Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (2 page)

Mopar nodded unhappily. He got it all right, but he wasn’t going to say so out loud.

Wolverine turned and started for the door, then stopped and turned back around.

“One more thing,” he said, suddenly worried that he’d come on a tad too strong and was getting off on the wrong foot with the troops. “I told you my name and I expect you to use it. Let’s have no more of this ‘Sarge’ bullshit. You just call me ‘Wolverine’ or ‘Sergeant Wolverine’ and we’ll get along fine. Got that?”

Marvel nodded, but Mopar waited until the new staff sergeant was gone before answering.

“Got it Sarge.” He hefted an imaginary foot-long penis in his hand and shook it at the doorway of the tent. “Got it
dangling,
you fuckin’ Lifer Pig!”

He turned on Marvel Kim, who was grinning that goofy grin of his, and appeared to be on the verge of giggling.

“You think this is funny, don’t you, you silly gook? All your talk about luck and omens and figuring the odds, and you can’t spot bad luck and trouble when it comes walking into the tent. Always looking to the future, huh? You think he’s got two, maybe three tours? Shit, Marvel! You’re looking so far down the line you miss out on the bad luck that’s at your feet. If that prick hadn’t come into the platoon we’d both be making sergeant, and I’d be a Team Leader! That’s bad luck. Marvel—bad luck in the here and now!”

Mopar swung his boots up on his cot and stretched out with his hands clasped behind his head.

“Giggle away, you goofy dork!” he said, breaking into a smile now, in spite of himself. “And while you’re at it, you better step outside and police up Tiger. He was avoiding me the last time I saw him.”

Wolverine shook his head and sat down on one of the foot-lockers. They were still in the aisle, still blocking the way to the bunker, but he decided not to say anything about that now. He wasn’t feeling as much like a hard-driving leader of men as he had ten minutes before. He took off his baseball cap and scratched the top of his head, and even Mopar, who was still reluctant to give him the benefit of the doubt, had to admit that he looked a good deal less formidable than he had on his first visit to the tent.

“This is the whole team? Two Spec Fours and a raggedy-ass little brown and black dog?”

He glanced over at Tiger, who was curled up on a pile of dirty fatigues, chewing contentedly on an old green field sock. With his dirty brown coat and black stripe markings, Tiger looked like he’d been born in a camouflage suit. He was a medium-small dog, lazy and self-indulgent, yet alert and shifty—a true recon dog. He looked up at Wolverine and wagged his tail in casual greeting.

“What’s he do? Carry the support radio?”

Marvel Kim looked over at Mopar and saw that he wasn’t in the mood to answer, so he answered for him.

“Tiger’s the sneakiest little thief and coward in the world,” he said. It was exactly what Mopar would have said, but Marvel didn’t say it quite as well. “Mostly he sleeps and eats and pisses oh things. But when we come in from the field he’s always there on the berm above the chopper pad, wagging his tail to welcome us back. It’s good to see him there, even if he won’t come down off the berm until the pilots kill their engines.”

This wasn’t the answer Mopar would have given, but it was much closer to the truth. Mopar credited Tiger with all sorts of unlikely wisdom and insight, and it was just as well that he hadn’t bothered to speak up, even though Wolverine had directed the question to him in the first place.

“So this is it? This is Team Two-Four of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol?” Wolverine sighed and put his cap back on his head. “Where the hell is the rest of the team, for chrissake?”

Now Mopar spoke up.

“Two of them’s dead. Gonzales is on R&R, and Ketchum got out of the Army. We’ve been floating—filling in on the other teams and pulling more than our fair share of radio relay.”

Mopar hated radio relay. While Marvel Kim thought it was deceptively dangerous duty, sitting on a fire base with nothing but straightleg artillery for security, Mopar just hated the boredom and frustration of following the teams on the map and missing out on all the fun they were having out there in the mountains.

“Well, you can forget about that.” Wolverine was pleased to note the impatient scorn with which Mopar had mentioned radio relay. “I’m the ranking team leader in this platoon, and I’ll go tooth and nail to get us missions. If you guys are as good as that old buzzard Stagg says you are, I’ll see that we spend ninety percent of our time in the field.”

