Bob took a second’s worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of the instant, the reticle had even materialized; the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel’s chest, and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the snap of a piece of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death from afar was sent upon its way.
But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire. Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.
Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor, sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet, deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.
Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of survival.
He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the stalks. He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain was excruciating.
He saw it very clearly: I am dead. I die now. This is it. But no life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss, recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.
He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as the world seemed to explode around him.
He didn’t know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only one phrase like a mantra: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.
He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time, seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.
He got so far when someone shouted, and then, goddamn them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as if it were an aquarium.
In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light, but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the night as another dozen or so green Chicóm flares popped.
This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly, “Julie is beautiful, Julie is beautiful!”, saw Donny rise above him with his M14 in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of the night on his butt, and dove into Donny’s shallow hole.
“Claymores!” he screamed.
“They’re not close enough!” Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to destroy them.
“Now!” he screamed.
“No!” screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices. Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Donny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380 with no extra magazines. Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a bayonet.
That was it.
“Shit,” said Donny.
“We’re cooked,” said Bob.
“Shit,” said Donny.
“I fucked up,” said Bob. “Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn’t have to come back up this hill. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Donny.
The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they’d carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn’t clear yet what their next move would be. They hadn’t fired any flares recently, but they were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.
“They may think we have more Claymores,” he said. “But probably they don’t.”
It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after the blasts. Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing. A cold wind whipped through the night.
“They’ll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way. Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way.”
“We tried,” said Donny.
“We fought a hell of a fight,” said Bob. “We hung ’em up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you.”
“I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified.”
“You ever file that marriage report?”
“No. It didn’t seem important. No off-post living in the ’Nam.”
“Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don’t you?”
“Oh, she doesn’t need the money. They have money. My brothers could use it for school. It’s okay the way it is.”
Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill, the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.
“I lost the picture,” Donny said. “That’s what bothers me.”
“Julie’s picture?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that flank security unit. I don’t remember. My hat fell off.”
“It was in your hat?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, tell you what, I can’t git you out of here and I can’t git you the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back, would you say I done okay by you?”
“You always did okay by me.”
“Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but you been so busy, and now you’re so tired you ain’t figured out that you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain. It’s still there. It’s hanging off your neck, across your back.”
“Jesus!”
Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight, pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.
“Shit,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.
“Go on,” said Bob, “that’s your wife; look at her.”
Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly damp, the photograph.
He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless it helped.
In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was so sweet, and he remembered the three days they’d had. They got married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains, and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country, checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right. Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?