Ghost War (24 page)

“So they
are
Americans …” he thought.

Suddenly, a bright burst of white light temporarily blinded him. Dropping back into his hole, he rubbed his eyes until the spots dancing on his retinas disappeared. Then he looked out again.

This time, he saw several bursts of the white light along the runway far out in the distance. But these were not muzzle flashes—rather, he quickly realized, they were acetylene torches. Twang estimated that there had to be at least twenty torches in all, telltale streams of sparks showered around each of the places where they were cutting. Those twinkling on and off in the distance looked like fireflies.

Twang studied the torching activity for a few moments, wondering what the defenders were up to. He considered calling back to his base. But the popping of mortars going off from the jungle behind him told him it would be unnecessary. His comrades in the hills had also spotted the torches.

But then an odd thing happened. All of the torches suddenly shut off.

Twang quickly took cover just as the .81-mm shells, dropping close to where the torches were being used nearest the runway, exploded. When he looked up, it was pitch black again. Twang felt a burst of pride for the Minx mortar crews. For once, they had been accurate as hell—their rounds had come down exactly on their targets.

Or so it appeared.

He found himself smiling for the first time in months. He’d been nearly killed and then entombed alive, due to the enemy’s fire—now they were getting it in return. But suddenly his vengeful grin turned to a look of amazement. One by one, all the acetylene torches began to flare up again.

Through the throbbing pain of his head wound, Twang watched as the enemy soldiers resumed their cutting. The mortar fire resumed as well, but this time the crews in the hills were aiming for separate torchlights. Their lack of success, however, didn’t change. All along the runway, the torches flared off just seconds after the mortars popped. The shells would land and explode. And after the echoes of the explosions faded, the same number of torches flared up again—sometimes at the same locations, sometimes elsewhere. This pattern repeated itself over and over for the next ten minutes.

These defenders are a cunning lot, Twang thought, his head wound now making him very dizzy. By cutting the torches off and moving to other sites, they thwarted the mortar crews from zeroing in. Thus, they not only avoided being killed, they were able to continue their work.

But what they were working on, and exactly what they were cutting, he had no idea.

His head spinning, Twang slumped back into his hole, for the first time feeling the twin streams of blood running down his face from his wound. Suddenly, he felt very tired, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. He knew it was against orders—but he couldn’t help himself. He closed his eyes—and was soon fast asleep, again.

Geraci, too, was exhausted.

He hadn’t slept going on thirty-six hours. Between the moving and then sandbagging of
NJ104
, the uprighting of
Bozo
, the massive nighttime barrage and the recent attack, he had burned up his reserve long ago. But he kept going, if only to keep up with Hunter, who if anything was working harder and longer.

Geraci was manning one of the acetylene torches while overseeing eight other torching crews scattered in the darkness around him. His second-in-command, Captain Don Matus was directly supervising the work of four of the crews about a half mile away. Another one of his officers, Captain Ray Palmi, was looking after the other four closer to the end of the runway. Each crew consisted of five engineers: two torchers, two others to help carry the tanks and gear—and one to keep a watch out for the telltale flare of mortar tubes going off in the hills.

With a map, a “shopping list” provided by Hunter, and a set of steel balls, Geraci and each of the other torchers were cutting away in the dark on the scattered hulks of the wrecked planes that littered the length of the Khe Sanh runway. They were on a treacherous and deadly scavenger hunt for parts—parts that they needed, parts that all their lives would depend on.

It was a nerve-wracking job. Working at night with all this equipment would have been a dangerous proposition, even under the most ideal circumstances. But these conditions were far from idea. In fact, they were almost impossible.

Still, he and his crews in the field were making headway. Personally, he had already managed to cut free six separate parts on his list: a leading edge panel from the tail of a Lockheed P-3C Orion, a starboard aileron from a Fairchild C-119G Boxcar, and four propeller blades from an old, C-130 Hercules.

