“Watson wouldn’t let something like that go, and he said he was going to make a formal complaint and see this man court-martialed. They argued, and Hauser said if he laid a finger on one of his men, he’d see him in hell.”

  I shrugged. “It sounds like he was just spouting off, but I’ll need to have a word with Lieutenant Hauser.”

  The half-smile still played on MacArthur’s face. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “Where will I find him?”

  The smile finally became a beam of triumph. “He’s up on Hill 871. I’ll find someone to guide you up there.”

  “Hill 871? I thought that place was under attack. Last I heard the North Vietnamese were all over them.”

  “I’m sure they’ll give you a warm welcome.”

  “The North Vietnamese?”

  “Probably, but I meant Lieutenant Hauser’s platoon. Good luck.”

  I walked out of the bunker knowing the bastard had sent me to my death. He was playing me, a macho challenge, the kind of thing a man finds hard to refuse. He’d executed my prisoner, Captain Tran Thieu, and I was next. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him shooting Thieu.

  The guy was facing a death sentence, no question. And Colonel MacArthur’s in the middle of tens of thousands of hostile Communist soldiers. He needs the murder of Major Watson resolved fast, before the situation inside Khe Sanh Combat Base descends into open warfare between Marines and ARVN. Did that give him the right to carry out a summary execution? No, it didn’t. And yet…

  I worked it out then, and maybe MacArthur was clever. The outpost on Hill 871 had come under attack, and that meant men would die. If Hauser was one of them, he could simply blame him and that would be a resolution. At least one to keep the ARVN happy. As for the Marines, they’d have to accept it and do what they did best. Fight like hell to defend the base and defeat the enemy.

  There was something else to factor into the equation. First me. I could report back to CID and tell them I wasn’t satisfied. Although if I got hit on the way up to Hill 871, that wouldn’t be a factor at all. There was another. If Hauser wasn’t the killer, and it didn’t seem likely, who had killed Major Watson? Whoever he was, he was still on the loose inside Khe Sanh Combat Base. Marine, ARVN, or Communist infiltrator, which meant he could kill again.

  I walked back to my bunker to dig out my bulky flak vest. I figured I was going to need it.

  Chapter Two

  I brushed the mud off the canvas-covered vest, strapped it on, and started digging for the rest of my gear when a quiet voice spoke from behind.

  “You planning on digging that any deeper or do you intend joining me on that hill?”

  I looked around, and the Ranger flashes on his camos were sufficient confirmation to identify him. He carried what I assumed was an M-16, until I identified it as the earlier Armalite AR-15.

  A Chinook was dropping in for a landing nearby, the noise making conversation impossible. They switched off the engines, the rotors spooled down, and normal conversation could be resumed. Apart from the incoming shells and sniper fire.

  “Who are you?”

  He held out a hand. “Ray Massey, Sergeant, Army U.S. Rangers. They said you needed a guide to get you up to Hill 871.”

  His face was streaked green with dirt and grease, and his uniform was different. Army Rangers. He carried a big pistol slung on his belt, a combat knife on the other side, an AR-15 rifle, and clipped to his webbing, a smoke flare. Designed for troops to pop smoke so incoming aircraft and rescue helicopters could locate them.

  “Carl Yeager, good to meet you.”

  “Did they say you were a Military cop?”

  “Army CID, that’s right.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Why is an investigator going up that hill?”

  “I need to interview a suspect.”

  “That’s one helluva way to interview a suspect. Can’t it wait until he comes down?”

  “No, that’s not possible.”

  A shrug. “It’s your funeral, buddy. If we’re going up there, now would be a good time before the commies lay down another heavy barrage. Are you ready?”

  “Lead the way.”

  They let us through the perimeter, and we began trekking cross-country, climbing toward the contested outpost situated three klicks from the perimeter. We’d barely made the first kilometer when a long burst of machine gun fire chattered over our heads, and we were diving to the ground, scrambling for cover. Several rifles joined in, firing short bursts, and we crawled forward, heading for a patch of jungle that looked thick enough to screen us from the enemy.

