Men in Green Faces (27 page)

Roland signaled with radio squelches, and the boats pulled into shore. As they climbed aboard, the crew slapped them lightly on their backs and shoulders. Gene caught words and phrases. “God, it’s good to see you. We thought you all might have hit the big one. We heard the shit hit the fan at the objective. When you didn’t make the extraction, we figured—”

“Wrong,” Brian protested. “We kicked their asses. Man, what a hit! They walked right into it. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Bodies were everywhere. No one got out.”

Brian, Gene knew, was pumped again, the adrenaline flowing now, with safety. As was his own, but with it returned the soul-deep rage that eliminated tiredness, cold, and hunger. The rage that demanded more of the blood of those who’d killed Willie, and the blood of Colonel Nguyen. He stopped listening and turned away.

Behind him, the boat captain called out, “There’s Seafloat!”

Gene, staring into the dark water, looked up to see a group of people standing on the east end. As the boat turned into the barge, some yelled, “Hoo-Ya!” and some applauded as the squad got off. Barely acknowledging them, he headed for the hootch.

Marc was waiting at the door. They looked at each other, smiled, but said nothing. Gene went inside. Behind him, Marc’s voice was loud as the others approached. “We’ve got hot chow waiting for you guys. Get down to the chow hall.”

“Drop your weapons off,” Jim ordered, “and go eat.”

At the top of his lungs, Doc yelled, “Hoo-Ya! Chow!”

Seconds later, Gene stood alone beside his bunk. He opened a can of tuna and then carried the 60 out to the cleaning table to make her ready. He spent half an hour cleaning before breaking out eight hundred rounds of new ammunition. Back inside, he put the ammo and the 60 on his rack. When he turned around, Marc was standing there with a cup of coffee.

“Here, buddy,” he said, handing Gene the cup. “Why aren’t you at chow? We’ve got steak and eggs waiting for you.”

“Thanks anyway, Marc. I ate some tuna. But thanks for the coffee.”

“You really had us scared. We were ready to go in to see if we could find you.”

Gene looked into the light blue eyes. “Eagle, who’s going out?”

Marc straightened. “KCSs. Got an op after lunch.”

“Thanks.” He turned back to the 60.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure. Seen Johnny?”

“Yeah. He’s at the chow hall talking to Jim. What happened out there?”

“Nothing, really. We had an objective. We hit it.” He looked in the Eagle’s eyes. He saw the concern, the caring. “Thanks, man. Thanks.”

His reply was swallowed up in the shriek of Seafloat’s siren.

“A
LL PERSONNEL! MAN YOUR
battle stations! General Quarters! General Quarters! All personnel! Man your battle stations!”

They were running before the order was repeated. Gene grabbed his 60 and tore out the door.

“All boats and choppers depart Seafloat!”

People rushed in all directions. Gene ran past a sandbag barrier wondering what the hell was going on. Every other attack had come in the dark of night.

“We have a large number of sampans coming in from the west!” the voice over the loudspeaker finished.

Gene dodged SEALs returning on the run from morning chow to get their weapons, and headed for the helo pads. The choppers were warming up. He could see sampans in the distance, coming in on their location. Looked like fifty or sixty of them. Boats were pulling away from Seafloat to intercept. Maybe today would be the day Charlie and the NVA overran them.

He squinted in the wind. One chopper gone…two choppers gone…He spun, looking in every direction. From what other direction would the enemy hit? Seafloat personnel were set. SEALs roamed the decks looking for sappers trying to float explosives in. The sampans were closing…about three or four people in each one. It was hard to see, to be sure. He tuned in to the open communications, between the boats and choppers, coming over the loudspeaker.

“Float, this is Airborne. We have about forty or fifty boats. They are flying the white flag. Weapons are stacked on bows. I repeat, they are
Flying white flag.
”

“Float to all crafts: Escort them into north bank.”

By that time, Gene was flanked by Brian, Jim, and Cruz.

Brian, looking through binoculars, suddenly yelled, “It’s the old man! It’s Raggedy!” Grinning, practically dancing up and down, he turned to Jim. “Can I take a Whaler out?”

Jim shook his head. “Wait.”

Good move, thought Gene. The boat people could be a decoy or a diversion. As the sampans neared within five hundred meters, riverboat crews directed them into the north shore. There, KCSs, Seabees, Montagnards, and two squads of SEALs from other platoons waited. Their platoon, Lima, was ordered to remain on Seafloat and hold their position at all costs if they were actually being attacked.

