Behind him Sloane just smiled.
Now he wouldn’t have to share the glory with anyone.
Captain McCulloden got to the reserve platoon just as they were getting ready to move out. He’d called earlier, told Sergeant Redmon to get ready, but to wait until he got there.
He’d come to the inescapable conclusion that, main attack or no, he had to reinforce the defenders on the east side. The loss of the bunker had sealed it. Even if the enemy had other tricks up his sleeve, he had also been known to exploit any developing advantage. If he saw he could, he would continually pour reinforcements through the gap and let other plans be damned.
“Have them carry as many grenades as they can,” he told Redmon. “Bartlett, I need you to get over to Olchak’s bunker, give him some blood expanders. He’s fading in and out, and we need him. You get him going, take him to the command bunker. Tell him to get on the horn, call higher, beg for any damned thing they can give us.”
Sergeant Bartlett didn’t try to protest, though he would have liked to. Captain McCulloden’s expression allowed no room for it. Besides, he thought, once I get Olchak over to the bunker, I can get back with them. Help. God knows they’re gonna need it.
“Ready?” Finn asked Redmon.
“He ready, I ready,” Bobby the interpreter said. Finn grinned. He’d completely lost track of Bobby in the heat of things, was glad to see him. “Kill a whole lotta goddamn fuckin’ sonabitch, huh, Dai Uy?”
“Many as we can, Bobby. Let’s go.”
Captain McCulloden had managed to send over some of the Mike Force heavy weapons people before he left the recoilless rifle position manned by Bucky Epstein. They were, Bucky thought, even better than the troops he had himself trained.
They’d silenced at least one heavy machine gun, taken another recoilless rifle under fire the moment it had made its first shot, and Bucky estimated, killed probably a platoon’s worth of troops in the open.
And it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
The fighting on the shattered east wall was so close that he didn’t dare fire at the NVA massing there. He saw figures running toward the battle, reckoned it to be McCulloden and the recon platoon, then saw another machine gun open up on them.
Sorry about that, motherfucker, he said as he spun the weapon around.
McCulloden and the recon platoon got into the trenches where Washington and his men were desperately fighting for their lives just as the enemy mounted a company-sized attack. The next ten minutes were a blur—it was throwing grenades as fast as he could pull the pins, snatching his rifle to shoot the man who suddenly appeared atop the trench, more grenades, explosions all around as the enemy stick grenades found their own targets, the roar of rifle fire so continuous as to achieve the status of white noise.
Down the trench a squad of NVA troopers managed to reach the lip, tossing grenades down on the men inside, moving in, and mopping up the survivors. Only to be themselves wiped out when an enraged Washington turned the corner of the trench and emptied a magazine of 5.56mm rounds into them, their cramped position allowing only one at a time to shoot at him, and each one falling as Washington’s withering fire cut them down.
Finn barely remembered pushing more troops into the gap, gasping orders to Bobby as yet another wave came swarming across the ruined wire. The Montagnard beside him, who’d brought a case of grenades that he’d felt were excessively heavy, but who now wished he’d brought more, started handing them to Finn with the pins already pulled and the spoons gone. Finn tossed them as quickly as he was handed the deadly little spheres, not bothering now to duck his head as they went off—if they got him too so be it don’t have time to duck oh shit here oh shit more gimme another ’nade too close gotta shoot somebody else just did here comes more oh shit.
And even more quickly than it had started, it was over. The surviving NVA soldiers were running back toward the perimeter and were being coolly shot in the back by the Montagnards in the trenches who, when these targets ran out, started shooting the wounded men still left in the battle zone.
Finn didn’t even try to stop them. He was far too busy gulping great gasps of air, wondering if he had held his breath during the entire goddamn battle or only the last part of it.
After a moment he started moving down the trench, stepping over the bodies of both the wounded and the dead. There were many. All too many. Whole sections of the zigzag trench were now held by one or two soldiers.
They come through here again, we’re screwed.
“Will you get the fuck off my stomach!”
He hastily pulled his foot back, squinted in the darkness to see Sergeant Washington’s grin. “Where you hit?” he asked.
“Ain’t, as far as I know. You want to help get these assholes off me?”
Finn grabbed a khaki-clad leg, yanked the dead NVA free, pulled at the arm of another only to have it come off in his hand. Washington heaved and together they pushed two more off the big man.
“Standin’ right on top of the trench,” Washington explained as he felt his body, checking to see if any of the blood with which he was covered was his own. “Bobby blasted ’em, and they fell right on top of me. Where’s that little asshole? Don’t know whether to kiss him or slap the shit out of him.”
“Right here,” Finn said, sadness filling him. Bobby’s gold tooth gleamed in the light of the flares. His eyes were already dull.
“Well, motherfucker!” Washington said.
That about sums it up, Finn thought. That just about sums it up.
Chapter 14
“Charlie Six, this is Cowboy One One, over.”
“Hello, Slats,” Gutierrez replied. “Where’s One Zero, over?”
“Puttin’ out fires,” Olchak replied. “Listen, you order a Sky Spot?”
“That’s a negative, One One.”
