New Title 1 (2 page)

Tony “Tripwire” Walker, Blackjack’s demolitions expert, leaned over the medic. “Easy, man,” he told him. “He’s gone. Nothing you can do.”

The medic stared up at Tripwire. His eyes were huge, the pupils dilated. His hands continued to push at the dead Marine’s guts, pushing with no real sense of purpose or understanding, as though it were somehow possible to jam all the blood back inside. “I gotta get out of here,” he said. “Can’t hack this shit no more.”

“Help me stabilize the others and get them to the Huey,” Tripwire said, leading him away, “then you’re going home.”

Tripwire went over to the black kid. Since being taught basic field medicine at Camp Pendleton, he’d become Blackjack’s meatball medic. He unshouldered his M-5 medical ruck and pulled out a bottle of Betadine, a suture kit, a blister pack of Dexedrine tablets, plus several ultra-absorbency Kotex pads. He plucked the morphine syrettes out of the black kid’s chest and asked his name.

“D-D-Dale.” This kid was seventeen years old, Tripwire guessed. Lied about his age, draft board only too willing to look the other way. His skin was the gray of a rotted potato. “A-a-am I go…gonna b-b-be o-okay?”

“You’ll be fine,” Tripwire said. It was a lie, but in a conflict built on lies, in a military machine that ran on lies, in a situation where men told lies to keep insanity at bay, this particular falsehood tripped off Tripwire’s tongue with slick ease. “Be pumpin’ Siagon whores by nightfall.”

Tripwire felt around the base of Dale’s right thigh. The limb was raggedly severed above the knee. His fingers came in contact with something wet, hard, and slippery: the kid’s femur.

Karoumph, karoumph
. Two artillery rounds exploded in a cypress grove three-hundred yards distant.

“What do you think?” Tripwire asked the medic.

“Let me check his pulse.” Leaning over Dale, the medic found his left wrist. “Racing and weak—165 beats per minute, I’d say.”

“You got serum albumin?”

“In my kit.”

While the medic set up an IV flow, Tripwire tore Dale’s fatigues up to the groin to get a better look at the wound. The meat of his thigh was badly chewed, most of the flesh blown clear off the bone. The femur shone wetly in the crisp sunlight, red muscle encased in a thin layer of adipose tissue. Tripwire saw a white blood vessel sticking out of the mess, blood spritzing from the vein like water from a spigot.

“Tourniquet him off high on the thigh,” Tripwire instructed.

After the medic had cinched Dale’s leg with an M-16 strap and stemmed the blood flow, Tripwire removed a hemostat clamp from the med kit, clamped it to the end of the bleeding vessel, and tied the end off with a piece of black surgical thread. He then padded the wound with Kotex before wrapping the stump in an Ace bandage. While he operated, the medic worked an IV needle into a vein in Dale’s hand and pumped in blood-plasma expander. The black soldier smiled slightly, laying back and closing his eyes.

“Good as we can do,” Tripwire said. “Let’s hoof your Lieutenant to the Huey.”

The medic unfolded a portable back-board and together they shuttled the wounded Lieutenant down a speed trail to the Huey’s landing zone. The man kept screaming: “Davey! Daaa–
veey
!” Tripwire knew the Lieutenant would probably be dead long before he reached the medical center at Da Nang. The same could be said for Dale and the other one. Maybe it was futile, but that didn’t matter. They were Marines. You did everything you could to save a fellow Marine’s life, even if it meant dying yourself.

By this time the other six members of Blackjack had moved to the clearing’s perimeter, where the remaining LuRPS were positioned. The 9th unit’s baby-faced corpsman looked barely old enough to deliver the Sunday paper.

“You got Charlie everywhere!” he screamed. “I mean,
every
–fuckin
–
where!”

Oddy said, “I can dig it.”

“I’m glad you can,” the corpsman said, “because I am flaking like fucking tuna!”

“Just chill, son.”

“Yeah, pacify.” Zippo lit the stub of a Swisher Sweets cigarillo on the shaft of blue flame thrown by his weapon’s pilot light. “Cavalry’s here to save your sorry asses.”

“Zip that lip,” Oddy told him. To the corpsman: “Where’s Charlie at?”

The corpsman pointed across the knee-high elephant grass to a dense glade. “In there. Don’t know how many.” He looked around frantically, eyes darting too fast to focus on anything or anyone. “Seems like a fuckin’ thousand!”

“LuRPS,” Slash said, chewing on the word like it was a turd while scanning the soldiers’ shit-scared faces. “I guess someone’s been lying to me.”

“Who?” a sandy-haired LuRP asked.

“The guy who told me you pussies were hardcore.”

“I said
zip
that
lip
.”

The low
thoomp
of a mortar being launched was followed by a whistling
sweeee
as it streamed through the air.

“Asses
down
!” Oddy hollered. The soldiers crouched low as the round passed directly overhead, landing thirty feet behind them. The ground shook as shrapnel cut through the grass and thumped into mangrove trunks.

“Charlie’s zeroing in,” Zippo said, shaking dirt off his collar.

“You and your men diddlybop,” Oddy told the corpsman. “Help your medic transport the wounded to the Huey’s LZ and send my man forward. Dig me, dogface?”

“You sure?” The corpsman peered up at Oddy from beneath the brim of his piss-cutter helmet. “There’s only, what, six of you?”

“Hey,” said one of the LuRPS, “the man told us to diddlybop.” He looked at the corpsman, then at the big black Sergeant, as if expecting Oddy to experience a sudden change of heart. “He gave us a direct
order
.”

