Attaching the silencer and the StarLight to his rifle, Alexander leaned over the rocks in the blackness, aiming the muzzle at the perimeter men. The rifle was steady in his hands.
“What are you going to do?” whispered Richter, who had woken up to change sentry and crawled next to Alexander. “Pick them off one by one?” He leaned against the rocks, rubbing his face.
“If you say so, Colonel Richter,” said Alexander. “I never disobey my commanding officer. One by one, tomorrow, while they sleep. It’ll take me fifteen seconds. No one will even notice.”
At two in the morning, a chopper lifted off from just beyond the village, having been camouflaged in daylight, and thup-thuped away.
“Well, looky at that,” said Elkins, who had also woken up. Richter had ordered the men to rest, but most of them were now stirring, as if they were not supposed to be sleeping either.
“Nice Soviet Kamov helicopter they’ve got there,” Alexander said to Richter. “I didn’t know that friendly, women-run Vietnamese villages had much need of Soviet military aircraft. But then what do I know? I’m only in MI, not on the ground, like you fellas.” He refocused his rifle sight.
Elkins pointed at something else through his green-eye. “Look over there,” he said. “At the back of the camp, there’s nothing but sandbags on that low flat rectangular roof. Missed it during the day. But what do you think they’re keeping under those sandbags?”
Alexander thought of the sandbagged statue of the Bronze Horseman and smiled to himself.
“Same thing we keep under ours in Kontum.” That is, heavy artillery in the ammunition supply points. “What’s interesting about theirs, though,” Alexander said, “is how long the sandbag roof is. In Kontum, ours are maybe fifteen feet. Theirs runs probably forty-five feet across. That’s not a supply point. It’s a supply dump.”
“What the hell is going on with this place?” said Elkins.
The men stayed low, StarLights to their faces. At four in the morning, the Kamov returned. It was Ha Si, who, without any night-vision goggles, crouched next to Alexander and Richter and said in a calm voice, “Do you see what I see?”
“No, what do you see?” Richter exclaimed with impatience. “What can you possibly see? You aren’t even wearing the green-eyes! Go the fuck to sleep.”
“Yours are obviously malfunctioning, sir,” said Ha Si. “Green-eyes, that is. Because I just saw six uniformed, heavily armed Viet Cong jump off the Kamov.”
Richter stared through his. “Oh, shit,” he said, peeling the StarLight off his face. “We are in so much fucking trouble.”
Alexander remained unfazed. “Nah,” he said calmly. “I’ve got some HE rockets that in three seconds will blow up that Kamov faster than they can say, what the fuck. We have at least ten thousand rounds between us, plus the waiting Chinook is loaded up. Say there are two hundred men down there. Ten thousand rounds for two hundred Charlies. What, not enough?”
“No,” said Richter, just as calmly. “Not nearly.”
“And, we’re on top of the hill.” Alexander—who had spent two months at the bottom of the hill in the forest of Holy Cross, with barely any ammo and certainly no M-60 machine gun with armor-piercing rounds reaching nearly four kilometers—stayed unconcerned.
Elkins and now Mercer lay down close to them.
“Colonel, I’m going to have to agree with Major Barrington,” said Elkins. “I know you’re worried about their RPG-7s, but there are twelve of us here, each with our very own, American-made rocket launchers. Two hundred and fifty 40mm buckshot grenades, plus some high explosives for good measure. I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, Elkins,” said Richter. “You couldn’t smell trouble during a Viet Cong ambush.”
And Ha Si said, “Those men aren’t Charlies, by the way, they’re Vietminh. North Vietnamese Army. The Viet Cong don’t rate Kamov choppers.”
Alexander and Richter watched the village. “You know where they live?” said Richter. “Underground. They live like rats in tunnels, in dark caves. The huts, I will bet you your Las Vegas dollar, are almost all empty. Now those are decoys. Most of their ammo, their men and their women are all hidden beneath the earth.”
“Like they’re living already in the grave,” said Alexander.
