The Hobo Woods (Vietnam Ground Zero Military Thrillers Book 7) Read online

  THE HOBO WOODS

  Vietnam: Ground Zero Series

  Book Seven

  Eric Helm

  To Sharon Jarvis

  who got the ball rolling,

  to Feroze Mohammed

  who picked it up and ran with it,

  and to Wilson ‘Bob’ Tucker

  who long ago advised me to stay in the game.

  Thanks to you all.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  ALSO BY ERIC HELM

  GLOSSARY

  “WHICH WEAPON DO YOU WANT?” BATES ASKED.

  “M-16, I think. And a pistol. I don’t suppose I could find a 9mm Browning.” Gerber tossed the laundry bag into the back of the jeep.

  “I think it can be arranged,” said Bates. “The only thing wrong with those exotic ones is that it’s hard to find ammunition.”

  “I wouldn’t call a Browning exotic.” Gerber climbed into the passenger’s seat.

  “Anything that doesn’t use .45 or .38 caliber is exotic around here.”

  “I see the paper shufflers in the World are still directing things. Anyone ever tell them the advantage of fourteen shots without reloading?”

  Bates shoved the jeep into reverse, grinding the gears. Then, spinning the wheel, they blasted out of the supply depot in a burst of red dust.

  “I doubt it,” yelled Bates. “I mean, those are the same guys who have declared the use of the shotgun as too inhumane but have done nothing to stop the use of napalm.”

  “Yeah,” was all Gerber could find to say.

  PROLOGUE

  THE HOBO WOODS REGION NEAR CU CHI, REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM

  Nuyen Van Ti lay in the shallow hole that overlooked the weed- and vine-choked path in the center of the Hobo Woods, watching an American patrol work its way to the north toward the Song Sai Gon. He had been there since before dawn, covered by six inches of moist earth and damp, rotting vegetation; only his eyes were exposed, and there was a small opening for his nose so that he could breathe. Ti had no weapon with him, no equipment. He was dressed in black silk shorts and nothing else. His job was to spy on the booby-trapped trail and report to his lieutenant after the Americans departed.

  It was an uncomfortable task. Once his comrades had buried him, he could not move. The stinging rays of the sun, broken and deflected by the scraggly trees and ragged bushes, were absorbed by the earth of his temporary grave, at first not bothering him and then baking him. By midmorning his body was soaked with sweat and he was breathing in short bursts, praying for a drink of water. He wondered why he hadn’t been given a canteen with a straw. He had the feeling he was being suffocated, and it was only through tough mental discipline that he was able to remain in place and ignore the dryness building in his throat.

  He had spent the morning listening to the American jets and helicopters as they had overflown the spot where he lay buried. There had been a distant rumbling as heavy explosives had been dropped from the planes, and then nearer, louder detonations as artillery had destroyed a small section of the Hobo Woods no more than a klick away. The nearby rattling of the shrapnel against the trees as it had cut through the leaves had scared him. He had feared that the artillery would kill him, but it had fallen without coming very close to him.

  Part of the time, to allay his discomfort, he had dreamed of his girlfriend in faraway Ban Me Thuot and the last night they had spent together. He had told her that he was going south toward the delta to fight the imperialist Americans who had invaded their country and who were turning most of it into a wasteland.

  She had not argued the point with him, because she worked on the American base at Ban Me Thuot, earning in one month more than her father could earn in a year. The money had allowed her to buy many things that she had only dreamed of. The gifts of the Americans had enabled her to provide much for her family, and although her father resented the newfound wealth from his daughter, he took it, as everyone else in Ban Me Thuot did. Each morning, he, along with a thousand other men, lined up at the main gate to Ban Me Thuot, hoping for a day’s employment inside. The Americans didn’t realize they were creating enemy soldiers with all their wealth and Ti had realized that he could exploit the situation. He had told his girl’s father that the Americans were paying her so much money because they expected more than honest work from her. It had caused trouble in the home and that was what Ti had wanted.

  But that last night had been something different for Ti. With the prospect that he was leaving for months or years or maybe forever, she had caved in to his desires. She had sneaked off with him, hiding in the rear of his hootch while he had slowly peeled her out of her clothes. When she was naked, he had licked the sweat from her body, concentrating on her breasts and then her thighs. He had moved slowly, enjoying everything and anticipating the best. Only the thought of his trip had spoiled the pleasure of the night, but he had managed to suppress that by studying her body, feeling the soft skin, tasting her salty sweat and kissing her willing lips.

  At first her response had been mechanical and ill-timed, but then she had gotten into the spirit of the act, thrusting herself at him and guiding his hands for her pleasure. She had moaned quietly as he had touched her, the sweat dampening her hair and plastering it to her head. She had spread her legs wide and pumped her hips wildly as the enjoyment had peaked. She had shouted her gratification and glee, forgetting the inhibitions taught to a proper Vietnamese young lady.

  Ti felt himself respond to the memories, the thickening at his crotch becoming uncomfortable given the circumstances. He couldn’t reach down to adjust himself or to relieve himself. Instead, he forced his mind back to his task.

