Time to Hunt (26 page)

“Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but you been so busy, and now you’re so tired you ain’t figured out that you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain. It’s still there. It’s hanging off your neck, across your back.”

“Jesus!”

Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight, pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.

“Shit,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“Go on,” said Bob, “that’s your wife; look at her.”

Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly damp, the photograph.

He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless it helped.

In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was so sweet, and he remembered the three days they’d had. They got married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains, and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country, checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right. Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?

“Here, look,” said Donny.

“It’s too dark.”

“Go on,
look!”
he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to his sergeant.

Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.

He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun played in her hair. She wore a turtle-neck and had one of those smiles that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very clean. Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy face. She
was
a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no one nowhere
loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still miss Bob’s father more than he’d miss Bob. That was the way it went.

“She’s a great-looking young woman,” Bob said. “I can tell she loves you a lot.”

“Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the service.”

“That’s too bad. He sounds like a good man.”

“They got him too.”

“Yeah, they get everyone in the end.”

“No, I don’t just mean ‘them, they.’ I mean a specific guy, with influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the purification process. I’d still like to look that guy up. Commander Bonson. Here’s to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You won in the end. Your kind always does.”

Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.

“Git ready,” said Bob.

They could hear the
ponk-ponk-ponk
as a few hundred yards away, three 81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began their downward flight.

“Get down!” screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the shallow hole.

The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced from the ground.

“Ah, Christ!”

A minute passed.

Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all over the place.

Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its dawns.

Ponk-ponk-ponk
.

The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities, then descended.

Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me live.

The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.

He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections. Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.

Oh, it was so very near.

“I was a bad son,” Donny sobbed. “I’m so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad son. I couldn’t stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so awful, oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.”

“You were a good son,” Bob whispered fiercely. “Your daddy understood, don’t you worry about it none.”

Ponk-ponk-ponk
.

Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he’d been a better son too. He remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last night in the twilight. Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn’t there. His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy’s deaths in a cornfield that looked like any other cornfield in the world.

The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb, then sting. This triple shot bracketed
the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for effect.

“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.

Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or died or fought here on this hilltop?

“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.

“There, there,” Bob said.

Someone fired an orange flare over on the horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did it at last dawn on them that it wasn’t a flare at all, it was the sun.

And with the sun came the Phantoms.

The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath, and blossomed oranger than the sun, oranger and hotter than any sun, with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.

“God!” screamed Bob. “Air!
Air!”

They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.

Then the gunships.

Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming insects, thin and agile in the air: they roared in, their mini-guns screaming like chainsaws ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.

“The radio,” Bob said.

Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on, searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.

“Hit eight, hit eight!” Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned it on to find people looking for him.

“—Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa, Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your position immediate, over.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain’t you boys a sight!”

“Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”

“I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern side of the valley; uh, I don’t got no reading on it, I don’t got no map, I—”

“Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke.”

Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all around the farm. I need help immediate. Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee-Niner-Papa, over?”

“Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y’all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay by your smoke, out.”

In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast, and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.

Soon enough, it was quiet.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Yankee-Zulu-Nineteen. I am coming in to get you.”

It was the bird, the Huey, Army OD, its rotors beating as if to force the devil down, as it settled over them, whipping up the dust and flattening the vegetation. Bob clapped Donny on the back of the neck and pushed him
toward the bird; they ran the twenty-odd feet to the open hatch, where eager hands pulled them away from the Land of Bad Things. The chopper zoomed skyward, into the light.

“Hey,” Donny said over the roar, “it’s stopped raining.”

E
ven in the hospital, Huu Co, Senior Colonel, was criticized. It was merciless. It was relentless. It went beyond cruelty. Each day, at 1000 hours, he was wheeled into the committee room, his burned left arm swaddled in bandages, his head dopey with painkillers, his brain ringing with revolutionary adages with which nurses and doctors alike pummeled him in all his waking hours.

He sat stiffly in the heat, waiting as the painkillers gradually diminished, facing faceless accusers from behind banks of lights.

“Senior Colonel, why did you not press on despite your casualties?”

“Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units to deal with the American sniper?”

“Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?”

“Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?”

“Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phuc Bo argue with you as to the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did you discount his advice? Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?”

The questions were endless, as was his pain.

They were also right in their implication: he had behaved unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison was evidently deep in his soul, unpurged by years of rigor and asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the
mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence reports could be believed.

He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion. He was a cockroach who had—

But then the strangest thing happened. Even as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of the political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the man tore open and read nervously.

Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the great Uncle Ho himself.

“Oh, Colonel,” he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it seemed nearly indecent, “oh, Colonel, you look so
uncomfortable
in that chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy? Sugar beet? American chocolate? Hershey’s, we have Hershey’s, probably, if I do say so myself, with …
almonds.”

“Almonds?” said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy Hershey’s with almonds.

Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey bars for the new celebrity. In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring warmly about the colonel’s beautiful wife and his six wonderful children.

The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel
was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did everything to assure his comfort.

“Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?” he asked. “I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a deviationist, a secret Western spy.”

“Oh, Colonel,” the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, “you joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel’s wit is legendary!”

And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.

What on earth could be happening?

And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam could explain such a sea change: the Russians.

A
t their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU—Chief Intelligence Directorate—grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn’t preparation for a trial, it was an intelligence operation.