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 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 hilclass="underline" 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 from 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!
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.