the Last Run (1987) (10 page)

Her silence that night broke his heart. It was the most painful loss he'd ever experienced.

Suddenly Wade was again aware of the agent rambling on, but he did not notice the woman's curious stare.

An orderly yelled into the mess hall. "The bird is inbound!"

Wade immediately got to his feet to make his apologies and be off, but to his surprise the obese agent and his lovely client both stood and began collecting their bags.

The agent grinned broadly as he picked up a briefcase. "Looks like we'll be traveling companions; isn't that great?"

Damn! Wade thought as he turned his back on the agent and frowned. "Yeah, great," he mumbled.

The woman, stepping in front of the sergeant, saw his dour expression. She smiled knowingly, but Wade didn't notice as he let the agent pass in the hope that the obnoxious man would select a seat as far from him as possible.

Nha Trang Corps Headquarters 173rd Airborne Liaison Office

At 0700 Lieutenant J. D. Gibson walked into a small stucco building adjacent to the huge Corps headquarters chateau. T\vo staff sergeants arose, smiling, from behind battered desks. The thinner one motioned to a door. "Your new office, sir."

Gibson stepped into the small cubicle and surveyed his new home. He hated it already; there were no windows.

"Sir, how'd you like your BOQ room?"

The lieutenant had been picked up at the airfield the night before and taken directly to the bachelor officers quarters.

Gibson sat on the sergeant's desktop. "The room's all right. It's just gonna take some gettin' used to. I haven't had clean sheets and a refrigerator stocked with beer in quite awhile."

The sergeant smiled broadly; it had been his suggestion to have beer for the new liaison officer.

Gibson gestured toward his office. "Will you move my desk out here by the door? I need to see sunlight and have a breeze."

The thin sergeant's smile dissolved as he exchanged a quick glance with the other sergeant across from him.

"Sure, sir, but I thought you'd like . . ."

Gibson stood, shaking his head apologetically. "I'm sorry, but I can't stand to be closed in. Why don't you all just introduce me to the G-3, and I'll help you move it later?"

The sergeant looked bewildered and nodded to his partner, a young black, for help.

The black sergeant stepped around his desk.

"Sir, I think you'd better sit down and let me explain what you're really going to be doing around here. I know the brigade S-l told you one thing, but he doesn't know how it really is."

Gibson sat down and listened, confounded, as the sergeant explained that he seldom, if ever, went into Corps Headquarters, let alone see the Corps G-3 operations officer. His job was to ensure that visiting high-ranking 173rd officers and their guests were billeted in VIP quarters and escorted to restaurants, shopping spots, and tourist beaches. He was to drive the VIPs wherever they desired and see that they enjoyed their visit. The sergeant's primary duties were to collect Corps messages to the 173rd headquarters and send them out on the earliest aircraft possible. The black sergeant took a message from his desk and used it as an example.

"You see, sir, I picked this up from G-l this morning. The message directs that the 173rd is to provide volunteers for the Corps Ranger Company. The only requirement is that the volunteers have at least four months in country. Volunteers are to be sent to Sierra Company Rangers in An Khe. Sir, all I do is put this in a pouch and send it out this afternoon."

Gibson listened for another couple of minutes with the realization that despite what the brigade S-l had said, he wouldn't be making any decisions, attending any meetings, or consulting about 173rd activities or operations. He was nothing more than a flunky, a "gofer" for the brass.

The final blow came when the sergeants walked him outside and showed him his personal jeep.

It was new, hand-painted with five coats of shiny, dark-green paint, and waxed to a sparkling sheen. The seats were white Naugahyde with a large, colored, and embroidered 173rd patch on the back of each. The tires were painted with tire black; the floor mats were light blue. The sergeants had thought he'd be pleased. The lieutenant almost vomited.

He prided himself on being a field soldier. The men in the bush thought of rear echelon types as "gettin' over" and "skaters." To be called a REMF, a rear echelon mother fucker, was the worst possible insult to an infantryman. Gibson stared at the jeep in disbelief. To drive such a vehicle was like tattooing "REMF" on his forehead.

