Rendezvous (2 page)

We were about four meters from the trees growing along the bank when Markowitz’s wrist jerked out of my hand. I turned and saw Garcia lying faceup in the rocky stream, a huge gaping hole in the left side of his head, meaning an exit wound, meaning the shot had come from the right.

I dropped face-first into the stream and scrambled to a small rock that gave me a little cover if I got real small.

I looked upstream in the direction the shot had come from, not expecting to see anything, but there, on a jutting bend in the stream about a hundred meters away, was a black-clad guy kneeling among the rocks. I stared, and the guy seemed to be staring back. From where my men were in the scrub brush, they couldn’t see what I could see from the stream.

Slowly, I took my field glasses from their case and focused on the guy. He didn’t seem to have a rifle, which was good, and he was wearing the traditional Vietnamese black silk pajamas. I focused in tighter and saw that it wasn’t a guy; it was a woman with long black hair. A young woman, maybe early twenties, with high cheekbones and big unblinking eyes, looking right at me.

I had two totally contradictory thoughts: This was the sniper; this couldn’t be the sniper. Just to be on the safe side, I unslung my rifle, but before I got it into a firing position, she shook her head and stood. I could now see a rifle in her hand, a long gun, probably a Russian Draganov sniper rifle, mounted with a telescopic lens.

I stared at her through my field glasses, and I knew if I moved myself or my rifle, that Draganov would be in both her hands, and I’d be dead. She had the range, as Markowitz or Garcia would attest to if they could, and she damned sure knew how to shoot.

The guys on the stream bank were still firing blindly, and through the fire I could hear them yelling at me, “Come on, Lieutenant! Get out of there! We got to get the hell out of here! Come on, come on!”

I looked one more time at the woman standing on the high bend in the stream, and she seemed very nonchalant. Maybe she was disappointed that we weren’t much of a challenge to her.

I stared at her. She held up her hand with four fingers extended, then clenched her fist and pointed at me. My blood ran cold. She turned and disappeared into the brush behind her.

I jumped to my feet and ran through the stream and up the muddy bank, pulled along by outstretched hands into the brush.

I gasped, “Sniper! I saw her! Upstream. Let’s go!” I began running on a path parallel to the winding stream toward where I’d last seen her.

Dawson ran up behind me and jerked me back by my rucksack. He said in a loud whisper, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw her! It’s a woman! She’s upstream. About a hundred meters.”

The other four guys caught up to us, and I explained quickly what I’d seen. I must have sounded a little nuts or something because they kept shooting glances at each other. Finally, they got it.

As I said, they’re pros, and a pro’s instinct for survival doesn’t mean running away; it means running toward what’s trying to kill you so you can kill it first.

In any case, we needed to run because we’d given away our positions with all that firing, and we were deep in enemy territory, so when you fire, you’ve got to get the hell away fast.

No one likes leaving dead guys behind, but this wasn’t regular combat stuff where you recover dead and wounded at all costs; this was long-range recon and getting left behind is definitely a possibility.

We ran about a hundred meters along the path, and Andolotti called out, “We could be running right into an ambush.”

Dawson replied through heavy breaths, “I’d rather do that than get picked off later. Move it!”

We came to the bend in the stream, and I ran out to the edge of the bank where I saw a brass cartridge sparkling in the sunlight. I picked it up and saw it was a 7.62 millimeter, most probably from a Draganov. I didn’t need evidence, but somehow finding the cartridge made me more certain that I hadn’t been hallucinating. I put the cartridge in my pocket.

We moved quickly back to the path, where we saw a few footprints in the damp soil. Reluctantly, but with the knowledge that it was her or us, we pressed on.

We moved at a half trot for about an hour, but by then, we knew we weren’t going to find her. She would find us.

We’d been moving away from Rendezvous Alpha, which we could make in the three days left before our dawn rendezvous time, if nothing went wrong.

You never go back on the trail you took in, so we headed into the woods and chopped our way through brush until we intersected a trail that headed in the general direction we needed to go.

We moved as quickly as we could, but the heat and fatigue, and fifty pounds of gear, was slowing us down.

