Red Flags (37 page)

Cox tore the filter off a Salem, pushed it between Grady's lips, and lit it. He took short drags, sucking smoke in small increments. A shot sounded. A signal we'd been spotted.

Grady arched his back a little from pain. "Visiting hours're over, old son."

Cox licked his lips. He hesitated for a second, then stripped off Grady's web belt and harness, taking the grenades and ammo, and slung the sergeant's rifle across his own back.

"I'll leave two morphines."

"Leave me a grenade. And some tear-gas powder."

I put a pack of dry CS in his lap, and Cox handed over a grenade. Grady held it up.

"Pull the pin for me."

Cox did. "If it gets too bad, use the morphine," he said.

"No. Take it. My watch too. I don't want them to get it."

Cox slipped off the Rolex and pocketed it.

Grady said, "Either I nod off and the grenade does the job ... or they'll find me. I'll wait till they're close. The gas should help slow them up too. Go."

Cox signaled Ruchevsky, and John shoved the VC prisoner past us. The captain touched Grady on the shoulder and rose.

Grady looked gray. "See you on the other side."

"Don't think so, Sarge," Cox said, squatting again. "I'm going to that better place, unlike some."

Grady took small sips of air. "Sure you are. Fuck you ... sir. Get outta here."

Cox went. I fell in behind him. Willie passed me, going forward to take the lead. Rot took up the rear as we pressed toward the rendezvous, a half an hour away, risking everything by taking an established trail, leaving Grady farther behind with each step.

Counting strides was one of my jobs. At a hundred and four we heard the grenade.

W
E HAD GONE
a mile, nineteen hundred paces, dogged by two of their scouts who fired signal shots intermittently to summon the pack. We were traveling fast but their signal shots never receded: they were keeping up. Cox gestured to halt and waved us off the trail about fifteen feet. The Yards disappeared to act as our security. While we thrashed through the jungle, big and overburdened, they slipped through it like fish in water. We collapsed in a circle, facing out; Ruchevsky and I lay on either side of Cox as he consulted the map. Our objective might be obvious to the pursuers by now if they knew the area and the few open spaces. Their comrades might be on faster trails, trying to beat us to the pickup. In which case, we were done.

Cox whispered, "We've gotta nail at least one watcher. They can't know when we turn off. Rider, take the lead. You're maybe twenty minutes from the pickup point." He showed us on the map. "You should find a stream a quarter of a mile ahead. Leave the trail there and hang a left into the stream. It will slope up toward a rise. The foliage will thin out."

"What are you gonna do?" Ruchevsky said.

"Hang back and try to pop a scout, then run the trail. Gotta keep them from following us long enough to make the turn at the stream without them seeing."

"Let me hang back," I said. "I don't know if your Yards will take direction from us."

"Negative," Cox said, and signaled us in motion.

Just then the first scout appeared, moving warily but fast along the trail. An NVA. Cox took aim. The man staggered and clutched his throat, the shaft of an arrow protruding out the back of his neck; wound tightly around its head was the thread impregnated with poison.

We stepped out of the bush and covered Cox as he checked the man writhing in agony. Cox raised the CAR to his shoulder to finish him but Willie trotted up, crossbow in hand.

"What's he doing?" I whispered.

"He wants him to suffer."

Willie said something. I looked to Cox.

"Says it'll be over in a second."

It was. Willie cut off his ears and threw them away. The deformity would disorient the VC's spirit so he wouldn't reincarnate easily to avenge himself. Captain Cox booby-trapped the body. As soon as they were done, we resumed our rush. A little farther along, he propped the empty outer casing of a claymore mine on its tripod at the side of the road.

"Something for them to mull over."

He tossed the ends of its wires into the undergrowth.

"Devious," Ruchevsky said, chest heaving.

Willie took the lead and we were off again, Cox right behind him, I was relieved to see. We loped after them, practically jogging. We crossed the stream and kept going until the first patch of hard ground. Cox whistled to Willie and signaled for us to step off the trail to the left. We all stepped off simultaneously, avoiding leaving any sign, and turned around. Rot, now in front, led us back through the undergrowth in reverse order to the stream. He headed into the current, flanked by reeds. We rushed after him, Ruchevsky in front of me with his prisoner, Cox and Willie trailing.

