and U.N. flags.
“Ain’t that somethin’?” D’Lupo said, taking his infrareds off, as he, like others, was prone to severe headache from the goggles if he left them on too long. “Gooks welcoming U.S. soldiers. I’m gonna tell my grandchildren ‘bout this one.”
“You’ll tell nobody, D’Lupo,” a Delta first lieutenant said, “if you keep callin’ ‘em gooks. Remember what the general said — he’ll cut your prick off!”
“All right,” D’Lupo riposted. “I’ll call ‘em ‘Charlie.’ “
“Shit,” Martinez cut in. “You tryin’ to sound like a vet?”
“Listen, dick brain, I figure in a coupla hours we’ll start being vets.”
“If you last that long,” Martinez said.
“Thanks a lot, Marty,” D’Lupo charged. “You’re all laughs, you know that?”
Dave Rhin, a black man from Chicago, flicked up his IR goggles. “Man, there are thousands of ‘em lined up. See ‘em plain as day.”
“Yeah,” D’Lupo said in the rough camaraderie of soldiers. “Well, they’re gonna find it hard to see you, Rhin.”
“I told you,” Martinez chimed in, “to use that fuckin’ sunscreen, Rhin!”
“Hey, dick brain,” Rhin retorted, “they gonna see you honkies all right. They don’t need no IRs to see you, man.”
“Oh,” Doolittle said to his fellow SAS troopers in the truck, “isn’t this nice? We’re on our way to a punch-up wiv Charlie an’ these blokes start a fuckin’ race riot. Lovely, i’n’it?”
“Can’t understand a fuckin’ word you say, limey,” Rhin said.
“No matter,” Martinez joshed, flicking up his IRs. “Brits are full of shit anyway.”
“You’ll get yours, mite!”
“All right,” the first lieutenant said on the cellular. “Pipe down. We’ll be in enemy country before you know it. General wants you all quiet as of now.”
The silence was deafening. Freeman had permitted them to let off steam on the way in from the Gia Lam Field. But now that they were past the Ho Tay — West Lake — approaching the Song Hong, or Red River, and Thang Long Bridge, a prime target for U.S. bombers during the Vietnam War, every one of the 127 men, including Freeman, was alone with his fear.
Marte Price had wanted to stay in Hanoi to cover the war, but the CNN crew of three had decided to go to the front, and being the only woman reporter, she felt she would lose face not only for herself but for all the women in the armed services if she didn’t go with Freeman’s spearhead recon group. Someone had joked she’d decided to go “all the way,” but there were no laughs.
Sitting in the second armed Humvee behind the vehicle carrying Freeman, Cline, and the two Vietnamese, Marte Price was sick with fear. She found, to her astonishment, that one’s teeth really do chatter in the face of a danger so overwhelming that she felt a shortness of breath — a rapidly rising surge of panic that momentarily convinced her she was having a heart attack.
Southwest of Hanoi, in the Vietnamese People’s Army indoctrination center at Xuan Mai, Vietnamese militia and reservists were being told once again that it was not the American people in the sixties and early seventies who had declared war on the freedom-loving peoples of Vietnam but the “imperialist criminals” Kennedy, Johnson, and McNamara. The fact that the U.S. had never actually declared war, attested to by the Pentagon’s insistence on still writing about the war with a lowercase w, was not mentioned.
The American people, continued the cadre, had had their own civil war and a war of independence against the British imperialists. Very few of those listening were paying much attention to the cadre’s harangue. All they cared about was that in Vietnam’s never-ending struggle — the first Indochina War, the second Indochina War, and the wars against the Chinese— war had been the way of life. Peace was the abnormal condition.
This time it was again China, which had had its eyes on the lush Red River Delta since two hundred years before Christ. The Vietnamese soldiers didn’t need a cadre to tell them the obvious: their country was again under attack by the Chinese. No one bothered raising the theoretical contradiction of one Communist state waging war on another Communist state, for everyone understood that this was a war not of ideology but for territory, the rich deposits of oil beneath the hundreds of offshore islands from the Gulf of Tonkin to Borneo. In any case, the Americans had helped the Vietnamese once before, giving them arms and money to fight the Japanese in Vietnam. War was the way of life.
The militia and reservists were told that should it become necessary, they might have to fight side by side with the Americans to plug any gaps the Chinese attack might open. Most of the subdued talk among the young militia and reservists, many of them women, was of how anxious they were to fight with the Americans. Most of them were too young to have fought in America’s undeclared war against North Vietnam, and the same would be true for many, though not all, of the Americans. Besides, it was a well-known fact that Americans had everything, and there was a collective craving among the Vietnamese militia and reservists for American cigarettes. Not only were they the best cigarettes in the world, but in many transactions throughout Southeast Asia they had become the currency of exchange, a prime cargo for the South China Sea pirates.
The indoctrination session ended with several militiamen dozing off, the general belief being that there would be no further Chinese breakthrough, that their Vietnamese regular army would soon counterattack and with the help of American bombers force the Chinese back from the Lang Son line across the border.
The arrival of the EMREF recon spearhead was known to Beijing within half an hour of the Hercules landing, CNN having beaten the transmissions of Chinese Vietnamese agents who radioed the news to the Chinese capital. But CNN, as part of its “deal” with Freeman, hadn’t disclosed it was only one Hercules, and had it not been for the agents’ transmissions, Beijing would have been under the impression that the total EMREF force of several thousand had already arrived in Hanoi.
In any event, the news jolted Beijing, and within minutes the HQs of the Chengdu and Guangzhou military regions had been notified that the gains made so far by Generals Wei and Wang must be consolidated as soon as possible on both flanks of the Lang Son front—
“It is like,” General Wei’s cadres explained to his troops, “attacking a loaded bullock cart — kill the bullock driver first before he can unload his weapons and ammunition.” In this instance, Wei explained to his HQ personnel, the carts — the U.S. air supply line — might not be stopped by the Chinese air force, but the lead driver, Freeman, was already here and could be killed.
The Chinese general announced that any PLA unit wiping out Freeman’s advance spearhead would receive a “thousand commendations from the people.” This phrase was officialese for the fact that any unit that wiped out Freeman’s spearhead force would receive a monetary reward — one thousand dollars U.S. It was a small fortune, and on the black market it would buy many American cigarettes. Some senior cadres objected that this was unworthy of the people’s army ideology and was a “capitalist corruption” of the troops, to which Generals Wei and Wang responded that they were responsible for the military tactics and that the cadres, with all due respect, should keep out of it — it was a military not a political matter. A senior cadre continued to object, and Wei told him in very unpolitical terms to perform a sexual act on himself with a pointed stick.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A thousand feet below the surface of the South China Sea aboard
“Possible hostile by nature of sound, bearing one four six! Range eighteen miles!”
“Very well,” the captain said calmly, already at the control room’s attack island. “Man battle stations.”
“Man battle stations, aye, sir,” a seaman of the watch repeated, pushing the “yellow” button that sent a pulsing F sharp slurring to G throughout the ship.
The captain turned to the D.O. “Diving officer, periscope depth.”
