Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (7 page)

Ten meters from the crest of the ridge Mopar froze. Almost immediately the men behind him halted. Mopar stuck out his tongue to test for wind direction, but the air was stagnant and close and so hot he had to dab the bridge of his nose with the back of his pointman’s glove to keep the mixture of sweat and bug juice and dissolving camouflage paint from trickling into his eyes. A little breeze would have helped his hearing, but as it was he could hear nothing but his own pulse and the slow, deep, even breathing of the men behind him. It would take a nose and ears like Tiger’s to tell if there was anything on the trail in this dead air.

Mopar glanced over his shoulder at Marvel, then looked back to the front. He shrugged to shift the weight of his rucksack, took a couple of quick, shallow breaths to calm his stomach, then started out again, even more slowly and cautiously than before, now that the crest of the ridge was so close. It was a good ridge for a high-speed trail, and as he looked up to check the canopy for the rend through which he’d spotted the trail from the air, Mopar regretted not having bet a little more—at least enough for a blowjob at Missy Li’s.

He had a leave coming up in a month, so he was saving his money and staying away from the whorehouse, but bet money was found money, and it was all right to waste found money on fleeting pleasures.

Bent over at the waist, and stepping carefully to avoid making noise in the undergrowth, Mopar edged closer to the place where the trail ought to have been. He eased his rifle off safe and primed himself to part the leaves on the crest and peer out at a platoon of NVA taking an early lunch on the trail. Even though there were no sounds of rattling mess kits or of chopsticks clicking against rice bowls—even though there was not a trace of the pungent scent of Nouc Mam sauce, or anything else suspicious in the air—Mopar was hot to sneak a peek at an enemy meal, or failing that, a good, hard-surfaced, high-speed trail. But there was nothing—nothing under the break in the canopy except dead branches, and dead leaves, and thousands of little green grass shoots that had just sprung forth from the soil displaced by the stray artillery round that had rent the canopy. There was nothing else of interest on the entire crest of the ridge; no enemy troops on chow break, no high-speed trails—not even an animal path. But it wasn’t until the team had zigzagged back and forth on the crest for ninety minutes without turning up the slightest sign of passage that Mopar was willing to concede defeat. At the first rest after moving back down the slope on the far side of the ridge Wolverine passed him a note of consolation: “Aerial recon unreliable. Need Lurps on the ground.”

Mopar had no interest in counting abbreviations, but he found it strange that Wolverine insisted on passing notes when it was becoming obvious, just from the stale feel of the air, that there wasn’t an enemy troop within earshot, and there probably wouldn’t be any in the whole Recon Zone, even down next to the stream.

Farley had been a lot more reasonable about whispering in the field, and if the pilots flying the day he got killed had had the balls to come in on the secondary LZ as requested, instead of hovering out over the scrub to drop a ladder, Farley would still be running Two-Four with an almost pristine field notebook in his breast pocket, and Wolverine would probably still be back in Special Forces, or sitting around the operations bunker swapping lies with Pappy Stagg. It was silly to pass notes and use hand signs where there was obviously no one in the area, and cupping his hand next to Wolverine’s ear, Mopar said so.

The hard look he got in reply to his whispered opinion was enough to stiffen the hairs on his neck and send him teetering on the brink of another sullen snit, but he was too proud of his field discipline to let his resentment simmer very long, and after a second or two he merely nodded and told himself that Wolverine would have to be broken in slowly. Sooner or later, even a hotshot lifer E-6 with three tours in Special Forces behind him would have to come around and start doing things the way everybody else did.

Following the proposed route of march they’d decided on when preparing their map overlays, the team moved down the slope and into the dank, dripping, leech-infested jungle that filled the draw between the ridge they had just inspected and the ridge to the south. It was a difficult descent. The ground was slippery, and it was sometimes necessary to grab a vine or a low sapling to keep from sliding, bumpity-crash-bump, feet first and ass down, into the trees. Marvel Kim was worried about losing commo in the draw. Twice during the descent he signaled for Mopar to halt while he got commo checks, first with the whip antenna he’d used on the ridge, then, two-thirds of the way down, off the pole antenna he carried broken down and folded in his rucksack.

