Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (9 page)

Marvel paused, embarrassed and aware that he’d spoken too long and with too harsh a whisper. Wolverine and Gonzales were both stirring now, but neither of them was awake yet, so he went on and finished what he’d started out to say.

“You just wouldn’t admit I was onto something. If you’d admitted I was right, maybe it would have changed the luck of the thing. Maybe if you hadn’t tempted fate laughing when I said radio relay was dangerous, those poor fuckers on Culculine wouldn’t have to get hit to prove I was right!”

Wolverine was awake now. He sat up and held a finger to his lips and scowled fiercely. Then, with a cold, malevolent smile, he took his finger from his lips and drew it across his throat. Mopar and Marvel held their breath to prove their sudden devotion to noise discipline, and, satisfied that he’d made his point, Wolverine nodded politely and went back to sleep.

Gonzales was awake now, although he didn’t change position or even alter the timbre of his breathing enough to give that fact away. He was thinking about home, wondering if those Sierra Maestre Oriente mountains back home resembled these gook mountains of Vietnam. He’d never been in the Cuban mountains, but he planned to go there someday with an army of his own. He’d have only good men in his army—nobody like Mopar and Marvel, who were given to squabbling in the field, where victory depended on keeping a united front against the
comunistas.
They were good men, but they didn’t understand the
comunistas
and they weren’t motivated by thoughts of victory. Gonzales spent most of his guard watch on slow nights thinking about victory. But it wasn’t yet time for his watch, and after a few minutes, he too drifted back to sleep, leaving Mopar and Marvel to man the radio for updates on J. D.’s situation and keep alert eyes on the shadows and speckles of filtered moonlight and the faint, diffused green glow of vegetable matter rotting back into the soil with a pale, cold fire.

J. D. failed to make his midnight situation report, and the next scheduled sit-rep after that. With a growing, fascinated horror, Mopar and Marvel passed the headset back and forth, but all they could hear was the radio relay whispering ever more desperately into the air waves: “Tacky Blinker Two-One, Tacky Blinker Two-One … This is Tacky Blinker Six Alpha, over …” and “Two-One, this is Six Alpha. If you hear me break squelch by code.”

Again and again the radio relay tried to raise J. D. on the horn, but there was no answer, and after an hour Mopar decided it was time to wake Wolverine. He bent down to touch him on the shoulder, but Marvel stopped him.

“Let him sleep. There’s nothing any of us can do now but keep our ears next to the radio in case J. D.’s all right and we can pick him up. Maybe we should start figuring out what we’re going to do when they overrun Culculine tomorrow and we lose our radio relay—but there’s no sense in waking Wolverine. Nothing even he can do for J. D. now.”

“I told you J. D. was too flashy to ever see his grandchildren. And I told you that radio relay was more dangerous than going to the field. Maybe now you’ll listen to me and start planning for your old age.”

Mopar put a finger to his lips and frowned, but he didn’t wake Wolverine, and he didn’t tell Marvel to shut up with his bullshit about grandchildren and old age.

“Twenty-one,” he thought silently, “just let me live to be old enough to buy a beer in the supermarket and I’ll be satisfied.”

All the next day the team stayed in its night halt position with a wire antenna slung over a tree branch in hopes that by some fluke of the airwaves they’d be able to pick up a message from J. D. that the radio relay and the Birddog spotter plane that was now flying over his Recon Zone might miss. It was a slow and funereal day, gloomy with fog until well after noon and made chill and unpleasant by intermittent rains once the fog was gone, and everyone except Gonzales was certain that J. D. and his whole team had been killed.

Once, just after returning to station after refueling, the spotter plane picked up a signal that it took to be J. D.’s ultrahigh frequency emergency radio. But before the pilot could fix on it the transmission stopped, and only Gonzales, bullheaded in his belief that the
comunistas—
any
comunistas—
were no match for a crafty dude like J. D., had any faith that J. D. would come back on the airwaves, alive and all right. The other men were already beginning to wonder why the Birddog didn’t give up on raising J. D., go back to the airbase, and come back with a couple of jets to lay a little napalm along the riverbank, where, judging from J. D.’s last transmissions, there must have been at least a thousand NVA hiding under the canopy. If J. D. were dead—and it was becoming more and more certain that he was—there was nothing to do but avenge him.