  It was early afternoon when he heard the first American voice in the distance and knew that the enemy was coming closer. For a moment he held his breath, fear invading his body like a disease, but then he remembered that most of the Americans didn’t see what they looked at. A well-concealed trap would be missed by them, and they would never spot his hiding place.

  The Americans stuck to the path of least resistance, dodging the thorny bushes and ducking under the clinging vines. There were twelve of them, all wearing sweat-stained uniforms and carrying the black plastic weapon called the M-16. They were walking single file, one man far out in front of the rest.

  Somehow the point man missed the trip wire stretched across the trail. He stepped over it and continued to move. His head swiveled from side to side as his eyes searched the vegetation around him. He held his weapon in both hands, the fingers of one curled around the pistol grip and trigger housing. He stopped once, listened and then moved on.

  Behind him, one of the men probed a bush with the barrel of his weapon. A big black man passed that soldier, his foot snagging the trip wire, jerking the grenade from the can that held the safety spoon in place. As the grenade pulled free, the spoon flew, and a moment later there was a dull pop like the sound of a light bulb hitting the floor. Red-hot shrapnel sliced through the air, cutting into the trees and the black man.

  A scream rose from him as he flipped forward, his hands beating frantically at his back as if to brush off stinging insects gathered there. He was shouting at the men with him, screaming for their help, but they had all disappeared, diving for cover. There were a couple of hasty shots fired at unseen targets and then silence, except for the moaning of the wounded enemy.

  Then another American with no weapon, just a green canvas bag with a bright red cross on it, knelt near the wounded man. With scissors, he cut the uniform from the soldier’s back, spreading it wide so that he could see the shrapnel damage. It looked as if someone had painted the man red.

  The man with the bag dabbed at the blood, wiping it away carefully. He tossed the blood-soaked rag into the bushes at the side and began to shake some kind of powder over the wounds. That done, he taped a transparent material lightly to the man’s back and then dug in his bag for a needle so that he could give the wounded soldier a shot. Ti guessed it was something to ease the pain.

  As he completed the treatment, another enemy, a bigger American, came forward and crouched near them. They talked quietly, and although Ti could hear the words, he didn’t understand them. Then the others approached, crawling on the ground, probing the trail with their fingers. One of them found a second booby trap and carefully followed the trip wire until he discovered another grenade in the can. He extracted the weapon and tossed it into the trees away from them. It exploded a moment later, injuring no one but scaring a number of birds. They flapped noisily into the air, screaming their fear at the forest around them.

  Gently two of the Americans assisted the wounded man to his feet, helping him walk to the north into an open area. All the men spread out, searching for the VC and then sat down to wait as the big man talked on his radio. Ti wished he could hear him now because he would be able to get the American codes, but the enemy soldiers were too far from him.

  Within minutes a helicopter appeared. It swooped out of the cloudless sky and touched down in the middle of a clearing nearby. Ti could he
ar the roar of its turbine engine and the popping of its rotor blades as it leaped back into the sky. They had placed the wounded man aboard the aircraft. The whirlwind of debris, leaves and dried grass slowly fell to the ground. With their wounded friend evacuated, the patrol regrouped and worked its way off the clearing and into the trees.

  Although Ti had seen what he had been left to see, he still didn’t move. He was enough of a soldier to know that there could be more men behind the first bunch, or that the first group could return. Ti would wait until dark before he extracted himself from his grave so that he could slip into the tunnel system that honeycombed the Hobo Woods and make his report. The officers would be pleased with Ti’s good work, even though the news that the Americans were patrolling in the Hobo Woods would be distressing. They would have to be careful as more of the men in their division slipped into hiding there.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SWAMPS NEAR FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA

  It was cold and wet and miserable, and Army Special Forces Captain MacKenzie K. Gerber couldn’t figure out how he had allowed himself to be talked into this training mission. There were a dozen men, all of whom Gerber outranked, qualified to stamp through the swamp.

  Gerber stopped moving, the clammy, foul-smelling water lapping at his thighs, soaking through the inadequate protection of his fatigues and filling his boots. He listened to the night sounds around him, then reached to the right and touched the smooth trunk of a dead tree, the Spanish moss hanging from its limbs like so much diseased skin. Switching his weapon to his left hand, Gerber pulled his compass from his mud-slimed pocket. He sighted on a distant point of light, checked the dimly glowing dial of the compass and then looked upward through the tangle of leafless branches into the cold blackness of the star-studded November sky.

  With great care, he began to move again, rolling his foot forward slowly so that the muck under the water released his boot. He chose an easterly direction, focusing on the dim light that he figured marked an isolated farm or roadside stand. He felt the water move with him, the quiet splashing lost in the night calls of the birds wheeling overhead. Gerber wasn’t worried about snakes. It was too cold for them. Too miserable for them.

