Soldier's Medal (Vietnam Ground Zero Military Thrillers Book 5) Read online

  Cavanaugh dropped his spoon into his bowl and pushed them away. “I’ll meet you at the gate,” he said, making it sound more like a question than a statement.

  “Sure.” Tyme nodded. “Make the equipment check. Make sure they all have the ammo they’re supposed to carry. Sometimes on these routine patrols they leave the ammo back. Don’t like humping it through the jungle.”

  “I know my job,” snapped Cavanaugh.

  “I’m sure you do,” said Tyme. “It’s just that you haven’t been out here for a while.”

  Slowly Cavanaugh got back into his gear. He adjusted the shoulder straps until they rested comfortably on his shoulders, buckled his pistol belt and walked to the door. For a moment he stared out, looking into the deep blue of the sky overhead. Back to the west was a line of black clouds that suggested afternoon storms. As he left the building, he said over his shoulder, “Meet you at the gate.”

  Since the camp had been destroyed during the fight to recapture it and since it had been redesigned afterward, the gate was now on the west side about a hundred meters from the runway. Two large bunkers that housed heavy machine guns, two .30-caliber machine guns and 90mm recoilless rifles guarded the flimsy gate and graded road that led to the Triple Nickel. Immediately inside the gate was a low wall of green rubberized sandbags that could be used as an additional machine-gun nest if the enemy was getting too close.

  Most of the Vietnamese strikers stood near the low wall, their packs on the ground at their feet, their rifles stacked nearby. A couple of them sat staring at the ground or talking to one another. Cavanaugh approached them slowly, cautiously, wondering if any of them remembered him or if they blamed him for the deaths of the RF strikers during the defense of the listening post. He could see nothing in their eyes that suggested they knew what had happened, or maybe it was just something in their past and they assigned no blame for it.

  He leaned his rifle against the sandbags and said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  The Vietnamese responded slowly, getting to their feet and helping each other seat the packs on their backs. They all picked up their weapons, a collection of rifles from the Second World War and Korea with a few of the new M-16s thrown in, and formed a ragged line facing away from the sun.

  Cavanaugh wiped a hand over his face, which was sweat damp in the early morning heat. He moved down the line, checking the packs, looking for the food rations of cooked rice and fish heads. He had to make sure that each man was carrying his allotment of spare ammo, that each had his share of the squad equipment — spare ammo for the M-60 machine gun, extra rounds for the M-79 grenade launchers and extra batteries for the radio.

  Moments later Tyme approached from the redoubt. He walked up to Cavanaugh and put a hand on his shoulder. “We about ready to bug out?”

  “They’re all set,” Cavanaugh told him. “Want me to check your pack?”

  “Take a look if you want,” said Tyme, “but shit, Sean, we’re only going to be out twenty-four hours. I can carry everything I need for that in my pockets.”

  “Just a thought.”

  Tyme turned to watch Gerber as he came toward them. No one saluted because saluting only identified the officers for the enemy.

  When he was close, Gerber asked, “You ready?”

  “Yes, sir. Everything’s set.”

  Gerber glanced upward, noticing that there were only a few wispy clouds directly above him, ignoring the black ones to the west. “Let’s watch the pace,” Gerber warned them, “it’s going to be hot and miserable out there.”

  Tyme wiped his face and then rubbed his hand across the front of his fatigues, leaving a ragged stain. “Yes, sir, it sure is. Anything else?”

  “Not that I can think of.” He moved closer to Cavanaugh. “Sean, you’ve been out of this for quite a while. Don’t be afraid to say something to Justin if you’re not used to humping in the bush.”

  “No problem, Captain,” said Cavanaugh. “I spent some of my time in Saigon working out. I can handle it.”

  “Okay,” said Gerber. “Have fun, then. I’ll see you when you get back. Good hunting to the both of you.”

  Tyme nodded to one of the Vietnamese. “Hanh, take the point. Move on out for about two hundred meters and halt.”

  Hanh shrugged and trotted through the gate and down the rough red dirt road that led to the runway. He crossed it and stepped onto the new shoots of elephant grass growing up through the thin layer of ash.

