Again to Carthage Read online

  The snakes loitered upstairs while Mize skimmed the trees on the valley floor. He hadn’t seen a thing until something flashed by right under them.

  His headphones crackled: “Hooches,” said Skeeter. “Equipment and stuff.”

  Mizner reported the find to the snakes as he kicked right pedal and worked the collective and cyclic to bank hard right and get a ways off. That was something you learned to do, come in from different directions, different speeds. Lots of guys didn’t do that and lots of guys were dead.

  As they flashed over this time Mizner spotted some AKs, an SKS semiautomatic, and some other military equipment lying around. “Pegasus three one, Pegasus one nine. We got hooches, tracks, weapons,” he said into his mike. He heard the chee-chee, Dulin keying the mike twice: affirmative.

  Cobras don’t talk, thought Mizner.

  Then: muzzle flashes. A red smoke grenade went down and Skeeter’s 60 started cranking behind him as he kicked right pedal again, letting Skeeter hose the area as they banked off.

  “One nine taking fire. Put your rocks on the red smoke. We didi now.”

  Chee-chee, said the radio.

  He continued banking the bird as Skeeter hammered away, then he turned again and started working his way up the side of the hill to get the hell out of the way of the gunships, which had already lined up for their rocket runs before Mizner had spoken. They could have done this whole familiar dance without saying a word.

  “Pegasus three one in hot,” said Dulin, the Cobra talking at last, and he was. The jungle danced with fire and light.

  Up on the hillside the hot air was funky humid and the chopper blades were clawing away at it impotently as Mizner neared the military crest of the hill like a slow fat June bug. Then they went directly over an enemy gun position and were shot full of holes almost immediately.

  Mizner saw a .51-caliber on a tripod and a guy behind it working it for all he was worth. There were three or four others, too, very intense-looking NVA regulars with AKs, all firing on full auto. They had obviously seen the helicopter coming from a long way off and were good and ready for them.

  At nearly the same moment he saw the enemy soldiers Mizner heard a bunch of metallic pings and knew instantly that they were hit all over, probably including the fuel cells—which were supposed to be self-sealing except that when they got shot up like that they weren’t self-anything. Just about every alarm and warning light in the cockpit was going off and the collective and cyclic sticks were jumping in his hands and even the pedals were fighting him as the cockpit filled with smoke. He hadn’t even had time to say Taking hits . . . into the radio. He was working hard just to stay airborne.

  They had almost no forward airspeed and the whirring blades were biting nothing solid, so they really were sitting ducks. Jeezus, he thought, what were the odds of flying blind right over a gun position like that?

  His instincts were to stall the tail rotor, do a hammerhead turn, and roll back down the hill, building up speed and staying aloft long enough to find a soft spot to autorotate down into. He actually thought about it for a second, but saw immediately that it would have taken them right back over the same gun position and then back down into the valley where the snakes were making another run. He really didn’t have any choice but to try to climb the hell out of there. He could hear Skeeter behind him leaning out of the door and pouring lead back behind them.

  The actual crest was coming up beneath his bubble finally and he had the collective to his chin, pulling as much power as he could, but it was going to be close. If they only had some firm air they might be able to claw their way out of there, but this hot gas was useless, a helicopter pilot’s nightmare. Though his main focus was the crest he was also scanning the jungle for places to crash, as well as glancing at the instrument panel and trying to gauge just how badly fucked up they really were. That was more a function of his training than anything else because he could tell from the noise and the lurching of the ship just how bad it was. His heart raced at the rare bleat of the chip detector over the other alarms because it indicated pieces of metal in the engine: The machine was eating itself.

  At some point the master alarm went off, and they were technically not supposed to be in the air any longer.

  Over the noise he heard Skeeter’s grim, satisfied voice on the intercom: “Got you, sonuvabitch.” His gunner had killed their gunner.

