So he just listened and watched. The two had it out. It was like a final confrontation between a proud father and his disappointing son or an upright son and his disappointing father. He could hear the anger and the betrayal and the accusation in the voices.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the older man kept screaming in the English that the Russian had studied for years.
“You cannot do this to me! You do not have the moral authority to do this to me!” the younger screamed back.
On and on it went, like a grand scene from Dostoyevsky. It was a mark of how each man was held in the respect of his comrades that no witnesses intruded, no officers interceded; their anger drove the young Marines, normally working hard on their suntans by this time, inside.
Finally, the two men reached some kind of rapprochement; they went back into the intelligence bunker, and after a while the young man left alone and went over to what must have been the living quarters, where he would bunk. He emerged an hour or so later, in full combat gear, with a rifle and a flack vest and went back to the intelligence bunker.
Solaratov knew: At last, the spotter is back.
There were no other sightings that day, and at nightfall, Solaratov finished his last canteen, rolled over and began the long crawl back to the tunnel complex in the treeline more than a thousand yards away.
“Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is here!”
The call, from a sergeant, rocked Huu Co out of sleep. It was a good thing, too. As on most nights, he was reliving the moment when the American Phantoms came roaring down the valley and the napalm pods tumbled lazily from under their wings. They hit about fifty meters ahead of his forward position in the valley and bounced majestically, pulling a curtain of living flame behind them.
He arose swiftly and located the Russian, eating with gusto and lack of sophistication in the tunnel’s mess hall. The Russian devoured everything in sight, including noodles, fish head soup, chunks of raw cabbage, beef, pork, tripe. He ate with his fingers, which were now coated with grease; he ate with perfect clarity and concentration, pausing now and then for a satisfying belch, or to wipe a paw across his greasy mouth. He drank too, glass after glass of tea and water. Finally, when he was done, he asked for vodka, which was produced, a small Russian bottle. He finished it in a single draught.
At last, he turned and faced the senior colonel.
“Now I wash, then I sleep. Maybe forty-eight hours. Then, on the third day, I will move out.”
“You have a plan.”
“I know when and where he’ll leave, and how he’ll move. It’s in the land. If you can read the land, you can read the other man’s mind. I’ll kill them both three days from now.”
For the first time, he smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Huey dipped low and landed in a swirl of dust. Quickly, the crew chief kicked off that run’s supplies — a couple of crates of belted 7.62mm NATO, a couple more of 5.56mm NATO for the M16s, package of medical provisions, an intelligence pouch, a command pouch — nothing major, just the routine deliveries of war — and Donny.
The chopper zoomed upward, leaving him standing there in the maelstrom, choking.
“Jesus, you’re back!”
It was a lance corporal in another platoon, a vague acquaintance.
“Yeah, they tried to fire me. But I love this place so much, I had to come back.”
“Jesus Christ, Fenn, you had it knocked. Nobody ever got out of here early. The Man sends you to the world and you come back to this shit hole, short as you are? Man, you are fucked in the head!”
“Yeah, well.”
“A hero,” the lance corporal spat derisively, threw the intel and command packs around his shoulders and headed out to deliver the mail. The ammo would sit until someone had the gumption to gather it in.
Donny blinked, and took a fraction of a second to reorient. He knew he wanted to stay away from the command bunker and the old man; officially he had no standing, and he didn’t want to face that shit until he faced Swagger. He went off to the scout-sniper platoon area, where Bob was king. But when he got there, two other NCOs told him Bob was now over in the intel bunker and he better get his young ass over there and get this squared away. One of them pointed out to him that he was officially UA from his new assignment in downtown Da Nang, and there’d be hell to pay.
Donny navigated through the S-shop area of the base, a warren of sandbagged bunkers with crudely stencilled signs, until at last he came to S-2, next to commo, a low structure from which flew an American flag. He ducked into it, feeling the temp drop a few degrees in the dark shadow, smelled the mildew of the rotting burlap bags that comprised the bunker’s walls, saw maps and photos hung on a bulletin board and two men hunched over a desk, one of whom was most definitely Swagger and the other of whom was a first lieutenant named Brophy, the company intelligence honcho and sniper employment officer.
Swagger looked up, down, then back in a hurry.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said fiercely.
“I’m back, ready for duty, thanks very much. I had a wonderful time. Now I’ve got a tour to finish and I’m here to finish it.”
“Lieutenant, this here boy is UA from Da Nang. He’d better get his young ass back there or he’ll finish up in the brig. You put him on report, or I will. I want him gone.”
Swagger almost never talked to officers this way, because of course like many NCOs he preferred to allow them the illusion that they had something to do with running the war. But he no longer cared for protocol, and the officer, a decent-enough guy but way overmatched against a legend, chose discretion over valor.
“You work it out with him, Sergeant,” he said, and beat a hasty advance to the rear.
“I want you out of here, Fenn,” growled Swagger.
“No damn way.”
“You are too goddamn short. You will be out there thinking about humping Suzie Q instead of humping I Corps and you will get your own and my ass greased. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”
“You recommended me for the Navy Cross! Now you’re firing me?”
“I had a heart-to-heart with my closest pal, Bob Lee Swagger, and he told me you are black poison in the field. I want you running a PT program somewhere. You go home, you git out of ’Nam. I fired you. You’re a Marine and you follow orders and those are your orders!”
“Why?”
“Because I say so, that’s why. I’m sniper team leader and NCOIC of scout-sniper platoon. It’s my call. It ain’t your call. I don’t need your permission.”
“Why?”
“Fenn, you are getting on my damn nerves.”
“I’m not going until you tell me why. Tell me why, goddammit. I earned that much.”
Swagger’s eyes narrowed-up, tight like coin slots in a Coke machine.
“What is with you?” he finally asked. “I’ve had three spotters before you, good boys all of them. But no one like you. You didn’t have no limits. You’d do anything I goddamned asked you to. I don’t like that. You don’t have no sense. If I had to think about it, I’d say you were trying to get yourself killed. Or trying to prove something, which amounts to the same goddamn thing. Now you come clean with me, goddammit. What’s going on in that head of yours? Why the hell are you out here?”