Then he thought, Fuck it!, and got up to take them from behind.
They came as he thought they would, good, trained men, willing to take casualties, a platoon strength unit fanning through the high grass. Bob could make them out in the mist, dark shapes filing through the weaving fronds; he thought of a deer he’d once seen in a foggy cornfield back in Arkansas, and Old Sam Vincent, who’d tried to be a father to him after his own had passed, telling him to fight the buck fever, to be calm, to be cool.
He heard Sam now.
“Be cool, boy. Don’t rush it. You rush it, it’s over and you can’t never get it back.”
And so he was calm, he was death, he was the kind hunter who shot for clean kills and no blood trails, who was a part of nature himself.
But he wasn’t.
He was war, at its cruelest.
He had never had this feeling before. It scared him, but it excited him also.
I am war, he thought. I take them all. I make their mothers cry. I have no mercy. I am war.
It was an odd thought, just fluttering through a mind far gone into battle intensity, but it could not be denied.
The platoon leader will be to the left, not in the lead, he’ll be talking to his men, holding them together.
He hunted for a talking man and when he found him, he shot him through the mouth and ceased his talking forever.
I am war, he thought.
He shifted quickly to the man who’d run to the fallen officer and almost took him, but instead held a second, and waited for another to join him, grab him, take command, and turn himself to issue orders. Senior NCO.
I am war.
He took the NCO.
The men looked at each other, dead targets in his eyes, and in a moment of utter panic did exactly the right thing.
They charged at him.
He couldn’t possibly take them all or even half of them; he couldn’t escape or evade. There was only one thing to do.
He stood, war-crazed, face green-black with paint, eyes bulged in rage, and screamed, “Come on you fuckers, I want to fight some more! Come on and fight me!”
They saw him standing atop the rise, and almost en masse pivoted toward him. They froze, confronting him, a mad scarecrow with a dangerous rifle atop a hill of grass, unafraid of them. For some insane reason, they did not think to fire.
The moment lingered, all craziness loose in the air, a moment of exquisite insanity.
Then they ran at him.
He dropped and slithered the one way they would not expect.
Right at them.
He slithered ahead desperately, snaking through the grass, until they began to fire.
They paused a few feet from him, fired their weapons from the hip as if in some terrified human ceremony aimed at slaying the devil. The rounds scorched out, ripping the stalks above his head to land somewhere behind. It was a ritual of destruction. They fired and fired, reloading new mags, sending their bullets out to kill him, literally obliterating the crest of the hill.
He crawled ahead, until he could see feet and spent brass landing in heaps.
The firing stopped.
He heard in Vietnamese the shouts:
“Brothers, the American is dead. Go find his body, comrades.”
“You go find his body.”
“He is dead, I tell you. No man could live through that. If he were alive, he would be firing at us even now.”
“Fine, go and cut his head off and bring it to us.”
“Father Ho wants me to stay here. Somebody must direct.”
“I’ll stay, brother. Allow me to give you the privilege of examining the body.”
“You fools, we’ll all go. Reload, make ready, shoot at anything that moves. Kill the American demon.”
“Kill the demon, my brothers!”
He watched as the feet began to move toward him.
Get small, he told himself. Be very, very small!
He went into a fetal position, willing himself into a stillness so total it was almost a replication of genuine animal death. It was a gift he had, the hunter’s gift, to make his body of the earth, not upon it. He worried only about the smell of his sweat, rich with American fats, that could alert the wisest of them.
Feet came so close.
He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.
They won this fucking war in shower clogs!
The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty, tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought; he could fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other’s boots were holey, torn, taped together, a hobo’s comic footwear, something Red Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the column, which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.
Then he crashed into the soldier.
NVA.
The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this obvious straggler, the idiot who’d wandered away. The man’s mouth opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality, smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him, pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He got his left hand about the man’s throat, crushing it, applying the full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his Randall knife.
The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob’s neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into the man’s testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.
Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into entrails, and drew it to the left. The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob’s wrist, gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the torso, the man arching with each stroke.
He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He wiped the Randall blade on his camouflaged trousers, and slipped it back into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty blood ran down from the point on his crown where he’d head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.
Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?
The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen. He’d never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His teeth were white. He had acne.
Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy. A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to the column.
I am war, he thought; this is what I do.
Huu Co’s political officer Phuc Bo was adamant. A stocky little man who’d been to Russian staff school, Phuc Bo had the blunt force of a party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a master of dialectics.
“Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty percent casualty rate; that is entirely acceptable to the Party.
Sometimes, the fighters’ lives must be spent to accomplish the mission.”
Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking patrol and no word from the sappers who’d been recalled. Still, the American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular specialty.
How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and when he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough percentage to be disruptive.
“He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail? What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly with criticism?”
“Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our strength. That is our power.”
“But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself be a decision that is commented upon.”
“I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the forces of history and our objective that should be your concern.”
“I am humble before my brother’s excellent and perceptive critique,” said the colonel. “I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in patience lies virtue.”
“Dearest Colonel,” said the man, his face lighting with fire, “I have sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to—”
Phuc Bo stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth. Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc coin and he died on his feet, falling backward into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he hit the wet ground.
Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared. In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper, and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important, the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Bo was an angry man and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior. Thus the senior colonel’s total lack of ego and presence had rendered him effectively invisible in the sniper’s scope.
There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.
The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men, and said conversationally to his XO, “Send out another platoon; I fear our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American’s hunt for glory.”
The order was sent.
The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still hunted them.