But the lieutenant, or the major in the Two Shop, or whoever was making the decisions, did not see things with such a clear eye. And so the Birddog stayed over J. D.’s Recon Zone, while the gooks rested and cleaned their weapons and rehearsed their assault on Firebase Culculine.

Shortly before dusk Wolverine had Mopar move the team to the crest of the ridge and fifty meters northeast, to the very edge of their Recon Zone. Here, in the thickest bush they could find, they sat up for their second night in the field.

Commo was excellent. Marvel could get the relay team easily with the whip antenna, and Pappy Stagg answered his first commo check on the pole antenna without going through the relay. But Wolverine insisted that he run out the wire—just on the long shot that they might be able to pick up J. D. when no one else could. The Birddog had already returned to the airbase, the clouds were heavy and low, and J. D.—if he was still alive and trying to transmit—would need every ear that could be spared.

Once again Mopar was the first man to go to sleep. He rested his head on his rucksack, cradled his weapon in the crook of his left arm, covered his face with his jungle blanket, and dreamed that he and Tiger were in the field together on a point recon and walked through a space/time warp that took them to the porch outside Sybill Street’s apartment. It was an old dream of Mopar’s and he’d had it many times before, usually when napping back in the rear. But this time he and Tiger actually got inside Sybill’s apartment and Tiger had a chance to lift his leg against Sybill’s kitchen table before the dream clouded up and dissolved into something different and unpleasant and impossible to remember on waking.

A soft rain was falling on the upper reaches of the canopy and dripping through the branches and leaves when Marvel Kim shook Mopar awake. Mopar shivered, pulled his jungle blanket tight around his shoulders, and sat up, stiff and cramped and miserable and wet. He peeled back the knit band he wore to cover the radium dial of his watch and checked the time. It was still an hour until his scheduled turn at watch, so he knew immediately that something was up. He shrugged off his jungle blanket and reached for the charging handle of his Claymore with one hand and the pistol grip of his rifle with the other. Everybody was up and alert, but with a glance Mopar could tell that none of them was preparing for action. Wolverine was holding the headset of his radio—the support radio—against his ear, and Gonzales was listening to Marvel’s headset.

“They’re hitting Culculine,” Marvel whispered. “Listen … you can hear the mortars.”

Mopar dropped the charging handle of his Claymore and cupped his hand behind his ear. At first he couldn’t hear anything but the rain in the treetops, but after his ears adjusted to that sound, he could make out the faint crumpling of mortars, far away to the northeast. It was hard to believe that people might be dying to that sound, it sounded so soft and innocuous at this distance.

Gonzales and Wolverine exchanged glances, and then a second or two later Mopar and Marvel could hear the sudden ripping sound of small-arms fire—sounding much closer than the mortars had, although that was to be expected because small-arms fire always sounded closer than it was when heard at night. There was one burst, then another, then a long drawn-out rattle of machine-gun fire, followed by an ominous silence. The mortars had stopped, and now, apparently, so had the small-arms fire.

“Legs …” Mopar muttered disdainfully. The troops guarding the Culculine perimeter were Legs and didn’t have enough sense to hold their fire and wait for a target. Paratroopers would never have opened up in panic like that, Mopar thought, suddenly worried about the guys on radio relay having to depend on a bunch of Legs for perimeter security. He could just imagine the Legs crawling out of their bunkers at the first letup in the mortar barrage and shooting wildly at shadows while their officers shouted and blustered and tried to get them under control.

The mortars began to sound again, and far off to the east Mopar thought he heard a bugle, but he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just his imagination. Now, even before the mortar barrage ceased, there came again the sound of small-arms fire.

Wolverine took his headset away from his ear and leaned over to whisper in Mopar’s ear and then Marvel’s.

“They blew a gap in the wire,” he said, trying his damndest to sound laconic and objective about it, even though he knew that the relay team was now in danger. “Artillery’s depressing a couple of guns for direct fire. Those poor jerks are jumping through their apexes—listen.”

He handed the headset around so that Mopar and Marvel could hear the panic in the fire direction center. The poor bastards were screaming orders into the radio, even though their own people were operating on a different push and couldn’t hear what was being yelled over the external net.

“Disgraceful!” Wolverine said, shaking his head sadly. “If it weren’t for the relay team, I’d be rooting for the gooks.”

