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An exposed root reminded Yeager that running flat out through the jungle on a moonless night was a stupid idea. He scrambled upright and proceeded at a more cautious pace, ducking and weaving around barely seen obstacles. Pettigrew caught up and stayed close behind.
They crossed the stream again and dropped belly down to worm the last few feet to the same observation point they had previously occupied, and they saw... nothing.
Whatever had caused the commotion had passed, and the camp was quiet again. The two guards remained as before, one circling, one stationary. The generator kicked on and burbled in the background.
Yeager put his lips next to Pettigrew’s ear. “What the hell happened?”
He got a shrug in response.
Using hand signals, Yeager directed the old vet to scout the perimeter in a clockwise rotation while Yeager moved counterclockwise.
“Use the generator to mask your movement,” he murmured.
Pettigrew shot him a look that said, Teach your grandma to suck eggs. Yeager patted the older man’s shoulder and oozed away to his right, moving like a stop-motion film of the world’s slowest lizard. Stones roughed up his belly, and vegetation scratched his cheeks. Insects skittered across his hands and wriggled under his shirt. Damp earth soaked him from collar to cuff. Yeager ignored all of it.
Moving silently through the jungle did not mean never making a sound. It meant making only small, natural noises easily dismissed by the human ear. Creatures moved at night—wild pigs, deer, rodents. Leaves rustled with the breeze. Twigs and acorns fell from trees and plopped on the ground. Keeping movement small, slow, and random allowed a stalker to blend in with the sounds of the night.
In Afghanistan, Yeager had been a master stalker. In the woods, at night, with or without NVGs, he feasted on sentries and observation teams. Many a Taliban had gone to hell with a surprised look and a hole under one ear from six inches of double-edged Gerber steel. The piss stink of their last minutes on earth haunted some of Yeager’s deep-night, sweaty wake-up moments, filling his nostrils with a ghost scent that he’d never quite forgotten.
The generator cut off, and Yeager froze in place. He had traveled less than twenty yards from his starting point, which had been about the five o’clock position relative to the camp. The building with the light over the door loomed closest, and Yeager detected the glow of interior lights—very dim ones—through the ventilation slots near the eaves. Either some low-light lanterns or electronic screens.
The urge to move, to do something, ate at Yeager’s nerves. He forced himself to hold in place. The guards were no longer visible from his position, but abrupt movement might bring them running, alert and ready. Half-formed plans to kill the roving guard—bash his head in with a rock, maybe—and take the man’s weapons flitted around the edges of Yeager’s thoughts. In order for such a plan to work, he needed the guards bored, complacent, and tired of staring at nothing, rather than agitated by strange noises.
And then what? He would have a single automatic rifle against a platoon-strength cadre of trained soldiers. Rambo lived on the movie screen, not in real life. Aimed fire from the bad guys would not miss the way it did for the action heroes, and he had no sequels for which his survival was required. A sustained firefight would get him dead quicker than telling Martina, his ex-wife, that yes, those slacks did make her ass look fat.
The generator kicked back on, and Yeager allowed his joints to unlock. He resumed his slow crawl, looking for anything, hoping for a miracle.
#
DANNY OSTERCHUK AND Gomer Pyle hoped to make it back to the overlook before night fell, and they further hoped the four-wheeled vehicles that had brought them up from the embarkation point would still be there.
They failed in the first objective, so there was no way to judge the second. Night descended like a drawn curtain, plunging them into a groping, gasping forward progress measured in feet per minute rather than miles per hour.
Osterchuk blamed their tardiness on a combination of extreme caution and a need to stay off the main trail that forced them into a cross-country hike through some really shitty terrain. More than once, they’d had to backtrack out of a dead-end path to find another route forward. Add to that the fact they were both old as Moses’s Little League coach and could only move as fast as their geriatric muscles allowed.
Not that I ever moved fast to begin with, you betcha.
