Red Flags (6 page)

"Not much, Sergeant. If we annoy them enough, they might. It wouldn't require much. Getting their forces off this plateau we're on ... that would be the hard part. They'd get punished from the air."

Provided the weather allowed our warplanes to fly, I thought, but I didn't bring up the obvious.

"Hopefully we're not worth the price," the colonel went on. "We try not to tempt them. Which is why we don't keep so much as a helicopter on the airstrip overnight. A single-engine Cessna is all."

"We hope our addition to the team won't tip the scales, sir," I said.

Bennett smiled. I appreciated his candor and didn't envy him his vulnerable compound. I wanted to do a good job for him handling the intel, despite our sub-rosa work for Major Jessup, and get out.

Bennett said, "Private Checkman will show you around. He's a foreign-service brat, smart as a whip. Speaks and reads Vietnamese." The colonel rose. "Good to have you with us."

 

Checkman took us across a gravel truck park. A Dodge pickup, now Army green, had obviously been Navy gray before being liberated from our sister service. Just beyond a two-seater latrine hut stood a sandbagged shed housing a pair of backup generators under its corrugated metal roof. Overhead rose a thirty-foot mast with a two-panel antenna grille pointed toward Signal Hill at Pleiku, fifty miles away, ten miles farther than by rights it should have reached. The antenna was stretched past its limits, like all our signal equipment in Viet Nam.

We glanced into a pair of metal shelters, heavily layered with sandbags and steel plate, connected by a corridor of more sandbags to a wooden shed between them. The Mickey-6 in the first van transmitted and received encrypted messages in high-speed bursts that punched themselves into paper tape from which they were printed out by a teletype machine. The facing rig was paneled floor to ceiling with racks of electronics carrying the teletype transmissions and six radio-voice channels up into the rectangular antenna.

We proceeded down the short corridor and stepped inside the signal shack. Half a dozen signalmen stood to attention. The shack was crowded with replacement parts and GIs. Two M-14 rifles and ammo pouches hung from pegs. A library of Signal Corps manuals filled a wooden ammo box mounted above an obsolete switchboard, and a large pot of chickenless Army chicken soup simmered on a small hot plate. A helmet parked on top was inscribed
Make Fuck, No Kill.

I put the men at ease and Miser took the report from Sergeant Rowdy, a buck E-5. He couldn't have been more than twenty and was a three-striper already. He had high clearances and ran the crypto rig, encoding and transmitting the classified traffic.

The other experienced man was a spec-4 called Geronimo, though he wasn't an Indian or even American. His name was Macquorcadale and he was Canadian, evidently a point of pride with him, as he boasted that there were "more f-ing Canucks in Viet Nam than candy-ass draft dodgers in Canada." Miser liked the tall, brash kid right off, I could tell. The rest were privates: two regular Army and two draftees.

Miser, Sergeant Rowdy, and I went out back to a sandbagged firing position surprisingly close to the chest-high steel-plank wall that circled the compound. Beyond it lay the broad, curving Ayun River, where we'd seen the bodies.

Rowdy gave us the rundown on equipment and warned us against inspecting the backup generators.

"They out of commission?" Miser said, hackles rising.

"No, Sergeant." Rowdy was all business. "Cobras."

"As in hooded?" Miser growled. "As in snake charmers?"

"Yes, Sergeant. Two, we think. We ran the generators several nights this week and they must've liked the warmth."

"Great," Miser said. "Cobra fuck buddies."

"Well," I said, "at least we don't have to worry about rats."

Miser and I excused ourselves to walk the compound.

"Sarge, what do you need from me? What signal work do you want me to do?"

"As little as possible,
Captain.
Sign the paperwork and stay out of the way. Stick to the intel charts-and-darts. We're spread thin. We got three jobs now. Your cover job, my cover, and our fucking chore for Jessup. Looks like that's going to be on you. I have my damn hands full."

"You remember enough to run the commo crew?"

"In my sleep. So long as we don't get attacked and bum-fucked."

"Not liking the odds here, Sarge?"

He shook his head. "This is fucking Fort Apache without the defenses. No mines, no flares, no claymores, not a single mortar."

