Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (6 page)

Two-One, J. D.’s team, was coming down the berm now. They never got down to the chopper pad first because J. D. was fond of the grand entrance.

Gonzales snatched the penlight from Wolverine’s hands and shone it on J. D. He was dressed in tiger fatigues, like the other men on his team, and like them he carried a stubby black CAR-15 “Commando” version of the M-16. He carried the same sort of canvas rucksack as the other men, and like them he’d taped down all the snaps and clasps and buckles on his web gear. He wore unpolished jungle boots, like the others, and he’d toned down the highlights of his face with green camouflage paint. From the eyebrows down he looked every bit the standard-version reconnaissance commando—but from the eyebrows up he looked like a pimp. Instead of a floppy Lurp hat, or subdued beret, or a knit watchcap, or a pirate scarf of camouflage-patterned parachute silk, J. D. was sporting an elegant, pearl gray, skinny-brim Homburg with a black silk hatband and a little green feather.

“Holy shit!”

Wolverine leaped to his feet, laughing and wheezing through the gap in his teeth, and before J. D. could defend himself, Wolverine snatched his hat.

“Hey you toothless ol’ Wolverine! Be cool! Give me back my pickpocket hat!” J. D. sounded on the verge of indignant tears, but Wolverine danced away with the hat behind his back.

“Hey, baby, be cool!” J. D. pleaded. “You can’t be rippin’ off a man’s pickpocket hat!”

Wolverine wadded the hat into a ball and tossed it to Marvel, who tossed it to Gonzales, who passed it on to Mopar.

“Sorry, J. D.” Wolverine tried to sound sympathetic but it didn’t come out that way. “Unauthorized headgear is a major no-no in the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol.”

J. D. didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, or lock and load his CAR-15 to show he meant business and wanted his pickpocket hat returned immediately. Mopar was already on his feet with the hat tucked under his arm like a football, running a zigzag pattern up the berm toward Tiger.

“Mopar! Damn your white ass!” J. D. shouted, but it was too late. Mopar had already passed the hat on to Tiger, and Tiger was tossing his head and growling fiercely as he raced off for the operations bunker with the hat in his teeth.

J. D. started up the berm, determined to recover his pickpocket hat even if it meant chasing Tiger into the bunker. But before he had gone more than a few meters he stopped. The pilots were coming out of the bunker now, and behind them came Pappy Stagg.

“The soup’s lifting!” Pappy yelled, swinging his big black head-breaking club of a flashlight over his head. “Crank ’em up! Saddle up, and get your asses on those ships! There’s a war on, and if you keep half-stepping and grabassing you’re gonna miss out on all the fun!”

J. D. stood still for a second or two, trying to decide whether to chase down Tiger and recover his hat or give it up and join his team on the helicopter. He glanced over his shoulder at his team clambering aboard the insertion ship, and when he turned back around Tiger and the hat were gone.

“Fuck it.” He shrugged and started back for the chopper pad. “My bottom lady always did say I was too flamboyant to wear gray.”

D
ESPITE MOPAR’S MISGIVINGS, IT
was a beautiful insertion. The troopship carrying Team Two-Four flew almost due west from the compound, staying high above the fog-shrouded draws and rugged mountains, then circled well to the south of the Recon Zone until word came over the radio that J. D.’s team was safely on the ground. The pilot brought the ship down in a lazy spiral to within a few hundred feet of the jungle canopy, cranked on the airspeed, banked north, then feigned landings on three separate hilltops to the west of the Recon Zone before coming in fast and low over the LZ Wolverine had chosen. As soon as the grassy space where the team was to insert came into view, the pilot dropped suddenly, broke pitch, and flared slightly, ten feet off the ground, while the Lurps jumped out and ran for the woodline. When the last man had unassed, the insertion ship climbed so that its skids could clear the treetops at the end of the LZ, then climbed some more and continued to fly straight and fast and low until well clear of the Recon Zone.

From the time the ship broke pitch over the LZ until the Lurps were safely in the woodline at the end of their Landing Zone only six seconds had elapsed, and the lieutenant, watching through binoculars from the Command and Control ship a thousand meters off to the north, grinned and flashed the thumbs-up sign to the crew chief, for it had been a fast and beautiful insertion, and the air crews deserved some thanks.