You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these years, you, sir, are très formidable.
Then he went back to considering how to kill the man.
Puller cursed the clouds. They were low, wet, dense, thicker than the blood on the floor of the triage tent, and they rewarded his anger with a burst of rain, which fell like gunfire slopping through the mud.
No air.
Not today, not with these low motherfuckers choking the earth. He looked back to his shabby empire of mud and slatternly bunkers and smashed squad hootches and blown latrines. A ragged curl of smoke still rose from where the dump had been blown yesterday. Tribesmen and cadre huddled behind parapets or ran from place to place, risking rifle fire. The mud smelled of buffalo shit and blood and the acrid tang of burned powder.
A mortar shell detonated nearby, and he dropped behind his own parapet, as a scream went up, “Medic! Goddammit, medic!” But there was no medic; Jack Deems, who’d been with him since sixty-five and was cross-trained both as a medic and a demolitions expert, a very good professional soldier indeed, was hit yesterday. Shot in the chest. Bled out screaming the names of his children.
Puller shivered.
Another mortar shell hit. Thank God the VC units only had 60-mms, which lofted a grenade-sized bit of explosive into Arizona, and could take out a man only if they scored a lucky, direct hit or they got him in the open and took him down with shrapnel. But when Senior Colonel Huu Co and his bad boys showed up, they’d have a weapons platoon with Chicom Type 53s in 82-mm, and those suckers were bad news. If they chose not to go for the direct kill, they could batter Arizona to pieces with that much throw-load, then move in and shoot the wounded. That would be it; then they’d fade into the hills. The whole front would go: it was exquisitely planned, just as American strength was ebbing but ARVN confidence not high enough, the temptation too huge to deny and therefore getting them out of their normal defensive posture for the first time since sixty-eight.
Puller looked again down the valley, which was shrouded in mist, and felt the bone-chilling rain on the back of his neck. He stared, as if he could penetrate that drifting, seething but altogether blank nothingness. But he could not.
Now and then a shot or two sounded, the heavy smack of the Marine’s .308; it was always answered with a fusillade. That Marine was still at it.
Man, you are a tiger, he thought. Don’t know you, brother, but you are one fucking tiger. You are the only thing between us and a complete screwing of the pooch.
“They no get him,” said Y Dok.
“No,” said Puller, wishing he could break a team out to bring in the sniper, but knowing he couldn’t, and that it would be evil waste to try. “No, but they will, goddamn them.”
Now they had him.
They were going to get him, but it was a question of when: early or late?
Where had these guys come from?
Then he knew.
They had to be the sapper unit out on flank security, brought back fast from out there. Probably Huu Co’s best troops, real pros.
Bob lay on his belly on the crest of a small knoll, still as death, breathing in unmeasurable increments. Underneath him he was wedded to the Remington sniper rifle, whose bolt now gouged him cruelly in the stomach. He could see through the wavering scope and watched as they came for him.
Somehow, they knew this was his hill: it was some hunter’s very good instinct. Then he realized: they found the dead soldier in the gully and tracked me. As he had moved through the wet elephant grass, he’d probably left a pattern of disturbance, where the grass was wiped clean, where the turf was trampled. Good men could follow much less.
Now they had him on this goddamned hill; it would be over in a few minutes. Oh, these guys were good.
They had spread out, and were moving up very methodically, two three-men elements of movement, two of cover. No more than three men, too widely spaced for three shots, were visible at any one moment, and then only for seconds. They were willing to give up one of the three to find him and take him out. Soldiers.
He knew he had to get to his grease gun; if they got close, and he was stuck with the Remington with one cartridge in the spout and a bolt-throw away from another shot, he was done.
Now it was his turn to move, ever so slowly, ever so noiselessly.
Learn fro
m them, he instructed himself. Learn their lessons: patience, caution, calmness, freedom from fear, but above all the discipline of the slow move. He had a complicated thing before him: without making a sound, he had to reach back under his rain cape, release the sling of the M3, draw it forward around his body, ease open the ejection port cover and fingerhole the bolt back. Then and only then would he have a chance, but that destination was long minutes away.
The rain fell in torrents now, disguising his noise just a bit. But these were sharp, trained men: their ears would hear the sound of canvas rubbing on leather or metal sliding across flesh; or they would smell his fear, acrid and penetrating; or they would see his movement irregular against the steadier rhythms of nature.
Ever so slowly, he eased over to his side from his belly, an inch at a time, shifting his hand back over the crest of his body. Now he could hear them calling to each other: they spoke the language of birds.
“Coo! Coo!” came the call of a dove in a part of the south where there were no doves.
“Coo!” came the response, from the right.
“Coo!” came another one, clearly from behind. Now they knew he was here, for the trail had led up the hill but had not led down it; they had not cut across it. He was thoroughly cooked.
His fingers touched metal. They crawled up the grip of the grease gun, pawed, climbed up to the tubular receiver and found the sling threaded through its latch. His fingers struggled against the snap on the sling.
Oh, come on, he prayed.
These little fuckers could be tough; they could rust shut or simply be tightly fitted and need too much leverage to free up.
Why didn’t you check it?
Agh!
Asshole!
He ordered himself to check the sling snap a thousand times if he ever got out of this fix, so that he would never, ever again forget.
Come on, baby. Please, come on.
With his fingers pulling, his thumb pushing, he battled the thing. It was so small, so absurd: twelve men were twenty-five yards away hunting him, and he was hung up on the cold, wet ground trying to get a fucking little—
Ah!