The stream flowed straight and we made good progress. The reeds and foliage thinned as we ascended. After fifteen minutes it grew distinctly lighter. We'd reached a savanna of high grass towering over our heads, tall as corn and topped with silky plumes. Cox planted a second claymore—this one no dud—and unspooled the wires as he pressed straight into the dense grass. The trail we left was obvious. Thirty yards in, we made a hard right for fifteen yards. Cox wired up the clicker that would detonate the claymore.

"Okay," he whispered, "knock down the grass," and hurled himself at the stalks, using his body to press them flat. Ruchevsky pushed the prisoner to the ground and we imitated him, opening a circle. Chaff and insects rose all around us as we crushed the blades.

"Rider," Cox said, "go back to the elbow turn. Stay out of sight best you can. Watch for our hunters. If it's a single scout, he'll sit and wait for the rest. If it's a whole bunch, empty a magazine at them. Keep their heads down. When the bird's coming in, hightail it back before it gets too close. The downdraft will flatten all this around us. I'll blow the claymore as soon as we're on board."

"It may get lively long before that," I said.

"Yeah. Go."

I got to the turn and lay down flat to stick half my face out. The heavy camouflage made me hard to spot but I still felt exposed. AKs would scythe right through the grass.

Rotors thudded. The bird was coming. Distant shouts in the jungle: they had heard too.

The chopper was close, dropping straight in. I listened for firing, hoping they didn't have the bird in their sights. As the tops of the grass stalks began to dance, shots clacked up at it. A door gunner's 60 answered back. The stalks bent halfway. I fired a full magazine down the alley and dashed for the circle. The grass went flat from the full blast of the downdraft, completely exposing us and the Huey. Ruchevsky threw the prisoner on board and ordered the Yards to follow. Cox knelt by the door, firing. Ruchevsky launched grenade rounds at them with his M-79.

I emptied another magazine at the woods as I went. Cox too. He jumped butt-first onto the chopper and detonated the claymore, sending up a geyser of dirt and fronds at the corner of the field.

I ran up to the bay door and dove in. The bird rose the instant I was on. A shot clanged off the chopper's armor under the pilot. Another screeched through the aluminum overhead. We were away.

I sat up, panting, my fatigues soaked with sweat, and vowed never to smoke again as I checked myself for wounds. I accepted a lit cigarette from Ruchevsky and inhaled it deeply. It tasted bitter. Cox, legs dangling out the door, kept his face turned away from us all. Willie shifted over next to him and held his hand.

 

I took the contraband medical supplies to Roberta at her clinic. She looked relieved to see me.

"You're okay?"

I didn't reply.

She turned pale. "Is the colonel ...?"

"He's on his way back, he's fine. But he's got a full plate waiting for him."

"Of course," she said. She resumed washing her hands in a basin; failing to find a towel, she dried them on her white lab coat.

"Just wanted to bring you this medical stuff."

"Everybody made it okay?"

"No. We lost a Special Forces noncom. Sergeant Grady."

"The black sergeant at Mai Linh?" she said. "Poor man."

"What's that?" I pointed at the jars on her bench.

"This?" she said, touching one. "
Kabang
tree resin. The Montagnards use it as a poison. This one—
ipoh
tree sap—is poison too. It's possible these substances could have medical applications."

Her face tipped toward me.

"Something on your mind, Rider?" She looked at me quizzically.

I needed to tell her about the father of the child we'd delivered, but I couldn't. Didn't.

"No," I said. "I'm ripped up about losing Grady the way we did, is all. Wanted to drop these supplies off," I said, holding out the haversack, my hand unsteady.

"Oh, Erik."

"I think it's mostly morphine in there."

"Thanks. You're an angel of mercy. We're always so short on everything."

She took the sack from me and laid out dextran blood thickener, vials of morphine, and two bottles of liquid sulfa. Out came a dozen lengths of commo wire, coiled. Except the wire was stripped out, leaving just the insulation.

I was baffled. "What the hell is that for?"

"Tubing," she said, stretching out a section. "God, it's an IV. They've improvised an intravenous line." She locked me in her gaze. "You captured this."

