Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (25 page)

The sun was just peeking over the opposite ridgeline and the valley was still in mist and shadow when Gonzales and Schultz set up rear security in the treeline behind the bluff while Mopar, Marvel, and Wolverine crept forward on hands and knees to part the ferns and get a look at the enemy. The valley was full of soldiers, and even in the faint light and gray morning haze, Mopar could see them stacking crates and rice bags, fetching water from the stream, cleaning weapons, sipping from canteens, stretching, resting, and standing around dug-in fires in idle groups, waiting for breakfast. The enemy resupply had come—not from the river and across the ridge, but overland, through the valleys and draws and passes—and with the resupply had come reinforcements. Mopar had never seen so many gooks bunched up like that before, and the sight was awesome and exciting.

He tapped Wolverine on the arm and reached for the binoculars, but Wolverine pushed his hand away and shook his head, unwilling to risk giving the team’s presence away with lens glare. The gooks were close—some of them no more than fifty meters away at the foot of the bluff—and were easy to see without binoculars.

Most of them, at least most of them that Wolverine could see, were in sweaty green uniforms and either brown boonie hats or gray pith helmets. Judging from the way they looked around in the light of daybreak, they’d moved in during the night and were now getting their first look at the valley. Wolverine motioned for Mopar and Marvel to ease back away from the bluff, and then, after one more look, he pulled back with them. After hunkering down over his headset to send in a report, he scribbled on his field pad, tore off the top sheet, and passed it around to the others.

“Shame to pass up a clusterfuck target like this. Let’s show them some arty.”

Marvel was the first to read the note, but the last to nod his approval of a fire mission. He wanted to be on the other side of the ridgeline when the rounds started coming in, but Wolverine seemed determined to stick around long enough to observe and adjust for effective fire, and Marvel had no choice, finally, but to grin and nod, and go along.

Wolverine glanced at his map, then gestured for Marvel’s headset. He took the headset, folded his Lurp hat and sweat towel around it, and called the artillery. He warned the Leg in the Fire Detection Center to whisper his readback, then he sent in his fire mission: “Troops in the open, two rounds white phosphorus on preplotted concentration Bravo Six-Nine, will adjust.”

Bravo Six-Nine was a hundred-fifty meters away, in the darkness on the far side of the valley. Wolverine and Marvel crept forward and hugged the ground, waiting for the crash, waiting to adjust to the flash and white smoke of the WP rounds. The whole team waited and listened for the distant guns, listened for the shells to come ripping through the air, but they heard neither, for the shells didn’t pass overhead and the guns were too far away. But the gun crews were fast and accurate. Seconds apart, the two shells hit right on the preplot, bursting white and throwing up a gentle-looking rain of burning phosphorus that pattered down like sizzling water all around. The shells had been deceptively quiet, hitting and exploding with more of a
crack
than a
boom,
but the screams and curses that followed them were loud and horrible, and very, very satisfying.

Wolverine was on the horn as soon as he saw the first flash on target. He adjusted up fifty for the stream bed, lined up another gun or two, then called in HE—high explosive—to sling a little shrapnel around. The gun crews were on their toes today. For more than a week they’d been firing nothing but random harassment and interdiction on unobserved targets. Now they were delighted at the thought of racking up some body count. Even the Leg in the Fire Direction Center began to get into the spirit of things, whispering on the horn and giving Wolverine a perfect readback every time he called in an adjustment.

“Ten confirmed. Thirty-five probable.” Wolverine could only guesstimate the body count, but he felt he had to give the gun crews some sort of encouragement, so he gave them some numbers.

The high-explosive rounds began to come in fast and tight—
boom! boom! boom!—
shaking the ground, tossing off storms of shrapnel, blowing dirt, branches, grass, rice sacks, and men into the air. Dirt, debris, and spent shrapnel spattered on the face of the bluff, and Marvel covered his ears so he wouldn’t hear anything flying past his head and get spooked. Surviving artillery was pure luck, and he figured a man could be just as lucky with his ears protected.

Impatiently, Mopar crawled forward to peek out through the ferns, but Wolverine grabbed his rucksack and pulled him back, then hunkered down with his headset and brought in a second and a third gun. The valley was swarming now with angry gooks, screaming gooks, shouting gooks, crying gooks, and dying gooks.