Didn’t think so, Olchak mused. No Sky Spot meant no misplaced bombs. Which meant that someone inside the camp had taken out the east side bunker. Someone who might still be running around.
“Get on the tactical net,” he instructed Becker. “Tell ’em we got an infiltrator. Somebody comes up carryin’ anything they ain’t supposed to carry, blow ’em away!”
As Becker did as he was told, Olchak got back on the command net. “We got penetration on the east. Holdin’ em okay right now, but if they reinforce, we got a problem. Anything we can get from you guys?”
“FAC tells me you’re solid overcast,” Gutierrez replied.
“He’s flying right over the camp now, says he can hear the shooting, but can’t see shit. He can’t see, he can’t direct.”
“Roger that. How about some arty preplots at the following locations?” Olchak strung out a series of coded grids.
“Can do,” Gutierrez replied. “Now, how about the Sky Spots?”
Might as well, Olchak thought. The high-flying bombers wouldn’t be bothered by the cloud cover. Of course, all they might be doing would be bombing empty jungle. Still, it wasn’t as if they were on a budget.
“Anything we can get on the north and east,” he said. “South and west are quiet right now, but stand by just in case.”
“Roger. You guys able to hold out?”
“Got to, don’t we,” Olchak said, thinking the question extraordinarily stupid. He recognized the impulse, the frustration at the other end of the line, sitting in a safe position and listening to people die and being able to do little about it.
But it was a stupid question, anyway.
He sat down heavily, grimacing in pain as the muscles flexed in his wounded leg. He’d refused the offer of morphine, knowing that he had to keep his head straight, just had to deal with it, that was all.
“You okay, Sarge?” Becker asked.
Another goddamn stupid question! “It look like I’m doin’ okay?” he snarled.
“Must be,” Becker said. “Still mean as a goddamn rattlesnake with a toothache.”
Despite the pain, Olchak had to grin. At least my reputation’s i
ntact.
Finn assessed the damage. Severe. Out of the recon platoon, ten were dead and fully half the remainder had wounds of varying severity. The two platoons of camp strike force whose area of responsibility this was were even worse off. Fifteen dead, six more soon to be, and very nearly everyone else wounded.
Worse yet, Spearchucker Washington had taken a bullet in the upper chest, punching through the scapula and exiting in a large hole in the rear. A sniper, they surmised, waiting for his chance, seeing it when Washington had raised up high enough out of the trench to shoot at the retreating enemy. Finn had patched him up as best he could and sent him to the dispensary, still cursing that he could damned well stay there and fight, goddamnit!
And worst of all, young Noonan was dead. He’d been hit by a burst from a heavy machine gun as he ran toward the fight. He’d never gotten the first round off.
That was it. Lieutenant Sloane should never have let him leave his position. Not only was he dead, there was now one less person to depend on when the shit really hit the fan, and for what? Absolutely nothing. Finn determined to relieve the lieutenant, send him to the command bunker where he could do no more harm. That a relief for cause during combat would kill a career didn’t bother Finn McCulloden at all. Son of a bitch doesn’t deserve to be an officer. Should have relieved him when I first came here. My own fault for giving him a chance. Won’t happen again.
But first he had to plug this gap.
A flash more bright than the sun dazzled him just a fraction of a second before the ear-pounding roar. The glow faded rapidly, replaced by a column of dirt and smoke lit luridly by the flares. Sky Spot, Finn thought. It had hit just to the east of the tree line. With any luck it had smacked one of their rally points. Five hundred pounds of explosives had a way of making you want to get far away as quickly as you could.
The bomb was followed by the sky-ripping sound of incoming artillery. Instinctively he ducked, then realized it was friendly. When he didn’t hear the explosions he thought, Shit! They’re still using time-delay fuse.
Where the hell did I leave the radio?
There, by the empty case of grenades. Jesus, did I throw that many? Got to get a resupply of those. Thank God Charlie doesn’t have them. The casualty rate would have been far worse, if he had. The stick grenades the NVA used burst in four to six large pieces of shrapnel, instead of the thousands of bits of wire of the Americans’. If one of theirs hit you, it was certainly going to do some severe damage. But the chances of it hitting you were fairly small. If you were within the bursting radius of an American grenade, you were going to get hit, and that was it.
He pressed the push-to-talk button, was grateful to hear the hiss indicating it was still working. “One One, this is One Zero, over.”
“Glad to hear you’re still walkin’ around,” Olchak answered. “Gettin’ worried about you.”
“Getting worried that somebody might get a chance at my Rolex before you did, most likely.” Finn was absurdly grateful for the sound of his friend’s voice. Getting old, he thought. Emotional.
“That too,” Olchak admitted. “That arty doin’ any good?”
“Not as much as it would, they were using VT instead of delay. See if you can get our redleg friends to do that.”
“Roger that. Just got a call from Inger. Spearchucker’s gonna be okay. Would you believe it didn’t even hit a lung? Wants to know how pissed off you’ll be, he comes back over there.”
Not too, Finn admitted. Ordinarily Washington should have been put under enough morphine to fell an elephant and make even the great Spearchucker feel at least a little woozy. Then they’d call in a dustoff and get him back to a nice field hospital, where he could thoroughly terrorize the entire medical staff.