We took a few minutes’ break every hour and pushed on until dusk, not saying much, but I’m sure everyone, myself included, was thinking about why the lady hadn’t blown me out of the water. I had a few answers to that, and it had less to do with a sudden feeling of compassion on her part and more to do with fucking with our heads.

The sun had sunk into Laos, and the enemy moves at night. We heard trucks and tanks rumbling somewhere to our right, then heard men chatting and laughing not far away. If I’d had a radio, I would have called in artillery on them. Actually, if I’d had a radio, I would have called in choppers to get us the hell out of there right after Muller and Landon got hit. But the lady had left us mute and deaf to the outside world.

We moved more quickly away from the enemy troop movements and about an hour later, we found a small hill covered with tall elephant grass where we set up a defensive perimeter, for what it was worth. We were six lightly armed guys, surrounded by massive numbers of enemy troops. Plus, one sniper, who knew we were there, but who wanted to keep us for herself.

We ate some dehydrated rations reconstituted in their pouches with tepid canteen water. No one said much.

About midnight, we took turns sleeping and keeping watch; two up, four down. But no one slept much. Near dawn, I was on guard duty with Sergeant Dawson, an old guy at thirty, who was on his second tour, and probably his last.

He said to me in a quiet voice, “You sure it was a woman?”

I nodded and grunted.

“You sure? You saw tits and stuff?”

I almost laughed. I replied, “I saw her in my field glasses. It was a woman.” I added, “They make good snipers.”

He nodded. “Had one in Quang Tri once. Killed four guys before we blew the shit out of her with rockets.” He added, “We found her head.”

I didn’t reply.

He asked the obvious. “Why didn’t she nail you?”

“Don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s like … maybe there’s a two-guy-a-day limit on her hunting permit.”

“Not funny.”

“No. Not funny.” He asked, “You think we gave her the slip?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

•   •   •

We moved out at first light and headed south toward Rendezvous Alpha.

About noon, we got to believing that we might make it. There were no more big streams to cross, just a few little brooks that were choked with good covering brush, and there were no open areas on the map that we couldn’t avoid. But then we noticed that the trees and the brush started to look a little sick, and within half an hour, we realized we were in an Agent Orange defoliated area that wasn’t marked on the map.

Pretty soon we were moving through a dead zone of bare trees and brown, withered brush that offered no concealment. Dawson said, “Lieutenant, we got to go back and around this defoliation.”

I replied, “We don’t know how big the area is. It might be a full day detour, then we’re not going to get to Alpha.”

He nodded and looked around. He said, “At least Charlie ain’t around here. They don’t like the defoliated areas.”

“Neither do I.”

We took a break, spread out, and got down, as per standard operating procedure when a patrol is stopped.

Smitty pulled a jungle bar out of his packet and bit off a piece of the chalky, so-called chocolate. He said, “That bitch.” Meaning the sniper, of course. “That bitch could have wasted us all back there in that napalm area. She could’ve wasted at least you, Lieutenant, back at the stream, and maybe a few more of us. What’s her fucking game?”

I didn’t reply, and neither did anyone else.

I was getting a bad feeling about this place, so I stood, put on my rucksack, and said, “Saddle up and move out.”

Everyone stood, and Andolotti unzipped his fly and said, “Hold up. Gotta take a quick piss.”

About midstream, he pitched backward and landed with a thump on his back, still holding his thing, which was still streaming yellow piss.

We all hit the ground and lay frozen on the dead, chemical-smelling earth.

I called out, “Andolotti!”

No reply. I turned my head and eyes toward him. His chest was heaving, and I saw blood around his mouth. He gave a final heave and lay still.

From the way he’d been thrown backward, I knew he’d been hit square in the chest, so I knew where the shot had come from. Through the dead vegetation, I could see a slight rise in the land about a hundred meters due west. I called out, “Follow my tracers!” I took aim from my prone position and fired a long burst toward the rise. Every sixth round was a red, streaking tracer that looked like a laser beam pointing toward the suspected target.

