“Sure. What about Vien and Dao?”

  “They’re okay, looking around to see if there’s anymore to kill.” He grinned, “Back in my tenpin bowling days, we’d have called this a strike.”

  “Except pins don’t shoot back at you. Call in the others. We need to get back, get everybody into the trucks, and get out of here while the going’s good.”

  * * *

  Commissar General Tran Khiem listened to Lieutenant Lam make his report, and he didn’t like what he was hearing. They’d searched everywhere, beat every bush, followed every path, and found nothing. The junior officer was shaking in fear as he stood to attention in front of the senior officer, a man he knew was well aware of the absolute power of life and death he held over him.

  “They must be somewhere. They couldn’t just disappear.”

  “No, Sir, they couldn’t.” He didn’t know what else to say, so agreement seemed to be his best option.

  Khiem fingered his Makarov. He was desperate to find them, desperate to avoid the inevitable disgrace that would follow yet another failure. Yet he despaired of these fools, he doubted many of them had the sense to tie their bootlaces.

  “What about the camp? Did you check to make sure everything was secure?”

  Lam’s mouth dropped open. “General, I…uh… assumed there were more than enough soldiers at the camp to deal with the situation. It was more important they guard the prisoners than join the search.”

  He sighed. “Lieutenant, you are aware the intruders have come here to locate and free the prisoners. Did it occur to you they may’ve found the camp, and even now are attempting to help them escape?”

  “Well, Sir, no. I mean, they have at least fifty soldiers guarding the camp. My opinion is they’re enough to make it secure.”

  “Like this airfield was secure?”

  Lam looked around, surveying the sudden devastation that’d turned a secure and secret facility deep inside North Vietnam into a burning wasteland. “Uh, no Sir.”

  “No.” He knew he should’ve thought of increasing security at the camp, but that failure he could cover by finding another scapegoat. Lam would be ideal, but in the meantime, he needed him to lead his men to the camp to boost security. Provided the enemy hadn’t found the camp and provided the enemy hadn’t done what they’d done here. It was too awful to contemplate, and he had a dawning suspicion he was too late.

  “Get every man to the camp, now!” He shouted for his driver. “Bring the car, we’re leaving!”

  * * *

  They found the released prisoners distributing weapons they’d taken from the dead, as well as those they’d discovered in the camp armory next to the commandant’s office. Among them were several XM-177 rifles. Heller’s squad helped themselves and felt better from regaining familiar American rifles. He found several pillaged Colt M1911s in good order and grabbed one, along with several spare magazines. After he’d exchanged the flight suit for his uniform, he felt good. They had a long way to go, but if they got into another fight, at least he’d look like the genuine Master Sergeant Rick Heller. And if necessary, die like the genuine Master Sergeant Rick Heller.

  He knew it wouldn’t be long before the enemy reacted. They’d struck a terrible blow to the Communists, and he had little doubt they’d want to exact a terrible vengeance. He looked at Colonel Anderson. “Sir, you’re the senior officer, so it’s time to give the order to mount up and get out of here before they turn up.”

  “You’re right, but here’s the thing, Sergeant. It strikes me you got us out of here, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re in command. I’ll pass that on to my men.” He turned and shouted, “All of you, get into the trucks. We’re leaving!”

  They gave out a loud cheer. A few hours before they’d been a bunch of sick, shambling men who’d given up all hope of rescue. Now they were free, at least for a short time, and they were armed. Once again, they were fighting men. He looked around for Dao and Vien. They were talking with four escapers, all ARVN officers. Dao jogged toward him.

  “We should have a Vietnamese in the driver’s seat of each truck. It could give us an edge when the enemy spots us.”

  He noted he’d said ‘when’ not ‘if.’ There was no doubt they’d run into NVA soldiers, no matter which route they took. He nodded his agreement. The four ARVN chose one truck a piece and got the engines started. He walked toward the lead truck and climbed into the cab. Vien joined him, squeezing in between him and the ARVN driver, who was looking at him. “Which way?”