About half the sampans had banked. Armed SEALs were meeting the beaching sampans and directing their occupants to Solid Anchor’s landing strip. Brian, Gene saw, couldn’t stand it.

“Jim, can I get the old man now? I know he’s scared. Let me bring him back!”

Jim looked over at him and shook his head. “Go ahead, get the old fart. Bring him back. But be careful. Cruz, go with him.”

Brian spun around and took off in a full run yelling, “Hoo-Ya!” with Cruz right behind him.

Gene continued to scan the area. With General Quarters still in effect, all sides of Seafloat were carefully watched. If there was any other movement out there, they’d see it. If the surrender was a ploy, the prisoners would be cut down. They couldn’t allow enemy on Solid Anchor. The Seabees had completed too much construction on their north shore.

He shifted the weight of the 60 slightly. Seeing the old man, they knew the sampans had come from Twin Rivers.

“Your little psych job worked,” Jim said.

Gene nodded, watching the activity. All boats had pulled in, and the last prisoners were being checked and counted. Command would have to call for helo transports to move them to Binh Thuy, to a U.S. POW camp. Brian, Cruz, and the old man motored past in the Whaler. Brian wore a huge grin, and the old man was patting him on the shoulder, smiling from ear to ear, and saying, “You number one…you number one.”

Brian was heading toward the east end of Seafloat, to their hootch. Looking at them, Gene was reminded of little kids on Christmas morning. And with the thought came the sobering memory of Tong’s two little girls and Willie. The small feeling of joy disappeared, and on the bank now, instead of the old man’s people, he saw the enemy.

They were prisoners. He couldn’t touch them. His hands tightened on the 60. In a few hours, he’d be going out with the KCSs, and he’d get a head count. A head count of any enemy bearing arms. Much as he wanted to, he knew he’d never be able to kill just anyone. But the enemy, and the colonel…They were his.

“Stand down from General Quarters!” ordered the voice from the speakers.

Gene walked slowly back to the hootch, Jim at his side. “Can I go out this afternoon?”

Jim looked at him, a strange expression on his boyish face. “Okay.” He frowned. “You feeling all right?”

“Yeah. I am.”

They walked on. Marc, silent too, joined them a short distance from the hootch.

The first people Gene saw, as they entered, were Brian, Cruz, and Raggedy. They were sitting on the floor next to the refrigerator. The old man was chugging a bottle of JD. After a long swig, he lowered the bottle and looked up, focusing on Gene and Marc. The smile disappeared from his face. His eyes widened. Gene could almost feel the old man’s extreme fear as he cowered next to, and almost behind, Brian. He began babbling.

“It’s okay,” Brian said, patting him as though he were a child. “It’s okay.” But the old man wanted nothing to do with them.

“He’s calling you evil spirits,” one of the Vietnamese SEALs said. “Devil gods. He’s boo-koo afraid of you two.”

Gene touched Marc’s arm, and they went outside. “Brian knows we’ll have to question the old man soon. I’m sure nobody’d object to our doing it in the briefing room. We just need to know who and what is still down there.”

“Anything we can use or destroy,” Marc said.

Johnny walked up. “Drinks on me, guys.” He set a six-pack on the cleaning table. “You two pulled it off. There are one hundred twenty-eight men, women, and children over there. Some ninety weapons.” He turned the gold class ring on his finger with his thumb. “Shit-hot idea, man. Really was a shit-hot idea.”

“Glad it worked.”

“I hear,” Johnny continued, “you’re going out with the KCSs.”

“Yup.” Gene turned to Marc. “And I hear we’ve got a guide for this op. Something about saving somebody’s daughter.”

Marc nodded. “Yeah. One of the boats coming in off an op with Tommy Blade’s squad—its wake swamped the guy’s sampan and the daughter fell overboard. She couldn’t swim. A couple of Tommy’s men jumped in and saved her.”

“Uh.” Johnny took a drink of his beer.

“Don’t know much more,” Marc said, “but the op’s on some tax collectors at the regional level, and it’s in a Secret Zone.”

Gene relished the icy coldness of the beer sliding down his throat. It would be his only one. Drinking stopped when an op was coming up. It ran through his mind that, on the hammer-and-anvil op he’d just come off of, they’d eliminated tax collectors and their escorts. But regional collectors were higher up the ladder. Secret Zone. Free kill zone. Good.

