The first grenade detonated about ten yards away and he felt the pain as several pieces of shrapnel tore at his arm and the side of his body that was exposed. But still he rolled and another grenade detonated, this one still farther away.
He came to a stop, could hear some hustling around, and pulled a grenade from his belt, pried the pin out and lofted it in the general direction of his enemies. As it exploded--was that a scream he heard?--he got a new magazine into the submachine gun, and though he had no targets, lost himself in the madness of firing. He emptied the magazine stupidly in a sustained blast, the gun thudding, the bullets fanning out to splash through the grass, atomizing stalks they struck, ripping sheets of mud spray from the earth.
Then he rolled backward and continued to propel himself down the hill. In one moment of repose, he got another magazine into the gun, but before he could see targets he heard the soft crush of something heavy landing nearby, and he went flat as a grenade detonated, sending a spout of earth high into the sky and numbing his eardrums. Now he heard nothing: his hearing was momentarily gone and his vision blurred. The left arm hardly worked, it had numbed out and he saw that it was bleeding badly.
Oh, shit.
Fire came at him from three points, short, professional bursts from AK47s. They probed, sending the rounds skirmishing after him in three vectors. He assumed that a few more were working around behind him.
That's it, he thought.
I buy it.
This is it.
Oh, fuck, I tried so hard. Don't let me chicken out here at the end. Oh, please, let me be brave.
But he wasn't brave. His anger melted. A profound sense of regret washed over him. So much he hadn't done, so much he hadn't seen. He felt the powerful pain of his own father's death upon him, and how, now that he was gone, no one would be left alive to mourn and miss Earl Swagger.
God help me, Daddy, I tried so goddamned hard. I just didn't make it.
A shot kicked up next to his face, stinging his neck with pricks of dirt. Another one buzzed by close. They were all shooting now, all of them that were left.
I ain't no hero, he thought.
Oh, please, God, please don't let me die here. Oh, I don't want to die, please, please, please.
But nobody answered and nobody listened and it was all over, it was finished. Bullets cracked past or hit nearby, evicting gouts of angry earth and pelting spray. He willed himself back, shrinking to nothingness, but there was only so far he could go. His eyes were shut. They had him. The next round would-Three fast booming cracks, heavy and powerful. Then two more.
Silence. "Swagger? Bob Lee? You all right?"
Bob lifted his head, about forty yards away, a young Marine stepped out of the elephant grass. Donny's boonie hat had fallen to his back and his hair was golden even in the gray light and the misty rain. He was an improbable black-and-green-faced angel with the instrument of his sergeant's deliverance, the U.S. Rifle M14, 7.62 MM
NATO.
"Stay down," Bob called.
"I think I got 'em all."
"Stay down!"
In that second, two men fired at Donny but missed, the bullets pulling big spouts from the valley floor. Bob turned to watch their shapes scuttle away in the grass, and he walked bursts over both of them, until they stopped moving. He crouched, waiting. Nothing. No noise, just the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart, the stench of the powder.
After a bit, he went to them, one was dead, his arms thrown out, the blood congealing blackly as it pooled to form a feast for ants. The other, a few yards away, was on his back, and still breathed. He had left his AK 30 feet away as he'd crawled after taking the hits. But now, exhausted, he looked up at Bob with beseeching eyes. His face and mouth were spotted with blood, and when he breathed heavily, Bob heard the blood bubble deep in his lungs.
The hand seemed to move. Maybe he had a grenade or a knife or a pistol, maybe he was begging for mercy or deliverance from pain. Bob would never know, nor did it matter. Three-round burst, center chest. It was over.
Donny came bounding over.
"We got 'em all. I didn't think I could get here in time.
Christ, I hit three guys in a second."
"Great shooting, Marine. Jesus, you saved this old man's fucking bacon," Bob said, collapsing.
"You're all right?"
"I'm fine. Dinged up a bit." He held out his bloody left arm, his side also sang of minor penetration in a hundred or so places. Oddly, what hurt the most was his neck, where the impacting NVA round had blown a handful of nasty dirt into the flesh and hair of his scrubby beard, and for some reason it stung like a bastard.
"Oh, Christ, I thought I was cooked. I was finished.
Wasted, greased. Man, I was a gone motherfucker."
