This time, there was no attempt at a surprise attack.
Four days earlier, Donovan had dropped into Vang Khom with an urgent message. “This is about to go to shit, Lincoln,” he’d said. They had been sitting inside Lincoln’s longhouse, having sent Sho out to get some privacy.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a major force moving down from the north,” Donovan explained. “Seven to ten thousand, according to the intel we’re seeing. They’re sweeping this way, wiping out Hmong villages as they go.”
“Why?” Lincoln asked.
“Because they know the Hmong want them gone. They suspect the Hmong are harassing them, not just here, but all over the Plain of Jars. You’ve heard about Sherman’s March, right? Carving through the South, burning towns as they went? This is the fucking Pathet Lao version of that.”
“And they’re headed this way?”
“They’re going to reinforce that camp. They need that intersection before the end of the rainy season, so when it’s dry again they can move into Vietnam. But it’s likely that they’ll also keep hitting Hmong villages, and that’ll include Vang Khom. They’re not going to stop until the Hmong are extinct.” He paused long enough to shake a cigarette from a pack and light it. “I told the Pentagon to just drop some fucking bombs on them, but they basically told me to go fuck myself. I swear, one of these days I’ll have a trophy room in my house, and I’ll have some old, white, shit-eating heads and shoulders mounted on the walls.”
“Shoulders, too?” Lincoln asked.
Donovan blew out a puff of smoke. “So I can count their goddamn stars.”
The idea that the Pathet Lao would wipe out Vang Khom had never been far from Lincoln’s thoughts, but at the same time, he had been able to convince himself that if it was going to happen, it already would have. Up here on this mountain, he had felt safe. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if everyone he had come to know here was killed, because of things he had done or not done.
Sho especially.
“What can I do?”
“If you’re going to take that camp, you’ve got to do it now,” Donovan said. “If they know they’ve lost the intersection for good, they might back off. Take another path into Vietnam. But only a significant goddamn loss is going to be convincing enough to change their plans. And I’ll warn you—even that might not work. Saving Vang Khom might be a lost cause.”
“Might be,” Lincoln repeated.
“Nothing’s for sure until it’s for sure. Except this—if you want to give this village a chance, you’ve got to raze that fort to the fucking ground. And you’ve got to do it now.”
• • •
By all reports, a couple hundred Pathet Lao soldiers had already deserted the camp. Those who remained had to know the end was coming soon. Lincoln expected a ferocious response—men fought hardest when the stakes were highest. But his hope was that some number would favor surrender to death, so he wanted them to see what they were up against.
His Hmong irregulars had no uniforms, and their weapons and accessories were an odd assortment of bits and pieces from practically every country under the globe except the United States. What was Donovan’s phrase? Plausible deniability, Lincoln remembered.
He had upward of six hundred men, and he was the only American in the bunch. If that wasn’t deniability, he didn’t know what was.
In their loincloths and loose pants and colorful shirts and headbands, the men gathered for the fight. Lincoln heard laughter and shouts, but he also heard quiet words of inspiration and fear. The faces of his men were somber, scared, at peace, excited, anxious, jovial. They were here to kill communists; some of them would die in the bargain, and every one of them knew that. They had come anyway.
The feelings welling through Lincoln as he walked among his warriors surprised him. He felt honored by their presence here. They had come at his bidding, willing to put their faith in his guidance and leadership, trusting his decisions. They would follow his orders to the death. No greater sacrifice could be asked. Lincoln Clay was just an orphan kid from New Bordeaux, abandoned, a punk who had grown up on the streets and in the embrace of a mob family. Life had not prepared him for this kind of responsibility.
But it was here, and it was his, and he was determined to live up to it. He would see this through to the end.
He just hoped that when it did end, he would still be around to know it.
Instead of attacking by night, under cover of darkness, they came during the daylight. Lincoln took up a position near the camp, hidden by the trees, because he wanted to see their approach the way the Pathet Lao would.
It happened just as he had planned. The Hmong came silently, from every direction, melting through the trees like floodwater through grates. One moment they weren’t there, then they were, then there were more of them, and more, and still more.
Lincoln heard the alarms being raised throughout the fort. Even though he didn’t understand the language, the tension was electric. The Hmong men moved like ghosts, manifestations from the spirit world. They hadn’t even pointed their weapons yet, and the Pathet Lao were already terrified of what they faced.
Then Lincoln gave the order.
Mortars thumped from the forest, and explosions blossomed at random points inside the wire. RPGs arced into the camp, targeting the watchtowers and the soldiers amassing for battle.
Finally, the Pathet Lao screwed up the nerve to strike back. Their machine guns raked the trees, but they were met, round for round, by machine guns carried in by the Hmong and set up in strategic spots. Infantrymen inside the fences opened fire. So did the Hmong, many of whom had trees to shield them.