Each of the cannibalized parts was carefully lugged to the entrance of Magic Mountain by a squad headed by another of Geraci’s officers, Captain Roy Cerbasi. Once there, the parts were whisked inside where eighty of Geraci’s engineers, taut, tired and hungry, began work on them, painstakingly assembling the building blocks to Hunter’s Big Plan.

All of the torch crews in the field were having success getting their assigned parts, so they kept Cerbasi’s men hopping between the runway and the front of Magic.

But there were many more parts to get. And the constant stopping to haul ass and take cover from the mortar explosions, and the hot shrapnel whizzing around only added to the madness.

And even as their arduous task continued in the field, Geraci was well aware that a third team of base defenders was hard at work inside the sandbag cocoon surrounding
NJ104.
They too were using acetylene torches to cut-through bent and twisted pieces of metal. They too were sending a stream of parts, both useable and not, back to the men inside Magic Mountain.

And they too knew that the work done by all on this endless night would go a long way in determining their chances for survival.

The next morning

T
HE SUN’S EARLY MORNING
rays cut through the thick morning fog and somehow reached Lieutenant Twang’s closed eyelids.

Still asleep, Twang smiled at their warmth. He was dreaming about a tropical island, far out at sea. The ocean waters surrounding this island were so clear they were green. There was a warm, pure white beach, and nearby, a high cliff. On the cliff, there was an airplane, surrounded by candles and covered in smoke.

Oddly, the airplane was painted pink….

Suddenly, Twang’s eyes popped open. He instantly felt a wave of panic wash over him.

Had he fallen asleep, on duty,
again?

He was quickly up on the lip of the spider hole and was relieved to find that he was still alone and undetected. But this relief soon turned to utter revulsion. The hole was surrounded by the corpses of his comrades, killed in the titanic battle the previous day. Twang felt paralyzed just looking at them. Some were missing arms, legs, heads. Others were horribly blown apart, stomachs, intestines, bowels strewn around them like huge hideous worms. Still others seemed perfectly fine. Their bodies were intact, their eyes open, their faces pulled back in involuntary smiles. They looked as if nothing was wrong with them—except that they were dead. They seemed to be beckoning to Twang. They seemed to want him to join them.

Twang slid back down into his spider hole.
Soon enough
, he feared.

He looked at his hands and realized they were covered with dried blood. Then it came back to him—the big battle the day before, his comrades’ suicide charge, the enemy’s massive rocket barrage, the chunk of something that hit him on the head and knocked him out. The terror of being buried alive and his frantic efforts to get back to the surface and breathe again rose again in his throat. His lungs were still filled with those first breaths of air; his tonsils still burned of the cordite; his nostrils still seared with the smell of the dead. He felt for the wound at the top of his head, and found a clump of puss, blood, and matted hair. He was instantly sick to his stomach—he was sure he looked worse than some of his dead compatriots lying outside the spider hole.

He slumped further down into the hole, feeling as if life itself was draining out of him. He closed his eyes and was surprised that he saw many spots—like those caused by camera flash bulbs or strobes. Was this a symptom of impending death?

Or were they caused by something else?

He had to struggle to remember—his head wound had caused a severe concussion, and quite nearly a fractured skull, so his memory was working slowly. But then it came back to him: last night. In the darkness. The enemy, armed with acetylene torches. They were cutting something….

He was back up on the lip of the spider hole in an instant. In the fog, past the bodies, he could just barely see the base runway. Closer to him was the carcass of a rusting airplane; it was no more than fifty yards away, and he’d been staring at it since he arrived in the stinking spider hole.

Now he strained his eyes to see that one of this dead airplane’s wings was missing parts of its wrecked propeller and engine, as well as the tip of the wing itself. Actually he could clearly see dozens of burn marks all over the airplane’s rusting silver skin.

Next to this airplane was a smaller one—an old jet fighter, he thought. He could see that pieces of this wreck were missing too; the burn marks around its engine cowlings were very evident, and apparently its clear glass canopy had also been taken.

