Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (8 page)

He turned back to his zone of security and watched the stream flow past fast and gloomy, a few meters away through the bush. He hoped that Wolverine would decide to monitor the cache to see if anyone came along to uncover it, even if that meant putting up with the leeches and working off a wire antennae. But Wolverine had other things in mind. After the cache was reburied and the ground had been covered with leaves and the fresh soil scattered, he made another transmission on Marvel’s radio, took down the wire, then motioned for Mopar to move out on point as soon as Marvel had his wire coiled and put away.

Mopar shrugged to shift the weight of his rucksack, then, when everyone behind him was ready, he moved out along the trail, looking for a narrow place to ford the stream. When he found one he crossed first, then covered the other men as, one by one, they darted across the stream and into the jungle on the other side.

After another hour of looking for trails, caches, sleeping positions, and other signs of enemy activity—all with negative results—the team moved up to the high ground on the opposite side of the stream from the cache and found a bramble thicket where no one could approach them without making enough noise to betray his presence. After Marvel had made a commo check on the whip antenna, the men put out their Claymores and set up, back to back and legs out like spokes, to wait for the night to filter down through the jungle canopy.

Gonzales took the first watch. He was still upset over the discovery that the exploding Communist weapons the American Forces Radio Network constantly warned the troops not to fire were not, as he’d happily assumed, explosive merely because they were products of inferior Marxist industry. He glowered and mumbled in Spanish, and Wolverine and Marvel stayed up to console him with their presence as the shadows blended into an impenetrable darkness broken only by the weird glow of rotting vegetation, scattered like shattered radium watch dials on the jungle floor.

Walking point always kicked his ass the first day in the field, so Mopar went to sleep as soon as he received permission from Wolverine to do so. When Marvel woke him for third watch, hours later, there was already a little moonlight breaking through the canopy and dripping like molten silver on the branches of the trees, dappling the bramble bushes and the sleeping Lurps.

A
FTER GLANCING OVER TO
make sure Wolverine was still asleep, Mopar took the headset from Marvel. Cupping his hand around a whisper, he asked Marvel how much of J. D.’s situation report he’d been able to hear. Marvel tilted his head back and looked up into the shadows and the moonlight. He smiled, his teeth flashing in the moonlight coming through the canopy, then stared at the trees as he answered.

“Movement all around. J. D.’s set up between two trails, and he’s got heavy traffic on both of them at the same time. He’s got motorcycle traffic on the lower trail.”

Mopar couldn’t decide if Marvel sounded like he was trying to be blasé, or if he was talking through his dreams. At any rate, he sounded goofy with all this talk of motorcycles on the lower trail. But Mopar let him go on without interruption.

“There’s no way to say ‘motorcycle’ in CAR code, you know, so J. D. reported a run of Hell’s Angels—right out in the open: ‘Hell’s Angels, Sonny Barger’s boys’—just like that, as plain as day to us, but incomprehensible to any gooks listening on the push. J. D.’s got a real gift for exclusionary thinking.”

Marvel giggled and slid over a little closer to Mopar so he could whisper up next to his ear and not have to worry about waking Wolverine. By now, he too was certain that there were no enemy troops in the vicinity—they were all in J. D.’s Recon Zone or hustling down the streams and trails to link up with the main force under cover of darkness. There were no streams or trails anywhere near the bramble thicket, but even if there had been a platoon of NVA encamped fifty meters away, they wouldn’t have been able to hear his whispers through such thick jungle.

“Now get this, Mopar—this is out of sight! Not only can the relay team hear motorcycles almost every time J. D. transmits, but we can hear them too sometimes, when J. D. holds his headset next to the trail and just squeezes the transmit button! I tell you, Mopar, J. D.’s the type of guy who can make his own luck in this life.”

Mopar shrugged. He wondered what in the fuck had gotten into Marvel to make him start gushing over J. D. with all this weirdo nonsense about “exclusionary thinking” and making his own luck. Marvel got to gushing over people sometimes when they acted the way he expected them to act, but he’d never had much good to say about J. D. before now. Mopar just couldn’t imagine why Marvel was so impressed. It was only good sense for J. D. to transmit when the motorcycles were going past his position. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about the gooks hearing him transmit—not over the noise a motorcycle could kick up, sliding and spinning on one of these muddy trails! And even more important, nobody hearing the engine sounds that came over the horn could doubt he was telling the truth. J. D. was very touchy about his credibility.