  He could’ve kicked himself. After everything they’d done, he hadn’t worked out where they were going. South, toward friendly territory? No way, it was several hundred klicks, and they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting there unseen, even with Vietnamese doing the driving. The other alternative was east, toward the South China Sea. If they made it, they could try to contact the Navy and request helicopters to pick them up. Except they had no way to contact the Navy. They’d have to steal a boat, somehow. It sounded harebrained, yet there was no other way.

  “East. Head for the coast and stay off the roads. If we’re gonna make it, we have to sneak through.”

  The guy nodded. “East it is.”

  * * *

  “Which way, Commissar General?”

  “One moment.” He glanced through the rear window where Lam’s troops had formed up, ready to follow. He considered the reports that’d come in. That the prisoners had escaped. Lam’s first instinct had been to send them to the south, assuming they would head toward South Vietnam. Unlikely. Those men had demonstrated they weren’t stupid, and they knew their chances of traveling all the way to the DMZ without being spotted were infinitesimal. They weren’t heading south.

  He briefly considered Laos but dismissed it. It would mean traveling two hundred kilometers to reach the border, and when they crossed, they’d be inside another Communist country and faced with more enemies. North was unlikely. China was one hundred and fifty kilometers to the north. Which left east. A much shorter distance, around twenty kilometers, and when they reached the coast, they could attempt to make contact with American warships lying offshore to send in a rescue party.

  “Wait.” He opened the door and stepped out. Cupped his hands and shouted. “You men bear responsibility for the escape. Now, you have a chance to make amends, but I warn you, any man who fails to make maximum effort will be shot. My driver will drive slowly to allow you to keep up, but you’ve been warned. Lam, if any man drops back, shoot him, and leave the body at the side of the track as a warning to the others. Remember, the honor of North Vietnam is at stake.”

  He didn’t say what he was thinking.

  As well as the honor of Commissar General Tran Khiem. As well as his freedom, and maybe his life.

  He climbed back into the car. “East. You will drive slower than usual, but not too slow. Make those useless bastards work hard to keep up.”

  “Yes, Comrade Commissar Khiem. Sir, do you believe we will find them? They seem to be resourceful.”

  Khiem wondered if his driver had just suggested he wasn’t resourceful. He doubted it. The man wouldn’t do anything to put his comfortable duty at risk. The alternative wasn’t worth thinking about. Sent across the DMZ to fight the Americans and South Vietnamese with their terrifying arsenal of devastating weapons. Hiding in dark, dank, diseased and airless tunnels, under constant siege from poisonous insects. Driving a senior officer was much safer. He wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his job. He didn’t notice the driver glance at him in the rearview mirror. Nor did he notice his strange expression. Almost as if he was wondering if his boss was up to it.

  But he did notice the man that suddenly sprinted out from behind a pile of timber, where he’d been hiding. “Commissar Colonel, look! It could be one of the intruders.”

  Khiem snatched out his pistol and cocked the action. “Stop the car!”

  He felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. The man was unarmed, so he should be easy to capture. One man who hadn’t got away rushed toward him, shouting at him with his hands up and for him to stop. With luck, he’d squeeze him for information that would assist them in hunting down the fugitives.

  He reached him and spat an oath. No need to squeeze this man for information. It was Quan, the South Vietnamese prisoner who’d agreed to become a spy for the North. The prisoners wouldn’t have given any information to a man they knew had turned traitor.

  He sighed. “Put your hands down, Quan.”

  He smiled with relief. “I thought you were going to kill me, Commissar General.”

  He’d like to have killed this miserable creature, but he was a high-ranking hostage certain to have information in his head that could be useful to them once Moscow had emptied his brain.

  “Of course not.”

  * * *

  Ten thousand feet above the dank jungles, paddy fields, and waving fields of elephant grass, watching intently for any sign of an enemy missile launch, the EA-6A completed yet another leg of the search grid. Major Vernon Watts banked the aircraft to starboard to alter course for the next leg. Since the pilots on the Forrestal had learned of the mission to locate the MIAs, they’d flown endless missions, flying long hours, their eyes often red-rimmed with sleeplessness, searching for that all-important flare.

