Darwin's Blade (27 page)

Syd's eyes darted around the room. “Could I have a glass of Scotch?”

“We're both driving,” said Dar. “I'm headed back tonight, remember? I was just going to leave in a few minutes.”

“I know what a ghillie suit is now,” said Syd, rather breathlessly, as if she had run from her car to the cabin. “And I know about Dalat.”

I
never told Barbara about Dalat,
thought Dar as he poured the drinks and rounded up the spaghetti-making equipment.
As close as we were, I never talked about any of it. Not to her. Not to Larry. Never to anyone.

Things are different now,
he argued with himself.
A Russian sniper tried to kill you the other day.

All right.
Dar clinked glasses with Syd and they drank good Scotch while he began preparing the meal in a mutual silence filled with the turmoil of too much thought.

Dalat was and is a highland Vietnamese city located at the foot of Lang Biang Mountain, some fifty miles from the coast. In 1962 President Kennedy and the United States government showed its solidarity with whatever South Vietnamese regime was in power at the time—Dar could not recall the strongman's name—by transferring plutonium and other radioactive materials to the South Vietnamese and helping to set up a working nuclear reactor at Dalat. The reactor was used to produce radioisotopes for research and medical purposes, but more important, it was a status symbol for the South Vietnamese and a gesture of America's cooperation and friendship.

Cut to March of 1975. Nixon and Kissinger had successfully “Vietnamized” the war. The soldiers who had been equipped to take the place of the six hundred thousand American grunts, Marines, Air Force personnel, and others who had been withdrawn were in full retreat. The Viet Cong and the regular North Vietnamese Army were busy overrunning and occupying every former American base, stronghold, and Vietnamese city. Saigon was ten days away from being overrun, and the situation at the American embassy—where only a token force of U.S. Marine guards were left—was, to put it in the Marine argot of the day, pure clusterfuck. A huge naval armada stood offshore, ready and waiting to haul away the last of the fleeing diplomats, dependents, and Marine guards.

In the middle of all the confusion—burning files, fleeing families, abandoned equipment, thousands of Vietnamese “helpers” petitioning to be flown out—two South Vietnamese technicians showed up at the U.S. embassy and diffidently reminded the Americans that the Dalat reactor was still up and running, and that weapons-grade plutonium was stored there. The ambassador and the top-ranking military man were finally briefed about this in the midst of all the confusion, and they immediately ordered the Vietnamese technicians to return to Dalat posthaste and to scram the reactor—perform an emergency shutdown procedure. They were ordered to then bring all of the vital radioactive material,
especially
the plutonium, to Saigon, where it would be flown out to the waiting armada.

The Vietnamese technicians allowed that they would very much like to do that, but respectfully reminded the general and the ambassador that Dalat was in the process of being overrun by both Viet Cong and NVA units, that all of the roads and railroad lines to Saigon and the coast had been interdicted by the enemy, and that all scheduled flights in and out of Dalat's tiny airport had been canceled because of the proximity of NVA soldiers. All of the other reactor personnel had fled, and the reactor itself was at that moment humming along unmanned. The two technicians described how they had flown out—through heavy small-arms fire—in a light plane belonging to the younger technician's brother, who just happened to be a captain in the South Vietnamese Air Force and who had dropped them at Saigon, landing in rough field along the chaos of the National Road and then had immediately taken off to fly on toward Thailand alone, and while the two technicians would be most happy to go back to Dalat to help their dear American friends, they were actually quite low level technicians who had no idea how to scram a reactor, and besides, having risked their lives to bring word of the Dalat reactor dilemma, perhaps they'd already earned their trip to the United States and a new life.

“Do we have any nuclear eggheads around?” asked the ambassador. “Any sailor or anyone who happens to know how to shut down a reactor and handle plutonium?”

As it turned out, they did. On board a nuclear aircraft carrier standing offshore were two American members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency: one Wally Henderson and a John Halloran. Neither of them was military; both of the men were affable, easygoing academics, and neither had ever heard of Dalat or even of the existence of a South Vietnamese reactor. They happened to be off the coast of Vietnam because several of the warships in the evacuation armada were carrying scores of nuclear weapons, others were chugging along in harm's way via their nuclear-reactor power plants, and the Defense Department had thought it prudent amidst all the confusion to have someone around—someone above the level of technician or Navy-trained nuclear engineer—who knew how the weapons and shipboard reactors actually worked. Just in case.

