heard him fire a burst toward his back and saw it chew the ground up around his feet but he didn’t stop. He stood up and kept running until he couldn’t run anymore. He fell on his hands and knees and threw up.
He heard the flamethrower nearby, felt the backlash of heat from it and peered through the jungle grass. The kid was twenty feet away, burning everything in front of him.
Perfect cover, thought Wonderboy, scrambling in behind him. Then somebody yelled, ‘Incoming!’ and he heard the sigh of the mortar falling down from the sky, and he pulled into a tight little curl like a slug in a garden. It was a direct hit on the tank, and the flamethrower and the kid erupted in a giant splash of fire that swept over him and a moment before he passed out he felt the skin on his face begin to melt. .
Finally there was Corkscrew and Potter. Now, there was a pair. Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, had once run most of the class hookers in MoTown from the backseat of a gold-tinted stretch Lincoln, .while Potter had scratched out a living on an Arkansas farm where the earth was so poor ‘the ants climbed trees to fuck,’ as he delicately put it. They had come out of the war closer than twins.
They had been holding the hill in Dang Pang for two days against a bunch of VC that seemed w be everywhere.
On the morning of the third day Potter crawled around the top of the hill and checked pulses. The rest of his men were dead. Mortars had taken down most of the trees and rain had filled the shell holes with stagnant water. Baby mosquitoes popped from their eggs and skimmed along the surface of the smelly ditches. Now there were three of them. Potter, the poor Arkansas dirt farmer, and Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, a couple of fast-living Detroit pimps who got caught in the draft. Dogface infantry soldiers all, with about as much in common as a banana and a glass of gin.
Potter crawled back to the small bunker he had fashioned from fallen trees and dirt.
‘We’re outa everything,’ Corkscrew told Potter and Hammer. ‘Outa ammo, outa food, outa water,’ he said.
‘Outa luck,’ Potter groaned, clutching his stomach. ‘I gotta have a drink, Corkscrew.’
Corkscrew said, ‘You got a stomach full of shrapnel, man, if you drink, you’ll die.’
‘I’m dead anyway,’ Potter answered.
‘Bullshit,’ snapped Corkscrew. Hammer had said nothing. Corkscrew reached over and shook his brother to wake him up, and Hammer rolled over and toppled face down in the muck at the bottom of a ditch.
‘Ham!’ Potter yelled. He jumped down and lifted Hammer up and dragged him back to the top of the ditch. But Hammer’s body was cold and his eyes were sightless.
‘Oh God damn, God damn you all,’ Corkscrew screamed angrily. ‘You motherfuckers, come on up here. You want something, you fuckin’ apes, come and get it. .
When the relief column came up the hill, Corkscrew was standing over the wounded Potter and his dead brother holding his empty M-16 by the barrel, waiting for the VC.
Yeah, thought Earp, they’d all do in a pinch, but tonight Riker will do. He nodded to the man in the safari hat.
‘Checking out,’ Riker said. He took off his hat with ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidered across the crown in gold and swept his chips into it. He was wearing khaki cotton tennis shorts and a red tank top, his chest hair curling over its neckline, and while his thick black hair was turning gray and he sometimes wore gold-rimmed reading glasses, his deeply tanned arms and shoulders had the smooth muscles of a man who kept himself in top physical shape. He walked across the room and cashed in his chips to the portly man they all called the Honorable.
A thin, hollow-eyed Johnny Prophett got up from the poker table and urged Earp into a dark corner of the alcove. ‘Let me go on this one, Wyatt, please?’
‘C’mon, look at you. Your hands are shaking so bad you could mix a martini without moving your arm.’
‘A cup of coffee, a quickie . .
‘Johnny, some other time, okay? I’m being straight up with you. If I take you on this, you could get us all killed. Maybe next time, okay. .
‘I pull my own,’ Prophett mumbled, looking down at his feet.
