They watched the helicopter leave. "That"s gotta be about the worst," Killer said. "I"d rather lose both legs. Both arms."

"You lose both arms, you wouldn"t have any s.e.x life anyhow," Spider said.

"Don"t be such a f.u.c.kin" hard case, okay?" Killer said. "That guy just had hisd.i.c.k blown off!"

Spider reddened and looked at the ground. "Yeah, it"s really bad. I guess I"d rather get killed." He kicked twice at a rock that stayed imbedded in the ground. "I"ll try to watch my mouth. It"s Graves, you know?

You had to joke about everything.""Guess so," Batman said. "Drive you f.u.c.kin" nuts if you couldn"t."

Three men came down to the LZ dragging a poncho with a dead body. Another man carried a b.l.o.o.d.y field pack. "Top said somebody wanted this," one of them said. "Another slick comin" in?"

Batman shrugged. "We just work here. That"s the slope?"

"Yeah." He flopped the poncho open. It looked like a boy of fifteen or sixteen, wearing the standard black pajamas, with a bolt-action rifle lying next to him on the plastic. There were bloodslick patches on his abdomen and chest, from bullet or fragment wounds, and an ugly exit wound through his mouth. The bullet had blown out his upper teeth and split his nose. His mouth was a big red hole full of splintered bone and brains, his bottom row of teeth intact, white and small. His eyes were open, slightly rolled back.

The shape of his face had been deformed by the force of the bullet, but his hair was neatly combed.

"He hardly looks real," Moses said.

One of the men who"d been carrying the corpse kicked it hard in the side. "b.i.t.c.h!" He kicked it again.

"f.u.c.kin"b.i.t.c.h!"

"That does a lot of good, Chap," the first man said quietly.

"Doesme some f.u.c.kin" good." He kicked the corpse again and stalked away.

"Just got the one?" Batman asked.

"I don"t know. We hit another one; there"s a pretty clear blood trail." He looked at the setting sun. "No way we"re gonna go after him this late. Let the motherf.u.c.ker bleed to death."

Spider was still staring at the corpse. He"d never seen a dead Vietnamese before. "Top say why they want this guy?"

"I don" know. Stuff him and mount him. Put "im in the officers" club."

"Couple of months ago they collected a bunch of them," Batman said. "Never did say what they did with "em."

"Cut their a.s.sholes out and ship "em to Lyndon," Killer said. "He likes rim jobs."

"That must be it," Batman said. "Not like they have enough a.s.sholes in Washington."

They went back to their bunker and got ready for the night, giving their weapons a once-over and blowing up air mattresses. They used C-4 to heat up some C rations-it burns with a bright yellow flame; a piece the size of a walnut will heat a whole can-but n.o.body had much appet.i.te, even before Moses ate half a can of Ham & Limas and barfed. He joked about it not being kosher.

Spider"s s.e.x life (1) It was not going to be a good night for sleeping, or for anything. After all the artillery had come and gone, a Vietnamese sniper fired one round into the camp, just to prove he"d survived. The bullet grazed a man on the cheek, a superficial wound only a little more serious than a shaving cut, except that no shaving cut would ever come so close to causing cardiac arrest.That twenty-five-cent bullet precipitated several hundred thousand dollars" worth of response. The 155-millimeter cannons at the fire base blasted a widening circle around their search-and-destroy camp as darkness fell. Then the 8-incher threw in a few rounds for dramatic effect. Then a jet flew over and dumped two canisters of napalm, and then made a U-turn and dropped a few cl.u.s.ter bombs for good measure. Then a four-deuce platoon, 4.2-inch mortars, decided they could use some practice, too, and did a firing exercise that tore the h.e.l.l out of the jungle about two hundred yards to the north of where the LP had reported the sniper. If their mistake had been two hundred yards south, instead, it would have vaporized Spider and the other engineers, and they knew it. That would not have made for good sleep even if youc"ould sleep, with illumination rounds popping every couple of minutes. They floated down on parachutes, and they didn"t turn night into day, actually; it was more like night-into-a-dim-black-and-white-TV-picture. But it was bright enough to give you exactly no privacy.