  Gerber stood watching as the rest of the twenty-man patrol exited the camp and crossed the runway, heading to the west. He put a hand to his eyes to shade them and then turned at a noise beside him.

  “They get off?” asked Master Sergeant Anthony Fetterman, the team’s operations sergeant. He was a small man, both short and skinny, and looked as if a stiff breeze would blow him over, yet he had a strength that surprised and amazed the rest of the men on the team. He had a dark complexion and claimed to be part Indian, sometimes Aztec, sometimes Sioux and sometimes Cherokee.

  “Yeah, they got off,” responded Gerber. “Just left. Be out of sight in the trees in ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Cavanaugh went out?” asked Fetterman.

  “Yeah,” said Gerber. “Cavanaugh went out.”

  “Good. We need to have a talk about him, and I figure’d it would be easier with him off the camp for a while.”

  Tyme watched the point man cross the runway that had been sprayed with peta-prime, and then followed with the patrol. They entered into an area where the grass had burned off, the tiny green shoots pushing up through the black ash and red dust. The strikers kicked up tiny clouds of ash and dust that seemed to hang in the air with no breeze to stir them.

  The column moved across the open ground, trying to reach the trees before the sun climbed high and baked them with its merciless heat. Tyme could see their path behind them, a wavering line of red in the nearly unbroken field of black and gray and green.

  Up ahead a finger of jungle reached toward them. At first it was little more than a few bushes and a couple of trees, but it widened rapidly into a deep green belt of coconuts, palms, teak and mahogany that stretched skyward. The broad leaves of the trees were interwoven in a canopy that shaded the ground and stopped the rain. If they could reach it before the sun got too high in the sky, it would make travel a little less difficult. It would still be hot and humid, almost like hiking through a steam room, but the sun wouldn’t sap their strength like an energy vampire.

  Tyme was already sweating when they entered the jungle. He could feel it on his back and under his arms. The go-to-hell rag around his neck absorbed some of the sweat, but not enough to make him comfortable. Tyme wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his jungle jacket and wished that it would snow. Just once and for only an hour or so. The constant hot weather was getting to him. Vietnam was a land of seasons. Two of them. Hot and dry, and hot and wet. He wasn’t sure which season he was in, however, because it had rained heavily the day before.

  In the jungle the patrol slowed, walking carefully, each man watching the ground around him for signs of booby traps or ambushes. They had found a game trail that looked as if it hadn’t been used by anything for a while. The growth wasn’t nearly as thick as it was in the surrounding jungle, and Hanh was able to make his way through it without using his machete. The strikers and the Americans stepped over fallen palms, pushed branches out of the way, tried to avoid the brambles of the wait-a-minute vines. Slipping through the jungle, the idea was to leave no clue that they had been there, but to look at the ground, searching for hints that Charlie might be near. Charlie was as good as they were, however, sometimes better at concealing his movements.

  Tyme glanced up then, and through the breaks in the vegetation, he could see the strikers leaping from the trail, taking up firing positions, facing right and left so that they were guarding each other’s backs. They crouched among the bushes and grasses, their rifles held ready, watching the jungle for hostile movement as they had been trained to do. Cautiously, Tyme made his way to the head of the patrol where he found Cavanaugh lying on his stomach, his rifle out in front of him, his chin nearly on the ground as he stared straight ahead.

  Tyme approached him, knelt and said, “What you got?”

  Cavanaugh turned his head slightly so that he could look back over his shoulder. He grinned at Tyme. “Trip wire. Step back a couple of meters, and I’ll see what it does.”

  Tyme backed off and watched as Cavanaugh reached out with his M-14. Then he pulled it backward until the wire was against the weapon’s forward sight. He jerked it once and dropped the rifle to the ground.

  There was a popping of vegetation as if something large was crashing through the jungle. An instant later there was a whoosh as a small tree that had been bent back was suddenly freed; it swept across the trail and smacked into the trunk of a large palm. Tyme could see that a dozen sharpened bamboo stakes had been driven into the palm by the force of the impact. They were about knee-high and designed to take out one or two strikers on patrol, maiming but not killing them. The philosophy behind the booby trap was that a wounded man required two other patrol members to carry him to safety, but a dead man was just dead.

