“And if we can’t make it back to the bunker?” Wren asked.
Damn, Finn thought. Wish he hadn’t asked that.
“Then you try to go the other way,” Finn said. “Get the hell outside the camp, E and E. Head south. Rest of the battalion is that way. Get with them, you’re okay.”
Wish I was as confident as I sound, he thought.
“Great plan,” Master Sergeant Olchak said. “You know, for that, I think we should sing the captain a hymn.”
And from every throat came the rousing chorus.
“Hymnnn,”
“Hymnnn.”
“Fuck himnnn!”
“Go in peace, my children,” Finn said.
Chapter 12
At dusk the Spads, A1E prop-driven aircraft from a different squadron than the Sandys, came roaring in. Just at the edge of camp the first one dropped the napalm canister; it tumbled end over end before smacking into the ground near the flagpole. The NVA must have been wondering what the Americans were doing, bombing themselves. Ordinarily when the silver canister hit, it would release jellied gasoline, immolating anything in its path.
This time there was no fire, no explosion. Only a swarm of Montagnards, grabbing the canister and pulling it into a bunker before the next plane came in.
The North Vietnamese gunners recovered from their surprise quickly enough, pursuing the third plane with green tracer as it sped over the camp. The pilot dropped his canister, pulled up in a power climb, cranked the plane over, and dove, opening up with his machine guns on the peskiest of the antiaircraft fire. He swooped back toward the south, then came back, this time doing a snap roll over the camp.
Wonder how that boy gets those big old balls in that little old cockpit? Finn thought.
Another power climb and he had disappeared in the clouds that were beginning to form to the east. Clouds that were moving in far too fast to suit Finn McCulloden.
A burst of automatic weapons fire sprayed across the ground, driving him inside the bunker. Charlie’s moved back in, Finn thought. Didn’t think he’d stay away long.
Sam Gutierrez had just informed him that Charlie Secord and the rest of the battalion had managed to break contact with the ambushing force, and that they had suffered only a few casualties. They were going to try another route in, backing off sufficiently to come at the camp from an entirely different angle.
But they’d lost at least a day. That the NVA hadn’t really pursued them in any coherent fashion meant to Finn that this result was exactly what the enemy wanted. Keep any relief forces far enough away that even if some of the defenders did manage to escape an overrun camp, they would have little chance of reaching safety.
They intend to kill or capture every last one of us, Finn surmised. Now I know what Travis felt, when he heard the sounds of the Dugello played by the Mexican military band outside the Alamo.
“Looks like we got a present here, Cap’n,” Olchak said, holding up a fiberglass weapons case. Three others were still in the canister.
Finn popped open the case, relieved to see that it seemed to have survived the ride with no damage. Inside was an M16 rifle, atop which was a bulky starlight scope. Instead of a flash hider at the muzzle, there was mounted a long black tube—a Sionics sound suppressor.
“Want to have some fun?” he asked the sergeant.
“More’n you know,” Olchak answered.
Private Duong Van Trinh was a careful man these days.
If he’d made a habit of being careful before, he would still have been Sergeant Duong Van Trinh, and he would not now be making his way beneath the barbed wire. His mistake had come when he’d been forced to attend yet another indoctrination session, conducted by the division political officer. He’d resented it, thinking that it seemed to be casting doubt on his reliability. And he’d been fighting this war far longer than the political officer, who had come down from Hanoi only the month before. That in itself should have testified to his reliability.
The PO went on and on about the poor, oppressed people of the South, how they were being crushed under the heels of the imperialist Americans and their running-dog South Vietnamese lackeys. How they were starved into submission, the fruits of their toil confiscated by the criminal Thieu government, and how the glorious North Vietnamese army had a duty to save them, a duty put forward by Ho Chi Minh himself, he of glorious memory.
Trinh, who had seen firsthand the conditions in the South, had obviously let his disbelief at this nonsense being spouted by the officer show on his face. Suddenly the captain had stopped his speech, looked directly at him, and asked him if he did not believe in the ultimate victory.
Trinh didn’t know why he’d said it. Perhaps it was because he had been there so long, had lost so many friends, had suffered wounds for which there was seldom enough medicine. All he knew was that suddenly he was fed up.
“I believe in the ultimate victory,” he had said. “But it won’t be because the people of the South rise up. It won’t be because of the glorious efforts of our comrades the Viet Cong. It will be only because of men like these”—he swung his arm to indicate the soldiers sitting there—“who will go on fighting, no matter what. Sometimes because of our leadership. And sometimes in spite of it.”
There was complete silence, his comrades-in-arms turning away from him, pretending perhaps that he didn’t exist. Or if he did, that they didn’t know him. Dropped from the sky in their midst, perhaps.
The political officer had been apoplectic. He had demanded that the sergeant be seized and taken out and shot—pour l’encouragement des autres.
That Trinh hadn’t been executed was due only to the fact that he had been such a good soldier, recognized as such by his company and battalion commanders. However, he obviously could not go unpunished. And he could not stay in the same unit, for fear of infecting the others with what the political officer called his defeatism.
He’d been publicly stripped of his rank and reassigned to a sapper battalion.
