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.