Mopar hoped that if he ever found himself in J. D.’s situation he’d have enough sense to sit tight and lay dog, quiet and still as humanly possible, all night and all the next day if necessary, until the gooks were gone or until the gunships came on station.

“What about calling in an air strike or some artillery? Has he made any requests?”

Marvel shook his head. “Requested? Yeah—but just for gunships to circle off station. It was denied. Not by our Six, but by that major from the Two Shop.”

Mopar sighed unhappily. J. D. was too impatient. He was nowhere near as reluctant to swap lead as a good recon man should be, and that was why Mopar had left his team for Farley’s. But even though Mopar wouldn’t have trusted J. D. to keep the gunships circling off station until they were really needed, he was outraged that the major had denied support to a team in a potentially tight spot.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Marvel said. “This major isn’t playing by the rules. But there isn’t anything J. D. can do about that, and even less we can do. And anyway, old J. D., he didn’t seem too unhappy about the situation, even after the major cheated him out of the guns. It can be good, or it can be bad, but a guy like the major—a guy like J. D.—can make his own luck in this life.”

Mopar had had enough of Marvel’s horseshit. It was bad enough for him to be gushing over that do-rag jigaboo madman J. D. when he’d never really been able to appreciate him before. But Mopar was outraged that Marvel would gush over the major, who may not have been a non-Airborne Leg but was the next thing to one, with his false-hearted, good leader, ho-ho ways and his staff of snotty wizards. Now the major was breaking all the rules of the game, refusing a team fire support as requested.

“You’re talkin’ out your ass again. Go on, crash. I’m on top of things now and don’t need your bullshit to keep me awake. If we keep whispering we’re gonna wake up Wolverine!”

Marvel sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was tempted to stay up and try to explain what he meant about a man making his own luck to Mopar. Sometimes he suspected that Mopar understood luck almost as well as he did, but just refused to admit that there was such a thing as luck at all. Luck wasn’t something a man could bully and push around, so Mopar wasn’t interested. But Marvel was too tired to waste sleep-time talking. He stretched his legs, careful not to rattle the brambles, then rested his head on his rucksack, pulled his half of the jungle blanket up to his chest, and went to sleep hugging his rifle.

For the first hour of his watch Mopar sat with his back against his rucksack and his rucksack against Wolverine’s, and every time there was traffic on the radio Wolverine seemed to stir and tense up, as if listening to the radio through his sleep. During the second hour of Mopar’s watch, Wolverine slept like an old lion, never stirring, but threatening at any point to break out with a sudden sawstroke of snore and wake up half the jungle. Mopar didn’t nudge him, even when he started to exhale with a wet hiss, even when he snorted and smacked his lips in his sleep. There was nobody but the Lurps to hear Wolverine, even if he took to snoring like a sawmill. But out in RZ Zulme, things were getting even tighter. J. D. was only breaking squelch, and didn’t dare risk a whisper into the headset now that the motorcycles were past and the traffic on the trails was thinning out.

Mopar could hear the relay team breaking squelch to acknowledge J. D.’s squelch breaks, and he could hear the traffic between the relay team on Culculine and Pappy Stagg back in the rear. But he couldn’t hear J. D., and he was too late to hear the motorcycles, so he sat with the headset next to his ear and his rifle across his lap and wondered just what in the hell was really going on out there in J. D.’s Recon Zone.

If the gooks really had been going by with motorcycles loaded down with cargo slipping and falling and getting stuck in the mud—running headlights no less, and making no effort at noise discipline—then why hadn’t J. D. figured out what those motorcycles were hauling? If the gooks were as close as J. D. said they were, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a good look or two from the shadows under the bushes—at the very least get some detail into the reports. But J. D. didn’t seem concerned enough about detail. Wilkinson—J. D.’s rear security, his tailgunner—never went on a mission without one of those mini-Starlight scopes. Why wasn’t he using it now to find out what the bikes were hauling and what the gooks were humping on their backs?