  Crouching in a shallow ditch, with more bullets whining over our heads, we were trapped. We couldn’t go forward, and we couldn’t go back. We were fucked.

  * * *

  Captain Le Linh, commander of the 155th PAVN assault battalion assigned the task of taking the enemy outpost at the crest of the hill, cursed his machine gunner. They’d stopped for a short time while they waited for their stragglers to catch up, and the man had spotted the two Americans heading in the same direction. If he’d held his fire a few moments longer, they could have brought every gun in the battalion to bear, and they’d be out of the way so they could continue their stealthy climb up toward the hill. Now he’d given the game away, and their task would be that much harder.

  “Cease fire, cease fire! Let them think we’ve left the area, so they’ll continue up the hill. With any luck, they won’t assume we’re about to join the attack. All of you men stay down and keep quiet. I’ll shoot the next man who pulls the trigger.”

  He was an officer with a reputation for extreme brutality. The Divisional Party Commissar had said extreme brutality was the only way to beat the Americans and their South Vietnamese lackeys. Some believed it. Others made a firm decision to stay out of the Captain’s icy gaze.

  Le Linh believed he had to prove his loyalty to Hanoi on every occasion. Slim and without the skin pockmarked by disease and poor diet, he was from Saigon, where he’d been an eager recruit to the Vietcong before he traveled north and joined the Army, the People’s Army of Vietnam. They were suspicious at first, and not just because of his family in the South. He was an educated man, with a degree in engineering from the University of Saigon, a bourgeois, middle class Vietnamese, smooth and urbane. Different from the coarser and more agricultural classes who held sway in the North. He often felt he was being assessed by the political commissars; whose cruel eyes were everywhere. Watching. Probing.

  Anything less than an overt and total commitment to the cause could result in his downfall. He’d lose his commission, and likely find himself in a punishment battalion. Sent in to absorb the initial enemy fire, or sometimes detailed to carry heavy loads along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Often a sentence of death, if the bombers didn’t get you, disease and poor diet would be enough. Although they carried backbreaking loads of food to their soldiers in the South, the porters existed on starvation rations. Food was for the glorious and brave soldiers of the liberation, not the men who labored to transport it on the arduous journey. They were expendable, easily replaceable.

  His men were quiet, fearful. Their pith helmets and tunics shrouded in thick foliage; they were invisible at any distance.

  He watched the Americans for a half-hour until they crawled away toward the slope, and Lieutenant Vo Chi Anh, a fanatical Communist, a man who claimed to have been born in the same village as General Giap, tapped him on the shoulder.

  “We are fortunate, Comrade Captain. They were going to the same hill as us. We will meet them again, and next time we will kill them.”

  “Yes, we will.” He surveyed the slope ahead of them, and the two soldiers were out of sight, “Tell the men to get moving again, Comrade Lieutenant. But make sure they stay out of sight. When we arrive, I want to give the Americans a big surprise.”

  “Their last surprise,” Vo grinned.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  The junior officer gave him a suspicious glance. “Are you not confident, Comrade Captain? Do you harbor doubts about our ultimate victory?”

  “My faith is unshakable, Vo. I will drive the Imperialists out of this place if I have to sacrifice the lives of every man in my unit, including mine.”

  He relaxed. “That is good.”

  “That includes your life, too, Comrade Lieutenant. I am certain you are prepared to make the supreme sacrifice.”

  The expression tautened into a grimace, and his fearful eyes contradicted his words. “As ever, Comrade Captain.”

  * * *

  He crawled back into the ditch, returning as silent as a snake. “I think they’ve gone.”

  “Does that mean we can go on?”

  “It does.” He paused as I started to get to my knees ready to crawl forward, “And it doesn’t.”

  Massey was the strong, silent type, and I had no idea how far his laconic act went.

  “Look, Sarge, I was infantry before I became a cop. Did a tour in country, and this time last year, I was inside the Iron Triangle searching for Charlie holed up in Cu Chi.”

