Shadows of War

back north.

“Just me?”

“Just you, Private. I know you can do it.”

Ai Gua nodded. Jing Yo slapped the fender and he put it in gear, spitting up large clods of dirt as he drove away.

“Could’ve just left the truck,” said Sergeant Wu.

“I don’t want to lose it,” said Jing Yo. “And we can get there faster without the backpacks. He’ll be okay.” He raised his voice to what they had called in officers’ training a commanding shout. “Come on, men. The road is this way! We run together.”

The squad fell in behind him, moving at a good pace over the field. The night had cooled, and after the long ride the sensation of blood and adrenaline pumping through his veins felt good. Jing Yo ran at about three-quarters pace up the gradual rise, until he came to a three-strand barbed-wire fence whose black wires stood out against the moon-painted silver ground beyond.

He stopped and turned around, waiting as his men caught up. Sergeant Wu, the oldest of the squad — not to mention the heaviest smoker — took up the rear, wheezing as he ran. It would have been a better idea to let him take the truck, thought Jing Yo, but it is too late now.

Private Chin removed a small pair of wire cutters from his tactical vest and cut the wires, which fell lazily against the ground. Jing Yo plunged back into the lead, running a little faster, until he began to tire and wondered where the road was. Finally the dark slick of macadam appeared ahead. He slowed to a jog, extending his hands to alert the others. Then he raced ahead to the drainage ditch flanking the road, flopping down against the side.

There was enough moonlight to see the road, but the glasses’ magnification allowed him to see down it for about a kilometer. Once he was sure there were no snipers on the other side, he rose and ran to the edge, pausing to make sure he was still clear. Then he leapt across the road, landing on the opposite shoulder in two giant bounds. He slid into the ditch that ran along that side, once more making sure they weren’t running their way into an ambush.

When he didn’t spot anyone, he stood and whistled; his team double-timed across the highway.

“Where’s the bridge?” asked Wu, out of breath.

“This is Route 6. We’ve got to go across that field, then up to our right,” said Jing Yo. “It should be less than a hundred meters.”

“All right.”

Jing Yo paused, listening. The gunfire he’d heard earlier had stopped.

That didn’t make any sense. The assault should be well under way by now.

Maybe the Vietnamese had thrown down their weapons and were fleeing. In which case, Jing Yo had best get his men into position quickly.

“Let’s go,” he told his men, and once more began to run.

Running always reminded Jing Yo of the days before being formally accepted for training as a Ch‘an novitiate, when he and the other boys under the monks’ care had had to prepare their bodies for the order’s grueling physical tests. The early-morning and late-evening sessions cleared his head and made his body work with his mind in a way that couldn’t be entirely explained in words; it was as if the exercise created new pathways between his muscles and his brain. Even now, running relaxed him, and though there were many things Jing Yo could have thought or worried about — whether the Vietnamese had wired the bridge for explosives, whether a unit had been assigned to protect it — his mind was an easy blank, filled only with the idea and sensation of running.

The field climbed upward toward a small copse. Jing Yo ordered his men to rest as they reached it, planning to use the trees as a vantage point to scout for the road. But before he could climb one, Private Chin shouted.

“There! The road is there, through the trees.”

Their target was less than fifty meters away.

“Chin, Bo, with me,” said Jing Yo, already starting back in motion. “Sergeant, stay with the others and cover us until we are sure it is clear.”

Jing Yo’s right boot hit the pavement as the sky to the north turned white. An instant later, the first big shell from the tanks exploded as it hit one of the Vietnamese positions; a dozen or more followed in rapid succession. Even Jing Yo, who had been in combat several times before as a “mercenary” in Malaysia, stopped, his attention momentarily drawn to the thunderous assault a few kilometers away.

But only for a moment.

“The bridge is that way. Go!” he yelled. Then he turned back to Sergeant Wu, signaling for him to follow as he and the other two men ran north.

Jing Yo sprinted until he saw the low white arch at the side of the road ahead. The bridge seemed much smaller in real life than on the map they had used to prepare — so much smaller that when he reached it he took two GPS readings to make sure he had the right place. It rose barely three meters over a small, rocky stream, and extended for only ten or twelve meters.

“This is it?” asked Sergeant Wu, as always arriving at the rear of the pack.

“According to the GPS,” said Jing Yo.

“We should send someone north to make sure.”

Jing Yo agreed, and chose Chin and Bo, telling them to make sure they weren’t seen by anyone. Then he inspected the area, looking for a place to defend the bridge from if they were attacked. A cluster of trees sat on the bank at the northwestern side; otherwise there was no cover at all, except for the bridge walls.

“No explosives,” said Sergeant Wu. “They weren’t expecting us.”

They divided up the men, posting two in the trees and the rest in spots under the bridge, where they had decent firing lines on the road. Jing Yo called the division headquarters, announcing that they had reached their objective. He stayed on the bridge with Sergeant Wu, waiting for the two men whom they’d sent up the road, and watching the flashes on the horizon.

“I’d hate to be those bastards,” said Wu as a succession of explosions shook the ground. “Going against tanks at night. You never know what the hell hit you.”

The Vietnamese had faced tanks before, Jing Yo thought, when they fought the Americans and French. They had quickly become experts on antitank tactics and weapons; indeed, he had studied some of the Vietnamese tactics while training to be a commando, and used a few in Malaysia, though there the biggest vehicle he had fought against was an armored car.

“You think this is going to last long, Lieutenant?” asked Wu.

Jing Yo shrugged. He hadn’t really given it much thought.

“I think it will be over inside a week,” said Wu. “They’ll quit before we reach Saigon.”

“I would imagine the Americans thought the same way.”

Sergeant Wu laughed. “Yes, but we’re not the Americans.”

One of the men below hissed. Someone was running up the road.

“Hold your fire. It’s Bo and Chin,” said Jing Yo, recognizing the shadows. “Report.”

“The Vietnamese are coming,” said Chin breathlessly. “They have armored cars.”

“Shit,” said Wu, a little too loudly for Jing Yo’s taste. “Here comes hell.”

“Get your grenade launchers ready,” shouted Jing Yo. “Wait until they are very close!”

He took a step to run off the bridge, then realized that his men were watching and might misinterpret his haste. So he moved at a slow, almost relaxed pace up to the copse. Corporal Linn had already zeroed his shoulder- launched Type 2010 rocket-propelled grenade launcher on the road when he arrived.

In its basic design, the Type 2010 was very similar to the RPG-7 model the Vietcong used much farther south against the Americans in the 1960s war. But in the particulars — charge and propellant — it was much better. The shaped charge could get past all but the largest main battle tanks; even then, a charge fired at the right angle and in the right spot could disable a Russian tank. Jing Yo knew this for a fact, since he had seen it done.

The vehicles they were up against were not nearly so well protected. But they were not tin crates either. French-made Panhard Sagaie 1 ‘s, they mounted 90 mm guns on their low-slung turrets. The trucks had wheels rather than traditional tank treads, which allowed them to move relatively quickly — Jing Yo estimated they were doing at least thirty kilometers an hour as they rounded the last bend before the bridge, about eighty meters from the trees.