The man’s facial features had been obscured by the floppy hat and heavy daubs of green and brown paint, but Tag remembered those eyes: bright, dark ‘ intense eyes, looking right back at you. Tag and his crew had done six SEAL insertions in the Rung Sat over the past year, and he had never heard one of them speak. more than about three words.
Sherman shifted his flak jacket and scratched his neck where some insect had just achieved a blood meal. He tried to remember if he’d taken his malaria pills. The interesting thing was how surprisingly normal these guys looked, as opposed to being huge, bandoliered macho monsters. Like this guy they were picking up tonight: He had been listed on the mission brief sheet as Hospital Corpsman First’class Galantz. He was not quite Sherman’s size: five eight, maybe five nine, 150 or 160 pounds.
Average-sized American military guy, maybe a little more muscle than most, but other than that, altogether unremarkable—except for the way he sat back there, still as a statue, totally self-contained.
The insertion drill was always the same: After making a big, noisy deal of transiting through the intended drop zone, they’d shut everything down and drift back with the current under the cover of darkness.
Sometime during the drift, they would feel the stem tip ever so slightly, indicating the SEAL had gone over the side. Sherman shuddered at the very thought of going into the black waters of the Long Tao, a venomous stew of toxic leeches, sea snakes, mangrove pythons, and, of course, the crocs. They must call these guys snake eaters for a reason.
Three, sometimes four nights later, they would execute the same maneuvers for the pickup. If the guy was a no show, they would try once more the following night. After that, he was on his own. Or dead. Or, worse, much worse, a prisoner. The VC were afraid of the SEALS, and reportedly, they would skin one alive and take a month to do it if they ever captured one.
Sherman expanded the radar display scale out to a half a mile and scanned the glowing details painted on the radar screen, orienting himself on the bank features leading into the S-turn at the top of the screen. The whine of the motor generator dipped -momentarily when he made the display adjustments. After eleven months, he knew the river pretty well, and he could tell where they were with one quick glance at the radar. There was no point in looking through the windows. As the driver, he had to sacrifice his night vision in favor of the Decca radar screen, like an airplane pilot flying on full instruments. He shifted the scale back to two hundred yards. The Decca was a beauty of a radar.
At this scale, he could make out individual logs as they bumped along the undercut banks.
Boss?” said Yank, speaking on the sound-powered intercom.
“Yeah?” Sherman pulled the mouthpiece up to his lips.
He kept his eyes on the radar screen and wiped a curtain of sweat off his lower face to keep from shorting out the phones.
“Ain’t we awfully close here? I can hear the freakin’ frogs.”
“Yeah, well, you wanta paddle? We do a drift ex, we go where the river takes us. Just let me know when our guy is back, and we’ll didi-mau the hell out of here.”
“I hear that,” Ryker chipped in. “Okay, knock it off, everybody,”
Sherman ordered.
“Only targets make noise in the Rung Sat at night.”
The circuit went quiet. Sherman knew everyone was tense, and the urge to talk was strong. But -sounds carried on the river. The radar showed that they were only fifty, sixty feet away from the right bank. He flipped on the Fathometer just to make sure. The orange water-depth marker flickered at thirty feet. About right. He shut off the Fathometer and wiped off some more sweat. Another thirty, forty minutes and he’d call it off, which was the decision Yank undoubtedly had been trying to provoke with his question.
But they had to give the snake eater a decent shot at getting back.
There was no telling where he would come out of the weeds, or in what condition.
After a year of operations, and despite what the Saigon propaganda boys said,’all the Swifties knew that the Rung Sat at night was Charlie’s country. It was an area of dense mangrove swamp, encompassing the bulk of the jungle twenty miles on either side of the Long Tao and extending from Saigon to the sea. It was mostly water, littered with small hummocks of semi-dry land.. By day, the American Army helos and the Navy’s Swift boats owned the Long Tao and the surrounding bayou channels. By night, however, it was all up for grabs. Charlie came out of his spider holes and island tunnel complexes to move his endless ant columns of guerrilla logistics. Precious rice and dried fish went north to the cadres fighting up-country. Ammunition, weapons, wounded, and replacements moved south. All movement in the Mekong Delta at large meant boats-usually small sampans powered by ancient FRENCH outboards, which the VC piloted in the darkness through the twisting network of side streams and mud flats. It was the American gunboats’ mission to prowl the rivers at night like big gray water spiders lurking out on the river, spiders with magic Decca eyes. Ordinarily, the Swift boats would skulk along the main channels, waiting with muffled engines until a sampan got itself smack out in the middle of the river. Then the gunboats would thunder to life and swoop down, searchlights stabbing out to transfix the small boat with its four or five occupants. The lights would be followed by the hellish roar of the-twin 50s tearing men, supplies, and the boat to pieces, until the wreckage disappeared under the bows of the gunboat. Then, searchlights off, reverse course, and tear up the banks on either side with the 50s and the big mortar to keep any support troops’ heads down. After a minute or so of suppression fire, slow down and retrieve some evidence of the kill-bits of boat, clothes, body parts, boxes of supplies bobbing in the water. Body parts were tough: This had been going on for long enough that the crocs now knew what all the noise meant. Body parts, you did with a boat hook, and there were times you relinquished the boat hook if a big-enough croc clamped onto it at a critical moment.
The crews of the Swift boat were not briefed on what the SEALS were doing out there in the Rung Sat, but everyone in the division had a pretty good idea. Word was that these uys would lay up in the trees for’a day and a night, watching the bad guys, identifying the officers, and then slip into the VC hideouts at night to knife the officers.
Sherman shuddered again. He could not imagine what kind of guy could do that. Yes, you can, he thought. Just remember those eyes.
Galantz submerged again, listening for the whine. And there it was-very faint, but definitely there. To the right, up stream of his tree. Now he had to wait until the whine drifted closer, because he’d be swimming underwater, and he didn’t want to misjudge the distance and have to surface like some noisy fish out there within Charlie’s AK-47 range. He pushed his face above the surface again, lots more room now, and began deep breathing. Then, just to be sure, he felt for the gap again, leaning down, his chin touching the surface of the water, reaching with his left hand for the top of the gap. There. Good. And then he felt something, a sensation of pressure from just outside the root cage, something moving in the water. In the split second of recognition, there came an excruciating clamp of pain on his left hand, pain so intense, he nearly blacked out with the effort to stifle his scream. And then the croc started tugging, trying to pull his meat prize out of the mangrove cage. Galantz pulled back, saw a white-hot flare of pain before his eyes, and got his head underwater just in time to release the scream, a horrible burbling sound that he hoped would be muffled under the water even as he set his legs and grabbed out at the slippery roots with ‘ his right hand for a purchase. But he knew what would happen next. The croc would start rolling to convert the clamping bite to a detached gobbet of meat.