Sweepers

SWEEPERS by P. T. DEUTERMANN

This book is dedicated to all the honest cops, throughout the country, who try their very best to keep us all safe.

I wish to thank It. Bruce Guth and the members of the Fairfax County Homicide Section; Comdr. M. T. Hall of the Navy JAG Corps for organizational advice; the expert on optical weapons, who must remain nameless; Drs. Brooks and Parks for medical pathology reference; Suzanne Olmsted for Doberman lore; Nick Ellison for intense moral support; and George Witte for careful editing. The names and functions of some government entities have been altered deliberately, as have some police procedures and forensics parameters. Any errors and omissions are, of course, mine.

Any resemblance (if the characters described herein to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Nothing in this book-is meant to represent the policies or views of the U.S. Department of Defense.

This is, for the most part, a work of fiction.

Marcus Galantz tilted his head back, pushed his nose above the surface of the water, and took a silent breath. He bumped the top of his head against the underside of the mangrove trunk and then realized the airspace was getting bigger here in the root cage. Ebb tide, finally. He discarded the breathing reed, breathing normally for the first time in two hours. He didn’t bother to open his eyes, knowing that he would hear the boat long before he would ever be able to see it in the darkness of the river. He reached out to touch the mangrove roots, which felt like smooth, slippery bones extending from the tree above down into the alluvial muck of the riverbanks.

There was only one drawback to a mangrove root cage with a space large enough to admit a human, but so far he’d been lucky.

He submerged again and listened. The Swift boats -would go quiet and darken ship when they drifted back down the river for the pickup, their huge diesels silenced. But they always kept their radar on. Without the engine alternators, the radar drew power from its battery-operated motor generator, which emitted a high-pitched whine through the boat’s aluminum hull, a sound that could be heard for some distance underwater.

He listened. Still nothing. He surfaced silently, aware that there might be a VC patrol nearby, probing the banks for him. Nighttime in the Rung Sat belonged to Charlie, although there weren’t as many as there had been two nights ago.

He shifted his feet in the muck, making sure he hadn’t been sinking ankle into a root tangle. A few noxious bubbles percolated up through the black water and broke soundlessly near his face. With his right hand, he made a fingertip inventory of the root cage, feeling for the gap that occurred where two roots diverged, about thigh-high in the cage. To get out, he must submerge, turn sideways, and push down through the gap. He would then swim out underwater, homing on the bearing of the motor generator’s whine, until he reached the boat.

His hand encountered the opening. Right. There. Okay.

He settled back against the landward side of the cavity and concentrated on his breathing. At one point, he thought he detected soft footfalls above; faint vibrations stirring the mud banks, a rhythmic sense of pressure.

C’mon, boat.

With the two big Jimmies shut down, the only sounds in the cramped pilothouse where Tag Sherman sat came from the sweep motor grinding away inside the radar display unit.

It was one of those bottom-of-the-well, pitch-black nights on the Long Tao… The surface of the river itself was indistinguishable from the motionless curtain of sodden night air and the black line of steaming vegetation on the near banks. “Near banks, hell, Sherman thought. The Long Tao was only a hundred yards wide here just below the S-turn. The scale of the radar screen reproached him-he had it on the two-hundred-yard scale. Much too close to the bank. Ambush city.

He squirmed in the driver’s chair of the sixty-foot-long gunboat, his khaki trousers sticking to the seat. He had to sit almost sideways to keep his head hunched over the hood that shielded the amber radar screen to his right. His left hand rested loosely on the engine start buttons.

He could hear and feel the subtle movements of the rest of the Swift boat through the thin aluminum superstructure.

Above the pilothouse, just behind his head, he sensed Gunner’s Mate Second Kelly shifting around in the cage of the twin 50 machine-gun mount, training the heavy black barrels in a gentle sweeping motion from side to side, the roller path of the cage so heavily greased that it made little sucking sounds when the guns moved. Back down behind him in the cabin, Radioman Second Ryker would be kneeling on the starboard-side bench seat, hunched over an M60 machine gun stuck through . the little window, his headset wire stretching over to the HF radio set. Gunner Jarret, desperate for a cigarette, would have the port side covered with an M 16 set on full auto, a backup magazine taped to the bottom of the service clip. Engineman First Keene would be on one of the bunks down in the tiny, stuffy cabin beneath the pilothouse. As the off-duty driver, Keene technically was supposed to be sleeping, but more likely he was fully awake, sweating in his combat gear and cradling his beloved captured Kalashnikov.

