This was Charlie's AO, a dangerous place of twelve-foot tides and stinking mangrove swamps, and the night had come full of spooky moonlight, fog, mad moths, and kamikaze mosquitoes the size of tarantulas. The previous day, a hellish time of fear and ceaseless bug swarm, Mr. Charlie had stalked the insertion team and suckered them into an ambush, and Operation Green River was now merely one more fucked-up Vietnam disaster.
Inside the strange mind of the beast, Snake Eyes stared out of his memory. The grids were so named because, on a military map, the intersecting features, a river and canal, vaguely resembled blue eyes on either side of a long nose of rice paddies. The mission had brought men in on foot because the passage of watercraft was made impossible at each low tide.
Chaingang was slightly to the southwest, in woods that bordered a ridge bank and slough parallel to the nearest canal, which was where the two squads had been ambushed. Only their tail man, who lagged behind the column and moved at his own snail's pace, and one other hardy camper survived the ensuing firefight, such as it was.
As a secret spectator, Bunkowski's only interest in the swift and unilateral contact was, first, in surviving, and then perhaps in assessing the degree of vulnerability to whatever easy targets might present themselves.
The other Caucasian to live through the ambush was a grunt named Meara. He was alive, but badly injured. Terminal screaming pain, the kind of eschatological stuff that surrounds and hurts without mercy, had him in its lock. Deceptive, coming first as smoke, wispy and bearable pain snaked out at him like the tendrils from a flame. Then it became dangerous and oily and it frightened him with its unforgiving nature. Billowing, dense, impenetrable clouds of pain choked him; suffocating end-of-the-world pain blanketed Raymond Meara, half-assed mercenary.
He felt it next as fire. It lingered in his throat and lungs, a double-barreled burn that one bit into like a chili pepper, a thing so hot that a single seed tasted like sucking on the end of a flame thrower. He felt it deep in his military fillings; tasted the scorching pain on his tongue. It enveloped him with the intensity of turbs, after-burners, blast furnaces, refinery flame-off, back-blast, this oilfield-Armageddon-hot pain.
He began to lose it with the heat mirage shimmer of agony. Ray Baby Meara, cut off from his fellow ground pounders, who were lost somewhere back behind him, swallowed by the earth, was befuddled by the pain that burnt him as it screamed in his ear.
“Callsign to handle, you copy? Over.” It shrieked at him over the radio.
“Bounty Hunter, Pallbearer Six Actual,” crackled through the fierce heat.
“Most frigging affirm, Pallbearer Six.” The Command Post. Six Actual, the Man his own self. Dai Uy (Viet for captain) McClanahan, who lived in a trailer called Der Bunker. Twelve feet below ground level, within B-40 range of Monster Mountain, Dai Uy held Meara's life in his hand. Dai Uy would work the magic for Raymond Meara and save him.
3
The beast sensed something, another presence, a thing that went unidentified, but these were the important nudges that he always listened to with the greatest care. The thing that had saved his life innumerable times poked him again, and told his life support systems to saddle up and hustle.
He moved, an apparition in the darkness of the woods, a freezer-big thing in a cammoed tarp the size of a small vehicle, loaded with a ruck most men would not be able to lift. In one enormous gloved hand he carried a belted M60, the other held his master blasters and det gear. His huge, meaty chest was covered with grenades, many of which were short-fused and meticulously taped to him. A massive fighting Bowie hung upside down from his Alice unit, and everywhere you looked there were claymores strapped to him. One custom-made 15EEEEE bata boot sprouted its own “hush puppy"—a silenced .22 sentry-duster, and across the back of his humongous duffel a sawed-off twelve gauge topped off the ensemble. Unlike the usual combat loads, Chaingang's twelve was filled with a curious mix of sabot-sleeve and fleshette loads. The first shell was a power-load behind a hardened lead slug in polyethylene—it would penetrate an engine block at close range—and the next capped a hot load behind twenty needle-nosed nails. They fanned out at three thousand f.p.s. Tree-cutters.
Bunkowski was literally armed to the teeth: Part of his arsenal was a martial technique he'd perfected during long, hard time in the slams, a vile thing called the Breath of Death. There was no more deadly hunter-killer team than this lone assassin.
Stocked with enough freeze-dried long rats, the so-called LURP rations that were a specialty of the house with recon patrols out in the superbad bush, Chaingang could go for weeks without resupply, living off the fat of the land, so to speak, taking a bit of protein here and there ... roving and killing.
The big death dealer silently blended into the blackest pocket of shadows and was gone.
4
Time shifted. Tenses commingled and became confused. Then was now. Past was future. Raymond imagined that he keyed his radio and whispered for blessed relief from those nagging aches and pains.
Bounty Humper One, he thought, calling in air support, we got mystery aggressors. Phrases wobbled and curved grotesquely in the heat, and Meara's imagination distorted them like the visions in a funhouse mirror.
They're on the way, Bounty Mountie One. Gut up and hang tough! The phantoms were coming. Phantoms streaking out of Udorn; fast movers that would come and get some. Light up slopes. Kick dink butt. Take serious names and dig big gook graves. It was blazing noon inside Meara's head.
He fought to get his bearings. He knew that he must prepare precise coordinates. He tried to think. He thought he was roughly northwest of the VNSF compound, home of the dreaded Look Deep Duck Back. To the south was the buried trailer of Dai Uy McClanahan. No, that wasn't right. Southeast? He and these other fools, they were proudly lost. Pathfinders, Rangers, Airborne, headhunters, and assorted scouts, all wearing the double-bad bloody skull patch of Deathsquad Recon, lost to the mothering world.
A quartet of specks materialized in the sky of Raymond Meara's imagination, shattering his fantasy with pain as noise, the noise of a hundred earthquakes and a thousand sonic booms. They brought pain as smoke, heat, discord, and, the worst of all, pain as napalm. Hell-hot, death-black, stinking petrozap of oxygen-sucking napalm exploded Raymond's world. It killed Look Deep Duck Back, Pathfinders, Rangers, Airborne, headhunters, scouts, brave soldiers, cowardly lions, and buried the Dai Uy dead in his air-conditioned double-wide beneath twelve feet of concrete, steel, sandbagged berm, rubble, and Monster Mountain real estate.
Pallbearer Six Actual? Anybody? Only pain remained to answer him in the stinking petrochemical afterbirth. Snake Eyes.
He shivered, captured by the misery of icy, intimidating silence. Pain so terrible and cold that it made him forget the hottest flames, isolated him, shocked his brain into numbness, and paralyzed its victim for the slow kill.
Imprisoned, gripped in the chilling claws of death, caught inside the heart of agony as formidable and unassailable as a sheer ice cliff, frozen immobile like some fossilized, prehistoric biped, Meara's fantasy of pain allowed him to whisper but not to breathe, and he knew it would make him die slowly, as it tortured him inside the freezing mass of glacier-like hurting.