* * *
‘Call him?’ Maxwell asked.
‘No, not now.’ Captain Albie shook his head. ‘He’ll call us. Mr Clark is busy right now. We leave him be.’ Irvin came into the Combat Information Center.
‘Clark?’ the master gunnery sergeant asked.
‘On the run,’ Albie told him.
‘Want me and some people on Rescue One, riding shotgun?’ That they would try to get Clark out was not a question. Marines have an institutional loathing of leaving people behind.
‘My job, Irvin,’ Albie said.
‘Better you run the rescue, sir,’ Irvin said reasonably. ‘Anybody can shoot a rifle.’
Maxwell, Podulski, and Greer stayed out of the conversation, watching and listening to two professionals who knew what they were about. The Marine commander bent to the wisdom of his most senior NCO.
‘Take what you need.’ Albie turned to Maxwell. ‘Sir, I want Rescue One up now.’
The Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Air) handed over the headset to a Marine officer only twenty-eight years old; with it came tactical command of the busted mission. With it went the end of Dutch Maxwell’s career.
It was less fearful to be moving. Movement gave Kelly the feeling that he had control of his life. It was an illusion, and intellectually he knew it, but his body took the message that way, which made things better. He got to the bottom of the hill, into thicker growth. There. Right across the road was an open space, a meadow or something, maybe a floodplain area from the river. That would do just fine. Nothing fancy. He grabbed his radio.
‘SNAKE to CRICKET, over.’
‘This is CRICKET. We read you, and we are standing by.’
The message came in gasps, spoken one short breath at a time: ‘West of my hill, past the road, about two miles west of objective, open field. I’m close. Send the helo. I can mark with strobe.’
Albie looked at the map, then the aerial photos. Okay, that looked easy enough. He stabbed a finger on the map, and the air-control petty officer relayed the information at once. Albie waited for the confirmation before transmitting back to Clark.
‘Roger, copy. Rescue One is moving in now, two-zero minutes away.’
‘Copy that.’ Albie could hear the relief in Clark’s voice through the static. ‘I’ll be ready. Out.’
Thank you. God.
Kelly took his time now, moving slowly and quietly towards the road. His second sojourn into North Vietnam wouldn’t end up being as long as the first. He didn’t have to swim out this time, and with all the shots he’d gotten before coming in, maybe this time he wouldn’t be getting sick from the water in that goddamned river. He didn’t so much relax as lose some of his tension. As though on cue, the rain picked up, dampening noise and reducing visibility. More good news. Maybe God or fate or the Great Pumpkin hadn’t decided to curse him after all. He stopped again, ten meters short of the road, and looked around. Nothing. He gave himself a few minutes to relax and let the stress bleed off. There was no sense in hurrying across just to be in open ground. Open ground was dangerous for a man alone in enemy territory. His hands were tight on his carbine, the infantryman’s teddy bear, as he forced himself to breathe deeply and slowly in order to bring his heart rate down. When he felt approximately normal again, he allowed himself to approach the road.
Miserable roads, Grishanov thought, even worse than those in Russia. The car was something French, oddly enough. More remarkably, it ran fairly well, or would have done so, except for the driver. Major Vinh ought to have driven it himself. As an officer he probably knew how, but status-conscious fool that he was, he had to let his orderly do it, and this little lump of a peasant probably didn’t know how to drive anything more complicated than an ox. The car was swerving in the mud. The driver was having trouble seeing in the rain as well. Grishanov closed his eyes in the rear seat, clutching his backpack. No sense watching. It might just scare him to watch. It was like flying in bad weather, he thought, something no pilot relished – even less so when someone else was in control.
He waited, looking before crossing, listening for the sound of a truck’s engine, which was the greatest danger to him. Nothing. Okay, about five minutes on the helo now. Kelly stood erect, reaching back with his left hand for the marker-strobe. As he crossed the road, he kept looking to his left, the route that additional troop trucks would take to approach the now entirely secure prison camp. Damn!
Rarely had concentration ever worked against John Kelly, but it did this time. The sound of the approaching car, swishing through the muddy surface of the road, was a little too close to the environmental noises, and by the time he recognized the difference it was too late. When the car came around the bend, he was right in the middle of the road, standing there like a deer in the headlights, and surely the driver must see him. What followed was automatic.
Kelly brought his carbine up and fired a short burst into the driver’s area. The car didn’t swerve for a moment, and he laid a second burst into the front-passenger seat. The car changed directions then, slamming directly into a tree. The entire sequence could not have taken three seconds, and Kelly’s heart started beating again after a dreadfully long hiatus. He ran to the car. Whom had he killed?
The driver had come through the windshield, two rounds in his brain. Kelly wrenched open the passenger door. The person there was – the Major! Also hit in the head. The shots weren’t quite centered, and though the man’s skull was opened on the right side, his body was still quivering. Kelly yanked him out of the vehicle and had knelt down to search him before he heard a groan from the inside. He lunged inside, finding another man – Russian! – on the floor in the rear. Kelly pulled him out, too. The man had a backpack clutched in his hands.
The routine came as automatically as the shot. Kelly clubbed the Russian to full unconsciousness with his buttstock, then quickly turned back to rifle the Major’s uniform for intelligence material. He stuffed all documents and papers into his pockets. The Vietnamese was looking at him, one of his eyes still functioning.
‘Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?’ Kelly said coldly as the eyes lost their animation.
‘What the hell do I do with you?’ Kelly asked, turning to the Russian body. You’re the guy who’s been hassling our guys, aren’t you?’ He knelt there, opening the backpack and finding whole sheaves of paper, which answered his question for him – something the Soviet colonel was singularly unable to do.
Think fast, John – the helo isn’t very far out now.
‘I got the strobe!’ the copilot said.
‘Coming in hot.’ The pilot was driving his Sikorsky as hard as the engines would allow. Two hundred yards short of the clearing he pulled back sharply on the cyclic, and the forfy-five-degree nose-up attitude stopped forward motion quickly – perfectly in fact, as he leveled out within feet of the blinking infrared strobe light. The rescue helicopter came to a steady hover two feet over the deck, buffeted by the winds. The Navy commander was fighting all manner of forces to hold his aircraft steady, and was slow to respond to something his eyes had told him. He had seen the rotor wash knock his intended survivor down, but –
‘Did I see two people out there?’ he asked over the intercom.
‘Co go go!’ another voice said over the IC circuit. ‘Pax aboard now, go!’
‘Getting the hell outa Dodge City, now!’ The pilot pulled collective for altitude, kicked rudder pedal, and dropped his nose, heading back to the river as the helicopter accelerated. Wasn’t there just supposed to be one person? He set it aside. He had to fly now, and it was thirty twisty miles to the water and safety.
‘Who the fuck is this?’ Irvin asked.
‘Hitchhiker,’ Kelly answered over the din of the engines. He shook his head. Explanations would be lengthy and would have to wait. Irvin understood, offering him a canteen. Kelly drained it. That’s when the shaking started. In front of the helicopter crew and five Marines, Kelly shivered like a man in the Arctic, huddling and clutching himself, holding his weapon close until Irvin took it away and cleared it. It had been fired, the master gunnery sergeant saw. Later he’d find out why and at what. The door gunners scanned the river valley while their aircraft screamed out, barely a hundred feet over the meandering surface. The ride proved uneventful, far different from what they had expected, as was the case with this whole night. What had gone wrong? they all wanted to know. The answer was in the man they’d just picked up. But who the hell was the other one, and wasn’t that a Russian uniform? Two Marines sat over him. One of them tied his hands up. A third secured the pack’s flap in place with the straps.