Matterhorn (14 page)

“He won’t like it.”

“To hell with him. Send a fire team around to the left. We’ll cover with Mole if they get into the shit. Who do you want to
go?”

Now it was Conman’s turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. “Rider.”

So some are chosen to die young.

Mellas turned to Skosh. “Rider up.” Skosh crawled back toward the next man. “Rider up.” The whisper passed along.

“Your seventy-nine man have any shotgun rounds?” Mellas asked Conman.

Conman held up three fingers.

Mellas cursed under his breath. The rounds, so useful in the jungle where nothing could be seen, were always in short supply.
The M-79 men hoarded them like misers.

“He’ll go with the team.”

Conman nodded.

“Set the gun in so Rider can get his ass back if he runs into trouble. I’ll go and pick him up.”

“What about artillery?” Conman asked.

Mellas felt a sudden sinking in his stomach. He’d forgotten all about it. “I’ll see Daniels on the way down,” he said, saving
face.

Conman gave him a thumbs-up and started crawling to the nearest person to set up the perimeter.

Mellas passed Skosh. “Stick with Conman. I’ll be with Daniels and on the arty frequency if the Six wants me.” Mellas continued
crawling down the line of intense questioning faces. He kept whispering, “Three gooks. Maybe more. Conman’ll set you in,”
all the while motioning them forward. He met Mole and Young, Mole’s assistant gunner, moving forward, both of them sweating
heavily. Mole looked grim. Young gave a wan smile, dragging the heavy machine-gun ammunition beside him on the ground, trying
very hard to move without making noise.

“You’ll block for Rider,” Mellas whispered to Mole. “See Conman.” Mole nodded, continuing in a low crawl, the large gun cradled
across his arms as he worked his way forward. Rider came crawling forward behind Mole and Young, his face glistening, his
eyes slightly wild. The two frightened kids in his fire team crawled behind him. Yet no one questioned that they would do
what they were told. “Three gooks,” Mellas whispered. “We have to find out if that’s all. Could be an OP. Tell Connolly that
I said for you to take Gambaccini and his M-79 with you.”

Rider licked his lips and looked quickly at his two friends. One nodded. The other was staring into the jungle as if the intensity
of his gaze could reveal its secret. But the undergrowth revealed nothing. The secret could be revealed only by crawling into
the jungle and meeting it there.

Rider nodded and pointed uphill, looking at his team. The three of them crawled toward the head of the column, disappearing
almost
immediately. Mellas continued down the line, sending kids forward to form the perimeter.

Daniels crawled up, his radio slipping awkwardly from side to side on his back.

“The angle is the shits for Golf Battery,” Daniels whispered. “The ridge is between them and the gooners. The one-oh-fives
will have to shoot nearly straight up to come straight down on them and Golf is so far away the rounds won’t reach. If they
shoot a flatter trajectory to make the distance, they’ll hit the ridge’s front side or fly right over the target. I think
you ought to use the company’s sixties. The rounds are a tenth the weight, but they’ll hit the target. I’ve got them up on
the net now.”

Mellas nodded his head, thankful for Daniels’s foresight. “Good,” he said.

Daniels started forward again, twisting the frequency knob at the same time to tell his battery to stand by, that he’d be
using the mortars; then he switched frequencies again and started talking to the company mortar squad. Mellas and Daniels
met Vancouver lying in front of them, his own machine gun cradled on a rotten limb. Skosh was crawling toward Mellas, holding
out the handset. Mellas grabbed it, waiting for Daniels to finish with the mortars. He noticed that Rider’s fire team and
Gambaccini and his M-79 grenade launcher were already gone. “It’s the skipper,” Skosh whispered.

“I’ll need a pos rep,” Fitch said. “Over.”

“We haven’t moved squat since the last one,” Mellas whispered. “Over.”

“Bravo One, I want a pos rep. You copy?”

“Wait one.” Mellas’s hands were shaking as he dug out his map. The jungle made it impossible to see any landmarks. He tried
to remember the terrain they’d walked over, estimate the distances. It was like navigating underwater. He stabbed a finger
at the most likely spot, still feeling it was the same place he’d radioed in last time. He looked at Daniels, raising his
eyebrows. Daniels moved his finger to a point on his own map with his own peculiar pencil marks and dogears, not trusting
anyone else’s. He looked at where Mellas was pointing on his own
map. Thumbs-up. Mellas radioed in the position. If he was wrong, the shells could hit Rider’s team, or them, instead of the
enemy.