He spun around and walked directly for his office. He had to call brigade right now and tell them he'd made a mistake. This job was definitely not for him!

2,000 feet elevation Twenty miles southeast of Bien Hoa Air Base

The medevac helicopter climbed to gain cruising altitude. Wade had managed to convince the right door gunner to let him sit with him in the side crew compartment, while the agent and woman sat in the passenger bay behind the pilot and copilot.

Wade, wearing headphones, sat back in the nylon seat and listened to the pilot talk to the copilot about the entertainer.

"You get a load of that black jumpsuit she's wearing?"

"Yeah, she looks like she was poured into it."

"She's gotta be a 36-Charlie at least."

"Man, you're blind! She's a 38-Delta not e-ven countin' the nipples."

The door gunner, listening to the same conversation, poked Wade in the ribs and grinned. Wade smiled back to be friendly, but he thought it unfair that the woman didn't know she was being talked about. The wind and engine noise made it impossible to hear the crew without the headphones.

The Huey reached cruising altitude and leveled. Wade leaned over to look at the land three thousand feet below and could see a gray ribbon snaking its way through a green tapestry of jungle- covered mountains. It was Highway 1 leading them to Phan Thiet.

Suddenly his earphones popped with static and a voice came over the radio ordering the pilot to pick up a wounded soldier somewhere below. The pilot argued that he had civilians on board, but the voice was emphatic: the medevac was the only help available, and this was an emergency. The pilot agreed reluctantly and took the radio frequency of the ground unit needing help.

The bird banked left and began losing altitude. The door gunner, who was a medic, reached under his seat and unstrapped a medical bag. Wade leaned back on the padded fire wall as the copilot dialed the ground unit's frequency and called over the radio.

An excited voice responded immediately and gave the unit's location. Wade could see they were passing over the highway and heading north into mountains. The chopper leveled at two thousand feet for only a minute and then suddenly banked hard right and dropped like a rock, leaving Wade's stomach in his throat. Thank God I'm only on for the ride, he thought, as the bird passed over a steep, tree-covered ridge only five hundred feet below.

The medevac streaked down a small valley and headed for a spiraling yellow smoke cloud a kilometer away. The pilot held ninety knots for five hundred meters, then lowered the bird's tail into a flare, breaking the forward airspeed in half. The bird fell into the dissipating yellow smoke and setded to the ground. They had landed in a small open area by a stream. On all sides was dense jungle; sweat-soaked GIs stood in the tree line with weapons ready. Two men broke from the trees carrying a black soldier on a poncho litter. His chest was bare and wrapped with a bloodstained bandage. The medic beside Wade hopped out and helped the men hoist the unconscious soldier into the passenger cabin, where the crew chief dragged him in between the pilot's seats and the passengers. The medic bent over the soldier as the bird lifted off. Suddenly the men in the tree line raised their weapons and began shooting into the jungle. Wade could only hear faint "pops" above the engine roar, but he tensed instinctively and tried to make himself smaller.

The chopper shot forward, barely clearing the treetops as the crew chief yelled "Taking fire!" into the radio transmitter.

Wade heard "pings" and prayed the small vibrations he'd felt weren't what he thought.

"We're hit!" screamed the pilot, trying to gain more altitude. The copilot spoke as if intoxicated, "I'm hit, I . . . I'mmm hit bad . . . I'm . . ."

The chopper began shaking in a faint vibration that steadily grew into a teeth-chattering lurch. The engine began to scream louder as if in pain. Wade knew he was about to die.

The shuddering chopper just cleared a steep ridge when the pilot lowered the nose and sped down into the valley to pick up airspeed for control. The bird fell rapidly, quieting the engine's tormenting whine and horrible shaking. Wade felt a twinge of hope until he opened his eyes. They were headed down a narrow, tree-covered valley with rugged mountains on both sides. Directly ahead loomed a larger mountain.

The pilot knew it was hopeless and only prayed he could raise the chopper's nose into a flare before hitting the jungle canopy. Their hope for survival was to settle in. He fought the shaking controls and spoke into the transmitter almost apologetically: "We're going in."

