Ghost War (29 page)

“So,” he dead-panned. “Where the hell have you guys been?”

The three of them ignored him; instead they were searching the place for a liquor bottle that had yet been drained.

JT was one step ahead of them. He was already pouring out four shots of dark red whiskey.

“They call this stuff
him-ham
,” he told them, as they each reached for a glass. “Not bad, considering.”

They didn’t even toy with the idea of a toast—the four shots were gone and four more poured out in the time it took to gulp.

“Our asses in the big ringer, and you’re here in Partytown,” Ben said, chasing his words with his second shot. “Why do these things always happen
to you?
”

“I live a clean life,” he said, pouring out four more shots. “So, who first?”

Hunter drained his third drink, slumped down further into the couch, and then proceeded to tell JT everything: Losing their way in the storm, battling the MiGs, the crash at Khe Sanh, meeting Geraci, the Minx, the mortars, the snipers, the Legionnaires, the building of
Bozo 2
, and all the time spent in between trying to figure out how the hell to get out of the place in one piece.

“Sounds like the old days,” JT said at the end of the story. “You guys can play yourselves in the movie.”

Ben reached over and began pouring the shots himself.

“Just tell us what the hell is going on here,” he told JT.

JT just shrugged.

“It’s a short story, really,” he began. “We went down low in the storm, took a lot of hits from the MiGs, but were able to put down here, probably just about the same time you guys went in.
Football One
was already here, and
Two
and
Three
came in right on our ass. I fucked-up the airplane pretty good on the landing—nothing but a pile of scrap metal now. But we all made it out alive. We were lucky that Jonesie’s intelligence was good, because the locals already had this place pretty well secured and they were happy as hell to see us.”

“So how’d you become God?” Hunter asked.

JT just shrugged again. “Their top dog is a guy named Yink. Nice guy; a rich guy. He paying all the free-lancers here, and he’s getting more everyday. Well, the Yinkman needed someone to—how shall I put it?—steer the ship. He needed organizing. He needed a can-do guy. And he was smart enough to, well, offer it … and … how could I refuse?”

JT was beaming throughout all this. He was, no argument, an operator’s operator.

“So what’s your situation?” Hunter finally asked him, turning the mood serious.

JT took his feet down and pulled the chair closer to the desk.

“We got about seven divisions of people out there in the jungle, somewhere, who don’t like us very much,” he said, motioning beyond the fortress walls. “They’ve been behaving themselves for about two weeks now. We get a few mortar rounds, every once and while, but that’s about it. But they’re not shitting me. They’re just waiting to get paid.”

“Paid?” Frost asked with a snort. “So these guys aren’t in it for the old Red glory either?”

JT laughed out loud. “Are you kidding?” he replied, “They’re just out there waiting to cash their paychecks, the bastards. Then they’re going to crash this party—or try to.”

He took the next ten minutes explaining what he’d learned about the Viet Minx and their screwy principles of Communist Capitalism. It fit in almost word for word with what the others already knew about the Minx.

“They’re greedy motherfuckers, aren’t they?” JT summed up. “I hear they bleed everyone dry, up and down the ranks. The top dogs sell the middle guys all their weapons, ammo, food, fuel—you name it. The middle guys raise armies and go off to carve of slice of the old Nam. They rape, they pillage, sell whatever they can back to the top dogs, then the whole cycle starts all over again.”

“They sound like the old mandarins,” Frost observed. “It’s in their best interests to keep wars going.”

“Well, they came to the right place,” Hunter said.

“Any timetable for an attack?” Ben asked.

JT poured out another round. He looked authentically concerned. “Two weeks?” he shrugged. “Maybe three. Yink’s intelligence guys tell me that the whole country is going to blow up pretty damned soon. The Minx have been planning this big offensive for a long time—they’ve got most of the countryside, and soon they’ll be going for all the major cities. This pea patch included. That’s why the good guys like Yink were sending out all those Maydays; they knew the roof was going to cave in at any minute.”

“And what do you hear from home?” Hunter asked.

“I talk to Uncle Jonesie everyday,” JT replied. “He was glad to hear you all made it in one piece, finally.”

