Time to Hunt (20 page)

Finally: you, little brother. An officer, youngish, with the three stars of a captain lieutenant, at the head of an infantry platoon. He would go first; then, back swiftly, to a radio operator; then, swing left as you run the bolt, and go for the guy with the Chicom RPD 56, put him down, then fall back. That was the plan, and any plan was better than no plan.

The reticle of the Redfield scope wobbled downward,
bouncing ever so slightly, tracking the first mark, staying with him as the shooter took his long breath, hissed a half of it out, found bone to lock under the rifle, told himself again to keep the gun moving as he fired, prayed to God for mercy for all snipers, and felt the trigger break cleanly.

“G
ooooooood morning, Vietnam,” said the guy on Captain Taney’s portable, “and hello to all you guys out there in the rain. Well, fellas, I’ve got some bad news. Looks like that old Mr. Sun is
still
AWOL. That’s UA, for you leathernecks. Nobody’s gonna stop the rain
today
. But it’ll be great for the flowers, and maybe Mr. Victor Charles will stay indoors himself today, because his mommy won’t let him outside to play.”

“What a moron,” said Captain Taney, Arizona’s XO.

“The weather should break tonight, as a high pressure zone over the Sea of Japan looks like it’s making a beeline for—”

“Shit,” said Puller.

Why did he put himself through this? It would break when it would break.

Standing in the parapet outside his command bunker, he glanced around in the low light, watching the floating mist as it seethed through the valley that lay beyond.

Should he put an OP out there, so they’d know when the 803rd was getting close?

But he no longer controlled the hills, so putting an OP out there would just get its people all killed.

The rain began to fall, thin and cold. Vietnam! Why was it so cold? He had spent so many days in country over the past eight years but never had felt it this biting before.

“Not good, sir,” said Taney.

“No, it isn’t, Taney.”

“Any idea when they’ll get here?”

“You mean Huu Co? He’s already here. He pushed ’em hard through the night and the rain. He’s no dummy. He wants us busted before our air can get up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have that ammo report ready, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Mayhorne just finished it. We have twelve thousand rounds of 5.56 left, and a couple more thousand .30 carbine rounds. We’re way low on frags, seventy-nine rounds and belted 7.62. Not a Claymore in the camp.”

“Christ.”

“I’ve got Mayhorne distributing the belted 7.62, but we’re down to five guns and I can’t cover any approach completely. We can set up a unit of quickmovers with one of the guns to jump to the assault sector, but if he hits us more than one place at once, we screw the pooch.”

“He will,” said Puller bleakly. “That’s how he operates. The pooch is screwed.”

“You know, sir, some of these ’Yards have family here in the compound. I was thinking—”

“No,” said Puller. “If you surrender, Huu Co will kill them all. That’s how he operates. We hang on, pray for a break in the weather, and if we have to, go hand to hand in the trenches with the motherfuckers.”

“Was it ever this bad in sixty-five, sir?”

Puller looked at Taney, who was about twenty-five, a good young Spec Forces captain with a tour behind him. But in sixty-five he’d been a high school hotshot; what could you tell him? Who could even remember?

“It was never this bad, because we always had air and there were plenty of firebases around. I’ve never felt so fucking on my own. That’s what trying to be the last man out gets you, Captain. Let it be a lesson. Get out, get your people out. Copy?”

“I copy, sir.”

“Okay, get the platoon leaders and the machine gun team leaders to my command post in fifteen and—”

They both heard it.

“What was that?”

“It sounded like a—”

Then another one came. A solitary rifle shot, heavy, obviously .308, echoing back and forth across the valley.

“Who the fuck is that?” Taney said.

“That’s a sniper,” said Puller.

They waited. It was silent. Then the third shot and Puller could read the signature of the weapon.

“He’s not firing fast enough for an M14. He’s shooting a bolt gun, and that means he’s a Marine.”

“A Marine? Way the hell out here in Indian Territory?”

“I don’t know who this guy is, but he sounds like he’s doing some good.”

Then came a wild barrage of full automatic fire, the lighter, crisper sound of the Chicom 7.62×39mm the AKs fired.