  They both knew if they crashed within range of an operational enemy .51-caliber machine gun they might as well go ahead and die in the crash. For the moment at least there wasn’t anyone firing anything serious at them. Skeeter kept pouring fire back behind them as they lurched noisily on toward the crest.

  Mizner almost slumped in relief when they finally reached it, but then he made a mistake. It was excusable maybe, a matter of habit, not something you could train for, or perhaps even be aware of. As he barely cleared the top of the hill, he instinctively pushed the nose down, getting ready to descend the back side, and knew it was a mistake because the ground effect disappeared. They had barely stayed aloft on the cushion of air a craft gets from its own thrust waves bouncing back directly from the ground, and when he pointed the nose down, even that left them.

  Despite the sudden drop, Mizner thought they had a chance, and he strained backward on the collective as if it might have a magical inch or two more to give. The top of the hill was bare, so at least they didn’t have to worry about clearing any vegetation, and Mizner really thought they might slip over.

  But then the right skid caught in the ground at the very top and it flipped the sick little bird up into the air like a shuttlecock and slammed it down on the far side of the hill, rotors tearing into earth and vegetation, destroying everything around, including the rotors themselves. Inside the loach it felt like a very dirty and dangerous carnival ride, but once the rotors were gone there was a quiet, peaceful second or two when Mizner thought it might be over with him still alive. His right triceps felt like he’d been stuck with a hot poker, but he was otherwise apparently unhurt. It had gone dark light dark light dark several times as they rolled, but then that stopped.

  Then, ever so slowly, he felt the bird turning on its axis, becoming perpendicular to the fall line, and then it started again. Slowly at first but picking up speed as Mizner braced himself in the cockpit as best he could, swearing out loud as map cases and K-Bars and clipboards and ammo magazines slashed and stabbed them all the way down, eighty feet or more, dark light dark light dark light dark light dark light dark light, and finally very dark and very wet and he was drowning.

  Mizner remembered that the valley on the other side had been rice paddies, but they weren’t in cultivation, so they were supposedly dry. But then he also remembered the bomb craters everywhere, left from a long-ago B-52 shitstorm, most of them partially filled with dark, unholy water. He was drowning in an open septic tank.

  Skeeter, meanwhile, was being held underwater by his own monkey strap. All the way down the hill he had been thinking, Well, at least we’re out of range of the .51-cal. And we’ve got friends who surely saw what happened. We might make it after all.

  But once everything was still and quiet in the dark water he couldn’t for the life of him get to the goddamn buckle on his goddamn monkey strap. The straps were all different, not military issue at all. Everyone knew that even the helicopters themselves had never been designed to carry weapons and that everything about this fucked-up war was ad hoc. Each door gunner concocted his own getup and went down to the dink store to have it sewn together.

  So Skeeter had made his so that the buckle was on the chest and easy to get to. The problem was, it slowly dawned on him, the buckle had worked its way up under his chicken plate and there was no way in hell he was going to be able to dig up under the tight armor to get to it. He was going to be drowned by his own safety strap.

  Then he remembered his K-Bar, which he used mostly to clear jams in the machine gun. It was sharp as hell and if he could get to it he could cut himself out of there. As he was feeling around for it he was running down mental checklists. Did he have any broken bones? Was he bleeding badly anywhere? What weapons could he get his hands on?

  The K-Bar was strapped to his leg where it was supposed to be and he yanked it out and started hacking at the monkey strap. He cut his own forearm once and the strap in three different places before it released him, and he was very close to breathing in a lungful of the noxious water when he stood up frantically through the doorway of the helicopter ready for a huge gulp of God’s own air. But though he knew he was out of the water, he was still drowning. His helmet and visor were still full and he had to wait several more horrible seconds for them to drain.

  Shit!

  He was looking into the faces of three very surprised North Vietnamese soldiers. After one stop-motion frame of shock, they scrambled for their AKs, now casually slung on their shoulders.

