“Eltee . . . Eltee . . .” whispered Whoopie Cushion.
The Lieutenant crept up a few yards and ran into Whoopie Cushion’s rucksack. Cushion was crouching next to a tree, vibrating.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“Repatch’s got somethin’ up there, sir.”
“Where is he?”
“Don’tcha see ’im? He’s right there,” said Whoopie Cushion, pointing into the dark with the barrel of his M-16.
The Lieutenant squinted but couldn’t make out a thing. He grabbed his binoculars and screwed his eyes to the glass.
Repatch was standing at the crest of the hill like a statue, his back to the Lieutenant. He looked like a tree stump or a fallen branch or something. He didn’t look like Repatch.
The Lieutenant scooted forward until he could reach out and touch Repatch.
“What’s going on, Repatch?” he whispered. He was kneeling and couldn’t see past Repatch’s broad back.
“Eltee? Gotcher binocs?” Repatch whispered.
“Sure.” He handed the binoculars over and waited.
Repatch looked through them for a very long moment, then crouched down next to the Lieutenant.
“You ain’t gonna believe this shit, sir,” he whispered, turning his head.
The Lieutenant could hear him, but he couldn’t see his face.
“What’s going on? Spit it out.”
“There’s a fuckin’ airstrip up there, Eltee, and they’re loading some fuckin’ plane. There’s a whole bunch of ’em movin’ around. Take a look.”
He handed the binoculars to the Lieutenant and moved to the side.
The Lieutenant slithered forward on his belly and, leaning on his elbows, had a look through the glasses.
“Jesus, you’re right, Repatch. It’s a fucking DC-3, and they’ve got a grass strip lit up out there somehow.”
“Little cans fulla kerosene or diesel. You can smell ’em,” whispered Repatch. “Jus’ enough light to land the fucker.”
The Lieutenant handed the binocs back to Repatch.
“Can you make out who it is?”
Repatch studied the scene for a moment.
“Nope. I mean, no, sir. Jus’ a buncha fuckers movin’ around the plane. Not enough light, an’ we’re too fuckin’ far away.”
“Let’s move up,” said the Lieutenant. He turned and crawled back to the rest of the patrol. He gathered them into a bunch and whispered, “There’s something going on about two hundred meters ahead. Somebody loading a plane. We’re going to have a look.”
“My Lord and Savior,” said Whoopie Cushion. “He’s come at last. Flyin’ first class.”
“Shut up, Cushion, you dull-ass mo’fo’. Yo’ Lord and Savior hadda knowed your ass was comin’ along, he’d a’ done took hisself a wife and settled down and done him some bass fishin’ and your ass woulda been grass long time ago,” said Moonface.
Whoopie Cushion started praying softly in the dark.
The Lieutenant signaled the patrol forward and they began to move.
Repatch led the way down the hill, breaking trail, not making a sound. The rest of the patrol followed just as silently. They approached the makeshift airstrip from its far end, sticking to the treeline. The grass strip had been well taken care of. It was freshly mowed and lined, just as Repatch had said, with tin cans full of diesel flickering yellow in the black night. The wind was blowing their way, masking any noise they made in the woods.
Halfway down the strip, the Lieutenant called a halt. He pulled out the binocs and had a look.
“Jesus, Repatch, they’re ours! Those are Americans! Round-eyes! They’re wearing civvies but they’re ours! What in hell are they doing out here?”
He handed the glasses to Repatch.
“Damn. Weirdest shit I ever seen, long as I been in ’Nam,” he said, handing the glasses back to the Lieutenant.
“We’re not in ’Nam,” said the Lieutenant. “We’re in Laos.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
“Whatchew gonna dew, Eltee?” asked Dirtball, radio receiver screwed to his ear.
“Let’s move on down farther and see what the fuck is going on,” said the Lieutenant. “Then we’ll make our move. We don’t want to come strolling out of the woods and spook them. No telling who they might take us for . . . VC, NVA . . . Anything might happen.”