Richter was silent a moment. “Well, what do you plan to do, Major Barrington?” he asked. “Fight a war underground with twelve guys?”
“We’re not going to fight a war underground,” said Alexander. “We are going to get the girl.”
“You don’t think Anthony’s here, do you?”
A small shudder was Alexander’s only reply.
“Oh, Major!” said Richter. “He’s been gone nearly half a year. He’s probably been taken to Hanoi, to Hoa Loa.” He paused. “Please, please, for a second, entertain that possibility.”
“I don’t want to entertain that possibility,” said Alexander, “because Hoa Loa is far to walk—at least today. We’ll get the girl. Once we get her, we’ll know where Ant is.”
In the darkness, the green human shapes, like aliens, flapped around, the flapping exaggerated by the green-eyes.
Ha Si was silent. Alexander thought he was heavily silent, like he had something to say and wasn’t saying it. That was good because Alexander didn’t want to hear it. He turned to Elkins instead.
“Elkins,” he said, “the one-eyed Moon Lai, do you think she is a prisoner of the NVA in that camp below? Does she move about like a prisoner down there?”
“No, I don’t think she’s a prisoner, Major,” Elkins said, hanging his head.
“Commander, if she is one of them,” said Ha Si, finally speaking up, “she is not going to tell you a thing. We will get her, but we will not get a word out of her. She will die first.”
They groaned to acknowledge the truth of this. Only Mercer was quiet, because he’d fallen asleep where he sat, and Tojo, because he never said anything, let alone groaned. Alexander said, “I appreciate what Ha Si is saying. I don’t necessarily disagree. But we have to get the girl.” He paused. “She is our best chance of finding Anthony. Don’t you agree, Ha Si?”
Ha Si was quiet. “I think,” he said, “you have decided to get the girl. Therefore, we are going to get the girl.”
Alexander looked intently at the Yard. He wanted, needed Ha Si’s help. The Vietnamese did not disappoint him, saying to Richter, “Sir, the perimeter is guarded zealously only at night.” They had observed the sentries, awake and on high alert. “Perhaps they only expect trouble at night, but I think there are supposed to be guards on duty during the day, but are not. Personally I think they have gotten careless. Which is very good for us. So I think we should go in broad daylight.”
“Don’t fuck with me, man!” said Richter. “We’re not doing an E&E in daylight!”
“Ha Si is right, though,” said Alexander. “We must.”
“You’re both fucked up,” said Richter. “Forget it. Our mission was to find and extract one man and escape without being detected. But now our mission parameters have changed since the entire fucking Vietminh army is headquartered down there.”
The soldiers stood silently.
“We don’t have enough men for this!” Richter hissed. “You all want to be dead?”
“We’re going to have to make do with what we have,” said Alexander, adding, “Colonel.”
“How many fucking times do I to have to tell you? What you’re proposing will require a hundred men! To go underground? You don’t know what you’re up against. And you have to assume the worst. We will have to req at least two, probably three Snakes.”
“The Cobras will hurt our mission, Colonel.” That was Ha Si, and he spoke low and with respect. “The Cobra is not for clandestine work.”
“Oh, and us, here on the plateau, building fires like fiery placards: if you want us, here we are, come and get us! What do you call that?”
“We build no fires,” Alexander said defensive
ly.
Ha Si stretched out his small hand. “You are right, Colonel. Theirs does seem a large-scale op—like a crucial base of operations between the NVA and VC. The river is probably used to transport their supplies downstream on barges. If they have any prisoners, they will be kept underground in bamboo cages.” He turned to Alexander and said, eyes steady, “They torture them with rats. If your son is here, are you ready for that?” He blinked—less steady.
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Alexander was less steady himself. “We should go in tomorrow. At three. When Moon Lai goes into that hut.”
Ha Si disagreed. “No, three is too late. The sentries have had a long rest, they are up. No. We have to go in no more than an hour after they have gone to sleep. Then they will be groggy, still exhausted, drunk possibly. I have something to help them sleep a little longer.” He took out his blowgun, a simple aluminum tube, smiling lightly. “Muzzle velocity of three hundred meters per second, a little opium dart into their neck. Not bad?”