Spider had been looking forward to night. There had been no privacy at the fire base, either, and he had gone far too long without jerking off. His t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es ached and he kept having spontaneous erections, to no end.

Early in the evening he wasn"t thinking about s.e.x because he was more worried about survival, with all the explosions marching around the camp and the jet dropping fiery h.e.l.l. But after a couple of hours it settled down to the random pop of the illumination rounds. They were fiendishly timed. Sometimes there would be fifteen or twenty minutes of darkness, and he would start to think about Beverly, her humid slickness and the musky smell of her s.e.x in the car when he made her come, and her shy stroking of him afterward, and the one time she"d licked him, and Spider would just start to reach for his aching d.i.c.k and pop!-you"re onCandid Camera. Around midnight he invented a no-hands technique, lying on his stomach in such a way that the sensitive frenum of his p.e.n.i.s lay against the rough texture of the inside of his fly. By rhythmically clenching and unclenching his a.n.u.s, he could make the delicate bit of flesh move back and forth about a millimeter each second, and in a surprisingly short time he was rewarded with a mild but prolonged o.r.g.a.s.m. There seemed to be an embarra.s.singly copious flood of s.e.m.e.n, but he was long past caring about appearances. He closed his eyes and slept like a dead man.

He anxiously checked in the morning and realized that his fatigues were so profoundly besmirched, anyway, that the stain from a tablespoon or three of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e would escape notice. The other men"s uniforms looked about the same.

Spider and the other men didn"t know about the Viking bands who had begun their voyages into battle by standing on the beach in a line as the sun came up and pumping together, spending a sacrifice into the sea. Perhaps it"s just as well.

Moving on A small patrol of seasoned veterans crept out as soon as it was light enough to follow the blood trail.

They found the body about a hundred yards away, untouched by the fortune spent on artillery and air support. The Viet Cong guerrilla had quietly bled to death from a bullet wound in his side, having propped himself into a firing position behind a fallen log. His rifle magazines and four grenades were in a neat row in front of him. The soldiers took the AK-47 and the ammunition and grenades and searched the body for identification, but he wasn"t carrying anything except a plastic bag of fish heads and rice, and a small image of Buddha on a golden chain in his pocket. They left the body in place. Back inside the perimeter, they reported to the captain and then disarmed and buried the grenades. They kept the rifle and ammunition for the point man to carry, and cut a deck for the Buddhist good luck charm.

By then it was time to move out, but there was still one extra Vietnamese corpse, waiting patiently besidethe LZ. n.o.body was able to contact the major in G-2, Intelligence, who had requested that they hold on to it, and no helicopter was going to come out and take it off their hands without a direct order. Spider wondered if they were going to have to drag it along with them.

It didn"t take long to break camp. They built a fire in one of the holes, into which went all the C-rations detritis: loose paper and plastic and cardboard and stamped-flat cans. Some joker tossed a rifle round in just to watch everybody hit the dirt. They refilled all the bunker holes and rolled up the emptied sandbags for reuse, and scattered the logs. Wouldn"t do to leave ready-made bunkers for Charlie.

Spider was comfortably leaning back against his rucksack, reading the Heinlein novel while most of the other X-Rays shot c.r.a.ps. Batman walked over from the command group, looking disgusted.

"Come on, guys. We gotta bury the stiff."

"Jesus," Killer said. "Why don"t we just leave him there?"

"That"s what I said. What difference does it make? But the captain says we gottado it, so we gotta do it."

Spider looked around for a shovel. "He would have to wait until the holes were all filled."

"Natch. You okay, Mose?"

Moses had sat down suddenly, white under dirt. "I don"t. can"t I maybe. "

"Freaks you out?" Killer said with a grin.

"Y-yes it does." He was trying to control the quaver in his voice. "Bad enough to sit here and smell it."

"Look, I"m used to it," Spider said. "You just hang loose and I"ll-"

Batman shook his head. "You know you gotta do it, Mose. It gets a lot worse, and you gotta be ready for whatever."

