Ghost War (19 page)

The officers aboard
Bozo
found different ways of busying themselves. Frost took a complete inventory of food and medical stocks from both C-5s; they had about a two-week supply, and then some left over to give to the beleaguered Legionnaires. Ben did the same for ammunition; based on one major attack per day, they had enough for about ten days, with some left over for Legion defenders. Geraci had his men surveying the most vulnerable spots on
Bozo
’s hull and covering them as best as they could.

Zouvette assigned a squad of his healthier troopers to fill sandbags for placement around the downed cargo jet. They stopped only at noon to pay a short, but emotional visit to the grave of their fallen commandant.

No one had seen Hunter for most of the day. He’d been up on the
Bozo
’s flight deck for hours, the specific reason being unknown to the others. But they all had a good idea. Many had been in tight fixes with The Wingman before—though not many tighter than this. It always fell to Hunter to come up with a plan, a strategy, a way to give them at least a fighting chance to escape their dire straits.

And they needed him to do so now more than ever.

As soon as dusk came, the Americans began to relax a little. The Minx never attacked after sundown—they were way too superstitious for night ops. The guard was doubled outside nevertheless, and a makeshift radio link established with the Legionnaires’ main bunker, 100 yards away. Then, those who could be spared settled down inside the hulk of the
Bozo
and either caught some sleep or dined on MREs.

Ben, Frost, and Geraci gathered near the battered nose of the huge plane and prepared a meal of MRE-style chicken à la king, applesauce pie, and coffee.

“How long has he been up there?” Geraci asked once the meal was ready.

Ben checked his watch. “Going on fourteen hours now.”

“No coffee? Nothing to eat?” the engineer asked.

Ben shook his head. “You know what happens when he gets in these modes,” he said. “I’ve seen him go for five days without a meal, a drink, or even a nap. It’s scary.”

Frost took a spoonful of chicken and washed it down with a swig of coffee. “He feels responsible,” he said quietly chewing. “He’s blaming himself for us being here.”

“That’s ironic,” Ben said. “None of us on
Bozo
would be alive now if it wasn’t for him. I’ve never seen anyone put a plane down like he did this one.”

Geraci finished his chicken and then tore into a piece of pie. “Well, he’ll have to pull a real rabbit out of his hat to get us out of this fix.”

“That’s why we’ve got to start right away …”

All three men looked up to find Hunter standing before him. Despite the conditions aboard the crashed jet, he looked well-rested and refreshed. His flight suit was neat and seemingly pressed, and not a hair on his head was out of place.

He was even smiling slightly.

All three men quickly got to their feet. “You come up with something, Hawk?” Ben asked. “Something to get us out of here?”

Hunter gave a kind of noncommittal shrug. “Maybe,” he answered. “But we’ve three big hurtles to get over—and like I said, we’ve got to get to work right now.”

Their spirits instantly revitalized, the three men began to discard the rest of their meals. But Hunter spotted one last MRE that was already heated. He very nonchalantly sat down on the twisted floor and began to dig in.

His three comrades looked down at him in mild wonder.

“I thought we were in a hurry,” Ben asked him.

Hunter just shrugged again.

“Hey, a guy’s got to eat,” he said.

Early the next morning

For Lieutenant Twang, it began with a rumble.

It was so violent, he was literally shaken awake. He blinked his eyes rapidly, suddenly short of breath.
What was happening?
He looked at his watch and saw that there was about one hour of darkness left before the sunrise. A sudden sickening feeling overcame him—he had fallen asleep on watch, the worst thing a soldier of his caliber could do. But what had woke him? Had the unearthly shaking simply been the end of a bad dream? But then he felt the rumbling again, this time even harder, even more frighteningly. He froze with fear once again. It had not been a dream.

But what was it?

He slowly lifted his head up over the edge of the spider hole and peered out into the inky black darkness of the moonless night. The enemy base looked no different—ragged shacks, broken sandbag walls, the fires burning here and there—all under an occasional stream of tracers zinging back and forth or mortar rounds landing sporadically every ten seconds or so. At first, the darkness, smoke, and fog, prevented him from seeing what was making such a horrific noise and causing the earth to shake. But then a slight breeze picked up and cleared his view.

His jaw dropped in astonishment at what he saw.

