“Here, look,” said Donny.
“It’s too dark.”
“Go on, look!” he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to his sergeant.
Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.
He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun played in her hair. She wore a turtleneck and had one of those smiles that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very clean. Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy face. She was a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no one nowhere loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still miss Bob’s father more than he’d miss Bob. That was the way it went.
“She’s a great-looking young woman,” Bob said. “I can tell she loves you a lot.”
“Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the service.”
“That’s too bad. He sounds like a good man.”
“They got him too.”
“Yeah, they get everyone in the end.”
“No, I don’t just mean ‘them, they.’ I mean a specific guy, with influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the purification process. I’d still like to look that guy up. Commander Bonson. Here’s to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You won in the end. Your kind always does.”
Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.
“Git ready,” said Bob.
They could hear the ponk-ponk-ponk as a few hundred yards away, three 81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began their downward flight.
“Get down!” screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the shallow hole.
The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced from the ground.
“Ah, Christ!”
A minute passed.
Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all over the place.
Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its dawns.
Ponk-ponk-ponk.
The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities, then descended.
Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me live.
The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.
He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections. Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.
Oh, it was so very near.
“I was a bad son,” Donny sobbed. “I’m so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad son. I couldn’t stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so awful, oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.”
“You were a good son,” Bob whispered fiercely. “Your daddy understood, don’t you worry about it none.”
Ponk-ponk-ponk.
Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he’d been a better son too. He remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last night in the twilight. Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn’t there. His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy’s deaths in a cornfield that looked like any other cornfield in the world.
The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb, then sting. This triple shot bracketed the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for effect.
“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.
Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or died or fought here on this hilltop?
“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.
“There, there,” Bob said.
Someone fired an orange flare over on the horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did it at last dawn on them that it wasn’t a flare at all, it was the sun.
And with the sun came the Phantoms.
The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath, and blossomed oranger than the sun, oranger and hotter than any sun, with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.
“God!” screamed Bob. “Air! Air!”
They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.
Then the gunships.
Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming insects, thin and agile in the air: they roared in, their mini-guns screaming like chainsaws ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.
“The radio,” Bob said.
Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on, searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.
“Hit eight, hit eight!” Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned it on to find people looking for him.
“—Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa, Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your position immediate, over.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain’t you boys a sight!”
“Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”
“I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern side of the valley; uh, I don’t got no reading on it, I don’t got no map, I—”
“Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke.”
Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all around the farm. I need help immediate. Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee-Niner-Papa, over?”
“Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y’all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay by your smoke, out.”
In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast, and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.