Fitch got off the hook and let Corporal Devon, the squad leader of the 60-millimeter mortars, come back up on the net.

Daniels started talking. “Bravo Whiskey, Bravo One One, fire mission. Over.”

And Mellas had nothing to do.

He sat down while Daniels called in the mission. He noticed that there were ants on the ground where they had set in. He could
barely see the backs of some of the kids as they lay beneath the foliage. A bird chirped. He didn’t know if the whole thing
wasn’t just a foolish exercise.

The thunk of mortar shells leaving the tube jarred him. For all the hours they’d walked, he was surprised to hear the sounds
of tubing so close to him. There was a sudden rush and a loud crash as the 60-millimeter shells came nearly straight down.
The sounds were muffled and seemed far away. Mellas wondered if they’d read the map that badly.

“Right fifty. Drop one hundred,” Daniels whispered, correcting by sound alone. The second salvo came down right on the ridge
above them. The sounds were magnified tenfold, no longer masked by the earth. Daniels called for four salvos. Then he adjusted
to the right and called in four more. Mellas was amazed: it was all mechanical, yet people were probably getting killed.

Pat was lying quietly next to Arran, who was sitting against a log. The dog was panting and so seemed to be grinning. His
odd reddish ears were standing up.

The radio whispered. Skosh handed Mellas the handset. “I have to know the word on the basketball team.” It was Fitch, using
the radio code for a fire team. “Big John Six wants to know. Also Golf Six wants to know why he’s standing by and not firing
the mission. Over.”

“Tell him character Delta thinks the angle is bad. We’re masked by a ridge and the mortars have a better shot at it. And I
can’t walk out and ask the damned basketball team what the score is because I don’t exactly know where they are. Which is
another reason why we don’t want the artillery right now. Over.”

Fitch came back up laughing. “OK. Let me know ASAP. Six out.”

An ant bit Mellas, who suppressed a yelp. He noticed Pat pressing his paws on the ground, holding his head back as if to push
the ants away. Several of the kids were squirting insect repellent on their faces and legs. He looked at his wristwatch. Only
five minutes had passed. More mortar shells crumped into the jungle; the explosions moved the ground beneath them yet seemed
somehow far away. Mellas slapped at a fly and missed. It circled off and landed on Skosh, who did exactly the same thing.
Two more minutes went by. Daniels told the mortars to hold off for a minute. One of the kids was cautiously moving his leg
back and forth, probably trying to get the blood back into a foot that had fallen asleep. The fly landed on Mellas again.
Then the jungle ripped apart.

It was as if someone had torn a sheet of solid sound. The M-16s, on full automatic, screamed, making Mellas wince and shut
his eyes. Just a few meters in front of him he could hear the slower, more solid hammering of the heavier-caliber NVA AK-47s.
Mellas, who had buried his face in the earth, now raised his eyes, trying to see through the jungle to where the sound originated.
Quick bursts from the lighter, higher-velocity M-16s of Rider’s fire team were going off; the bursts alternated as one rifleman
would cover for another who was slamming in a new magazine. The blurred screams of the M-16s on full automatic answered the
slower and heavier slapping of the AK-47s. The AK bullets cracked overhead, cutting branches in two. Leaves, bark, and splinters
rained down on the men’s helmets and backs. There was a short explosive pop followed almost immediately by the thud of a much
louder explosion as Gambaccini got off a grenade round. Uphill from them, someone was shouting. There were crashing sounds
in the jungle. The radio was screaming. “What the fuck’s going on? You being hit? Over.”

Mellas could scarcely talk because of the blood pounding in his throat. The air was crazy with the ear-hammering noise of
automatic weapons. “That’s a neg.” Mellas was unaware that he was shouting. “It’s the basketball team. Over.”

“Where are they? Give me a pos rep. Over.” Fitch’s voice steadied Mellas, who had to cover one ear with his hand to hear what
Fitch was
saying. “About twenty-five meters bearing zero-four-five. Maybe less. I don’t know. I can’t see shit.” Mellas’s words were
coming out in gasps.

“Get your arty cranked up. You want the sixties dropped in closer? Over.”

“That’s a neg.” Mellas gasped for air. “Don’t know where the team is.” Panting. “Character Delta’s going up on the arty net
now. Over.”