  Tyme stood and looked at the trap again. Ingenious in design and use of local flora. He wasn’t sure that he liked the way Cavanaugh had triggered it, although no one had been hurt by it.

  Cavanaugh climbed to his feet and brushed the dirt and dead vegetation from the front of his fatigues. “That takes care of that. Ready to move out?”

  “Let’s give the men a break,” said Tyme. “We’ve been at it for better than an hour.”

  “Fine with me.” Cavanaugh stepped off the trail and into the jungle, almost disappearing into the vegetation. He crouched and
took a drink from his canteen, then poured some of the water on his go-to-hell rag. Draping it over his head, he let the evaporation of the water cool him.

  Cavanaugh dropped his pack, rummaged through it until he found the pound cake from one of the C-ration meals that he carried. He opened the tin with his P-38, got the cake out and ate it quickly. He took another drink from his canteen, draining it, and then sat back to look at the tiny patches of sunlight that managed to find their way through the thick foliage. On the branch of a small bush, he saw a spider spinning a complex web that seemed to fill one patch of sunlight.

  When Tyme passed the word for them to saddle up, Cavanaugh slipped on his pack, adjusted the shoulder straps until it rode high on his back and then smashed the spider’s web with his boot, crushing the insect before he stepped onto the trail.

  Moving into thicker jungle, they were forced to follow the trail more closely because of the tangled vegetation. Vines clogged the undergrowth like a net strung between the trees. The canopy, now three layers thick, kept the sun from penetrating to the jungle floor. They were wrapped in a continuous twilight with deep black shadows that shifted in the light breeze. Instead of cooling them, it only reminded them of the muggy heat. Far overhead they could hear the rumble of thunder and knew that it was raining. They could smell it, the fresh, clean odor brought by the breeze, and they could hear it falling into the trees above them, although the water didn’t reach the ground yet.

  As they continued to move, the rainwater trickled down the trunks of the tall hardwood trees and fanned out onto the broad leaves of the bushes before dripping onto the soft earth of the jungle floor. The men nudged the bushes forward, then let the branches slap back, hitting the others behind, covering each with the moisture that was now seeping into the jungle. They looked as if they had been standing in an open field in the storm. Even though they could now tell that the rain above them had slowed, they knew that the water would continue to seep through the vegetation for hours.

  The patrol halted again, and Cavanaugh moved forward slowly, using the undergrowth and trees for cover until he found Tyme crouching at the edge of a clearing. There, uprooted trees, broken bushes and a thick growth of elephant grass had taken root on the sides of a gigantic bomb crater. Before he could say a word to Tyme, he noticed a slight movement in the vegetation on the other side of the crater. A single VC, dressed in black pajamas but wearing Khaki web gear and carrying an old bolt-action rifle, was moving through the clearing slowly, watching the ground near his feet.

  “Do we take him?” Cavanaugh whispered.

  “Not yet,” answered Tyme. “Let’s see if there’s anyone behind him.”

  Cavanaugh slipped off the safety of his weapon and aimed at the enemy, tracking him as he progressed across the clearing.

  “Don’t shoot him,” warned Tyme.

  “I’m not planning on it,” Cavanaugh replied. “I’m just keeping him covered.” His weapon didn’t waver from the VC.

  The man walked into the trees and then reappeared, his shoulders hunched against the light rain. He moved to the edge of the crater and looked down into it, as if he had found something fascinating in the bottom of it. He reached back toward his hip and then seemed to look right at Cavanaugh and Tyme.

  Cavanaugh didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger of his weapon twice and watched as the enemy soldier was slammed backward violently, one hand flung in the air, the other clutching his rifle in a death grip. The man disappeared into the grass, rose slightly as if to look at his killers and then fell back out of sight.

  “What in the hell did you do that for?” snarled Tyme.

  “He saw us. He was going for a grenade.”

  “Christ, Sean, we could have captured him. You didn’t have to shoot him.”