It was an extravagant promise. There was no way any reconnaissance unit could get that much field time. But Wolverine was determined to spend as much time as possible out in the field, even if it meant volunteering the team for rinky-dink security patrols or even point work for the infantry. Just about anything was better than sitting on radio relay or filling sandbags in the rear.

“All right,” Wolverine stood up and stretched. “Now that we got that out of the way, I think I’ll take me a little stroll around the compound—get in some terrain familiarization. Anyone want to show me around?”

He addressed the invitation to both of them, but since Marvel Kim had finished cleaning his M-79 and was now working on his rifle magazines, it was up to Mopar to accept. He got to his feet slowly and took his time putting on his floppy Lurp hat. He pulled on the brim and styled it until his eyes were lost in shadow, then reached down and snatched the sock away from Tiger.

“Come on, you mutt!” he said, smiling slightly now that he was done with his snit. “Let’s show this cherry E-6 around the Lurp compound.”

Tiger sprang to his feet, snapping at the sock and wagging his tail happily.

Mopar had no idea how much better he smelled with his anger blown away.

N
ESTLED BETWEEN THE CHOPPER
pads of the 23rd AirCav on the north and the muddy brown warehouse tents and dark green conex containers of the 7077th Support and Supply Battalion on the south, the Lurp compound was not in the most distinguished company. To the east of the compound, separated from the sleeping tents by a couple of rolls of concertina wire and a shallow trench, was the neatly sandbagged Cav mess hall and a corner of the sprawling Cav motor pool, with its sheds and oil drums and trucks and burned-out helicopter hulks. Directly across the road from the Cav mess—the Slop Shop—was the fenced-in compound of Brigade S-2 Intelligence—the Two Shop.

Although neither of these institutions contributed much to the tone of the neighborhood, they were important even so. When the Lurps weren’t in the field, when they tired of their own freeze-dried Long-Range Patrol rations, they were always welcome in the Cav mess, even though they pointedly ignored the Cav’s uniform code and insisted on dining in their grubbiest “tiger-stripe” camouflage fatigues.

The Lurps—all of them except the lieutenant, Pappy Stagg, and the commo chief, Sergeant Johnson—were much less welcome in the Two Shop than they were in the Slop Shop. The Lurp platoon was normally under operational control of Brigade S-2 Intelligence, and the results of their patrols supplied most of the information that the Two Shop wizards processed and analyzed and turned into what passed for intelligence. But the Lurps were boisterous, loudmouthed, and far too curious to be welcome in the Two Shop, and a great deal of hostility existed between the enlisted men of the two detachments.

To the west of the compound, beyond the concertina wire at the far edge of the Lurp chopper pad, was the bunker line, and beyond that the perimeter of the base camp. Abandoned rice fields stretched a few miles from the perimeter into the foothills. Some of these foothills had only a few years’ growth on paddy terraces that had once gleamed like jade stairways on the slopes and in the draws. Even now, from the air, the terraces looked like steps, but mossy steps, treacherous steps that led into the dark and foggy mountains behind them.

While Tiger sniffed the guylines and lifted his leg against the antennas on top of the operations bunker, Mopar and Wolverine paused on the high ground between the bunker and the tent, and looked out at the mountains.

“There must be a million gooks out there,” Mopar said, shaking his head in awe at the thought of there being that many gooks in the whole world. There was an odd, wistful tone to his voice that Wolverine noted with approval. A good recon man was, above all, curious, and Wolverine was glad that his new ATL could look out at the mountains and get to wondering what-all was waiting out there for him.

They jumped off the bank onto the muddy compound driveway and trudged down to the gate. It wasn’t really much of a gate—just a barricade of steel and barbed wire that could be moved across the drive, a plywood sign announcing that this was the compound of the Headquarters & Headquarters Company Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol Platoon, and another, smaller sign warning all visitors to report to Brigade S-2 for entry clearance—but everybody called it the gate for lack of anything better.

“Don’t pay no attention to that sign,” Mopar said. “We don’t get many visitors. But anyone who wants to can just walk on the compound. We only pull the barricade across at night. But hell, we know it ain’t enough to keep anyone out. The only thing to challenge any unauthorized visitor would be Tiger’s barking—and he’s the quietest dog I ever saw.”