When true night fell and they began flailing through unseen vines and tripping over invisible obstacles, he and Pyle made a command decision to sit the fuck down and wait for some light. They hunkered together at the base of an enormous tree and shared the rations they’d packed for the hike. Bottled water and energy bars. Yum.
Osterchuk kept his griping to himself. Having a conversation with Gomer was out of the question. For one thing, he’d have to damn near shout, thereby revealing their position to any lurking terrorists, and for another, the responses from Pyle would often be unrelated to the subject under discussion. The man heard about half of what you said, and half of that he heard wrong. No, best to stay quiet. Try to get some rest. So sayeth Osterchuk.
Only a few thin, high clouds whispered across a night sky so brilliant with a wash of stars that Osterchuk felt the impact of his insignificant existence on the galactic stage deep in his belly. That was saying something, since one thing Osterchuk could do was hide a Ford Explorer—with room left over for a Jeep Wrangler—inside his belly. Only the most profound revelation could register deep inside his gut.
He grunted a short laugh at his own expense, and Gomer looked a question at him.
“Nothing,” Osterchuk said with a shake of his head. “Pay me no mind.”
The day’s exercise claimed its toll. A deep ache stole into his muscles and throbbed with every heartbeat. Tiredness pulled at his eyes. Osterchuk let his head flop forward and felt sleep lurking just around the corner. One thing he could do was sleep at the drop of a hat. That he could do. Oh my, yes—
#
NEAR PHU BAI, SOUTH Vietnam
24 December, 1967
Danny’s Story
On 31 January, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched a surprise attack on several targets in the South, including Hue City, located six miles from the coast and sixty miles from the DMZ. The NVA called this undertaking General Offensive-General Uprising, but Western news outlets would soon refer to it as the Tet Offensive.
The Battle for Hue City featured some of the most brutal house-to-house combat faced by the US Marine Corps since... well, ever. The Marines drove the NVA and Vietcong from the city. The result: more than six hundred Marines killed, somewhere between four and ten times that number of enemy dead, half the city reduced to rubble and, despite the ultimate victory, a public relations disaster in the US.
In the days leading up to Tet, the North Vietnamese struck bases south of Hue in coordinated attacks on the Marines stationed around Phu Bai and Phu Loc and all along Route 1. Those strikes might have been meant to weaken support for Hue from the south prior to assaulting the city, or they might have been the random mayhem of war throughout the province.
It didn’t matter to Danny Osterchuk. He missed it all, lying in a hospital bed.
On December 24th, 1968, Ngo Pham, a buddy of Osterchuk’s and fellow member of Combined Action Platoon Hotel 6, had invited Osterchuk to dinner at the home of one of his cousins. Combined Action Platoons were an amalgamation of a Marine rifle squad and local militia known as Popular Forces, or PFs. They worked together to deny the VC operational support at the village level and ran interdiction and combat patrols throughout their assigned area. Ngo wasn’t a Christian, but he saw how glum the big-eared kid from Minnesota was at being away from home on the holiday. In Ngo’s tin-roof shanty on stilts by the Troui Lagoon, Osterchuk ate exotic fish coated in pure fire and washed his burning tongue with warm beer. Seated on a wood plank floor, he and all of Ngo’s extended family held a three-legged conversation with Ngo translating and Osterchuk sweating an ocean. Osterchuk sang Christmas carols, and the family clapped along, chiming in at fa-la-la, which left Osterchuk rolling on the floor, laughing so hard he pulled a muscle.
Late that night, he and Ngo left the shack and headed for their racks. It was dark as a coal mine at midnight. A narrow country lane connected the village to Route 1, which would take them west, back to their base six klicks east of Phu Loc. They carried only sidearms, and both wore civvies. In retrospect, those were stupid choices—given the tension and enemy activity—as well as a violation of regulations, but it was Christmas Eve, and Osterchuk wanted to set the war aside for a time.
He was more than a little drunk, and his reactions might not have been at their fastest as he walked next to the tiny—by comparison—Ngo Pham. He blundered into Ngo and knocked the smaller man to the ground when Ngo stopped in the middle of the dirt road without warning.
