Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Did the ARVN lay mines?” Chuck asked hopefully.

“Naw,” said Sergeant Carlos. “It’s the only fucking place in fucking South Vietnam with no mines.”

The thirty-man infantry shouted a victory cry, raised the North Vietnamese flag, and ran for the second fence. The four Marines killed them.

It was after midnight when the VC and the NVA began crawling out of the jungle toward the outer wire. In training, Dar had been taught that the new generation of passive image-intensifying devices—night scopes—were the Vietnam-era equivalent of World War II’s Norden bombsight: top-secret technology. In the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the saying had been “Charlie owns the night.” Now the Marines owned the night.

Twenty-five years after Dalat, Dar would see an ad in L.L. Bean or some other outdoor catalog for six-hundred-dollar night-vision goggles and he would have to smile. The priceless, die-before-letting-it-be-captured night-vision miracle had become catalogue item #NP14328, available for next-day delivery via FedEx. In recent years he had actually ordered such a pair of night-vision goggles and found them not only lighter and more effective than his old Starlight scope, but the price was much more reasonable.

Ned used the tripod-mounted Night Observation Device to sight the enemy at distances up to fourteen hundred yards and alert Dar and Chuck for their Starlight scope shots at eight hundred yards or less with the M-14s. Sergeant Carlos used the other NOD mounted on the .50-caliber M2 to cut down enemy soldiers at fifteen hundred yards the instant they moved in the midnight shadows.

Unusual for Vietnam at that time of year, the skies remained clear all that long night. There was no moon, but the stars were very beautiful.

Shortly after sunrise of the second day, six brand-new T-72 tanks and six T-55s began clanking purposefully toward the Dalat reactor. Infantry moved close behind them, and NVA snipers maintained covering fire from the tree line.

“I didn’t know the fucking North Vietnamese had that many tanks in their whole fucking army,” commented Sergeant Carlos, punctuating the soft words with a spit of his chewing tobacco.

Deep in the bowels of the building, Wally and John had slept an hour each. While one slept, the other had driven radioactive materials around on a forklift. None of the four Marines had slept at all.

Sergeant Carlos watched the tanks approaching the outer wire. He had been busy since predawn, talking on the PRC-45—their so-called Prick 45 command radio. Just before the circle of tanks reached the outer wire, a flight of five fast movers—F-4 Phantoms in this case—roared in at two hundred feet and dropped their ordnance, high-explosive shaped charges. Dar watched with fatigue-tinged disbelief as the turret of the lead T-72 blew three hundred feet straight into the air, higher than the F-4s had flown, the tank gunner’s charred legs clearly visible dangling and kicking from the tumbling turret.

Several of the tanks survived the air assault and churned around in confusion, some running over their own infantry in the smoke and flame. Thirty seconds later, a follow-up strike mission of three Navy A-4D Skyhawks flying off the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk laid down napalm on three sides of the reactor complex. The resulting smoke and flame made it very difficult for Dar and the others to kill the fleeing survivors, but there were few survivors.

The second twenty-four hours were far less clear in Dar’s memory, though even more indelible.

Something happened to time; that was the only explanation for it. Time was distorted, stretched completely out of shape—almost to infinity or eternity was his impression—yet folded back on itself with moments and hours and events overlapping and coexisting. It was as if Dar had dropped below the event horizon of one of the black holes he would study in his doctorate work in the years to come.

There were several more all-out infantry assaults on the morning of that second day. During one of them, the Navy air strikes were delayed by half an hour and several hundred NVA regulars—no VC in black pajamas here, but well-fed, uniformed, superbly well armed crack troops, the pride of General Giap of the North—reached the inner fence. In a normal situation, Dar and the others would have called in artillery fire missions from fire bases nearby, but all of the American artillery had packed up and left the country, and all of the ARVN artillery in the province had been overrun. The only thing that saved their little Alamo was the fact that Giap obviously wanted to take the reactor intact.

Dar remembered that it was during one of those attacks on the morning of the second day that the barrel of his original M40 melted and he had to switch to the backup sniper rifle. Ned was killed by NVA countersniper fire just before that last morning attack—or perhaps just after. Dar could not remember with certainty. But he did remember the sequence of deaths. Ned was shot in the eye while using the twenty-power scope around midday. Sergeant Carlos was hit in the chest and throat sometime during the evening’s fusillade, and died just as the sun set red and full behind Lang Biang mountain. Chuck was killed by a volley of bullets just seconds before they were to board the Sea Stallion.

During the last night—Wally and John still working and loading and using waldoes, remote handlers, deep in the building—Chuck and Dar talked about Plan B. Plan B was walking the fifty miles to the coast. Both Marines knew it was now impossible. It was not just that there were now at least two battalions of NVA mechanized infantry and perhaps three companies of VC in the jungle on all sides of them. Marines could deal with that. But with Ned and Sergeant Carlos dead, Dar and Chuck could never make it to the coast carrying the two bodies, while helping the scientists with their hundreds of pounds of radioactive isotopes and plutonium and what all. And Marines did not leave their dead behind.

Dar had always thought this policy the height of obscenity—trading more human lives for dead bodies—but he also knew that he was not going to be the one to break the tradition and leave Carlos and Ned for the enemy.

When the last attack of the day came and the last air strike was called in, it was napalm again, dropped from four F-4 fast movers. Some of the ordnance burned the outbuildings, the Jeeps, and the base of the containment building itself. Dar would never forget the smell of frying human flesh, nor his shame at the fact that in his hunger, the smell made him salivate. He had not eaten in twenty hours. The screams seemed to come from just a few feet away instead of fifty yards away. Dar clearly remembered cowering on the parapet floor, covering his scoped sniper’s rifle with his body as if protecting a child from harm, as flames rose two hundred feet high all around the reactor building and the air became too hot to inhale.

Chuck and Dar spent the second night moving from position to position, using the Starlight scopes on the M-14s and the NOD on the .50-caliber to spot and shoot the scores of sappers and troops crawling from all directions.

“Did you ever see Beau Geste ?” Dar had called to Chuck during a lull in the shooting.

“What?” said the Marine from the higher parapet.

“Never mind,” shouted Dar.

The NVA was laying down smoke by this time—which was smart because even image-intensifying night scopes could not see through smoke—but there was already so much smoke in the air that it worked against the NVA cover-fire snipers as well. Usually, when a trooper got within one hundred yards, either Chuck or Dar would catch a glimpse of greenish movement through the hellish curtains of smoke and white-blob glare of the open flames, and then one of them would kill him with a single shot. When they were shooting from the same side of the building, the two Marines worked efficiently, yelling, “Mine! I’ve got it!” like Little League outfielders calling for a catch.