‘Run a coupla service clubs down in S—town.’
‘Sounds real tough.’
‘It’s a living. You a reporter?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I know a few TV guys down country. Keep them happy, know what I mean?’
‘Right,’ said Prophett, huddling down in the seat, hoping the shakes wouldn’t get too bad. At least he could score there, maybe catch a Huey ride back up to the line. He draped a foot over the side of the jeep. ‘Camranh sounds fine t’me.’
‘I’d watch that,’ said Gallagher. ‘This road’s fulla cracks.
Hate to lose control with you hanging that leg over the side like —,
The words were hardly out of his mouth when they hit the land mine. Gallagher didn’t even hear the explosion; all he felt was the ungodly pain in the bottom of his feet, as if he had been hit with a baseball bat by Hank Aaron, and he was tossing head over heels in the air, trying to grab on to something, anything, only there was nothing to grab on to. He landed in a soggy ditch twenty feet away with a thunk that sounded like someone smacking a pumpkin with a board. The air hissed out of him. He rolled over on his back, out of the gooey mess, and stared up at the sky and thought, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, be kind to me. Don’t let me die here.
On the other side of the road the shattered jeep lay upside down, its wheels still spinning around, its undercarriage blown away. Prophett lay on his side, staring dumbly at his leg, which was trapped under the wreckage. He had forgotten withdrawal, the pain in his leg was so great. He slid up to a sitting position and pushed halfheartedly on the side of the vehicle, as if he thought it might just topple back upright. Then he passed out.
Then there was Wonderboy, rock star turned marine. He had left most of his face in the Mekong Delta.
Harswain was a short, lean stick of a man with a bushy mustache and hair like a porcupine’s and he still carried his swagger stick from the days when he was a DI at Parris Island. He sat on a log and drew little nothing doodles in the dirt with it.
‘You’ll know when it’s coming, pretty boy,’ he said to Wonderboy. ‘That round with your name etched into it. You’ll know it. It’ll come sighin’ ‘cross the field and it’ll spit in yer eye a second afore it eats up yer brain.’
He laughed.
Wonderboy felt a cold chill on the back of his neck. Fear nested in his chest and squeezed his lungs and he was out of breath. It was time for some relief. On the line for seventy-seven days. No break. Out of the first sixty that had gone up, there were fourteen left. He listened to Harswain and he thought about that bullet.
That was when Charlie hit. There was chaos — everybody running around, scrambling to get behind something, grabbing for weapons. Mail coming in. Harswain yelling at them as usual.
‘Get below his horizon,’ he was yelling and Wonderboy was snaking across the ground on his belly, crowding a downed tree and suddenly it was being chewed up a foot away and he cowered down behind it and got his piece ready and then he did a John Wayne, twisting, rising, throwing his rifle across the log, popping half a dozen caps at the jungle.
That was when he saw the bullet, or thought he saw it, that lead slug auguring through the air toward him as if in slow motion, spinning white-hot like an angry wasp, an ugly stub of lead whistling through the air.
He fell on his back with his eyes squeezed tight shut and waited, listening to more lead ripping the tree over his head, and then he dropped his gun and scrambled on his hands and knees away, toward the jungle, sobbing with fear, listening to Harswain’s scream, ‘Come back here, you lily-livered little freak, you. Damn you,’