Three figures detached from the darkness beside the road. Osterchuk gaped, boggle-eyed and woozy. Blades glinted in the moonlight. Were they Communist infiltrators, VC, or street thugs?
Ngo and the three men jabbered back and forth. The words made no sense, but Osterchuk recognized the tone: Give us your money, or else. They were street thugs, then.
Lance Corporal Danny Osterchuk had a bit of a temper in those days. This was his second time as a Lance Corporal, since he’d been busted for breaking the jaw of a stupid shit stain from Brooklyn in a bar fight over a hooker. A rage demon lived deep inside Danny Osterchuk. When it possessed him, Osterchuk transformed from a human being to a wrecking ball. He felt no pain. He lost all reason and all memory. He lived to hit people and break things. He’d fought the red demon inside him all through high school and basic training and the first six months of his deployment and, with rare and notable exceptions, had won that battle.
When one of the scrawny thugs waved his knife under Ngo’s chin, Osterchuk felt the demon take him. His face burned hot, and the pressure inside him expanded the way a steam boiler overheated. One second he was sane. The next, he was not.
With one mighty fist, he launched the nearest mugger like an Atlas rocket. Bones crunched at the impact, and Osterchuk knew in his gut that he’d broken the man’s neck. And his demon rejoiced.
Secret fact and the reason he kept his demon under control: Osterchuk liked hitting people. He could hit people harder than a falling telephone pole. Yes, he could.
The rest of the fight blurred to a series of snapshot images. He remembered glimpses of it later, but he couldn’t put together a coherent narrative. Later, Ngo told him he’d ignored the jabbing and slashing knives and thrashed the remaining two thieves as though possessed by a mighty dragon—a thing known as a long—and wreaked such destruction that the earth trembled. Osterchuk doubted that last part and told Ngo he was full of shit.
But secretly, he liked it. Yes, he did.
Ngo had sprinted the three miles to the village of Ngoc Ngot and raced back with a corpsmen, who patched Osterchuk’s leaking holes. By the time help arrived, the red demon had faded, and Osterchuk lay in the dirt, cold and shivering, his blood soaking the clay soil. He was only vaguely aware of the corpsman yelling at him to stay awake.
Osterchuk had killed three men, and not with the pistol at his waist but with his fists. His knuckles resembled raw meat. He had sixteen stitches in his colon, and sixty-eight more decorated his body in a railroad-track map.
His knife wounds earned him a trip to the Naval Support Activity Station Hospital in Da Nang, where he stayed long enough to miss the destruction of his unit. Ngo Pham died on 7 January, when a swarm of one hundred fifty VC overran the hamlet of Ngoc Ngot and decimated CAP Hotel 6.
He ate ice cream and sucked soup while the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines counterattacked the NVA in Hue City and beat them back into the jungle.
Osterchuk had kept his demon under control ever since.
#
SINCE HE AND PETTIGREW had approached the camp from the south, Yeager arbitrarily assigned their starting point as the six o’clock position. He numbered the structures clockwise—his recon had circled behind building four and building three. His stalk around the perimeter of the camp had ranged to the twelve o’clock position and uncovered a number of new facts.
Pettigrew, moving clockwise, would have rounded behind building one and two.
Yeager’s reconnaissance had located a fifth cabin, smaller and more compact than the others and set farther back, tucked between buildings two and three. It had its own generator, which kicked on less frequently than the larger one attached to building three. Dim lights glowed from inside. Their random flickering indicated the presence of someone moving around the interior. The rumble of a deep voice reached Yeager as he passed the place, too far away and too low to make out.
Yeager found a good observation point near the skeletal remains of a dead tree and settled in to wait. His muscles complained form the strain of hours of belly crawling and constant vigilance. There was no sign of Pettigrew.
He tried to relax and let his body recover. From his vantage point, Yeager had a good view of the back of the small cabin, which he designated as building five.