Lincoln couldn’t simply watch any longer. Bloodlust was as real as any other kind, and seeing his men fall to the Pathet bullets, he needed to be part of the action. He had two ARs, one in his hands and the other strapped onto his back, in addition to his other weapons. Now he opened fire with the first of them, spraying a long burst at the soldiers who lined the fence nearest his position. Some of them hit home, and he was gratified to see the carnage that resulted.
He emptied that magazine and switched guns, letting the first cool for a spell. In that way, alternating weapons, he powered round after round through the fences. On the inside, bodies started piling up, and some of the Pathet soldiers lay down behind their dead comrades, using them for cover as they kept firing back.
From deep inside the camp, Lincoln heard a rumble that was at once familiar and strange. He knew what it was but hadn’t known there were any here, hadn’t heard one in many months. It took only a few minutes for the tank to emerge from behind some buildings, still half-draped in the camouflage netting that had disguised it from the air. It was at least a dozen years old—a Soviet-made T-54/55, Lincoln thought. But it was a tank; one thing his troops didn’t have and couldn’t match.
An RPG jetted toward the tank and exploded against it, seeming to not even scratch the paint. The turret swiveled, like the head of a fat, ungainly bird seeking its prey. With a burst of flame and a loud boom, the tank fired. Trees blew apart, and human beings with them, engulfed in a blast of fire and smoke.
Having fired, the tank didn’t hesitate. It rolled down the pavement toward the front gates, which Pathet soldiers were swinging open for it. Lincoln started in that direction, shouting orders as he wove through the trees. He needn’t have bothered—the Hmong in that area were already doing what he wanted: shooting at the men at the gate.
The gatekeepers were cut down before the tank had cleared the gate, but it didn’t matter; the massive vehicle crashed through, tearing fences from their moorings. The turret turned, and it fired again. Then its machine guns opened up, clanking and spitting lead that splintered trees and tore through flesh. It plowed forward on enormous treads, following the pavement until it had passed the minefield, then turning into the trees. Trunks shattered before its weight, and men scattered or were cut down by its guns and ripped asunder by its shells.
Instead of running away, Lincoln hurried toward it.
Up close, it was like some mythical beast, a dragon or a T. rex restored to awful life. Its sinister look and the sound of its roar inspired terror, even without acknowledging its terrible destructive power. The flash when it fired was almost blinding. Lincoln knew the thing could alter the tide of the battle if it wasn’t stopped. Grenades had proven ineffective; bullets just bounced off its steel hide.
Its machine guns, fired from within, lacerated everything in their path. Lincoln had to swing wide to avoid them, then angle in toward the right rear corner. Soviet tanks were made for taller crews than Chinese-made ones, and although the disadvantage of a small interior compartment wouldn’t be a problem for the Pathet Lao soldiers inside, he hoped their lines of sight were hampered by their small stature.
That was just a hope, though, not at all a certainty. Charging toward the rattling, clanking, roaring beast was one of the scariest things he had ever done.
He had to do it, though, if this day wasn’t going to be a repeat of the last attempt on the base. And he had already decided that it wouldn’t be.
It turned out that approaching the tank was only the second scariest thing, because leaping onto it was far more terrifying. Lincoln’s left foot slipped off its body and touched the tread, and he yanked it away, knowing that to be snagged in that would guarantee that he’d be pulled under and run over, spread all over the jungle floor like jam on toast.
Then he stopped thinking about what could go wrong. No more time for that. The hatch opened as he was reaching for it, and an angry face showed behind a gun barrel. Lincoln pulped it with a burst from his AR. The soldier fell away, and the hatch cover dropped back into place. Lincoln let the weapon dangle from its strap as he tugged two grenades from his belt. He pulled the pins, held them for an almost unbearable few moments, then kicked open the hatch again and tossed them in.
Without worrying about where he would land, or on what, he leapt from the tank. He hit the splintered remains of a tree, feeling wood jab into him like knives, but he yanked himself free and ran. Another thing he knew about the T-54/55 series was that their internal ammunition supplies weren’t shielded.
One grenade flew into the air and exploded harmlessly in the tree canopy. Presumably no one could find the second, or in their rush to get it out the soldiers inside the tank collided, because it went off, sending a jet of flame out the hatch. The secondary explosion—the tank’s ammo stores—was much, much larger. Fire shot up into and through the canopy, and the tank almost seemed to swell from the force of it. The turret dislodged, and the main gun drooped. From the Hmong forces, a cheer went up that almost shook the jungle floor.
The tank’s death breathed new life into the attack. Hmong fighters kept up their positions encircling the camp, but the larger mass of them pushed toward the destroyed gate. Flowing from the jungle onto the pavement meant they could safely avoid the land mines.
Pathet Lao soldiers surged toward the gate to plug the gap, but that only meant that a furious firefight broke out. The Hmong had numbers and momentum on their side, and it wasn’t long before the Pathet fell back. Another cheer rose from the Hmong as they swarmed through the gates and were finally inside the Pathet fences.
Lincoln wasn’t cheering, though. Progress was progress. But the soldiers inside would be desperate now, cornered beasts fighting for survival.
The worst, he knew, was yet to come.