"Yeah. Didn't want to see it go to waste."

"How will you ever beat these people?" she asked, returning her attention to the contents of the sack.

"I don't know."

"They're beyond determined." She turned toward me. "You sure you're all right?"

She called a nurse to take away the supplies and made tea. We took it out on the bare concrete slab at the back of the house and stood with our cups, looking at the trash-strewn lane. The sky was threatening again. Clouds rolling in a solid gray avalanche. It was going to pour later. The full monsoon was drawing closer.

"Everything's going to turn to goo soon," she said.

"Yep. The ARVN will stand down and snooze away the rainy season. The VC will maneuver through the mud and launch their monsoon offensive. And we'll curse the bad flying weather and our jeeps and trucks and armor."

"Some things don't change."

A Montagnard family marched toward us in a line, grandfather at the front, followed by his son-in-law, his daughter, and their children. The old man carried the youngest boy in his arms. They stopped in front of her and spoke in their language. Roberta pinched the boy's skin. It remained bunched when she let go.

"Dysentery. He's totally dehydrated. Nearly gone. Rider, I've gotta go."

She led them into the dispensary, calling out instructions to her nurses.

 

Miser laid it open on a bit of plastic sheeting in the grass in the quadrangle between the bungalows and the mess hall.

The NVA radio nested in a .50-caliber ammo can, one of ours. The whole rig was hand-built. The knob of its Morse code key was a mahjong tile. The set was housed in aluminum, precisely wired, well machined, the tube sockets drilled out, capacitors aligned, resistors grounded to the chassis.

Miser sniffed at it with professional coolness. "Hand-wound coils."

"Impressed?" I said.

"Built from scratch."

"Let me see." Ruchevsky leaned closer.

The courier was already in the air on the way to Pleiku. Cox was accompanying him to II Corps headquarters for MACV. No way were we exposing him to Colonel Chinh's intelligence officers and field police across the street, even though the official demand to see the prisoner had arrived soon after we returned. Bennett wasn't yet back from his mission, so he couldn't be held accountable for any alleged slight or violation of directives. I was all too happy to play the offending party and shoo the ARVN lieutenant away from the gate. I lied and said the captured documents had gone with the prisoner. Joe Parks offered some sage advice as we walked back toward the bungalows.

"A word of caution. Translate the enemy documents before you pass 'em back to the head shop in Pleiku."

"They won't do it?" I said.

"They will, but you'll never know what was in them, even if they're plans for another attack on Cheo Reo. The higher highers will tell you that you haven't got the clearance to see it. It's too sensitive, and like that. Intel's a one-way street. Tap off what you need before passing it on."

"What a way to run a war," I said.

Checkman hunched at his desk, slaving over the papers. We had risked our lives to gather the raw intelligence, and we wanted to learn what we could about what was really happening in our backyard before sending the stuff down the rabbit hole to headquarters.

Colonel Bennett, still in battle dress, returned and summoned Ruchevsky and me to his office, along with Gidding and Parks.

"Incredible," he said. "You got Wolf Man. A special courier comes at first light tomorrow to fetch all this. It's getting its own chase ship." Bennett motioned at the materials spread over Checkman's desk. "Do we know any more about what's happening locally?"

I held up a classified teletype message. "Intel from Two Corps. Confirms the NVA are still on the move setting fire to mountainsides along the way to block overflight sensors."

Bennett said, "What's your take on what's happening, Joe?"

Parks clamped down on his pipe. "They'll march three nights running, twenty to twenty-five miles a night, their companies spaced an hour or so apart."

"That's what passed by the night we were probed?" said the colonel.

"Yes, sir. Probably four or five companies maneuvering past us, single file, their soldiers two meters apart. With maybe two other similar columns following different tracks farther out."

"They needed to get out of this basin and into the mountains," Ruchevsky said.

Sergeant Parks sat down, facing the colonel's desk. "Right. Once the NVA near their targets, they'll lay low again until everyone's assembled. They'll distribute extra ammo, put casualty-recovery squads in place, set up aid stations along their withdrawal routes, dig graves ... and it'll be on. Some base or airfield will take a major hit; at least two battalions.