"I know, s.h.i.t." He got back to his feet, using his rifle for support. "So I"m a p.u.s.s.y."

It was easier to dig the soil back out of a bunker than to start a fresh hole, of course. The nearest position to the LZ was an M60 perimeter point. The machine-gun crew watched them work without comment.

"Deep enough," Batman said when they"d dug down a yard. "Don"t have to go to f.u.c.kin" China." Spider laughed nervously at that, wondering what country they would actually reach, Canada? Batman took his shovel and gave him a hand out of the hole. "You and me drag him over."

"Oh, I"ll come too," Moses said. "Might as well."

The corpse looked pretty bad even to Spider. It was spreadeagled with rigor mortis and the body had swelled enough in decomposition so that b.u.t.tons had started to pop off the shirt, which the night before had been pajama-loose. The mouth and eyes were black, crawling with ants. The smell was so strong it was choking. Moses dropped to his hands and knees and vomited onto the ground.

Spider and Batman took opposite sides of the poncho and half carried, half dragged the stiff body. They dumped it in the hole and everybody shoveled furiously to cover it up. The M60 crew even helped. Theyleft one puffy hand protruding from the dirt, a Marlboro jaunty between its fingers.

Spider knew his pack was only a few cans of food heavier, but it felt like twice the previous day"s load.

There was a knotted cramp between his shoulder blades and a fiery ache in the small of his back. Just not used to it, obviously; the infantry carried more and they just saddled up and walked off grumbling.

Spider"s walk was more of a stagger, sometimes leaning on the shovel as a crutch.

At dawn the jungle had resounded with a cacophony of bird calls and monkey howls and a kind of lizard that shrieked "f.u.c.k you!" The animals were silent now, but the people were not. The company didn"t have a trail to follow this time. They just toiled through the underbrush in pursuit of a compa.s.s point. The noise of their struggling and muttering made Spider nervous; he thought it sounded like the clumsy advance of a large beast that didn"t have any natural enemies in the jungle. If only they didn"t!

They came to a sudden stop after forty-five minutes because Moses had fainted, weakened and dehydrated from vomiting. The medic revived him with ammonia and water, but said there was no way he could hump a full pack. The engineers split up his load. Spider got the demolition bag and an extra box of Cs.

Moses was apologetic and embarra.s.sed. "It"s not supposed to happen this way," he said to Spider in a feeble croak that was scary. "In every war movie there"s one Jew in the platoon, and he always dies. But not like this."

"Not gonna die," Batman said. "That"s always a New York Jew. You from Idaho."

"Ohio, d.a.m.n it."

"Same, same. Think you can get up?"

He nodded and managed to stand without help. He wobbled a bit, then stabilized. "Whew. Let"s get to wherever we"re goin"." Batman pa.s.sed up the word and the three twisting columns started forward again, Moses lurching like a man constantly moving forward to keep from falling on his face. But at least he was moving.

They only humped for three hours, though the last hour was all uphill. They wound up on the crown of a hill that overlooked Route 14, the road between Kontum and Dak To. A small campfire site indicated Charlie had probably been there not too long ago. The brush was trampled down, too.

That was why they"d come to this location. A few nights before, Charlie had dropped mortar rounds on a convoy from somewhere up here.

He might have left some surprises. The three columns formed in one shoulder-to-shoulder line and swept the hilltop for mines or b.o.o.bytraps, at first inching along and studying the ground with intense concentration. After they"d covered about half of the hill with no discoveries, inspection of the second half became progressively more desultory. Spider continued inspecting just as slowly and carefully, waiting for the loud bang when somebody else stepped on a mine. But it didn"t come.

Before the engineers could start on their bunkers, they had to clear an LZ, and they weren"t allowed explosives, because of "sound discipline." There were a lot of large evergreens covering the top of the hill, but down the side away from the road there was an area that was mostly saplings. They hacked away with machetes and axes for an hour, and wound up with an area of stubble slightly larger than a helicopter. The captain took a look at it and said to make it half again as big.When they eventually did get around to digging their hole, they found that it was not as easy a proposition as last time, since the hill was mostly granite. So on top of his axe blisters and machete blisters, Spider got to add some pick mattock blisters. They all tore the skin off at a slightly different place. Before the hole was half deep enough, Spider had bandannas tightly bound around both palms, and they were both soaked with blood.

