Time to Hunt bls-1 Page 11

  Don't forget your jungle boots."

  He turned and walked out.

  "That was stupid, Fenn," said Weber.

  "Fuck you, Weber, you ass-kissing creep."

  Weber swallowed and turned to Dogwood.

  "Restrict him to quarters. His orders will be cut by four."

  Then he turned and walked out.

  Dogwood went to the phone and talked in an intimate voice with someone. Then he hung up.

  "Sit down, Fenn," said Dogwood, turning back to Donny.

  "Do you smoke?"

  "No, sir."

  "Well, I do." Shaking a little, he lit up a Marlboro and went to the door.

  "Welch, get in here!"

  Welch scurried in.

  "Yes, sir."

  "You have until four, Welch, to get liberty papers cut for Corporal Fenn, get 'em back here for my signature.

  Seventy-two hours. If you have to run over to personnel at Henderson Hall, you take my car and driver. Don't stop for traffic. Do you understand?"

  "Uh, well, sir, I, it's highly irregular, I'm not--" "You heard me, Welch," said the captain.

  "Now get going."

  He turned back to Donny.

  "Okay, Fenn, I can't save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson's paperwork catches up with you."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as possible."

  "Yes, sir. I-Thank you, sir."

  "Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is."

  A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood's wife.

  "Here, Mort," she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to Donny.

  "You must be very foolish, young man.

  Or very brave."

  "I don't know, ma'am."

  "Fenn, here. It's six hundred dollars, cash. It's all we had in our quarters. It'll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few days."

  "Sir, I--" "No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it back when you can. And when you get to the "Nam, keep your ass down. That shithole isn't worth another Marine.

  Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck."

  PART II

  SNIPER TEAM

  SIERRA-BRAVO-FOUR

  RSVN, I Corps February-May 1972

  CHAPTER nine.

  The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers, barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut that got these sad boys home.

  But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country. There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on maps only by its height in meters--Hill 519--two of them cowered in the downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.

  One of them dreamed of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up, he was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the 'Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there: Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service.

  Donny's was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.

  On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures.

  He dreamed of the desert, from where he'd come, Pima County, Arizona, the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras out of Mexico, dry as the devil's breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family, a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the downpour: "You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you'll make it and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so mad."

  He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt: "Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I didn't know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because he's the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at all!"

  Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie's beauty was like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.

  A shiver rose through Donny's spine, a deep and relentless cold. The world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain, no other elements existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind of universal declamation of misery.

  Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.

  He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats, mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49 spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round

  7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and, enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to Dodge.

  "Commo check," said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and paddies and jungles and low, mean hills.

  "Get on the horn, Pork."

  "Shit," said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay, because there was no hotter place, either.

  Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.

  He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to on. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said "Fuck" under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.

  The problem with the Pricks wasn't only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives.

  Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed send.

  "Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?"

  He pressed receive, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain's own vagaries at play, sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn't.

  He tried again.

  "Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Brav
o-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?"

  The response was the same.

  "Maybe they're all asleep," he said.

  "Naw," said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, "it's too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying."

  Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.

  "I'm going to the backup freak," he finally stated.

  The sergeant nodded.

  Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.

  They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net, some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand, some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west, some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.

  Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.

  "Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?"

  "Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here, yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?"

  "Tell 'em we're drowning," said the sergeant.

  "Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we're all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over."

  "Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over."

  "They want to know, do you want to call an abort?"

  The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.

  "Affirmative," he said.

  "No bad guys anywhere.

  They're too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell 'em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible."

  "That's an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over."

  "Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You'll have to park it until we can get airborne again."

  "Shit, they're souped in," said Donny.

  "Okay, tell 'em we'll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain't bringing home any scalps."

  Donny hit send.

  "Foxtrot, we copy. We'll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over."

  "Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out."

  The radio crackled to silence.

  "Okay," said Donny, "that about ties that one up."

  "Yeah," said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.

  "Pork," he said after a second or two, "was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?"

  The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.

  "No, I didn't hear a thing," said Donny.

  "The chatter, you know, the usual stuff."

  "Okay, do me a favor, Pork."

  He always called Donny "Pork." He called all his spotters Pork. He'd had three spotters before Donny.

