Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (17 page)

“That dog ain’t gonna make it another two meters!” declared Cubby Cardiff. “Them stakes was easy. They caught some of the blast, but if he makes it through the next roll of wire without settin’ nothin’ off, he’s gonna find himself hemmed in so tight he won’t be able to turn around.”

It was true. The punji stakes in the next rank were much closer together. But first Tiger had to get through the concertina wire, and this roll was intact.

He approached the closest loop of wire warily and nudged it with his nose, then backed off, spooked when a cluster of beer cans three loops down began to bounce and rattle and the wire itself sprang back and almost rapped him on the snout. He cocked his head from side to side, sizing things up, then reached out with his paw and gave the wire another tentative nudge. Again the cans rattled and bounced, and once again the wire itself jumped and shivered as if it were alive. With a patient sign, Tiger sat down to scratch his other ear and wait for the wire to stop jiggling.

“What did I tell you?” Cubby Cardiff gloated. “He’s stumped now. If he tries backtrackin’, like as not he’ll blow his ass away on one of them mines. You jokers feel like paying up now?”

Both the young medic and Lieutenant Hoang shook their heads.

“C’mon, boss,” grinned the young medic, “you ain’t getting off that easy.”

By now, almost the entire population of the camp was lined up along the wall to watch. The Nungs who weren’t on duty were cracking melon seeds between their teeth and making bets among themselves. All of them were wearing web gear and carrying their weapons, and though they were enjoying the show, they were still a little disappointed that there wasn’t going to be any shooting. The members of the Vietnamese Special Forces team—all of them except Lieutenant Hoang, who was following Cubby Cardiff’s lead and betting against sentiment—hated Tiger and wanted to see him blown all over the perimeter. The Vietnamese in the Strike Force, however, remembered Tiger nipping the Dai Uy’s ankle, so they were rooting him on and wishing him the best, while the Cambodes and Yards looked on silently, content to let him work out his own fate. The Americans were almost to a man on Tiger’s side. But Tiger had his pride. He ignored them one and all.

Scratching and digging with his nose and forepaws, he cleared a space around him, then went down on his belly and crawled right up to the concertina wire. He rose halfway and touched the bottom of one loop, then jerked his paw back, yipping with surprise and pain. He’d made it through that first blasted-out roll without discovering the barbs on the wire. But now he knew, and now he was leery.

“Barbed wire,” said Cubby Cardiff with grim satisfaction, “barbed wire makes believers out of ’em every time.”

Tiger licked his forepaw and stood up. The rain had been light all night and now it had stopped completely. The clouds were still thick and dark and low, and there was almost no breeze. The camp odors were trapped in the humid air, and without lifting his nose, Tiger could smell the people gathered along the wall and in the towers to watch his progress through the perimeter. He could smell their cigarettes and sweat, the insect repellent on their skin, and the stench of Nouc Mam sauce, tobacco, liquor, and onions on their breath. He could hear them talking and laughing and moving around, and he could feel their eyes on him. But he didn’t care. He didn’t like them, he didn’t trust them, and he wouldn’t let them stop him from going home. He yawned and stretched, his forelegs flat on the muddy ground, his tail high and curled proudly, and his rear end pointing directly at the tower where Cubby Cardiff was manning the searchlight.

“I think he’s trying to tell you to kiss his ass, boss,” laughed the young medic.

Before Cubby Cardiff could reply, Tiger stood up. He stepped delicately between two loops of the wire and kept on going. He seemed to know just where to put his feet, just how high he could hold his head and tail to avoid snagging the barbs. Without having to think about it, he knew just how much to draw in his shoulders to keep from brushing against the loops and sending the whole roll oscillating on down the line, slapping loops together and bouncing them apart with enough dance to set off every booby-trap for ten meters in either direction.

Tiger was a smart little sapper, and a patient, lucky one at that. There was almost nothing in the world that Cubby Cardiff respected more than a patient, lucky sapper. Now, there was nothing too shameful about being a drunken, tough, old potbellied fireplug of a cockhound master sergeant. And a lot of men smart enough not to try probably daydreamed of seeing the exotic, disease-ridden places where he’d spent a third of his life. A lot of men dreamed of doing the sort of things he, Master Sergeant Cardiff of the United States Army Special Forces, had been doing since he was seventeen. But the one thing he never wanted to find himself doing was crawling through a knock-up mantrap of a perimeter like this one. And the one thing sure to impress him, to raise the goosebumps and bristle his forearm hairs, was the sight of a patient, lucky, wire-dodging sapper going methodically about his job.

