Bayonet Skies Page 13

  Brake at the end of the runway. Run the engines up to full power; technicians worshiping the gauges, alert as any acolyte to the slightest fluctuation, whims of their god.

  Forward. Gathering speed, the engines run up to full. Roar that fills the ears, even through the helmet. Long run out; no need to get a combat takeoff here. Nobody shooting at you, for a change.

  In the sky, climbing hard. Long way up to thirty thou. Up where the airliners cross the sky, their passengers blissfully oblivious. Follow just behind an Air France jet out of Bangkok, so close they can’t tell you’re there—one blip for the radar downstairs.

  Couple of minutes now. The crew chief gives the signal. You’ve heard it anyway, through the earphones you insisted on wearing. Give the signal to the two people with you. Get smiles in return. Ready.

  Help each other attach the rucksacks behind the legs. Added weight makes it damned difficult to move. Shuffle about like an old humpbacked woman. Help the crew chief and aircraftsmen free the bundles. Hit the strobe atop each bundle; the light flashes through the airplane like a dance hall gone mad. The tailgate yawns open. Outside is dark eternity.

  Watch the lights just to the side of the hydraulic shaft of the tailgate. Red now. Crew chief gives the signal for just a few more seconds. Disconnect from the console. Crack the bailout bottle attached to the harness. The familiar free flow of oxygen rushes into the lungs. Let it flap out the cheeks of the mask as you breathe out. At this point you have only one decision to make. It is a jump, or it isn’t. There are no turnarounds. You don’t have enough capacity in the bailout bottle to play.

  Green light. Push the bundles out the tailgate, watch them disappear into the night. Clasp hands with the others, out into the great dark, slipstream catching, flip once, down fall.

  Fall free and clear, catch sight of the strobe on the bundle, follow it down. Thirty-six thousand feet upon release; cold, damn cold. Fly close. No desire to play games up here. Now you follow the flashing light of the bundle as if it was the godlight itself.

  Altimeter winding through thirty, twenty, ten. Fly so close you can feel the presence of the others. You, who have felt yourself such a solitary, want the closeness of brotherhood, of blood. Push away from each other only enough to get freedom for the canopy. Watch for the opening of the bundle; now, pull.

  Full canopy. Pull one toggle line, then the other to make sure they’re free. To either side, dimly seen, are the others. Shadows in the moonlight. Follow the bundle down; nothing fancy here. At least there’s no one shooting. Of course, what would they shoot at? Ghosts, clouds?

  Nothing to see below; smooth blackness. You’ve been dependent upon the navigational skills of the Air Force, now for a moment you’re seized with doubt. Suppose something went wrong, you got seriously off course? Instead of jungle you’re about to drop into the ocean, or a major lake. With all the equipment you’re carrying you’ll be dragged to the bottom long before you can get free. Such things have happened before.

  There is a crackling of branches as the bundle crashes down, and you breathe a sigh of relief. Cross the legs, point the toes down, cross your arms in front of your face; poor protection against the branches but better than nothing. The rucksack will not be let out on a lowering line this time—in its position on the rear it will protect your backside. There is always the fear, crashing through the trees like this, that a broken branch will jam through the tough canvas jumpsuit like tissue, run right up your ass. Of all the things that could happen that seems somehow to be the worst.

  Contact and the foliage whips by, grasping, clawing, trying to shred the intruder. Don’t let it pry your feet apart! You’ll straddle a branch and likely get caught that way, break a leg at best. At worst, rip one off. Bounce heavily against the bole of a tree, knocking the breath from your lungs. The canopy above catches, rips loose, catches again. Now is the time of the greatest danger. If it collapses completely and doesn’t catch anything on the way down you will fall free to the ground. And the ground is a long way down here in the triple canopy. Still falling, it seems faster now. Try to catch hold of something? No, that’s a fool’s errand. All you’ll do is break something, and probably not be able to grasp anything to break your fall anyway.

