Incident at Plei Soi (Vietnam Ground Zero Military Thrillers Book 10) Read online

  INCIDENT AT PLEI SOI

  Vietnam: Ground Zero Series

  Book Ten

  Eric Helm

  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

  GERBER RAN TOWARD THE FAR END OF THE REDOUBT.

  He passed the dispensary and the team house, which were little more than smoking rubble now. He found Fulton crouched there, a PRC-25 set up on top of the bunker, giving the antenna a little extra height.

  “How are we doing?” asked Gerber.

  “Not good. I’ve ordered the strikers on the west wall to E and E. Can’t get them in here, and their only hope is to escape. We’ve lost the whole outer perimeter.”

  “What’s our status now?”

  Fulton laughed. “Well, the Mike Force is still on the ground at Moc Hoa. Seems the rain has the choppers grounded. The Air Force can’t penetrate the clouds, and most of the artillery around here is involved in counterbattery duels. Charlie is dropping mortars on everything within range of us.”

  “Then we’re on our own,” said Gerber grimly.

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  PROLOGUE

  TRANG MAI VILLAGE, ONE MILE EAST OF THE CAMBODIAN BORDER, REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM

  Tan Van Nguyen stood in the doorway of his mud-and-thatch hut, contemplating the sweltering heat of the early morning, and wishing that he didn’t have to work the fields. Maybe just once he could sit around in the shade and watch the dark clouds build into rainstorms until the lightning flashed and the thunder roared. He wished his two sons hadn’t run off in the night to join the Viet Cong because, now that his fingers were bent with arthritis and his back hurt all the time, he needed them. He wished his daughters hadn’t been drawn to Tay Ninh City by the lure of the American riches to be found there.

  He glanced over his shoulder at his old wife, sitting in the darkness of the hut, sweat staining her light cotton shirt and dripping down her face. He wished she had the strength to help in the field, but the bombs that rained from the sky had crippled her long ago. He didn’t know if they had come from the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the Viet Cong or the Americans. All he knew was that she hadn’t been the same since the day he’d found her lying in a puddle of blood among the new rice plants. She was unable to work in the fields and had trouble walking. The only thing she still did well was sleep.

  Without a word to her, he left the hut. He wasn’t even sure anymore that she heard him when he spoke to her. She stayed in the hut all day, and on many afternoons he was forced to carry water from the stream to bathe her because she didn’t answer the calls of nature.

  He picked up the shovel that he had found. It was a flat-bladed tool with a broken handle that the Americans had discarded. He had replaced the handle with a length of bamboo and wondered why anyone would throw away something so valuable, even if the handle was broken. It was the best thing to have happened to him in a year.

  In the field he stripped off the black pajama shirt he wore so that he was bare to the waist. Not more than a half a kilometer away, another farmer was tending his crops. Nguyen waved at his friend who occupied a similar hut not far from his own. When the man responded, Nguyen bent to work, digging at a dike so that the water in the paddy behind it would flood into the dry one. It was time to get ready for the planting there.

  Overhead, the American jets roared as they crisscrossed the skies from Thailand to the South China Sea in search of the enemy, many of them leaving spidery silk threads in the deep blue. There was the distant boom of artillery as it destroyed some other farmer’s fields. And there was the rattle of small arms as the enemies tried to kill one another in a finger of jungle about a mile away.

  Tan Van Nguyen tuned it all out. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care who won the war, and in any case he couldn’t tell which side was which. He only knew the misery that it had caused him. Sons who were missing, possibly never to be heard from again, and daughters who would never help him with their mother. They sometimes came home, bringing gifts of food and clothes and, once, a fancy fan that was useless because there was no electricity.

  He tossed a final shovelful of stinking mud up onto the dike and climbed to the top of it as the foul-smelling water drained from one paddy into the other. He sat down, the shovel beside him, and watched the spreading stain of brown water, the sweat dripping from his nose and chin and down his neck to his chest. A hot, miserable day, just one of many that had preceded it and a harbinger of more to come.

  It was then that he heard the distant, distinct pop of a mortar round being fired. He glanced up at his hut and saw the explosion as the round detonated. The black cloud of smoke and dust vanished in the light breeze as shrapnel ripped through the flimsy walls of his home.

  For a moment he sat dumbfounded, too stunned to move or react. He watched as his life blew up in front of him. Mortars landed near the hut and in the water buffalo pen, wounding the beast. As it bellowed its rage and pain, two rounds dropped through the roof of the hut, blowing the top off and collapsing the front.

  Tan Van Nguyen leaped to his feet and jumped into the muddy water. As he began running toward the smoking remains of his home, mortar rounds raining down around it, he saw the tiny well vanish in a puff of smoke. He heard the shout of a neighboring farmer and the scream of anguish that came from a nearby but.

  As the farmers neared the remains of their homes, the tree line that stood on the Cambodian border erupted into small-arms fire. The bullets sounded like angry bees, cutting down the wounded water buffalo and one of Tan Van Nguyen’s neighbors. Then the black-clad men emerged from their cover, shooting their rifles from their hips and shouting for a long life for Ho Chi Minh and for the death of the imperialist running dogs from the West. Death to the puppet soldiers from Saigon and their evil spawn. Death to all who opposed them.

