“Over by the mortar pits,” Raymond said. “Where the chaplain holds church. That short fucker. Too short for an American. Chaplain’s a goddamn dink in disguise. Had plastic surgery done on his face up in Hanoi. He’s been signaling to the dinks up on the ridge. We’ve been watching. When he makes the cross sign during communion, it’s a code. My buddy cracked it. Should get a medal.”
Reynolds grinned.
“You boys’ll waste ’em,” Jackson said, humoring them.
“Come on ambush with us,” Raymond said. “We think they’ll be digging through tonight.”
Reynolds sang, “You’ve got me blowing, blowing my mind/Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?”
“No thanks,” Jackson said.
Later that night Jackson walked out of the TOC to go to the latrine. He was glad it was in the opposite direction from where Reynolds & Raymond had set up their ambush.
“Sappers!” someone yelled.
There was M-16 fire on automatic, another LAW, and the chug of a heavy machine gun from the perimeter. Red tracers crisscrossed the firebase. Jackson dropped to the ground. He did not want to be trapped in a bunker by sappers tossing satchel charges.
Maybe Reynolds & Raymond had been right. The fire was coming from a position near the mortar pits.
Another LAW went off, the rocket impacting near the TOC. Now fire from the whole perimeter was turned inward, directed at the mortar pits. Flares went up, and he saw men crawling across the compound. Then the fire from the mortar pits stopped.
Jackson got up and ran for the TOC. Leander and Hale were there. Leander had taken off his pith helmet and held it with one hand by his side. Labouf was at the radio.
“You find those bastards!” Hale shouted at Leander. “You make sure they don’t have weapons again when they are on this firebase. We go over into Laos, they’ll be walking point.” Then Hale continued, “Get rid of that fucking helmet.”
“Yes, sir,” Leander said, putting on the helmet before he left the TOC.
Hale went into his room.
“Fucking R&R have stepped in the shit,” Labouf said and grinned. “Won’t be following me around no more. Leander said they started shooting at the mortar crew when his guys got called out on a fire mission. Shit, R&R got one half of this fucking place shooting at the other. Lucky no one got killed.”
“What’s Hale mean about going to Laos?”
“Aw, that fucking crazy Morton at Two Corps it always on his ass to go over there. Nothing’ll come of it now that the engineers are stringing wire.”
Jackson took the radio and went up on the roof of the TOC. The flares had all burned out and the firebase was quite. He set the radio on Light’s frequency and waited.
“Tom Light, Tom Light,” Jackson said into the handset, thinking of what might happen if Hale took the battalion over into Laos.
White noise hissed from the handset. Jackson lay back on the sandbags and closed his eyes. He began to think of home, how good it was going to be to walk out of the house on a summer morning and go to the barn to feed the horses his father kept.
“Jackson,” Light’s voice came out of the handset.
“I’m here,” Jackson said.
“I can’t use the starlight no more. Don’t want to see the weird shit. Know what’s gonna happen to the troops. But don’t know what’ll happen to me.”
Jackson gasped for breath and said, “There’s nothing in the scope?”
“You keep your head down. You’ll be all right.”
“What about the Tiger?”
“You’ll be all right. I’m thinking about going over into Laos. There’s an abandoned city up there. No need to look through the starlight there. No war.”
“You stay here. Remember your mother’s heart. There’ll be your mail.”
Light paused and replied, “Maybe I’ll stay, but I ain’t looking through the starlight. No more killing.”
“I’ll write your letters. I’ll come out.”
Then Jackson released the transmission bar and waited for Light to talk. Nothing came out of the handset but white noise. He was gone.
Jackson took a deep, slow breath to try to calm himself but failed and ended up lying on his back gasping. Light maybe gone, walking to Laos. Labouf’s money could get them out. Bribe a chopper pilot and fly to Saigon. From there to Sweden. A year or two to learn the language. Money in the bank. It would be easy.
But he couldn’t. Just something to dream about. Even if he had the plane ticket in hand he could not run. The people at home: Loretta, his parents, Uncle Frank, and the cousins scattered throughout the country expected him to stay, to die if necessary. He wished he could be with Light, buddies, still soldiers, walking the jungle into Laos, eating deer roasted over a fire, drinking from the mountain streams, Loretta haunting his dreams at night.
CHAPTER
15
When the Tiger shot the Jesus nut off a chopper the main rotor blades went flying off into the bush. As the ship crashed just outside the wire, the fuel tanks going up with a black, oily whoosh, Jackson knew that without Tom Light it was going to be very bad at the firebase. Jackson had not heard from Light on the radio and hoped he had not gone over into Laos.
Labouf said, “We’re all going to die.”
“I’ll be safe. Me and Light have a deal,” Jackson said, only half-believing it himself, but it could not hurt to say it.
“Jesus, Alabama, leave that alone,” Labouf said.
And it soon began to look as if Labouf was right. The Tiger shot guards out of the tower, door gunners out of choppers, and men at the piss tubes. He shot a chaplain as the priest was placing the host in a soldier’s mouth during a communion service. Always it was one shot, and he never missed. No one was ever sure exactly where the fire was coming from. When the soldiers heard the distant crack of his rifle they would pause for a moment and wonder who had just died.
Hale called in airstrikes on the ridge, the only possible place the fire could be coming from. For three days the bombing went on, mostly napalm. Every day the Tiger killed a man. Then the air force gave up and went away, telling Hale it was the infantry’s job to flush out snipers. They refused his request for an arclight.
“I got it figured out,” Labouf said.
“You’re going to stay in the TOC the rest of the war,” Jackson said.
Labouf laughed and said, “No, you’re safe as long as you act normal.”
And everyone soon lived by Labouf’s theory. Commonplace targets were safe. The Tiger never shot a man unless the soldier’s death was likely to cause laughter among the living. When the Tiger shot a man who was not wearing his fatigue jacket but was doing nothing else unusual, everyone on the firebase began wearing his jacket, no matter how hot the day was. They all adopted a stiff way of moving like people who had suddenly found themselves on stage but were not used to being there.
“I’ve made a map,” Labouf said.
“Of what?” Jackson asked.
“The Tiger’s kills.”
They were in the TOC, and Labouf spread a sheet of paper out on Hale’s map tripod.
“See, there’s a pattern,” Labouf explained. “I’ve figured out where the safest places are. Piss tubes’ll be all right for a while.”
Jackson laughed and said, “We’re in the safest place.”
“But we gotta leave sometime. I wouldn’t walk over by the mortar pits. That’s the next place he’s going to kill a man.”
That night a mortar crewman died as he held his eye to the gun-sight. Soon Labouf was selling looks at his map and the predictions that went with them for ten dollars, payable in advance.
“Haven’t you got enough money?” Jackson said.
“No one has enough,” Labouf replied. “I’m saving lives, providing a service. I’m doing more than that fucking Hale.”