  Since that first white flare, when pilots had bombed the crap out of what they later identified as a battalion strength force of NVA, they’d seen nothing more. Yet as long as those infantry guys were on the ground, they’d continue putting their lives on the line to give them the support they needed. After all, most of those prisoners they were searching for were their guys. Aircrew, pilots, navigators, weapons systems operators, bombardiers, the men who’d survived enemy missile hits only to fall victim to a brutal, inhumane, cruel, and relentless enemy.

  “Something down there,” Lieutenant James Laverne exclaimed, his normally calm, taciturn voice louder than usual, “About ten klicks southwest, looks like a fire. A big one.”

  “I see it.”

  Watts applied gentle pressure to the control column, bringing the aircraft loaded with electronic countermeasures equipment, including every sensor in the American infantry onto the new course. He dropped the nose to lose altitude and make a closer inspection of the target area. Impossible to make anything out, other than a huge fire, until they got close and spotted the devastation. What looked like the remains of two MiG fighter interceptors on the ground, as well as burned-out buildings. The damage was visibly extensive, although it became clear most of the fires had died down. Just enough for Laverne to spot it from altitude.

  Watts made his first pass at six thousand feet and banked into a diving turn to make a second pass at low altitude. He didn’t need to order the weapons systems operator to set the video camera rolling. Where there were MiGs there had to be an airfield, yet although the U.S. Navy and Marine Air Force had overflown the region for years, they’d never picked up a stretch of clear, level ground sufficient for jet fighters to take off and land. He recalled an F-4 crew had reported unexpected missile launches from this area where there was no reason for them to be there. It could be connected. Yeah, a camouflaged airfield meant anti-aircraft batteries, missiles, and radar-controlled guns. That would explain it. Unless there was another reason.

  He overflew the conflagration, watching carefully for any sign of anti-aircraft activity, yet there was none. Something had happened down there. Maybe a fuel dump had accidentally exploded. He briefly thought about the soldiers searching for the MIAs and speculated whether it could be anything to do with them, but he doubted it. His first theory, an accidental explosion, seemed most likely.

  He climbed for height and turned to fly the next leg of the search grid. If they were alive, which wasn’t likely, the half-dozen men of the Recon Team would be heading for the coast. He was tired, dead tired. Flying constant surveillance flights was mind-numbing, boring work that required the utmost concentration for every second. Lose mission focus for an instant, and a man could find a missile heading up his ass. He thought about the men those soldiers were searching for. If by some stretch of the imagination they’d managed to breach the awesome North Vietnamese defenses and found them, right now they could be on their way back.

  He unscrewed his thermos flask and tipped hot coffee into his mouth. Coffee so hot it burned his tongue.

  Jesus, that hurt! I needed that.

  The coffee did its work, the caffeine pushing his brain back into action. Fuck the boredom, fuck the tiredness! He was flying a warm, comfortable, air-conditioned aircraft. Not fighting his way past every man with a gun, and in this country, it could also be women with guns. Sometimes kids, they weren’t choosy about who they chose for cannon fodder. Those guys would be plodding across muddy fields, hacking their way through deep jungle. If they were heading for safety, they deserved the best he and every other flyer could give them.

  He glanced at Laverne. “You want a slug of coffee?”

  He passed him the thermos. Despite the caffeine, despite his resolve, he knew in his heart those guys were dead. They couldn’t have stood a chance.

  Chapter Nine

  They’d taken a wrong turn. At first, the track looked passable, but after the first five hundred meters, the dense foliage closed in around them. What looked wide enough for a truck to pass had narrowed to something more suited to a motorcycle. At first, they’d tried to push their way through, until they were forced to stop. A huge tree trunk had fallen across the path where it lay at an angle, too low to drive under. Even if they could shift the tree, which had to weigh several tons, the path petered out several meters further, probably from disuse following the fallen tree.