  Tan Van Nguyen ignored the danger as he raced to his home. He slid to a halt near the rubble that had been the front. Inside, a single hand was visible. It was surrounded by a spreading pool of bright red, and he knew that his wife had finally been taken from him, too.

  He turned and glared at the approaching soldiers. He yelled at them, demanding to know why. Why had they attacked him and the tiny hamlet where he lived? He and his wife, the people of the settlement, had done nothing to deserve the attack.

  But that didn’t stop the VC. They advanced rapidly, their weapons ripping at the mud walls that still stood, cutting down everything that moved. Nguyen saw a farmer break for the tree line, attempting to escape the burning thatch of his roof. He had taken no more than a few steps when he suddenly seemed to do a jerky dance, then his body sprawled in the dirt, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

  Nguyen watched the death of his friend in horror and then realized that in order to survive he had to flee. He glanced at the hand of his dead wife one last time, then turned to run. As he sprinted across the open ground, bullets danced at his feet, and he felt the sting of a rock kicked up by a stray round. He dived for cover in a clump of trees, then began to crawl through it rapidly, the shouting and shooting diminishing in the distance behind him.

  He would never return to the hamlet. Of that he was sure. Neither his son
s, nor his daughters would come back now. Somehow they would learn of the destruction and would not return. They would forget about him and their mother. They would go on with their lives, forgetting about the tiny hamlet where they had been born and where they had grown up.

  Without looking back, he headed north, thinking of the camp the Americans had built not far from the hamlet. A sudden sense of security swept over him as he thought of the Americans, tall, robust men who had promised to protect those who came to them. Nguyen had nothing now except the black shorts he wore. He decided he would go to the American camp and ask for their help.

  Finally the heat overwhelmed him. He collapsed, breathing rapidly, his mouth full of cotton. He had nothing left, not even the shovel that had been thrown away. As he smelled the hot, dry dirt of his beloved Vietnam inches from his nose, he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He watched his sweat mingling with the reddish dirt, trying to understand why it had happened. There was no reason for the Viet Cong to attack him or his hamlet. None whatsoever.

  What he didn’t know and couldn’t be told was that the hamlet stood on an escape route. In the coming days and weeks, the NVA and VC would want a clear path into the Cambodian sanctuary, and it was Tan Van Nguyen’s misfortune to have built his hut one of the best escape routes.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE ORIENTAL HOTEL, SAIGON, RVN

  U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Mack Gerber sat in the air-conditioned luxury of one of the Oriental’s bars and stared across the table at his companion. Gerber, possibly the most senior captain in the U.S. Army because he was on the promotion list for major, was a fairly young man for his rank. He was tall, just over six feet, with brown hair and blue eyes. His skin was a reddish-brown from so much time spent in the hot tropical sun. Until only a few weeks earlier, he had been in the World, teaching younger men what they should need to know to survive for their year in Vietnam. Now, on his second tour, he was assigned to MACV-SOG in Saigon. His assignment as the commander of B-52, a Special Forces operation in Nha Trang, had blown up with the company he had escorted into the Hobo Woods.

  The woman with him, Robin Morrow, was a journalist assigned to a press bureau in Saigon. She was a young woman with light brown hair cut in bangs and bright green eyes. Unlike many of the journalists in the bar, she wasn’t wearing fatigues or safari-style khakis. Instead, she was wearing a light, green silk dress that molded itself to her body. She wasn’t watching Gerber, concentrating instead on the glass that held the tiny ice cubes and the almost nonexistent alcohol of her old-fashioned. She was spinning it so that the cubes rattled.

  Finally she looked up. “Have you heard from my sister?”

  Before he could answer, the waitress reappeared and took another drink order. Gerber waited until she vanished into the gloom before he spoke. “Heard from your sister? Well, yes, Robin, I have. Recently, in fact.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Gerber repeated. “And I haven’t written back to her yet. With everything that’s happened since I set foot in-country, I haven’t had much in the way of spare time for writing letters.”

  “Uh-huh.” Robin looked up and stared at Gerber. “I notice you’re avoiding the question. I can only assume the worst.”

  Gerber picked up his empty glass, glanced at it as if seeing it for the first time, then set it down. “This isn’t easy.” He cleared his throat. Not as easy as facing the Viet Cong over the sights of a rifle or waiting for the random mortar round to drop on him.

  “I’m a big girl,” said Robin. “You don’t have to spare my feelings.” She was quiet for a moment and then her voice hardened. “I can take anything but this beating around the bush, damn it. I have a right to know what’s going on.”

  “Yeah.” Gerber rubbed his face with both hands and wished the waitress would return with a fresh glass of bourbon. Hell, he wished she’d return with the bottle. “Robin, there’s really not much to tell. The letter I got from her scolded me for my lack of sensitivity. She claims I should have told her about the orders to Vietnam. But she understands now.”

