“Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job.”
“But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some make-work pussy job, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.
He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his co-conspirator and hung up.
“Swagger, that’s your NCO?”
“Yes.”
“Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there. Swagger don’t want you humping the bush with him no more.”
Donny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac, buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multiservice PX out at Bailey’s Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just Americans doing their jobs.
Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds, and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker. He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and the CO; neither man could be found — both had gone back to quarters early. He went by the S-3 office — operations and training — to look for Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the movies—Patton, already two years old, was the picture — and then to the 1-2-3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser. They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he himself did not quite understand.
He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath. The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry, cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.
There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn’t been incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids returning from the 1-2-3 Club. But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.
Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar of the air conditioner.
I have it made, he told himself.
I am out of here.
I am the original DEROS kid.
I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.
He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and rational life. He dreamed of love and duty. He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough for it.
At 0-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in the dark, pulled on his bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain range. Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off, artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon. Somewhere something exploded.
The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the operations shack, chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the crew chief looked at him.
“This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?”
“That’s us.”
“You’re the bus to Dodge City?”
“Yeah. You’re Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back. Great job at Kham Duc, Fenn.”
“Can you hump me back to the City? It’s time to go home.”
“Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You will crawl all night,” Huu Co explained to the Russian. “If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill you.”
If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest, community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable. Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing, thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.
He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co’s heroes were designated “Brother Ten” when they distinguished themselves by killing ten Americans: this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms; he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him well.
The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was no approach, no visible approach, except on one’s belly, the long, long way.
“Could you hit him from this range?”
The Russian considered.
“I could hit a man from this range, yes,” he finally said. “But how would I know it was the right man? I cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man; that is the point.”
The argument was well made.
“So then … you must crawl.”
“I can crawl.”
“If you hit him, how will you get out?”
“This time I’m only looking. But when I hit him, I’ll wait till dark, then come out the same way I came in.”
“They’ll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way.”
“Yes, I may die.”
“In napalm? Not pleasant. I’ve heard many scream as it ate the flesh from their bones. It’s over in an instant, but I had the impression it was a long instant.”
The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all, even though they’d lived in close proximity for a week and had for days before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.
“My advice, comrade brother,” said Huu Co, “is that you follow the depression in the earth three hundred meters. You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have nightscopes and they will be hunting. But the scopes aren’t one hundred percent reliable. It’ll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure.”
“I have no heart,” said the solitary man. “I am the sniper.”
For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ dagger, black and thin and wicked.
He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like unboiled noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass, he was invisible.
Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn’t exist. Who would have patience for such a journey?