  He looked at the ARVN driver, a major he told him his name was Trung. “Hold it here. I’ll go back and tell them we can’t go any further. We don’t have a choice; we’ll have to back up.”

  He jumped down from the cab and walked back to the rearmost truck. Ripley climbed out from the passenger seat. “What is it?”

  “There’s no way through, we’re heading back. Tell your driver to reverse the way we came.”

  He nodded and climbed back into the cab. Heller was about to tell the men in the other trucks when he heard it in the distance. Engines. Vehicles getting closer, and he ran to each track in turn and told them to lock and load and get into cover. Men poured from the trucks, some ducked behind the wheels and aimed their rifles, waiting for targets to appear. A few dived into the foliage on either side of the path and lay on the ground. Waited.

  The noise of the trucks was louder. And then it began to fade. They hadn’t taken the turn. They were going a different way. They Probably knew the path petered out, and it hadn’t occurred to them the men they pursued could’ve gone that way. He let out a breath. They’d been reprieved, at least for now. He walked back to Ripley, who was starting back along the path, just in case they came back.

  “We got away with it that time, but now we have a problem.”

  His eyebrows rose, and his lips twitched into a smile. “You don’t say. I thought trying to break out of North Vietnam was enough of a problem for any man’s lifetime.”

  “Yeah. Here’s the deal. We turned off the main track, thinking this would enable us to get through unseen. If we back up, we’d have to take the main track. Which means we’d be following those vehicles we just heard drive past. We must assume they’re looking for us, and we could blunder into them, and drive right up their asses. It’s a no-go.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “We stay on this path. Get the tree that’s blocking us out of the way and hack a way through. Unless my navigation is wrong, this path heads due east. The coastline of North Vietnam can’t be more than a few klicks from here.”

  He shrugged. “If there’s no alternative, what’re we waiting for? So far, they don’t know we’re here, but sooner or later, somebody will stumble across us. A hunter maybe, or some peasant looking for a wandering water buffalo. They’ll run to the local cops or militia post, and we’re fucked.”

  “Right. We need to make a start. We don’t have long.”

  He called them together and explained what was needed. Colonel Anderson examined the fallen tree and came up with an idea. “If we find a way to raise it enough to get through, we can drive past and drop it back into place. It won’t be so obvious we’ve come this way, but even if it is, we don’t need to make it easy for them to follow. “

  “Colonel, that must weigh around ten tons.”

  “Closer to twelve I’d say. Sergeant, I was a civil engineer before I signed up for the Marine Corps, and I’ve got a good idea of how these things work. I know it won’t be easy raising that kind of weight, but it can be done. The trucks all have heavy tow ropes in case of breakdown, and I can rig up a kind of pulley system so we can raise it.”

  “You think it’ll work?”

  “Why don’t we find out?”

  They pulled the ropes from each truck and Anderson worked for an hour to make a harness to rig them to the tree. They needed more, levers and props, and men searched the area to find more fallen but smaller, lighter tree trunks a dozen men could carry back. He worked for three more hours, directing them to assemble the timbers into a structure that bore a faint resemblance to a crane gantry. A very crude crane gantry. It looked good, but Anderson wasn’t satisfied, and he directed them to take it back down and rebuild it in such a way that it would support the massive trunk.

  Darkness fell, and they still weren’t done. They carried on working into the night, and it wasn’t until dawn he pronounced himself satisfied. They were exhausted and hungry, yet they were breathing the heady air of freedom, and it kept them going. At least for now. Anderson made last-minute adjustments that took forever, but by mid-morning, they were ready. Men took hold of the ropes, others grabbed the levers, and he gave the signal to start. To everyone’s astonishment, the heavy trunk went up several inches. A man ran forward to prop it so it wouldn’t fall back, and he signaled for them to do it again. Another inch, another prop, and infinitesimally slowly, the trunk lifted.