  Skeeter quickly went back under the murky water, ripping off his helmet and frantically feeling around for any kind of weapon as he heard the sodden plinks of bullets hitting metal and water all around. His 60 was pinned up under the helicopter and probably would have exploded had he fired it anyway. He felt around for the CAR-15 assault rifle but couldn’t find it in the jumble. There also should have been an M79 grenade launcher, a .45 pistol, and a box of frags, but the only thing he could get his hands on were the frags.

  He was almost on the verge of breathing water again by the time he got two in his hands and the pins out. Like Poseidon rising from the depths he stood up through the door again, taking in a huge breath and throwing both frags at the same time, in opposite directions across his body, before ducking under the murk again. He felt around, grabbed two more, pulled the pins, waited until he could stand it no more, surfaced and thre
w them, and then went down again. He did this until he couldn’t do it anymore and he rose from the water one final time ready to face his own death. That’s when he felt a friendly hand on his shoulder as he cleared the murk out of his eyes and saw his pilot’s smiling face.

  “I think you got them with the first two,” Mizner said loudly, apparently suffering some kind of hearing loss. He was standing up through his own door, his unfired .38 in his hand, his right arm soaked in blood.

  Two dead NVA soldiers lay at the edge of the crater, and there was a bloody trail leading into the brush where the other one had crawled off.

  “Let’s didi,” said Skeeter.

  Mizner helped sling the muddy 60 over Skeeter’s shoulder and leaned over to pick up several of the heavy bands of little lead bottles. He weighed them carefully in one hand and tossed all but one back. The belts might save their lives; but they might also slow them down and get them killed. Ah, war choices to delight a Hobson, he thought. But his sphincter was still a pinprick and he wasn’t fooling anybody; he was scared to death. The grunts were scared in the air, and the fliers were scared on the ground. It was all a matter of what you were used to. By rocking the fuselage back and forth they had at least been able to get the big gun loose, and Skeeter wanted that gun.

  With the gunner in the lead they started humping the hell out of there. Mizner noticed that his crewman had picked up some of the ammunition belts he had left behind, and he had finally found the CAR-15.

  Their Cobra had been over to check them out but had gone back over the hill. Normally they would have had their own pink team capping the situation, but the other guys were probably putting more ARPs in and must have been pretty busy. You could hear the firefight from all the way over the hill.

  Well, there was no question who was in charge now. Mizner was the officer and college boy and Skeeter was a noncom who’d barely gotten his GED, but if they were going to get out alive, rank didn’t mean squat. They didn’t see anything around them but the usual green garbagy tangle of rot and life and stingy things that is Jungle; millions of buzzy furry sets of jaws frantic to get a hunk of your skin or to eat out your belly. In some clearings the sun would break through the high canopy and brighten them for a moment, and Mizner could almost convince himself he was on some kind of hike, maybe taking a picnic down to the Millhopper in Kernsville. He flashed on a spring day an eon ago in north Florida tubing down the Ichetucknee with his friends and it caused him such pain and remorse he had to willfully put it out of his mind.

  They huffed wetly along the little trail that led from the bomb crater, and soon had slogged enough klicks to feel removed from the crash scene and thus somewhat more optimistic about life and some kind of future. Surviving the night even seemed a possibility if they couldn’t get a lift out. They needed to find a place to hole up in a little clump of anything that wouldn’t give them a rash.

  A Huey could have maybe picked them up in a clearing without getting shot up too badly, but Mizner could tell from the noise of the firefight that they had their hands full over there. Mizner also knew from the radio chatter before they went down that fuel was getting short and that they had called in more loaches and Cobras, as well as a whole bunch of ARPs. They must have stumbled on a tunnel complex, a hornet’s nest of NVA.

  Mizner knew it would bug the hell out of them, not being able to get over to provide cover, not being able to extract them right away. Then having to leave to get fuel and ammo. He could imagine their oh-so-bored pilot voices on the radio. “Pegasus three niner breaking off. We bingo ammo. Gonna cut a chogie on over to Delta Tango for fuel and rocks. Be back chop chop.”

