“Aim for the lead car,” he told Linn. “The ones behind it will crash.”
Linn waited another half second, then fired. The rocket spit across
the night, its whistle thin against the sounds of the battle in the distance.
The nose of the armored car flashed white and it stopped dead in its tracks. As Jing Yo had predicted, the second vehicle ran into the rear of the first with a tremendous smash.
A second grenade, this one fired by one of the men near the bridge, hit the lead vehicle just below the turret's muzzle. The charge penetrated the metal, and turned the inside of the tank red hot in an instant, not merely frying the occupants but setting off several of the thirty-odd charges for the gun. A fireball leapt from the open hatch at the top of the car, its red light cascading across the night sky.
Remarkably, the second car was able to back away from the wreck. As it moved, its gun began to rotate in the direction of the trees.
“Take it,” Jing Yo told Linn.
But the private was having trouble reloading his weapon and wasn't ready. The muzzle of the armored car flashed, and Jing Yo felt his breath involuntarily catch in his chest.
It has missed, he thought, if I can feel this.
The shell
had
missed, whizzing through the trees several meters above them. The gunner in the armored car immediately began to correct; his next shell passed only a few centimeters away.
Linn's grenade hit the front corner of the truck before he could get another one off.
The grenade happened to strike at a bad angle for penetration, and rather than sinking into the armor, it exploded outside of the vehicle, pushing it a few feet back but doing comparatively little damage. The explosion did throw off the gunner's aim, shoving the muzzle upward as it fired.
Jing Yo leapt from behind the tree and ran toward the road. It was not a logical thing to do, nor was it entirely prudent. Yet he knew instinctively that he had to do it.
Racing across the road, he took one of the grenades from his tac vest and thumbed off the tape holding the fuse closed. He circled around the front of the burning armored car, swerving to avoid the flames as they shot out from under the turret. As he did, the gun on the second car swung in the direction of his men on the hill. Jing Yo grabbed the thick iron rail at the rear of the car's body and leapt onto the Panhard, feet sprawling over the rear. Then he rolled upward and climbed to the
top of the turret just as the car's commander popped through the hatch and reached for the machine gun.
Jing Yo had not expected to have such an easy chance, and for the briefest momentâa fraction of a fraction of a secondâhe hesitated. Then he dropped the grenade through the opening. With his left hand, he grabbed the Vietnamese soldier and pulled him with him as he leapt back off the armored car. The grenade exploded with a dull thud, the vehicle rocking and then hissing as smoke rose from the open hatch.
Jing Yo dragged the Panhard commander across the road. The man was dazed, unable to comprehend what was going on, let alone resist. By the time Jing Yo's men came up to help him, Jing Yo had already taken his pistol and trussed his hands behind his back with a thick plastic zip cord.
“You took quite a risk,” said Wu.
The launcher at the base of the bridge had not had a clear shot at the second tank, and it would have taken Linn nearly another minute to fire a third grenade, during which time the armored car's gunner would surely have found his target.
Did he have to explain that to Wu? What was the point?
“What needed to be done, I did,” he said. “There was no other option.”
Sergeant Wu laughed softly, shaking his head.
The Vietnamese armored car commander was a sergeant, who was either too shell-shocked to say anything useful, or a very good actor. Jing Yo brought him under the bridge, removing the man's boots. He used the laces to bind his feet.
“If you try to leave, my man will shoot you,” Jing Yo warned, first in Vietnamese and then in Chinese. “You're not worth the trouble of chasing.”
Back up on the road, Sergeant Wu had climbed into the second armored car. With help from Linn, he cleared it of its dead crew, restarted it, and managed to back it up off the road. The main gun seemed to have been damaged during the fight, but the machine gun at the top was still working, a fact Sergeant Wu demonstrated with a few bursts in the direction of the curve to the north.
“We'll catch them by surprise,” said the sergeant.
“If our tanks arrive, the surprise will be on us,” Jing Yo told him. He sent Private Chin back up the road to act as a lookout, then checked in with division to see how the assault was progressing.
Communications were coordinated at the divisional headquarters, a legacy of decades of Communist top-down military philosophy as well as the political need to keep tight control on the army. The headquarters was actually a mobile unit only a few kilometers behind the lead element of the assault; still, it was clear that they were having a difficult time sorting through the various reports and coordinating support on the fly.
Jing Yo was told to hold his ground; the tanks would be arriving shortly.
“We have disabled two enemy vehicles,” he repeated, sure that the specialist on the other side of the radio did not fully comprehend what he had just been told. “I don't want the tanks to fire at us.”
“Yes, Captain, I understand.”
Under other circumstances, the unintended promotion might have amused Jing Yo, but it only made him even more wary.
“As soon as you see our units, get off the armored car and run away from it,” Jing Yo told Wu. “Take no chances.”
“You're a fine one to talk about chances.”
“Don't compare yourself to me, Sergeant. Simply do your duty.”
Jing Yo checked on each of his men, trotting to them in turn. Then he went over to the Vietnamese sergeant. The man was hunkered by the side of the stream, shivering.
It was such a pathetic sight that Jing Yo thought of putting him out of his misery: the man would face a life of shame as a prisoner of war, even after he was released. But he would have to face his fate; Jing Yo could not help him escape it.