Mellas was bewildered by the suddenness of it all. It had been so methodical, so easy. Now he couldn’t even tell where the
fire was coming from. Should he go after Rider or wait for him? Questions rattled through his head, but no answers came. He
decided to stay put.

An AK-47 bullet with just enough energy left to keep moving after it exited from a thick brush stem fluttered over Mellas’s
head with a high-pitched whine and lost itself in the dense jungle behind him.

Then there was silence. It was as if the last shattering burst had killed all sound. Everyone was breathing rapidly. Mole
was digging his toes into the earth behind the machine gun, the stock pulled in tight to his shoulder, staring down the barrel
as if trying to cut through the jungle with his eyes.

There were no sounds from the forest.

Mellas crawled up next to Connolly and whispered, “We’ve got to get in touch with Rider.”

Connolly nodded. He cupped his hands and called out in a strangled half whisper, “Rider?” His voice carried through the silence
like a shaft of light through a dark cave. No answer. An insect started to chirrup again. “Rider, get your ass back in here.
Call my name when you get close so we’ll know it’s you.” Connolly turned to Mellas. “He ain’t hardly going to yell back, sir.”

The radio hissed with static. Mellas knew what was coming. “This is Bravo Six. We need a sit rep. Big John is creaming his
jeans. Over.”

“Six, this is One Actual. No change yet. Over.”

There was a long pause. Fitch knew as well as anyone that, at the moment, to go looking for Rider would be insane. He’d be
shooting anything that moved. So would any number of NVA. The radio hissed again. “I copy. But you’ve got to get me a sit
rep ASAP. Over.”

“I copy. We’re working on it. Over.”

“Roger that. Bravo Six out.”

Three long minutes went by. Then they heard a sound in the bushes. Rifles moved in unison, focusing on the single sound. Connolly’s
hand was up, holding the fire. A whisper cut through the bush. “Conman?”

Rifles relaxed.

“Here,” Conman whispered back.

A brief commotion followed, then Rider came scrambling into the perimeter, crouched low, followed by his two team members
and Gambaccini with the M-79 still smoking from the barrel. They threw themselves to the ground.

Rider crawled over to Mellas. He was breathing hard. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat. His utility shirt reeked.
“Two gooks,” he said. “Maybe more. We saw each other at the same time.” His chest heaved, trying to pull in more air. “We
both opened up. We hit the deck. Shot shit out of everything. I may have hit one. They dee-deed.”

“Which way?”

Rider shook his head negatively. “Fuck if I know. Downhill.”

“That’d be south,” Mellas said, pulling out his map. He pulled the squad back while Daniels worked over the area south and
east of them with artillery and mortar fire, controlling the 105-millimeters from his own radio and the 60-millimeters from
Skosh’s radio. After about fifteen minutes the squad moved into the worked-over area, everyone on the alert, Pat quivering
with excitement but under perfect control by Arran.

Pat picked up a trail and started tracking. The squad followed Pat down into the valley. They worked through thicker and thicker
growth, occasionally seeing a torn bush, a broken tree limb, or fresh dirt from the artillery. Other than these small signs
and the smell of the explosive, the half-hour fire mission and fight had made no impression on the jungle at all. The Marines
began to grow weary.

The radio cracked. “Bravo One, this is Bravo Six. Big John wants an after-action report. He can’t wait any longer. He’s got
to see Bushwhacker Six. I’ve also got Golf Six on my back wanting to know how his artillery did. Over.”

“Wait one,” Mellas said. He sighed, holding the handset in front of his mouth, thinking. Mellas wanted to believe something
had happened, something good that he could report. They’d shot up a quarter of an hour’s worth of shells. Rider had done an
incredible job checking out the alert. No one had been hurt. It was a good job. Mellas wanted to believe they’d done well.
He wanted to, so he did.

“Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Our character Romeo feels certain he got one right when he opened up. He only saw two gooks,
but from the sound of things there had to be more than that. We got a probable for sure. Over.”

There was a pause. “What about the artillery damage assessment? Over.”

Mellas looked at Skosh. Skosh shook his head and spat, still leaning over. “I don’t know. I’m just the fucking radioman.”

Conman spoke up. “Give them a fucking probable and get the arty off the skipper’s back. They’ll never leave us alone if we
don’t, sir.”