Wally Henderson and John Halloran were promptly helicoptered in to the scurrying anthill that was Saigon, briefed, and flown into Dalat with twelve Marines. The briefing—to both the scientists and the Marines—was fairly simple: shut down the reactor, don't let it explode or whatever reactors do when they're being shelled by the enemy, rescue as much of the radioactive isotope material as you can, retrieve the approximately eighty grams of plutonium at the reactor, and fly back to Saigon. If the airfield is overrun, try walking the fifty miles through jungle to the coast where they could radio for pickup. At all costs, bring the plutonium along.

Of the twelve Marines, four were snipers. Dar Minor, nineteen years old, a precocious college graduate with a degree in physics—which no one in the military or at the embassy knew of or cared about at the time of his assignment to Dalat—was one of those snipers. When they landed in Dalat in an ancient commercial DC-3, made all the less flyable by a lead-lined storage facility quickly jury-rigged to hold the radioactive materials, eight of the Marines, including the commanding officer—a lieutenant—stayed behind to guard the airfield from the North Vietnamese while Dar and three others accompanied Wally and John to the reactor. It was just after 0700 hours and the morning mists were burning off.

The reactor was abandoned, the elite ARVN guards had fled, and the guard gates and main doors were literally standing open. But the enemy had not yet arrived. To young Dar Minor, the facility reminded him of the mock-up of Fort Knox he had seen in the movie
Goldfinger
when he was eight years old: A huge, heavily reinforced and domed concrete structure on a low hill, the Dalat reactor was surrounded by almost a kilometer and a half of grassy slope in all directions. There were three rows of barbed-wire perimeter fences, one within the other at hundred-meter intervals, and the four Marines had the presence of mind to lock the gates of each as they drove their Jeep and the two excited scientists to the main reactor building. In three directions lay thick jungle, in the fourth the open road to Dalat. The reactor commanded the high ground for that open kilometer and a half. To a sniper—even to an untested sniper like nineteen-year-old Dar—it was obviously the ultimate killing zone.

Although unblooded, Dar was the leader of his two-man team. Snipers had been formally a part of the Marine Corps only since 1968, when divisional orders had recognized their importance in the war and approved the organization and formation of sniper platoons within each regiment's headquarters company, as well as in the headquarters and service company of each reconnaissance battalion. Formally, the sniper platoon consisted of three squads of five two-man teams and a squad leader for each team, plus a senior NCO, and an armorer and an officer, bringing total platoon strength to one officer and thirty-five enlisted men. Formally, the reconnaissance battalion had a slightly different configuration adding up to a total strength of one officer and thirty enlisted men In reality, Marine snipers operated—as they had throughout this war, Korea, and two World Wars—in teams of two, both of them marksmen but the team leader literally calling the shots, with his number two acting as spotter.

During the Dalat mission, Dar was leader of Team Two, and as the team leader, he carried a 7.62-millimeter Remington 700 bolt-action sporting rifle, modified and renamed the M40 by the Marines, while his spotter was armed with an accurized M-14. The earlier Marine spotters in Vietnam-era sniper teams had been issued standard M-16s for rapid fire, but the Marines had discovered the hard way that the M-16s lacked the necessary long-range accuracy and had reverted to the accurized M-14s.

For this mission, the two sniper teams had literally brought more weapons and ammunition than they could carry. Dar had assumed that with the war over, the U.S. was leaving tens of billions of dollars of equipment behind; what would a few more weapons on this mission matter? The second Jeep was filled with four extra M40 Sniper Rifles, two extra M-14s, one extra M40 barrel for each team, and crates of ammunition. Each of the four Marines carried his own set of binoculars and personal short-range radio, while the two teams shared a large PRC-45 radio for calling in artillery or air strikes. In addition to the binoculars, each spotter carried a twenty-power scout telescope. To add to their observation power, the second Jeep hauled in two heavy NODs—Night Observation Devices—and four smaller AN/PVS2 Starlight scopes mounted on the two extra accurized M-14s. One of the large NODs was mounted on a tripod, but the other was mounted on the pièce de résistance of their arsenal, a .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun specially modified to function as a single-shot sniper weapon. Also included for the M2 was a massive Unertl telescopic sight for daylight use.