Then the gunfire fell silent.

“Shit,” said Taney. “Sounds like they got him.”

The sniper fired again.

“Let’s run the PRC-77 and see if we can pick up enemy radio intelligence,” Puller said. “They must be buzzing about this like crazy.”

Puller and his XO and Sergeant Blas and Y Dok, the ’Yard chieftain, all went down into the bunker.

“Cameron,” Puller said to his commo NCO, “you think you’ve got any juice left in the PRC-77?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s do a quick scan. See if you can get me enemy freaks. They ought to be close enough to pick up.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, if air comes and we need to talk ’em in—”

“Air isn’t coming today, Cameron. Not today. But maybe someone else has.”

Cameron fiddled with the radio mast on the PRC-77, snapping a cord so that it flew free above the wood and dirt of the roof, then clicked it on, and began to diddle with the frequency dials.

“They like to operate in the twelve hundreds,” he said. He pulled through the nets, not bringing anything up except static, the fucking United States Navy bellowing about beating the Air Force Academy in a basketball game and—

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” said Puller, leaning forward. “Can’t you get us in a little tighter?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, sir?” asked Taney.

“Oh, yes, yessy, yessy, yessy,” said the head man Y Dok, who wore the uniform of a major in the ARVN, except for the red tribal scarf around his neck, “yep, is dem, yep, is dem!” He was a merry little man with blackened teeth and an inexhaustible lust for war, afraid, literally, of nothing.

“Dok, can you follow?” asked Puller, whose Vietnamese was good but not great. He was getting odd words—
attack, dead, halt
—and he couldn’t follow the verb tenses; they seemed to be describing a world he couldn’t imagine.

“Oh, he say they under assault on right by platoon strength of marksmen. Snipers. The snipers come for them.
Ma my
, ’merican ghosts. He says most officers dead, and most machine gun team leaders also—
oh!
Oh, now he dead too. Y Dok hear bullet hit him as he talk. Good shit, I tell you, Major Puller, got good deaths going, oh, so very many good deaths.”

“A platoon?” said Taney. “The nearest Marine firebase is nearly forty klicks away, if it hasn’t rotated out. How could they get a platoon over here? And why would they send a platoon?”

“It’s not a platoon,” said Puller. “They couldn’t—no, not overland, across that terrain, not without being bounced. But a team.”

“A team?”

“Marine sniper teams are two-men shows. They can move like hell if they have to. Jesus, Taney, listen to this and be aware of the privilege you’ve been accorded. What you are hearing is one man with a rifle taking on a battalion-strength unit of about three hundred men.”

“Dey say dey got him,” said Y Dok.

“Shit,” said Taney.

“God bless him,” said Puller. “He put up a hell of a fight.”

“Dey say, ’merican is dead and head man say, You
fellas get going, you got to push on to the end of the valley and de officer say, Yes, yes, he going to—
oh. Oh ho ho ho!”
He laughed, showing his blackened little teeth.

“No. No, no, no, no. He got dem! Oh, yes, he just killed man on radio. I hear scream. Oh, he is a man who knows the warrior’s walk, dot I know. He got the good deaths, very many, going on.”

“You can say that again,” said Puller.

W
hen the trigger broke, the North Vietnamese captain lieutenant turned as if to look at Bob just once before he died. All the details were frozen for a second: he was a small man, even by NVA standards, with binoculars and a pistol. An instant ago, he had been full of life and zeal. When the bullet struck him, it sucked everything from him and he stood with grave solemnity, colorless, as all the hopes and dreams departed him. If he had a soul, this would be where it fled to whatever version of heaven sustained him. Then it was over: with the almost stiff dignity of formal ceremony, he toppled forward.

Bob threw his bolt fast, tossing out the spent shell, but never breaking his eye relief with the scope, a good trick it only took a lifetime to master. In the perfect circle of nine magnifications, he saw the men who were his targets looking at one another in utter confusion. There was no inscrutability in their expression: they were dumbfounded, because this was not supposed to happen, not in the rain, in the fog, in the perfect freedom of their attack, not after their long night march, their good discipline, their toughness, their belief. They had no immediate theory to explain it. No, this was not possible.

