Phantom Leader Part 20

"I've dialed in Nomad's freq. Press the b.u.t.ton on the cord and you're transmitting." Wolf nodded.

As he was about to press the b.u.t.ton, he realized he hadn't been a.s.signed a call sign. He grinned and pressed the b.u.t.ton.

"Nomad, Nomad, this is Wolf. Do you copy?" He had to call three times before Nomad came up on the radio.

"Wolf, this is Nomad. I read you loud and clear. How me?" Wolf could hear the sounds of shots and explosions in the background.

"Loud and clear, Nomad. Sounds like you're in it. Can you give me your position?" Normally, position coordinates were transmitted in code. In terse situations there wasn't time enough to code and decode.

"Wolf, Nomad, roger. Everybody else knows where I am, and they're shooting at me. Not much time left. We gotta get out of here. Can you get to Tay Loc? I'll direct you from there."

Lochert looked at McClanahan, who peered forward through the gloom and smoke searching for the Tay Loc runway. He shrugged.

"Nomad, this is Wolf. We'll try, over."

"When you're at the south end of the runway, I'll pop smoke. We'll talk about what I need once you have an exact fix on my location." Although the enemy knew where Nomad was located, Wolf could tell he didn't want to discuss any rescue plans until the last minute.

Suddenly the left door-gunner opened up with the nasal hammering of his M60, followed quickly by the right gunner. The nose dipped and the helicopter started a rapid descent, blades biting the air. Below, red muzzle blasts shredded and tore the morning mist. Wolf opened his lap belt, checked his harness, and crouched next to the left gunner, Lopez behind him. Both had their equipment strapped on, Rennagel's bag at their feet. The copilot handed Wolf a portable telephone version of the PRC-25 FM radio. Wolf gave back the helmet and boom mike and picked up the handset.

McClanahan spiraled down, leveled at 200 feet, tipped, flew one way then the next, then zoomed for the side of the runway, blades slap-slapping.

Wolf saw green tracers reaching for them. Then purple smoke billowed from the flat roof of a two-story French-style villa 200 meters to the south of the airfield.

"Nomad, I got purple," Wolf barked into the handset.

"Purple it is, Wolf. Put her down on the roof, stay light on the skids.

There's three of us and we got to vamoose." His voice was strained.

Wolf looked over his shoulder at McClanahan. The pilot nodded, his hands busy on the controls. The door gunners yammered as McClanahan pulled his craft over to the besieged building. They could see huge pockmarks in the concrete, a collapsed wall at ground level, blown-out windows, and smoke curling from a burned-out vehicle in the yard. He noted the yard was surrounded by a high concrete wall, with a gate that was as yet still intact. Outside the gate on the street, he saw several crumpled bodies clad in the olive-drab fatigues worn by ARVN infantrymen. He saw furtive movement along the trees farther up the street to the north.

McClanahan pulled over a stand of tall palms, then mushed in toward the roof.

Wolf saw two people in civilian clothing, a man and a woman, crouched next to a third along the low concrete barrier at the western edge of the roof. Dirt and leaves blew Up, nearly obscuring the landing zone as McClanahan eased his Huey to the rooftop. The door gunners ceased firing as their line of vision was obscured by the concrete retaining walls lining the edge of the roof. McClanahan held his s.h.i.+p such that the skids were barely touching the surface of the roof.

The third person, a man, was flat on his back, wedged in the corner formed by the wall and the roof. His s.h.i.+rt was ripped away and his upper body was lacerated and b.l.o.o.d.y.

Heavily stained strips of what looked like bedsheets were wrapped around his chest and arms. His eyes were closed and his face was blue and sunken. Wolf knew at a glance he was dying. The woman, with long blonde hair hastily tied in a knot behind her head, crouched over him.

She held his hand and s.h.i.+elded his face from the blowing dirt. Her face was twisted and lined with tension. Next to her was a thin man with dark hair, holding an M 16. Several magazines and frag grenades were in a box at his feet. Nearby lay a PRC-25 radio. Both the woman and the man were dotted with blood specks and had rips in their clothing.

Wolf slipped from the doorway, holding his M16 like a pistol in his right hand, and ran crouched to the civilians.

Lopez flung himself down behind a wall, rolled onto his stomach, and poked his rifle over the wall. The door gunner unhooked, grabbed an Ml 6, and dashed behind him.

"Get in the chopper," Wolf yelled above the din of the rotors to the civilians. The retaining walls bounced the sound and the downwash back in his face. Smoke from the yard swirled and spun. "We'll get him." He pointed to the dying man. The girl scrambled to one side. Wolf slung his rifle over his shoulder and reached for the man's shoulders.