  "Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I thought I heard a syllable that sounded like 'gent."" "Gent? As in gent-prefer blondes?"

  "You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent."

  Donny's fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured militare se made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha, Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it's raining. It meant nothing.

  But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with concentration, un shivery in the wet, hardly even human in his intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter's eyes, 100 percent American redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an odd grace and efficiency to him.

  He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home, not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer, and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter bitch Duty, whom he'd never once cheated on, whom he'd honored and served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he'd won some big civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine too, back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent, hard scrabble times, of which. he preferred not to speak and on whose agonies he would remain forever silent.

  He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He never shot if he didn't see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed. Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was super cool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business. It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn't love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar, the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-pi astre bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was pretty funny.

  But in the end, it would kill him, Donny thought. The war would eat him up in the end. He would try one more brave and desperate thing, eager somehow to keep it going, to press himself even further, and it would, in the end, kill his heroic ass. He'd never hit his DEROS. For boys like this, there was no such thing as DEROS. Vietnam was forever.

  He reminded Donny of someone but Donny hadn't figured it out. There was something about him, however, oddly familiar, oddly resonant. This had struck him before but he could never quite nail it down. Was it a teacher somewhere? Was it a relative, a Marine from his earlier tour or his time at Eighth and I? For a time, he'd thought it was Ray Case, his furious platoon sergeant there, but as he got to know Bob, that connection vaporized. Case was a good, tough, professional Marine, but Bob was a great Marine. They didn't make many of them like Bob Lee Swagger.

  But who was he like? Why did he seem so familiar?

  Donny shook the confusion out of his head.

  Swagger sat under the poncho, the water dripping off his boonie hat, his eyes almost blank as he listened to the crackly tapestry of radio. He was as equally laden as Donny: the taped bull barrel of his M40 sniper rifle-really just a Remington 700 .308 Varmint with a Redfield

  9X scope aboard--poked out from the neck of his poncho as he did what he could to keep the action and the wood, which would swell with moisture, dry. He also carried four M26 grenades, two Claymore bandoleers, an M57 electrical firing dev
ice, a .45 automatic, two canteens and a pack full of C-rats (preferred poison: ham and powdered eggs), and seventy-two rounds of Mil 8 Lake City Arsenal Match ammo, the 173-grain load used by Army and Marine high-powered shooters at Camp Perry. But he was a man who traveled well prepared, he had a Randall Survivor knife with a sawtooth blade, a Colt .380 baby hammerless in an aviator's shoulder holster under his camo utilities and, strapped to his back, an M3 grease gun and five thirty-round magazines.

  "There," he said.

  "You hear it? Swear to Christ I heard something."

  Donny had heard nothing in the murk of chatter, still, he slowed his diddling and redialed, watching the little numbers on the face crackle through the gap as he shifted them. Finally he lit on something so soft you could miss it entirely, and he only received it because it seemed to be right on the cusp of the megahertz click to another freak, if he took the tension off the knob, the signal disappeared.

  But, raspy and distant, they did hear it, and the words seemed to define themselves out of the murk until they became distinct.

  "Anyone on this net? Anyone on this net? How you read me? Over? Urgent, goddammit, over!"

  There was no answer.

  "This is Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have beaucoup bad guys all over the goddamn place. Anyone on this net? CharlieCharlieNovember, you there, over?"

  "He's way out of our range," Donny said.

  "And who the hell is Arizona-Six-Zulu?" Donny wondered.

  -"He's got to be one of the Special Forces camps to the west. They use states as call signs. They call 'em FOBs, forward operating bases. He's trying to reach Charlie Charlie November, which is SOG Command and Control North at Da Nang."

  But Arizona-Six-Zulu got a callback.

  "Arizona-Six-Zulu, this is Lima-Niner-Mike at Outpost Hickory. Is that you, Puller? Can hardly read your signal, over."

  "Lima-Niner-Mike, my big rig took a hit and I'm on the Prick-77. I have big trouble. I have bad guys all over the place hitting me front ally and I hear from scouts a main force unit is moving in to take my base camp out. I need air or arty, over."

  "Arizona-Six-Zulu, neg on the air. We are souped in and everything has been grounded. Let me check on arty, over."