Dar's spotter was a twenty-two-year-old black fellow corporal from Alabama named Ned. Ned had actually outscored Dar—very slightly—on marksmanship proficiency—but Dar had come out of his 205 hours of formal sniper instruction, 62 hours of marksmanship practice, 53 hours of field training, and 85 hours of tactical field exercises with the higher total score. The real top shot of the two squads was Sergeant Carlos, an old man—thirty-two years old—the only one of the four Marines who had seen combat. Carlos's spotter was another nineteen-year-old named Chuck, from Palo Alto.

Dar and the others parked the Jeeps out of sight in one of the several empty outbuildings, had a quick look at the eerily empty reactor control room as the two nuclear scientists got to work, and then went up onto the parapets to stand guard for the next forty-eight hours. Carlos was delighted at the reactor's layout in terms of being a shooting stand. There were two 360-degree, cement-walled balconies around the main reactor building, one at a four-story height and the other just below the dome at sixty feet up. The walls on both balconies were slightly tessellated in the sense that every twenty paces or so, the concrete was raised three feet above the average four-foot wall height. This turned the parapet into a battlement, according to Sergeant Carlos. To make it even more of a battlement, the four Marines quickly humped more than eighty sandbags from the abandoned guard posts below to create shielded shooting stands and revetments.

The reinforced walls of the seven-story containment structure were twelve feet thick; the parapet walls were four feet thick. Although a few low outbuildings were clustered near the base of the reactor building, the parapets were high enough that their field of fire was unobstructed in all directions. Access to the two levels and the main control room was via internal corridors and ladders. There were no windows.

“Shi-iit,” said Sergeant Carlos when they finished their strenuous sandbagging job. “If Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Colonel Travis, and the rest of those crackers had this place and these weapons instead of the shitty old Alamo, my ancestors never would have killed their asses and captured the place.”

It took Wally and John forty-two hours to shut down the reactor, locate and load the various isotopes, and find the marked canister reported to contain eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium. The enemy arrived at the Dalat reactor three hours after the Marines.

An hour after Dar's arrival, Lieutenant Hale radioed from the airport. The eight Marines there—also outfitted with serious weaponry—were in a firefight with what appeared to be a battalion of VC. Half an hour after that, Lieutenant Hale's radio man reported that half the Marines were dead—including the lieutenant—and that the remaining Marines were attempting to hold off what appeared to be a full mechanized company of North Vietnamese regulars. The DC-3 had flown out, leaving them behind. Hale's men had called for dust-off, but gunships and evac choppers were unable to approach the airport terminal because of massive anti-aircraft fire from the surrounding tree lines.

For another hour, Dar and the other three Marines on the reactor parapets listened to the distant rattle of small-arms fire: the distinctive bursts from M-16s and M60s, the even more distinctive rattle of Kalashnikov AK-47s, the crump of mortars, and the blast of tank cannon. Sergeant Carlos said that this was the first time in three tours in Vietnam that he had ever heard enemy tank fire.

Then the shooting stopped. The silence was so terrible that Dar was actually relieved when the first Viet Cong appeared in commandeered ARVN Jeeps, a few light armored vehicles, and a line of trucks coming up the main road from Dalat.

“Watch this,” said Sergeant Carlos.

The .50-caliber M2 with a special Unertl scope had been set up on the wide wall between the sandbags. While Chuck and Ned spotted with their twenty-power scopes, Sergeant Carlos opened fire on the VC column at a shooting distance of twenty-two hundred yards—more than a mile away. The first bullet turned the head of the Jeep's driver into a balloon of red mist. The second bullet—an explosive round—ignited the Jeep's gas tank and blew the vehicle fifty feet into the air. Carlos's third shot penetrated the light armor of the vehicle behind the lead Jeep and must have killed the driver, for the armored vehicle veered to the right and splashed into a deep irrigation ditch. The sergeant's fourth shot blasted through the engine block of the third vehicle in line—a deuce-and-a-half-heavy truck—freezing its engine and stalling the entire convoy. Troops jumped out of the trucks and began running for the jungle on each side.