The gunner bent over his legs. Before Wolf could move, a motion in the air caught his eye. He saw a mortar sh.e.l.l starting to are down from the apex of the high lob. The finned sh.e.l.l appeared to be headed straight down on them.

"Incoming," he yelled, and ducked low over the man's body. The sh.e.l.l flashed over the far side of the roof and exploded in the courtyard.

"Stay down," he pantomimed above the roar of the helicopter to the civilians. He pointed at Lopez and the gunner, then over the wall. "We gotta get that mortar or we're not gonna get outta here," he yelled in his ear. He looked up, the others following his motion. Another high wobbling lob was now at the apex over their heads, the fins and curvature of the sh.e.l.l perfectly clear in stop motion in Wolf's eyes. As it started down, Wolf knew beyond doubt it would land on the roof. He had to restrain himself from emptying his M 16 at it. The insane thought of shooting down mortar sh.e.l.ls like skeet with a shotgun crossed his mind.

The sh.e.l.l impacted on the flat roof on the far side of the helicopter next to the pilot's compartment. The explosion, confined by the retaining wall, blew hundreds of fragments up and into the c.o.c.kpit.

McClanahan absorbed most of the blast and died instantly in a welter of gore and shredded flight suit. His copilot lost his helmet and his right arm. With his left arm he made dazed and feeble movements at the collector. The right door-gunner was thrown from the helicopter over the wall to the courtyard below. The helicopter settled heavily on its skids and began to scream and rock from side to side as the mangled controls sent impossible commands. Soon it would tip over and flail the entire rooftop with the blades as they broke up. The gunner kneeling next to Wolf threw down his weapon, scuttled in a scrambling crouch to the left c.o.c.kpit door, flung it open, reached inside, and shut the turbine off.

As the hissing and whopping of the blades wound down, Wolf looked up and saw another mortar round approaching the apex. He felt a slight breeze from behind, and knew it was enough to make the sh.e.l.l fall short. He sighted along the azimuth from which the sh.e.l.l came, and estimated the range from which a sh.e.l.l that size could be lobbed to its alt.i.tude.

That threat had to be eliminated before any other decision or action could take place. He unslung his rifle, rose on his knees, quickly poked his rifle over the wall, and opened fire in the general area he had fixed in his mind. He hated shooting without a definite target, but had to come up firing to keep the enemy's heads down. He triggered two- and threeround bursts as he looked for the mortar crew. He spotted a thin wisp of smoke, looked upwind from it, and saw a natural depression behind a wrought-iron fence in a villa across the street. He could just make out the top of a tube and two crouched figures through the fence grille.

"Over there," he yelled at Lopez, who was still shooting from his position at the edge of the roof. Then he fired two quick bursts to keep them from dropping another round down the open mouth. When Lopez picked up the fire with his weapon, Wolf ducked down and grabbed several eggshaped hand grenades. As he knelt and pulled a pin, he saw the gunner trying to help the badly wounded copilot from the helicopter.

"Get over here and shoot where I tell you," he commanded. "We'll take care of him later." He turned and flung the first grenade, then a second and a third as fast as he could. The girl crawled to the copilot's door. The gunner flopped down next to him and kept up a steady stream of fire into the dirt and dust blown up by the explosions. A second gun started yammering to his left. He looked over and saw the civilian coolly sighting and placing his bullets with great care. He looked back at the mortar position. As the smoke cleared, he could see part of the fence was blown across the mortar position. The mortar tube protruded through the grillwork.

"Okay," he said to the gunner and Lopez, "we got him.

Crawl around each wall. See what's out there, how close they are. Fire a round or two each time you poke your heads up.

Make 'em think we have plenty of people up here." Lopez and the gunner nodded and crawled away. Wolf rolled back to face the civilian.

"Let's go get the copilot," he said.

They crawled to the c.o.c.kpit and crouched next to the woman, who knelt there holding the pilot's left hand. Inside, they could see the blanched face of a young man shrunken inside his flight suit. He had bled to death.

Wolf looked at the woman. "Better get over to the side," he said gently. She looked up at him with a face smeared with dirt and gray eyes that seemed strangely calm. She nodded and crawled back to the dying man at the wall.

"You know how to fly a helicopter?" Wolf asked the civilian. He shook his head. "Well then, let's get what we can use out of this machine,"

Wolf said. They pulled a door gun with ammunition, the private weapons of the two dead men, canteens, and several boxes of food and emergency medical supplies. Wolf reached into the gore of the pilot compartment and pulled out the pilot maps and flight cards. He looked for a code wheel but couldn't find one. He stuffed the papers in the parachute bag. They crawled back to the shelter of the wall.

