enemy sprint into the tree line and disappear, before the captain could get a shot away.
“Shit!” Land said, looking at Hathcock, who was futilely trying to resist laughing. The captain began smiling too. “You dumb ass. He got away. Now we gotta pick up and move. He’ll be back with help.”
Carlos blinked and a curious expression came over his face, “Captain Land, what if we sat tight? We got our six o’clock covered by that patrol that dropped us off. If that gook wants to come back with his friends, who’s to say we can’t shoot ourselves a bunch of them. And, what if he brought back his boss. You know who she is.”
“Get on the radio, Carlos,” the captain said firmly. “Tell that patrol to close up on our rear and sit tight, and be ready for anything. In the meantime, I think we’d be better off at the other end of this clearing. We can set up in those low bushes on mat rise along the edge. They might come back with mortars or rockets, and I don’t want to be hanging out where old Nguyen saw us last.
“You’re right about that woman. She’s gotta believe there are a couple of bozos out here, after that little show of mature professionalism that we put on. She just might come out here lookin’ to capture herself a couple of easy pigeons.”
The two snipers cautiously crawled along the edge of the clearing, through the short palms and on to the upper reaches, where a thick stand of grass and elephant ears covered their movement. A slight rise in the earth made an ideal bench-rest for their rifles. They adjusted the camouflage around their position and settled into their new hide.
By noon, nothing had crossed their line of sight. The patrol that lay hidden far to their rear along a low ridge remained silent, too.
When the Viet Cong sniper reached the network of tunnels and underground chambers that housed his unit’s headquarters, his commander—the woman who hunted Marines at Hill 55—met him at the door. He told her of the two enemy soldiers whom he saw fighting at the edge of the clearing and urged her to hurry back and get them. The woman was hesitant. Where there were two Marines, there could be many more. She had planned an ambush for that evening and to reach the place where it would be set up, she would need to go over or around the hill in front of which the two Marines had shown themselves. After some thought, she decided not to cancel the evening’s ambush. She would decide whether they would go over or around the hill when they reached it.
Gnats and other flying, biting insects swarmed in the shade beneath the low plants and palms as the sun heated the humid afternoon. The air hung still in a hot house doldrums that left the two Marines stewing beneath the foliage, helplessly suffering from the bites of the hungry bugs that swarmed over them. Sweat seeped into Hathcock s eyes and dripped from the tip of his nose, while an army of tiny pests crawled around his neck, inside his ears, and on his eyelids and nostrils. Hathcock remembered hearing that the Japanese in World War II had a word for days like this—it translated as “buggy-hot.” He lay motionless. Any sudden motion could draw attention from an unseen enemy.
“Sir,” Hathcock whispered to his captain, who lay next to him suffering similarly. “You okay?”
“No,” came the captain’s sharply whispered retort. “I’ve just about had it. We don’t pick up a sign by sixteen-hundred and we’re gone.”
Hathcock didn’t want to complain, but the bugs were getting to him, too. He felt certain that an army of black ants had found then—way into his trouser leg and now waged battle on his loins. The reassuring comment from the captain made their stinging more tolerable.
Just then, Hathcock saw a sudden motion among the broken tree trunks at the crest of the hill. “Skipper. Look. Just at the top.”
The captain shifted his spotting scope slightly to his left and immediately saw the black-clad man, crawling on his knees through the maze of dead wood with an AK-47 in his hand.
“Don’t shoot, Carlos. He ain’t alone.”
“Sir”
“Look at the rifle. If he was a sniper, he would be carrying a long stick, not an assault rifle. Bet you money that he’s a scout.”
“Reckon he belongs to that woman?”
“Odds look promising. We’re in the middle of her stomping grounds.”
“I keep thinking how good a whole lot of folks would feel if we nailed her. After that night back at Hill 55, I haven’t been able to get the idea of her out of my head.”
“Don’t go gettin’ your hopes up. It’s likely we won’t get a clear shot at her, even if we see her. And, don’t forget, she hit An Hoa last night, and that is way over the other side of Hill 55 from where we are now. She could just as likely be laying back mere now, looking to catch herself another young boy to skin.”
“I know. Still, it don’t hurt none, wishin’.”
“While you’re wishin’, just keep your sights on old Nguyen Schwartz out there a snoopin’ and a poopin’.”
Land had guessed correctly, die Viet Cong soldier was a scout. He had left the tunnels two hours ahead of his patrol in order to disclose any enemy ambushes on, or around, the hill. If the hill was clear, he would wait just below die crest and signal his comrades to approach.
The little man spent more than an hour crawling on his knees and elbows through the heavy fall of splintered tree trunks that lay criss-crossed and tangled, like a heap of gigantic pick-up sticks.
“He’s definitely scouting,” Land concluded in a soft whisper to Hathcock. “Probably looking for us. Let him look.”
The black-clad man moved back to the hill’s crest and disappeared on the other side.
“Sir,” Hathcock said. “We either let another one get away, or we’ve got ourselves a whole stringer full of fish fixing to strike the bait.”
“He’ll be back,” Land said.
Hathcock looked at his watch. It was nearly 5:30 P.M., an hour and a half beyond the time they had planned to leave this blind. He wondered how long his captain would persist in the wait. He only hoped he wouldn’t give it up prematurely.
The November sun now stood just above the mountaintops that rose along the western horizon. It had turned from bright white to yellow and now deepened to a burning orange ball. Long shadows stretched below the trees.
“We’re losing our light, Carlos,” the captain said. “It’s time w? pulled in our lines.”
“Sir, ten more minutes. I got this feeling that any second…”
“Carlos,” the captain said, but the sight of a dim silhouette emerging at the hilltop stopped him. “The hilltop. Something’s coming.”
Hathcock looked through his scope and saw the outline of several figures emerging over the hill’s crest. “I can’t tell, Sir.”
“I can, Carlos,” Land said, looking through the more powerful spotting scope. “They’re VC. Check out the one that just squatted off to the left, just below the rise from the others.”
“It’s a woman! She’s pulling at her britches leg.”
“She’s taking a piss, Carlos.”
“Is that her? Is that the Apacne?”
“It’s her,” the captain said, now certain from his recollection of the photos and sketches that an intelligence officer at the division command post had shown him. “Carlos, hand me that radio handset. I think that our best chance of hitting them is with artillery. Read me the coordinates off your map.”
The answer to their radio call came quickly. The first shell exploded directly at the junction of the trail and the road, killing three of the seven Viet Cong there. Two ran down the trail away from where Hathcock and Land lay hidden. The woman, who was still squatting when the first shell exploded, fell on her face. Two shells exploded behind the first, and a VC soldier ran down the trail, toward the two Marines. The sound of more incoming artillery sent him leaping for shelter among a jam of logs.
The woman scrambled to her feet and, in sudden panic, ran down the trail, and down the hill, directly toward the two snipers hiding in the low palms and grass. She remembered how trouble always seemed to plague her on this hill. It was where her unit had had its headquarters before the bombers had laid it flat. She was running hard in panic, her heart pounding, and tears streaming from her eyes.
Hathcock tightened his grip around the stock of his Winchester rifle and centered the scope’s reticle on the woman’s chest. “Hold it. Don’t rush the shot,” he reminded himself. “Keep the cross hairs centered. Wait. Wait. Get her at the turn.”
