a walkover.”
“And it would have worked,” Olchak said.
“It would have worked,” Finn agreed. “Had the same thing happen to me down at Vinh Thanh, in ’66. First Cav sent a convoy up our road, resupplying us with artillery ammo. Since we’d stolen our 105 from them, it only seemed fair they’d have to give us ammo for it.” Finn grinned, relishing the thought. There was nothing a Special Forces man liked better than to put something over on his peers in conventional units.
“Anyway, one of the officers left his camera in a jeep while he walked around; it got stolen of course. We closed the camp down, searched everywhere. Found the camera. Also found all sorts of caches like this, and detailed plans for attacking the camp. That night.”
“Lucky.”
“Yeah,” Finn said. “Lucky.”
Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep—and that was all too often these days—he would think about just how lucky he’d been. He wasn’t a particularly religious man, but sometimes had to wonder if something or someone truly was watching over him.
Or was fate just the result of some cosmic crapshooter, and so far he had been coming up sevens? In which case snake eyes was bound someday to follow.
“They shot the sapper because they were afraid we’d find out about the big tunnel,” Olchak said. “Didn’t know the LT here had already found it.”
“That’d be my guess. Think you can walk, Lieutenant? We’ll get you over to the dispensar
y. Take a few aspirin and lie down for a while. Andy Inger will want to look at that wound, anyway, fill out a casualty tag.”
What he didn’t say was that Inger would also want to observe the lieutenant, make sure there was no brain swelling from the tremendous concussion such a wound could cause. He’d been watching Sloane’s eyes while bandaging him, satisfied to see that pupil size remained the same on both sides. But the body was a strange mechanism. He’d seen men take a half dozen rounds, any one of which should have been fatal, and spend no more than a month in the hospital. And others with no visible wounds at all, die for no apparent reason.
You tried to take no chances.
“Gonna get a Purple Heart, Lieutenant,” he said. “This your first one?”
This is getting interesting, Bucky Epstein thought. He had, according to his own estimation, killed or wounded six enemy snipers so far. But it hadn’t seemed to slow down the volume of fire coming into the camp. It seemed that when he took out one, they replaced him with at least one and possibly two more.
Sooner or later, he knew, they were going to figure out where he was. Probably time to move.
Almost in confirmation of the thought, a round came through the embrasure and struck the sandbags on the far wall. Damn, he thought, they’re getting better.
“Where did it come from?” he demanded of the spotter.
“No see, Trung Si,” the Montagnard said.
“Goddamnit, how could you not see? Close as he came, you should have been looking right down his barrel.” He launched into a tirade, the gist of which was that if the ’Yard couldn’t do a better job than that, he was going to send his ass back down to the trenches.
Snap! The crack of the bullet passing by his ear, breaking the sound barrier as it did so, was enough to draw his sudden and alert attention back to the matter at hand. There! Branches and leaves moving in a way they shouldn’t, the sniper undoubtedly trying to get a slightly better angle.
Napalm Dreams Page 11