Wade saw the treetops rushing past at eye level and pressed himself against the fire wall. He heard the sickening slap of the skids hitting the branches and braced himself.

The pilot tried to pull up, but suddenly the bird nosed over as if tripped by a snare. The huge rotating blades struck the canopy, exploding in a succession of thunderous "cracks." The fuselage was thrown upward and flipped on its left side as the tail rotor tore into the top tree branches like a buzz saw and disintegrated in an explosion of shrapnel. The tail boom snapped off and the dying bird screamed its last with an earsplitting grinding of gears. The medevac helicopter crashed down into the waiting jungle canopy.

Wade, who had been pinned against the fire wall by centrifugal force, was thrown upward as the wreck plummeted. The seat belt seemed to be tearing him in half and was squeezing the air out of him. His eyes bulged outward, forcing his eyelids open. The sounds of screams from the passenger compartment were drowned out by the deafening cracks and pops of broken limbs and the horrid screeching of branches scraping down the metal fuselage like amplified fingernails on a blackboard.

The Huey pitched violently side to side as it fell fifty feet before jolting to an abrupt halt, impaling itself on a dead mahogany. A jagged limb had torn through the passenger cabin and protruded through the open door. The dead bird lay on its side twenty feet off the ground, looking as if it had been stabbed by an upended pitchfork.

The jungle was deathly silent. Leaf and twig fragments filtered down, shrouding the wreckage in a woody dust. The sun's rays poured through the path of destruction in the canopy above and basked the fuselage in an eerie diffusion of light.

Matt Wade lay motionless against the fire wall. After a moment, his eyes fluttered and then opened. His head was spinning, and he thought he was in a dream. It had to be a dream. He was in a deep, dusty tunnel looking up at the sun. Then he shook his head and concentrated. It wasn't a dream.

Wade felt as if he was broken in half. There was no sound, no motion, only pain and the warmth of the sun on his face. I'm alive! he thought in astonishment, but he quickly shut his eyes and forced himself to check his body movements. Please God, oh God, please, he prayed, as he tried to sit up. He couldn't move. God, no! He fought the feeling of desperation and tried again. His head and shoulders moved but his midsection wouldn't respond. Wade fell back, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then suddenly grabbed at his waist. The seat belt! he thought. The damn seat belt is holding me! He wanted to scream out in relief as he began to unbuckle the strap when a ghastly sound seemed to tear right down into his soul. It was a gurgling, inhuman sounding rasp. He freed the belt and crawled groggily to the passenger bay. "Oh, shit!" The agent had been partially lifted out of his seat belt by a branch that had smashed through the cabin. The jagged branch had torn through his skull and ripped him upward. His body was stretched out, with his lower thighs still restrained by the seat belt. The woman's blood-covered body was held by her belt and sat supported by Walter's exposed stomach. Twenty feet below, lying crumpled on the jungle floor, were the two bodies of the medic and wounded soldier.

The gurgling sound snapped Wade's head toward the pilot's seat. He pulled off his sling with a jerk, grabbed the protruding limb, and swung over to the pilot's door. The pilot's front Plexi- glas window had smashed in from the top and scraped down the pilot's helmet and visor. The jagged edges had finally penetrated his throat, pinning him to the seat. He was suffocating on his own blood. Matt smashed the side window with his boot and grasped the window. He strained with all his might but could move the plastic only an inch. It was not enough to clear the pilot's chin. Frothy blood gushed over his hands, making the plastic slick. He lost his grip. The window snapped back like a steep spring. "Oh, Jesus." He tried again but it was useless. Seconds later the pathetic gurgling ceased.

Wade sat back on the door, feeling sick and defeated.

His mind had taken many unwanted pictures. Pictures that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He fought their grisly images and concentrated on the one in the mess hall. She had been so beautiful, so . . . Shit! He cleared his head of all thoughts except how to get down and away from the crash, knowing the dinks would be there long before a rescue party.