And now he was one of the twenty-two sappers whose job it was to make their way through the defenses of the camp, carrying satchel charges that they were to throw into the machine gun positions, command bunkers, communications center, and ammunition dumps. More here to be careful of than just your unguarded mouth, he told himself.
He lay on his back, using only shoulders and hips to wriggle his way forward. His right hand was extended to the front, feeling for trip wires, the prongs of buried mines, the wire itself. Each strand was carefully raised and placed atop the bamboo pole he carried in his left hand. By pushing up slightly on the pole he made space enough to move forward, inches at a time.
It was slow, painstaking work. He had been at it for an hour and was only now almost through the first barrier. No trip wires, no mines, no tin cans with pebbles inside. The enemy would, he knew, be saving that for the closer-in defensive belts.
Behind him would come the next group of sappers, these pushing bamboo poles filled with explosives before them. The poles would be joined together and, when the time came, detonated. Bangalore torpedoes, he had heard them called, though the Vietnamese name was different.
The bangalores would blow great gaps in the wire, detonate any mines within a few feet, create paths through which the assault troops could come screaming in. It was a time-tested technique, having worked again and again in camps and outposts throughout the country. But much depended upon him and others like him. If the machine guns weren’t taken out, they would with their interlocking fire simply mow down the assault troops. Few if any of the first wave would get through. The commanders would not stop, of course. They would assault again and again until the enemy guns got so hot they couldn’t fire or ran out of ammunition or were hit by lucky shots from RPG-7 launchers.
But in the meantime, hundreds would die. Many of them would be his former friends. And although they now shunned him, he did not want to see them dead.
He passed the last bit of concertina wire, now working his way in
to the tanglefoot. Here he would be far more likely to run into trip-wired flares. Push on the wire, and the flare would go off. Cut the wire, and the spring-loaded trigger would fire the flare from the other direction. In either case, he would be caught in the light like a bug on a wall.
Almost as soon as he thought it, he felt the telltale resistance of a tiny piece of wire, much smaller than the barbed wire he was going through. He ran his fingers one way, finding only its anchor point, and then the other. There was the trigger. He reached down into the bag on his chest, pulled out a roll of tape. It had, he knew, come from one of the American supply depots, purloined by a greedy sergeant and sold on the black market. Duct tape, they called it, or hundred-mile-an-hour tape. Trinh had no idea what either meant, but did know it was wonderful stuff. He tore off a strip and wrapped it around trigger and flare, securing the trigger quite well. He then felt safe enough to cut the wire, using a set of cutters he had also secreted in the bag.
He did not allow himself to feel satisfied. There would be, he knew, many more. And he had to be very good, or very lucky, each and every time.
He did not allow himself to think about anything else—not his wife, left behind two years ago when he marched South. Not his two sons, neither of whom really knew their father. Not his perpetually grumbling stomach. There was seldom enough food, and the fare was so monotonous that the soldiers often took to the jungle to scrounge lizards, insects, the occasional edible root. Of course, when this many soldiers were in one place, the jungle was soon stripped of edibles, the forest floor resembling what it would look like after a swarm of army ants had marched over it.
Concentrate! Was that just the slightest brush of another wire?
He never felt the bullet that took his life. It smacked into the top of his head, the energy dump from the high-speed round creating so much overpressure in the skull it blew both his eyes out of their sockets.
Behind him a sapper dragging a bangalore torpedo died too.
Finn handed the weapon to Olchak, who sighted through the starlight scope to see the two dead men, glowing eerily in the green enhanced light.
“Looks to me to be zeroed about right,” Finn said, his voice flat.
“Good enough,” Olchak grunted.
“Let’s get one of these on each side,” Finn instructed. “If we can take out the sappers, we can slow things down a bit.”
Olchak left to do Finn’s bidding. Finn put the rubber grommet of the scope to his eye again, swept the perimeter. Nothing was moving at the moment. They would, he knew, regroup and try to come in again. Wondering what had happened. The heavy sound-suppressor would have made it difficult for them to hear the shots, much less tell where they came from. More important, the suppressor completely hid the muzzle flash. The still-burning gases that created both the report and flash were redirected into swirl chambers within the metal tube, slowing them and allowing the burn to complete. The round, still supersonic, would still crack in the night air, thus the tube was called a suppressor, rather than a silencer.
The only way you could tell where the round was coming from was to be looking exactly down the barrel at the moment the round was fired. And if you were, you weren’t going to be in any shape to tell anyone where it came from.
They’d figure it out sooner or later. They weren’t stupid, after all. Then they’d try to suppress the fire by means of their own weapons while the next wave of sappers came through. It was always a measure of this or that, one measure being met by a countermeasure, like a giant game of chess.
Only difference was, here, if you got checkmated, you didn’t fold up the board, put your pieces in their holders, and walk away.
“You ever used one of these before?” he asked Sergeant Young, who was standing beside him, obviously eager to take his turn.
“Back at Bragg, sir.”
“You a good shot?”
“Better’n most.”
“That’s what I like. Modesty.”
Sergeant Young grinned, his teeth gleaming in the little bit of light coming in through the bunker embrasure. “Farm boy, sir.”
