Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (24 page)

“What about the site itself?” Wolverine asked. He was whispering more often now, and Mopar couldn’t decide whether that meant he was getting slack and lazy, or just being practical. It was a pain in the ass to be always scribbling and passing field notes around. Besides, if one or two of the notes fell out of someone’s pocket onto the ground they could compromise the whole team.

“Approaches are easy, right across the trail and up around from behind. There’s a lot of ferns at the side of the trail, so we can’t be seen.”

“The site? What did you find there?”

Mopar shrugged uneasily. “Good concealment. Carpet of dead leaves, a few bushes. That’s it. Marvel thinks the place is spooky.”

Wolverine didn’t much care what Marvel thought about the place. He wanted to know if they’d found the bodies.

Again Mopar shrugged. “Nothing. No brass. No bones. No equipment. No bullet holes or shrapnel scars on the tree trunks. Marvel’s right, Sarge. The place
is
spooky. It’s like J. D. was never even there.”

Wolverine ran his tongue over the gap in his teeth. He dismissed Mopar with a nod, then reached back for his headset and called the radio relay with a situation report. As soon as he finished his report, he gestured for everyone to saddle up and get ready to move out. Maybe they’d find some sign of Two-One farther down the ridgeline. And maybe they wouldn’t. But at least it wouldn’t be necessary to plant the Black Boxes in the middle of a stinking bone pile, and Wolverine found some consolation in that.

While Marvel moved off a few meters into the bushes behind Wolverine to stand rear security, Mopar, Schultz, and Gonzales put out their Claymores and took up security positions just off the trail. They had rehearsed this at the firing range before the mission, and now they all moved into place without a whisper. Wolverine was left with the Black Boxes and both radios, and as soon as he’d called in his location, he began to dig.

He’d planted sensing devices of all kinds in all sorts of places, but he didn’t believe any of them were worth the money they cost or the trouble of putting them in. He’d planted Black Boxes much like these along infiltration routes in Cambodia and next to two-lane dirt roads in Laos. He’d tied automatic cameras to trees on the mountains east of the Ashau. And once he and three Vietnamese Strikers had rigged cleverly camouflaged microphones in the ceiling beams of a temporarily deserted VC command bunker in the Mekong Delta. The microphones hadn’t worked, and as far as he knew, neither had any of the other sensing devices. Maybe the automatic cameras would have worked all right, but before anybody could sneak back into the area to recover the film, someone in Higher targeted the place for an Arc Light—a B-52 strike—and reduced the slope where they were hung to a smoking wasteland.

Wolverine didn’t have too high an opinion of Electronically Derived Intelligence, but he was an old hand at planting sensing devices. He dug two holes a few feet apart, just behind the thickest trailside foliage, then worked the plastic boxes down in the holes and moved them around until the bubbles in the monovial windows showed that they were level. He arranged the ferns to conceal the two thin antennas, removed the safety wires from the self-destruct mechanisms, then gently covered the boxes with loose soil and dead leaves.

After calling back to the artillery battery on Firebase Culculine to make sure the devices were transmitting properly, he signaled for Marvel and the others to bring in their Claymores and get ready to move out. The artillery was under orders not to fire on the boxes until after the team was extracted from the Recon Zone, but Wolverine didn’t completely trust them to remember those orders and abide by them. One of the boxes was supposed to be sensitive to ground vibrations and the other to human sweat and uric acid. If they didn’t work any better than most of the other devices Wolverine had planted, some poor gook would have to step on one of the boxes and piss on the other to bring a fire mission down on his head.

But Wolverine wasn’t going to take any chances. If the team stuck around to monitor the trail, maybe—just maybe—the boxes would start sending because of
them,
and some trigger-happy hotshot in the Fire Direction Center might forget it was his own people out there and call a world of shit and shrapnel down on them. And besides, it was bad patrol procedure to stay in one place any longer than necessary.

Originally, Wolverine had planned to move back to the south after planting the boxes. There was a bluff overlooking the river in the southwest, and he’d planned to set up there and watch for water traffic. But there was another bluff to the northeast, overlooking the valley, and since J. D. had probably been moving in that direction—headed back toward his insertion LZ for an emergency extraction—it seemed best to continue north along the ridgeline in hopes of finding some sign of Team Two-One. Wolverine radioed his change of plans back to Pappy Stagg on a wire antenna, then brought down the wire, switched over to a whip, and gave Mopar the high sign to lead out.