  The canopy catches again, rips, the noise agonizingly loud. Bounce at the end of the risers like a puppet, ripping again, a little more drop, then it holds. Sway slightly at the end, finally allowing yourself to breathe. Bounce experimentally, just a little. There is no more ripping. Caught firmly, thank God.

  Rest there for a second in the harness, listening. Another ripping sound as one of the other men comes in, a heavy thud, a loudly whispered “Shit!” Jerry. You hope he’s okay. No groaning in pain, and that’s encouraging.

  Look down, into the inky black. No way of telling how far down the ground is. Pull the quick releases on the rucksack, let it fall to the end of the lowering line. It bounces against more foliage a couple of times, then stops, pulling the line taut. More than thirty-five feet to the ground, at least you know that much.

  Pull a mountaineering snap link from the pocket, hook it into the front of the parachute harness. The hundred-foot length of flat nylon strapping is already hooked into the risers just above the quick release. Pull it loose, wrap it twice through the snap link, hold it tight against the hip with the right hand as with the other you unfasten the quick releases. Slight drop, and you are free. Rappel down the strap until you feel the rucksack hit the ground, followed very quickly by your feet. Good thing. There is only about another ten feet of free strap left. Trees were damn high.

  First thing to come loose is the rifle; chamber a round, listen carefully for sounds. Nothing to indicate the crashing of pursuit; relax a little. Take off the parachute harness, strip out of the coveralls and helmet. Wait again, still no sounds.

  Over to the right comes the dim flashing of the strobe still attached to the bundle. You’ll rally there. Move slowly, cautiously through the jungle. Back in the familiar triple canopy. Lots of stuff down at the bottom level to trip you up, make it damn difficult to move. Wait-a-minute vines covered with tiny thorns, low-growing creepers to catch the feet, the thousands, millions of branches fallen from the trees above making a natural abatis. Phosphorescence from the rotting vegetation makes an unearthly glow down close to the ground, almost but not quite bright enough to see by. Makes the imagination go wild: Is that something moving over there? Perhaps just one more of the legions of the dead forever condemned to walk this unholy ground.

  Jesus Christ, Jim. Get a hold of yourself.

  The bundle, heavy as it is, has crashed through all the way to the ground. That’s both a relief and a burden. If it had hung up in the trees they would just have left it, depending upon possible passersby not seeing it. The area in which they had dropped had been chosen deliberately for its remoteness. No trails or rivers came anywhere close; there was no real reason for anyone to come here.

  Now they would have to cache it; carry it some distance away from the parachutes still caught in the trees and bury it. Find some distinctive terrain feature from which they could take polar coordinates so they could, they hoped, someday once again find it.

  “That you, Captain?” Jim heard, raising the hackles at the back of his neck. Christ, have I been away from this for too long? I would have heard his approach back in the old days.

  “Yeah, Jerry, come on in,” he whispered back. A dark form detached itself from the rest of the inky blackness, came forward. By the light of the still-flashing strobe Jim saw that his sergeant had suffered a few problems in his ride through the trees. The coveralls he was still wearing were torn and slashed, and there was a dark stain on one leg.

  “Branch got me,” he explained. “Fuckin’ thing was like a razor. I’m okay, though. Put a pressure bandage on it, got the bleeding stopped, I think.”

  “Siddown,” Jim commanded, hearing Jerry’s sigh of relief as he took the pressure off the injured leg. He took out his flashlight, in the red filtered
light looked at the injury. The pressure bandage was already leaking through. Jerry had obviously lost quite a lot of blood.

  “Damn, what happened to you?” Dickerson said, startling Jim once again. Either his two sergeants could move soundlessly, or his combat skills had suffered a severe degradation.

  “Gonna need your help,” he told Dickerson. “Hold this light.” He cut away the pressure bandage, saw the heavy ooze of blood, black in the red light. Nothing squirting, anyway. That was a relief.

  He got the aid kit out of his rucksack, flipped open the canvas instrument holder. “Morphine?” he asked.

  Jerry shook his head.

  “Let me know if you change your mind. This is gonna hurt.”