  “Operation Cedar Falls?”

  “Correct. What I’m saying is I’ve been under fire, and I don’t need any bullshit. Do we go on or not?”

  He glanced at the NVA position and held his gaze for almost a minute. “We can go on, Yeager, but that’s not the issue.”

  “Then what is? I just want to get up this damn hill, talk to Lieutenant Hauser, and get back to Khe Sanh ready for the next flight out.”

  “Uh, huh. What worries me is where they’ve gone. You know they were fighting a pitched battle up there, and they gave the NVAs a bloody nose. They pulled back, but those guys don’t give up. If the soldiers who were shooting at us are sneaking up there to join their buddies, Hauser’s men could be in for a shitload of trouble.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  He grinned, and I wondered if he was enjoying it. One of those gung-ho Special Forces types who lived and breathed the adrenaline high of action. “We follow them and see where they’re going.”

  Shit.

  “Massey, we’re supposed to be going up to Hill 871 so I can interview a suspect.”

  He kept the grin in place. “Exactly, and if I’m right those commies will be heading for the same place.”

  “There are two of us, and I’m guessing a lot more of them.”

  “Probably. My guess is around a battalion, so we’ll need to be careful.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We’ll just have to be sneakier than they are.”

  We reached the lower slope of the hill and started up. It was hard going, walking bent double to hide our profile from any enemy soldiers who were watching, and we were halfway up when he froze, and I almost ran into him.

  “What is it?”

  “Up ahead. Sniper.”

  I couldn’t see a thing, but I took his word for it.

  “I’ll handle him. Wait here.”

  He disappeared, crawling into a patch of thick foliage and I waited, almost jumping out of my skin when the crash of a renewed artillery barrage shook the ground. Incoming fire from a fair distance away, and the shells whined overhead to thump down on the base. Several more salvoes rained down on the base, and then it was the turn of counter battery fire. Outgoing shells, and they’d be hammering at the enemy positions as much as fifteen klicks away.

  I recalled my history lessons, Dien Bien Phu, the French defeat in 1954, when the Viets dragged heavy artillery up into mountainous terrain, sheltered it inside caves dug into the hillside, and destroyed the French garrison. That time they were let down by a number of factors, and one was the failure of their Air Force to destroy the enemy. This time it was different, and our own aircraft were quick to retaliate. A flight of four F-4 Phantoms, the two-seat fighter-bombers, screamed overhead at about ten thousand feet, their noses pointed down as they hurtled toward their target.

  Someone had learned the lessons, and the only way to hit the enemy artillery was to respond so fast they didn’t have time to hide the guns. Distant explosions suggested the Phantoms had attacked their target, and inwardly I was cheering them on.

  Come on. Waste those mothers. Get them all, so we can go home.

  Except we couldn’t go home; everyone here had a job to do, and until it was done, we’d be stuck in this miserable shithole until the last NVA soldier had packed up his rice bowl and gone home. Massey returned as silently as he’d left, and I noticed the bloodstained hilt of the combat knife tucked into his webbing. We moved off and saw no further sign of the enemy, so we quickened our pace, stopping every few paces to watch and listen. If they were heading toward Hauser’s platoon, they’d need to know how many and from which direction.

  After one such stop, Hauser signaled it was time to move off. I took one step and froze, as his arm grabbed at my shoulder.

  “Hold it. Don’t move.”

  I didn’t move. “What’s up?”

  “The bastards left a booby trap, and you were about to step into it. Look down.”

  The fishing line was almost invisible, stretched across the game trail we were following. Massey parted the branches of the bush from where the line originated.

  “Shit.”

  What else can a man say when he sees his almost death staring back at him?

  A grenade was packed inside a cluster of fine bamboo darts. They’d be poisoned, I knew that much from my time prowling around Cu Chi. A few guys had detonated those things and died. They were the lucky ones. The darts would spear anyone unlucky to be close, and the points, dipped in a variety of toxins, including human feces, would result in a long, agonizing death from blood poisoning.

