Ghost War (41 page)

One of the cornerstones of JT’s bold plan was for the safety of the many civilians inside Da Nang city, numbering as high as 5,000. Obviously they couldn’t have remained inside the city once the fighting broke out. But neither could they be evacuated to the air base—it was much too dangerous there, too. So, the solution was to build this place—and quick.

The ironic thing about the Jersey Tunnel was that it was originally laid out by the forerunners of the Minx, the Viet Cong themselves. It had been dug by the communists to stretch from the jungle to the east wall of Da Nang city and used to move fifth columnists in and out of the city. Never exposed or filled in, it was included on updated plans of the city during the first communist occupation—plans which JT and Geraci had access to when planning the defense of the city.

The project Geraci’s men had faced was widening the original twenty-by-twenty passageway to accommodate the bulging population of Da Nang.

Even more important, they were tasked with reenforcing it for what was about to come.

The man with the unlikely name of Assass Asmad Asadd was now in charge of the walled city of Da Nang.

He was the top Viet Minx commander in the battle area, unusual because he was an Iraqi by birth, and therefore the only non-Oriental on the command staff of the Minx. He was a tall man, dark skinned, bald head and a thrice-broken nose. While he was widely disliked by other officers in the other various Minx commands, not to mention the Minx troops themselves, he nevertheless wielded great power. And not just in the field, but with the board members of CapCom too.

His well-armed, well-drilled, black-uniformed troops had moved down Route 9 from abandoned Khe Sanh and had carried out the main attack on Da Nang, leaving the stalemated battle at the nearby Da Nang airbase to other, less-impressive Minx units.

Now as he toured the city in the back of an open car, he felt extremely gratified—and more than a little confused. His elite troops had done bang-up job in capturing what had been thought to be the best defended targets in South Vietnam—even Assass was surprised when his free-lance suicide troops easily gained entrance to the walled city. Yet the place itself was deserted—except for the Minx soldiers themselves, there wasn’t another person to be found anywhere inside the captured city.

The little parade accompanying Assass’s touring car pulled up to the front of the Palace. It was now surrounded by Minx troops and equipment. Two Minx T-72 tanks had broken through the massive steel gates leading into the former defenders’ headquarters and now they stood guard at the front of the large yellow building.

Assass waited until his underlings opened his door for him, and then he strutted out of the car, riding crop in hand. He surveyed the palace building, noting that even though more than a few Katy rockets had hit the structure, only moderate damage had been inflicted on the building. This impressed him; the place was obviously well-built.

“I want the complete architectural drawings and plans for this building within an hour,” he demanded of his understaff handlers. “Failure to do so will result in death.”

He walked through the palace gates and up into the main building itself.

The place was empty inside—absolutely stripped of anything of value, from lights, to furniture, to booze at the bar. Again, Assass thought this very unusual. Obviously the enemy had retreated—but maybe it hadn’t been as hasty as those in Hanoi had been led to believe.

He climbed the long staircase, his entourage of junior officers behind him. Each room on the second floor had been similarly cleaned out; very little of anything of value remained. He proceed up to the more palatial third floor and walked into what had obviously served as the enemy commander’s headquarters.

Assass came to like the office it right away. It presented an outstanding view of the entire city, as well as the ocean and the jungle beyond. He walked over to northside windows and could see the enemy airbase not quite a mile away. Several columns of smoke were rising from its northern end, and he could still hear the occasional booming of artillery, way off in the distance. At last report, the air base was still “under siege.” This was another thing that puzzled Assass. CapCom’s intelligence reports had told them that Da Nang city had been more heavily defended than the air base nearby. Why then had the city fallen without barely a shot being fired, when the air base was still in enemy hands?

Then there was the situation over at Go Minh. A flanking attack on Da Nang city by 900 Minx river soldiers had never materialized. Just where the soldiers were, no one seemed to know. They had been reportedly in position for weeks, yet when the jump-off call came, they disappeared. It didn’t make sense to Assass; surely the enemy troops routed from Da Nang city couldn’t have wiped out an entire company of Minx soldiers—could they?

