Bob fired a five-round burst into his body, sending him down. He pivoted, rising, and in the same second saw others turning toward him. He swept the grease gun across them, a long, thudding burst, watching the bullets chop through the grass in a blizzard of spray, ensnare his opponents and take them down. Spent shells poured spastically from the breech of the junky little piece as it rattled itself dry. In the silence that followed, he heard the ping of grenade pins being pulled and frantically threw himself backward, rolling through the grass, feeling it lash and whip at him as he went, so glad he’d left the pack behind. The first grenade detonated about ten yards away and he felt the pain as several pieces of shrapnel tore at his arm and the side of his body that was exposed. But still he rolled and another grenade detonated, this one still farther away.
He came to a stop, could hear some hustling around, and pulled a grenade from his belt, pried the pin out and lofted it in the general direction of his enemies. As it exploded — was that a scream he heard? — he got a new magazine into the submachine gun, and though he had no targets, lost himself in the madness of firing. He emptied the magazine stupidly in a sustained blast, the gun thudding, the bullets fanning out to splash through the grass, atomizing stalks they struck, ripping sheets of mud spray from the earth.
Then he rolled backward and continued to propel himself down the hill. In one moment of repose, he got another magazine into the gun, but before he could see targets he heard the soft crush of something heavy landing nearby, and he went flat as a grenade detonated, sending a spout of earth high into the sky and numbing his eardrums. Now he heard nothing: his hearing was momentarily gone and his vision blurred. The left arm hardly worked; it had numbed out and he saw that it was bleeding badly.
Oh, shit.
Fire came at him from three points, short, professional bursts from AK47s. They probed, sending the rounds skirmishing after him in three vectors. He assumed that a few more were working around behind him.
That’s it, he thought.
I buy it.
This is it.
Oh, fuck, I tried so hard. Don’t let me chicken out here at the end. Oh, please, let me be brave.
But he wasn’t brave. His anger melted. A profound sense of regret washed over him. So much he hadn’t done, so much he hadn’t seen. He felt the powerful pain of his own father’s death upon him, and how, now that he was gone, no one would be left alive to mourn and miss Earl Swagger.
God help me, Daddy, I tried so goddamned hard. I just didn’t make it.
A shot kicked up next to his face, stinging his neck with pricks of dirt. Another one buzzed by close. They were all shooting now, all of them that were left.
I ain’t no hero, he thought.
Oh, please, God, please don’t let me die here. Oh, I don’t want to die, please, please, please.
But nobody answered and nobody listened and it was all over, it was finished. Bullets cracked past or hit nearby, evicting gouts of angry earth and pelting spray. He willed himself back, shrinking to nothingness, but there was only so far he could go. His eyes were shut. They had him. The next round would—
Three fast booming cracks, heavy and powerful. Then two more.
Silence.
“Swagger? Bob Lee? You all right?”
Bob lifted his head; about forty yards away, a young Marine stepped out of the elephant grass. Donny’s boonie hat had fallen to his back and his hair was golden even in the gray light and the misty rain. He was an improbable black-and-green-faced angel with the instrument of his sergeant’s deliverance, the U.S. Rifle M14, 7.62 MM NATO.
“Stay down,” Bob called.
“I think I got ’em all.”
“Stay down!”
In that second, two men fired at Donny but missed, the bullets pulling big spouts from the valley floor. Bob turned to watch their shapes scuttle away in the grass, and he walked bursts over both of them, until they stopped moving. He crouched, waiting. Nothing. No noise, just the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart, the stench of the powder.
After a bit, he went to them; one was dead, his arms thrown out, the blood congealing blackly as it pooled to form a feast for ants. The other, a few yards away, was on his back, and still breathed. He had left his AK 30 feet away as he’d crawled after taking the hits. But now, exhausted, he looked up at Bob with beseeching eyes. His face and mouth were spotted with blood, and when he breathed heavily, Bob heard the blood bubble deep in his lungs.
The hand seemed to move. Maybe he had a grenade or a knife or a pistol; maybe he was begging for mercy or deliverance from pain. Bob would never know, nor did it matter. Three-round burst, center chest. It was over.
Donny came bounding over.
“We got ’em all. I didn’t think I could get here in time. Christ, I hit three guys in a second.”
“Great shooting, Marine. Jesus, you saved this old man’s fucking bacon,” Bob said, collapsing.
“You’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Dinged up a bit.” He held out his bloody left arm; his side also sang of minor penetration in a hundred or so places. Oddly, what hurt the most was his neck, where the impacting NVA round had blown a handful of nasty dirt into the flesh and hair of his scrubby beard, and for some reason it stung like a bastard.
“Oh, Christ, I thought I was cooked. I was finished. Wasted, greased. Man, I was a gone motherfucker.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“You wait. I left the rifle up top. Just let me catch my breath.”
He sucked down a few gulps of the sweetest air he’d ever tasted, then ran up the hill. The M40 lay where he had dumped it, its muzzle spouting a crown of turf, its bolt half open and gummed also with turf.
He grabbed it and ran back to Donny.
“Map?”
Donny fished it out of the case, handed it over.
“All right,” Bob said, “he’s sure got that column moving again. We’ve got to move on, pass them, and jump them again.”
“There’s not much light left.”
Bob looked at his Seiko. Jesus, it was close to 1700 hours. Time flies when you’re having fun.
“Fuck,” he said.
He had a moment’s gloom. No light, no shoot. They were going to get close enough to stage an assault in the dark, and all the snipers in the world wouldn’t make a spit’s worth of difference.
“Shit,” he said.
But Bob’s mind was so fogged with delirium, adrenaline and fatigue it wasn’t processing properly. He had the vague sense of missing something, as if he’d left his IQ points up there on that ugly little hill. It was Donny who pulled another sack from around his waist, opened it, and out came what looked like a small tubular popgun and a handful of White Star illumination flares; the bag was heavy with the cartridges.
“Flares!” he said. “Can you shoot by flares?”
“If I can see it, I can hit it,” Bob said.
hey moved swiftly through the gloom, amid small hills, in the elephant grass, ever mindful they were paralleling the movement of the enemy main force in the valley, ever mindful that there were still scouting units out in the area. If and when the NVA discovered their dead recon team, they might send still other men after them.
They moved at the half-jog, through a fog of fatigue and pain. Bob’s arm hurt desperately and he didn’t have any painkillers, not even aspirin. His head ached and his legs felt withered and shaky. They followed a compass heading, reshooting it each time they moved around a hill. The elephant grass was tall and concealing, but it cut at them mercilessly. There wasn’t much water left and even in the falling dark, Bob could see that the clouds hadn’t broken, still hung low and close. A wicked, pelting rain started, delivering syringes of cold where it struck them. Soon the trip became pure blind misery, two hungry, dead-tired, filthy men running on faith and hope toward a destination that might not even exist.