  The water began to drop away, and Gerber scrambled up a slight muddy rise sprinkled with dried grass. He was out of the swamp for the first time in an hour. A gentle breeze reminded him just how cold he was, and he huddled with his back against the trunk of a gigantic tree that dripped Spanish moss and blotted out the sky. Shafts of moonlight reflected on the rippling water of the swamp, dancing gaily, looking almost inviting.

  From the east came the drone of aircraft engines. Gerber knew it was the first of the simulated recon entering the tactical zone. He couldn’t see the blacked-out shape but could tell from the sound that the C-130 Hercules was approaching. He hoped Sergeant McInnerny had deployed the aggressors near what they presumed would be the drop zone. There were only a few places that a squad could jump into without risking drowning in the swamp or hanging themselves up in the branches of the forest, especially at night. Gerber had ordered McInnerny to cover two of them. Gerber was close to the third.

  As the plane neared, Gerber slipped into the swamp again, the water washing around him as he edged his way toward the drop zone. The water closed around his crotch, shriveling his scrotum until he could feel the ache from it. Once he was clear of the overhanging trees, he glimpsed patches of the night sky, blazing with a thousand stars. He heard the engines of the C-130 roll back as the pilot decreased his speed so that the paratroopers could exit. Straining his eyes, he could not see lights from the plane, but as it turned away and the roar increased, he caught the pale reflections of parachutes drifting on a steady breeze. He grinned to himself and eased out of the water, rubbing a hand over his face, which was now covered with mud and disguised underneath layers of camouflage paint. The drop would not be a success.

  Free of the water, he crouched near a fallen tree and laid three wet hand grenade simulators on it. Next to them he placed a single flare, then set two spare magazines for his M-16 on it. He was planning a one-man ambush with grenades and flares that would surprise and confuse the parachutists. He hoped that the M-16, dragged through swamp water that was sometimes chest deep, would not jam. He had been careful to keep it out of the water and mud, but he had slipped once, nearly falling.

  From the left came a quiet voice, “Captain, I have good news and bad news.”

  Startled, Gerber rolled away, landing on his side, propped on one elbow and bringing his rifle up to fire, but he could not see a target. As he removed his finger from the trigger, he said, “That you, Tony?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the voice. Master Sergeant Anthony B. Fetterman seemed to materialize out of the gloom at the base of the tree. He unfolded himself until he was a short, slight black shape against the dark gray of the background.

  “Christ, Tony,” said Gerber. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you full of holes.”

  “Had faith in you, Captain. Knew you wouldn’t open fire without identifying the target, no matter how surprised you were.” He grinned, his teeth flashing in the night. “Besides, you’ve only got blanks.”

  Gerber ignored that and turned to the slash of gray that was the intended drop zone. “If you’ve a few minutes, I’ll throw a scare into these guys.”

  “If you don’t mind, Captain, I’ll take care of their surprise. While I was waiting for you to finish playing in the swamp, I rigged the DZ with artillery simulators.”

  Gerber rolled to his hands and knees, crawled to Fetterman, and as he sat down, waved a hand. “Be my guest.”

  Fetterman picked up the hand-held electrical generator that trailed wires, and crouched near the end of the fallen tree where the roots reached into the night. He held the body of the equipment in his left hand, his right grasping the handle of the crank. Overhead, the parachutists continued their silent descent, barely visible in the light of the half moon. He watched the twelve of them, waiting until each had reached the ground.

  With a grin, he said, “This’ll wake them up.” Savagely he twisted the generator’s handle, once, twice, three times. The current surged through the lines, setting off the sequence of simulators.

  From his position, Gerber saw the first bright flash, like a giant strobe, and heard the loud, flat bang of the simulator as it exploded. From the center of the DZ came the staccato burst of an M-16 on full automatic, the man outlined by the muzzle-flashes of his weapon. The rest of the squad was standing there, trying to find their attackers, trying to collapse their chutes, and scrambling to bring their weapons to bear on the unseen enemy.

  And then it seemed that the whole DZ erupted. Glaring bursts of light ringed the clearing, giving the impression of a well-worn silent movie. The movement of the men took on the jerky motions of old films as they spun, searching for the attackers. In a real combat environment, they would all have died in less than a minute.

  Fetterman jerked the wires free from the generator. “That takes care of that.”

  “I guess it does,” said Gerber.

  “Now, as I said, I have good news and I have bad news.”

  “Good news first. Takes the sting out of the bad.”

  “Yes, sir. Good news is that our orders arrived. Courier brought them to headquarters a couple of hours ago. Special delivery since they were so late. We’re on our way back to Nam.”

  “And the bad?”

  “We have to be in Oakland by ten this morning.”

  Gerber pushed back the mud-encrusted sleeve of his fatigues, peeled the camouflage strip off the face of his watch and saw that it was a quarter of three. “Doesn’t give us much time. Not with a four-mile hike to the camp.”

  “I brought a jeep. I have no great fondness for waltzing through cold, muddy swamp water when I can drive a nice, warm jeep.”

  “Then lead on,” said Gerber.

  “What about the men in the DZ?”

  “Let them find their own ride.”