I listened to the pounding that sounded like tanks firing in the back of my brain and wiped some of the dirt and blood from my face with my free hand. I took a deep breath and stood, thinking that I’d better find the CID man and his chum before they found me.
Then the bushes turned and looked at me.
They were wearing black pajamas and flat hats and stood there with gleaming AK-47s. One of the bushes toward the back held a Soviet-made RPG grenade launcher and gestured for the others to help him haul a light machine gun that Hoang’s body must have hit when it had been thrown from the jeep.
I raised the .45 as the closest soldier, the one with the RPG, began screaming. I fired, and he slumped backward into a sitting position, the bush camouflage falling to his side. I ran toward the others. It was a dicey proposition, but the range on the Colt was useless against the AKs unless I could get in close. I ran forward as the next bush swung his weapon toward me. I blocked the barrel by grabbing the fore stock, and he fired into the hillside. I pressed the .45 into his midriff, pulled the trigger, and held on to his gun as he fell away.
A spray of gunfire ripped up from the ditch, and I fell to the side of the man I’d just shot, yanked the automatic rifle up, and took a bead on the VC soldier who was shooting. The kick was a little harder than an M16, or maybe it was just the uncomfortable wooden stock, but the other fellow dropped anyway, and I lit up a few more VC as the rest disappeared into the high grass.
Do what you’re trained to do and you might get out of this alive. Make the right decisions as if your life depended on them, because it does. Hesitate and you hesitate forever.
I lay there trying not to focus on the multitude of ways I could’ve died in the last few minutes and listened to the pounding in the back of my head instead. I stretched my jaw muscles and looked down the road where the sappers and Viet Cong squad had been headed. I knew we weren’t very far from the west gate of the air base, but the few hooches in the area appeared deserted and there were no civilians on the highway, which was something I’d never seen before. It was then that I noticed the wreckage of an M48 tank. There were bodies sticking out from all the hatches, and it was obvious that the machine was out of action. Beyond it was an M113 armored personnel carrier—the battle-taxi must have run into the back of the Patton when it’d gotten shelled—and there was another body slumped over the .50 caliber machine gun at its commander seat.
Farther down the line, I could see more wreckage where a few more of the APCs had been likewise shelled and were out of commission. Along with the remaining tank, five vehicles were herringboned off the road and firing into an old textile manufacturing building to the west.
It was obvious what had happened. With boots and saddles, the cavalry force must have been dispatched from further north, possibly from Cu Chi, in defense of Tan Son Nhut, and been dry-gulched on Highway 1.
A buddy who had been at the Fort Knox armor training school said they’d shown them what a real firefight was supposed to look like in a display known only as the Mad Minute, but where the tank and machine-gun fire was directed at a target in the display, here and now the thousands of green tracers that were lighting up the quasi-darkness were traveling toward me.
A few streaming bolts of fire from a bazooka caromed off a billboard at the roadside until one found a trajectory that hit the armored personnel carrier that had been the source of the nearest friendly fire. It blew to pieces with a thundering shudder.
A few of the Viet Cong squad that had been disguised as bushes were now throwing hand grenades over the arch of the highway about a hundred yards away. I was unfamiliar with the AK-47, but I finally found the single-shot switch and aimed at the nearest VC. My shot was a little low and to the right, but he fell and the grenade he held exploded, taking him and the two men nearest him.
I stepped back into the bamboo for cover, counted five seconds, then leaned back out and fired again. I had a clean miss on the next, and he began running the other way to join another squad that had come out of the civilian hooches.
There were hundreds of them.
I started rethinking my tactics and thought that perhaps I should try to find somebody on my side who wasn’t dead. With a glance at Hoang’s body, I struggled to get up the embankment to the burnt-outM48. The footing was pretty good, and I got to one of the dirt berms that had blocked the road. A few enemy rounds ricocheted off the surface. I took some deep breaths and slid around to the east behind another dirt pile to get to the personnel carrier’s forward track. The driver was the closest, and it was obvious that he was dead. I glanced up at the commander’s cupola and could see that he was dead, too. I decided to check the next APC.