The crashes, the explosions, the pandemonium and panic in the valley, were incredible. Once more Mopar crawled forward to peek out through the ferns, and this time Wolverine didn’t stop him. All the gooks were down now, except for one wounded man who jumped up and down in the stream, waving the stump of his left arm in the air, screaming and cursing, firing back at the sky with his good hand until he exhausted his magazine and fell back into the bloody, muddy water to die.

The headset in his hand and Marvel tagging behind, Wolverine joined Mopar in the ferns. He peeked out and grinned. He felt like Jehovah Himself, sitting on the bluff, calling down fear, death, and destruction on the poor dudes in the valley. Whispering into his headset, he methodically walked the 155s up one side of the stream and down the other, then blasted the feet of both ridgelines with the smaller 105s. Between explosions he could hear the poor dumb fuckers on the other side going nuts, calling for their mothers, pleading for medics, cursing and shouting and trying to get their shit together. But they didn’t have a chance. The rounds kept coming in, falling right and left, up and down, north and south and east and west. Wolverine was having a high old time. Just to ensure a uniform pattern of destruction, he brought the 105s in on the bottom of the bluff, scaring the other Lurps, forcing them to shrink back and make like turtles, cringing against the noise and falling twigs, half-expecting a rain of hot metal.

“Got to keep the whole place jumping!” he whispered to himself as he rose up on his knees to watch three rounds of white phosphorus burst in the tall grass and set it on fire.

“Die, you pissants! Die!” he chuckled, loud enough for Marvel to hear him over the screams and noise in the valley. “You fuck around, you lay around!” he exulted. “You snooze, you lose! Back to hell, you little pissants! I got you now!”

He leaned closer to Marvel and cupped his hand next to his mouth. “I love it!” he half-shouted over the crash of incoming shells. “Artillery is a beautiful thing once you learn to appreciate it!”

Marvel gave him a quick and nervous smile, then ducked and covered his ears as two more rounds hit the foot of the ridge. Wolverine was flipping out. He was bringing up the 105s too close to the team now. Worst of all, he was sticking around to enjoy the show. A shell hit halfway up the slope, jolting the team and bringing a shower of twigs and dirt and broken branches down on them. At the next lull in firing, Marvel peeked out apprehensively from the concealment of the ferns.

Wounded men were everywhere, thrashing and moaning and screaming. Some of them were on their feet, staggering around in confusion; others crawled up on the mounds of loose dirt the shells had thrown up, as if hoping the soft, warm soil would make their pain go away. One man had been flung into the branches of a tree, and his intestines hung down from the branches like shiny yellow hose. But most of the dead were harder to spot than the wounded because they looked like piles of dirty laundry, not men. Marvel wasn’t about to count them just so the artillery could have its body count.

The damage was terrible, but not all of the men were dead or seriously wounded. Marvel watched, fascinated, as they began standing up and looking around, policing up their weapons and forming into tight little clusters—men again, but no longer soldiers, as they huddled together instead of spreading out the way they should have.

Wolverine wasn’t through with them yet. Another volley came screaming in, and Marvel ducked back, horrified at what he’d seen, angry at Wolverine, and very anxious to get the hell as far away from that valley as he could.

But first he had to take one more look, just to be sure he’d never forget what he’d seen. A shell had just hit in the middle of the stream, and other shells were still coming in, exploding on the slope of the opposite ridge. Yet already men were spreading out in an assault line on the near side of the valley. An officer in a gray pith helmet leaped up on a mound of dirt, ignoring the wounded men clawing at his pant legs, ignoring the shells exploding on all sides, and began waving a little blue flag on a bamboo pole over his head. Marvel could see that he was shouting, but he couldn’t hear him. Suddenly the enemy officer pointed the pole right at the bluff where the Lurps were hiding and dipped it once, twice, three times. Marvel and Wolverine ducked into the ferns together, pulled Mopar with them, and scrambled back to the others. Somehow the gooks had spotted them, and now there was no time to lose.

The whole team was up in an instant, falling back into the treeline and getting away from the bluff. Without waiting for them to reply, Wolverine ordered the relay to have Pappy crank up the gunships, then hung his headset on his rucksack strap to free his hands. But Marvel ran with his headset in hand, bouncing against his cheek, as he panted over the horn, begging the artillery, “Keep it coming! Fire for effect on the goddamn slope, but don’t bring it down on top of us!”

