Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller’s angry, angry brain.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn’t supposed to be happening.

Kham Duc was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn’t even bother with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he was up against hundreds, maybe thousands. And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?

Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us .

Puller’s antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th Infantry Division, Fifth People’s Shock Army. Puller had seen his picture, knew his résumé: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo-French family and even a graduate of the École Militaire in Paris before deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of the Diem regime, he had become one of their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.

A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters of the command post.

“Anybody hit?” he called.

“No, sir,” came his sergeant’s reply. “The bastards missed.”

“Any word from Matthews?”

“No, sir.”

Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action in Malaysia. He’d been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger, Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG. This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965 for more than a month, under serious bombardment. He’d been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which would kill most men.

He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the tactics of the old.

But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had really fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his indigs that the NVA couldn’t get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was happening to him. And nobody could save his ass.

The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still boiled from the ground, rising to mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a shambles as were most of the squad hootches, but a unit of VC sappers that had gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn’t get hung up in the shit as they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of crew-served weapons.

Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They’d move at night, but probably not attack. At least not in force: they’d send probers, draw fire, try and get Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets, but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No. 3 Battalion.

Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they’d try like hell, and if they could get birds up, they’d get ’em up. But maybe the pilots were reluctant: who’d want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who’d want to die now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the futility? He didn’t know the answer to that one himself.

Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine, knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.

“Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick.”

It was Sergeant Blas, one of his master sergeants who worked with the Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too many tours and also didn’t deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in a lost and fruitless war.

Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter, crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.

Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.

It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews’s head.

Three quicks and one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.

He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier’s life:

1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People’s Revolution.

2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.

3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.

4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.

5) Carry out other missions of the Army.

6) Help consolidate internal unity.

8) Preserve and save public properties.

9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.

10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.

All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Duc, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before documents were signed.

Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.

Slow plan.

Quick advance.

Strong fight.

Strong assault.

Strong pursuit.

Quick clearance.

Quick withdrawal.

He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.

Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.