Bob pivoted the rifle just a bit, found a new target, and felt the jolt as the rifle fired. Two hundred yards out and two tenths of a second later, the 173-grain bullet arrived at 2,300 odd feet per second. The tables say that at that range and velocity, it will pack close to two thousand foot-pounds of energy, and it hit this man, a machine gun team leader standing near his now dead commanding officer, low in his stomach, literally turning him inside out. That was what such a big bullet did: it operated on him, opening his intimate biological secrets to those around him,
not a killing shot, but one that would bleed him out in minutes.

Quickly Bob found another and within the time it takes to blink an eyelash, fired for the third time and set that one down, too.

The North Vietnamese did not panic, though they could not hope to pick out Bob in the fog, and the muzzle blast was diffused; they only knew he was on the right somewhere. Someone calmly issued orders; the men dropped and began to look for a target. A squad formed to flank off to the right and come around. It was standard operating procedure for a unit with much experience and professionalism.

But Bob slithered away quickly, and when he felt the fog overwhelm him, he stood and ran ahead, knowing he had but a few seconds to relocate. Would they take the casualties and continue to march? Would they send out flanking parties; would they take the time to set up mortars? What will they do? he wondered.

He ran one hundred yards fast, slipping three new cartridges into the breech as he jounced along, because he didn’t want to waste time loading when he had targets. That was shooting time, precious. He slipped down off the incline onto the valley floor and crouched as he moved through the elephant grass, an odd nowhere place sealed off by vapors. He came at last to the center of the track, and got a good visual without the grass: he was now three hundred yards away and saw only the dimmest of shapes in the fog. Sinking to a quick, rice-paddy squat, he put the glass to them, put the crosshairs on one, quartering them high to account for a little drop at that distance, and squeezed the trigger. Maybe he was shooting at a stump. But the blob fell, and when he quartered another, it fell too. He did that twice more, and then the blobs disappeared; they’d dropped into the grass or had withdrawn, he couldn’t tell.

Now what?

Now back.

The flankers will come, but slowly, thinking possibly they’re up against a larger force
.

Not even bothering to crouch, he ran again, full force through the mist. Suddenly the NVA opened up and he dropped. But the sleet of firepower did not come his way and seemed more of a probing effort, a theoretical thing meant to hit him where, by calculation, he should be. He watched as tracers hunted him a good hundred yards back, liquid splashes of neon through the fog, so quick and gossamer they seemed like optical illusions. When they struck the earth, they ripped it up, a blizzard of splashy commotion. Then the firing stopped.

He dropped, squirmed ahead and came to a crook in a tree. Quickly he slipped four more rounds into the M40’s breech, throwing the last one home and locking the bolt downward with the sensation of a vault door closing.

The rifle came up to him, and he seemed to have lucked into a thinner spot in the veil of fog, where suddenly they were quite visible. An officer was talking on the radio phone as around him men fanned out. Bob killed the officer, killed two of the men. Then he got a good shot at a man with four RPGs on his back squirming for cover, put the crosshairs onto a warhead and fired once. Force multiplier: the quadruple detonation ripped a huge gout in the earth, possibly driving others back, possibly killing some of them.

He didn’t wait to count casualties, or even take a quick look at his results. He crawled again through the high elephant grass, the sweat pouring off him. He crawled for what seemed like the longest time. Tracer rounds floated aimlessly overhead, clipping the grass, making the odd
whup
sound a bullet fighting wind will make. Once, when the firing stopped, he thought he sensed men around him and froze, but nothing happened. When at last he found some trees so that he could go back to work, he discovered he was much farther back in the column. Before him, as the vapors drifted and seethed, were some men who seemed less soldiers than beasts of burden, so laden were
they with their equipment. This was simple murder; he took no pleasure in it, but neither did he consider it deeply. Targets? Take them down, eliminate them, take them out. Numbly he did the necessary.

H
uu Co, senior colonel, had a problem. It wasn’t the firepower; there wasn’t much firepower. It was the accuracy.

“When he shoots, brother Colonel,” his officer told him, “he hits us. He is like a phantom. The men are losing their spirit.”