The rumbling was coming from six bulldozers spread out, fanlike, in front of the second huge airplane which had crashed at the far end of the runway. Twang quickly picked up his binoculars. Aided by the dim glow of the fires, he saw that all the bulldozers had large slabs of metal welded to their right sides—as bullet-shields. Trailing behind each earthmover were three heavy duty chains, braided together. It appeared to Twang that the other ends of these chains were attached to various points underneath the enormous wrecked airplane, but he couldn’t be sure.

As he watched through the spyglasses dumbfounded, Twang saw a small light flash three times from the plane’s cockpit. At that moment the bulldozers dropped their transmissions into low gear and slowly began to move forward. Twang watched as the six lengths of braided cables rose from the ground. They
were
attached to the airplane. The cables instantly tightened from the straining bulldozers and their giant steel treads began to bite into the soft blacktop of the tarmac.

But the plane didn’t budge.

A moment later, a burst of flame shot put of the airplane’s right inside engine. Suddenly it popped and screamed to life. In the light of the engine flare, Twang saw a man in fighter pilot overalls, a white flight helmet barely covering his long hair, sitting inside the plane’s shattered cockpit furiously working the controls. Who this man was, Twang had no idea.

Suddenly he heard the engine wind higher and higher. The plane began vibrating so much that Twang thought the whole damn thing was going to fall apart.

But instead, the huge plane began to move.

Twang reached for his radio—but at the same moment he realized that his call would make no difference: the combined noise of the bulldozers and of the jet engine was so ungodly, he was sure his comrades in the hills would hear it too.

He was right.

Five seconds later, a flare went up from the far treeline and burst over the runway. At once, the night-duty mortar crews and snipers saw the source of the tremendous racket and immediately stepped up their firings. Then more flares went up. Suddenly it was as bright as day. By this time, Twang understood exactly what this enemy was doing;—they were moving the huge airplane down the runway. But why? He thought for a moment that they were trying to escape—but how could they hope to take off in such a battered airplane?

Twang watched as the plane slowly moved toward the edge of the Minx’s effective mortar range. Then he heard the tubes in the hills begin to pop with a vengeance.

A half dozen shells immediately exploded right in front of the lead bulldozer. Suddenly, heavy machine guns mounted on the back of the bulldozers opened up, spraying the treeline with hundreds of rounds of tracer rounds.

But the machine-gun fire was answered by dozens more mortar rounds that began to rain down all around the airplane and the bulldozers. The air was instantly thick with red hot shrapnel and torn up pieces of tarmac. Each illuminating flash of a mortar round lit up the area like a strobe light, revealing images of the base soldiers furiously returning fire into the hills while trying to keep their heavy equipment operating.

Through it all, the giant airplane crawled forward, inches, feet, yards, its progress somehow unimpeded by the barrage.

Another set of flares went up, giving the snipers more light to get their range. Bullets ripped through the air, striking all around the fuselage of the big airplane. More mortar shells dropped. Twang saw chunks of the aircraft blown off, its wings peppered and perforated by tracer bullets. But the enemy kept firing back from the bulldozers, somehow still avoiding major mortar hits.

And the plane kept moving.

Just as the towed airplane reached the halfway point on the mile-long runway, Twang heard the other big plane at the base end of the runway open up its large machine guns. Instantly, thousands of rounds of ammunition were dispensed through treeline and into the hills beyond. A few seconds later, grenade launchers and rockets were added into the mix. Twang was petrified. The sudden and brutal firepower was just what the enemy needed to keep the Minx gunners from zeroing in on the slow-moving airplane.

The towed plane continued to lurch from bursts of power of the single jet engine and the earthmovers. Incredibly it was now only 200 yards away from the opposite end of the runway, and the other crashed jet.

Mortar rounds, bullets, and RPG shells kept coming in, and a fierce stream of automated fire was going out. Twang had never seen anything like it. Shrapnel blasted more holes in the sides and the wings, but somehow the plane managed to avoid any direct hits.

And it kept moving—moving until at last it reached its apparent destination, the base end of the runway, next to the other great airplane. And then suddenly, all the firing stopped.

As the dawn’s early light broke, Twang shook his head in wonder. Why the hell did the enemy go through all this? What was the point?

I
T WAS PANDEMONIUM INSIDE
Commander Dong’s palatial mobile HQ.