No one was firing from the vehicle, but I could still hear noises from inside. The main hatch was open, and it looked like the majority of the personnel had escaped with only a few dead. I could smell the blood, so sweet it was almost sour, and was about to move on when I noticed a sergeant who was still breathing sitting with his back against the engine housing. I yelled at him. “Gunny, you all right!?”
His head wavered a moment, then he raised his face. His left eye was gone.
I scrambled through the hatch and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward me as another round of AK fire ricocheted off the tough hide of the armored vehicle and flew around the area where I’d just been standing. I had a flickering of anger at the men who had deserted the damaged sergeant as I staggered into the vehicle and placed him against the bulkhead. “On second thought, it might be a little safer in here.”
I grabbed a first-aid kit from the steel-plated interior and pulled out a pad and a box of gauze, carefully wrapping it around his head to stanch the bleeding. The round must’ve entered his eye and then exited at his closest ear, a miracle in itself. Then I slipped out one of the syrettes of morphine and stabbed the one-hitter into his chest.
He started and looked at me with the one eye. “Do you know what day it is?”
He had a thick Appalachian accent, and I studied him, stunned that he could still talk or hear. “What?”
I watched as he tried to speak with one side of his mouth. “Do you know what day it is?”
I swallowed in an attempt to work up some spit, but my tongue still felt like one of those fly strips. “I think it’s a Tuesday.”
He nodded. “It feels like a Tuesday.”
I smiled back at him and placed the sticker from the syrette on his lapel so that the medics would know he’d been dosed. “Yes, it does.” He mumbled something else as I checked the rifle’s banana-style magazine and found it had only two rounds left.
The attacking soldiers were getting closer, and it was only a short question of time before they hit us with another screaming antitank round or dropped a grenade in the hatch. I laid the almost-spent AK in the sergeant’s lap. “Sarge, I need you to sit tight, because if I don’t start laying down a little suppression fire, we’re about to be overrun.”
I saw that one of the M60s had exploded its barrel and that the other one didn’t look much better. I was trying to avoid the dead commander, but the .50 caliber machine gun looked like our last chance. I reached up and gently pulled the captain down from his position and set him beside the sergeant. He’d caught at least three rounds in the chest, and his expression was one of profound interest; he didn’t look surprised, and it was as if he’d known exactly what was happening to him as it had happened. I looked at the sergeant, who appeared to sink back a little as his one eye closed, and I hoped I could get us a little breathing room before he stopped breathing.
I checked the .50 and could see that it had never been fired. I racked the charging handle, braced my boots, and carefully raised my head up through the hatch. I could hear voices to my left and pivoted to see a number of VC crawling all over the M48 that I had abandoned.
I swung the barrel of the heavy machine gun around and tried to remember the numbers from basic and recalled that the air-cooled M2 would cycle 550 rpm if you let it, but that if you did, it would shoot out the barrel; so I pulled the trigger with just a little restraint— sprayed and prayed.
The weapon did everything it was designed to do, and I hoped that I would never have to see anything like it again.
I pivoted back to the ditch and laid suppression fire along the embankment; those who could crawl or run scattered into the hooches and grass like Wyoming wild turkeys on the third Thursday of November.
If I was going to get the sergeant and myself out of there, now was the time.
I jumped down from the commander’s platform and turned around in time to see Baranski. He was perfectly framed in the open back hatch of the armored personnel carrier, and he was smiling.
I stood there for one of those slow-motion frozen seconds as he raised Hoang’s silenced Walther PPK directly at my face and fired.
* * *
“Do you want to answer that?” His voice was coarse with enough gravel to fill a five-yard dump truck.
I looked up at Virgil’s eyes and tried not to focus on the damage to his left brow. “What?”
He exhaled a slight laugh. “You’re playing a very good game, but the phone is ringing.”
I looked down at the half-finished chess match and then up to the phone on the holding cell wall. “Thanks. You’ll let me know if I win, right?” I walked over and picked up the receiver. “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Offifice?"” I didn’t sound like I was sure.