A hundred meters into the woods, satisfied that the undergrowth on all sides was now thick enough to hamper flank movement and provide some concealment, Mopar found a relatively open patch of ground and called a halt. Silently the other men moved in and stood back to back with their rucksacks touching to listen for a few seconds to the jungle around them. There was no sound of movement, no crashing in the bush or rattling branches; only the occasional buzzing of an insect or the distant cry of a bird in the far reaches of the canopy and the steady, barely audible dribble-drip-drip of condensed water filtering through the leaves. On a signal from Wolverine the team sat down.

They sat with their backs together like the hub of a wheel, their legs extended in front of them like spokes, each man with his weapon in hand. Marvel Kim and Wolverine exchanged glances, then with a bashful and reluctant half-smile, Marvel handed Wolverine the headset to his radio. Wolverine had allowed Marvel to carry the support radio and take care of air-ground coordination and any artillery fire the team might need to order. Farley had let Marvel make all the routine reports usually without even bothering to check to see whether their maps jibed, and Marvel figured that by the end of the mission Wolverine would be wanting to trade radios just for the sake of convenience. Then, if it became necessary to bring some fixed-wing aircraft or gunships on station or order some artillery fire, Marvel planned to simply go ahead and do his job on the support radio the same way he was prepared to work the command net. There was really nothing all that difficult to any job in the Army, if you kept a cool head and used your mind to figure the odds and techniques involved.

Wolverine took the headset from Marvel and muffled it with his Lurp hat. He eased his left arm out of his rucksack strap, unbuttoned the top of his tiger shirt, and put the headset inside, nestling it in the hollow between his clavicle and his deltoid muscle. Then he reached back and pulled a green sweat towel from his rucksack, draped it over his head and shoulder, and hunkered down to make his transmission.

All Marvel could hear was the squelch breaking whenever Wolverine squeezed the handle to transmit, but even that was so faint a sound he wondered if Mopar, who was sitting with his ears cocked away from the radio, could hear it.

When Wolverine finished his transmission he handed the headset back to Marvel, got a commo check on the radio he was carrying—the support radio—then fished his notebook and ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket and bent over to write. He hadn’t used his pen and pad, nor even a compass, protractor, or map to figure the team’s position before his report, but now he was scribbling away with such diligent concentration that Marvel and Gonzales naturally increased the width of the sections of the security wheel they were covering to make up for his absorption. Neither one of them had seen any signal from Wolverine that they were to take over his area of security, but they were good in the field and didn’t need a signal.

Gonzales was sure that Wolverine was testing him, trying to trip him up and catch him half-stepping, so he made a point of sweeping his rifle into Wolverine’s section of the security wheel where he would be sure to see it. Marvel, on the other hand, assumed that Wolverine had enough confidence in him to expect such consideration, so he only swept with his eyes, keeping his rifle in his own zone and refusing to make a show of it.

Wolverine took out his map, removed it from the acetate, and spread it out on his lap. Marvel had never seen anyone unfold a map completely while laying dog off the LZ after insertion. He wondered if it had been folded incorrectly back in the compound, but it seemed hardly likely that Wolverine would make a mistake like that. Marvel peeked over Wolverine’s shoulder and watched him trace along a river that ran through an almost solid maze of wavy contour lines in the northwest corner of the map-sheet, thousands of meters from their own position, way up in J. D.’s Recon Zone.

Wolverine glanced at Marvel and shook his head. He shot a couple of compass azimuths, scribbled some figures on the cardboard back of his pad, and then after studying them for a few seconds and looking back at his map, he crossed out the figures and flipped his pad over to write on the top page. When he had finished writing he ripped off the top page and passed it to Marvel.

“J. D. on high-speed trail …” the note began. There was no attempt to write entirely in acronyms and abbreviations—when Wolverine wrote a field note he wanted it to be clear. Marvel read on:

“… At least 300 NVA/new uniforms/batta boots/softhats/est. 200 AK, 50 SKS …” Marvel smiled to find that abbreviated “est.” He read on: “I confirmed RPK/many stretchers/heavy packs. Moving W/NW from trail to stream.” Marvel could only guess an azimuth or even J. D.’s position without taking out his own map, but he knew that the river that ran through J. D.’s Recon Zone also flowed only a few hundred meters from Firebase Culculine, where the relay team and the artillery support were based. Wolverine—or maybe it had been J. D.—had come to the same conclusion Marvel had: “… NVA headed for our R/ R.” Radio relay; that was hardly an abbreviation to Marvel anymore.