Moses had tried to help but he had collapsed a few minutes after they started working on the LZ. The medic said he had a temperature of 102 degrees, and probably ought to be evac"ed if a chopper came in.

They weren"t expecting any resupply, though, and he didn"t think it was serious enough to call in a medevac. Just stay in the shade and take water and salt pills.

Moses said he didn"t want to be evac"ed as long as he could keep up with everybody. It was one thing to get slack time because of army policy about religion-that was just FTA, f.u.c.k the army, and n.o.body in his right mind could disapprove of that-but getting out of humping because you couldn"t look at a dead body without throwing up, that was a lot less cool. He tried to explain this in a garbled way to the medic, but the medic said bulls.h.i.t; it could be malaria or some infectious disease you could pa.s.s on to the others.

Don"t try to be so f.u.c.kin" hard-core.

The sound discipline must have applied only to engineers. The fire base dropped in four smoke rounds, zeroing in on the top of the hill. That would give Charlie a nice surprise the next time he used it.

Of course there wouldn"t be a next time. They were being watched, and their actions correctly interpreted. The 82-millimeter mortar that had been there a few nights before was now being carried to an adjacent hill. It wouldn"t have a clear shot at the road, but tonight it wasn"t the road they would be interested in.

Beverly"s s.e.x life (2) Our activist house-painter, folksinger, and purveyor of homegrown hemp, Lee Madden, thought love was the most powerful force in the universe, and s.e.x was the most direct and dramatic manifestation of it.

He also knew there wasmana, spiritual power, a.s.sociated with the s.e.x act, and the more you did it the moremana you had. There seemed to be objective evidence for that: The more f.u.c.king you did, the easier it was to find willing partners. (His philosophical readings were largely confined to the Eastern religions; he had neglected logic.) Lee would have bristled if you called him a ladykiller, but his persona was as smooth and effective as any pseudo-Bogart lounge lizard"s would have been for a previous generation of women. He was scruffy but not unwashed, cynical but compa.s.sionate, experienced but childlike. Loud in denunciation of wrongdoing, his voice was intimate and husky one-on-one. He had long blond hair and a California tan on a lean body hard with muscle from honest labor and surfing.

Beverly had never met anybody like Lee, and when he turned his focused searchlight of attentions in her direction she was more than flattered, she was literally captivated: trapped. After she said goodnight to him she couldn"t get him out of her mind. When her roommate Sherry was asleep, she squeezed a pillow hard between her legs and pretended it was him.

Their next date, their first actual "date," was take-out pizza and cheap wine at the house Lee was using as a crashpad. There were always ten or twenty people hanging around listening to music, smoking dope, trying to study, making out on the sofa, or whatever. The couple who rented the house had real jobs and soft hearts, and never turned anyone away. Lee was a semi-permanent fixture, though; he even had hisown bedroom upstairs, since he chipped in a little on the rent and always had good gra.s.s.

Beverly was intoxicated by the bohemian atmosphere-not the psychedelic posters and peace slogans on the walls, not the hippy outfits and att.i.tudes, but the combination of easy acceptance, good humor, and earnest commitment. She was not stupid but shewas innocent, and at first she didn"t see that for many of these people, sincerity was something they practiced the way some children practice the piano: a ch.o.r.e you had to do if you wanted to go out and play.

Lee wasn"t that way. He was honestly committed to both the civil rights and peace movements; he"d been jailed twice for the latter and cracked over the head with a nightstick for the former. He was brave on the barricades and modest afterward. He was fiercely honest about most things, though he lied a little about his draft deferment. He said he was 4-F from ulcers. It had actually been a psychiatric deferment for h.o.m.os.e.xuality, b.u.t.tressed by letters from a psychiatrist and two dear friends.