"You handle a weapon pretty well," Wolf said, eyeing the man. He was slender, with short-cropped dark hair and a strong face.

"I should. Infantry, early sixties."

"Who you with now?" Wolf began checking their weapons and inventorying the supplies. Lopez and the gunner had almost completed a circuit of the roof. They snapped off rou rids every few seconds.

"Aye Eye Dee," the man said. "Police activities." Wolf took a closer look at him. Some Agency for International Development (AID) people with strong military backgrounds were hired to teach police techniques to the appropriate Vietnamese departments.

Wolf held out his hand. "Lochert," he said.

"Jim Polter." They shook. The girl crawled over.

"He's gone," she said in an accent that Wolf recognized as southern German.

"This is Greta Sturm," Polter said.

Wolf nodded. "What happened here?" he asked. Lopez was firing short bursts now. The gunner was busy replacing a magazine.

"The attack started late last night. By two this morning it was a full-scale operation," Polter began. "We were having a social function.

Some of the people from State, AID, and from the German Maltese Aid Society, sort of a Red Cross mission that's where Greta is from, she's a nurse. It was downstairs in this house." He tilted his chin at the dead man.

"His house. Then all of a sudden the whole city was under attack.

Rockets, mortars, heavy machine guns. There had to be infiltrators to open the gates, because right away the city was swarming with NVA troops. Most of the ARVN First Division is off on Tet holiday. Their headquarters and part of the city and airfield is defended by the Hac Bao, the Black Panther company from the First. We're looking down the muzzles of a whole d.a.m.n NVA regiment, the Sixth, I think.

This place is going to go. We've got to get out of here."

"Who is that?" Wolf pointed to the body.

"Chuck Felton. He is, he was, " he corrected himself, "the Agency man here in Hue. He had quite an a.r.s.enal." Wolf noticed Polter said "agency" of the CIA and not "company, as many of those who were not fully informed said.

"Was he Nomad?" Wolf had been wondering why he had been singled out for the rescue attempt of some low-key employees. It became clear. Although he didn't know Nomad, most of the Agency people knew him. Through the years he had performed many almost impossible tasks for them, and was, he knew, highly regarded as one of the few Army men that didn't let the whole thing go to his head.

"Yeah."

"Where is everybody else?"

"Downstairs," Polter said. "Blown away. When it got rough, Felton called Saigon for help on the Agency HF net.

I heard him mention your name but had no idea they could track you down.

Later he was. .h.i.t bad, so it was me on the horn when you checked in."

"How come the activity is slow right now?" Wolf asked.

"At dawn the Panthers sent some troops out. Best I can tell, they flanked the NVA, fired a few bloopers to take the pressure off us, then fell back to their CP when the NVA started to rush them. They're taking the city house by house.

They have plenty of time, so I expect they have been firing just enough to keep us pinned down. Things changed when the chopper came in. Now they know somebody big is here, they might get serious again."

"Are you two okay? Think you can run for a bit?" Polter nodded. Wolf looked at Greta Sturm. She seemed st.u.r.dy and capable.

"Yes," she said, "I am all right." She was well-featured and athletic-looking.

"Can you shoot?" Wolf asked.

She pursed her lips. "No," she said. "I cannot shoot."

Something about the way she said it made Wolf ask, "Can not, or will not?"

Her chin rose. "Will not." Her wide-set gray eyes held Wolf with a measure of defiance. "I am, after all, a nurse."

"Sir," Lopez called, "I need some help." Wolf and Polter crawled to his spot on the west wall. The street below ran north and south. He pointed to the north. "Up there. Looks like a lot of bad guys coming together in one location."

Wolf saw an armored vehicle and a dozen or so green-clad infantrymen ducking behind it. "Looks like they've captured an APC and are about to head our way." He looked to the south. What appeared to be a squad of the enemy had formed a blocking group. Wolf quickly crawled around and peered over the remaining three walls, looking for a way to escape the trap. The only open direction seemed to be to the east toward the rear of the villa. Wolf looked down into the yard. Well-kept shrubbery and low trees surrounded a pool and a tennis court with a high chain-link fence. Beyond the tennis court were one-story concrete servant quarters set against the rear concrete wall of the grounds. Over the wall was a dirt road, then an open field next to the Tay Loc runway. He saw a South Vietnamese battle flag flying over a sandbagged complex near the control tower.

Wolf crawled back to the others. He pointed to the far edge and described what he saw. "That's where we have to go. I want us to link up with the Viets." A mortar sailed over the roof and crashed in the south courtyard.

"We go now," Wolf said. "Polter, get us to the back door."