“At three hundred meters per second,” said Alexander, “that opium is passing through their necks and exiting the other side. You might as well shoot them with my Colt.”
Ha Si smiled. “Your Colt is very loud, sir. Quietly, I shoot into the back of their necks or their shoulder blades. They sleep. But we do not yet have sufficient knowledge to go in. Today we saw the girl at three in the afternoon. But she might pay her first visit early in the morning. We need to stay put one more day, watch for her early, see how the whole camp operates from morning till night. We will know when the best time to go in will be.”
Richter glared at them both. “Are you two quite fucking done? We are not going anywhere. How many Charlies you think are down there? I guarantee you, a lot more than twelve. No, I’m calling for a Hatchet force to come help us,” he said. “That’s thirty-five more guys. I don’t give a fuck anymore that we’re in North Nam. We’re going in with more men,” he continued, “we’re blowing the motherfuckers away and torching their whole fucking village. By the time anyone will come around to ask any questions, they’ll be ashes, and we’ll be back in Kontum. We’ll say we got lost. The compass broke. We went the wrong way, thought we were in hilly Laos, stumbled on this.”
Alexander put his hand on Richter. “Colonel,” he said steadily, “let’s just wait a day. One day. Your operational in charge of CCC while you’re away knows what’s happening. He’ll get you your Hatchet team in three hours. But first let’s just see if Ant is here.”
“Alexander!”
“Let’s wait.” His intense eyes bore into Richter. “Please.”
Richter grumbled that he was not Japanese and did not like kamikaze missions. That made Tojo speak! He said that he was Japanese and didn’t like them much either. Richter radioed his sleeping pilot down at the SOG base, to ask how much ordnance they had in the Chinook. Turned out plenty. The pilot had listened well. Richter told him to fly to their insert position in Laos first thing tomorrow morning and three of the Bannha would go back and retrieve more ammo.
They fell asleep where they sat and woke up in the dew two hours later as the sun was barely coming up. It was cold in the morning in the mountains, low forties, Alexander figured, wrapping himself in the trench cover. Not much tropical humidity here in the winter months. The ville had quietened down. The men had disappeared and the women appeared. Dozens of young women with their babies and their old mothers came out of the huts and ambled to the foggy basin to wash their clothes and clean their pots in the sediment run-off. Though where were they cooking? Underground? Perhaps the smoke exhaust was emptying out into the fog, undetectable.
After watching this bucolic scene for a while, a defeated Richter and a grim Alexander stared despairingly at each other.
“So, Colonel Richter, are you going to send in a Hatchet force?” Alexander asked. “To torch all the women and children?”
Richter spat on the ground. “The bastards are hiding behind them,” he said impotently. “And this is why we die, and this is why they’re going to win this fucking war. Because they don’t give a fuck about their own women, while we’re supposed to.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “More is expected of Rome.”
Richter spat again. There was to be no Hatchet.
While the women worked, the guards on the perimeter had already fallen asleep in the growing bamboo. At eight in the morning, the small dark woman, all in white with a white patch over her eye came out from her hut looking fresh from sleep. Alexander’s binocular gaze was zeroed in on her like the crosshairs of his rifle sight. Her belly protruding, she sashayed along the length of the huts, past the sleeping guards, carrying what he now saw were clean white gauze bandages, and disappeared into the farthest hooch. He waited. Twenty minutes later, she reappeared, holding unclean bandages in her hands.
Alexander’s binoculars slipped for a moment at the sight of those unclean bandages.
When she was back by the stream, Moon Lai helped an old woman to the outhouse latrine. Perhaps it was her mother, since she touched the old woman gently, and the old woman rubbed Moon Lai’s belly. Afterward, she carried two babies to a tub of water. The small boy was by her side again. The only activity on the base was near the murky soup of a river. The day got much warmer.
