Ian Slater - South China Sea

Murphy suddenly stopped. Shirley grabbed his arm.

“Danny,” Murphy said in a hushed tone. “You hear that?”

“Yeah.” It sounded like linoleum tearing, a machine gun in the distance. But whose?

“Let’s stay put for a while!” Danny said.

“Good idea,” Murphy said. They were near a grove of trees. “I’ll take the first watch.”

Shirley eased herself to the sodden muddy ground and felt dizzy from fatigue and hunger. After the explosion at the railway, Trang being killed, the horse, she’d had no appetite, but now she was ravenous and reached into the pockets of her PLA uniform and remembered that what few rice balls she’d managed to save were back at the railway in her jeans pockets. She had taken them off and put on the PLA uniform, forgetting in her hurry about the rice. Her sigh of disappointment was audible to Murphy.

“What’s up, Shirley?” She told him. He gave her his last ration, but she refused. He insisted, saying if she didn’t take it, he’d start swearing again.

Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t help a smile, which he could barely make out in the moonlight. “In that case,” she told him, “I’ll eat it.” When he gave it to her, he folded her fingers over it and kissed them. She was astounded. As far as she knew, Australians only did that kind of thing when they were blind drunk. Maybe it was the concussion of the rail wreck.

The point man on one of Freeman’s unofficial border patrols had them in the green circle of his starlight scope, especially the one — a woman, he thought, from the blur that looked like shoulder-length hair — who was wearing a PLA helmet. One of the men had an AK-47, at least that’s what it looked like in the moonlight. What to do?

The Skyraiders, six of them now, among the last of their kind, were swallowed by ominous soon-to-be-storm clouds seventy miles west of Hanoi. They went to instrument flying and radio silence. They knew the drill: go in as low as you could, drop the jelly without fuses — so that it wouldn’t explode — then leave.

Colonel Berry had thought about requesting a flare ship, a plane with a two-million-candlelight power beam, but to illuminate the area for the drop would also have lit it up for the PLA, enough to encourage them for another rush at the triangle. Berry called Roscoe about the tactical beacon.

“Tacbe on?” Berry inquired.

“Sending out its signal now, sir.”

“Soon as we hear them, I want you to have a squad with purple smoke, but don’t throw it until I give you the word. I don’t want any chink throwin’ it back at us. When you throw, make sure you’ve got it right”

“Affirmative.”

Berry passed the word to listen for the planes, but suddenly became alarmed by the fact that all he could hear was a persistent, high-toned ringing in his ears, drowning all other sounds. “Kacey?”

“Sir.”

“How’s your hearing?”

“Okay, sir.”

“Moment you hear those Skyraiders, let me know.”

“Yessir.”

“And Kacey, what was that between you and the brother?”

“He ain’t no brother, sir. He’s an asshole.”

Berry nodded and walked down through the foggy darkness past Kacey, along the trenches of the DEF triangle. “Anyone here from Foxtrot column?”

“Yo,” came the response, but the two men lying in the trench beside him were dead. The other men from Foxtrot, who were piling up bodies on the trench lip for extra cover, hadn’t yet reached them.

Berry spoke softly but without alarm. He patted the man who’d answered him and said, “Take their dog tags, son. Medics mightn’t get ‘round to it.”

“Yessir,” the soldier replied, but he knew that what Berry was really telling him was that if the Chinese made another attack en masse, there wouldn’t be time to take out the dead, no time even for body bags, maybe not even enough time to withdraw to the designated LZ south of Dien Bien Phu in what would be a terrible humiliation for the U.S. No matter that such a defeat would be assigned to USVUN, everyone knew the force majeure was the United States. The soldier, as others were doing all down the line, took off the dead men’s tags.

There was sporadic fire in the gloomy fog from both sides, but Berry advised Roscoe and the NCOs to conserve ammo and the men to fire only when they had a definite target. “Men here from Echo?”

“Yessir.” He went about bolstering morale in what was now the almost uncanny quiet of the battlefield, the PLA waiting for dawn, Berry waiting for the Skyraiders. He shook hands with Vietnamese NCOs and other troops, a smile here and there for the Airborne as well, and a bracing, “You’ll be all right, son,” where needed, Berry for a moment like Freeman’s double, as he was conscious of doing exactly what Freeman had done in the Battle of Skovorodino. It was a battle Freeman had lost.

The unfused jelly was also one of Freeman’s little-known tricks. Hopefully it would work.

At 0530 hours an SAS trooper heard the distant hum of prop-driven planes. The relative slowness of the old faithfuls, the Skyraiders, would allow greater accuracy for the jelly drop, but it would also expose them to much greater danger from any of the PLA’s radar-guided triple A flak.

The fog began to lift, but only enough to glimpse enemy positions through the starlight scopes. “Shit, they’re everywhere!” Kacey opined. “Like bats in the belfry.” He checked his Winchester 1200 for the sixth time in as many minutes, and he could feel the fog’s dampness seeping into the marrow of his bones.

It wasn’t yet dawn, but over Disney Hill and the surrounding countryside the air had been cleansed by the rain, and the predawn light allowed the point man of Freeman’s patrol to discern that it was a Caucasian woman in the PLA uniform, and that the other two were both males, dressed in nondescript clothes — light-colored shirts, one of them in what looked like jeans, the other in baggy shorts. The point man, by hand signal only, ordered the other ten members of the patrol to stay down, for it looked as if the three were headed up the knoll toward them. The point man didn’t want to spook the guy with the AK-47. But who in hell were they? They couldn’t possibly be some kind of Chinese resistance movement. Or were they?

The six Skyraiders came in V formation and were now peeling off and coming in on the beacon, but Kacey had already heard them and alerted Berry, who in turn told Roscoe and the CO. of the Airborne.

“Show ‘em purple!” Berry ordered, and from all around the DEF triangle violet smoke canisters were fired into the outer perimeter’s breached wire, parts of the wire hidden from view, so dense was the outpouring of the smoke. Firing broke out, mainly from the Chinese side, Berry trying to limit the response. Within thirty seconds of the purple smoke canisters, a dozen or so, being thrown to form a rough circle a hundred yards or so from DEF’s triangle of trenches, at least three were picked up by PLA and flung back toward the triangle.

Without hesitation Berry rushed out. Four or five men, including a Vietnamese, immediately followed him into the open where, despite the fog, PLA gunners could see them. Berry was cut down in the first burst, as were an SAS and a Delta trooper. Now the triangle opened up in covering fire as the Vietnamese trooper and Doolittle grabbed the flares and flung them back into the mess of outer razor wire before making their way back to the trenches.

The first Skyraider, radio silence now broken, guiding the others, swooped down out of the cloud to no more than two hundred feet above the ground, like some enormous bird of prey in the dawn’s early light, and dropped the silvery tanks of napalm just beyond the purple flares. It banked hard left and dropped another tank, and like all the others, it burst in midair into a giant hoselike spray.