But that wasn’t going to happen. And right now Finn needed every hand he could get.
“Have him go over to the west side, pick up every spare body he can get,” Finn said. “Get ’em back over here as quick as he can. Got a feeling Charlie ain’t gonna wait long.”
“Gotcha. By the way, I’m feeling just a little bit useless here right now. Sure you don’t need me too?”
“Need you to keep calling in thunder and lightning. I’m gonna be tied up for a while.”
With a young lieutenant, Finn thought. Maybe I ought to just shoot him. Save us all a bunch of trouble.
They were coming. He could feel it.
Massing somewhere just outside the range of the starlight scope. He could not tell how he knew—he just did.
As he’d known all along that this was what he had been meant for. No matter where he had been sent, there it was going to be. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been in the north, in the east, or even the relatively safe west. If he had been in the west, the NVA would have made the insane assault across the airfield. If he had been in either of the other places, it wouldn’t have been a probe—it would have been the main attack.
He’d had a moment of doubt, listening to the course of battle on the east side, the seesawing of the tide, the bloody and desperate fury of the fight. But, he thought, he should have known better.
They were coming. And he was ready.
Relieving Sloane was going to have to wait. First came the mortar barrage, far more furious than before. Finn estimated that they were using at least two dozen tubes, everything from 60mm all the way up to 120s. The high arc of the weapon made it a perfect means of creating casualties in the trenches with no overhead cover. He crammed as many men as he could in the surviving bunkers.
Then came recoilless rifle fire directed at those very bunkers. They were being hit on both the east and the north, the purpose being to keep their heads down, degrade their return fire, provide cover for the assault that was sure to come.
Much of the fire was being directed at their supporting weapons—Epstein’s recoilless position, Stankow’s mortars. Both crews stubbornly kept on firing, dropping down into cover only long enough to avoid the closest barrages, popping back up again and slamming back.
Finn could only wait, constantly monitoring the radio to hear Olchak adjusting the artillery, request yet more Sky Spots, transmit casualty reports. There would have been a lot more of those if the Seabees who had built the camp had not done such a good job.
During the lull he’d had a crew out hastily emplacing claymore mines, connecting them all to one firing circuit wired to a blasting machine that he now held. He could only hope that the mortar barrage didn’t cut too many of the wires, that the mines themselves were properly placed and sited, that none of them had been raided for C-4 for cooking fires.
Also during the lull he had checked on the enemy casualties piled up in various waves where they had been cut down. He had not been entirely surprised to see that they had been armed with a motley assortment of rifles and submachine guns—mostly semiautomatic SKS carbines and PPSH submachine guns shooting the underpowered 7.62 pistol round. This meant that the NVA had sent in the most expendable troops first—punishment battalions, locally recruited auxiliaries.
Bullet soakers.
Such tactics worked well when facing a relatively poorly trained adversary. The tendency of such defenders was to put their weapons on rock and roll, firing up everything they had and all they could get within the first few minutes of the fight.
Not so well against troops like his. They husbanded their rounds, shooting only when they had a target, and then only in two- or three-round bursts. There was still plenty of ammunition, and many, many more grenades.
They would need it. The good troops would come next—the shock battalions, the battle-hardened infantry. They’d be armed with AKs, which they’d fire from the underarm assault position, RPD machine guns, B-40 rockets. And instead of human wave attacks they’d be using fire and maneuver, an element laying down a base of fire while another rushed forward, then the first rushing while the forward element laid down the fire.
It would be exactly as he would have done it. The turkey shoot was over. Now came the real
nut-cutting.
Lieutenant Sloane instructed his interpreter to tell the Montagnard gunners to evacuate the bunker, get to the east wall and help repel the attack that was sure to come there. That he could handle this position alone.
The interpreter, a Vietnamese who had been a school-teacher before the war and who was usually to be found in as safe a position as he could find, was happy to leave the exposed bunker, stuck like a finger into the eye of the enemy. He would not, he thought, be going with the gunners. There was a nice safe hole not too far from here, where he could hide and wait for the end to come. If the Americans won, they wouldn’t do anything to him. And if the North Vietnamese did, he could claim he was on their side all along. It was not being traitorous, he told himself. Just realistic. The war had been going on so long, the only sensible thing to do was to survive it. No matter who won.
Sloane watched their departure, feeling both deep satisfaction that his plan was working so well, and terrible apprehension. Now the enemy had to do his part. Would he? As the minutes passed by, and the sounds of the battle behind him grew even more fierce, he was seized with doubt. Would the entire action pass him by? Had all this been for nothing?
No! Quit whining, you silly little shit. His lips curled in an ironic smile. Exactly the same words his father would use. The acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree after all.
The world suddenly lit up as the bangalore torpedoes, snaked under the wire by replacements for the sappers Noonan had killed, blew. The concertina coiled in the sky like an angry snake, snapping back in a half dozen places and opening gaps through which any number of people could come.
And any number of people were coming. He could see them, coming out of the ravine in a solid mass. The burst of fire each triggered as his left foot hit the ground provided a steady metronome, a drumbeat, a thump of a giant heart.
Napalm Dreams Page 23