  “I thought he was going for a grenade.”

  “Okay.” Tyme pointed to three of the strikers behind them and indicated positions for them. Then, moving slowly, Tyme got to his feet and entered the clearing. He skirted the edge of the crater, looked at the clear water that filled the bottom and then approached the dead soldier. He stepped on the hand that still was clutching the rifle and bent over to jerk it free. With his foot he rolled the body over, saw the two bullet holes in the chest — neat, circular holes in the man’s black pajamas, the edges glistening bright red. Near his hip the VC carried two hand grenades and a canteen. Tyme looked at the grenades, the canteen and the water in the bottom of the crater. Cavanaugh could have been right. Or the man might have been about to refill his canteen.

  Tyme shrugged, pulled the web gear from the body, checked for documents and insignia that would give Kepler and his intelligence boys something to work with.

  “I think we might as well head back to the camp,” said Tyme when he reentered the trees.

  “Let’s see if this guy had any friends,” said Cavanaugh. “We might be able to get a couple more.”

  “I doubt it. If he had any friends, they would have scattered by now. Searching the jungle won’t do us any good. Besides, I’ve seen all I was supposed to. Sean, why don’t you take the point.”

  “You’re the boss,” Cavanaugh said, but he didn’t ask for a direction of march. Instead, he began to backtrack, following the same path that they had used to get to the clearing.

  Gerber and Fetterman were going to have their talk in the team house after they had finished their checks of the camp’s defenses to make sure nothing had happened to them during the night, but Sully Smith was there eating his lunch. Gerber stopped in the doorway and turned to look at Fetterman. “Let’s go over to my hootch.”

  They crossed the compound and entered the small structure. It was similar to the two- and three-man hootches used by the others, only smaller. Gerber had his Army cot shoved against one wall under the off-center ceiling fan. Next to the bed was an old ammo crate, which had been turned on end to serve as a nightstand. Near the door was a small Army field desk that could be folded into a cube about two feet on each side. When opened and assembled, however, it was a moderate-sized desk painted a sickening green. A metal folding chair sat behind it while two more occupied the space in front of it. The furnishings weren’t quite as nice as the ones Gerber had had before the camp was burned.

  “Take a seat, Tony,” he said. He pulled a bottle of Beam’s out of the desk’s bottom drawer. “You want a touch?”

  “Not now, Captain. It’s a little early.”

  Gerber smiled and put the bottle away. “Don’t let it be said that I wasn’t the gracious host. Now then, what do you have on your mind?”

  Fetterman crossed his legs and ran his thumb and index finger along the crease in his jungle fatigues. He studied his uniform intensely for a moment and then asked, “Are you aware that Cavanaugh has been having nightmares?”

  “I think that’s to be expected,” said Gerber, “given the circumstances.”

  “Yes, sir. But they’ve continued. I’ve seen all the classic signs. He’s the last one to leave the team house, usually the first one up, looks tired, and I’ve seen him out inspecting the bunker line at night when it’s someone else’s turn to do it.”

  “I know that,” said Gerber, nodding. “Saigon advised me of it, but they also pronounced him fit for duty. They should know what they’re doing. Besides, he asked to come back here.”

  Fetterman smiled. “I don’t know why you would think that Saigon knows what it’s doing. I know I don’t trust those doctors. Hell, Captain, they’re a bunch of college boys who’ve never been out in the real world. What are they, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old and given commissions as captains and majors because they’ve spent eight, nine, ten years in college? They blow into Vietnam and pretend they understand the stress of combat based on the Saturday afternoon matinee.”

  “I would think they’re qualified to practice medicine,” said Gerber.

  “I do, too, sir. But they don’t understand the nature of combat. How could they? They’ve never been in it. They see it in the movies and think of it as something adventurous. People die, but they die cleanly. Little, neat holes in a shirt with a little fake blood splashed around, and in the next feature the guy is up and around again. They know about the clichés, but they don’t know the business. They’ve never seen a man killed in battle, his uniform soaked in blood, with the top of his head missing, or an arm, or all his guts stacked on his chest.”