All Necessary Force - Страница 2

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The ball bearings of the claymore shredded the lead NVA element in pursuit, with the white phosphorous grenade spewing out a blanket of fire that incinerated anything it touched. The enemy response died off, replaced by the screams and moans of the wounded.

The team continued running, everyone panting. Hale did a head count and saw he was missing his tail gunner.

He shouted, “Where’s Houng?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “He was right with me when we started to break.”

They both knew there was no way they could search for him. To do so would cause the entire team to be annihilated. Hale strained to see some indication in Thomas’s face, but it was his decision to make.

Hale paused for a moment, torn, then said, “Fuck. We can’t go back in. Call Prairie Fire.”

He got the team up and moving again, hearing Thomas relaying the call to Covey. Prairie Fire was the code word for a team about to be overrun. It was used only in absolute need, because everything available was dedicated to that team. No one-zero wanted to call Prairie Fire and have another team die because he had taken their support.

Thomas said, “Covey’s got two Thuds inbound with some ordnance left from a run to Hanoi. No idea what they’re carrying.”

The flight of F-105 fighter/bombers would help, but only if they got to the team soon. Hale knew it would be a matter of minutes before the NVA gained control and began a methodical hunt, using what appeared to be an entire regiment around them. After what he had seen at the lanai, he was sure they wouldn’t quit until the team was dead, and maybe not even then. He could see the team knew it as well, the fear pulsing off them, the whites of their eyes stark against the camouflage greasepaint on their faces. He was reminded of a treed raccoon from his youth, hissing and snarling while the dogs barked in a frenzy below. He’d often wondered how the raccoon felt right at the end. Now he knew.

Still on the move, he heard Cummings empty a magazine at the rear of the formation, screaming, “B-40 rocket! B-40 rocket!”

An explosion lifted Hale off of his feet. Momentarily stunned, he saw his right side covered in blood. The team lay scattered, some still firing, others in a daze. Shaking the haze from his head, he moved from man to man. Reorganizing the defense, he was relieved to see that, despite various wounds, everyone with him was still alive and ambulatory. In front of him he saw nothing but khaki uniforms darting between the trees, perhaps a hundred NVA advancing toward them. The sight caused him to momentarily freeze, the sheer magnitude of their situation sinking in.

We’re dead.

The enemy unleashed everything they had, the rate of fire preventing the team from moving, the bullets snapping through their small perimeter like a swarm of angry bees and shredding the vegetation around them. Hale scrambled through the fire to Thomas, intent on breaking the NVA momentum before they realized they had it. He took over the radio, talking directly to the inbound F-105 pilots, giving them instructions on where to drop their load.

He dropped the hand mike and shouted, “Hug the ground! Danger close! Danger close!”

No sooner had he said it than the earth rocked violently, literally lifting the team into the air, the shock wave of the ordnance hammering them. The firing from the enemy slacked off to nothing.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Hale said, urging the team forward before the enemy could recover. He heard Thomas asking Covey for an exfiltration LZ, and heard Covey reply that the closest one was two kilometers to the north.

We aren’t going to make it two klicks through this. Hale said nothing out loud.

After ten minutes of movement without contact, Hale began to think that maybe they’d broken through. That now it was just a footrace, with only the team knowing the location of the finish line. He began to hope. Five seconds later, something slammed into his chest, knocking him to the ground. The air around him erupted in pops from incoming rounds. The team immediately returned fire, with someone grabbing his combat harness and dragging him forward. The Yard pulling him was hit, causing him to let go. Immediately, another took his place, continuing to drag Hale to cover.

Amazingly, the enemy fire grew fainter the farther they ran. After the experience with the claymore, the NVA were pursuing cautiously, not wanting to charge into another wall of ball bearings and fire, giving the team some much needed breathing room.

Hale shook the hands off of him and tried to stand up, then sank back to a knee. He felt like he couldn’t get any air, like he couldn’t inflate his lungs.

Thomas checked him, then began to work, putting a plastic strip over an entrance and exit wound on his breast. He said, “You got an in-and-out. It’s sucking.”