“Flaunt it while you got it, ’cause you won’t have it long,” he whispered very softly so there wouldn’t be any chance of distracting or influencing Tiger, out there picking his way through the wire.

The tower and the wall were suddenly silent. Even the Viets from the strike force cut off their grabass chattering and peered expectantly and nervously over the sandbags.

Stiff, still, bristling, and alert, Tiger the Lurp Dog was standing frozen in the middle of the roll of wire. His ears were cocked forward, and his eyes and nose focused downward on the next step. There, on his chest, tight as the winner’s tape at a track meet, was a strand of thick black commo wire that had somehow tangled itself around a loop of concertina wire so thickly strung with fishline trip wires that it looked in the glare of the searchlight like some horrible barbed ring of spider web.

Tiger seemed to cower a little. He flattened his ears against his head, and Cubby Cardiff was sure he saw him lick his chops nervously before squinting and turning his head away. He kept his feet in place but pushed his chest forward, testing the wire, caring nothing for the white phosphorus grenade that was nested at the junction of the web of trip wires. He was only testing for barbs and feeling out the slack. Suddenly he stepped back, took the wire in his mouth, and yanked it free. A thunderous roar of applause and cheering came welling up behind him, but Tiger wasn’t impressed. He squirmed on out of the concertina and pranced, head high and tail bouncing like a fat antenna, into the next line of punji stakes.

After a brief, sniffing investigation he had the measure of the stakes. Their foundations had turned to mud, and they’d been arranged in close clusters, rather than banks and lines, so it was easy to wind among them. He was through in fifteen seconds, and after scent marking the last cluster with a jet of urine, he disappeared into the next roll of concertina wire.

Now the only part of him visible from the tower was his tail. Every few seconds it appeared, bobbing and bouncing beyond another roll of wire.

“You want to toss a month’s base pay into this operation, boss?” asked the young medic smugly.

“Sure as hell do!” Cubby Cardiff tossed him an evil smile. “I’m the only swinging dick in the camp that’s seen old Nick Hogg’s mine chart, and I tell you this: Ain’t nothing but God’s own angels or a skinny fruit fly can cross through that next twenty-meter minefield and stand up alive on the other side of the fence.” He shook his head. “No way, Buck Sergeant. I been in this man’s army long enough to know when there’s a way, an’ I tell you this, goddamn it, there ain’t no motherfucking way!

“Will I throw in my base pay against your E-5? You’re goddamn right I will! I’ll even throw in my pro pay and rations allowance, you wet-nose rookie Buck Sergeant E-5. There just ain’t no way he’s gonna make it!”

By this time, Tiger was halfway through the last and outermost row of concertina. He was about to enter the minefield—the big minefield—and Cubby Cardiff looked down in astonishment. He regretted having made his bet against sentiment. It wouldn’t shorten the odds a bit, but he wished he could hold his breath and silently cheer the poor mutt on. The crazy little sapper was gonna need all the help he could get if he pranced on into that minefield. Cubby Cardiff didn’t want to watch.

“Fuck it,” he said. He turned control of the searchlight over to Lieutenant Hoang and started down the ladder. “I’m gonna get me a drink. Figure I can hear a mine go off in the team house as well as I can here, so I might as well listen in comfort.” He climbed down the ladder and started back to the team house, his respect for old Nick Hogg’s perimeter sorely depleted and his faith in the wisdom of betting against sentiment shaken. He walked slowly, skirting the puddles and the mud, his shoulders hunched slightly in anticipation of the blast he was sure would come any second. When he got to the door of the team house he paused to listen to the sound coming from the west wall. At first it sounded like a fight had broken out among the spectators. Men were yelling and shouting, and then came the sound of applause and cheers. Someone, one of the Cambodes most likely, discharged a whole magazine of tracers into the air.

“Goddamn!” He spun around and began to race back to the perimeter. “Goddamn I don’t fuckin’ believe it!”

He ran, panting, cursing, and splashing through mud puddles, all the way to the gate. He got there just in time to see Tiger the Lurp Dog crawl out from beneath the bottom strand of the barbed-wire fence, step up onto the muddy Louc Ma Road, shake the water from his dripping coat, and lift his leg against the closest fencepost. He shook himself again, then tossed a disdainful glance back at the perimeter and trotted off into the darkness.