Report after report streamed in by radio or by courier, and none of the news was good. Casualties among his troops had soared in the past forty-eight hours. Weapons expenditures had also gone through the roof. In a panic, the aides inside this air-conditioned trailer desperately tried to piece together the fragments of information coming in from the front to get a clearer picture of the situation for presentation to their leader. But it was nearly impossible.

It had all started with the dozens of reports on the landing of one huge plane at the encircled base at Khe Sanh; more reports on how it had repulsed the last large-scale Minx attack with unheard-of firepower. Then, later on, it was confirmed that something else landed at Khe Sanh, an aircraft that differed from the first. After much debate, it was finally concluded that
two
planes had actually arrived at the embattled enemy camp. This was finally confirmed by a report from a slightly hysterical Lieutenant Twang, who just within the past hour also described a bizarre, gigantic towing operation successfully completed by the enemy right before dawn that day.

Commander Dong gloomily scanned each updated report. While incomplete, these bits of information told him one thing: time was running out on his campaign of conquest. His troop strength was ebbing—especially after the losses incurred the day before against the mysterious armed airplane. His ammunition was getting low, as was food and water. Suddenly he felt like a house of cards was collapsing on him. He had tried to cheap out and wound up stretching his resources way too thin. Now, his chance of getting a big slice of Vietnam once the war was over were growing slimmer by the hour: Now
he
was beginning to feel backed up to the wall.

And all because some Americans had decided to stick their noses into something that was none of their business.

There was only one option left open to him—a very expensive option. It was a step he dreaded, but, nonetheless, one he had to take. He would be forced to personally pay a visit to his employers—the chairman and the members of the board of CapCom, the people who were the brains—and the bankrollers—behind this latest Vietnam war.

Dong reluctantly wrote out a short order which commanded all his officers to cease all but sniper and mortar harassment operations until further notice. Then he ordered his command helicopter readied.

Retiring to his dressing quarters, his valet gloomily helped him into his full dress uniform, complete with all the necessary accoutrements—battle citations, medals, spit shined black leather riding boots, and ceremonial sword. A distinctive
whop whop whopping
sound signaled the arrival of his chopper several minutes later. After a last glance in the full length mirror to make sure everything was in place, Dong glumly shuffled out to the concrete landing pad. Accompanying him were two aides straining to carry a heavy iron chest between them.

The jet-black Soviet-built Mil Mi-8 Hip-C touched down lightly—just long enough for Dong and the two aides to climb aboard with their precious load. The two 1268-Kw Isotov TV2-117a turboshafts powered up, and the heavily armored helicopter roared into the sky, quickly turning due north.

While the jungle below sped by, Dong pondered his dire situation. Here he was, a proud Mandarin with a large army bought for his disposal, reduced now to playing the role of a pleading subcontractor for CapCom. His experience with the people who sold him his army told him that they knew very little about military operations. Rather, the members of CapCom were ranting commercialists, driven by an ironically twisted sense of Communistic capitalism and an insatiable greed for money and power. They were very adept at using their purse strings to yank a man by his balls and squeeze them until something gave. And now Dong found himself at the full mercy of their royal scam. He’d gotten in way too deep—and now he had to pay dearly. At times like this, Dong hated Cap Com more than he hated the enemy at Khe Sanh. At least the enemy fought and died for what they believed in. His employers at CapCom preferred to buy off people to do their dying for them.

Two hours later, Dong’s chopper was nearing the outskirts of Hanoi.

The dense jungle below ended and the helicopter came upon an incredibly beautiful country estate, far different than the front line battle command area Dong had left behind. The chopper passed over acres and acres of rolling manicured lawns, rock gardens, with waterfalls, stables of thoroughbred horses, polo fields, swimming pools, and an eighteen-hole golf course. The Mil Mi-8 Hip-C finally touched down before a French-Colonial-style mansion that covered more than fifteen acres. Inside were hundreds of rooms, including two ballrooms, a dining room that sat fifty, three kitchens, a bowling alley, a rifle range, an indoor pool, a fully equipped gymnasium, many saunas, geisha rooms, hot tub halls, and one, enormous well-appointed boardroom. There was also a large and elaborate torture chamber. Thankfully, it was the boardroom where Dong was scheduled to meet his employers.