“Yeah,” said Frank “Gunner” Hardcastle, Blackjack’s machine-gunner, 250 pounds of ripped Iowa farm muscle with bad attitude to spare. “Get thee
gone
.”

“Okay,” said the relieved corpsman, turning to address the remaining LuRPS. “Hustle back to LZ double-time. Jackson, you and Henried hoof Phillips. Samuelson and me got—”

Suddenly there were several loud hollow pops and someone shouted, “Incoming!” Seconds later the first of a half-dozen mortar rounds landed in the grass twenty yards behind the men.

When the sound of the explosions receded, Oddy heard screaming.

A mortar shell had struck the corpsman high on the left arm, just beneath the shoulder. While the deadhead round hadn’t exploded, the force of its downwards trajectory was enough to tear the corpsman’s arm off. He stood looking down at his arm in the green, green grass, the fingers still twitching, biceps flexing convulsively.

The corpsman made the sounds a baby will make when he is trying to work up the breath for a good scream. Blood spurted from the wound, plastering his face in red sheets. The corpsman’s right hand clenched around the butt of his M-16, fingers squeezing the trigger. The clip emptied in a rapid cook-off, slugs slamming into the earth and punching through his shins, feet, kneecaps, toes. The young corpsman dropped onto the grass with a grunting sigh. He fell forward on his face into a clump of small yellow flowers.

“Hightail him back to the Huey,” Oddy said.

“Jesus, man,” the sandy-haired LuRP said, “he’s wormfood!”

“Hoof…him…
back
.”

“Okay,” the LuRP said, moving toward the body. “You got it.”

Tripwire and the medic had loaded the Huey by the time the remaining LuRPS reconnoitered with their dead corpsman. Tripwire helped them onto the bird, receiving their grateful looks and whispered thanks with a curt nod.

The pilot gave Tripwire the thumbs-up before lifting off. As soon as the Huey gained altitude, small arms fire erupted from the glade. The door gunner answered with his M60.

Tripwire hustled to rejoin his unit. Oddy flagged him down beneath a banana tree. The Sergeant pushed a cluster of small green bananas out of his face and said, “Charlie knows they’ve been trumped. They’re royally pissed.”

Just then, AK-47 fire erupted from the trees. Tripwire spied a few camouflaged uniforms crouching along the darkened wood line.

Tripwire said, “So what are we gonna do?”

“What we always do, son.” Oddy smiled, his teeth stark against the black skin and streaks of olive-green lampblack. “Go to work.”

So. The Magnificent Seven got to work.

Sheltered beneath drooping fleshy mango leaves, Blackjack sniper Neil “Crosshairs” Paris scanned the enemy line through the iris of a Gewher scope, sighting down a soldier whose fatigues roughly matched the bark of the breadfruit tree he was perched in. Crosshairs’s silenced G3SG/1 sniper rifle made a
tssst
sound and the VC’s head snapped back in a mist of red. The corpse slumped over the branch like a noodle on a chopstick. Crosshairs was able to pick off two more before Charlie got wise.

A wave of VC soldiers crept out of the jungle on their bellies, AK’s pushing down the elephant grass. Then they reached a semicircle of M-14 toe-poppers and Bouncing Betties Tripwire had strung fifty feet off Blackjack’s position. Panicked shouts were followed by a sequence of muffled explosions; these were followed by a clotted rain of earth and charred cloth and ribboned flesh and enough bone-confetti to outfit a ticker-tape parade.

A second wave charged hard, releasing a pack of attack dogs before them. The dogs, starved and murderous, caught the insert team’s scent and rushed headlong, yellow teeth bared.

Zippo rose up from a copse of bushes, thumbing the pilot light on his LPO-50 flame-thrower. “Run along, little doggies.”

He loosed a whip of liquid flame that turned the dogs into canine fireballs. They ran through the grass in maddened, helpless circles, fur burned away, flesh melting like candle-wax. They ran in herky-jerk circles, biting at the flames crawling down their throats and igniting their lungs. The smell of them was horrid, a tire fire in July. Soon they lay down, all of them all at once, lay still as stones and burned to black smudges on the grass. Zippo receded into the bush before the Viets could draw a bead.

Now the second wave found themselves with their asses hanging out, exposed in the middle of the field.
Tssst
: one of their number was thrown out of his boots, the back of his head exploding in a spray, a stream of blood plastering his face, executing a graceless backwards-somersault to land facedown in the grass.

Gunner swung around the trunk of a moss-covered tree hefting a Stoner M63A1 light machine-gun. The Stoner’s .223-in hollowpoints punched through the VC soldier’s uniforms, blowing their combat jackets out in billowy bell-shapes. The exit holes cast a lingering pinkish mist and their faces contorted and they tried to scream, lungs filling with blood. Gunner slipped behind the tree as retaliatory fire slammed into it.

While the remaining VC’s concentrated their fire on Gunner, Oddy and Slash jack-in-the-boxed from their hidey holes. Slash took two of the four soldiers out with textbook K-5 shots. Oddy’s first shot went high, blowing a crease in the top of the second-to-last soldier’s skull. He lowered his aim and drilled a slug straight into the man’s face, spewing cartilage and molars out the back of his head. He sighted down the M16’s barrel and squeezed off a pair of shots that destroyed the last soldier’s kneecaps, dropping him to the dirt, screaming.

Eight-and-a-half minutes had passed since the Magnificent Seven touched down.

They waited to see if the wounded soldier would draw any lingering comrades from cover. The man’s screams tapered to moans, then to whimpers and, finally, to a pitiful sort of sniffling.

Oddy whistled. The insert members assembled on his position. The rest of the team covered Gunner and Slash while they humped out to retrieve the wounded soldier.