Dawson, Smitty, and Johnson joined in with long bursts of M-16 fire, and we raked the hill, while Beatty, who had the grenade launcher, popped three phosphorous grenades at the hill, setting the dead vegetation ablaze.

I shouted, “Outta here!”

We moved back quickly in a crouch, firing to cover our retreat.

Beatty slipped another phosphorous round in his grenade launcher and was about to get off a hip shot when the launcher flew out of his hands, and he went backward like he’d been hit by a truck.

Dawson yelled, “Beatty’s hit!”

I shouted, “Move back! Move back!”

I was about ten meters from Beatty, and I could see he was still alive. I hit the ground and started crawling toward him, then saw his body jerk in three quick movements. A fourth shot hit his grenade launcher and a fifth shot threw dirt in my face. I got the message and got the hell out of there.

I joined up with Dawson, Smitty, and Johnson. We ran like hell until we came upon a dry gulley, which we dropped into. We moved in a crouch through the gulley for a few hundred meters until I gave the order to stop. This wasn’t the direction we needed to go, so I ordered everyone out of the gulley, and we moved quickly due south, toward our rendezvous point, which was still about thirty kilometers away.

We got out of the defoliated area and entered a place that had been carpet-bombed by B-52s. The forest had been blasted to splinters by the five-hundred- and one-thousand-pound bombs, and craters as big as a house dotted the landscape.

All around us were twisted pieces of steel, almost unrecognizable as once being vehicles. Pieces of rotting corpses lay everywhere, and the surviving trees were draped with body parts. Some sort of carrion-eating birds were feasting and barely noticed us.

The sun was sinking, and we were near the end of our physical limits and our mental endurance, so I ordered everyone into a bomb crater. We lay along the sloping earth walls of the crater, caught our breaths, and drank from our canteens. The place stank of rotting flesh.

Dawson grabbed an arm and flung it out of the crater, and then made the standard joke and said, “So, we count the arms and legs, divide by four, and we got a body count.”

No one laughed.

He finished a canteen of water and informed us, “Two bad things about bomb strike zones. One, Charlie comes looking for salvage and pieces of people to bury. Two, the B-52s sometimes come back to the same place to get the guys looking for stuff.” He added, unnecessarily, “We gotta get outta here.”

I agreed and said, “Take five, then we move.” I took out my map and studied it.

Smitty said to me, “Hey, Lieutenant, why’s she always missing
you?
”

I didn’t reply.

Johnson asked me, “You think she’s still on us?”

I kept looking at the map and replied, “Assume she is.”

I climbed to the rim of the crater and looked through my field glasses. I swept the area in a 360-degree circle, pausing every ten degrees to focus on any possible movement, any glint of metal, or a wisp of smoke, or anything that didn’t look like it belonged in its surroundings.

I was a sitting duck, but I’d developed a fatalistic attitude in the last few days; she was saving me for last.

She’d get Smitty and Johnson in whatever order she wanted, then Sergeant Dawson, whom she had identified as a leader, then me.

I pictured her stalking us, like a big cat, slow and patient, then she struck. The survivors ran, and she ran after us. She was very fast, sure-footed, and quiet, and she knew just how close she could get without getting too close. The chances of us setting up an ambush were not good. All we could do now was run.

I slid back down into the crater and said, “Looks clear.” I checked my watch. “Thirty minutes until dark.” I unfolded my map and studied it in the dim light. I said, “Okay, if we hustle, we can do five kilometers before dark and that will bring us to a rock slide area where we can spend the night.”

Everyone nodded. Rocky areas were like natural fortifications, giving both cover and concealment, and usually good fields of fire. An added bonus was that Charlie avoided open rocky terrain because of our scout choppers so we weren’t going to meet him there. And with luck, our guys might see us from the air.

The one downside was the lady with the gun. She had a map, or she knew the terrain, and she was smart enough to know where we’d be heading. Even if we’d lost her, she could guess where to find us. I mentioned this privately to Dawson.

He replied, “Maybe you’re giving her too much credit.”

“Maybe you’re not.”

He shrugged. “I like rocks around me, and I like choppers overhead who can see us and get us the fuck out of here.”