Hale saw the look of fear on his face and nodded. He slowly stood up, adrenaline alone willing him forward.

“Let’s keep moving. Those fuckers will be back on us soon.”

To confuse the enemy tracking them, they took a right turn, walked for about a hundred meters, then continued toward the LZ, now moving at a much slower pace. Hale was struggling to keep up, the gap between his diaphragm and left lung filling with air and preventing him from inflating it. He heard Thomas get confirmation that three helicopters were five minutes out, two slicks with gunship escort. Hale figured the team was at least thirty minutes from the landing zone.

It dawned on him that with the loss of Houng, they were down to a normal team of six men, which could be extracted by McGuire rig — a simple sling seat that was dropped from both sides of the aircraft, three to a side, allowing exfiltration without having to land.

“We aren’t going to make it to the LZ,” he said. “We get hit again, and we’re done. Tell Covey to pick us up here, with strings.”

Thomas relayed while they moved. Minutes later, he was talking directly to the helo, coordinating the extraction with the team spread out in a perimeter around him.

“I’ll pop smoke. You identify.” He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade, knowing it would be a beacon for the NVA but vital to get them out.

The pilot’s voice came back calm and mechanical. “Roger. I see green smoke.”

“Roger. That’s us.”

The team could now hear the chopper and smell salvation. The first Huey was sliding into position when a 12.7mm heavy machine gun opened up from the camp, strafing the tail. The gunship immediately obliterated the fire with its miniguns, but the damage to the first helo was done. Hale watched it pull off and begin limping back toward the South Vietnamese border. He prayed it would make it.

The second Huey came overhead and dropped the rigs, the rotor wash beating the brush around them in a mini hurricane. As the men were frantically getting inside the slings, one of the Yards began screaming and pointing. Out of the wood line, Hale saw Houng stumbling toward the hovering aircraft, weaponless, one arm dangling uselessly at his side, his face a bloody mess. In the distance behind him, he saw swarms of NVA drawn by the smoke and noise of the helicopter. He slipped out of his sling to give it to Houng.

Thomas shouted, “What are you doing?”

Hale looked at him with sadness and said, “You know what I’m doing.”

Thomas started to leave his sling as well, tearing at the slip noose around his wrist. Hale stopped him.

“No. You’re not getting off. Remember what I told you about the camp. Get that information back to the FOB.”

“Fuck that! No way! You die, we both die.”

Hale pointed to his chest and side, both freely bleeding from the multiple wounds. “I’m already dead. Go.”

Without waiting for an answer, Hale turned and assisted Houng into the last sling. Thomas helped as tears left tracks through the greasepaint on his face.

The NVA began running forward and firing through the trees in a desperate attempt to stop the extraction. Doing figure eights overhead, the gunship unleashed its twin miniguns, knocking soldiers down by the dozens as if they had been swatted by a giant hand.

“Go, go, go!” Hale screamed. He turned and stumbled away, wobbling toward the brush while firing his last magazine into the advancing soldiers. The enemy paid no attention to him — not even realizing he was there. Instead they focused all of their fire on the helicopter as it lifted off. Hale crawled forward underneath a tree that had been shattered by lightning, pulling brush over his body in an attempt to hide himself, the fear of death coiling in his belly like a snake. Wheezing from his destroyed lung, he watched the team lift off, dangling beneath the helo like spiders on a web, heading toward safety. Toward home.

He remembered he still had the camera in his rucksack, with the proof of the meeting. Intelligence of tremendous value to the war effort. He cursed himself at the oversight, knowing the information would die out here with him. Disappear as if it had never existed. At least Thomas would pass the basics along.

As the helo got smaller, another heavy machine gun opened up. The tracers arced through the sky and cut into the aircraft, punching through the thin skin to the avionics beneath. Hale watched the bird lose tail-rotor function and begin spinning out of control, the team now flung out on the end of the ropes like a pinwheel from the centrifugal force. He watched in disbelief as the helicopter slammed into the earth in a fireball. He heard the NVA cheering.

The fear left his body, replaced by despair at the futility of it all. He closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.