They glided through the treeline in Repatch’s wake. That was the thing about Repatch. With him on point, you couldn’t help but pick up his rhythm. Inside of a couple hundred yards, you were moving just like he did, soft and quick and happy. It was spooky. Behind the Snake, you stopped sweating and swearing and sucking wind. With Repatch on point, you were inviolate, walking hallowed ground. Even Whoopie Cushion stopped his mumbling and praying. The only god out there on point was Repatch, and he worked just fine, thank you.
The Lieutenant called a halt when they were opposite the plane, about fifty yards away across the airstrip. They could see the action around the plane clearly now. A half-dozen Americans in blue jeans and olive-drab camouflage T-shirts were loading something on the plane, boxes it looked like, tightly wrapped with tape and rope. Another dozen men, also American, also in jeans and fatigue T-shirts, were standing guard in a circle around the plane. They were heavily armed. Every man carried at least one weapon in his hands and one slung over his shoulder. Two of them carried M-79s.
“Eltee. Check it out,” said Repatch. “Dudes are carryin’ Kalashnikovs. One of ’em’s got a RPG. That’s some weird shit, Eltee. ‘Merican dudes carryin’ that shit.”
The Lieutenant raised the glasses. It was exactly as Repatch had said.
“Give me the radio, Dirtball,” said the Lieutenant.
Dirtball unlatched the receiver from his head and handed it to the Lieutenant.
“Rattail Six, this is Rattail Two, over,” he whispered into the receiver.
Static.
“Rattail Six, Rattail Six, Rattail Six, this is Rattail Two, this is Rattail Two, over.”
Static.
Break.
Dead air.
Static.
“Dirtball, check and see if you got the right freek,” said the Lieutenant.
Dirtball unshouldered the prick-25 and peered into the dim glow of the radio frequency dials.
“S’right freek, Eltee. We’re on the company net solid.”
“See what you can do, Dirtball,” said the Lieutenant, handing the mike/receiver to his RTO.
Dirtball knelt next to the radio, whispering into the receiver. The Lieutenant turned around and looked through the glasses at the scene on the grass airstrip.
“I got nothin’ on this mo’fo’ radio, Eltee,” said Dirtball. “Either this fucker’s shot, or they ain’t monitorin’ the freek. And I know this fucker’s in good shape. We was talkin’ to the captain only an hour ago, sir. I know my radio’s strac, sir. I swear it.”
“Okay, okay, Dirtball,” said the Lieutenant.
“Whatchew gonna dew, Eltee?” asked Repatch.
The Lieutenant looked around. The patrol was gathered in a semicircle, kneeling on the forest floor. Twelve eyes were gazing up at him shining so brightly they looked like oncoming headlights in the distance down a long flat road . . . wet, glowing, expectant, hopeful, scared, trusting . . .
. . . loving . . .
“Well, they’re Americans, just like us. They’re ours. They’re in our AO. We may as well see what’s going on, men,” said the Lieutenant. “Come on. Let’s see what the fuck is up.”
The Lieutenant led the way through the treeline onto the grass. He had taken three steps when Repatch tackled him. He looked up as he went down.
One of the men in jeans and T-shirt wheeled around and shouldered his Kalashnikov.
The Lieutenant heard a brief burst of fire, then he heard a dozen bursts of fire and another dozen bursts and the night was ablaze.
He looked up and waved his arms over his head and yelled as loud as he could, “Hey
, assholes, we’re American! Weapons platoon, Triple-Deuce! Hey!”
He knew they heard him, but it didn’t matter. Gunfire kept coming.
Rounds splattered the ground around him and he found himself crawling at top speed back to the treeline. Moonface, who hadn’t left the trees when the shooting started, had dropped and was firing his M-60 at an ungodly clip, spraying the airstrip as if he was watering it with a garden hose.
The Lieutenant reached the treeline and dropped and turned around. Strosher was hit, lying on his back in the tall grass at the edge of the strip. Woodley was lying next to him, holding a compress over his stomach.
“Get the fuck in here!” yelled the Lieutenant.