He turned from the northern view and looked out to the south. He could see the ocean beaches—they were deserted, of course—and the thick jungle beyond. Since he was from the desert, Assass was unfamiliar with the type of foliage of this country. But there was a long line of trees about a kilometer from the outside of the city that looked very unusual—almost
too
green,
too
lush.

He made a mental note to investigate it later.

He finally made it around to the large oak desk in the middle of the room. He sat in the chair and tried the desk on for size. It fit perfectly. At that moment, his decision was made: this palace would be his headquarters from now on. From here he would oversee the conquest of northern South Vietnam. From here, he would communicate with his highest superior, a man totally unknown to the fools at CapCom.

He clapped his hands twice and two Minx officers literally ran into the room.

“Set up the long-range communication gear atop this building,” he ordered them. “Install the satellite dish first.”

The Minx officers shuffled right back out again, as Assass leaned back in his new, slightly squeaky, office chair.

With any luck, he might be able to call Baghdad by midnight.

Da Nang air base

The F-16XL came screeching in for a landing, its airbrakes and drag chute slowing it down to crawl seconds after touchdown.

Hunter taxied the futuristic fighter off the runway and into a hardened bunker which served as the base’s aircraft ordnance—loading section. Two squads of flight mechanics were waiting to service the XL. Clad in flak jackets and Kevlar helmets, they would quickly refill its fuel tanks and load more weapons under its wings. Time was of the essence for the turnaround, a fact underscored by the bone-chilling background noise of Minx artillery and rockets crashing down all over the base.

Just as he was pulling into the thick-concrete service bunker, Ben and Frost were pulling out. Their F-20s recently bombed up and refueled, they were heading to hit Minx positions about a quarter mile south of the base perimeter. At the very same moment, JT’s F-20 was off bombing Minx supply lines about five miles west of the air base. Meanwhile ZZ’s
Triple X
gunship was orbiting the base, providing on-call air support for the friendly troops fighting all along the defense perimeter.

Hunter squealed the XL to stop and popped his canopy. As the flight monkeys went to work on the airplane, he gratefully accepted the cup of coffee handed up to him by the crew’s sergeant. The plan’s timetable was so tight, Hunter didn’t even have time to unstrap from the cockpit, never mind climb down and stretch his cramped muscles for few minutes. He had to get rearmed and refueled and back in the air as quickly as possible.

Even as the battle raged out on the perimeter, he could see squads of mercenaries roaring by the bunker in all kinds of vehicles, towing artillery pieces and AA guns that had previously been protecting the outskirts of Da Nang city. Removed from their forward positions just the night before, these guns were now on their way to be added to the already awesome arsenal of high-tech weaponry ringing Da Nang air base.

Hunter checked the time. It was now 1430; the battle had been raging for about four hours. So far NT’s plan was working. The base defenders were successfully holding back the tide of Minx surrounding it, once again using to full advantage advanced weapons and sophisticated tactics to keep the strategically crude enemy at bay.

But Hunter could not help but feel a chill in his bones when considering the current situation: it was, as they once used to say,
déja vu
all over again. Though better armed and possessing more manpower, it was hard to escape from the fact that he was once again fighting from a position surrounded by the enemy. It was almost as if the bad dream up in Khe Sanh was just a warm up. There would be one big difference though: unlike Khe Sanh, there was no way they were going to fly out of Da Nang in a Rube-Goldberg aircraft built to fly twenty miles in five minutes and no more. There were just too many people for that.

No—for better or worse, the fight for Da Nang air base would be a fight to the death.

The crew chief called up to him that the XL was ready to go. Hunter’s tanks were full of JP-8 and his cannons replenished with ammunition. Beneath his wings was another of array of ordnance: four 500-pound GP bombs, and six cluster bombs of various shapes and sizes. Also filled were the three cameras—one for film and two for video—located in the XL’s nose cone. His next sortie would include a recon of the entire battle situation.

From this, they would determine if the second and most important step of JT’s plan could be launched.