“Goddamn, I don’t believe it!” Cubby Cardiff rubbed his eyes and pulled on his earlobes and let out a deep breath. “That’s one sharp little sapper, that Tiger the Lurp Dog!”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, WHEN
the news of Tiger’s escape hit the Lurp compound, Wolverine was down in the operations bunker planning a class on Escape and Evasion techniques. He was sitting at the commo desk scribbling on a yellow pad when Cubby Cardiff came slinking in, all wet and miserable looking, to break the news to Pappy Stagg with first a philosophical shrug, then an admission of defeat.

“I get the feeling you was testing me somehow, Stagg,” he said. “Ever since that time in the Ashau, I just don’t feel natural around you no more. I know it’s all my imagination, but I still got this feeling that you planted that dog on me just to see if I could outsmart him and keep him from getting away. Well, damn your gawky strap-hangin’ ass, Stagg! That Tiger done up and got away, and now you got me even further in your debt. God-damnit.”

Wolverine dropped his pencil and pushed his chair back away from the commo desk, but a warning look from Pappy Stagg was enough to silence him.

Cubby Cardiff shook his head in admiration. “Damn your hide, Stagg, you old buzzard! I swear you should have been there to see it! That little dog cost me a month’s base pay and made old Nick Hogg’s perimeter look like some sort of a goddamn pansy patch. Where in hell did you get him from anyway? I swear his daddy must of been a VC sapper who couldn’t keep his dick outa the kennel. He went through all that wire and stake like a pro, Stagg—like a real pro.”

“He’s a Lurp dog,” said Pappy evenly. He puffed on his pipe and leaned back in his chair. “Sergeant Wolverine’s pointman trained him. I don’t let anybody sack out in my compound unless I know he can cut the mustard—not even a dog. We got some standards around here. Sergeant Wolverine will tell you. We got some standards around here.”

“That’s right, Top!” Wolverine didn’t know whether or not Pappy was down on this Cardiff character for letting Tiger get away, but it was beginning to look that way. He was puffing on his pipe now, a great smile of contentment on his face, as though nothing on earth amused him more than listening to his old buddy’s embarrassed bluster. Sometimes it seemed like the calmer Pappy got, the more he made you wish he’d lose his temper and start chewing ass like a normal master sergeant.

“So you met your match, did you? Here I give you a simple job—just keep a pup out of the soup for a couple of weeks, and what happens? I get you drag-assing into my operations bunker at eight hundred hours in the morning, weeping and moaning about how I’m testing you. Damn it, man, have you no pride? I got better things to do than to go around training dogs to break an old buddy’s perimeter.”

Wolverine wasn’t sure whether the “old buddy” was supposed to be old Nick Hogg, who’d designed and laid out the perimeter, or Cubby Cardiff, who was supposed to have kept it invulnerable. But he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Cubby Cardiff. He was a shifty character—or so people said—but he probably really had tried to keep Tiger tied up safe and secure, and Pappy should have cut him some slack.

“Aw, what the hell,” Pappy seemed to relent, “I don’t know why I’m being so hard on you, Cardiff. You did the best you could, and you must be feeling a touch down on yourself already, seeing as how your best just wasn’t good enough.”

Cubby Cardiff had no choice but to laugh.

“You should have been there to see it, Stagg. It was the funniest damn thing I ever saw. That dog had his tail hooked up under more’n one trip wire, and all our glorious Vietnamese counterparts—lousy little dirty buggers, one and all—they were all whooping and giggling and clapping each other on the ass, hoping to see Tiger blow himself away. But it never happened. Ol’ Tiger done pissed on the camp flagpole. He nipped the Dai Uy on the ankle—or at least the Dai Uy says he did—and then he up and disappoints all our glorious South Vietnamese counterparts by keeping his own self alive. You should have been there to see it, Stagg. The whole camp was betting and figuring the odds, and it was a show to see, Stagg. Funniest damn thing I’ve seen in more’n a week.”

Cubby Cardiff couldn’t help stretching things a bit. Tiger’s escape had not really been all that much fun to watch. Give it another five or ten years and it’d be a good story to get drunk and tell over Jack Daniels. But for now, he wondered if maybe he’d better back off a pace or two and keep things in perspective. “Well, maybe it weren’t that funny, exactly. But anyway, you should of been there, Stagg. It was a hell of a show.” He shook his head, “Damn dog.”