  He tore open a package of sterile surgical sponges, daubed the wound to clear the blood away. It was quickly filled again, but it appeared that there were no major blood vessels involved. Only a couple of not terribly important veins. He selected a hemostat from among the instruments, daubed the blood away once again. There. He caught the severed vessel in the jaws of the hemostat, clamped down to shut off the flow. Leaving the instrument clipped in place he took another, performed the same action again. In a few minutes there were four hemostats protruding from the hole, and the only bleeding a slight ooze from the capillaries.

  Jerry had kept his teeth clenched so tightly throughout the ordeal he had chipped one. Only a soft moan escaped his lips when the last hemostat was clipped into place.

  “Easy part’s over,” Jim said, earning himself a muffled curse. He next selected a forceps and some surgical gut, tied off each of the bleeders just above the hemostats. The gut would hold the flesh long enough for the blood to clot and the wound to scarify, then dissolve in the body. Then he chose another length of the gut and sewed the muscle back together where it had been cut almost in two.

  As a last act he chose some surgical silk and closed the skin together. Gut usually wasn’t strong enough to hold the skin; the silk would be removed as soon as the flesh had grown back together. He left a small space at the bottom for drainage. Likelihood was that the wound would get infected; though it had been relatively clean you never knew what kind of Southeast Asian pathogen might have been hanging around on the tree branch. He would keep Jerry full of antibiotics, check the wound every day, open it up again and debride it should it become necessary.

  He hoped it wasn’t. There would be no evacuations on this mission; no Dustoffs to come in and get the injured man, fly him to a field hospital where sterile conditions could be maintained.

  He had not realized how much he had counted on the immense machine supporting their efforts during the war. No matter what happened, you could always count on someone coming in to get you, take you away from all the blood and filth and terror. Now they were on their own.

  It was a terribly lonely feeling.

  He and Dickerson busied themselves with the bundle while Jerry rested. Jim had already come to the decision that they would not be able to carry it very far with only two people. As it was they would have to take on most of Jerry’s gear as they moved.

  “We’ll bury it here,” he said. “Hope nobody finds the chutes.” He shrugged. “We have to, we can do without it, anyway.” The bundle contained duplicates of almost everything they carried, and since nothing had been lost in the drop, was not essential to their operation.

  “They ain’t gonna find the chutes,” Dickerson said. He rigged a couple of short pieces of nylon strap into Prusik knots, slipped them over the lowering line on which Jim had come down. The Prusik, a mountaineering knot, allowed you to slip it freely upward, but when you put weight on it caught the rope around which it was tied and refused to slip downward. Dickerson stood in the loop of one while he pushed the other up the lowering line, then put his weight on the other and repeated the process, slowly making his way upward until he could finally reach the first branches. After that it was a short shinny up to where the chute was hung—a few tugs in the right direction and it came slipping down. Two more times—luckily neither his nor Jerry’s chute had caught up quite so high—and he had all the evidence of their jump piled with the bundle.

  They dug a deep hole with the entrenching tools included in the package, cursing and sweating as they made their way through the tough roots of the trees and vines. Luckily the roots didn’t go very deep; the jungle soil everyone thought so rich because of the rank growth that sprang from it was actually very thin. Beneath it was hard-packed clay, tough to dig through but much easier than cutting through the roots.

  It was almost dawn before they finished. They shoved the bundle, still wrapped, into the hole, followed by the coveralls and parachutes, then covered it all back up, spreading the leaves and rotten limbs over the area as well as possible. It would have to do. Wouldn’t fool anyone right now, but with a couple of days of rain it would fade into invisibility.

  “You guys hungry?” Jerry asked. He had reconstituted three of the LRRP dehydrated rations with canteen water, offered them to the two dirt-covered men. Gratefully they sank down beside him and dug into the food. Jerry had jazzed it up slightly with the inevitable Tabasco sauce; only thing that gave the cardboardlike mess any flavor.

  Still, it filled a hole. One hundred percent of your daily requirement of vitamins and nutrients, all served in one almost indigestible mass.