We walked toward the perimeter. There wasn't much to the compound: a water tower, a couple of scraggly trees, hootches for the enlisted, the main generator shed, several sandbagged bunkers shored up by ten-foot-long perforated steel planks driven vertically into the hard earth, some laid across like beams for roofing. Villas in Saigon boasted more grounds and security.

"Yeah." I had to agree. "If Charlie's willing to face the morning after, he can absolutely have his way with us."

"Once the dumb-ass monsoon grounds our air support, they could screw with us easy."

He was right. Small units in the hinterland were expendable. No big deal if we got overrun. It was just a fact of life in the military. We were a tiny piece of the machinery. Somebody somewhere up the food chain was betting that our value as a target was offset by the possible cost of taking us down. But it was a safer bet that that officer was never going to spend a single night in Cheo Reo.

Miser bared his jagged teeth. "Anyone with a decent arm could throw a grenade halfway into this fucking compound, drop satchel charges on us, no problem, and knock out communications. The bungalows and hootches aren't even sandbagged. Mess hall either. Talk about lightly defended."

"What's the good news?"

"Gooks can't throw for shit." Miser exhaled loudly. "Still ... we'd be dead meat in minutes if they decided to have themselves the propaganda victory of taking a province capital."

"Even with our valiant allies bivouacked across the road?"

"Yeah, right," Miser growled, indignant. "Uncle Ho's birthday is coming around again. I'm not interested in being a goddamn party favor."

"We better hope we're done here soon. I don't want to spend the monsoon mildewing in Cheo Reo, waiting for Charlie to drop by some stormy night when nothing's flying."

"How exactly are we supposed to do this little job for Jessup? Maybe we should hop over to Hong Kong and stick up that bank. Probably easier than fucking up their wholesale business from here."

"If we knew who was growing the stuff and where, or how they're moving it, we could mess with the fields or the growers—or the pipeline."

Miser shook his head ruefully. "You haven't a goddamn clue how to do this, do you, Captain, sir?"

"Not yet."

I left Miser to get acquainted with his men. Checkman, who had stood off at a discreet distance, fell in step as I passed and directed me back along the covered walkway to my new quarters, the third bungalow from the end. He didn't bother knocking, just showed me in.

"Your roommate is a civilian. He leases a place in town, which is where he mostly stays. He's only in the compound when there's trouble or meetings run late."

"Agency?"

"It would be presumptuous of me to say, Captain."

He had to be the spook-in-residence.

The room was small. Two metal bunks up against opposite walls. Between them, a desk with two gooseneck lamps and a green Army field phone was pushed against the windowless back wall. A flag with a yellow star in the center of a red field hung above my roommate's bed. A Vietnamese farmer's hat and a forty-two-shot Zephyr automatic rifle with scope sights hung beside it on a peg.

"What's his name?"

"Ruchevsky. John Ruchevsky. Big John."

Checkman left. I emptied my dopp kit of everything but shaving gear and soap, unpacked one set of civvies and shoes, additional fatigues, and an extra pair of jungle boots. At the foot of each bed was an actual bureau. I clamped some socks and underwear to my chest with my chin and opened the top drawer of mine. Inside was a perfect cone of fine wood shavings topped by the metal stem and trimmings of a handmade Montagnard pipe. Somebody's souvenir. Invisible bugs had devoured the wooden bowl, leaving only the aluminum stem and brass ring fittings cut from different calibers of spent bullets.

I emptied the sawdust out the door onto the grass, tossed my stuff into the top drawer, and slid it back in place. The next drawer down held a large card. The English text addressed
Advisers.

There is a Reward for your capture and death!
Surrender Now and Live! We will pay for your
information on your training.

As an afterthought it said
This Girl and $10,000.
Dead center was the girl, a sedate brunette in a coy pose.

"Come on, Charlie," I muttered to myself, "give it a rest."

I tacked the card over my bed—home sweet home—and went about draping the mosquito netting over the T-frames attached to either end. I shoved my agent's paper ID deep in my left thigh pocket and buttoned it shut. Outside, a spent artillery shell clanged like a gong, announcing chow. Struck repeatedly it would have meant an alert, all hands to the wire. Some things were the same all over Viet Nam.

 

The mess hall was modest and served all ranks. Oilcloth covered a dozen tables. French-era Sten guns hung around the pastel walls, below the screens and shutters of the window openings.