No one would have guessed that who saw him with Beverly. It was a big chaotic party, the arguers in the kitchen, the singers in the study, the people who were listening to Hendrix and smoking dope in the living room. Lee propelled Beverly from one aspect of the party to another, his arm always around her waist or shoulders, feeding her pizza, pa.s.sing the bottle of wine back and forth. At first she refused marijuana-she"d tried it once before and hadn"t liked it-but eventually she took a couple of puffs, and got a little giddy and silly. Her indulging in the wine and the dope were both at least partly out of nervousness.

She was sure that Lee was going to ask her to spend the night, and she was building up the courage to say yes.

In fact, it was she who asked him, in a moment of relative isolation in the hall between the study and the living room. He answered with a pointed squeeze, the first time he"d touched her intimately that night, which made her squeal and then giggle again.

So Lee was in for a surprise an hour later, when it was a squeal of real pain and then blood on his sheets.

He hadn"t known; he didn"t think; he never would have done anything to hurt her. She said and did the right things, though, instinct sometimes working better than experience, and by morning Lee found himself both physically exhausted and emotionally in unfamiliar territory: For the first time in years, he was falling in love.

Later the next day, after some of the fog had dissipated from his brain, he told himself this was stupid.

There was no room or time in his life for romance. Romance was just a shackle, anyhow, a device through which men declared ownership of women and chained them to the kitchen and the cradle.

Besides, he was busy; the world needed changing. His emotions had been subverted by guilt over having taken her virginity-but h.e.l.l, she was the one who set it up! He ought to feel resentment, not this sentimental puppydog s.h.i.t.

But when she came through the front door that afternoon, he ran to her from the kitchen and almost broke his neck, slipping on the hall rug. She moved to help him up and they started wrestling playfully, then earnestly, and barely made it to the bedroom-almost literally, barely.

Incoming The six-man Viet Cong mortar team waited until it was nearly dark to move their two weapons into place. They did have a clear line of sight to the top of the other hill through some light brush, and didn"t want a sudden motion or stray reflection to give them away. They were less than a mile from the Americans, as a bird flies.Initial calibration-of the larger mortar, a Soviet M36 82-millimeter, was not difficult, because they had fired three test rounds from the target hill to here, earlier. Since the hills were the same elevation, the same angle of fire would be effective. The small mortar was an antique, a 50-millimeter j.a.panese leftover that was considerably older than the boys who carried it. The twenty-four sh.e.l.ls that went with it had come from a falling-apart box stenciled 1942; each round had been carefully cleaned and wrapped in oiled cloth. The one test round had worked, and the weapon had demonstrated sufficient range for this job. It could not be particularly accurate, though the two boys manning it were certain they would at least hit the hill with most of their twenty-four rounds. Their orders were to start firing when the others did; to fire as fast as possible and then run like sudden wind, abandoning the old thing.

The other four men had a more demanding job, since of course the new Russian mortar could not be abandoned. They would wait until the American fire base to the south was engaged in a fire mission elsewhere, which could gain them a few valuable minutes. Then a man with night gla.s.ses, 7X50 binoculars, would look at the target while they fired one round. If he saw where it fell, he would call out traversing instructions; if they missed the hilltop, they"d have to guess on the next round, and maybe the next. But they were confident they wouldn"t miss.

They carried forty rounds, and once they had the hilltop targeted, they would fire them all as fast as possible, one every three or four seconds. Then they would disa.s.semble the machine into its three parts-asbestos gloves for the man with the barrel-and run down into the valley.

That is, if everything went well. The enemy seemed perilously close. As they worked on their bunkers, you could hear the pickaxes clinking against rock, and occasionally s.n.a.t.c.hes of their guttural, unmodulated speech. If the Americans were able to zero in on the sound of the mortars, it could be swift death. The VC squad was just within range of their M60 machine guns, and they also were carrying two light mortars. The moonlight that made spotting easy would fall on both hills.

