2
The hunter-killer unit of Operation Green River hid in deep woods roughly ten klicks north of LZ Mary, a forward base for clandestine ops on the Ca Mau. The official parent of record, Alpha Company, carried three platoons on its books. Each of these subdivided into three squads, a squad being, theoretically, three four-man fire teams and a squad leader. That was on paper.
In reality, one of the forty-three-man platoons, Alpha's recon outfit, was a cover for a two-squad insertion probe being run by the mysterious USMACVSAUCOG, a group mandated in the secret pages of a National Security Council directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a “non-skid jacks” in the spook parlance. Sensitive wet work was their specialty of the house: over-the-fence deals and “special” actions such as Operation Green River, which were meant to stay off the books.
The hunter-killer unit, a fire team in itself, was unique. It consisted of only one man: a sociopathic, heart- eating behemoth named Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, a serial killer and mass murderer who'd been turned and set free in the field to take care of Uncle's dirty laundry. He was happy in his work.
The “unit” was approximately the size of a large freezer stood on end and rounded off, six feet nine inches tall, four hundred sixty-odd pounds of unrelenting hatred, an abused and tortured child who'd grown up with a talent for destruction, and owned a well-earned reputation for having taken a human life for every pound of his weight.
Chaingang Bunkowski, whose jailhouse nickname had derived from his killing tool of choice, a three-foot, tractor-strength chain wrapped in friction tape, did not care who died just so long as someone did. He was an equal opportunity destroyer, and he would waste a human without regard to race, color, or national origin. At the moment, hiding in the deep woods near an intersection of map grids designated Snake Eyes, he was enjoying a scene of bloody carnage. Two dozen of SAUCOG's finest were getting their asses lit up, and he was enjoying it fully. He hated his own men as much as he did the little people. They were all human—his natural enemy as he saw it. It pleased him to watch them die.
This was Charlie's AO, a dangerous place of twelve-foot tides and stinking mangrove swamps, and the night had come full of spooky moonlight, fog, mad moths, and kamikaze mosquitoes the size of tarantulas. The previous day, a hellish time of fear and ceaseless bug swarm, Mr. Charlie had stalked the insertion team and suckered them into an ambush, and Operation Green River was now merely one more fucked-up Vietnam disaster.
Inside the strange mind of the beast, Snake Eyes stared out of his memory. The grids were so named because, on a military map, the intersecting features, a river and canal, vaguely resembled blue eyes on either side of a long nose of rice paddies. The mission had brought men in on foot because the passage of watercraft was made impossible at each low tide.
Chaingang was slightly to the southwest, in woods that bordered a ridge bank and slough parallel to the nearest canal, which was where the two squads had been ambushed. Only their tail man, who lagged behind the column and moved at his own snail's pace, and one other hardy camper survived the ensuing firefight, such as it was.
As a secret spectator, Bunkowski's only interest in the swift and unilateral contact was, first, in surviving, and then perhaps in assessing the degree of vulnerability to whatever easy targets might present themselves.
The other Caucasian to live through the ambush was a grunt named Meara. He was alive, but badly injured. Terminal screaming pain, the kind of eschatological stuff that surrounds and hurts without mercy, had him in its lock. Deceptive, coming first as smoke, wispy and bearable pain snaked out at him like the tendrils from a flame. Then it became dangerous and oily and it frightened him with its unforgiving nature. Billowing, dense, impenetrable clouds of pain choked him; suffocating end-of-the-world pain blanketed Raymond Meara, half-assed mercenary.
He felt it next as fire. It lingered in his throat and lungs, a double-barreled burn that one bit into like a chili pepper, a thing so hot that a single seed tasted like sucking on the end of a flame thrower. He felt it deep in his military fillings; tasted the scorching pain on his tongue. It enveloped him with the intensity of turbs, after-burners, blast furnaces, refinery flame-off, back-blast, this oilfield-Armageddon-hot pain.
He began to lose it with the heat mirage shimmer of agony. Ray Baby Meara, cut off from his fellow ground pounders, who were lost somewhere back behind him, swallowed by the earth, was befuddled by the pain that burnt him as it screamed in his ear.
“Callsign to handle, you copy? Over.” It shrieked at him over the radio.
“Bounty Hunter, Pallbearer Six Actual,” crackled through the fierce heat.
“Most frigging affirm, Pallbearer Six.” The Command Post. Six Actual, the Man his own self.
3
The beast sensed something, another presence, a thing that went unidentified, but these were the important nudges that he always listened to with the greatest care. The thing that had saved his life innumerable times poked him again, and told his life support systems to saddle up and hustle.
He moved, an apparition in the darkness of the woods, a freezer-big thing in a cammoed tarp the size of a small vehicle, loaded with a ruck most men would not be able to lift. In one enormous gloved hand he carried a belted M60, the other held his master blasters and det gear. His huge, meaty chest was covered with grenades, many of which were short-fused and meticulously taped to him. A massive fighting Bowie hung upside down from his Alice unit, and everywhere you looked there were claymores strapped to him. One custom-made 15EEEEE bata boot sprouted its own “hush puppy'—a silenced .22 sentry-duster, and across the back of his humongous duffel a sawed-off twelve gauge topped off the ensemble. Unlike the usual combat loads, Chaingang's twelve was filled with a curious mix of sabot-sleeve and fleshette loads. The first shell was a power-load behind a hardened lead slug in polyethylene—it would penetrate an engine block at close range—and the next capped a hot load behind twenty needle-nosed nails. They fanned out at three thousand f.p.s. Tree-cutters.
Bunkowski was literally armed to the teeth: Part of his arsenal was a martial technique he'd perfected during long, hard time in the slams, a vile thing called the Breath of Death. There was no more deadly hunter-killer team than this lone assassin.
Stocked with enough freeze-dried long rats, the so-called LURP rations that were a specialty of the house with recon patrols out in the superbad bush, Chaingang could go for weeks without resupply, living off the fat of the land, so to speak, taking a bit of protein here and there ... roving and killing.
The big death dealer silently blended into the blackest pocket of shadows and was gone.
4
Time shifted. Tenses commingled and became confused. Then was now. Past was future. Raymond imagined that he keyed his radio and whispered for blessed relief from those nagging aches and pains.
Bounty Humper One, he thought, calling in air support, we got mystery aggressors. Phrases wobbled and curved grotesquely in the heat, and Meara's imagination distorted them like the visions in a funhouse mirror.
They're on the way, Bounty Mountie One. Gut up and hang tough! The phantoms were coming. Phantoms streaking out of Udorn; fast movers that would come and get some. Light up slopes. Kick dink butt. Take serious names and dig big gook graves. It was blazing noon inside Meara's head.
