Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals III

There were guards here and there and, in front of one cave, another parked tank.

There were Soviet jeeps, and several antiaircraft guns.

The day was hot and still.

I chanced binoculars and saw, below me, dignified men walking about. It could have been the steps of the Capitol Building on a sleepy summer day, with senators and representatives digesting their lunch, and planning speeches.

And now we would kill them all.

I slid back in line, brought my troops up, and chanced using my radio.

"Sunrise Six Actual Up."

Simons crawled up a few minutes later, his bodyguard and radiomen behind him.

Babysan waved him to the crestline, showed him what I'd seen.

Simons came back, with one of the few smiles on his face I ever saw.

His plan was going perfectly.

He picked up the handset, whispered commands into it.

Behind me, men started moving toward the flank.

Then Babysan started waving furiously at me. I crawled up, Simons behind me. He was pointing, miming binoculars.

I found my bush, looked through it in the direction Davidson was pointing.

I saw Satan, or anyway the man most Americans thought was his embodiment.

It was a frail old man with a long, wispy beard, being helped by an aide, in deep conversation with two much younger men. Trailing the three were a host of aides.

Ho Chi Minh.

Our target was right there in front of us, no more than two hundred meters away.

Simons was beside me, hissing into his radio, "Snipers up! Goddammit, snipers up!"

And then the shit hit the fan.

Bull Simons's other radio, on command net, crackled, "Sunrise Six, Sunrise Six, this is Charlie Golf. Approaching your area. Request sitrep, over."

Watching Bull Simons try to keep from exploding in all directions might have been funny.

Somewhere else, not here.

"Who in the roaring blazing fuck is Charlie Fucking Golf?" he managed.

I had no idea, and then we heard the roar of a helicopter.

A HH53 blazed overhead. Not one of the dirty, flat green Giants that we had, but a finely waxed, gleaming machine that was fit to carry presidents.

I knew the bird. I'd seen it in Saigon.

It was General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General, MAC–V's own chopper. And now I knew who Charlie Golf was. Commanding General. Someone must've picked it as a call sign we might recognize.

Simons ran off a string of obscenities. The radio droned back, blithely.

"Sunrise Six, this is Charlie Golf. Pop smoke at your location, and prepare a Lima Zulu. Over."

We were about to kill Ho Chi Minh, and this stupid frigging Westmoreland wanted to do a white-glove inspection or something.

It actually wasn't quite as stupid as it sounds, as I found out, years later. It took that long for things to be declassified, because of what a disaster that day was.

Even the declassified data is spotty, but it seems that someone in Washington talked about some kind of supersecret, ultraclassified mission being planned.

Richard Nixon and John Connolly, who I correctly thought were planning a run at the presidency in 1972, decided now was the occasion to get in on the act, either critically if it failed, or in bed with it if we succeeded.

Evidently they did not know exactly what President Rockefeller had ordered. By the time I investigated it was clear the mission had been planned by the CIA, and ordered directly by Rockefeller, bypassing all conventional lines of command.

Westmoreland, not knowing what was going on up north, and getting angrier by the minute at being bypassed, flew to Hanoi with the two politicians and, by relentless grilling, found out where our team was headed and its mission.

I don't know if he would have ordered us to stop, or what made him fly north from Hanoi, especially with Connolly and Nixon. Evidently he didn't know exactly where Ho Chi Minh was supposed to be, or anything more than the area we were moving in.

No one knows, even, who ordered smoke, and a landing zone cut. It might have been an overzealous staff officer, listening to, most likely, Connolly.

Westmoreland was too professional… I think… for that, and Nixon too cagey. Not to mention cowardly.

Regardless, we lay on that hilltop, frozen in shock.

The Viets below us weren't.

That summer calm was shattered, as if someone had pitched a rock into a hornet's nest.

Alarms rang, and troops began doubling here and there.

Two men had Ho Chi Minh by the arms, and were hurrying him to the shelter of a cave.

I have no idea where the snipers were.

But someone had to do something.

I slid my LAW off my chest, remembering its total unreliability, pulled the pin and slid the tube forward. The iron sight flipped up automatically, and I aimed.

I squeezed down on the firing mechanism, and nothing happened.

The sights were off that small man, only a few meters from safety. I started to correct, and the goddamned LAW fired.

The rocket, wisping smoke, shot out and down, passing over Ho Chi Minh's head by at least two meters, and struck a commo truck thirty meters distant. It exploded, and the truck bucked and burst into flames, just as Ho Chi Minh and his entourage vanished into safety.

I was staring down, almost in tears at my miss, and so I didn't see Westmoreland's helicopter sweep overhead, not one hundred meters off the deck, no doubt drawn by the smoke which the pilot might have thought was our ordered marker.

Some people said it was an SA-2 missile that was launched, which I doubt, given its range requirements for arming. More likely it was a heavy machine gun or maybe even a lucky shot with an RPG.

Whatever, something took the big Sikorsky through the canopy, and exploded. The helicopter bucked, rolled on its side, and dropped. About ten meters above the ground, an explosion boiled through its fuselage, then it struck, and another explosion sent bits of aluminum and… other things… through the air.

Simons, quicker than us all, was on his feet.

"All right," he shouted, and I think his voice carried across the nearby border. "India Alpha. Shoot their dicks off, then we're moving out. By teams!"

Down below, a pair of PT76s rumbled into life.

Three LAWS spat from the flank, hitting them in their lightly armored sides. Two exploded, the other boiled smoke, and spun to a halt.

We fell back, down the hill.

"To the road," Simons shouted. "The hell with being careful!"

We obeyed, shooting as we moved. We were undoubtedly doomed, but the reflexes of our training took over.

We went down the road, almost to that hamlet of Ha Quang.

Mortars thudded, and people went down. If they still moved, someone had them back on their feet, and carried them. Medics tried to treat them as we moved.

If they were dead, they were abandoned, with sometimes a grenade, its pin out, tucked under them as a hasty boobytrap.

Just before the village, Simons was standing at the junction of that almost road.

"Down this way," he ordered.

I stopped my reaction force there, spread them out.

"Goddamit, Richardson-"

"Move your ass, sir," I shouted. "I've got my orders."

A momentary grin came and went, then he grabbed his handpiece, was calling for our lift ships.

I counted twenty-five men running past me, leapfrogging their way. There were ten men with me.

Babyface and Mad Dog Shriver hurtled past, behind their Montagnards.

A solid wave of infantry boiled down the road, and machine gunners opened up. One of the gunners grunted, flopped over, and I had his RPD.

The Viet infantry was hesitating.

M79s thunked, and grenades exploded in their midst.

I put a drum from the RPD into the mass, and they broke and ran.

Then we were moving, following the others toward safety.