Mopar ran a list of twenty things through his mind and still couldn’t figure out what the gooks were carrying. But it was easy to guess what sort of things they had on the bikes: Rockets and recoilless rifles and mortars and rice. There’d even be coffins, perhaps, to boost their gook morale. J. D. should never have let the bikes get past without a positive ID or two, Mopar thought with growing irritation. The least they could do is guess.

Mopar made a situation report without asking the relay team about J. D., even though the temptation to do so was hard to resist and the punishment would be no more than an asschewing from Pappy Stagg after the mission. It just wasn’t a professional thing to do, wasting air time when another team had movement.

He took out a canteen, unwrapped a cornflake bar, and relaxed as he waited for the relay team to pass his sit-rep and J. D.’s on to Pappy Stagg in the rear. He didn’t know how Marvel’s watch had gone, but it couldn’t have crept by like this. Marvel at least had had the chance to listen to some of J. D.’s better situation reports. But all Mopar was getting was squelch breaks, and he could hear only the relay’s half of those. Life might be a butt-puckering, pulse-thundering thrill in J. D.’s Recon Zone, but here among the brambles on a totally cold ridge in a very dead RZ, Mopar was losing his patience and dying to know what the motorcycles had been hauling.

There had been nothing said during his watch so far—no questions about specifics relayed from the rear, no updates from J. D. himself, and Mopar wondered how much had been covered in previous traffic but wasn’t exciting enough for Marvel to pass on to him.

He bent down and shook Marvel awake. “Listen,” he whispered, “I’ve been monitoring the radio all this time without any idea what’s on those bikes. What did J. D. say during your watch?”

Marvel rubbed his eyes and sat up slowly. He looked around at the darkness and the scattered phosphorescence and the other men sleeping half in shadow and half in dappled moonlight. He yawned. He’d been dreaming about finding a large yellow balloon drifting down a slow jungle river beneath an arch of overhanging branches, and he wondered if he could pick up where he’d left off if he went to sleep without answering Mopar’s stupid question. It had been an oddly pleasant dream, and Marvel was certain that it meant something.

“Come on, you silly gook—what did J. D. report during your watch? I want it all, in detail.”

Marvel stretched and yawned again. He took his time answering. J. D. hadn’t been able to see much, he explained, and all he’d said about the cargo of the motorcycles was that it seemed to be made up mostly of rectangular crates of some kind, and long cylindrical objects—rockets or bangalore torpedoes.

“Where do you think they’re going? Culculine?” Mopar asked.

Marvel shrugged and doused some bug juice on a leech that had just fastened to his cheek. He brushed the dying leech off his face and shivered with disgust.

“Fucking leeches—they aren’t even part of the food chain. What do they live on when the Lurps are back in the rear? I don’t even think they exist until we come along, and then they just sort of generate out of all the rot and decay on the ground and come feeling for our heat. I hate the fuckers, I really do.”

Mopar frowned impatiently. He hated leeches as much as the next man, but he hadn’t shaken Marvel awake to discuss them.

“Come on, you dork! What do you think they’re up to?”

“Who? J. D.? He’ll probably get his ass in a sling opening fire on somebody, and they’ll have to give him his gunships. He’ll kill about a million zips, give Pappy Stagg a few more gray hairs, then bring his team out alive and well in the morning and get himself a medal and an asschewing. J. D.’s too flashy, and that’s his bad luck.”

“You know I wasn’t asking about J. D., damnit Marvel, you dipshit!” Any louder and Mopar wouldn’t have been whispering anymore. Gonzales rolled over in his sleep, and Wolverine’s breath caught for a second in a half snore, then evened out as slow and regular as before.

“What about the gooks? What do they have in mind?”

The combination of Marvel’s Korean blood, Hawaiian upbringing, and his visits to the fortune teller in the Louc Ma marketplace when everyone else was in the whorehouse had made him an expert on indigenous psychology, and Mopar trusted his judgement in all matters related to the gook mind.

“There’s only one place they can be headed,” Marvel said. He looked toward the north, the direction of both J. D.’s Recon Zone and the radio relay team on Firebase Culculine. “Poor Culculine …” Marvel shook his head sadly. “They’re going to wipe her off her mountain. I told you radio relay was dangerous. I broke it down and laid it out and labeled the parts, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Radio relay was too boring to be dangerous. It was chickenshit and boring and degrading. But it wasn’t dangerous. That’s what you said …”