The lieutenant in charge was tempted to open fire now, while the Americans were out in the open. But it would be suicide. In the light, their position would be obvious. After sundown they would have a good chance to fire all of their rounds and escape.

Spider and his squad were still digging at sundown. Out of necessity, they quit before the bunker was quite as deep as might be desirable; about an axe handle. Four guys could squeeze in there if they had to.

They only had three layers of sandbags, and those were pretty lumpy, filled mostly with rocks. That was definitely not recommended, since there would be occasions when you were outside the bunker, firing from behind the sandbags. An enemy bullet could strike a rock and explode it into hundreds of fast-flying fragments. The argument articulated by Batman was that they would only be firing their rifles if the enemy overran the camp, in which case they were dead meat anyway. And three layers filled with rocks was better than one layer filled with pristine earth.

Spider hardly had the strength to open a can of food. He decided the world owed him a treat, though, so he did a can of chili and mixed in the little can of cheese sauce. He b.u.mmed a splash of Tabasco from Murphy and heated it all to bubbling with C-4. (This was one thing the engineers had over the infantry: the grunts had to heat their food with regulation heating tabs, which gave off a faint blue flame that took forever to warm up a can.) Murphy had noticed his b.l.o.o.d.y hands and sent the medic over; he gave him a Darvon for pain and washed the wounds with hydrogen peroxide and bandaged them with gauze. He said he would do the same tomorrow, gotta watch out for jungle rot.

It made Spider feel better to look slightly heroic, bandaged. The meal was good, and he drank half a Budweiser that Moses gave him. He was so tired he could barely blow up the air mattress.He lay back and sipped the beer, looking at the patches of sky that were visible through the trees. It got dark really fast here. On a moonless night the sky became remarkably black and deep, the Milky Way a billowing cloud. Spider had been an amateur astronomer as a kid, and still had taken his telescope out occasionally in high school and weekends home from college. The Southern skies were fascinating and mysterious, all kinds of stars he could never see from Washington"s lat.i.tude. He"d asked his mother to send a Southern star chart, but either she hadn"t done it or it had been lost in the mail. He would have to ask her again, or maybe Beverly.

The winter stars were impossibly high, Orion almost overhead. He knew the constellation under Orion was Lepus, the Hare, but there was a whole bunch of stuff under that one that he didn"t have the faintest idea about.

The fire base started a mission, at least two guns, a farawaybang-bang. bang-bang. Spider shifted around to look in that direction. Sometimes you could see the artillery rounds fly overhead, swift dull red meteors.

There was a faint sound like a champagne cork popping in the distance. Someone shouted "Incoming!"

and for a moment Spider was puzzled. Our own artillery? Then other people picked up the cry and suddenly there were people running every which way. Someone tripped over Spider"s leg in the dark and went sprawling in a clatter of rifle and helmet, cursed, kept running. Spider got to one knee and tried to orient himself, which way was the bunker, where"s my M16? He put his helmet on just as the first round hit, off to the left about fifty yards, a smoky orange flash and a sharp loud bang and shrapnel hissing and whirring through the air. Spider dropped to the ground and crawled very fast toward the bunker, f.u.c.k the M16, let"s just get under something. He found the shelter just as the second round hit, much closer, and toppled into a tangle of arms and legs. The other three shifted around so there was room for all of them to keep their heads below ground level.

Behind them came aspat sound, not as loud. "They got two," Batman said. "A light mortar and a medium one."

"Are we okay down here?" Spider asked. Anotherspat, below and to the right, by the LZ.

"Oh yeah we strack." Spider translated Batman"s monotone into "Boy, I wish we had another layer of sandbags," and agreed heartily. His mouth was cotton, his knees were water, he desperately wanted to pee, and his a.s.shole was doing a dangerous flutter. Do people actually s.h.i.t themselves if they get scared enough?

In the bunker next to them the artillery forward observer was shouting into the radio. He wasn"t sure where the mortar was, he said, but take the last coordinates, drop a thousand, fire one HE, see what happens. Spider knew enough of the jargon to translate: he wanted a single high-explosive round put a thousand meters from our position, in the direction of the fire base.