The Generals (40 page)

When the firing inside the prison died down, Geoff left the corridor and went outside to see how the mine-clearing operation was proceeding.

He saw that teams of Berets had fanned out around the landing zones. When they were on opposite sides, two hundred yards from each other on the roughly square landing zones, there came other shotgun-like sounds. The United States Coast Guard Supply Depot at Cape May, New Jersey, had not long ago had its stock of eleven line-throwing devices completely depleted in a sudden, and unexplained, priority requisition.

White line snaked through the air from one side of the landing field to the other. Green Berets caught it in the air, or fished it out of small trees. Then, very carefully, they began to pull the line toward them.

To the lines were now attached—every twelve feet—three-pound blocks of Composition C-3, over which had carefully been taped a sandbag. These would direct the force of any explosion downward, into the ground.

The ropes were pulled in very slowly and carefully, until the field was criss-crossed with explosive charges.

Two Berets hooked up detonation devices. Each was capable of detonating the entire system of charges. But there were a pair of both detonators and operators in case one was taken out. If both were taken out, two more Berets would place and blow C-3 charges and short fuses. This would blow the rest—it was devoutly hoped—by a physical phenomenon known as “sympathetic detonation.”

“Fire in the hole!” a voice shouted.

A moment later, there was an awesome roar. And a moment after that the shock wave nearly knocked Lowell and others off the roof. But there was no secondary explosion. The Coast Guard’s reluctant contribution to Operation Monte Cristo and the elaborate plans for redundancy had proved unnecessary.

Lowell took his miniaturized ground-to-air transmitter from his pocket. But it was unnecessary to talk to the Chinook crews. They had seen the explosion, and were already making an approach to the landing site.

He waited until he saw MacMillan leap from the first Chinook. Once Mac was on the ground, defense of the prison was his responsibility.

“Ok, Ski,” Lowell said. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Wojinski took a folding grappling hook that had been strapped to his leg and smashed the terra cotta roof beam away. He next unfolded the grappling hook, sank two of its points into a now exposed wooden beam and tugged it with all his weight. Then he threw the line down into the courtyard. He waited now for Lowell.

“Shit,” he said, as Lowell took the line in his hand. “All that fucking around with the line-throwers for nothing.”

Lowell pushed himself from the roof and started down the line. Six feet down the side of the building, he found himself looking through rusty one-inch bars into the hollow, blank eyes of a cadaverous unshaven white man.

He had already dropped another six feet—out of sight—before he finally understood that he had been looking at one of the men they had come to get. The dull-eyed skeleton behind the bars was a commissioned officer of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

One of the captains in Force I was waiting for him, holding his M-16A3 loosely in his hand.

“Mac’s down,” Lowell said.

“Can’t find any keys, Craig,” Geoffrey Craig replied.

“Oh, shit!”

Since Intelligence had reported the steel doors of the masonry cells were locked with padlocks (one at the bottom and one at the top), it had been hoped that keys would be locally available.

“No turnkeys?” Lowell asked.

“Two,” Geoff answered. “Both had keys that opened a lock on the little doors they fed them through. But nothing that opens the padlocks on the doors.”

“You put the torches to work?” Lowell asked.

“Yes, sir,” Geoff said. He nodded toward the passageway through the building. A cloud of dense white smoke was curling out of it, close to the ground. As Lowell watched, a Beret came stumbling out of a side corridor, coughing and rubbing his eyes.

“Goddamn,” Lowell said. “We didn’t think about the damned smoke.”

Geoff looked at him, but said nothing.

“There’s nothing that can be done, I suppose,” Lowell said. “But go ahead and do what you’re doing.”

“If we torched the Jolly Green now,” Geoff suggested, “the heat might draw some of the smoke upward.”

“And it might not,” Lowell said. He went to the sergeant, who was leaning against the stone walls, coughing, and helped himself to a half dozen of the previously prepared thermite charges.

They were small, foil-wrapped packages, which were ignited with a twenty-second pull-fuse; and they would literally melt the hinges from the cell doors.

Lowell took a deep breath, and then ran into the side corridor. Ten feet inside, his eyes began to tear; and twenty feet inside, he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He moved to the side, found the wall with his hand, and moved down it.

