Mike Maden - Drone Command

The young Communist infantry officer instinctively turned to Pearce, his elder, an important man with a reputation. The worry in his face said that this was his first taste of combat. His searching eyes asked Pearce if it was safe to move now.

Pearce recalled the moments before. The tough Vietnamese infantry sergeant who had stared daggers at him when he approached the crashed drone on top of the hill. The small circle of enlisted men, rifles loose in their grips, ridiculously young, scanning the tree line, smoking cigarettes. Dr. Pham, his guide and translator, as pretty as she was earnest, introducing him to the lieutenant.

Dr. Pham nodded at the drone. “Do you recognize it?”

Looked exactly like a Predator. It wasn’t.

“Yeah. The Pterodactyl. Chinese.”

Above, a familiar sound.

Muffled rotors whipped the treetops.

Machine guns fired, shredding the three soldiers nearest him in a plume of blood.

Pearce snatched the woman’s wrist and bolted down the hill.

Now they were stuck behind this log.

Too fast, too quiet, too disciplined for regular soldiers.

Special ops. Pearce was certain.

He ought to know. He’d been one of them, years ago. He and his best friend, Mike Early. God rest him.

The Chinese were good.

But back in the day, he and Mike were better.

Dr. Pham warned Pearce the Chinese might try to recover the drone on the trek up the long winding hill. He believed her. Apparently the lieutenant didn’t. The lieutenant looking to him now for answers.

Pearce shook his head. His silence itself a warning. Not safe yet. Signaled with his fingers. Soldier talk.

They’re out there. Hunting.

The lieutenant checked his illuminated watch.

What the hell. You late for a movie? Pearce wanted to say.

The lieutenant whispered in the ear of the researcher. She nodded. Leaned over to Pearce. He smelled her sweat. Felt the heat of her body. A strange intimacy in a dangerous place.

She whispered in his ear.

“He says we must leave now. He will cover us.”

Pearce shook his head. Whispered in her ear. “Not without him.”

She glanced at Pearce, frowning. Leaned in close again. “He says we must go now, so we go.”

The lieutenant gave a short, curt nod. An order. His eyes, a plea. Save the girl .

Pearce nodded. Okay .

The lieutenant pulled back the bolt handle on his well-oiled assault rifle, slowly, quietly, not making a sound, then reversed it just as silently, putting a round in the chamber. Another curt nod to Pearce.

The lieutenant leaped to his feet and opened fire, spraying the tree line above them.

“Run!”

Pearce grabbed Pham’s wrist again and dragged her away from the roaring AK-47. They made it a few steps. Pearce heard the familiar pop of suppressed fire.

The lieutenant cried out. Stopped firing.

“NO!” Pham broke Pearce’s grip and turned back up the hill.

The young lieutenant was down.

Her brother.

The mission was now officially a goat fuck.

Pearce grunted and reversed direction. Laid a massive hand on her back and pushed her down into the dirt. Fell on top of her. Growled in her ear.

“Shut up. Stay here.”

She nodded wordlessly.

Pearce listened. The lieutenant moaned ten yards up ahead. No other sounds. The birds and bugs had more sense than people.

Pearce bolted tree to tree, squatting low. His thighs burned. Knees creaked. He was too old for this shit.

But he loved it.

Saw Lt. Pham on the ground. Crept toward him.

A twig snapped.

Pearce reached for his pistol. Not there. The Vietnamese colonel took it back at the base. “You won’t need it,” he said.

Shit.

Pearce leaped for Pham’s rifle, lying in the leaves, still charged. Rolled. Fired. Three shots. Mag empty.

But it was enough.

The Chinese operator clutched his throat, fell to his knees.

Pearce threw down the rifle, dashed for Lt. Pham. Heaved his light frame over his shoulder and ran like hell.

Pearce and Dr. Pham cleared the tree line on a dead run, the wounded lieutenant still slung over Pearce’s back. Rotor blades up on the mountain behind them strained. Pulling up the drone wreckage , Pearce thought.

The low, hellish moan of jet engines blasted the night sky. Deafening.

A pair of Vietnamese twin-ruddered Sukhoi fighter-bombers roared toward the mountain. Seconds later, an eruption of boiling liquid fire. The night sky burned an angry orange, licked by a cauldron of flame, like a scene from one of Pearce’s favorite movies. He wanted to shout, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” because he was a sick bastard, but he didn’t. Dr. Pham wouldn’t get the joke, or if she did, she might be offended. Besides, he’d smelled napalm in the morning and he hated it. The stench of burned flesh and gasoline always made him want to puke.

Twenty minutes later, Pearce found himself in another movie scene. The lieutenant was lying on the chopper deck, medics at work. Plasma, Cipro, bandages. They moved slowly now, kept checking his pulse. A good sign. Leg wound. Like Daud’s, a friend, long ago in another place. At least this one would live.

Pearce settled in his seat, soaked in his own sweat and Lt. Pham’s blood. Secretly, he was pleased. Sitting in the helicopter, door flung open, watching the moonlit canopy of trees slide below his feet. He’d always wanted to visit Vietnam, the country and the war that had so defined his father and, by extension, him. As a kid, he had always wondered what his dad’s war had been like. Now he knew. The experience had nearly killed him. Still, it was a gift.

He wondered what the old man would’ve thought had he seen his only son riding shotgun in one of Charlie’s helicopters on a secret mission to help the communist government of Vietnam. Or running full tilt with a VPA lieutenant on his shoulder, saving him from certain death.

Not hard to guess. His old man would’ve shit bricks then punched his lights out.

Pearce smiled.

Dr. Pham fell into the jump seat next to him. Her long hair danced in the air rushing through the cabin. She still wore a canvas pouch slung over her shoulder. The Pterodactyl’s CPU and a few other electronic components were stashed inside. She said something. Pearce couldn’t hear her. He pointed at the headset next to her. He pulled on his.

“Thank you for saving my brother,” she said, her voice an electronic whisper in the roaring noise.

Pearce shrugged.

She tried to tuck her flying hair behind her ears but it wouldn’t stay. Even though she held a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering, was a senior drone researcher at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, and an obviously brave and loyal patriot, she was still a woman, and a beautiful one at that, even if she was smeared with mud and blood.

“We wanted you to see for yourself that the Chinese violated our national airspace and how they continually invade our territory.”

Pearce nodded. “You knew they’d come for it.”

“Of course. Just not when. You weren’t supposed to be there when it happened, but you took so long to get here.”

“Bad travel agent.” Pearce couldn’t explain to her that he had just come from a Japanese diesel submarine in a secret operation in the East China Sea.

Just then the helicopter swooped over a small town. Dr. Pham pointed at it. “Cao Bang. Very famous. Do you know it?”

Actually, Pearce did. Cao Bang was the site of the last battle in Vietnam’s 1979 war with China, where a hundred thousand Vietnamese militia and border forces humiliated a much larger regular Chinese army in less than a month of bloody fighting. Pearce had written a paper on the Sino-Vietnamese war in one of his undergraduate courses at Stanford and studied the battle of Cao Bang intently in a modern warfare graduate seminar, a classic.