The windows
were curtained, but some daylight had penetrated prior to the incantation. Now,
though, it was as if all light was forced from the room save the glow in the
braziers and a single candle in the center of the pentacle. They were in
darkest night and a bone chill had taken over. Springbuck couldn’t suppress the
conviction that they had somehow left the room and arrived elsewhere, in a
place where it was beyond his ability to orient himself or apprehend reality.
Gabrielle threw
her hands over her head and her entire body began to glow with a blue light
that pulsed and flickered.
An amorphous
shadow rose amid the runes, expanding from the floor in a manner which struck
the Prince as unwilling. He had the distinct impression that it was listening
to the chanting, that it scrutinized him briefly and then ignored him, and that
it received instructions with a hateful resentment.
Gabrielle and
the scholar were silent now, though the woman still radiated the eerie aura and
gave the appearance of being in a trance. Andre changed his tone from a chant
to a steady, placid mode of speech. Springbuck thought that he assumed the
attitude of a schoolmaster assigning a complex task to a defiant and
not-terribly-bright student.
Without warning
the darkness rolling within the pentacle was throwing itself from one side of
its invisible confinement to the other, straining to break free and destroy the
mortals in the room. Andre spoke a syllable of duress in a voice fearsome and
completely unlike anything Springbuck had heard from him before. The thing
within the pentacle was instantly quiet.
Andre issued a
last instruction and, with an almost vocal snarl, the being was gone. Light and
warmth returned to the chamber.
Andre stepped
from his spot to recover Calundronius and Springbuck noticed that he was bathed
in sweat and that his pudgy hands trembled badly.
“Well,” asked
the Prince as Gabrielle began to reorder the room, “where is our defender?
Where is this fabulous metal war machine?”
Van Duyn,
extinguishing a brazier, replied, “Our… unwilling benefactor has gone to
arrange for its transportation here. It wouldn’t do to have the contraption
materialize in this room, so Andre specified that it be brought to the meadow
outside the castle. If it’s moving when it arrives here, it could do damage
within the confines of a room or the bailey.”
The scholar and
the wizard hurried off together to watch for the fruit of their handiwork,
chattering importantly in the way of experimenters everywhere. Springbuck
shifted his attention to Gabrielle as she bound up her hair with rawhide
throngs.
She came to him
where he stood nursing his wrist and there was much, much in the glances they
exchanged.
“I—I knew that
you and Edward would come to conflict, knew it in my heart when I first saw
you,” she told him, her eyes still holding his. She took his injured wrist
between cool, elegant hands.
“Not hurt
seriously,” she decided after exploring it gently with her fingertips. “The
pain will leave it soon.”
They stood quite
motionless so, for a moment.
His gaze was
first to fall away.
“I suppose we
should be on the ramparts with the others,” he murmured.
Her hands left
his and he was immediately sorry he had spoken. He would have continued, for
there were more words that he wished to say to her, but he was forestalled by a
staccato blast from the distant meadow.
APC
We will
ride ’em, we’ll collide ’em,
And we’d
drive ’em straight through hell.
We’re the
Chosen Few who ride the APC’s.
From “APC’s,”
an unofficial
song of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regt., U.S. Army
THE metal monster forged along to
the squeaking and clanking of full-track treads, the reddish dust of the
anhydrous dry season spuming behind it, doing maybe forty-per on the flat,
straight road from Phu Loi.
If we were
in a convoy,
thought Gil MacDonald to himself as he stood in the track
commander’s cupola,
I’d be digging that shit out of my teeth right now. But
I’d feel better.
The vehicle he
rode was known by assorted names: “Armored Calvary Assault Vehicle,” “track,”
or “Armored Personnel Carrier,” but was most often referred to as an “APC.” He
shifted his weight at the hips with automatic ease to compensate for the
rigorous swaying and tossing of the journey; the rhythms of his mechanical
environment had long since become part of the substance of life, like the
rolling which fosters sea legs.
Silly idea of
the Old Man’s, he reflected, to have the crew come into base camp to pick him
up instead of waiting for a chopper to ferry him out to the forward area.
