body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay, because there was no hotter place, either.
Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.
He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to on. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said 'Fuck' under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.
The problem with the Pricks wasn't only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives.
Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed send.
'Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?'
He pressed receive, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain's own vagaries at play, sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn't.
He tried again.
'Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?'
The response was the same.
'Maybe they're all asleep,' he said.
'Naw,' said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, 'it's too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying.'
Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.
'I'm going to the backup freak,' he finally stated.
The sergeant nodded.
Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.
They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net, some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand, some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west, some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.
Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.
'Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here, yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?'
'Tell 'em we're drowning,' said the sergeant.
'Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we're all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over.'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over.'
'They want to know, do you want to call an abort?'
The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.
'Affirmative,' he said.
'No bad guys anywhere.
They're too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell 'em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible.'
'That's an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over.'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You'll have to park it until we can get airborne again.'
'Shit, they're souped in,' said Donny.
'Okay, tell 'em we'll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain't bringing home any scalps.'
Donny hit send.
'Foxtrot, we copy. We'll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over.'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out.'
The radio crackled to silence.
'Okay,' said Donny, 'that about ties that one up.'
'Yeah,' said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.
'Pork,' he said after a second or two, 'was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?'
The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.
