Plateau of Shadows

The first round did not whine. It came in low and flat, cracking through the brush like a split rail, followed immediately by the dull concussive thud of an eighty-two millimeter mortar tube firing from the tree line across the draw. IS1 (SW) Steven Gregory threw himself forward into the ferns before the detonation registered in his ears. The blast erupted thirty yards up the ridgeline, hurling hot red clay, chopped bamboo, and burning phosphorus into the canopy.

Then the machine guns opened up. They were Soviet RPDs, firing in synchronized five-round bursts from prepared interlocking positions. The ambush had not been tripped by a sloppy point man. The North Vietnamese gunners had surveyed the terrain, preregistered the impact grid, and waited until the entire four-man team cleared the creek bed. Miller and Vance died in the first three seconds. Gregory saw Vance's silhouette jerk violently against the muzzle flashes, his torso torn open by heavy steel before his knees hit the dirt. Miller never even unslung his weapon. A direct mortar hit caught him near the base of a wild fig tree, disintegrating his ruck and pitching his severed legs into the brush.

Gregory rolled hard to his left, clawing through the mud toward a depression beneath the root system of an upturned mahogany. Automatic fire was chewing the foliage three inches above the dirt, shearing off leaves in a green blizzard that smelled of crushed sap and cordite. Behind him, petty officer third class Roy Chen was screaming, a high, wet wail that rose above the crackle of burning brush. Chen had taken shrapnel across his chest and neck, and his boots were drumming against the slick mud as he thrash-crawled toward the trail edge.

Gregory lunged out of the root hollow, gripped Chen by the canvas webbing of his harness, and dragged him backward into a jagged bomb crater left behind by an old B-52 strike. Dirt rained down on them. Gregory slapped his bare palm against the left side of Chen's neck, trying to seal the arterial fountain pumping between the boy's fingers. Warm blood surged over Gregory's knuckles, slippery and thick as oil. It pooled in Chen's collar and ran down into his mouth.

"Hold it down," Gregory whispered, his chest heaving against Chen's vest. "Chen, look at me. Clamp down."

Chen's pupils were blown wide, black and vacant under the canopy shadows. His mouth opened, but only crimson bubbles formed on his split lips. He gripped Gregory's forearm with astonishing force, his fingernails digging through the wet tiger-stripe cloth until the skin gave way. Then his grip slackened. His head rolled back into the crater wall, his jaw falling open against the red clay. He was gone.

A second mortar barrage walked straight down the ravine. The blast wave struck Gregory like a plank of oak across the spine, slamming him face-first into Chen's dead ribs. Pain ripped through Gregory's left calf, an incandescent burn that felt as though a red-hot spade had been driven into the muscle. The concussion tore his helmet clean off his skull. When his vision cleared of gray static, he smelled burned metal and melting rubber. The PRC-25 radio mounted to Chen's pack frame was shattered. A jagged fragment of an American bomb casing, repurposed by an enemy mortar shell, had cleaved straight through the housing, pulverizing the battery casing and shearing off the handset connection. The frequency dials were crushed into a paste of gray pot metal and copper wire.

Across the creek, the firing tapered off into disciplined, single-shot probes. Vietnamese voices rose from the darkness, callouts echoing down the ridge in short, functional phrases. They were moving out from their bunkers to police the kill zone, sweeping the ferns with fixed bayonets to finish the wounded.

Gregory remained flat in the muck, not daring to take a breath that might rattle in his throat. He did not fire. Returning fire from a hole against an infantry platoon was suicide, an amateur mistake that bought thirty seconds of noise and an early grave. He counted the flashes in the mist. Three distinct sectors of fire. Twelve to fifteen rifles on line, advancing three yards apart. They were moving deliberately, systematically stabbing deadfall and brush piles with long SKS bayonets.

The ground will keep you alive or kill you, boy, but it won't ever apologize. Move, hide, and never linger on a site where you bled.

Master Chief Garrett's voice scraped through Gregory's memory, clear and dry as gravel rattling in an iron bucket. The old man had drilled it into them during jungle phase in the Coronado mud flats until their shins were raw. A kill site belonged to the shooter until you took it back or vanished into the dirt.

Working entirely by touch, Gregory kept his head below the crater lip. He reached down to Chen's web gear, unhooking four fresh magazines of 5.56 ammunition and pressing them into his own chest pouches. He slid the plastic M57 firing device, the clacker, out of Chen's side pocket, followed by a full two-quart nylon water bladder. He unsnapped the map pouch and felt the sealed metal canister resting at the bottom of his own rucksack. The high-altitude recon film from the border surveillance site was still dry, packed securely inside the waterproofed rubber lining. If that film fell into northern hands, the coordinates for the covert staging sectors across the plateau would be blown wide open.

Gregory slid his hand down to his left leg. His trousers were drenched in warm stickiness. The jagged entry wound was two inches deep in the meat of his calf, leaking steady dark blood into his boot. He bit down on the collar of his utility shirt, took a field dressing from his harness, and wrapped the thick gauze pad tightly over the hole. He took a strip of torn camouflage fabric from his hem, looped it twice over the dressing, and pulled the knot until stars swam behind his eyes. The pain made his stomach heave, but the bleeding slowed to a seep.

Ten yards away, a branch snapped. A flashlight beam flicked across the high branches, reflected faintly in the gray mist. Boots sucked in the marsh mud. Gregory pulled Chen's silver dog tags from the dead man's neck, along with the extra tags he carried for Vance and Miller. He did not let the metal click. Working with his left hand, he scooped a deep hollow into the wet clay at the bottom of the crater, pressed the tags into the bottom, and buried them beneath six inches of packed muck.

He turned onto his belly and pushed his body out of the crater, sliding through a narrow drainage ditch cut into the slope by monsoon runoff. The muck was freezing against his ribs, but the cold kept the fever from flaring in his leg. Above him, the search parties swept the rim of the draw. An AK-47 barked twice as an enemy soldier put two insurance rounds into Vance's corpse. Shouts drifted down the creek bed, sharp and interrogative.

Gregory lay motionless in the mud as a green tracer burned overhead, snapping through the broad leaves of a banana tree and ricocheting into the rocks above. He looked through the gaps in the understory toward the northern skyline. Beyond the broken limestone bluffs, rising out of the mist like a black wall against the stars, lay the high rim of the Kon Tum Plateau. The elevation was over eight hundred meters. Up there, above the dense humidity of the creek bottoms, the canopy opened into granite outcroppings. If he could reach the crest and find line of sight to the eastern lowlands, he could strip the components from his emergency transponder and signal a search plane.

He pulled his CAR-15 carbine close against his chest, tucking the muzzle inside his sleeve to keep the bore free of red silt. He began to crawl east, using his elbows and good right knee to drag his frame through the thorny wait-a-minute vines. Every yard sent a hot pulse through his ruined calf. Behind him, the flashlights multiplied along the trail, sweeping the empty crater he had abandoned to the dark.