  The Ranger disconnected the line and made the grenade safe while I watched and sweated. I glanced at my watch, and incredibly, it was only 15.30. The first shells slammed into the base ten hours before, and here I was halfway up a remote hill, expecting to be shot at by a bunch of Uncle Ho’s soldiers determined to kill me.

  We carried on up the hill and almost ran into them. Like the man had said, a battalion of NVA soldiers. They were within five hundred meters of the outpost, taking a rest, drinking water, and a few smoked cigarettes. That’s what warned us, the stink of tobacco smoke. They were heavy smokers, and that suited us just fine.

  “What do we do now?”

  Massey was thinking hard. “We have to sneak past them and get to the top. There’s too many of them. You see that trail over there?”

  I didn’t see a damn thing. “Nope.”

  “It’s there. If we can reach it, it leads all the way to the top.”

  “Only problem is we’ll be in full view of the enemy.”

  “I gotta plan.”

  He took a smoke grenade from his webbing and laid it to one side. The radio in his backpack came out, and he spoke in a soft murmur. “Cobra calling base.”

  Cobra?

  They must have been waiting for him to call. “Go ahead, Cobra.”

  “I have an enemy battalion on the slope of Hill 871, due east of your position. I can make smoke five hundred meters below them, can you direct fire on them?”

  “Five hundred meters below 871, due east of the base? That’s an affirmative. You make sure you keep your heads down.”

  “That’s a given.”

  “Fire commences in three minutes.”

  “Roger that, Cobra out.”

  He stashed the radio, tossed the grenade, and left the area on the run, moving to the west of the NVAs. Massey checked his watch several times until he shouted, “Cover!”

  Shells screamed overhead from artillery and heavy mortars. The initial salvo was short, but they corrected, and the screams from dying men tore through the foliage.

  “Let’s go!”

  He was up and running, the crazy bastard, and I went after him. “They’re still raining shells on this hill.”

  “That’s right. They’ll keep their heads down.”

  “They’ll blow ours off.”

  He was running at breakneck speed, and I followed, praying if I died it wouldn’t be from our own artillery. Even better from no artillery, ours or theirs. We were climbing fast, and I struggled to gulp in enough air into my lungs. Everything became a blur, explosions, smoke, the stink of burned powder, even the sickening smell of burned flesh carried on the wind. We were going so fast I didn’t realize how close we were to the top until I almost tripped on a long line of barbed wire. A hand reached out to steady me as I plunged over the crest and pitched headlong into the mud. An American voice said, “Welcome to hell.”

  They were dirty, disheveled, and scared. The reinforced platoon had no illusions what they were facing. General Westmorland had trumped his strategy for months, to draw the NVAs into a clash of arms in a place he had chosen. These Marines hadn’t chosen anything. They followed orders, and the next hours and days would decide whether those orders had sent them to their deaths.

  Hauser was short and stocky, with a determined, square jaw. Pale-skinned, betraying a possible Germanic heritage, he looked the part, a leader of men, a man who’d take his unit to hell and back.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I came to talk to you, Lieutenant. Warrant Officer Carl Yeager, I work for Army CID. This is Sergeant Massey. He helped me get up here. It’s about Major Watson.”

  I picked myself up, and he glared at me. “Are you serious? Do you know what’s going on here?”

  I glanced around at the barren patch of dirt that constituted Hill 871. Three men lay wounded, and others were assisting them with dressings and antiseptics. A body was barely hidden beneath a shelter, and more bodies lay around the perimeter. NVA.

  “I can guess. I’m sorry, but Major Watson was murdered, and they thought you’d be able to throw some light on what happened. They told me you had a heated argument about him accusing one of your men of theft.”

  We automatically ducked as a mortar shell screamed overhead and exploded somewhere down the slope. I was still brushing dirt and debris from my uniform when I straightened and became aware of his hostile gaze.