“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 mechanisms 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.
Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind, his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, “Enough, begone. Back to your land. Let these people be.”
In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck is sometimes the reward for boldness. The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won, and the eventual fall of the Kham Duc camp would be his reward.
“It is good,” said the XO.
“Yes, it is,” said Huu Co. “When this is over, I will—”
But Nhoung’s face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the source of illumination.
A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing the people’s will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought, unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.
Then the shot rang out.
Puller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn’t planned to, it just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he’d been in the field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine. Was she a spy? There was that possibility, but there wasn’t much to know; it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt. Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists. Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn’t matter. The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after she’d spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush they’d prepped for an ARVN officiaclass="underline" just blew her away.
He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning, always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO’s wife.
“I won’t have it,” Mary said. “I won’t live like that. What does it get you?”
His wife had no answer. “It’s what we do,” she finally said. “Your father and me. We’re both in the Army. That’s how it works.”
“It won’t work that way for me,” she said.
He hoped it wouldn’t. She was too smart to end up married to some lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of Pleiku, who’d taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn’t even let himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward Operations Base at Kham Duc a year after the war was lost, threw himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.
Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch. It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the field.
But he had an odd sensation: something was happening. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to get up and—
“Sir.”
It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.
“Yeah?”
“It’s — ah-you won’t believe it.”
“What?”
“He’s still out there.”
“Who?” Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.
“Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper.”
“Does he have night vision?”
“No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He’s got flares.”
He didn’t get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering glow of the floating flares he got enough: movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would stand and try and mount a rally, the runner who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team that peeled off to try and flank him.
The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the ’Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of illumination; then the ’chute would open and grab the wind, and they’d begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.
But still, he’d get targets. He’d fire at what his instincts told him was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly naked to the sniper’s reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was said. Not this night. It belonged to Bob.
They’d worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move and they’d get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out, where the grass was shorter and there wasn’t any cover. It was a good killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was correct.