"Let's get the fuck out of here."
"You wait. I left the rifle up top. Just let me catch my breath."
He sucked down a few gulps of the sweetest air he'd ever tasted, then ran up the hill. The M40 lay where he had dumped it, its muzzle spouting a crown of turf, its bolt half open and gummed also with turf.
He grabbed it and ran back to Donny.
"Map?"
Donny fished it out of the case, handed it over.
"All right," Bob said, "he's sure got that column moving again. We've got to move on, pass them, and jump them again."
"There's not much light left."
Bob looked at his Seiko. Jesus, it was close to 1700 hours. Time flies when you're having fun.
"Fuck," he said.
He had a moment's gloom. No light, no shoot. They were going to get close enough to stage an assault in the dark, and all the snipers in the world wouldn't make a spit's worth of difference.
"Shit," he said.
But Bob's mind was so fogged with delirium, adrenaline and fatigue it wasn't processing properly. He had the vague sense of missing something, as if he'd left his IQ points up there on that ugly little hill. It was Donny who pulled another sack from around his waist, opened it, and out came what looked like a small tubular popgun and a handful of White Star illumination flares, the bag was heavy with the cartridges.
"Flares!" he said.
"Can you shoot by flares?"
"If I can see it, I can hit it," Bob said.
They moved swiftly through the gloom, amid small hills, in the elephant grass, ever mindful they were paralleling the movement of the enemy main force in the valley, ever mindful that there were still scouting units out in the area.
If and when the NVA discovered their dead recon team, they might send still other men after them.
They moved at the half-jog, through a fog of fatigue and pain. Bob's arm hurt desperately and he didn't have any painkillers, not even aspirin. His head ached and his legs felt withered and shaky. They followed a compass heading, re shooting it each time they moved around a hill.
The elephant grass was tall and concealing, but it cut at them mercilessly. There wasn't much water left and even in the falling dark, Bob could see that the clouds hadn't broken, still hung low and close. A wicked, pelting rain started, delivering syringes of cold where it struck them.
Soon the trip became pure blind misery, two hungry, dead-tired, filthy men running on faith and hope toward a destination that might not even exist.
Bob's mind slipped in and out, he tried to concentrate on the job ahead but it would not stay. At one point, he called a halt.
"I got to rest," he said.
"We been pushing pretty hard," Donny said.
Bob slipped down into the grass.
"You've lost a lot of blood."
"I'm okay. I only need a little rest."
"I got some water. Here, take some water."
"Then what'll you drink?"
"I don't need to shoot. I just fire flares. You need to shoot. You need the water."
"You'd think, all this fucking rain, the last thing we'd be is thirsty."
"I feel like I just played two football games without quarters or half ti
mes Just two games straight through."
"Oh, man," Bob said, taking a big swig of Donny's water, feeling its coolness rush down his flaming throat.
"After this, I'm going to sleep for a month," said Donny.
"No, after this," said Bob, "you are going on R&R to be with your wife, if I have to go to the goddamned general and ass-kick him myself."
It was almost full dark. Somewhere birds were beginning to call, the jungle was close, just beyond the hill line.
There was, however, nothing alive in view, once again, they seemed alone in the world, lost in the hills, stuck in a landscape of desolation.
Suddenly Bob's mind sped to other possibilities.
"I got a idea," he said.
"You got tape? Don't you carry tape? I think I told you to--" Donny reached into a bellows pocket of his cammies, pulled out a roll of gray duct tape.
"This would be tape, no?"
"That would be tape, yes. Okay, now .. . goddamn . the spotting scope. Don't tell me you dumped your spotting scope. You didn't leave that back with your gear, did you?"
"Fuck," said Donny, "I brought everything except a helicopter. Hmmm, sink, tent, Phantom jet, mess hall, oh, yeah, here .. ."
He pulled another piece of gear slung around his shoulder. It was a long, tubular green canvas carrying case, strapped at either end, which carried an M49 20X spotting scope, complete with a folded tripod. It was for glassing the really far targets.
He unslung it and handed it over.
"Now what?"
"Oh, just you watch."
Greedily, Bob bent to the scope case, unscrewed it and reached out to remove a dull-green metal telescope, disjointed slightly, with a folding tripod underneath. It must have cost the Marine Corps a thousand bucks.