"Decoration?" I asked Checkman.

Checkman shook his head. "More like fire extinguishers, sir. They're oiled and loaded."

Dinner in the mess hall was thoroughly cooked and tasteless. The meat was white, the mashed potatoes white, the French beans albino. Miser and I declined the cream sauce. The potatoes, like the milk, were dehydrated and then reconstituted from powder and water. Forensics couldn't have identified the meat.

Miser eyed his portion suspiciously. "This looks like it's been done with an acetylene torch."

"No germs, that's for sure."

"Tastes just like chicken," he said.

Whatever unimaginable creature or organ we were eating, Miser always made the same observation. This time it actually was chicken. You could tell by the drumsticks. We went through the motions of eating and looked for the bar.

A side door opened onto a modest concrete slab roofed and sided with thatch, not much more than a screened-in patio with half a dozen stools and a small bar that served all ranks. Team 31 was far too small to have separate drinking establishments for enlisted, noncoms, and officers. Over the bar hung Christmas-tree lights and a hand-forged VC submachine gun, its trigger housing and magazine holder welded to a gun barrel made from a lead pipe. Crude but lethal. The ashtrays were empty c-ration cans, with linked rounds of spent machine-gun ammo snapped shut in a ring around each one.

Miser eyed the handcrafted receptacles skeptically. "Glad to see the campers are keeping busy."

The bartender was a huge black guy named Westy whose chief jobs were keeping the main generator running and the water tower filled and treated.

"What can I do you gents?"

"Larue," I said. Everyone concurred and he served up bottles of cold Tiger beer all around.

We were joined by the intel sergeant, Joe Parks, who was celebrating twenty-four years in the Army and his third war in Asia. Parks declared himself a homesteader who rarely left the compound. A major once, he'd been caught in the downsizing after Korea and given the option of leaving the Army or accepting a severe reduction in rank. Parks stayed, as a sergeant E-7.

He unfolded a sheet of paper and slipped it in front of me. "No doubt you've seen these before," Parks said. Prominent in the middle, my rank and name—
Di Uy Erik A. Rider
—and the bounty on my head: sixty thousand piasters. Something like three hundred bucks, a small fortune in Indochina.

He passed Miser one too. "Your reputation precedes you, Sergeant."

Miser beamed when he saw the price on him. "I'm at a hundred thou!"

I leaned over Miser's sheet. "
Ellsworth
Miser?" I said. He snatched it back.

We carried on like it was funny, but here we were in the back of nowhere, and the VC knew us by name.

"Makes you feel kinda important," Miser said. "Gives me the fucking creeps."

Back in country less than forty-eight hours and the sarge and I were already on the local hit list. A cheap propaganda psych-out, but it worked. We needed to watch our asses if we didn't want to finance some VC farmer's next planting season. I slid off the barstool, took our sheets over to the one solid wall shared with the mess, and added our bounty chits to the two dozen others pinned around a red battle flag with a large yellow star in its center.

As the light faded, several Montagnard aborigines drifted past, dark-complexioned and black-haired, their skin like bark. Three Montagnards, barefoot, dressed in black long-sleeved native shirts and matching loincloths trimmed in red. The fourth wore a French military shirt and shorts. An old soldier. All four shouldered or cradled vintage bolt-action rifles and smoked homemade pipes as they strolled.

"Our night guards," Parks said as they ambled by. "Jarai tribesmen. There aren't enough of us to man the perimeter at night, so we've hired them. They're all veterans of the French colonial forces."

Made sense. Vietnamese hated the Montagnards, looked down on them as repugnant inferiors. The Montagnards returned the sentiment and quietly despised the Vietnamese. When Americans took casualties, the Yards expressed regret.
Chia buon.
I share your sorrow. When the casualties were South Vietnamese, all you got were blank looks. Whatever courtesies might be observed during the day, no Vietnamese was allowed in the compound at night. The simple truth was, we all liked the Yards better and trusted them a whole lot more.

In addition to the Jarai, an American stood guard on the gate and an American manned the shortwave radios all night in the MACV commo bunker, monitoring the three Special Forces camps in the province and periodically warning aircraft about impending artillery fire from the guns across the road so they didn't unwittingly fly into the trajectory. The signal detachment also maintained a separate radio link to Pleiku around the clock.