They found two more bodies in the water by looking for the lamps on their life vests, and the helicopters were also busy, their lights picking out the shapes below and their divers went down on the hoists to recover them on litters.
Liam decided that they were too overloaded and should take their sorry cargo to the minesweeper, unload and return once more, so he turned the boat away from all the activity and opened the throttles some more. After no more than a minute or so, to Liam’s utter disgust the port engine missed, coughed and then fell silent. “Ah… you’re an awful contraption and that you are… an’ after the sweet words and flattery I’ve been heaping on you too!” He brought the bow around to point into the waves and throttled back, intending to open the engines casing long enough to give it a blast of WD40 in the carburettor and a hefty rap with a spanner.
Nancy had expended all the air from her lungs and still not reached the surface. The bulky mass of the aircraft had her trapped in its sinking wake, but she didn’t know this, she did know that she needed air or she would die. In desperation she fought back the instinctive urge to open her mouth and gulp, instead she pulled the toggle on her life vest, breaking the fatal hold the aircraft had on her as the vest inflated and carried her upwards.
She broke the surface and gasped at the precious air as a wave rolled over her. Salt water burned her sinuses and throat; she choked on the water, coughed and spluttered to evict it, in order to take in oxygen.
Each time a wave lifted her she waved an arm and shouted toward the lights, but the wind and the noise from the helicopters rotors drowned her pleas.
The cold was like a living thing, sapping her strength and her will as it first seeped into her limbs, and then her brain.
She didn’t know at what point she slipped from reality and into a dream world, but the warmth of the summer sun in Montana replaced the all-pervading cold of the Atlantic. She was hiking with her parents and brother again in the holidays before she started high school, tramping across the wooded hills of Glacier National Park. The scent of pine and wild flowers was heavy in the air along with the heavy drone of insects. She paused on the trail when she caught sight of a deer amongst the trees; the deer was motionless, staring right back at her. It was a magical moment that she had spoiled the first time by calling out to her family what she could see, and the deer had bolted. This time however her brother hadn’t shouted at her to leave the deer alone and catch up, he grabbed her by her pigtails and pulled hard. That in itself was very strange, because she knew for a fact she’d never worn her hair that way.
The light from Liam’s own lamp caught the pale face as it drifted just beyond the stern of the Galway lifeboat. He saw the pasty white face and blue lips, and took it for another dead body until the lips moved, mouthing, “Look at that!” He leant forward to grab her by an arm but she was drifting out of reach and he caught a handful of long dark hair instead. Taking a firm hold he pulled the body in to the side of the boat where he and Terry lifted her inboard where Terry felt for a pulse.
“We’ll be needing a helicopter, she has a pulse … but it’s terrible weak.” He pulled open a space blanket, wrapping it around the figure in the water-logged USAF uniform, and activated chemically heated hot bags which he placed atop her torso whilst Liam called in one of the S-61s to airlift her to hospital.
There was only a light powdering of snow on Nikoli’s Gortex bivi bag when he emerged into the pre-dawn with a full bladder. He had a Bergen and an arctic ‘maggot’ beside the bivi bag, which were not of Russian issue but British. All the items were at least second-hand when he had acquired them, but they were of superior quality to that which his troops had to make do with. Since arriving back from the UK the kit had earned a few envious glances, but he had brought back to the Red Army something else acquired from the British, it ensured that if his men couldn’t get out of the wind, rain and cold, then neither did he. He didn’t eat until his troops had done so, and he did not practice the Russian military class system. The one senior NCO who had displayed the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude had found himself doing every shitty job that had needed to be done, and a few that hadn’t. By the time he had been promoted to Captain after the Leipzig operation, everyone in the Regiment had heard of his unusual command style. It made him a popular, yet respected figure with the junior ranks, and one viewed with an element of suspicion by the more senior ones, as someone who’d ‘gone native’ whilst in the West. Only one of his peers had taken it upon himself to criticise Nikoli to his face, and that individual was still baffled by his reply.
“My heart pumps purple piss, hinney… now sod off before I back squad yer teeth to Week One!” Nikoli had said in an appalling attempt at a Geordie accent.
As he watered the side of a tree this morning he looked around at the position. All his men were below ground level in shell scrapes spread about in a roughly triangular position; he had instigated its use, dispensing with the established Russian circular orientation. A machine gun sat at each of the three points, so an attacker coming from any direction would have at least two of them, plus two thirds of the units rifles to contend with. It wasn’t a Russian invention, it wasn’t British or American either, but Australian. The ‘Iron Triangle’ had been proven when a company from 1RAR, 1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, had found itself surrounded by almost a regiment of regular troops from the NVA, North Vietnamese Army, on 8th January 1966 near Cu Chi, in an area known as the Ho Bo Woods. Several other factors had leant a part in the Australians successful defence; the personal weapons carried by the Australians were the GPMG and the SLR, which used the same calibre ammunition, the heavy 7.62 round. The SLR was self-loading but did not have an automatic fire capability, so the infantrymen only fired single, aimed shots; there was none of the extravagant expenditure of ammunition that was the norm with US troops who used the M-16. The Australian troops had received no significant ammunition resupply during the action, although about 6000 rounds of belted ammunition in boxes had been dropped, quite literally, through the tree canopy to them from a helicopter that just happened to be passing and heard a short range radio message toward the end. The Aussie troops had carried everything in with them, in their webbing pouches and packs. The gimpies had run low on belted ammunition, and this had been solved by the riflemen contributing some of their spare 7.62 ball. The gun groups emptied the rounds from the SLR magazines tossed to them and made up fresh belts using links from already expended belts that lay in heaps below the guns. It was not a practice that could have been duplicated by an American unit who’s M-60s and M-16s used incompatible calibre ammunition. The Australians had been unable to call in artillery or air strike as the one radio with the range to reach anyone friendly was an early casualty. The NVA had tried both infiltration and human wave tactics from most points of the compass, but the Australians had dug in and held. When the NVA had withdrawn nine hours later, they left over two hundred of their number behind, the boys from Oz lost eight dead and twenty-nine wounded.
Nikoli had not learnt of that battle in a Russian military school, but whilst sat at the back of a classroom in Brecon during one of CSM Probert’s lectures. Colin had ended that particular lesson by pointing out that a single hit from an SLR, even on a limb, would put the recipient out of action due to the stopping power of the 7.62mm round. The M-16 on the other hand had to be altered by the US servicemen, quite illegally, in order to make its lighter round tumble, to achieve something close to the same effect. This affected its range, which was not a great problem if in the jungle, and its accuracy, which was. With a wry smile he had held up an SA-80. “And guess which round this thing uses.”