Hunter was airborne less than five minutes later, roaring off the base’s main runway even as Minx artillery shells were landing at the far end.

Turning over the northern end of the base, he could clearly see that the battle was still in full fire. The Football City Rangers were sending up huge plumes of dirt and dust as they scurried back and forth in the small Scorpion tanks, stopping, firing, and moving on again. On their flanks were the telltale blue streams of smoke from the GE Gatling guns, mowing down what was left of the forest and the Minx positions within. Above it all, the air was filled with white contrails from the LARS, its continual barrage of high explosive rockets hitting Minx positions as far as 10 miles behind the lines.

Hunter clicked his front video camera on for about twenty seconds, capturing the most salient parts of the battle. Then he flipped over and headed for the western edge of the base. The terrain here was more hilly than to the north, and during the opening minutes of the battle, the Minx had opened up with a number of 88-mm field guns hidden on the high ground.

Now these hills were almost quiet. There were no enemy guns, only craters and plumes of smoke, rising into the sky. Hunter knew immediately what had happened. The place had recently been visited by ZZ Morell’s
Triple X
gunship, it now carrying many of the Gatling guns formerly installed on the wrecked-beyond-repair
Nozo.
Hunter rolled off fifteen seconds of video strictly for poststrike evaluation. It was evident that the Minx would not return to this particular area anytime soon.

He then banked over to the southern edge of the base, a sector where the Minx lines were probably no more than 100 yards beyond the defense perimeter. What he saw made his breath catch in his throat for a moment. Back in the last Vietnam war, the U.S. forces used a tactic known as the “mad minute.” Basically, this tactic called for a large force of soldiers to simply fire every gun they had into a confined area where they believe Viet Cong or NVA to be lurking. The thinking was that in sixty seconds such a wall of intense, concentrated fire would decimate any hidden enemy soldiers and/or scare away those who somehow escaped the carnage.

The tactic usually produced mixed results, but was, if nothing else, an impressive display of firepower.

Now the defending forces on the southern edge of the base—a mix that included some of
Bozo
’s old crew, some of Geraci’s engineers and even a few French Legionnaires—had adapted the basic idea of the “mad minute” and expanded on it in a rather mind-blowing way.

Using the level-barreled light artillery and AA guns quartered from the perimeter along Da Nang city, these troops were laying down a continuous, flank-to-flank barrage of high-caliber fire that stretched for more than a half mile from one end to the other. This nonstop stream of wasn’t encumbered by a time restraint of a mere sixty seconds. Rather, Hunter knew the gunners were working on
ten
-minute intervals, or
600
seconds of blasting away back and forth.

Like its predecessor, this “Mad Ten Minutes” presented such an overwhelming vision of firepower, not even the most fanatical Minx would dare enter its awesome killing zone.

As before, Hunter recorded the action on his video cameras, and then moved on.

His next stop was over Da Nang city itself.

Da Nang City

T
HE MYSTERIOUS OFFICER ASSASS
looked out from the roof of the partially destroyed palace and smiled.

Convoys of Minx troops and weapons were flowing into Da Nang city at no less than four separate points. At the west gate, the largest entrance to the walled city, the troop trucks were actually backed up in a traffic jam so acute, many of the troops were being ordered off the vehicles and marched into the city.

It was a pleasant problem to have, Assass thought. It was not many commanders who could overwhelm such an objective as Da Nang city so quickly, that his conquering army was actually snarled in a traffic jam, so intent they were in claiming their prize.

Off in the distance, he could see the smoke and flames from the battle at the air base—but this was of little concern to him. The conquest of the air base was in the hands of other Minx units, and he supposed it would fall to them in good time. His main goal was the city. That was what CapCom had contracted him for, and the sacking potential was vastly superior than what he felt he would eventually find at the air base.

But it was more than that. Taking an entire city was not just a victory of military terms, it was a triumph of power. And the first rule of conquest was to consolidate one’s prize. Now as Assass looked out over the walled-in, urban sprawl of Da Nang, Assass imagined himself and his ancestors ruling the city for generations to come.