They had been moving slowly all morning, but now they moved even more carefully. Every four or five paces Mopar paused, and the men behind him stopped to listen for sounds of movement. Every hour or so Wolverine called a halt and had the team move into a tight wheel, to lay dog and listen some more, for they could hear occasional shouted commands down in the valley.

It was impossible to see what was going on, and Wolverine and Marvel could only hear a few of the shouts distinctly enough even to guess at their meaning, but it seemed like the gooks were having a training session of some sort because one of the most persistent commands—the only one the Lurps could hear clearly—was “Faster! Faster!” That wasn’t the sort of thing an officer would have to shout if his troops were just resting or going about their daily chores.

So far, it seemed that the troops in the valley had no idea that an enemy reconnaissance team was in the area. Wolverine wanted to keep things that way, at least until the next morning. Then, if the bluff offered both concealment of some kind and a decent view of the valley, it might be time to stir things up a tad, to give those poor hungry troops down there in the grass a little live fire training.

For the rest of that afternoon Wolverine insisted on strict noise discipline. There was no whispering and no crashing through the bush. The team stayed under the thick canopy, where there was little undergrowth. They used hand signals and field pads, and except for an occasional location report, all radio communication was conducted in squelch code rather than voice.

Shortly before dusk, Wolverine called a halt and had the team form up in a security wheel. It was time for the late afternoon hush to descend on the jungle, and he wanted to take advantage of it to listen for the sounds of enemy troops. There were probably some on the ridgeline now, perhaps moving along the high-speed trail toward the river or coming up from the river to cross into the valley. Even though they had heard nothing on the ridgeline all day, the river was wide enough and deep enough for boats, and Wolverine figured the poor dudes in the valley would be looking for a resupply to come in. Even the North Vietnamese Army couldn’t function forever on a diet of gritty rice and wild vegetables, and they’d have to cross the ridge to get to the river. The day before, when he and Mopar had been looking down on the valley from the other ridge, the wind was blowing in the treetops, but now the air was still, and Wolverine was confident that he could hear enough to get a compass azimuth on any sound.

The five Lurps sat back and waited. The birds stopped singing, and the mice and snakes and frogs stopped moving in the undergrowth. Soon the only sound was that of water dripping from the top of the canopy to the leaves below. Mopar scratched an insect bite on his cheek while Marvel daydreamed, but Wolverine’s brows knitted as he strained to hear. Here and there a lone cicada rubbed its legs together, and before long, ten thousand others joined in and the buzzing became a roar. The buzzing diminished, then welled louder and stopped, much more suddenly than it had begun. Mopar cupped his hand behind his ear, hoping to hear the bamboo flute he’d failed to hear the evening before, but almost immediately the silence was broken by another chorus of insect songs, and then, as if by command, the canopy came alive with the clamorous chirping of bats. Night birds screamed and tittered in the upper branches, and the raucous lizards on the ground and tree trunks barked
fuckyou fuckyou
at the deepening gloom and shadow.

Wolverine tapped Mopar on the shoulder and gestured off to the north. It was time to start looking for some thick bush in which to spend the night. They’d have to be moving out early if they wanted to be on the bluff overlooking the valley when the sun came up.

Halfway through their shared watch that night, Gonzales tapped Mopar on the shoulder and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “Remember J. D. that time in the Aloe Valley?”

Mopar nodded, surprised that Gonzales was breaking his noise discipline just to reminisce. “Yeah, he wasn’t like that all the time, but that once was enough. That’s why I joined Two-Four. J. D. was nuts.”

Gonzales grunted softly and fell back into his customary silence, leaving Mopar to wonder, once again, just what it was that a glum and straightlaced spic like Gonzales could so admire in a rash and colorful soul like J. D.

Mopar had been J. D.’s pointman on six or seven missions, while Gonzales had only been out with him once, that time in the Aloe Valley. And that was one mission Mopar wished he could forget. He’d never been so nervous for so long a time. The mission had been a steady progression from bad to worse. They’d been shot out of their primary insertion LZ and so had to go in on a highly visible but unguarded secondary landing zone, and from the time they hit the ground until they were pulled out under fire two days later, they’d had constant movement around them. The tension had been almost unbearable.