Strosher looked back at him, a look of shock blanketing his features as though he’d woken up in the middle of a bad dream. Woodley scooted backward toward the trees, dragging Strosher by the arms behind him.
Gunfire was still coming, tree branches cracking and falling as rounds thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwacked into the woods around them.
Moonface laid down heavy machine-gun fire, and the others cut loose with their M-16s. Whoopie Cushion had Dirtball’s M-79, and he pumped grenade rounds at them as fast as he could load. The first few grenades hit, and most of the men around the plane dropped, easing up on their fire.
The Lieutenant looked back at the plane. One engine was going, and the other was turning over. Some of the men were up and running for the opposite treeline. Three of them were crouched next to the plane, under the near wing, firing at the patrol. Three more were still tossing burlap bales through the side door of the DC-3.
The Lieutenant wondered what three men would be doing in the middle of a savage firefight, throwing bales into an airplane. He pulled out the glasses and squinted through them.
Another volley of rounds from the Kalashnikovs thwack-thwacked into the trees, and everybody ducked.
The DC-3 was roaring down the airstrip, taking off.
Moonface followed the plane with the barrel of the M-60, firing until the plane rose and disappeared over the trees and into the night.
The barrel of his M-60 was glowing white-hot in the dark, like a magic wand. Any minute Moonface was going to wave it and all their wishes would come true.
Yeah, the Lieutenant thought. Real fucking likely.
All of the American men in jeans and camouflage T-shirts were gone. Nothing was moving. Everybody crouched in the treeline and listened.
No engine noise. No firing. No movement.
Nothing.
“Anybody other than Strosher hit?” the Lieutenant asked, looking around at the patrol.
Everybody shook his head no.
“You okay, Strosher?”
There was no answer.
“He’s dead, Eltee. In the stomach. Nothing I could do.” Woodley looked up at the Lieutenant blankly. All business, Woodley. Coldly efficient. Dropped out of Kansas University. The men said he could stem the tide of a good-sized creek with a Q-tip, he was that good at stopping a wound from bleeding. The Lieutenant wouldn’t trade him for three real docs. There was no one like him in the whole Battalion. Good man. This time, however, as at several other times in the past, there was nothing he could do. Strosher lay there on the ground under the trees, under the black night sky, staring up with wide-open eyes that saw nothing.
The Lieutenant looked down the airstrip to where the plane had disappeared. The cans of diesel were smoking densely. Several had burned themselves out. Others were flickering and dying.
“Dudes knew how to time them runway lights,” said Repatch. He was picking his teeth, watching the diesel cans go out one by one. The plane hadn’t been gone sixty seconds.
“Where’d they go?” asked the Lieutenant, stunned by the sudden silence.
“They gone, Eltee,” said Moonface, sweat pouring from his brow, eyes sparkling, teeth glistening in the dark.
The Lieutenant stood up and walked to the edge of the woods. He started onto the grass, heading toward the spot where the plane had been loaded.
A single round thwacked into the branches next to him. He ducked, watching and waiting.
Nothing.
He felt a tugging on his pants leg and looked around.
It was Dirtball.
“C’mon, Eltee. More a’ them than us anyways. Nothin’ we can do for Strosher now. Let’s set up our fuckin’ little ambush like Rattail Six done said, an’ settle on down for the night.”
“Nobody gonna believe this shit.” The words came from the dark.
“I don’t believe this shit,” said the Lieutenant.
A man was dead, killed by friendly fire.
Somebody shouldered Strosher. Repatch slithered into the dark and they were gone behind him, sucked up into the black woods like smoke.
10
* * *
* * *
They say betrayal can happen only in the presence of love, but they are wrong.
When the General got to Vietnam, he turned to Jake Rousseau before anyone else because the scrappy Frenchman-turned-American had been his most trusted aide for eight years in Berlin after the war, when the General headed up the CIA in Europe and he needed someone he could trust in his first civilian job in thirty years.
From the start, Jake Rousseau owed the General his career, indeed his citizenship and his identity as an American, as a CIA man.
But the General remembered someone who wasn’t there anymore. He was an old man who had fought an old war and was still playing by old rules. This was a new war. And there were new rules.