  “You gonna be able to move?” Jim asked the sergeant.

  “Don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, do I?” Jerry replied. “It’s a little stiff right now, but I’m gonna be okay. Hope you didn’t think you’d be leaving me behind.”

  No, Jim thought, but we were afraid we’d have to carry you. And that wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of fun. The rendezvous point specified by Y Buon Sarpa was a river junction over twenty kilometers away.

  Jim stuffed the empty food bag into the side pocket of his fatigues, got up, and stretched. His shoulders ached from the digging, there was dull pain from the bruises he had suffered on his way down through the trees, and he was looking forward to a hell of a long walk through thick jungle.

  It felt right. He smiled.

  There was only one more task. Dickerson once again climbed the trees and rigged an antenna while Jim broke out the radio and generator. Dick then tuned the ancient machine, tapped out a code word on the key he’d attached to his thigh. No need for the burst device this time—the code word was the approved signal that they’d made it in and were ready to continue the mission.

  If the radio operator had been transmitting under duress he would have tapped out another code word and, back in the old days, waited for the air strike that would have blown both him and his captors to rags. Of the two, captivity or death, Dickerson figured the latter was the far better choice.

  Jerry resolutely refused to let them carry any of his gear. The only concession to his injury was to allow them to help him into his rucksack. He moved, limping, forward. “Hell,” he said, “time’s a wastin’. You fuckers want to take a nap or something?”

  “Pain in the ass little shithead, ain’t he?” Dickerson said, bowed under the weight of his own ruck. He grinned, teeth flashing in the early light of dawn filtering weakly through the trees in the eternal twilight of triple canopy.

  “Wouldn’t know him if he wasn’t,” Jim agreed, and moved off in point. Ordinarily that would have been Jerry Hauck’s position, but even the tough little sergeant recognized that to do all he had to do and break trail too would have been just a little beyond his abilities.

  They’d landed almost atop a ridge line—at least they didn’t have to climb. Not yet, anyway. For it is an immutable law of the infantry; for every hill you go down there is another one you will have to go up.

  Jim followed a general compass heading; didn’t try to be exact. As long as the navigator had put them anywhere close to where they should have been dropped there was no chance they would get lost. There was a river somewhere to the northeast of them, and another to the southeast. As long as they kept moving in a general easter
ly direction they would sooner or later run into the junction.

  This method allowed him to follow contour lines, rather than a straight line up and down the hills. Far easier to move. Also allowed them to avoid the open areas. Even here, as far away from civilization as man had probably ever been, there were the scars from the slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by the H’Mong, a people of the same ethnic stock as the Montagnards. Though there was no sign of those people. They’d long since moved out, tired of being bombed by both sides.

  The few trails they came across were totally unused, almost overgrown. Jim felt better and better about the whole thing. Unlikely anyone would have seen the drop, unlikely the parachutes would be discovered. With any luck they would be able to perform the mission and be out of there without the Communists being any the wiser.

  They took frequent breaks. Jerry, despite his determination to keep up, was limping badly. No hurry, Jim told him. We don’t get there today, we’ll make it tomorrow. Or the next day. Not as if we’re on schedule or anything. Sarpa said they’d come to the rendezvous point every day for the next three months. That still leaves us a month.

  In truth, he wasn’t feeling all that well himself; welcomed the breaks. It was the heat, he supposed. Certainly he was in good enough physical shape; they all were. The rucksack marches and runs through the mountains of Bavaria had made sure of that. But the wet oven they were going through bore no resemblance to the crisp mountain air of the Alps. It sucked the energy out of you, gone with the sweat running in rivulets down your sides. All of them drank as much water as they could; dehydration was a very real danger here. Fortunately there were a few streams along the route in which to replenish the canteens. A couple of iodine tablets to kill the bugs, and you were good to go. Never mind that it felt like you were drinking medicine. Better than the worms, spirochetes, bacteria, amoebas, and pathogens as yet unknown with which the brown liquid was undoubtedly filled.