Still, it pleased the twenty-one-year-old sergeant in a personal way to know
that Captain Cronkite wanted him back on the job immediately after his return
from R and R. The run forward wasn’t such a long one, but enemy activity was on
the upswing in the wake of Operation Big Sur.
He resettled
his headset under his helmet liner and steel pot, not as comfortable an
arrangement as a crew helmet, but crew helmets don’t stop shrapnel too well
either, and so, just as they endured hot, heavy, fiberglass flak jackets, he
and his men opted for safety. He squinted around him through the searing heat
that floated in waves from the baked road.
At least, he
knew, Alpha-Nine, his APC, was topped off with fuel and stocked with ammo. He
ran his eye over the .50-caliber machine gun on its mount before him, satisfied
that it had been well maintained in his five-day absence. He knew, too, that
Handelman, Olivier and Pomorski were sitting on the open cargo hatch behind
him, scanning the terrain as he was. Sometimes he found himself thinking of
them in simple terms of rates and fields of fire, the first two as M-60 machine
guns and the latter an M-79 grenade launcher. They were his friends, but they
were part of the APC, just as he was, the parts that guided it and reached out
from it to kill.
Spend enough time in one of these things,
he mused,
and
maybe you’d become integrated altogether, stop thinking of yourself as a human
being.
The big V-8
engine pulled them briskly, equal to operating conditions even in Southeast
Asia. He blinked sweat from his eyes and made a mental note to grab a salt
tablet the first time they stopped. A sudden hissing from the radio brought him
back from a brief reminiscence of his stay in Bangkok.
“Steel Probe
one niner, Steel Probe one niner, this is Steel Probe six, Steel Probe six,
over.”
A cultured
voice, it carried the faintest hint of the Southern Black drawl. Wondering why
Captain Cronkite would want him right now, Gil flipped the transmit switch on
his headset.
“Steel Probe
six, this is Steel Probe one niner, over.”
“Steel Probe
one niner. this is Steel Probe six. Halt and remain at your present location.
Ahh, Steel Probe one zero will rendezvous with you there in approximately one
five mikes. Do you roger? Over.”
“Steel Probe
six, this is Steel Probe one niner, roger your last transmission, over.”
“This is Steel
Probe six, out.”
Gil flipped his
microphone over to intercom and told Al Woods to pull the APC over to one side
of the road for the fifteen-minute wait. He didn’t like the stretch they’d
stopped in; the grass grew high and there were dense stands of rubber trees
nearby, abandoned to undergrowth. He forgot all about his salt tablet. But the
rendezvous wasn’t too far off, and he didn’t know from which direction the
other APC would come. Steel Probe ten would be Bronco Jackson and
Gunfighter,
Alpha-Seven, maybe the second-best track and crew in the 32d Armored
Calvary Regiment.
Of course, Gil
MacDonald and his squadmates, known collectively as the Nine-Mob, knew past all
question that no better track flattened turf than
Lobo,
their own
Alpha-Nine.
Still keeping
watch as Woods killed the engine, he said conversationally, “News reports about
Operation Big Sur had me worried about you clowns.”
“So,” answered
Pomorski from behind, “whip some current events to us. We been beatin’ the
boonies for a week; haven’t seen a
Stars & Stripes,
even.”
Gil dug a late
copy of the American serviceman’s newspaper out of the pouch pocket of his
jungle fatigues. He opened and began to read it, glancing over the top of the
page to check out the landscape with nervous caution.
Getting
shaky,
he chided himself,
letting the Shortimer Syndrome get to you.
He read: “An
ancient tactic in the timeless business of war was employed this week by
commanders of the U.S. Army’s Second Field Forces as a part of the ongoing
effort to maintain the safety of the Saigon Capital Military District.
“In simplest
terms, the maneuver was a well-coordinated trap, tempting bait with crushing
jaws poised around it. The bait in this case was from the 32d Armored Cavalry
Regiment.
“Counterintelligence
sources permitted the compromise of information concerning a convoy route and
schedule. The convoy, to be made up of thin-skin cargo vehicles, rolled on
time, but was actually composed of the 32d’s durable 1st Squadron.