Mopar’s jaw dropped. He stared first at Wolverine, then at Marvel. What was this treasonous peacecreep bullshit? What the fuck had happened to the hardnose lifer who’d insisted on using a field pad and hand signals, even when it was obvious that they were in a cold Recon Zone? Were two days in the field—one of them spent laying dog in a night halt position—enough to turn a three-tour Special Forces veteran into a babbling peace-creep? Mopar was disgusted.

By now there were gunships circling over Culculine, and Gonzales, who was keeping on top of things by monitoring the Lurp command net, acknowledged a message from the rear and turned to whisper in Wolverine’s ear that the helicopters that had been waiting on the Lurp chopper pad were now being diverted to provide emergency medevac for the wounded on Culculine. Wolverine nodded and passed the word on without comment.

“No support,” thought Marvel, forcing himself to smile his sappiest smile so Mopar wouldn’t think he was upset at the news. “No arty on call. No gunships, no medevac, no extraction ships, and pretty soon—if things keep up this way—no radio relay. From here on out everything is going to depend on luck.”

“No support,” Mopar thought with a satisfaction that allowed him to stop worrying momentarily about the guys on relay. “Now we can show our stuff!” He hoped that in the morning Wolverine would decide to go back by the stream, to keep an eye out for gooks coming back from the attack along the trail they’d found. “If the relay gets knocked out or extracted,” he reasoned, “Pappy Stagg will be able to pick us up off a whip antenna, even from the low ground with an air relay.”

Gonzales pressed the headset of the command radio against his ear for a second, then passed it to Wolverine.

“The gooks are inside the wire,” Wolverine whispered after acknowledging the relay team’s last transmission. “McKinney and Smith are going out to give the Legs a hand, and Davis is staying on the horn as long as he can.”

Marvel was right. Radio relay was dangerous duty after all.

T
IGER THE LURP DOG
yawned and stretched out on the sandbags atop the operations bunker. Below him, on the chopper pad, the whole platoon was drawn up into a neat formation in front of a makeshift speaker’s podium and a folding table on which stood seven pairs of spit-shined jungle boots. Tiger had been curious about the podium and table earlier, when Mopar and Marvel Kim were setting them up. He’d listened with sympathetic interest but no real comprehension when Mopar explained the significance of the boots. It was an old paratroop custom, he’d said. The boots represented the dead paratroopers for whom the service was being held, and Mopar made it clear that Tiger was not to spray them. It had all been most confusing, and Tiger had finally retreated to his customary observation post, to watch the goings-on at a safe and dignified distance.

The lieutenant and the major from the Two Shop came out of the bunker and walked past Tiger without even nodding. Behind them, smelling of aftershave and spray deodorant, and sucking on a wintergreen Lifesaver, came the overweight chaplain from Brigade Headquarters. This was his first visit to the Lurp compound, and already the lieutenant’s insistence that he include in his service six men who weren’t yet officially dead had put him ill at ease. He, too, walked past Tiger without acknowledging his presence and followed the other two officers down to the chopper pad. Tiger thumped his tail lazily against the sandbags when he heard Pappy Stagg call the formation to attention, but then with a snappy salute Pappy turned the formation over to the chaplain, and Tiger turned away, suddenly bored and disappointed, distracted by a light breeze coming down the hill from the Cav mess hall.

“Paradise rest! At ease!” the chaplain barked in his best drill-field voice, and there was a rustling and mumbling in the ranks.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the chaplain said, the wintergreen Lifesaver lodged between his right lower molars and his cheek.

“We are gathered here to mark the passage of our beloved comrades to their eternal reward.” The chaplain lowered his eyes sadly and peeked at a slip of paper he had cupped in his hand.

“Robert McKinney. John L. Wilkinson. Thomas P. Fisher. James Dunlap Dwight.” Here there was a titter in the ranks that almost made the chaplain lose his composure. He had no way of knowing it, but J. D. had always claimed that his full name was Jahmal Diddley Dwight. “James Dunlap Dwight,” the chaplain said again before finding his place on the list. “George Roberts. Louis Haggins. And William Murphy Clark. These seven brave young American soldiers were your friends. You knew them well, and knew what sort of men they were. Clean-cut, patriotic American boys who gave their all and paid the ultimate price in defense of their God, their Country, and our American Way of Life.”