“Any mail wagons due to join us soon?” Ben asked.

JT just shrugged. “No way of telling,” he replied. “They’re busting their asses back at Edwards to get at least a few of them over. But you know we stole all the good stuff, and now they’re working with leftovers.”

Hunter ran his fingers through his long hair. He needed to eat, he needed to sleep, but most of all, he needed a bath.

And so did the others.

“There’s a big empty room at the end of the hall,” JT told them. “I’ll have some bunks and clean clothes sent up. Pull about an hour or so and then we’ll eat big time.”

They spent the next ten minutes discussing the care and feeding of the beleaguered Legionnaires. Any of them who recovered to the point of carrying a gun would be given light duty inside the fortress walls. Then came the dispersement of Geraci’s men. It was agreed that they would first strip
Bozo 2
of its weapons and useable equipment, just as JT did with
Nozo
’s guns. The New Jersey 104th could then use the weapons to establish yet another defense line at the far edge of the city’s already heavily defended airport, located about a half mile away. Ben and Frost would head for the airport the next day too, to help the staff triangulate their defense control systems.

This left only Hunter with no real assignment.

The others got up to leave. Hunter looked at JT and asked: “Well, boss, what do you want me to do?”

JT’s usually cheery face sank. Suddenly, he
looked
like someone who was in charge of a very precarious position.

“You can go save Crunch,” he replied grimly.

Hunter knew it was too good to be true.

He knew that between the viciousness of the MiG attack and the monstrous typhoon, it was a miracle that any of the Galaxys of the First American Expeditionary Force made it.

But as JT told it, a total of six were now accounted for:
Bozo
,
Nozo, NJ104
,
Football One
,
Two
and
Three.
Plus, they’d heard a reliable report that the Cobra Brother’s
Big Snake
had crashed on the island of Hainan in the Gulf of Tonkin, where all aboard were safe, but being held for ransom by the radical Eastern religious cult which controlled the island. Jones was currently negotiating via long range radio for their release.

But that left two C-5s unaccounted for: Crunch’s
Crunchtime
and the JAWs plane.

JT reported that no one had heard anything from JAWs. When last seen, they were being swarmed over with MiGs, their wings and fuselage aflame. The sad conclusion was that they probably went into the sea. Hunter felt a dull ache in his stomach every time he thought of Captain Cook and the guys from Jack Base being dead.

The fate of Crunch’s plane was another matter.

Two days after JT and the other C-5s landed at Da Nang city, they’d received a report from a New Zealand mechanized division that was just barely holding on at Cam Ranh Bay, 300 miles to the south. The New Zealanders had processed a local militia’s report that a large plane had been seen falling into the marshes 250 miles south of
them.
This put the rumored crash site deep down in the Mekong Delta area, more than a 100 miles south of what was now known as New Saigon.

Could one of the C-5s have flown more than 500 miles away from the main pack after the MiG attack? It was unlikely. Yet Crunch’s plane
was
carrying extra fuel on board in huge rubber bladders. Plus, the local militiamen, whose reliability the New Zealanders vouched for, reported the huge airplane was painted gray and red with scrolling on the wings and tailplane—a near perfect description of
Crunchtime.
They also claimed that there may be some survivors, at least they heard from the natives in the area that some Westerners had approached them for food and a radio. When the local militia passed through the area two weeks later, they reported the wreck was still there, but there was no sign of anyone around it.

The Mekong Delta was not a good place for an airplane crash. Bordered by the South China Sea on the east, the Gulf of Siam in the west, and what used to be Cambodia to the north, the area itself was just about total marshland and paddy area—rough going for airplane survivors. At one time, the Delta fed a lot of Southeast Asia with its rice crop; this was why the French came to Vietnam in the first place back in the nineteenth century. More than eight million people lived in the Delta during the last Vietnam war, but it was sparsely populated these days.

The only road servicing the Delta was old Route 4, a long, winding, serpentine highway which itself seemed lost in the almost-forgotten, marshy wilderness. In addition to the hundreds of miles of natural waterways—rivers, streams and lake—the Vietnamese had hand-dug more than 4,000 kilometers of canals in the area. Wherever these canals met in a major convergence there was usually a good-sized town, but these were all largely abandoned.

