He had been hit twice. It didn’t seem fair. Witherspoon lay back, trying to get it all clarified in his head. How many of them could there be? How had the world turned so surrealistic on him?
“You doin’ good, sonny,” said Walls next to him. “Man, like we make these white boys
Witherspoon could hardly answer, he hurt so badly. It was a dream fight. Total silence, then the sudden flashes as the bullets whipped by, tearing into the walls of the tunnel, their own quick answers, and the stumbling fallback before the detonation of the grenades. How many times now? Three, four. How many had they killed? How many of their own grenades were left?
But worse: how much tunnel was left?
The answer was depressing: not much.
“Whooo-eee,” moaned Walls softly now, “we at the end of the line, boy.”
Behind them the tunnel stopped. It ended here.
“Nobody’s going home from this party,” Walls said, loquacious at the end as he had been at the start. “But we made them white boys do some paying, right, man?”
Witherspoon was silent. He’d long since lost the MP-5. He had his automatic in his hands, though he was shaking. He could hear the quiet slide of plastic against metal as Walls slid more shells into his Mossberg.
“Shame I couldn’t get this piece back to the guy,” said Walls, cycling the slide with a ratchety
“My wife never let me down,” said Witherspoon.
“Sure, boy. You just lie quiet now.”
The smell of powder was everywhere in the tunnel. Witherspoon’s mouth was dry. He wished he had a drink of water or something. His whole left leg was numb; he didn’t think he could move anyway, so at least it was good they had no place to run anymore. He was thinking a lot about his wife.
“Man, Walls. Yo, Walls.”
“Yeah.”
“My wife. Tell her I loved her, you got that?”
“Man, you think I’m going to be around to do any telling?” Walls chuckled at the absurdity of this idea. “Anyway, man, I bet she knows.”
“Walls, you’re a good guy, okay?”
“No, boy. I’m a very bad guy. Fact, I’m a motherfucker. I just happen to do good tunnel work. You best be quiet now. I think it’s coming on to nut-cutting time.”
And so it was. They heard the scuffles in the dark but had no targets. That was the terrible thing about it all: they could not fire until fired upon; it was a question of lying still and waiting for the world to end. Witherspoon raised the pistol, a Browning 9-mil. He had thirteen rounds in the mag, and then that was it. And there was no place else to go.
They could hear them getting closer now, edging along. Damn, these were brave men too. It pissed Witherspoon off to be matched against such good ones. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. But these guys, no matter how many you killed, they just kept coming. They were the best.
The 1st Battalion of the Third Infantry was only three hours late, the convoy having gotten all fouled up in the amazing pile-up of traffic outside the operational area.
There was something peculiar about these men, Puller thought, watching as they climbed down from the big trucks just outside his headquarters in the falling dark. Then it struck him: they were all handsome and white and their hair was cut short around their ears in a style he hadn’t seen for years, what used to be called white sidewalls; they had the odd appearance of Prussian cadets. He noticed next that instead of the ubiquitous M-16, black plastic and famous, they carried the old wooden-stocked M-14 in 7.62mm, a real infantry battle-fighting rifle. And then he noticed, good Christ, their fatigues were starched!
“Who the hell
“Ceremonial troops. They guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shit like that. They march in parades, bury people in Arlington. Pull duty at the White House. Hollywood soldiers.”
“Jesus,” said Puller.
He found the CO, a full bird colonel, rare for a battalion, even a reinforced one, and introduced himself.
“I’m Puller,” he said. “Colonel, get your men out of the trucks and distribute ammo. You can even chow ’em down if you’ve got time. But keep ’em near the trucks. We’re going to get the ball rolling real soon now, I hope, depending on what I hear from the Pentagon and whether this young hotshot I have working on the door problem thinks he has a shot at getting the shaft open.”
The colonel just looked at him.
“Sir, maybe you’d like to tell me what this is about.”
“Nobody briefed you, Colonel?”
“No, sir. I’m under the impression it’s some kind of nuclear accident and we’d be pulling containment duties.”
“It’s a night infantry assault, Colonel, and you’ll be pulling perimeter penetration duties, supported by a shot-up company of National Guardsmen who’ve already lost half their manpower, some state policemen, a local cop or two, and any high school ROTC units I can round up, and maybe, if the goddamned weather holds, a Ranger battalion now somewhere between here and Tennessee in a couple of C-130s. Your job is to get Delta in close so it can jump the silo. You might want to think about reforming your squad heavy weapons teams into an ad hoc machine-gun platoon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Brief your senior NCOs and your officers now. There’ll be a final briefing at 2000 hours. You can check with Delta staff for maps. I’ll expect all your officers to know the terrain backward and forward by then.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“You in Vietnam, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir. I was a captain with the 101st, a company commander.”
“Well, you’re back there, Colonel, except that it’s a little colder and a lot more important.”
Walls fired. He fired again. He fired again. Beside him, Witherspoon fired with the pistol. Walls could hear it going off like the bark of a dog. Meanwhile, heavy automatic fire came at them, tracer, and as it skittered overhead it whistled on back to the end of the tunnel, and began to ricochet. Spent rounds whirled through the dark space over their heads. It was like being in a frying pan at full sizzle, bubbles of hot grease dancing everywhere, flying through the air in angry flecks. That’s what Walls thought of. But of course it wasn’t. It was just the tunnel.
The Charlies broke off contact.
“Okay,” Walls said. “Goddamn, I think I got one that time. Man, can’t be too many left. Man, we may be out of tunnel, but them boys goin’ be out of
“Man, like to kill me a whole muthafucking platoon of them boys before I’m done!” He laughed again, and then noticed the silence from Witherspoon. He reached to him and found that the young soldier had died sometime during the fight. He had simply and quietly bled to death.
Walls shook his head in disappointment. Now who was he going to talk to? Man, this was worse than solitary.
He heard noises up ahead, the click of guns being checked and readied. Okay, white boys coming again. He tried to think of them as Klansmen, big crackers in pickups with ax handles and flaming crosses. Or big Irish Baltimore cops with red faces, motherfuckers on
He laughed again, threw the slide on the Mossberg, felt a shell lifted into place.
“Hey, come on, motherfuckers!” he yelled, laughing. “Come on, white motherfuckers, Dr. P got some shit for you boys!”
It then occurred to him that there was an even larger joke he could play on them! He could blow them all up! For hadn’t Witherspoon, the perfect little soldier boy, hadn’t he carried C-4 explosive in a block somewhere on him?