“I’m ready.” He reached in his pocket, closed his fingers around Willie’s cross, and felt the stiff fabric of Nguyen’s shoulder patch.

Finished with his beer, Gene left the two men and walked barefoot to the edge of the helo pad on Seafloat’s west end. Feet dangling in the water, he looked downriver, thinking of the hammer-and-anvil op and how easy it had been to blow the enemy away. Real easy. Some one of the bastards out there had killed Willie at Nguyen’s command.

Memories surfaced again of the village burning, Tong holding his wife, the faces of the two little girls as he had covered them with his shirt, Willie, inside the drab-green body bag…His rage mounted. They had reason enough for being there, with all the horror, the killing. Those poor people. The raping, the murdering, had to be stopped. If the assholes wanted death, he’d bring them death.

He looked up at the sound of helo transports. Two Chinook helos were coming in to take the POWs away. They couldn’t be kept at Solid Anchor. Let V Corps interrogate the rest, he thought. The SEALs had the old man. He’d stay here. For now anyway.

Gene stood up and walked over to Johnny’s hootch. He knocked on the door. “Johnny? You in?”

“Door’s open.”

When he entered, Johnny put down the western novel he was reading. “What’s up?”

“Any word?”

He frowned. “About what?”

“Give me a break, Johnny. Who hit Willie?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Who? The colonel?”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

“Have you located him?” His voice sounded in his ears like gravel crunched under boots in winter.

“I think so,” Johnny said, “but I’m checking it out.” The ring glinted as he ran his fingers through his hair. “The last word that came in was that he’s northeast of here. Maybe twenty or thirty miles. He’s picked up more men. Possible training camp up by Five Sisters.”

The edge of the desk cut into Gene’s thigh as he leaned forward. “Yeah.” Five Sisters. Five large rivers feeding down into the Mekong Delta. Not far from the Secret Zone where they’d hit the R&R Center. Son of a bitch! They’d just been there. “Yeah,” he said again. “Keep me posted,” he added, and left.

He didn’t tell Johnny they’d seen what must have been the training camp. Didn’t want anybody else going after the colonel. Wanted him for himself. The colonel belonged to Lima.

Just before 1100 hours, Jim called the squad together for a debrief. Everything, from the time they’d left Seafloat until their return, was covered. The details of what they’d seen, heard, and smelled were given by each of them. After the debriefing, the reports would be sent to SpecWar Headquarters in Saigon, with copies to Johnny. They’d get them all. Except one. The intel on the training camp.

In charge of intel for Lima, Gene secured that bit of information in his footlocker before deciding he’d better go to chow. He didn’t know how long he’d be out with the KCSs. The op might be short and sweet—go in, kill them, get the money, go home—or it could be another long one. A possible dick-dragger.

It didn’t matter, he thought, walking around a work crew on his way to chow. His 60 was cleaned, oiled, loaded, and ready to sing.

By the time he arrived, the line was short and almost every seat was taken. When he reached the serving line, he realized that, standing in front of him, was Freddy Fanther.

Gene opened his mouth, then shut it. Nobody liked the poor bastard, for all kinds of reasons. Still, he was one of them. And maybe, this op, he’d come back in a body bag like Willie had. It was time to let bygones be bygones, clear the situation, and leave as few bad memories as possible.

Good old Freddy. Didn’t look around to see who was next to him. Too busy piling on the food.

“Are you going to eat all that or sell it to the Montagnards?”

Freddy jumped at the sound of his voice. “Just leave me alone.”

“Hey, mellow out, man.”

“Dammit, just stay away from me.” He took a step backward, then hurried off to a table.

Gene felt a flood of guilt. The freckled SEAL was scared to death of him. What if Fanther got killed on his next op? He had to settle this thing. Or at least try.

Gene took the makings of a sandwich, some veggie sticks, a glass of milk, and a cup of coffee. Wending his way past tables and chairs, he spotted Freddy. A vacant chair sat next to him.

Freddy glanced up, then lowered his head, looking as though he were silently saying, Don’t sit here . .. please don’t sit next to me.

Gene pulled the chair out. “You mind?”

“Would you go if I said I did?”

“No. Just thought I’d be polite and ask before I sat down.” He put the tray on the table and took the chair. “Mind if I say something?”