“Six—” This was printed out, and Marvel wondered if Wolverine was such a lifer he felt it disrespectful to let a numeral stand for the lieutenant, “wants us to lay dog here until NVA past J. D. Pass along.”

Hoping Mopar would notice that Wolverine was still using a white-paged field pad even though they were now available from supply in discreet shades of light brown and pea green, Marvel passed the note around.

Culculine was sure becoming a bad-luck firebase. Marvel had always felt that it was safer to stay deep in the field, on a real Lurp mission, than to stick around a place like Culculine. The last time the NVA blew a gap in the wire, the leg infantry and the cannoncockers put up a pisspoor fight and wouldn’t have been able to keep the gooks out if they hadn’t had gunships on call.

When Mopar had read the note and passed it along to Gonzales, Marvel took out his own pad—a green one—and without looking away from his zone of security for more than a few seconds, he scribbled his own note and passed it on to Mopar.

“What did I tell you?” he wrote. “R/R not safe. Don’t pass it on.”

Mopar nodded, wadded the note up, and stuffed it into his right thigh pocket, under a freeze-dried Lurp ration, where it wouldn’t be likely to work out and fall in the jungle to leave trace of their passage.

If Farley were still alive and leading the team, there would have been whispering all around.

For two hours Two-Four lay dog in their first halt position, alternating back and forth as first one man, then another, stood up and took a careful step away from the hub of the wheel to piss away the premission coffee. After piss call it was time to eat. Again each man waited his turn before resting his weapon on his thighs and turning away from his security zone to dig a ration and collapsible canteen out of his rucksack.

Marvel couldn’t help thinking about Farley. If he were still alive and felt the wind was blowing enough to diffuse the smell among the trees, he would have passed around a cigarette, or maybe kept one after another going in a chain, because the leeches had wasted no time zeroing in on the Lurps’ body heat and needed to be burned off. But Wolverine had made it clear that he tolerated no tobacco in the field, even though he smoked a pack a day in the rear. So the leeches were kept at bay with bug juice, and Marvel had to nibble on a cornflake bar instead of puffing on a cigarette.

It was no big thing. Even Farley had forbidden cigarettes when the air wasn’t up to filtering the smoke or when there was sign of enemy in an area—and on the last few missions before he got killed, that had been most of the time.

While Marvel was nibbling on a cornflake bar and thinking about Farley, Mopar was getting impatient to be moving on. There was a trail just another fifty meters or so uphill, right along the crest of the ridge. Or at least there had seemed to be a trail there on the overflight the afternoon before. Mopar was hot to get on up there and check it out. Wolverine had said it was just an animal path, and there was a five-dollar bet riding on what it really turned out to be. Mopar tried not to fidget, but it was getting harder and harder to sit still. His right leg ached from being straight too long, and he had a charleyhorse in his left leg, even though he’d bent and flexed it every few seconds to keep the blood moving. He was just about to take out his pad and write a note of his own, suggesting a point recon to the crest of the ridge, when he heard the radio break squelch, two long and one short.

Marvel handed the headset to Wolverine, and word came that J. D.’s team was moving away from its first position near the trail and edging out, off the right flank of an NVA column, hoping to follow it down to the low ground near the water. Wolverine passed around another, shorter, note, huddled over his map and compass with Mopar for a second, then scratching his palm and holding up five fingers to remind him of the bet, he stepped back and motioned for Mopar to lead out on point.

Easing sideway through the narrow, vine-snarled gaps between the tree trunks, and pausing every few paces to let Marvel step up and lift away any vines or branches that may have hung up on his rucksack, Mopar led the team due west a hundred very slow meters along the contour of the ridge until the vegetation thinned and he found a place where enough sun penetrated the canopy to put a little grass on the slope. He’d been hoping to find a natural stairway of exposed tree roots, but anything—except a trail—was better than slipping and sliding on the slick and treacherous slope farther back.