"What about them?" Greta Sturm asked, pointing at Felton's body and the ruined men in the helicopter.

Wolf looked at her anxious eyes, and shook his head.

"Move it," he said in a brusque voice.

Laden with their equipment, they crawled across the roof behind Polter to an open hatch over a ladder down to a storeroom. In the room, Wolf took a quick look around.

Empty mover's crates and cardboard boxes marked with Felton's name were stacked along one wall next to an old chair with a broken leg. The far wall had a metal rack filled with boxes of whiskey, beer, and soda water. Two military boxes of ammunition on the bottom shelf caught Wolf's eye.

Next to them was a Soviet Rocket Propelled Grenade RPG-7 launcher and a canvas sling holding five sh.e.l.ls. He quickly knelt by the boxes. "Take as much ammo as you can," he said. Polter carried an M16, a radio, and had stuffed his pockets full of grenades. Lopez did the same. The door gunner carried his big M60 and had slung several bandoliers of ammunition around his neck. Wolf motioned to Greta Sturm. "You carry these," he said, and handed her the RPG and the sling with the sh.e.l.ls.

"Nein, " she said. "No. I will not shoot, I tell you."

Wolf shook her by the shoulders. "Du brauchst she night abzuschiessen, sondern nur zu tragen. You don't have to shoot them, you have to carry them." In shocked silence she shouldered the sling and picked up the heavy RPG.

They went quickly out of the room, Polter in front. He led them down a wide marble hall past several doors and past stairs leading to the front of the villa. In the rear, he opened a door to a narrow set of servant stairs that descended into a large room used as a kitchen and pantry.

Bullets splatted against the marble and concrete of the front of the villa. A mortar exploded on the roof, jarring their ears with concussion. They hurried down the steps to the rear door. Greta Sturm carried the RPG awkwardly. "Carry it like a Besen, a broom," Wolf said.

He opened the door and studied the grounds for a moment.

"We're going to go over the rear wall and try for the airfield," Wolf said. "I'll take the lead. Polter, you take the girl. Don't move until I signal you each time I stop. You ... He looked at the name tag of the gunner. "Rizzo, you be tailend Charlie. Joe," he said to Lopez, "pick a spot just outside the door and cover us. I'll holler when I want you to catch up."

They all nodded, the girl's eyes big and white now as if she finally realized she had a good chance of being killed. Wolf bolted out the door in a running crouch, crossed several meters of patio, and dove to the protection of a low brick wall by the pool. He flattened as he heard the chugging of an AK-47 and several bullets threw up spray in the pool behind, then spanged the concrete by his face. He flipped over the wall, crawled along it for ten feet, rose quickly, looked back in the direction from which he thought the rounds were coming, and shot instantly at movement he saw on the wall of the north courtyard. A lone man toppled to the ground.

Wolf heard several shots from where Lopez was holding. He waited a few seconds, saw no more activity, and waved to the group in the doorway.

They ran, crouching, to the safety of the wall. "That was the advance man, the scout. They don't know on the other side of the wall where the shot came from that killed him.

With luck they'll think we're still in the house. They know we're armed, so they'll be careful. We've got a few minutes before they rush the place. I'll have to get Lopez out of there now." He looked over his shoulder, down the length of the pool to the tennis court. He pointed to the bushes lining the pool. "We'll use them for cover." He crawled away until he was concealed behind the trim bushes. They smelled sweet and earthy. He waved for the others to come. When they were next to him he called Lopez to join them. There was no answer. He called again.

"Lopez, move up, move up. Fire two rounds if you hear me."

There was no response. Wolf bit his lip for a second, then crawled around the base of the bushes to look at the back door of the villa. He saw three NVA dragging a slumped and inert Lopez around the corner of the villa away from him.

He sighted for an instant and realized he couldn't shoot for fear of hitting Lopez. "d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n," he said and pounded the earth. Then he pushed himself back to his group.

"Let's move it," he said in a gruff voice.

It was easier running the length of the pool behind the bushes. At the end they came to the tall chain-link fence around the tennis court.

"This way," Wolf said. He led them just short of the path he had seen from the roof that led to the servants' quarters. It paralleled one end of the court and the north wall. "Wait until I signal," he said.

Crouching once again, he peered up and down the path. Nothing moved. He pulled a Claymore from the parachute bag and rigged it among branches on one side to point up the path.

He taped a thermite grenade to the face and put a coil of detonating wire next to it. He pointed at Rizzo. "Bring that with you," he whispered. He checked the path again and, holding his M16 at port arms, dashed toward the small servants' house. Halfway there he rolled to one side and rigged another Claymore.