“Shit,” Eraserhead said in disappointment. “No dead dudes inside.”
“Didn’t burn,” Sarge observed. He pointed at the streamlined housing humped above the crew compartment. “Looks like they caught a couple rounds from a twelve-seven heavy machine gun in the engine and auto-rotated in.”
“You look thoughtful,” Croyd said to Mark, settling himself down drowsily as First Squad came tromping down the trail to see. “What’s on your mind.”
“I —” He shook his head. “It just seems, like, real sad to me somehow.”
“What’s this? The Last Hippie wasting sympathy on a machine? All this indoctrination in dialectic materialism must be getting to you.” He put his head down on his forefeet and lay still,
Luce Gilbert came downhill in his natty cammies and posed for a picture with his foot propped on the dead Huey’s duckbill snout. Mark just stood there with tears coursing down his cheeks. He had no idea why.
Mark flattened himself behind the moss-grown log his rifle was propped on and willed himself to become one with the spongy mulch of rotting vegetation below him. Its smell, rich with decay and edged with fermentation, made his head swim. He had a bunch of branches stuck to his hat, which made him feel like a walking salad. The afternoon sun ricocheted among the leaves of the trees like a light-speed pinball.
“Damn!” Croyd exclaimed beside him.
Mark jumped. “Wow,” Croyd said. “For a moment there I thought you’d just found out you could levitate.”
“You scared me,” Mark hissed.
“What are you whispering for?”
“We’re supposed to be on ambush practice.”
“Yeah, but it’s broad daylight. Hard to take it all seriously. Aren’t ambushes supposed to happen at night? Isn’t that in the rules?”
“You can have ambushes in the daytime.”
Actually Sarge had grumbled mightily about having to run ambush drill during the day. But the platoon was only doing maneuvers in daylight, since they’d tried a nocturnal patrol night before last and Luce fell into a stream. For some reason it had taken the members of his First Squad almost fifteen minutes to haul him out, dripping and sputtering.
“Mark Meadows,” Croyd said, “jungle warfare expert.”
Mark grunted. At least Croyd seemed all the way awake today. Lately he seemed always on the verge of dropping off; yesterday Mark could have sworn he saw his outline began to shift, as if he were beginning to metamorphose right before Mark’s eyes. Croyd told him the sun was boiling his brain, which may have been so, but Mark was glad he’d roused him anyway.
He was settling his mind back on blending into the landscape when a scream raised him up off the humus all over again.
Croyd jerked as if startled awake. “Now what?”
Thirty meters away through the undergrowth Haskell was hopping around clawing at his stocky body. “Army ants! Army ants!” he shrieked. “I’m being eaten alive! Aieee!”
Mark jumped up, martial make-believe forgotten. They had encountered nasty stinging white ants before. If the machine-gunner had gone to ground in the midst of a swarm of those, he was running a serious risk of anaphylactic shock. That meant Mark would be needed in a hurry. The sergeant had received medic cross-training, but he wasn’t real current.
Haskell was dancing around his M60 as if paying it bizarre ritual homage. The pink cilia around his mouth waved like a stadium crowd at a playoff game. The ground around the heavy weapon, and indeed the machine gun itself, was alive with a white swarm.
“Whoa, look at the size of those suckers,” remarked Croyd, who was following Mark. “And check out the size of their jaws.”
The sergeant had one hand on Haskell’s shoulder, trying to get him to stand still, while the other brushed at the half-inch insects that covered him. “Here, here, settle down,” he said in a low, level voice. “You’re okay. Those aren’t ants.”
“They’re all over me, they’re all over me!” Haskell shrieked. “They’re eating me, Goddammit!”
“No, they’re not.”
All of a sudden Haskell stopped hopping and squalling. “They’re not?” he asked in a normal voice.
“Feel any bites?”
“Uh … no. Just them mosquito bites I been itching since last night.”
The sergeant picked one of the insects off Haskell with his fingertips, held it up before his face. The creature opened and shut sweeping mandibles that looked a third as long as it was.
“Soldier termites,” Sarge said. “They don’t eat people.”
He stuck the tip of his forefinger between the jaws. They pinched it, indented the skin deeply, then released. Mark thought the bug looked outraged at being had.
“The ’Yards — that’s short for Montagnards — use ’em to close wounds, instead of stitches. They pinch the wound shut, get a termite to close its jaws on it, then bust the body off and leave the head holding on. Works fine.”
“Wow,” Mark said.
“Bugs won’t eat you, but they will eat everything else that isn’t metal. Including the furniture on your pig, there.” He nudged the M60 with the toe of his cloth-topped jungle boot. The weapon was crawling with termites, all gnawing away to see what was edible.
“All right, everybody. Time to shift. We put our ambush right in the path of a swarm.”
Haskell grabbed up the machine gun and began to dust insects from it. The sergeant looked at Croyd. “What are you waiting for, brother? Chow down.”
Croyd reached out and tweaked the mandibles of the insect the sergeant held. “Too spicy for my tastes,” he explained.
Chapter Thirty
Standing out in the black and the rain, Mark felt he really understood erosion for the first time. If he just stood there till, oh, about noon, he figured all of him would have washed away.
A joker shaped like an oil drum with a low dome of a head passed down the line of shivering troops, handing out Ripstop magazine pouches.
“Y’all guard these with your lives,” said Sergeant Slumprock, the platoon sergeant. He was another original, a good ol’ boy from Oklahoma, stubby and powerful, with a general melted look to him. Nobody knew if Slumprock was a joker name or his by-God surname. “Have ’em ready to hand at all times. God help you if you load one of them suckers into the magazine well of your M-16 without Lieutenant Gilbert, Sergeant Hamilton, or myself orderin’ you to do so. Got that?”
“Yes, Master Sergeant!”
He glared around at them with tiny blue Poland China-hog eyes beneath brows so pale they were only visible because the early-morning rain darkened them up some. He looked as if he wanted to run the old “I can’t hear you” gag on them. But like Hamilton, Second Squad’s leader, Slumprock didn’t really go in for hardass movie-drill-instructor games. You didn’t want to give the man any static, but he didn’t walk out of his way to step on your face either.
“All right. Everybody keep your heads out there. Now git your asses in them trucks.”
“Villagers say no deserter here,” Pham the translator said. He was a skinny little guy with not much in the way of a chin, dressed out in PAVN khakis and a rain-glossed pith helmet. He held his nostrils pinched, which made him talk funny, and he looked as if he wasn’t sure which disgusted him more, jokers or the Montagnard villagers huddled miserably under their freshly loaded guns.
Mark stood by Croyd with his M-16 held so muzzle-low, the flash suppressor was practically in the mud. Like those of the rest of the platoon, his hands and face streamed blood from dozens of tiny cuts. They had humped half a klick through elephant grass for their surprise visit to the suspect village. The stuff was higher than Mark’s head and edged like razors.