“Our man. One.”
“Right. Hook up with him, and meet me near the road,” said Zeus. He tried miming it with his hand. “Okay? I’m going down to the water and see if I can find anyone else. Where is Major Chau?”
“Chau?” The sergeant shook his head grimly.
“By the road. Meet me. Don’t kill our guy.”
“Yes,” said the sergeant.
A boot floated in the water nearby. It turned on the current, revealing the hacked edge of a lower leg.
Zeus steeled himself, balancing amid the trees. He could see the semisubmerged hulk of the PBR ten yards away, on his left. Two bodies floated in the water near it.
Both sailors.
Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, Zeus shimmied up one of the trees, trying to get a better view. He could see at least one other body beyond the PBR. It was a soldier’s.
Chau?
Zeus hugged the tree and turned in the other direction, looking for the Stolkraft. He found it grounded on some debris about thirty yards downstream. A shell blast had broken the hull in two, and the sides bowed up, as if the boat were a deck of cards waiting to be shuffled.
Zeus counted three bodies on the deck. Several missile containers, and ammunition boxes were there as well. A few were stuck in the mud nearby. They could all be salvaged.
Zeus pushed himself higher on the tree, looking toward the opposite shore. He saw no sign of the Chinese there. There was a rise a little more than a mile beyond. He guessed that there was a roadway through or near the swamp, and that the Chinese had gathered their tanks there. A scout near the water would have seen the boats, and sent back information about them. Or maybe he’d just fired to provoke the Vietnamese and alert the tanks.
The theory gave him a working target. They’d move up in that direction and look for the tanks — or whatever it was that had hit them.
Zeus shimmied down the tree trunk, his legs and palms scraping though the trunk was smooth.
As he started back up through the field, he heard the whine of vehicles moving in the distance. He put his head down and started to run. He crossed to the right side of the house, running past the bodies of the Chinese soldiers, who’d been left where they fell.
A mistake, thought Zeus. If the Chinese saw them, they’d know exactly what had happened.
But there was no time to do anything about it. The ground was shaking with the approach of the armored vehicles, moving on the dirt road in the field beyond the houses. Zeus ran up along the woods to the opening where he had crossed earlier. He was about five or six steps away when he heard the swoosh of a Kornet missile streaking across the open yard.
A loud crack followed, as if lightning had hit a massive redwood and felled it with one burst. A second missile zipped into the air, but this time there was no explosion. Instead, a Chinese ZTZ99’s 120mm began to fire, tossing shells in the direction of the house where Zeus had left the soldier.
Another missile — an explosion, small-arms gunfire, a shout and a scream.
The air reverberated, the ground shaking as the Vietnamese engaged the force of tanks that had moved down the road. Zeus, realizing that he would not be able to run across to the buildings without being caught in the crossfire, changed course and headed toward his left, hoping to come up around the Chinese force.
He remembered the crates of missiles lying back at the shore, and considered going to grab them, but it would take considerable time to fish out even one, and he might be more useful in the meantime. At a minimum, he had to know what he was up against.
Zeus sprinted across the field, crossed a muddy lane, then circled around a small shed that bordered the road before finally reaching a point where he could look in the direction of the firefight. Four Chinese tanks, very closely packed together in a column, sat in front of the house. Smoke billowed from the lead tank. Black smoke and gray steam furled behind it, from at least one other Z99 that Zeus couldn’t see. The others were firing their machine guns in a steady hail, the sound a kind of steel-tap chorus.
The house was engulfed in flames and smoke.
Zeus laid down flat and began easing across the field on his belly, trying to get a better angle. After about ten yards of crawling through the mud he came to a water-filled ditch. Slipping into it, he found himself in water almost to his neck. Holding his rifle just above the surface of the water, he followed the ditch as it slanted behind the tanks’ position, moving away as it drew parallel to them. The depth of the ditch decreased as he went, until finally when he was even with the tanks he had to kneel to avoid being seen.
One of the four tanks was still firing. The empty building was on fire as well. If the Vietnamese were still alive, he couldn’t see them, or hear their guns.
More vehicles were moving in the distance, on his left, coming to join the fight.
The smartest thing to do at this point — aside from running away — was to backtrack, get some of the missiles, and get into position to either take this tank out or, more likely, ambush whatever was coming up as reinforcements. Zeus turned and looked back down the trench, calculating whether it might not be easier to back out here and make a wide circle back.
It would certainly be drier. Zeus looked back to make sure the Z99’s turret was buttoned up. When he didn’t see anyone on the machine gun, he climbed out of the ditch and crawled straight back, aiming for a row of foliage separating the field from another. He reached the bushes and turned around, got his bearings again, and started to run along the brush to angle back toward the water. He kept his eyes on the tank and the road some fifty or sixty yards away.
He’d gone no more than a few steps when the top of the tank popped open. Zeus dropped down immediately. By the time he looked up, the tank commander had grabbed the machine gun on the turret and begun firing toward the two burning houses.
If he was thinking logically, Zeus might have seen this as an opportunity to get away — the man was focused on a target one hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction.
But Zeus wasn’t thinking logically. Instead, he saw a threat to the men he’d been with, and he reacted instinctively, jumping up through the brush and starting across the field. With a different, more familiar weapon, he might have fired from the brush itself — fifty yards was not a particularly difficult shot with an M-16 or even an AK- 47 for that matter, so long as the shooter was used to the weight and pull of the gun, and the weapon itself was in good repair. But Zeus had little experience with an AK, and he’d already seen that the weapon could be unreliable except at very close range.
He stopped ten yards from the tank.
The Chinese tank commander hunkered over his machine gun. The man ceased firing and straightened, looking over the field to see where his enemy was hiding.
Now, thought Zeus. He dropped to his knee, almost too close to have an angle.
But he did have an angle, and he did have a shot, dead-on in the middle of the iron sights.
Zeus pressed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. The gun had been fouled in the water.
He cleared, tried again. Nothing.
In the next second, the sound of a steam engine about to blow rose in his ears; the noise merged into a loud screech and boom. One of the Vietnamese had fired an AT-14 at the tank.
Steam exploded from the fissure. The lower half of the tank thumped down hard against the ground, shaking it in a rumble that reverberated through Zeus’s chest. The top of the tank peeled back, metal spitting off.