“Walt?”
I came back fully when I realized it was Frymire. “Yep?”
“I’m over here at the hospital, but Sancho’s not here.”
That wasn’t like the Basquo. “What about Tuyen?”
“Sleeping like a baby.”
"Maybe he went to the bathroom or to get something to eat."”
Chuck was sounding a little rattled. “Sheriff, I’ve been here for a half an hour, and he hasn’t shown up. I asked the on-duty nurse, but she said she hadn’t seen him since she’d made her rounds at eleven forty-five.” I looked up at the clock—forty-five minutes. “You want me to call him at home?”
I thought about Marie and their expected child, and her reaction to a one o’clock in the morning call from the Sheriff’s Department concerning the whereabouts of her husband. “No, I’ll take the beeper and come over.”
I glanced back at Virgil White Buffalo as I hung up the phone and thought about what he would do to the jail when I left him alone. I was going to let him go tomorrow anyway— today, technically, so what could it hurt? I handed him his personal effects from the drawer, including the photo wallet, jacket, and knife. “Virgil, how would you like to go on a little field trip?”
By the time we’d driven through the sulky, high-plains night and gotten to the hospital emergency entrance, the duty nurse, Janine Reynolds, was waiting for us.
She looked up worriedly at Virgil, no doubt remembering his last visit. I glanced up at him. “You’re not going to trash the place again, are you?”
His face remained impassive. “No.”
Frymire was standing in the hallway next to his chair at Tuyen’s door when we approached. He stood, a little unsteadily, and readjusted his shoulder with Tuyen’s computer still under his arm. “I haven’t seen him, and I’ve been here for almost an hour.”
I turned to Ruby’s granddaughter. "Janine?”
She pointed. “When I made my rounds before midnight, he was sitting in that chair.”
Frymire tried to interrupt, but I was still looking at Janine. "Tuyen?”
She nodded toward the closed door. “I took his dinner tray away. He was looking out the window when I told him it would be a good idea to turn off the light and rest.”
I shrugged as I turned the handle and opened the door. “Well, at least he hasn’t been asleep long.” Frymire held it open as I entered and flipped on the light. “Mr. Tuyen?” He was rolled up in the sheets and a single polyester blanket and was turned away from us toward the windows. “Mr. Tuyen, I’m sorry to bother you, but...”
He didn’t answer and, as I got closer, I could see that there was a dark stain on the covers. I leaned over and carefully pulled the sheet back from his face.
“Oh, Sancho.”
16
He wasn’t dead, but damn near.
Tuyen had used the serrated dinner knife from his hospital tray and had utilized the flimsy blade to its worst advantage, planting it deep while twisting it upward and into Saizarbitoria’s kidney, then breaking it off, resulting in massive internal hemorrhage and partial paralysis. Fortunately, he had been attacked in the hospital, and we had him in surgery in less than ten minutes. “I’ll call Marie, you call everybody else and get an APB out on my truck. He’s got Sancho’s gun, so make sure they know he’s armed, then get over to the office and coordinate. ”
“Who’s everybody else?”
We stood by the swinging doors. “Vic, the Ferg, Ruby, Double Tough, the highway patrol, Natrona County, Campbell County, Sheridan County.... And if there’s a Canadian Mountie on duty, I want him on it, too.”
“What about Henry?" ”
I looked up at Frymire, at his battered face and broken arm, still cradling Tuyen’s computer. “Especially Henry.”
I started toward the emergency room exit and noticed that something continued to block the fluorescent light in the hallway over my shoulder. I turned and looked at Virgil; how had I forgotten about a seven-foot Indian? I pointed at Frymire, who was making his calls from the nursing station. “Virgil, could you go with him?”
He didn’t move but studied me and then strained to get the words out. “You need help...”
I stared at him. “I’m about to get a lot of it.”
I looked into the haloed reflections in his pupils and could tell that it cost a lot for him to speak. “You need help now.”
Other than shoot him, there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop him, and maybe I was ashamed that I had him locked up for almost a week with barely any cause, but I didn’t have time for this. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but...”