Back on the fantail, Boatswain Second Yanckley would be sitting on an upended mortar crate, pointing the Hotchkiss gun to starboard, a full-pack white-phosphorous round loaded in. its 81-mm mortar tube and a prodigious chew stuck in the side of his mouth. Sherman grinned in the darkness. With the turretlike armor-plated jacket and a steel helmet big enough to accommodate both his sound-powered phones and his large, many-chinned, round bead, the bosun would look like a big armor-plated toad back there on his ammo crate. But with that mortar, Yaftk was the Man: He could hit a palm tree at a thousand yards, as a few Victor Charlies had learned just before they went to see Baby Jesus in a cloud of superheated white phosphorus. Or maybe over here it was Baby Buddha.

Sherman took a deep breath and let it out quietly. The stinking wet air gave his lungs little satisfaction, and there was a persistent metallic taste on his tongue. He screwed his ears on even harder, trying to sift out any human sounds coming through the pilothouse doors on either side from the nearby reed beds and palmetto grass. With the engines shut down, they were unable to maneuver, and they had drifted in much closer to the shoreline than was wise. He could smell the banks of the river now that the ebb tide had begun in earnest, the muddy, earthy smell of an ancient swamp, threaded now with the stink of Agent Orange and the sewery effluvium coming down from Saigon, some twenty miles upstream.

Ordinarily, they would keep themselves precisely out in the middle of the river, but not tonight. They were drifting on purpose, fully darkened, all electronics running on the batteries, while they slipped downstream at the whim of the Mekong tidal currents. Their mission tonight was a SEAL pickup. Three nights ago, they had come roaring up the Long Tao through this same area, making lots of noise, lights on, the big 39 boat throwing up a powerful wake, which chased the monkeys off the banks and caused the smaller crocodiles to grunt in irritation and slither into the water. One mile above the S-turn, they had slowed to idle speed and then, when darkness fell, shut her down, going dark and quiet, to begin the slow drift back toward the insertion point at the’top of the S-turn.

Tag could still conjure up an image of the SEAL sitting all the way at the back of the boat, perched on top of the mortar ammo locker in the familiar costume: an olive green floppy hat and T-shirt, khaki swim trunks, flip-flops, and a knife strapped to one ankle. No guns, radios, flippers, masks, or anything else. And no talk. And no face-just eyes.

The man’s facial features had been obscured by the floppy hat and heavy daubs of green and brown paint, but Tag remembered those eyes: bright, dark ‘ intense eyes, looking right back at you. Tag and his crew had done six SEAL insertions in the Rung Sat over the past year, and he had never heard one of them speak. more than about three words.

Sherman shifted his flak jacket and scratched his neck where some insect had just achieved a blood meal. He tried to remember if he’d taken his malaria pills. The interesting thing was how surprisingly normal these guys looked, as opposed to being huge, bandoliered macho monsters. Like this guy they were picking up tonight: He had been listed on the mission brief sheet as Hospital Corpsman First’class Galantz. He was not quite Sherman’s size: five eight, maybe five nine, 150 or 160 pounds.

Average-sized American military guy, maybe a little more muscle than most, but other than that, altogether unremarkable—except for the way he sat back there, still as a statue, totally self-contained.

The insertion drill was always the same: After making a big, noisy deal of transiting through the intended drop zone, they’d shut everything down and drift back with the current under the cover of darkness.

Sometime during the drift, they would feel the stem tip ever so slightly, indicating the SEAL had gone over the side. Sherman shuddered at the very thought of going into the black waters of the Long Tao, a venomous stew of toxic leeches, sea snakes, mangrove pythons, and, of course, the crocs. They must call these guys snake eaters for a reason.

Three, sometimes four nights later, they would execute the same maneuvers for the pickup. If the guy was a no show, they would try once more the following night. After that, he was on his own. Or dead. Or, worse, much worse, a prisoner. The VC were afraid of the SEALS, and reportedly, they would skin one alive and take a month to do it if they ever captured one.

Sherman expanded the radar display scale out to a half a mile and scanned the glowing details painted on the radar screen, orienting himself on the bank features leading into the S-turn at the top of the screen. The whine of the motor generator dipped -momentarily when he made the display adjustments. After eleven months, he knew the river pretty well, and he could tell where they were with one quick glance at the radar. There was no point in looking through the windows. As the driver, he had to sacrifice his night vision in favor of the Decca radar screen, like an airplane pilot flying on full instruments. He shifted the scale back to two hundred yards. The Decca was a beauty of a radar.

At this scale, he could make out individual logs as they bumped along the undercut banks.

Boss?” said Yank, speaking on the sound-powered intercom.

“Yeah?” Sherman pulled the mouthpiece up to his lips.

He kept his eyes on the radar screen and wiped a curtain of sweat off his lower face to keep from shorting out the phones.

“Ain’t we awfully close here? I can hear the freakin’ frogs.”

“Yeah, well, you wanta paddle? We do a drift ex, we go where the river takes us. Just let me know when our guy is back, and we’ll didi-mau the hell out of here.”