'No, I didn't hear a thing,' said Donny.
'The chatter, you know, the usual stuff.'
'Okay, do me a favor, Pork.'
He always called Donny 'Pork.' He called all his spotters Pork. He'd had three spotters before Donny.
'Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I thought I heard a syllable that sounded like 'gent.'' 'Gent? As in gent-prefer blondes?'
'You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent.'
Donny's fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured militare se made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha, Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it's raining. It meant nothing.
But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with concentration, un shivery in the wet, hardly even human in his intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter's eyes, 100 percent American redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an odd grace and efficiency to him.
He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home, not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer, and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter bitch Duty, whom he'd never once cheated on, whom he'd honored and served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty- five and another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he'd won some big civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine too, back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent, hard scrabble times, of which. he preferred not to speak and on whose agonies he would remain forever silent.
He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He never shot if he didn't see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed. Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was super cool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business. It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn't love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar, the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-pi astre bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was pretty funny.
But in the end, it would kill him, Donny thought. The war would eat him up in the end. He would try one more brave and desperate thing, eager somehow to keep it going, to press himself even further, and it would, in the end, kill his heroic ass. He'd never hit his DEROS. For boys like this, there was no such thing as DEROS. Vietnam was forever.
He reminded Donny of someone but Donny hadn't figured it out. There was something about him, however, oddly familiar, oddly resonant. This had struck him before but he could never quite nail it down. Was it a teacher somewhere? Was it a relative, a Marine from his earlier tour or his time at Eighth and I? For a time, he'd thought it was Ray Case, his furious platoon sergeant there, but as he got to know Bob, that connection vaporized. Case was a good, tough, professional Marine, but Bob was a great Marine. They didn't make many of them like Bob Lee Swagger.
But who was he like? Why did he seem so familiar?
Donny shook the confusion out of his head.
Swagger sat under the poncho, the water dripping off his boonie hat, his eyes almost blank as he listened to the crackly tapestry of radio. He was as equally laden as Donny: the taped bull barrel of his M40 sniper rifle-really just a Remington 700 .308 Varmint with a Redfield
9X scope aboard--poked out from the neck of his poncho as he did what he could to keep the action and the wood, which would swell with moisture, dry. He also carried four M26 grenades, two Claymore bandoleers, an M57 electrical firing device, a .45 automatic, two canteens and a pack full of C-rats (preferred poison: ham and powdered eggs), and seventy-two rounds of Mil 8 Lake City Arsenal Match ammo, the 173-grain load used by Army and Marine high-powered shooters at Camp Perry. But he was a man who traveled well prepared, he had a Randall Survivor knife with a sawtooth blade, a Colt .380 baby hammerless in an aviator's shoulder holster under his camo utilities and, strapped to his back, an M3 grease gun and five thirty-round magazines.
'There,' he said.
'You hear it? Swear to Christ I heard something.'
Donny had heard nothing in the murk of chatter, still, he slowed his diddling and redialed, watching the little numbers on the face crackle through the gap as he shifted them. Finally he lit on something so soft you could miss it entirely, and he only received it because it seemed to be right on the cusp of the megahertz click to another freak, if he took the tension off the knob, the signal disappeared.
But, raspy and distant, they did hear it, and the words seemed to define themselves out of the murk until they became distinct.
'Anyone on this net? Anyone on this net? How you read me? Over? Urgent, goddammit, over!'
There was no answer.
'This is Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have beaucoup bad guys all over the goddamn place. Anyone on this net? CharlieCharlieNovember, you there, over?'
'He's way out of our range,' Donny said.
'And who the hell is Arizona-Six-Zulu?' Donny wondered.
-'He's got to be one of the Special Forces camps to the west. They use states as call signs. They call 'em FOBs, forward operating bases. He's trying to reach Charlie Charlie November, which is SOG Command and Control North at Da Nang.'