  They would be discussing the downed bird too, probably breaching radio protocol. But nobody would say squat to a guy who came back from a day’s work smelling of cordite. If some new guy ever did start up, he instantly got The Look. The Look said, I’ve been killing assholes all day and I wouldn’t mind doing you right now.

  Like most pilots, Mize was usually calm under pressure, but the sound of the firefight on the other side of the hill told him the enemy owned this place and he was an interloper. The idea of spending the night out here filled him with an empty-gut terror, the kind of fear that made a hole in your stomach and then filled it with nothing but the idea of your own demise. He finally got the little prick ten, the PRC-10 emergency radio, working, but he could only receive. Apparently no one could hear his polite requests for assistance. The little radio was drenched and beat to hell, so it was a wonder it worked at all.

  As they stopped once more to catch their breath, Mizner knew he was getting too weak to go any farther. Skeeter saw what was happening and steered them into a dense little thicket of something that looked like mountain laurel. Mizner’s knees buckled as he slung the bandoliers onto the ground. There was even a small depression, so they were almost defiladed. He slid down to rest with his back against a tree.

  He sat and watched with dull eyes as Skeeter used his own shirt to bind up his arm. It was loss of blood more than real fatigue, the gunner knew. Normally the lieutenant could hump all day and into the night like a regular grunt, and the grunts knew it too. They had both gone out with the ARPs before just to see firsthand what they did. The soldiers were amazed at the pilot’s stamina, and when Skeeter told them where it came from they started calling him the Runner. They didn’t know or care much about his past; none of that shit mattered out here, but they knew he could hump their asses off and that impressed them.

  Mizner knew there were trees out here with sap that could eat your skin and he could probably remember what the leaves were supposed to look like if he could conjure up a memory from survival school, but at this point he was so goddamned tired he really didn’t care. The arm didn’t feel that bad, but there was a lot of blood and he worried more about leaving a trail.

  Skeeter finished with the dressing and smiled at him.

  “I’m going to go see if I can find some water, sir,” the gunner whispered as he inspected the bandage again. “It’s not really that bad, sir. Lost a lot of blood, but it’s through and through. Probably jus’ a fragment.” Skeeter was talking very low, with great sympathy.

  He patted Mizner’s good shoulder. “You been carryin’ most of it so you sit and rest,” he lied.

  He stood up and gestured vaguely around the little clearing. “And sir, try to straighten this shit up. Hooch is a rat hole.”

  Mize smiled weakly and waved him off. He was asleep before his hand dropped into his lap. When he heard what he thought was Skeeter coming back he also heard a metallic click that sounded both familiar and alarming. He opened his eyes and was shot right between them.

  It was the most important event of his young life and he missed it.

  The firefight on the other side of the hill went on all afternoon and into the twilight. Trying to get the reconnaissance guys out, some of their own ARPs had gotten pinned down, then another blue team of grunts trying to relieve them had been pinned down, and then a Huey putting in still more grunts had been shot down. Two other loaches had been knocked down in the valley trying to support their aerorifle platoons on the ground.

  It was one giant deadly goat rodeo is what it was.

  When there were enough resources to send a loach over, Skeeter set off a smoke marker but he was nowhere near a clearing and the place was still crawling with enemy. Somebody from two boxes over had reported more moving NVA regulars and tanks. The loaches loitered for a while and put down some fire, but when they tried to get down to them they got shot up so quickly they had to pull back out. Eventually they got low on fuel and left. Another one showed up for just a few minutes to see if they were still alive and then he left too.

  By late afternoon Skeeter was having a hard time staying awake but he could hear enemy all around him. Finally just before dark some Cobras came over and killed a lot of them and sent a lot of the rest scattering. But some of them got dug in pretty well and now it was obvious to the rescuers that the downed fliers couldn’t move. If they couldn’t get them to a clearing, they’d have to wait until they could get enough grunts over to get them out. They weren’t coming up on the emergency channel so no one knew what their situation was.