It was hard to move in the jungle with pole antennas. They weren’t flexible and they snagged on the vegetation. So before setting off on the last leg of the descent, Marvel took down the pole and ran out a wire antenna. He slung the wire over a tree branch and got another commo check, and without waiting for Wolverine’s permission or to check the coordinates with him, he also reported the team’s position and situation. From now on until they regained the high ground there would be no instantaneous communication with the radio relay. As he pulled down the wire antenna and coiled it on top of his radio, Marvel smiled and giggled at the absurdity of going willingly into what could be the valley of the shadow of death with only the spottiest commo. Mopar always claimed he liked being entirely on his own, out of reach of the relay team and the rear, cut off from the rest of the world, but Marvel didn’t believe him. Nobody liked being without commo. And anyway, reporting back to the rear was the most important part of a Lurp’s job, even if it did seem silly to run out a wire and risk giving the team’s position away just to send in a negative situation report.

There was a stream in the draw. It was only a little pisstrickle that fed into the larger stream where Mopar had wanted to insert, but the vegetation around it was close and heavy and wet, and there were leeches everywhere. The leeches inched along the leaves and rose up like charmed cobras on the jungle floor as they zeroed in on the Lurps’ body heat and the smell of their sweat and blood. The leeches were hungry, and Marvel took that as another sign that there was no enemy presence in the area. He ran out the wire and got a commo check with the relay team, then doused his collar and boots with bug juice while Wolverine pointed east and motioned for Mopar to move toward the larger stream.

It was impossible for the men to sit down in their security wheel here in the thick and tangled jungle. Every time they paused to listen for movement they stayed on their feet in order of march, sweating and silently cursing the leeches, until Wolverine signaled for them to move out again. As they moved closer and closer to the main stream, the vegetation grew thicker and thicker. It was impossible to move silently now. The trees were much lower than they were on the ridge, and they were much closer together. Between the trees were tangles of hanging vines and curtains of wet leaves. Every few steps Mopar was forced to stop and allow Marvel to come up behind and free him from the vines and branches that snagged his rucksack. Gonzales, on rear security, simply gave up and stopped trying to straighten bent branches and replace the leaves the other men had knocked aside in their passing. The growth was just too thick, and there was no way to avoid leaving a trail.

If there was no way for Gonzales to sanitize their trail, there was even less way for Mopar to avoid the leeches that crawled up his boots and attached to his face and neck and hands as he brushed the leaves on which they waited in ambush. He felt one leech inching along the back of his ear, moving toward the warmth and rhythm of the pulse of his neck, and for just a fleeting instant he had to fight down a surge of sympathy for the poor bastards on the other side who had to live in these jungles without benefit of American insect repellent. It wasn’t the first time he found himself putting himself in the other guy’s place, but he repressed his feelings more quickly than usual and went on with his job. A man had to stay on guard against getting soft.

Mopar found a trail parallel to the main stream. It was overgrown and snarled with thin, raspy vines and obviously hadn’t seen any heavy traffic for at least a month. But it had to be reported all the same. Marvel Kim ran out his wire and called the trail in himself. Wolverine glanced impatiently at him and held a cautionary finger to his lip, when Marvel whispered too loudly into the headset, but he didn’t interfere or have anything to add to Marvel’s transmission.

Mopar wanted to get back to high ground. He talked a lot of brave bullshit about operating without commo, and a little bit of it was true. He knew the other guys—the gooks—didn’t always have radios, and if they could get by without commo, then so could American Lurps. The leeches bothered him more than the lack of commo. He was sick of the leeches, sick of the stench of the stagnant pools and rotting vegetation along the stream, and sick of wasting time moving slow when there wasn’t a gook in the whole damn Recon Zone.

But that lifer, Wolverine, insisted on following the trail and searching along the stream, and Mopar was determined to do a knock-up, top-notch job of it. He dodged the low branches and droopy, leafy boughs that overhung the trail and slipped side-way between the vines, keeping out of the elephant-ear plants that clogged the surface of the trail. Thirty meters on, he found an abandoned sleeping position a few meters off the trail.