Oddly, the current enemy only seemed mildly concerned with the Delta these days. Viet Minx presence in the area was only rated as moderate, with several reenforced forts on the mouth of Son My Thou River, and a small port facility, twenty miles to the south at a place called Son Tay. Armed ferries and tugs regularly plied the South China Sea between Haiphong and Son Tay, sometimes accompanied by helicopter gunships as escort.

Inside the Delta itself, the Minx were using small mine-sweeping type boats which featured heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and extensive flamethrowing equipment. Similar flame-throwing vessels used by the Americans in the first war were nicknamed “Zippos.”

If anyone survived an airplane crash in the Delta it was probably just a matter of time before an enemy Zippo found them—or at least, it would seem that way.

But according to the local militia, and somewhat verified by the New Zealanders, something very different was happening down in the Mekong Delta these days.

After washing up and stepping into fresh clothes, Hunter, Ben, Frost, and JT feasted on a dinner of chicken stew, mashed peppers and the local gut-busting
him-ham
liquor.

JT played the perfect host. There was no end to the food and booze. He even arranged to have a half dozen local “hostesses” on hand, to “help with the arrangements.” But most of the night was spent discussing the current situation in Vietnam. Basically it came down to this: In a strange way, the sudden arrival of the C-5s had postponed what seemed to be an imminent takeover of the southern part of the country. The key word was “postponed.” For the Viet Minx forces had been simply delayed in their war of commerce and conquest, and if anything, the extra three weeks or so would give them addition time to bolster their armies and even add to them. This was especially true in the midlands where no less than 18 divisions of Minx were waiting, and around the New Saigon area, where an equally formidable force of fifteen reenforced divisions were said to be hiding. It didn’t take a military genius to figure out that these forces—almost a half million men in arms—would not, could not, wait forever. If JT’s estimate of three weeks before the attack on Da Nang was on target, then action in the rest of the country would most likely erupt at that time too.

The dinner debate lasted well into early morning, with dozens of strategies and wild ideas discussed. But on one point everyone agreed: if the Minx had their way, there would be no more democratic Vietnam inside of a month, no matter how many C-5s managed to show up.

When the day dawned, Ben and Frost reported to Da Nang’s airport. The Legionnaires were transported to the city’s hospital where they received a heroes’ welcome. Geraci and his men began removing the vast array of weaponry from the carcass of
Bozo 2
, and trucking it in pieces to Da Nang to be set up along the far edge of the airport. And JT went back to running the paid-army that a man named Yink built.

As for Hunter, he was gone an hour before the sun came up.

I
T HAD BEEN YEARS
since Hunter had flown a helicopter.

But here he was, at the controls of an ancient Huey, carving a sloppy wake through the superheated tropical air above steamy South Vietnam.

Below him was the deceptively beautiful countryside. He saw a few examples of war sites left over from the last go-round—abandoned fire bases, deserted air strips, even the wreckage of aircraft, including two C-130s. The jungle had reclaimed everything else, he guessed.

Everything but the ghosts.

He’d refueled twice already, once at Quang Nai, which was now under control of First Italian Expeditionary Corps, and again at Cam Ranh Bay, where he spoke with the top commanders of the New Zealand contingent. They knew nothing more about the supposed crash in the Delta. The monsoons were absolutely flooding the area, as they were all of Southeast Asia, and reports of any kind were few and far between.

So Hunter was now heading for a place called Suk Deek. Located about 110 clicks south of New Saigon, it was on the northeastern edge of the Mekong Delta. It was the last outpost of the New Zealanders, a place so small it could handle one chopper landing site, and one boat dock facility and that was it. From here, two New Zealander scouts would escort him even further in the Delta, to the area where the big plane crash—as well as a number of other, unexplainable events—had supposedly occurred recently.

He reached Suk Deek just before sundown. It was even smaller than advertised, a black dot in a sea of brown water and green jungle. Located at the junction of two large canals, it consisted of two stucco-style buildings, a tiny dock, a metal net for the chopper pad and an antique 120mm howitzer.