Another discovery: all along the northern side of the camp, a steep cliff fell away into a big, deep, empty bunch of nothingness. Yeager had found the drop by almost crawling directly into space. It was too dark to see the bottom, but a few experimental stone drops gave him a best guess of around a forty-yard fall.
Particularly stupid to situate a camp with no back-door escape route.
Then he found the back-door escape route. At some point in history, a chunk of the cliff wall had fallen away, leaving a wedge cut in the rock face. A natural trail led down from the ridge like a chute filled with gravel and overgrown, in places, with Hawaii’s tenacious and ever-present ferns. Yeager had hiked a good ways down the cut, far enough that he was relatively sure the route would provide a second egress from the campsite. The fissure started at approximately the one o’clock position and pointed almost due north.
A quick peek at his phone under the cover of his shirt revealed the time as 2:20 a.m. The guards had changed over at midnight and not since. Four-hour rotations? If so, that was a long stretch to remain on sentry duty. Longer shifts typically meant fewer personnel, so maybe there weren’t as many terrorists as Yeager had at first feared.
There was no sign of the hostages, though Yeager had convinced himself that one of the two central barracks housed the prisoners. Based on the guard positions, he would put his money on building two. There were no back doors on the buildings he had reconnoitered.
Yeager spotted Pettigrew only because he was looking for movement and knew about where to look. The old vet was slithering along, visible by his tan jacket and not much else. Yeager rattled some brush to get the man’s attention.
Pettigrew shifted direction, and when he approached, Yeager gestured and led them both to the back-door cut he had found in the ridge. Going down, they were at least able to stand and work their way toward the bottom in a more human fashion. Both maintained their silence until they reached the end of the rockslide, a solid quarter-mile from the lip of the ridge.
When Yeager turned right and kept going, Pettigrew whispered, “You know where you’re going?”
“Think so.”
After nothing else came for a time, Pettigrew grunted. “Huh. Well, okay, then.”
Yeager hiked along the base of the cliff for a solid ten minutes. The effort was rewarded when his ears picked up the hiss of falling water.
“Is that—” Pettigrew said.
“Waterfall.”
Another five minutes brought them to a pool fed by a thin stream of water from the bluff above. Yeager had to restrain himself from diving headfirst into the hot-tub-sized pond. He dropped to his belly and cupped water out with his hands, drinking in deep, sloppy gulps. Pettigrew was quick to copy him.
“Probably get the shits,” Yeager said after he’d slurped enough water to wash a buffalo. “But that’s the least of our problems.”
“Roger that.” Pettigrew splashed water on his face, scrubbing with both hands. He blinked, and droplets fell from his eyebrows. “Did you find anything helpful? Besides this here water, I mean. I didn’t see much on my side...”
Pettigrew’s report mirrored Yeager’s observations. Five buildings—one short and four long—fanned out in an irregular spread that surrounded the central clearing. Overhead was camo netting with sod piled on top.
“These boys are ready for overhead surveillance,” Yeager noted.
“Agreed.”
Two guards were visible, one rover and one posted and within sight of each other except when the rover went around building two on his patrol route. They were armed with AKs and sidearms, with radios clipped to their belts.
Yeager and Pettigrew settled on a flat rock near the pool, and the older man fired up one of his diminishing pack of Marlboros. “We can get the rover when he goes around the building,” Pettigrew said, though he didn’t sound thrilled by the idea. He sucked a deep drag and exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
“Then we have to get the other guy right away.” Yeager lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He stared at the vast blanket of stars. “So, one for you, one for me. With what? Rocks?”
“Better than spitting on them.”
“Mm. Say that happens. Then what? Will they have keys on ’em? If not, we have to bust the lock off the door.” Yeager sighed. “That’s a lot of noise.”
“Uh-huh. Every injun in the teepee be on us.”
Yeager’s eyelids grated, heavy as steel doors. He was tired to the core. Short night, long day, no food, and lots of exercise had taken a toll he couldn’t afford to pay. He allowed his eyes to slide closed, took a deep breath... and drifted off to sleep.