The balls of his fingers were suddenly burned. He had come to a door to which the thermite charges had already been applied. He decided against trying to pull the door down (it would be better to wait until the smoke cleared) and moved farther down the corridor. The third door down had not been torched. He pulled the plastic protector from the adhesive that backed the charge and put it in place, immediately pulling the fuse cord. It began to hiss. Then he dropped to his knees and put the second charge in place and ignited that.

Then he grew dizzy. He was suddenly terrified, soaked with sweat. He didn’t want to die of asphyxiation.

On his hands and knees, he crawled as rapidly as he could to the central passageway. Then he got to his feet, coughing heavily, and staggered out the front of the prison.

Someone handed him a canteen. He took a deep swallow. It wasn’t water, it was whiskey.

“You sonofabitch!” he spluttered.

“Colonel, you want water, I got water,” the Green Beret said, deeply embarrassed, and handed him another canteen. “I thought you needed a drink.”

Lowell spat up some of the water, and then took a drink of the whiskey. That seemed to straighten him out. He smiled at the Beret. “Thank you,” he said.

A very small skeletal man, with hair cropped very close to his head and a week’s growth of beard on his shrunken, haggard cheeks, shuffled four steps toward Lowell.

And then his hand rose haltingly in a salute.

“Malloy,” he said, “Lieutenant Commander, USN, sir.”

“The program is to get these people immediately on the choppers,” Lowell said, angrily.

“That’s what I was doing when you staggered out here,” the Green Beret said.

Lieutenant Commander Malloy of the United States Navy stood there in the gray pajamas he was wearing, his hand still raised in salute.

Lowell returned the salute, and took his arm.

“Come with me, Commander,” he said. “We’re going to take you home.”

He started to lead him out to the Chinooks, but after a few shuffling steps, gave it up. He scooped Lieutenant Commander Malloy up in his arms, carried him out to the nearest Chinook and up the ramp, and sat him on the floor.

Then he ran forward in the cabin and stuck his head up into the cockpit.

“Back this thing around so you can blow your rotors into the building,” he said.

The pilot looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“The place is full of smoke,” Lowell said. “I want you to blow it out.”

“Got it,” the pilot said.

Lowell went through the fuselage. Lieutenant Commander Malloy had gotten himself off the floor and was sitting on the nylon seats that run along the fuselage walls.

“Do you know a Major Parker?” Lowell asked.

Malloy didn’t seem to comprehend what he was being asked.

“Parker. A great big black guy.”

“He’s dead,” Commander Malloy said, tonelessly.

“You’re sure?”

Malloy nodded his head in confirmation.

The Chinook had been bumping over the ground, and then it stopped. The pitch of the engine changed, and Lowell ran down the ramp again. There was a steady, heavy pressure of air from the blades. He didn’t know how much good it would do, but it couldn’t hurt.

He heard explosions and looked up in alarm at the roof. It took him a moment to realize that the Berets, without orders, were solving the problem of the thermite smoke in their own way. They had tried blowing enormous holes in the roof. But not very much smoke rose from these, so Lowell decided that wasn’t going to work, either. Then there were other explosions, and sections of the stone wall (from already empty cells) were blown outward.

The smoke, which had settled close to the floor, now began to flow out and dissipate.

He looked around for Geoff, but didn’t at first find him. He found Tex Williams first. Williams was crying. He was leading another of the walking skeletons toward the Chinooks.

The skeleton was saying, “Is that you, Tex? Is that really you?” over and over and over.

Then he found somebody else staggering out of the passageway. Another walking cadaver—six feet three and no more than a hundred pounds. The cadaver made it outside and then leaned against the wall. Lowell ran to him, afraid he was about to pass out.

The cadaver looked at him out of sunken, bloodshot eyes. He had the shredded remnants of a green beret on his head.

“You sure took your fucking sweet time to get here, rich boy,” Major Philip Sheridan Parker IV said.

Lowell wrapped his arms around him, partly because he was so glad to see him, and partly because he knew he couldn’t talk for the moment.

Finally, he broke the embrace, and, his voice stiff and artificial, said, “Come on, Phil, I’ll put you on the Chinook.”

“Nevertheless, under the circumstances,” Major Parker IV said, his own voice breaking, “you may consider yourself pardoned.”