Even before boarding the chopper, Mopar’d felt uneasy about the mission. J. D. had just come back from a Hong Kong R&R, and even though the Aloe Valley was full of tall yellow grass at that time of year, he’d insisted on wearing the new green and black leaf-pattern camouflage suit he’d had custom tailored on Nathan Road. Everybody else was wearing faded tiger stripes because they blended well with any sort of vegetation, particularly tall grass. But J. D. insisted on wearing his tailored cammies, saying they made him look like the baddest African in the French Foreign Legion or some sort of savage Congolese mercenary out to kill himself a few Simbas and rape a few nuns. Thinking back on it now, Mopar could clearly see that J. D. was nuts.

They’d moved off the secondary LZ into the bushes and elephant grass and had immediately found themselves in a maze of paths and trails. They were forced to spend most of their time hiding in the grass, listening to gooks, and watching them pass, sometimes so close Mopar could’ve reached out and touched them. Heavy rains hit them early the first night, messing up their commo with the relay on Firebase Alexine, but the rain covered the sound of their movement and gave them a chance to start edging toward an extraction LZ while most of the gooks were covered up and trying to sleep. Early the next morning the team set up in a patch of raspy grass and cactus, less than a hundred meters from an LZ and only ten meters from a trail. They’d hardly had a chance to get a couple of Claymores next to the trail when three NVA officers, all of them carrying clipboards and wearing holstered pistols, came strolling casually down the trail in front of them.

Mopar could remember holding his breath and watching the gooks approach in the grass. He remembered wishing they’d hurry on by and not look to their left. But as soon as they drew abreast of the team, J. D. rose up suddenly like an avenging angel of death, a Claymore charging handle in one hand and his CAR-15 jumping and spitting and barking in the other. He was grinning, and Mopar would swear he’d heard him yell, “You snooze, you lose, Chuck!” just before he squeezed the Claymore handle and blew the gooks away.

There was hardly time to strip the bodies of weapons and papers before the whole place was swarming with angry gooks. Bullets cracked and clipped the grass like steel-jacket hornets, and Mopar threw out more than a few rounds of his own, just spraying the flanks. After a wild, running firefight and a quick, dangerous extraction by Pappy Stagg in the Command and Control ship, the team was out. Mopar was still trying to catch his breath and start coming down from his adrenaline rush when J. D. went back to playing the role. He fired up a Kool, shook his head with philosophical sadness, and apologized to one and all for having caused so much trouble.

“It’s just I can’t help it, you dig? I mean, I just
got
to ice somebody when I’m looking this good!”

Mopar took a sip of water from his canteen and leaned over to whisper to Gonzales, to ask him if he thought J. D. had done something that dumb out here in RZ Zulme. Gonzales shook his head, but didn’t bother to whisper any reply.

Mopar just didn’t understand. Maybe J. D. had let himself get carried away, just that one time. But that didn’t mean he was dumb, or nuts. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a hardcore dude and a badass Airborne Ranger. Gonzales knew that J. D. wasn’t the least bit afraid of these gook
comunistas,
for he’d seen the proof that morning in the Aloe Valley. J. D. was a bad nigger and a very crafty dude, and Gonzales had a hard time believing he was really dead.

F
ROM MIDNIGHT ON, THE
whole team was up on hundred percent alert, sitting in the darkness, invisible even to each other, grenade pouches open and Claymore handles in their laps, as what sounded like the whole North Vietnamese Army moved into the valley from the passes to the northeast of the ridgeline. Before dawn the team abandoned its night position and began picking its way very slowly through the jungle. Sweating even in the chill mist, his gloved left hand extended in front of him to protect his face from hidden branches and vines, Mopar led the team toward the bluff, and the men behind him followed very closely, guiding on the luminous tape on the back of his Lurp hat and listening to the new arrivals shouting back and forth to their comrades, sounding relaxed and confident, as if they were moving into a bivouac site outside Hanoi instead of a narrow valley within artillery range of Firebase Culculine.