The General had made an error typical of military men. He confused one currency for another. Jake owed him something old: loyalty. But he paid him off the Vietnam way, with something new: crushed hopes and broken promises and disappeared dreams.
In Vietnam, truly, nothing was as it seemed.
The General, waiting for Rousseau in his room overlooking the ersatz waterfall in the courtyard of the VIP Villa, wasn’t really part of the American royalty he had aspired to through his marriage to Carey Randolph, not to mention his marriage to Belinda Thomason. He was a sharecropper’s son who had made good the hard way, by taking everything he could get and giving nothing back once he had it.
The Colonel, sweating under a ceiling fan stirring the wet air in a hotel room in Saigon, wasn’t just boring and pedantic and honest and thorough—he was brave and boring and pedantic and honest and thorough.
And the Lieutenant, who by now was languishing some thirty kilometers away in the stockade in Long Binh—a place the troops jokingly referred to as LBJ, Long Binh Jail—who looked just like his grandfather had looked in a photograph taken when he was twenty-four, also a Lieutenant and a platoon leader—who had patterned his life on the General’s every utterance and motion, wasn’t really like him at all. For the first time he had just seen life through his father’s eyes—boringly and pedantically and thoroughly and honestly. It happened because, like his father, he was a fool for love and a sucker for a sad thrill.
And Jake Rousseau? He wasn’t AID, he was CIA, and he was above all in vogue. He betrayed the General with a shrug of his shoulders the modern way, on the phone, through a slit in his face called a smile.
It was 9:00 A.M., and the General was shaving when the call came. He wiped the soap from his face and picked up the phone.
“General Blue,” he growled, sounding like an unmuffled car engine turning over for the first time, grinding, snarling to life.
“General, please hold for Mr. Rousseau,” said a woman’s voice, obviously his secretary’s.
A moment passed, and Jake Rousseau came on the line.
“General, sir?” said Rousseau.
“Goddammit, Jake, what in hell’s going on over there? I want to find out what’s happened to my boy. I want to see him, for crying out loud. Let’s get on with it.”
There was a long pause before Jake Rousseau answered him.
“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible, General,” sa
id his former aide.
“Not possible! Goddammit, Jake, what in tarnation are you talking about!”
“Your grandson has gotten himself into some very serious trouble, sir, and I’m afraid it’s completely beyond me to affect the situation at all from my end.”
“Your goddamned end? What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I can’t do anything for you, sir. And I certainly can’t do anything for young Matt.”
“Goddammit, Rousseau, you were that boy’s age when I took you onto my staff in Tripoli. We’ve been through two lifetimes together, Jake. I counted on you. I still count on you.” The General’s raspy voice was tarnished and tired, thickened with half-tones of desperation and despair.
“I’m afraid this time your trust was misplaced, sir,” said Rousseau.
To the General, Rousseau’s words came from the bottom of a well.
“There is only so much I can do, only so far that I can go. A man in my position must tread carefully when it comes to matters of the law. You yourself taught me that, General, in Sicily, when you ordered a court-martial for that soldier who shot himself in the foot. We were standing down on the beachhead, the Third had been in combat for fifty-six consecutive days, and there was a rash of self-inflicted wounds, thirteen in all, as I recall. You ordered every officer in the division to watch for self-inflicted wounds and catch a soldier in the act. You wanted to make an example of him. I will never forget it, sir. And I’ll never forget what you told me just after the man was found guilty and sentenced to hang, a consequence you had not foreseen.”
“Get on with it, goddammit,” the General growled. He remembered the incident too.
“You said, ‘The goddamned law is an impenetrable thicket, Jake. You turn to it at your own risk.’ ”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what I said in Sicily, Jake. That’s all behind us now. History. This is different. My grandson’s life is at stake. I want to know what happened to him. When is the court-martial? Who’s the prosecutor? Were there any witnesses? What’s going on up there in II Corps? Goddammit, Jake, don’t you understand me? I want some help on this.”
Army Blue Page 19