On the way to the Chinook, he found Geoff and Geoff’s radio man.

“I’ll take care of the major,” Geoff said. “Mac’s on the horn.”

Lowell passed Parker into Geoff’s arms and motioned for the radio handset.

“Mac, this is Duke,” he said.

“How’s it going?”

“Oh, we’re holding all right,” Mac replied. “But I hear some tanks, I think.”

“Great!” Lowell said. Even with the TOW, Mac could not hold against tanks. All he had was small arms.

“How’s it going over there?”

“No problem,” Lowell said.

“Oh, shit, they are tanks,” Mac said, and the carrier went dead. A moment later, over the roar of the helicopter engines, there came a heavy, dull noise. A tank’s fuel cells blowing. Lowell knew the sound.

Geoff came back from the Chinook.

“We’re in trouble,” Lowell said.

“We’ve got thirty-nine out, Colonel,” Geoff said. “Nineteen to go.”

“Forty-one,” Lowell corrected him. Two more prisoners, one thrown over a Green Beret’s shoulders in the fireman’s carry and the other cradled like a baby in the arms of CWO Jefferson, were on their way from the prison building to the waiting choppers.

The radio operator pushed Lowell’s arm with the handset.

“Go ahead,” Lowell said, taking it.

“I just had three blown away,” Mac reported, laconically. “They’re shooting canister, Duke.” Canister is an artillery round loaded with thousands of steel balls—an enormous shotgun shell that is very effective against exposed troops.

“Can you get the bodies?”

“Parts of them,” Mac replied.

“We’ve got seventeen to go,” Lowell said. “You can start pulling back in a couple of minutes, but wait for the word.”

“Yeah,” Mac said, and the carrier went off the air again.

Two prisoners went crazy. Both crouched in corners and fought off ferociously all attempts by the Berets to lead them out until Mr. Jefferson finally got them to come along. It took brute force to do it.

“All we can find are loaded, sir,” Geoff said. “I can’t find Petrofski.”

“I would hate to leave anybody here,” Lowell said. “Are we sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

Lowell motioned for the radio handset.

“Let’s go home, Mac,” he said.

“Something’s wrong with Colonel Mac,” a fresh voice said.

“Who’s this?” Lowell snapped. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Sergeant Knowlton, sir. I dunno. He all of a sudden started spitting blood from the mouth—”

“Withdraw, Sergeant. Bring your dead and wounded with you,” Lowell ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Make sure you bring the TOWs. Or blow them up.”

“They’re already blown, Colonel,” the sergeant replied.

Lowell turned to Geoff.

“Torch the Jolly Green,” Lowell ordered. He ran toward the cluster of Chinooks. They all seemed intact, their rotors turning. He climbed up the side of the nearest one and stuck his head in the copilot’s window.

“Contact Gander Leader,” he said. “Tell him to execute Angry Gander.”

The copilot already had the frequency dialed in. He pushed his mike button.

Of all birds, the female goose—or gander—is the fiercest in protecting its young.

The first Navy fighter bomber of Gander Flight screamed in at 550 knots to lay napalm, 20-mm cannon fire, and 4.5-inch rockets on the North Vietnamese forces attempting to move toward the Dak Tae prison compound. Then a short, squat Green Beret who didn’t look like he was large enough for his burden, ran up to Lowell’s Chinook and dumped Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan, quite obviously dead, on the cabin floor.

“I don’t know what happened, Colonel,” the Green Beret said. “He wasn’t shot or nothing.”

“What did happen?” Lowell asked.

“Well, we had two TOWs left, and Colonel Mac went out after a tank.”

“
He
went out after a tank?”

“Yes, sir. And he got it,” the sergeant said. “And then he came running back and said there was another tank and picked up the other TOW. And he said, ‘Oh, shit’ and there was blood in his mouth, so I figured he caught a round. Then he fell down and I looked for the wound and there wasn’t any.”

Patton
, Lowell remembered,
expressed regret that he had not been killed with the last round fired in the last battle. Mac was too damned old to be running around taking out T-34 tanks with TOWs. But maybe a heart attack, or an embolism, or a stroke, or whatever had killed him was the next best thing to the last round in the last battle. This would have been Mac’s last battle, as it will be mine
.