Mopar was flat bookin’! Vines, bushes, saplings, thorns—they were all in his way, but none of them slowed him down. Marvel’s fire mission came crashing in behind them with a jolt, spewing shrapnel and branches and dirt up the slope and into the treeline, but the team kept running. Mopar glanced back to make sure no one was hit, then continued to plunge into the jungle, heading for the tall trees and the dark canopy, his Swedish K on automatic and his CAR-15 loose, banging against his chest. He could hear gooks yelling behind him, and it sounded like a thousand men were swarming up the slope now. Mopar had to get the team to high ground, where they could hide or hold out until the gunships came to save them, and he had to do it fast.

Shells were still falling in the valley, but even over their crashing and booming and wham-bam impact, Gonzales could hear gooks shouting back and forth, hacking through the thick stuff with machetes, beating the bush like tiger hunters. Gonzales didn’t want to be hit from the rear, so he tried running sideways to cover his security zone, but he tripped and fell in the thorns, then scrambled to his feet with blood running down his forearm. He looked back once at the team’s clear wake of bent branches and broken vines, then, swearing to himself in Spanish, he turned his head to the front just in time to see Schultz lose his footing and go down on the slippery rocks of a wash.

“My fuckin’ ankle!” Schultz whispered, trying to keep the fear from his voice. “Twisted it.” He grimaced when Gonzales pulled him to his feet, but with Gonzales pushing from behind he managed to grab some vines and pull himself out of the wash. Gonzales heard a rifle bolt crash home off to his left rear. He paused just long enough to whip a grenade out of his pouch and pull the pin, then let fly the handle and tossed the grenade in the direction of the sound. He scrambled madly up the bank and almost knocked Schultz on his face trying to get away.

The grenade went off with a dull boom in the wash. A burst of automatic fire clipped the twigs over his head, but Gonzales was ready. He lobbed another grenade toward the wash, but it hit a branch, bounced off to the side, and went off so close a piece of shrapnel whizzed by his ear.

“Cut it out!” Schultz yelled over his shoulder. “You’ll blow us all away!” He stumbled again, and would have gone down if Gonzales hadn’t been there to catch him.

“Fuck the ankle, man! Drive on! Airborne! Run!” Gonzales panted as he shoved Schultz ahead of him. A sudden burst of fire clipped the leaves a foot from his head. Gonzales forgot about Schultz, spun around, got off a longer burst of his own, then ducked to the left and got off two more short bursts, firing by instinct, firing blindly, without a target. He didn’t stick around to see if he’d hit anything. Changing magazines on the run, he caught up with Schultz and urged him on. They were under the canopy now, but he could hear gooks jabbering and shouting behind them, and more gooks struggling upslope on the left flank. Gonzales tossed another grenade behind him, then pitched one more down the slope between the trees. He now had only three grenades left, and he hoped they’d be enough to slow the
comunistas
down when they got to the high ground.

There was another burst of firing to the rear, but the trees took the rounds and the Lurps just kept on running. The gooks were making noise on purpose now, crashing in the bushes, shouting, and firing blindly in hopes of scaring the Lurps into firing back, but the Lurps knew better than to fire now, and continued to run until they made the crest of the ridge. Here, they slowed down and began picking their way cautiously through the trees. The gooks weren’t as close as they sounded, but Wolverine couldn’t raise the relay on the horn when he called again for gunships, and he was getting a little worried.

Schultz was barely keeping up. He passed the sawed-off grenade launcher and a bandolier of antipersonnel rounds up to Marvel, then tripped over a tree root and would have fallen against Wolverine if Gonzales hadn’t grabbed him.

Marvel hung the bandolier across his chest and slung the grenade launcher under his arm where he could swing it up quickly. He touched the haft of his dagger for luck and turned to sweep to the right, where—so far—there had been no sounds of flank movement. He was sweeping his security zone out of force of habit now, out of good training, out of caution and curiosity, out of a fine sense of responsibility, but he didn’t expect to see anything. Suddenly his radio headset crackled with static, and the Fire Direction Center came calling across, as clear, relaxed, and loud as an AM hillbilly disc jockey.