Finn smiled back. The sergeant didn’t have to say anything more. He was of that type that flocked to the Special Forces, kids raised on farms in Mississippi, Iowa, New York, and every other state in the Union. Kids with no prospects, other than backbreaking labor for little reward. Kids who were smarter than the rest, who knew there was something besides getting up before the chickens, repairing equipment that should have been replaced years before, waiting for crops that died from insects or drought or too much rain or just plain bad luck.
Kids who would have been shooting the family rifle since they were big enough to pick it up, using it to supplement the commodity beans and rice and cheese passed out by bureaucrats left over from the New Deal. The one thing you didn’t do, when you might have ten or twelve .22 bullets to your name, was waste one of them.
Finn handed him the weapon, noted approvingly that the sergeant first checked to see if it was on safe, then retracted the bolt slightly to make sure a round was in the chamber. In the early days the M16 had had a distressing tendency to jam, and no soldier took it for granted even now that the problems seemed largely solved.
Young stood slightly back from the embrasure and scanned the perimeter. By staying to the shadows deep in the bunker he lessened his chances of being seen by the alert NVA spotter, who would be looking through binoculars to see the flash of glass, the movement of a barrel, the shape resolving itself into a body.
Satisfied, Finn left the bunker. He drew his pistol, hunched down, and traversed the connecting trench. While he didn’t think any of the sappers had yet managed to get through the wire, there was no use in taking any chances. Each twist of the trench was negotiated carefully, pistol held close to the body to make sure someone on the other side of the next turn couldn’t grab it and twist it away.
The only people in the trench were Montagnard sentries, who were satisfyingly alert. Two men covered each stretch of the trench. They flashed gold-toothed grins at him as he passed. The Montagnards counted their wealth by how many gold teeth they could accumulate, many of them with fancy inlays of hearts and stars of semiprecious metal. Some said the North Vietnamese rear-area troops carried around pliers, specifically to deal with the teeth of the ’Yards killed by the assault troops.
He felt a wave of affection for these men. Recruited from their longhouses by Special Forces troops, pulled from their families, facing little but the likelihood of their own death, they served with little complaint. They adapted to modern weaponry, after having used only bamboo crossbows all their early lives, like a duck would to water. One of Finn’s favorite Mike Force troopers carried a Browning automatic rifle (BAR) that was longer than he was tall. He’d stripped the weapon of bipod, carrying handle, or anything else that added weight but could be done without. His favorite trick was to fire the massive .30-06 cartridges one at a time, with appalling accuracy. Almost inevitably after a battle a number of the enemy soldiers would be found to have one .30-caliber-size hole right between their eyes. When the Mike Force had been issued M16s, replacing the underpowered carbines with which they’d previously been armed, this soldier had been offered one of the new weapons. He had refused to take it, vehemently voicing his preference for the BAR.
He still carried it.
Finn made the rounds of the bunkers as well, finding that each had alert soldiers at the guns. The camp was built in the shape of a star, with machine gun bunkers at each point and at the vee where the legs of the star met. There were three machine guns in each, sometimes the newer M60s and sometimes the old 1919A6 in .30-06 caliber. Personally, Finn had no preference between the two, but wished that they fired the same bullet. Trying to keep two different kinds of ammunition, especially when you were trying to resupply one of the bunkers while under fire, was a nightmare.
The guns in the left and right embrasures had their zones of fire at approximately forty-five degrees off-center, the on
e in the center embrasure with a zone that overlapped the other two. While the enemy was still at a distance, they would engage with point fire. Only when the assaulting force got too close would someone call for final protective fires. At that point the guns would be locked in on a fixed azimuth, each one overlapping the fire from the machine guns on the bunker to either side. The guns in the vee would fire directly down the legs of the star, covering the point bunkers and laying down a curtain of lead that no one could get through.
At least in theory. The problem was that if you lost one bunker, you lost the ability to cover the other bunkers to either side. And if you lost two?
Well, you just hoped the enemy wouldn’t be smart enough to exploit a sector that would be covered only by the rifle fire from the men in the trenches.
Unfortunately, Charlie was never that stupid.
That was why they had the claymores. Charlie would rush as many men through the breached defenses as he could, and if the claymores were tripped at just the right time, they would slaughter some of the best troops the enemy had. One hoped that such a debacle would give the enemy pause, perhaps even cause him to break off the attack.
Of course, if it didn’t, the second wave was going to come right into the camp, with only individual defenders to stop them. Past that, it was every man for himself. Finn had the utmost confidence in the fighting abilities of his troops. Problem was, you could be the best fighter in the world, but when you were outnumbered by ten or twenty to one, the outcome was pretty much ordained.
He could only hope it wouldn’t come to that.
He reached the command bunker for the west wall to find DiUlio and Wren arguing over who would get the starlight-scope-equipped weapon. It seemed that DiUlio had missed a shot, and Wren hadn’t, therefore Wren obviously needed to be the sniper. Armando DiUlio swore that he wouldn’t have missed if Wren hadn’t picked exactly that moment to cough loudly, thus throwing off his aim.
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