Gonzales photographed the sleeping position, but it was old and filling up with new plant life, and Wolverine shook his head when Marvel offered to call it in. When Gonzales was finished photographing the site, Mopar led out again, wondering how in the hell the gooks would choose to sleep down here with the most voracious leeches. Ten meters on from the sleeping position, just off the trail and between it and the stream, Mopar found a patch of ground that showed signs of recent digging. He signaled a halt, and Wolverine came up to see what he’d found. It was a relatively recent cache.

Marvel tossed his wire over a branch and called in the cache’s location while Mopar and Gonzales stepped back to provide security. When Marvel had finished his report Wolverine took the headset from him, muffled it with his towel and Lurp hat, appended the phrase “Beans on the fire” to Marvel’s report, and handed the headset back to him with a mischievous smile.

There was nothing about beans in the codebook.

Marvel raised his eyebrows quizzically, and Wolverine motioned for him to leave the wire hung and step closer to the cache. After lowering his rucksack carefully to the jungle floor, Wolverine squatted next to the cache and began to dig with his knife and canteen cup. He made a pile of twigs and fallen leaves, then another pile of dark, moist soil. He dug for more than an hour. The sweat poured down his face and washed away the protective coat of camouflage paint and insect repellent that would have discouraged the mosquitoes that swarmed there along the stream. When he finally struck wood and turned to flash Marvel a toothless grin, his cheeks were streaked with green and gray, and his lips were puffy with insect bites.

For the first time on the mission, Wolverine relaxed his noise discipline.

“Give me a hand here, Kim,” he whispered. “Help me clear off this lid and open it, and I’ll show you a trick I learned in SOG.”

Marvel almost ripped the wire from his radio in his rush to kneel next to Wolverine. Farley had never had any new tricks to teach—but then he’d never worked for MACV-SOG.

It took another ten minutes for Wolverine and Marvel to pry the lid off the wooden crate Wolverine had uncovered. Mopar and Gonzales were both getting bored, glancing over their shoulders from time to time to see what was going on. Finally Wolverine and Marvel got the crate open and stepped back to allow Mopar and Gonzales a look.

There were four AK-47 assault rifles in the case, plus two nine-mil pistols and four cardboard boxes of ammo for the AKs. The rifles were still packed in Cosmoline, and the pistols were wrapped in soft, oily cloths. Wolverine reported the contents of the cache, and once more said something about beans on the fire. He knelt down to rummage in his rucksack and came up with a jungle blanket, a couple of Lurp rations, and a collapsible canteen of water. He put these aside, then smiling broadly, reached in with both hands this time and came up with three ammo boxes that looked exactly like those in the cache.

“Bolo beans,” he whispered. He held one of the boxes up for everybody to see. “They’ve got a triple charge. Charley busts one of these caps, he’s gonna get the bolt of his own weapon blown back through his chest.”

Sometimes it was better to break noise discipline than to write on the pad. The very existence of bolo beans was highly classified, and Wolverine didn’t want to risk carrying a written explanation around with him. It was one thing to get killed with a few boxes of enemy ammo in his rucksack—the gooks searching his body would probably not be too suspicious of that. But it was another thing altogether to carry a written explanation of one of SOG’s sneakier tricks around in his pocket. He didn’t plan to die on this mission, but that was no reason to get careless. Wolverine wouldn’t even have been able to get hold of the bolo beans without Pappy Stagg’s connections—not now, now that he was out of SOG. They were hardly an item to be signed for in supply, not even in the Lurp platoon. Wolverine replaced three of the ammo boxes in the cache with booby-trapped rounds, then fitted the lid back on the crate and pressed it tight.

Mopar was impressed. He kept his eye on his security zone, but he couldn’t resist peeking over his shoulder at Wolverine.

“Maybe after this next extension is over I can extend for SOG,” he thought. “If Pappy Stagg and Wolverine put in a word with the right people it shouldn’t be too hard.” It was almost impossible, he knew, to get on a Special Forces “A” Team without going through the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. But with the right clearance, the right experience, and the right references, it shouldn’t be too hard to get in one of the really off-the-wall projects where a man didn’t have to know too much about training indigenous troops, as long as he knew how to patrol and keep his mouth shut. Mopar didn’t know too much about SOG, but from what he heard, it sounded like they had a lot of fun when they were in the rear and didn’t have any superstitious awe of international borders when they went into the field.