The Panhard's machine gun started firing. Jing Yo raced up the embankment and saw that several Vietnamese soldiers had come up through the field near the trees, apparently getting to the road before being spotted. Sergeant Wu had killed all but one; the survivor, having retreated to the ditch at the edge of the road, was firing back with an AK-47. His shots dinged harmlessly off the armored car. But the man was equally protected by his hiding place; Sergeant Wu couldn't manage to silence him.
The firefight had an almost surreal quality, as if it were a practice exercise rather than an actual conflict. Wu would fire several rounds, temporarily silencing the Vietnamese soldier. Then, just as it seemed as if the man were dead, he would start firing from a slightly different position. Wu would respond, and the exchange would continue.
Finally, Wu tossed a hand grenade into the ditch. The AK-47 stopped firing.
A minute later, more trucks appeared on the road. These were pickup trucks, filled with Vietnamese soldiers who hung over the cab and off the back willy-nilly.
Sergeant Wu caught the first truck in the radiator, the machine gun's bullets slicing into the engine block after passing through the narrow fins. Wu's gun jammed as he swung it toward the second truck just to its left. Cursing, he fired a burst from his own rifle, then climbed out of the armored car and ran back toward the bridge.
By then, everyone else in the squad was emptying their rifles at the rest of the trucks. The Vietnamese threw themselves over the side, desperate to escape the hail of bullets as the vehicles knotted on the road.
“Stop wasting your ammunition!” yelled Jing Yo when he saw they were having little effect on the Vietnamese soldiers. “Let them bunch up! Linn, get ready to take it with a grenade.”
The lack of squad radiosâa handicap he hadn't had in Malaysiaâhurt Jing Yo immensely. He couldn't be sure his men heard what he was saying.
The hell with the army's rules, he decided. He would find a way to procure squad radios as soon as possible.
Jing Yo heard one of the Vietnamese officers yelling something at his men, directing them one way or anotherâprobably away from the truck, though he couldn't quite be sure.
“Fire, Linn!” yelled Jing Yo, worried that they would soon lose their easy target. “Fire!”
Linn may or may not have heard himâthey were separated by roughly forty metersâbut if not, he read the situation as well as Jing Yo did. The grenade popped from its launcher, rocketing across the darkness in a fiery red flash like a meteorite plunging into the earth's atmosphere. It hit the cab of the truck and exploded, sending shrapnel and debris into the small crowd of soldiers behind it. Panicked, the men began to retreat, only to be caught by Chin, who worked them over with his assault rifle.
The darkness, the confusion of battle, and most of all the inexperience of the Vietnamese soldiers had given the commandos a serious advantage against a numerically superior and more heavily armed foe. But Jing Yo realized that those were nebulous and fleeting qualities in war.
His small force could easily be overmatched by the sheer number of Vietnamese soldiers trying to retreat down the road.
The first sign of this danger came a minute or so later, when he saw flashes in the field beyond the trees to his right. The Vietnamese had finally realized they didn't have to use the road to advance.
“Chin! Drop back to the bridge, to the ravine!” Jing Yo ordered. He shouted, then had to resort to using his flashlight to send the message up the road.
Chin acknowledged, and began making his way back.
Had their instructions not been to hold the bridge, now would have been the time to retreat. The commandos had stalled the retreat, killed a large number of enemy soldiers, and not taken any casualties. An artillery strike zeroed in on the destroyed vehicles and then gradually expanding would safely eliminate a sizable portion of the enemy, and provide ample cover for Jing Yo and his men to get away.
But such a strike would almost surely damage the bridge as well, and besides, his instructions were to take and hold the span. It didn't matter that the original plan had called for another three companies to be there to help, or that the bridge seemed, in Jing Yo's opinion, considerably less important than the planners had believed. It mattered that those were his orders, and he knew better than to try and get them changed.
Having Chin retreat saved the private, who could easily have been overrun, but it also allowed the Vietnamese to advance without opposition. Jing Yo could partially compensate for this by having someone flank them from the east; it turned out that Sergeant Wu had already thought of this, and tracers began whipping through the brush and high grass.
A whistle sounded from the Vietnamese line. Jing Yo braced for an all-out attack, then realized that the Vietnamese commander was calling for a retreat.
“Hold your fire,” he ordered.
Undoubtedly it would be only a temporary respite. The enemy would regroup quickly.
Jing Yo called division again, to get a read on the location of the vanguard and to tell them that they were under heavy fire at the bridge. The major who was coordinating the attack communications told him that the vanguard was on Highway 12 and would soon be in his area.
“How close are they?” Jing Yo asked. “Can you give me a GPS point?”
“We don't have specific data points,” said the major. “Things are in flux, Lieutenant.”
“We have a sizable number of enemy in front of us.”
“Then you have much opportunity. I must move on; there are many things happening.”
Judging only by the sound of explosions in the distance, the battle at the Lai Châu barracks had begun to wind down. But there was no way of knowing how close the tanks and infantry at the leading edge of the assault were. Nor could Jing Yo communicate directly with them.
Colonel Sun could. Jing Yo punched in the colonel's command line. Sun surprised him by answering himself. His voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of explosions.
“Sun.”
“Colonel, we are holding the objective on Route 12,” said Jing Yo quickly. “We have a large force in front of us.”
“Good.”
“We have held off two assaults, one by armored cars. The force opposing us is mustering for a fresh attack. We've used about half of our ammunition,” said Jing Yo, laying out the problem in its starkest terms. “If they continue to press, we will run out of ammunition.”
“Hold your position,” snapped Sun.
“If I could get a read from the vanguardâ”
“Hold your position.”