It was all coming back to him now, in a rush so fast, it was actually painful.

He had come to briefly during the night; long enough to see the enemy soldiers running around in the darkness, cutting up the dead airplanes with their torches, and dodging the barrages of mortar shells fired from his comrades in the hills.

He had watched them—but for how long? Ten minutes? An hour? Two hours? He didn’t know.

But now, he imagined he could remember events from the unconsciousness that had followed. Even greater flashes of light. Sounds louder than mortar blasts. A rumbling even more earthshaking than when the enemy moved one of their wrecked airplanes the length of the runway a few nights before.

Had he dreamed all this? Dreamed it before he flew without wings to the tropical island, the one with the green waters and the pink plane on the cliffs?

Again, he didn’t know. He stepped even further up the lip of the spider hole, cursing the thick morning fog, cursing his weary eyes, weakened by the knock on his skull.

The thick mist was lifting, but not quick enough for him. As it dissipated, it revealed more of the nearby wrecked airplanes—and more evidence that they had been cut up during the night. Landing struts were gone here, tailplanes were gone there. All of the old wrecked airplanes within his view looked like they’d surrendered at least one part to the torches. But oddly, there seemed to be no rationale for the enemy’s nocturnal efforts, no discernable pattern. Why would the totally outgunned Caucasians choose to risk their lives and precious time cutting up old plane wrecks?

It just didn’t make any sense.

Behind the lines

One hour later

A
LL IT TOOK WAS
one look at his valet for Commander Long Dong Tru to know the small war for Khe Sanh was all but lost.

Dong stared at the man in his dressing room mirror as he arranged a set of medals on Dong’s chest. He looked simply ragged. His uniform was frayed, his eyes watering, his face gaunt and etched with newly carved wrinkles. He looked like an old man, though Dong knew the valet was actually quite younger than he.

“When was the last time you had a meal?” Dong asked him.

“Two days ago, sir,” was the man’s barely audible answer.

Dong was authentically surprised. “Two days? I thought we had plenty of food on hand.”

“We did,” the valet replied, never looking his commander in the eye. “But the front-line troops stole it all three days ago.”

“Stole it?
Why?
”

The valet froze for a moment. “In order to eat it all before the last battle,” he replied finally.

Dong was both startled and puzzled by the words. “But why would they do that?”

The valet just shrugged as he smoothed the cuff on Dong’s uniform pants. “Because they knew they were going to die,” he replied simply. “They wanted to go to the hereafter with a full stomach. It’s an old superstition.”

That’s when it hit home for Dong. For the first time he realized that his troops had recognized the futility of this adventure long before he had.

There was no way that troops with that mind-set could prevail. No wonder the battle the day before had gone so badly. Even the new weapons and troops he’d purchased from CapCom had had little effect. The tenacious base defenders had somehow held on once again.

The news from the front was so bad, Dong had refused to look at the casualty figures from the last battle—he didn’t have to see numbers on a page to tell him just how miserable a defeat it was.

What had gone wrong?
Dong wondered gloomily. Would he ever know? The enemy at Khe Sanh was small, weakening and desperately outnumbered. On the other hand, his troops had everything. All the ammunition they wanted, all the mortar rounds, all the weapons. And he had fed them well, too.

But for some reason, it hadn’t been enough.

He quickly dismissed the valet and called for his personal aides to bring to his office the large iron chest in which he kept his gold reserves. The aides soon appeared with the large steamer trunk chest. Dong was quick to notice they no longer struggled with its weight.

They laid the chest on his desk and were dismissed. Dong himself worked the combination lock, springing it open on the third try.

One look inside only depressed him further.

He had but one hundred and twenty bags of gold left. This from the thousands he’d still owned even after purchasing his first army. The 120 bags were worth about $5 million, possibly a little more. Also inside the box was his ledger book, the one he had intended to use to bill CapCom for the overrunning of Khe Sanh and the securing of the strategic highway of Route 9 beyond.