Time to Hunt (25 page)

Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.

He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away.
He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.

Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device, slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its ’chute opened and it began to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white. It was snowing light.

Bob was shooting now.

The last act had begun.

T
hey were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as possible. Still, they weren’t targets so much as possibilities, squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it descended.

He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He’d had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty.
God, I killed some boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was death today, I was the Marine Corps’s finest creation, the stone killer, destroying all that moved before me
.

Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn’t locate him, and he was so close, and now the bossman had made a decision—to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a Russian general had put it.

It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can’t kill us all. We will defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won this war; that is how we will win this battle.

He could hear sergeants screaming,
“Bi! Bi! Bi!”
meaning “go, go, go,” urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go, clearly. He’d gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most disciplined of troops to face.

He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He fired again, quickly, in the fading light; then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets, so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass, emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.

X
o Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second, drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His soul flew away to be with his ancestors.

“We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!” a young soldier screamed.

“Shut up, you fool,” yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.

“They’re on the left this time,” he screamed again, because he had seen the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.

“On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!”

His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs, ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.

He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone of light; he was the target. It didn’t matter. His life didn’t matter.

“Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left; Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement; weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic weapons one hundred meters to the right.”

He waited for the sniper to kill him.

But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am. Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the torch.

“There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him,” Huu Co shouted.

A
s he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time, filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through the scope, jacked up three times: he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed
outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling desperately.

Commanding officer, he thought.

Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!

Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the trigger with—
damn!
—enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died. He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed, mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.

Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.

Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired, taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.

Got you
.

You’re it
.

You’re the man
.

He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him, whoever he was.

The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment. He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough, very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so bright as the flare descended.

Bob took a second’s worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of the instant, the reticle had even materialized; the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel’s chest, and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the
snap
of a piece of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death from afar was sent upon its way.

But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire. Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.

Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor, sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet, deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.

Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of survival.

He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the stalks. He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain was excruciating.

He saw it very clearly:
I am dead. I die now. This is it
. But no life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss, recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.

He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as the world seemed to explode around him.

He didn’t know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only one phrase like a mantra:
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die
.

He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time, seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.

He got so far when someone shouted, and then, goddamn
them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as if it were an aquarium.

In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light, but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the night as another dozen or so green Chicóm flares popped.

This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly,
“Julie is beautiful, Julie is beautiful!,”
saw Donny rise above him with his M14 in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of the night on his butt, and dove into Donny’s shallow hole.

“Claymores!” he screamed.

“They’re not close enough!” Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to destroy them.

“Now!” he screamed.

“No!” screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices. Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.

D
onny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380 with no extra magazines. Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a bayonet.

That was it.

“Shit,” said Donny.

“We’re cooked,” said Bob.

“Shit,” said Donny.

“I fucked up,” said Bob. “Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn’t have to come back up this hill. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Donny.

The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they’d carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn’t clear yet what their next move would be. They hadn’t fired any flares recently, but they were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.

“They may think we have more Claymores,” he said. “But probably they don’t.”

It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after the blasts. Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing. A cold wind whipped through the night.

“They’ll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way. Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way.”

“We tried,” said Donny.

“We fought a hell of a fight,” said Bob. “We hung ’em
up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you.”

“I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified.”

“You ever file that marriage report?”

“No. It didn’t seem important. No off-post living in the ’Nam.”

“Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don’t you?”

“Oh, she doesn’t need the money. They have money. My brothers could use it for school. It’s okay the way it is.”

Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill, the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.

“I lost the picture,” Donny said. “That’s what bothers me.”

“Julie’s picture?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that flank security unit. I don’t remember. My hat fell off.”

“It was in your hat?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, tell you what, I can’t git you out of here and I can’t git you the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back, would you say I done okay by you?”

“You always did okay by me.”