Alexander turned to Richter. “First of all,” he said, “I can’t think straight until I get a smoke. Second,” he continued, “scientific evidence may still be deficient in deducing the workings of that girl’s cross purposes, but our second empirical observation has told us a little bit more about her.” He paused for the inhale of his invisible cigarette. “The first thing Moon Lai does when she wakes up in the morning—before mothers, before babies, before washing herself—is disappear into that hut. And comes out twenty minutes later with filthy rags.”
“It’s probably not your son, Major Barrington,” said Elkins by way of comfort. “One-eyed, eight-fingered NVA whores are very fickle. It could be another injured john.”
“Elkins, for fuck’s sake!” said Richter. “Is this the time for jokes?”
“I wasn’t joking, sir,” Elkins said feebly.
But Alexander couldn’t help it. He was tormented by the sight of the pregnant young woman. His judgment was failing him. In her actions, in her movements, in her posture, in the sweet expression on her face, no matter how hard to see, to decipher through the distance and the distorting magnifying lenses—she reminded him of Tatiana. A half-blind, mutilated Vietnamese Tatiana. Where was Anthony? Was Alexander wrong about everything? He was weary and troubled—and in the throes of grim nicotine withdrawal. He didn’t know what to think. What would Tania think?
Miserably he watched the camp all morning and then said to Richter that either they had to go in to get Moon Lai now and not a second later or he needed to go have a cigarette now and not a second later. Richter was amused, mockingly inquiring what in the world did Alexander do in the past, when he was, say, in prison and was denied cigarettes for weeks at a time as punishment. Alexander, who was not amused in the least, unmockingly replied that unless Richter wanted to string him up by his ankles and hang him naked and upside down for eight hours, he would let him have a cigarette. Richter solemnly considered both options, but finally gave Alexander and Elkins permission to walk two kilometers into the woods. Elkins, rifle in front, could barely keep up. Deep in the jungle, Alexander sank onto his haunches in the wild bush and gratefully smoked down three cigarettes before he uttered a word. He found it only mildly ironic that he had gone nearly four years without a woman, yet could last barely twenty-four hours without nicotine.
“What’s up, Ant’s father?” said Elkins, smoking happily, and not nearly as desperately. “Worried about the snatch?”
Alexander shook his head. “I am, but that’s not it.” He dragged his smoke out because he couldn’t drag his words out.
“What? You can’t believe your son and my best friend fell for someone like her?”
Another cigarette. “That’s
a little more along what I’m thinking.”
“Major Barrington,” said Elkins, patting him comrade-like on the arm. “I’m assuming you don’t know this, but to say you’ve fallen for a young Asian beauty, even a crippled beauty, is redundant. The Asian girls are too heady for the white man. We have no weapons against them. That Anthony fell in love with that girl is now becoming quickly secondary to our main problem. What we want to know is—did he fall for the Mata Hari? Did she lure him here, her new husband, a soon-tobe-father, and then betray him?”
Alexander smoked. “Elkins,” he said, “that is what I’m thinking. But what I don’t understand is how he could have continued with her beyond the DMZ.”
Elkins shook his head. “You’re not seeing things anymore. It’s okay. You don’t have to.” He paused. “You forget how you scolded me for not seeing that we were ambushed by her eighteen months ago in Hué. I had no idea what you were talking about. Well, now I do. If she was part of that ambush, and he was blind to it then, even before he fell for her, he would’ve easily come with her quite far north after he had.”
Alexander nodded. That’s what he thought, too. But this far? What confounded him was the observable change in Mata Hari’s movements as she walked to that hut and then crawled back. Alexander couldn’t reconcile what he had observed of her as contrasted with the things he suspected of her. He sat on the ground, thinking and smoking, and didn’t tell Elkins any of his worst fears about Anthony’s fate at the hands of the NVA.
Alexander smoked eight cigarettes before he staggered back, much slower on the return, and collapsed next to Mercer, feeling woozy and addled, but a little better having smoked, and better still, sitting next to Anthony’s friends, as if by being near them he was a little closer to his son. Exchanging a look with Elkins, Mercer cleared his throat.