There had been plans to put up a real gate and a real sign, an arch with jump wings and Ranger tabs hanging from it, but Pappy Stagg had vetoed that idea. Pappy felt that it’d be a waste of time and money, and anyway, he already had his hands full trying to get the Lurps to keep a low profile, and a gaudy compound sign wouldn’t help things at all.

“We don’t really need a gate,” Mopar explained. “None of these rear-echelon Legs ever come poking around. They figure the least we’d do if we catch them nosing around would be to laugh at them, and the most we’d probably make them play catch with a baseball grenade. They don’t come around, so we don’t need a gate.”

Whenever he came out of a snit Mopar became garrulous and friendly, as if in compensation for having been a sulky prick while the snit was still on.

“Now down the slope there’s the chopper pad,” Mopar said with a wave of his hand. “You know; ropes and rope ladders and McQuire rigs—we even have a bunch of parachutes we’ll probably never get to use.”

Mopar wondered if Wolverine had ever infiltrated into a real-life target area by parachute, or if all of his jumps had just been training. He started to ask him what he’d been doing in Special Forces, then thought better of it. If he’d been doing anything interesting, Mopar realized, he probably would not be willing to talk about it right off with someone he hardly knew.

“Over there—hell, you can smell it from here—that’s the shithouse.”

Mopar waved at Team Two-Two’s pointman, Bill Kemp, who was pulling the shitcans out the back of the latrine so that he could burn off yesterday’s accumulation of shit with diesel fuel.

“It’s a three-holer, and Pappy scrounged up some real toilet seats, so we don’t get splinters in the ass every time we sit down to relax.”

They paused next to the rigging shed while Tiger sprayed the skids of the helicopters on the pad, then moved on past the supply tent and commo shed for the ammo bunker and the sandbagged firing pit where the men tested their weapons before each mission.

“We got to turn in all of our demo and grenades and special weapons when we come back from a mission,” Mopar said when they passed the ammo bunker. “Seems chickenshit to me, but Pappy runs a tight ship when it comes to some things.”

Wolverine wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and lit a cigarette with a survival-pack lighter.

“What about smoke grenades?” he asked. “You don’t turn those in, do you?”

Mopar nodded. “Smokes, frags, gas, det cord, Claymores—everything but our ammo. Pappy says he don’t want us getting ourselves blown away back in the rear. Says it’s unfair to the poor gooks who got to live out there with the leeches and snakes for us to kill our own selves off and keep them from getting a fair shot at us.”

Mopar paused and looked over at the jeep that was coming through the gate.

“Did you know Pappy Stagg before coming to the platoon?”

Wolverine nodded but didn’t volunteer any specifics.

“Well then you know how he is,” Mopar said. “He’s the best Top in the whole fucking Army. But he does have his ways.”

The jeep had pulled up on the drive beneath the operations bunker, and Pappy Stagg was down there next to it, joking with the driver, who was off-loading two red nylon mailbags.

“I gotta go, Sarge,” Mopar said. “I’m expecting a letter from this girl. And I want to beat Marvel to the newspapers.” He waited for Wolverine to nod in dismissal, then raced off for the bunker with Tiger bounding along beside him.

Wolverine watched them for a few seconds, then threw down his cigarette and ground it under his heel.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said under his breath, “don’t let them catch up with me here!”

W
OLVERINE WAS NOT NAMED
Wolverine when he first joined the army. He’d been only seventeen then, and he’d enlisted under his original name, over the forged signature of his father, the Reverend Doctor Matthew Wolverton of the Living Message of God Full Gospel Church.

The recruiting law was very specific: No one under the age of eighteen could be enlisted without parental consent; and there was no way that the Reverend Doctor would have given his consent if it had been sought. He had already secured a clerical scholarship for his son, and if Three Rivers Bible College had been good enough for him, than it was good enough for the boy. The Reverend Doctor Wolverton had always struggled to do the best he could for his only begotten son, and it was his God-given responsibility to guide him along the paths of righteousness and Christian living, and having preached the Gospel at revival meetings outside military bases from Alabama to Washington State, he knew that soldiers were a sinful lot, given to the evils of strong drink, foul language, and immoral women. There was no way he would have signed, and so Wolverine was forced to sign for him. The recruiter was behind on his quota for the third month, so was forced to overlook the obvious forgery and send the young recruit on his way with a few words of advice: “Keep your mouth shut and your ears open, and you’ll do all right.”