“Aim for the lead car,” he told Linn. “The ones behind it will crash.”
Linn waited another half second, then fired. The rocket spit across the night, its whistle thin against the sounds of the battle in the distance.
The nose of the armored car flashed white and it stopped dead in its tracks. As Jing Yo had predicted, the second vehicle ran into the rear of the first with a tremendous smash.
A second grenade, this one fired by one of the men near the bridge, hit the lead vehicle just below the turret’s muzzle. The charge penetrated the metal, and turned the inside of the tank red hot in an instant, not merely frying the occupants but setting off several of the thirty-odd charges for the gun. A fireball leapt from the open hatch at the top of the car, its red light cascading across the night sky.
Remarkably, the second car was able to back away from the wreck. As it moved, its gun began to rotate in the direction of the trees.
“Take it,” Jing Yo told Linn.
But the private was having trouble reloading his weapon and wasn’t ready. The muzzle of the armored car flashed, and Jing Yo felt his breath involuntarily catch in his chest.
It has missed, he thought, if I can feel this.
The shell
Linn’s grenade hit the front corner of the truck before he could get another one off.
The grenade happened to strike at a bad angle for penetration, and rather than sinking into the armor, it exploded outside of the vehicle, pushing it a few feet back but doing comparatively little damage. The explosion did throw off the gunner’s aim, shoving the muzzle upward as it fired.
Jing Yo leapt from behind the tree and ran toward the road. It was not a logical thing to do, nor was it entirely prudent. Yet he knew instinctively that he had to do it.
Racing across the road, he took one of the grenades from his tac vest and thumbed off the tape holding the fuse closed. He circled around the front of the burning armored car, swerving to avoid the flames as they shot out from under the turret. As he did, the gun on the second car swung in the direction of his men on the hill. Jing Yo grabbed the thick iron rail at the rear of the car’s body and leapt onto the Panhard, feet sprawling over the rear. Then he rolled upward and climbed to the top of the turret just as the car’s commander popped through the hatch and reached for the machine gun.
Jing Yo had not expected to have such an easy chance, and for the briefest moment — a fraction of a fraction of a second — he hesitated. Then he dropped the grenade through the opening. With his left hand, he grabbed the Vietnamese soldier and pulled him with him as he leapt back off the armored car. The grenade exploded with a dull thud, the vehicle rocking and then hissing as smoke rose from the open hatch.
Jing Yo dragged the Panhard commander across the road. The man was dazed, unable to comprehend what was going on, let alone resist. By the time Jing Yo’s men came up to help him, Jing Yo had already taken his pistol and trussed his hands behind his back with a thick plastic zip cord.
“You took quite a risk,” said Wu.
The launcher at the base of the bridge had not had a clear shot at the second tank, and it would have taken Linn nearly another minute to fire a third grenade, during which time the armored car’s gunner would surely have found his target.
Did he have to explain that to Wu? What was the point?
“What needed to be done, I did,” he said. “There was no other option.”
Sergeant Wu laughed softly, shaking his head.
The Vietnamese armored car commander was a sergeant, who was either too shell-shocked to say anything useful, or a very good actor. Jing Yo brought him under the bridge, removing the man’s boots. He used the laces to bind his feet.
“If you try to leave, my man will shoot you,” Jing Yo warned, first in Vietnamese and then in Chinese. “You’re not worth the trouble of chasing.”
Back up on the road, Sergeant Wu had climbed into the second armored car. With help from Linn, he cleared it of its dead crew, restarted it, and managed to back it up off the road. The main gun seemed to have been damaged during the fight, but the machine gun at the top was still working, a fact Sergeant Wu demonstrated with a few bursts in the direction of the curve to the north.
“We’ll catch them by surprise,” said the sergeant.
“If our tanks arrive, the surprise will be on us,” Jing Yo told him. He sent Private Chin back up the road to act as a lookout, then checked in with division to see how the assault was progressing.
Communications were coordinated at the divisional headquarters, a legacy of decades of Communist top- down military philosophy as well as the political need to keep tight control on the army. The headquarters was actually a mobile unit only a few kilometers behind the lead element of the assault; still, it was clear that they were having a difficult time sorting through the various reports and coordinating support on the fly.
Jing Yo was told to hold his ground; the tanks would be arriving shortly.
“We have disabled two enemy vehicles,” he repeated, sure that the specialist on the other side of the radio did not fully comprehend what he had just been told. “I don’t want the tanks to fire at us.”
“Yes, Captain, I understand.”
Under other circumstances, the unintended promotion might have amused Jing Yo, but it only made him even more wary.
“As soon as you see our units, get off the armored car and run away from it,” Jing Yo told Wu. “Take no chances.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about chances.”
“Don’t compare yourself to me, Sergeant. Simply do your duty.”
Jing Yo checked on each of his men, trotting to them in turn. Then he went over to the Vietnamese sergeant. The man was hunkered by the side of the stream, shivering.
It was such a pathetic sight that Jing Yo thought of putting him out of his misery: the man would face a life of shame as a prisoner of war, even after he was released. But he would have to face his fate; Jing Yo could not help him escape it.
The Panhard’s machine gun started firing. Jing Yo raced up the embankment and saw that several Vietnamese soldiers had come up through the field near the trees, apparently getting to the road before being spotted. Sergeant Wu had killed all but one; the survivor, having retreated to the ditch at the edge of the road, was firing back with an AK-47. His shots dinged harmlessly off the armored car. But the man was equally protected by his hiding place; Sergeant Wu couldn’t manage to silence him.
The firefight had an almost surreal quality, as if it were a practice exercise rather than an actual conflict. Wu would fire several rounds, temporarily silencing the Vietnamese soldier. Then, just as it seemed as if the man were dead, he would start firing from a slightly different position. Wu would respond, and the exchange would continue.
Finally, Wu tossed a hand grenade into the ditch. The AK-47 stopped firing.
A minute later, more trucks appeared on the road. These were pickup trucks, filled with Vietnamese soldiers who hung over the cab and off the back willy-nilly.
Sergeant Wu caught the first truck in the radiator, the machine gun’s bullets slicing into the engine block after passing through the narrow fins. Wu’s gun jammed as he swung it toward the second truck just to its left. Cursing, he fired a burst from his own rifle, then climbed out of the armored car and ran back toward the bridge.
By then, everyone else in the squad was emptying their rifles at the rest of the trucks. The Vietnamese threw themselves over the side, desperate to escape the hail of bullets as the vehicles knotted on the road.
“Stop wasting your ammunition!” yelled Jing Yo when he saw they were having little effect on the Vietnamese soldiers. “Let them bunch up! Linn, get ready to take it with a grenade.”
The lack of squad radios — a handicap he hadn’t had in Malaysia — hurt Jing Yo immensely. He couldn’t be sure his men heard what he was saying.
The hell with the army’s rules, he decided. He would find a way to procure squad radios as soon as possible.
Jing Yo heard one of the Vietnamese officers yelling something at his men, directing them one way or
