It popped, with a metallic click that he believed could be heard all the way to China.
But nobody cooed and he wasn’t jumped and gutted on the spot.
The gun slid free and down his back, but he captured it quickly with his hand, and now withdrew it, very slowly, bringing it around, drawing it close to him, like a woman to treasure for the rest of his life. He smelled its oily magnificence, felt its tinny greatness. A reliable, ugly piece of World War II improvisation, it probably cost a buck fifty to manufacture from hubcaps and sleds and bikes picked up in scrap-metal drives in the forties. That’s why it had such a cheap, toylike, rattly feel to it. With his fingers he deftly sprung the latch on the ejection port, then inserted a finger into the bolt hole that he had just revealed. With the finger he pushed back, felt the bolt lock, then let it come forward. He dropped down and drew the gun up to him.
“Coo! Coo!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The message came by radio to the hasty command post dug into the side of a hill. It was from the sapper patrol on the right flank.
“Brother Colonel,” gasped Sergeant Van Trang, “we have the American trapped on a hill half a kilometer to the west. We are closing on him even now. He will be eliminated within the quarter hour.”
Huu Co nodded. Van Trang was a banty little north countryman with the heart of a lion. If he said such a thing was about to happen, then indeed it would happen.
“Excellent,” said the colonel. “Out.”
“There are no shots,” his XO told him. “Not since the unfortunate Phuc Bo was martyred.”
Huu Co nodded, considering.
Yes, now was the time. Even if he couldn’t get the whole battalion through the pass, he could get enough men through to overwhelm Arizona. But he had every confidence in Van Trang and his sappers. They were the most dedicated, the best trained, the most experienced. If they had the American trapped, the incident was over.
“All right,” he said. “Send runners to One, Two and Three companies. Let’s get the men out of the grass, get them going. Fast, fast, fast. Now is the time for speed. We have wasted enough time and energy on this American.”
The XO rapidly gave the orders.
Huu Co went outside. All around him, men rose from the grass, shook the accumulated moisture from their uniforms and formed up into loose company units. A whistle sounded from in front of the column. Behind Huu Co, with amazing swiftness, members of the combat support platoon broke down the hasty command post so that nothing remained, then they too went to their positions.
“Let’s go,” said Huu Co, and with a gaggle of support personnel around him, he too began to move at the half-trot, ahead through the mist and the rain, to the end of the valley where the Americans were under siege.
The long train of men moved quickly, bending back the grass. Overhead, the blessed clouds still hung, low and dense, to the surface of the earth. No airplanes would come. He would make Arizona by nightfall, give the men a few hours’ rest, then move them into position and, sometime after midnight, strike with everything he had, from three directions. It would be over.
From the right it came, at last: the sudden flurry of fire, the sound of grenade detonations, a few more shots and then silence.
“They got him,” the XO said to him.
“Excellent,” said Huu Co. “At last. We have triumphed. Frankly, between you and I, the American provided a great service.”
“The political officer, Brother Co? I agree, of course. He loved the party too much and the fighters not enough.”
“Such men are necessary,” said Huu Co. “Sometimes.”
“That American,” said the XO. “He was some kind of fighter himself. If they were all like that, our struggle would be nowhere near its conclusion. I wonder what motivates a man like that?”
Huu Co had known Americans in Paris in the early fifties and then in Saigon in the early sixties. They had seemed innocent, almost childish, full of wonder, incapable of deep thought.
“They are not a serious people,” he said. “But I suppose by the odds, every now and then you get one who is.”
“I suppose,” said the XO. “I’m glad we killed this one. I prefer the good ones dead.”
He lay very composed, trying not to listen to his heart or to his mind, or to any part of his body, which yearned to survive. Instead he listened to nothing and tried to plan.
They are tracking you. They will come right to you. If you let them carry the fight, you will die. You must shoot first, shoot to kill, attack decisively. If you are aggressive you may stun them. They will expect fear and terror. Aggression is the last thing they expect.
He tried to lay it all out, under the knowledge that any plan, even a bad plan, is better than no plan.
Shoot the visible ones; spray till the mag empties; throw grenades; fall away to the left; fall back into better cover in the trees. But most of all: get off this hill.
They were very close, cooing softly to one another, having converged. They were patient, calm, very steady. Oh, these were the best. They were so professional. No problems. Getting the job done.
One suddenly stood before him. The man was about thirty, very tough looking, his face a blank. He held an American carbine. He seemed to have some trouble believing what lay before him on the ground.
Bob fired a five-round burst into his body, sending him down. He pivoted, rising, and in the same second saw others turning toward him. He swept the grease gun across them, a long, thudding burst, watching the bullets chop through the grass in a blizzard of spray, ensnare his opponents and take them down. Spent shells poured spastically from the breech of the junky little piece as it rattled itself dry. In the silence that followed, he heard the ping of grenade pins being pulled and frantically threw himself backward, rolling through the grass, feeling it lash and whip at him as he went, so glad he’d left the pack behind. 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, reshooting 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 halftimes. 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 m
echanisms 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 Duc. 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.