How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and when he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough percentage to be disruptive.
“He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail? What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly with criticism?”
“Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our strength. That is our power.”
“But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself be a decision that is commented upon.”
“I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the forces of history and our objective that should be your concern.”
“I am humble before my brother’s excellent and perceptive critique,” said the colonel. “I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in patience lies virtue.”
“Dearest Colonel,” said the man, his face lighting with fire, “I have sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to—”
Phuc Bo stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth. Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc coin and he died on his feet, falling backward into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he hit the wet ground.
Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared. In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper, and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important, the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Bo was an angry man and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior. Thus the senior colonel’s total lack of ego and presence had rendered him effectively invisible in the sniper’s scope.
There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.
The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men, and said conversationally to his XO, “Send out another platoon; I fear our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American’s hunt for glory.”
The order was sent.
The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still hunted them.
You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these years, you, sir, are très formidable.
Then he went back to considering how to kill the man.
uller cursed the clouds. They were low, wet, dense, thicker than the blood on the floor of the triage tent, and they rewarded his anger with a burst of rain, which fell like gunfire slopping through the mud.
No air.
Not today, not with these low motherfuckers choking the earth. He looked back to his shabby empire of mud and slatternly bunkers and smashed squad hootches and blown latrines. A ragged curl of smoke still rose from where the dump had been blown yesterday. Tribesmen and cadre huddled behind parapets or ran from place to place, risking rifle fire. The mud smelled of buffalo shit and blood and the acrid tang of burned powder.
A mortar shell detonated nearby, and he dropped behind his own parapet, as a scream went up, “Medic! Goddammit, medic!” But there was no medic; Jack Deems, who’d been with him since sixty-five and was cross-trained both as a medic and a demolitions expert, a very good professional soldier indeed, was hit yesterday. Shot in the chest. Bled out screaming the names of his children.
Puller shivered.
Another mortar shell hit. Thank God the VC units only had 60-mms, which lofted a grenade-sized bit of explosive into Arizona, and could take out a man only if they scored a lucky, direct hit or they got him in the open and took him down with shrapnel. But when Senior Colonel Huu Co and his bad boys showed up, they’d have a weapons platoon with Chicom Type 53s in 82-mm, and those suckers were bad news. If they chose not to go for the direct kill, they could batter Arizona to pieces with that much throw-load, then move in and shoot the wounded. That would be it; then they’d fade into the hills. The whole front would go: it was exquisitely planned, just as American strength was ebbing but ARVN confidence not high enough, the temptation too huge to deny and therefore getting them out of their normal defensive posture for the first time since sixty-eight.
Puller looked again down the valley, which was shrouded in mist, and felt the bone-chilling rain on the back of his neck. He stared, as if he could penetrate that drifting, seething but altogether blank nothingness. But he could not.
Now and then a shot or two sounded, the heavy smack of the Marine’s .308; it was always answered with a fusillade. That Marine was still at it.
Man, you are a tiger, he thought. Don’t know you, brother, but you are one fucking tiger. You are the only thing between us and a complete screwing of the pooch.
“They no get him,” said Y Dok.
“No,” said Puller, wishing he could break a team out to bring in the sniper, but knowing he couldn’t, and that it would be evil waste to try. “No, but they will, goddamn them.”
ow they had him.
They were going to get him, but it was a question of when: early or late?
Where had these guys come from?
Then he knew.
They had to be the sapper unit out on flank security, brought back fast from out there. Probably Huu Co’s best troops, real pros.
Bob lay on his belly on the crest of a small knoll, still as death, breathing in unmeasurable increments. Underneath him he was wedded to the Remington sniper rifle, whose bolt now gouged him cruelly in the stomach. He could see through the wavering scope and watched as they came for him.
Somehow, they knew this was his hilclass="underline" it was some hunter’s very good instinct. Then he realized: they found the dead soldier in the gully and tracked me. As he had moved through the wet elephant grass, he’d probably left a pattern of disturbance, where the grass was wiped clean, where the turf was trampled. Good men could follow much less.
Now they had him on this goddamned hill; it would be over in a few minutes. Oh, these guys were good.
They had spread out, and were moving up very methodically, two three-men elements of movement, two of cover. No more than three men, too widely spaced for three shots, were visible at any one moment, and then only for seconds. They were willing to give up one of the three to find him and take him out. Soldiers.
He knew he had to get to his grease gun; if they got close, and he was stuck with the Remington with one cartridge in the spout and a bolt-throw away from another shot, he was done.