After the plane had left, Lincoln called Koob into his longhouse. Together, they sat at Lincoln’s table and divided up the cash Corbett had brought. The payroll went to the men in equal increments, with a bonus to Koob for his leadership and translating effort. The poppy money went into a general village fund, managed by Koob and Kaus. Lincoln had already skimmed off his slice.
“You’ve gotta send runners to all the nearby villages,” Lincoln said after the finances had been dealt with. “We need more men, and fast.”
He spread the photographs Donovan had given him on the table. “The Pathet Lao are expanding their base and bringing in more soldiers. We need to take the place apart at the seams, and we need more people to do it. We have more guns on the way. Mortars, grenades, RPGs, all the supplies we need. Tell whoever you send to show some cash around, let the people in the other villages see that soldiers are well paid here.”
“I’ll send them,” Koob promised. “Tomorrow, they’ll go.” He grinned. “Soon we will have too many soldiers!”
“No such thing,” Lincoln said. “We’ll have to clear some more forest and get busy building new houses for them. Your village is about to get a lot bigger, Koob. And a lot richer, too.”
• • •
Koob was as good as his word. The next day, men from Vang Khom spread out to all the villages in the area, to bring the good word about opportunities to oppose the communists and earn some money. Those left behind started cutting down trees and burning brush to make room for the expected newcomers. The smoke roiled into the village, stinging Lincoln’s eyes. The smell was everywhere, inescapable. Lincoln knew it could be seen for miles and miles and wondered if it would attract the attention of the Pathet Lao. So far, his attacks against their outpost had not drawn retaliatory action against the village. But it was the nearest Hmong village to the camp, and he fully expected that they would show up sometime. If they did, it would be a slaughter. The village was barely defended, and its warriors were few. Now that they were bulking up their force—if indeed, people came from other villages to join their effort—maybe he would be able to improve Vang Khom’s defensive capabilities. Fences and land mines at the very least would be a good idea.
Lincoln wasn’t sure what to expect of the Hmong men’s recruitment efforts. He braced himself for disappointment, and during the hours he spent alone, studying the Pathet Lao camp’s expansion and trying to formulate a battle plan, he included in his calculations ways to attack effectively with no more men than he already had.
So several days later, when the first man returned—accompanied by more than a dozen hardy males from another village—he was surprised. Another pair came back to Vang Khom leading a procession of thirty or more men, plus the women and children who had chosen to accompany them. When everyone Koob had sent away had arrived, Lincoln’s army had grown to almost two hundred. Over the next several days, more trickled in, having heard about the effort.
He radioed Donovan a coded message with the news and added a plea for increased payroll. The response came almost immediately: a promise that Corbett would bring more cash on his next visit.
Like it or not, Lincoln was forced back into the roles of trainer and drill sergeant. This time, he had more than a handful of men to instruct. But he had advantages he had lacked earlier, including a rudimentary knowledge of the Hmong language—which Sho was helping him with every night—and more Hmong who knew some English.
As before, he instructed them in basic military discipline and standard hygiene, as well as in the arts of war. He drilled them mercilessly on the weapons available to them. He taught them hand-to-hand combat techniques and made them practice on one another until every one of them was bruised and bloody. He was less hesitant than he had been earlier about using live fire in his drills. He knew now that they would face enemy soldiers who would try to kill them and would succeed in some cases. They had to be prepared for a battle in which real bullets, and worse, would be coming at them.
He identified some of the men who had a modicum of medical training, or what passed for it in remote mountain villages, and showed them what modern techniques he knew. He taught them what everything in his medical kits was for and how to use it. He would need more medics than just himself, with a force of this size.
He let up on the drilling only when he and Pos made another scouting trip to see the camp’s expansion in person. They took a different route in and discovered that the original game trail had been mined and the sides of the trail booby-trapped in other ways.
The post was indeed larger than before. The fence came all the way out to where the original cleared ground had been, and many more structures—mostly barracks, Lincoln judged, but also storehouses and bunkers and an enlarged motor pool area—were tucked behind it. A large swath had been scraped clean all the way around it, killing ground for the towers—one at every corner, now—and weapons emplacements positioned throughout. The road leading up to the camp had been paved, as had roadways inside.
It would take a massive frontal assault to dislodge the Pathet Lao now. Even with his new recruits, Lincoln didn’t have a force nearly large enough for that.
But since his last conversation with Donovan, that wasn’t the plan. A victory that couldn’t be won with direct action could still be achieved in other ways. For his attack on Colonel Phan, Lincoln had adapted techniques common to North Vietnamese sappers, and they had worked. Guerilla tactics were the only ones that had a chance of success in an unconventional war like this one. And there was no law saying the communists were the only ones allowed to practice those.
Seeing the camp in person, in its expanded size and scope, gave Lincoln the inspiration he needed. He knew what to do now. He just needed to be able to pull it off.