"Beautiful, ain't it?" he asked. Then he rammed its delicate lens against Donny's rifle muzzle, shattering it into a sheet of diamonds. He reamed the tube out on the rifle barrel, grinding circularly to take out all the glass and the delicate internal mechanisms for focus adjustment.
He unscrewed and threw away the tripod. Then he seized the canvas case, took out his Randall Survivor and began to operate.
"What are you doing?" Donny asked.
"You never mind, but you get my rifle cleaned up. No rules today. Hurry, Pork, we gotta get a goddamned move on."
Donny worked some rough maintenance on the gun, clearing the muzzle of mud and grass, scraping the dirt, and in a few minutes had it ready to shoot again. He looked back to see that Bob had sawed off one end of the scope case and cut a smaller hole through the other, giving him a green tube about twelve inches long.
Bob wedged the spotting scope tube back into the case.
"Here, you hold that goddamn muzzle up for me," he commanded, and, working swiftly, commenced to wedge the scope case and scope on the muzzle, then wrap yards of tape around the case and the muzzle, securing the case so that it projected a good eight inches beyond the muzzle.
It looked like some kind of silencer but Donny knew it wasn't a silencer.
"What is?"
"Field expedient flash suppressor," said Bob.
"Flash is just powder burning beyond the muzzle. If you can lengthen the cover on the barrel, it'll burn up in there, not in the air, where it'll light me up like a Christmas tree. It's pretty flimsy and won't hold much more than a few dozen shots, but by God, I don't want them tracking my flash and hitting me with the goddamned kitchen sink. Now, let's mount out."
A last fast.
The troops were driven by duty and destiny. An extraordinary accomplishment, the long double-time march from Laos, the ordeal of the sniper in the valley, the victory over the man, and now, on to the Green Beret camp at Kham Due. Battalion No. 3 was just a kilometer away from the staging point, maintaining good order, moving smartly.
Huu Co, senior colonel, glanced at his watch and saw that it was near midnight. They would be in place in another hour, and could use a little time to relax and gather themselves. Then the assault teams would stage and the weapons platoon would set up the 81mm Type 53s, and the last stage would commence. It would be over by dawn.
The weather wouldn't matter.
Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind, his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, "Enough, begone.
Back to your land. Let these people be."
In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck is sometimes the reward for boldness.
The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill, he had gambled and won, and the eventual fall of the Kham Due camp would be his reward.
"It is good," said the XO.
"Yes, it is," said Huu Co.
"When this is over, I will--"
But Nhoung's face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the source of illumination.
A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing the people's will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought, unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.
Then the shot rang out.
Fuller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn't planned to, it just happened, she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he'd been in the field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine. Was she a spy?
There was that possibility, but there wasn't much to know, it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt.
Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists.
Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn't matter.
The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after she'd spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush they'd propped for an ARVN official: just blew her away.
He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning, always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO's wife.
"I won't have it," Mary said.
"I won't live like that.
What does it get you?"
His wife had no answer.
"It's what we do," she finally said.
"Your father and me. We're both in the Army. That's how it works."
"It won't work that way for me," she said.
He hoped it wouldn't. She was too smart to end up married to some lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of Pleiku, who'd taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn't even let himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward Operations Base at Kham Due a year after the war was lost, threw himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.
Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch.
It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the field.
But he had an odd sensation: something was happening.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to get up and-"Sir."
It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.
"Yeah?"
"It's--ah--you won't believe it."
"What?"
"He's still out there."
"Who?" Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.
"Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper."
"Does he have night vision?"
"No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He's got flares."
idle didn't get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering glow of the floating flares he got enough: movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would stand and try and mount a rally, the runner who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team that peeled off to try and flank him.
The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the
"Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of illumination, then the 'chute would open and grab the wind, and they'd begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.
But still, he'd get targets. He'd fire at what his instincts told him was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly naked to the sniper's reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was said.
Not this night. It belonged to Bob.
They'd worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move and they'd get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out, where the grass was shorter and there wasn't any cover. It was a good killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was correct.
Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop, while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement. Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest light. Then he'd move too, the same one hundred steps, through the grass, and set up again.
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