  “Well, shit.” Robin stared with total fascination at something on the ceiling, her eyes blinking rapidly to stop the tears. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Gerber reached out and touched her hand. She drew it away from him. “Don’t!”

  “I’m handling this badly,” he said. “You’re misunderstanding everything here. Maybe it will help if I tell you that something has changed in the past year. I’ve had a chance to watch Karen carefully…”

  “That helps a great deal,” snapped Robin. “I’m so happy that you had the opportunity to watch Karen carefully for the past year.”

  Gerber suddenly had a vision of Robin on the bar of a smoky club, a hundred GIs watching as she slowly stripped off her clothes, throwing them at him and flaunting herself while demanding that he watch. While the GIs had shouted encouragement and waved dollar bills at her, Gerber had felt sick to his stomach. He remembered the pain etched on her face as she’d stood outside the same club, Gerber’s fatigue jacket around her to hide her nudity. The MPs had stood close, listening to them talk, but none of them had entered the conversation. They had just wanted to make sure that the scene wasn’t going to get worse and that no one got hurt.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve seen her at her worst,” Gerber finally said. “She tried to manipulate everything and everyone around her. Her world centers on her completely. She gets what she wants and then discards it because she knows she can do better if she tries.”

  “That’s my sister,” agreed Robin. “But no one seems to see it but me.”

  “The point,” said Gerber, ignoring what Robin had said, “is that I left her high and dry. I didn’t tell her about the impending trip to Vietnam because I didn’t care what she felt. I didn’t care about her. She’d taken our relationship and destroyed it.”

  Robin heard the words but couldn’t believe them for a moment. She reached out now to touch Gerber, but then the waitress was there putting the drinks on the table, smiling broadly for a larger tip. Gerber handed her the money. When she left, Robin said, “She destroyed it?”

  “I don’t know how to say this without hurting you all over again, but I need to explain it. Karen and I’d go out to dinner, and she’d flirt with every man she saw. She’s the center of her world, has to be the center of attention, and she thinks she’s everyone’s ideal of the perfect woman.”

  “Yes, that’s my sister.”

  “Anyway, I realized she wasn’t what I wanted.” He stopped and smiled. “And I realized I wasn’t what she wanted, either. At least I wouldn’t be when I was captured again. As long as I was the one in control, as long as she had to pursue me, then she’d go to any lengths to catch me. Once that was done, I’d be discarded.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Robin shook her head. “Someone’s actually seen through her.” She took a healthy swig from her drink and made a face as the liquor burned her throat. “You should have heard my mother when Karen announced she was going into nursing. What a loving and caring person she was to devote her life to the service of others.”

  “A clever dodge,” said Gerber, almost to himself. He picked up his glass but didn’t drink. Instead he watched Robin as she talked.

  “When I said I was going into journalism, she said it was so typical of me, always putting myself above everyone else. I told her it was a career of service as well, but she didn’t see it that way.”

  Gerber felt his stomach flip at that. He could imagine the pain of a girl as her mother called her unfeeling, especially after she had praised her sister. He couldn’t understand how parents could be so cruel, and yet he had seen it a hundred times. He had seen it in the faces of the young men who arrived at Fort Bragg for training. Not the draftees, but the young volunteers who were trying to do something so that the unfeeling men and women who masqueraded as their parents would notice them.

  “The point of all this,” said Gerber, “is that I broke
it off with her. Ended it before the trip to Vietnam, in fact. I was the one who ended the relationship when I discovered what a carnivorous creature she was.”

  “Oh, my.” Robin clapped her hands. “Oh, my! I bet she went into a frenzy.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I saw her for what she really is. Love may be blind, but it isn’t stupid. I saw her play a hundred other men, and a few women, like they were so many game fish. I didn’t like it.”

  Robin leaned forward, her elbows on the table, the movement revealing more cleavage. She reached across and touched Gerber’s hands, then released them immediately. She had felt the same electricity she always did when they touched. “So you’re through with Karen?”

  “Yes,” said Gerber smiling. “She’s there in the World, and in a year she’ll have moved on to other things. Other people.”

  “Okay,” said Robin, nodding. “Now we have to decide what we’re going to do.”

  “You mean with our lives?”

  “No, silly. With the rest of the night. I’m not hungry at all. A little drunk, but not hungry.”

  “I’d planned on dinner,” said Gerber. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  Robin was on her feet then, reaching for him. “We’ll eat later.” It was almost a command.

  Gerber began to slide back his chair, when Robin collapsed into hers, her face suddenly white, as if an apparition had appeared in the doorway. Gerber turned to see Master Sergeant Anthony B. Fetterman approaching.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Robin. “This is probably nothing to worry about. He then turned to face Fetterman. The master sergeant was a diminutive man, wiry with black hair and dark eyes. He claimed various ancestry from the Sioux Indians to the Aztecs, and for his small size was the most deadly man Gerber had ever known. His skill at warfare was unmatched.

  “Good evening, Tony,” Gerber said.