“As hoped,
Charlie showed up to make his kill on easy pickings promised by the bogus
rumor, but received a rude shock upon springing his ambush. With lethal
precision, assembled APCs and tanks turned their firepower on the Communist
infantry, repelling them and killing many while close air strikes were called
in to F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers already in the air.
“Airmobile troops
were flown in by helicopter immediately after the last strikes to support
mop-up operations. In all, over forty-three enemy dead were confirmed by body
count.
“1st Squadron
Commander Colonel J. B. Woolmun—”
Gil stopped
reading and looked up. “Hey, anybody want to hear a quote from Wooly?” The
mildest reply he received was to the effect that the colonel had Oedipal
tendencies.
“What
journalism washout wrote that?” Pomorski wanted to know. “And how can a
timeless business have ancient tactics?”
Gil folded the
paper and stared across the quiet countryside before him, gnawing his lower
lip, nerves still on edge. Then they got to him, and he thumbed the transmit
switch.
“Steel Probe
six, Steel Probe six, this is Steel Probe one niner, Steel Probe one niner,
over.”
He repeated the
call twice, drawing no response whatever, with the same results when he tried
to raise Bronco Jackson. Stuffing the newspaper back into his pocket, he
snapped, “Light it up, Al. Everybody look sharp, we’re haulin’ balls out of
here. I got the boss five-by on his last call and now I can’t raise him or the
boys on
Gunfighter.
I never asked the CO to authenticate his message
because I thought I recognized his voice, but it doesn’t sound like him to
stick us out here and wander out of radio contact.”
They were all
alert now, suspicious as wild animals.
Sure, they can tell something’s
wrong, just like me. You show up at a convoy point and there’re no kids or
mama-sans around or at night on the perimeter you hear the cans you’ve tied to
the hurricane wire start clanking. Or something like this happens. Ice on your
backbone and knots in your belly.
Woods’ hands
were firm and quick on the laterals, the braking levers, but moisture covered
his brown face. While the three machine gunners searched anxiously around them,
Pomorski, nosing his grenade launcher apprehensively this way and that, played
what he called “tailgate trombone,” eyes-behind on the rear hatch.
They’d reached
a stand of particularly high grass when the ambush came. Later, Gil was
thankful that Charles Cong hadn’t come up with a land mine for the occasion;
the radiotelephone deception implied that someone had been planning it for a
while. The enemy op’s imitation of Captain Cronkite’s voice had been extremely
adept. Probably the ambush of
Lobo
was a trial, a tryout preparatory for
a more ambitious trick.
He never knew
why the first RPG-4 rocket missed. At that range
Lobo
was a sure hit
unless the man handling the launcher was awfully unsteady, the only explanation
he could think of.
The rocket
sizzled a foot or so in front of the APC and exploded to the left and rear,
sending shrapnel
sponging
off the cupola and splash shields.
The clout of an
AK-47 opened up to the right. Gil brought the .50 around and he and Handelman,
who manned the right-side M-60, opened up on the deep grass in blind reply, the
slower base boom of the sergeant’s piece coupled with the rapid tattoo of
Handelman’s weapon. The man who’d fired the RPG-4 was cut to bits, but they
couldn’t spot the covering man with the AK.
A gut
conviction gripped Gil. As Woods sent the APC shooting forward, he traversed
his gun to the left and watched for a backup man. He missed the parting of the
grasses caused by the extension of the second launcher, and so did Olivier, for
all their intense surveillance. Gil caught the movement out of the corner of
his eye only in the last, irrevocable moment. The man had waited until they
were slightly past him and he had no worry about hitting his comrades. The
Vietnamese stood up and took quick, competent aim on
Lobo’s
broad side.
Even as he wrenched at the .50 Gil knew with dismal certainty that neither his
gun nor Olivier’s could come to bear on the track killer in the half second
available to them before the rocket was sped on its way, small and invisibly
swift and incredibly destructive. There was only time to know mournfully that
the next instant would see the missile punch its way through Alpha-Nine and
destroy them all, men and machine.