The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons
Deadfall in Kum Kau
Two days later, barely at dawn, all saddled up, Alexander, Tom Richter, Charlie Mercer, Dan Elkins, Ha Si, Tojo, and a six man Bannha Montagnard team, one of whom was a medic, twelve Special Forces soldiers in all, flew out in a Chinook with a large red cross on its nose, three hundred miles north into the Laotian jungle.
They were escorted by two Cobra gunships from Kontum. They had to refuel once. They brought long dehydrated rations, regular C-rations, heat tabs, water, plasma, and arms for a hundred men.
The insertion point was barely a meter inside the Laotian border, seven kilometers west from the mapped-out location of Kum Kau. The hook flew high through the mountain pass, because just last week a Huey slick was flying too low above a valley and was fired at by an RPG-7. It went down; the pilot, the co-pilot, the gunner, and two of the Indians were killed. So this time Richter ordered the chopper to fly above cloud cover to escape detection and not take any short cuts through valleys.
They were inserted without incident in Laos, and then set off to walk through the jungle in the north central highlands, a thousand meters above sea level, deep in the high plateau of enemy territory. On the chopper, they had drunk coffee, smoked, talked bullshit, cut up, joked, but here in the woods, everyone became somber and silent, not speaking, weapons raised, trying not to disturb the fern. Richter made Ha Si walking point, Mercer slack man, Alexander third, and Elkins fourth. Tojo, the Bannha who was nearly seven foot tall, was the drag man at tail—he, apparently, was always at drag because he was like a stone wall. In front of Tojo was Richter, constantly and quietly on his radio, and in front of Richter walked six more Bannhas.
The trail they laid was just noticeable enough for them to make their way back. It was an early December morning, dry and a little cool. The jungle was tall and verdantly dense. After hovering over the men in a holding pattern until they disappeared, the chopper flew thirty kilometers south to the SOG base that was the standby reaction center for the mission. Six Cobras waited there and a medic slick—just in case. The pilot told Richter not to get into trouble for an hour. After refueling, he was ordered to wait for further instructions.
The troops were dressed in jungle camouflage battle fatigues; even their steel helmets and lightweight nylon and canvas boots were camo. Over his tunic, Alexander wore a combat vest stuffed to bursting with 20-round cartridges. The bandolier over his waist was filled with an assortment of 40mm rockets that flew farther than hand-thrown and were most useful for close combat. He had on a demolition bag of miscellaneous rounds for his pistols and extra clips for his rifle. He wore another bag holding three Claymore mines, plus clackers and tripwire. The M-16 was in his arms, with the rocket launcher already affixed below the rifle mount. He had with him his lucky Colt M1911, plus the regulation Ruger .22 with the silencer attached. He carried an SOG recon Bowie knife and an excavating tool that could also be used as a piercing weapon. His ruck was filled with medical kits and food. He had at least 90 pounds of ammo, weapons and supplies on him, and he was 50. In the mountains of Holy Cross he was 25, and carried 60 pounds of gear. That was a physics problem worthy of Tania herself. And he wasn’t even carrying Harry’s heavy punji sticks or extra rounds. The Montagnards were carrying those, plus the awe-inducing 23-pound M-60 machine gun with a tripod, plus their own 90 pounds of gear. Without the Yards, the never-complaining, silent, helpful, mountain people of South Vietnam, who were trained by the SOG to be efficient killing machines and who fought alongside the Americans, search and rescue missions would have scarcely been possible.
It had been twenty-five years since Alexander led the 200-man penal battalion for the Red Army through Russia, through Estonia, through Byelorussia, through Poland and into Germany. Back then they had no food and barely any weapons or ammo—he didn’t know why his gear had weighed as much as 60 pounds. His men had been political prisoners, not Special Forces commandos; his men were not trained; many of them had never held a rifle. And yet somehow they managed to get all the way into Germany.
And before Holy Cross, Alexander defended Leningrad. For two years he defended it on the streets, across the barricades, and across the Pulkovo and Sinyavino Hills, from which the Germans bombed the city. He defended Leningrad on its rivers, and its Ladoga Lake. He drove tanks across the ice, he shot down German planes with surface-to-air missiles. And before that, he fought against Finland in 1940, underfed, underclothed, undersupplied and freezing, armed barely with a single-bolt rifle, never dreaming that one day he would be walking through the triple-canopy jungle in Vietnam searching for his son while carrying a weapon that could fire 800 rounds a minute, discharging each round at over 3000 feet per second. Yes, the third-gen M-16 was an unbelievable rifle.
But he had liked his Shpagin, too, the Red Army standard-issue for officers. It was a good weapon. And the men under his command, they were good men. His sergeants, even in the penal battalions, were always fighters, always brave. And his friends—Anatoly Marazov, who died in his arms on the Neva ice. Ouspensky. They had been fine lieutenants. Ouspensky protected Alexander’s hide for many years, even as he was betraying him, fiercely protected the man who was his ticket out.
Except for Richter, Alexander didn’t know the men he was going into the heart of the jungle with—and wished he did. He wished he had heard their stories ahead of time, before they reached the mountains of Khammouan. He knew the lives of all of his lieutenants and sergeants in the battalion. Yet he had no doubt about any of the men with him now. Because they were Ant’s men. And he knew his son, and had no doubt about him. Mercer, Ha Si, Elkins—they were Ant’s Telikov, Marazov, Ouspensky.
Alexander was glad he had continued to train at Yuma, that he had kept himself rated to enter active combat at any time. He trained even when he was supposed to be translating military intel documents. He didn’t want to tell Tania this, but he had always quite liked the weapons, and the Americans made weapons like no one else. So he went to Yuma, put on the ear protectors, fitted the silencers over the M-4 machine guns and spent the afternoons at the range, keeping his sharpshooter rating permanently on the whetstone. Then he returned to the married quarters at night, took a scalding shower to wash the traces of gunpowder off his body, and lay down with Tania. He touched her with the hands that not two hours earlier had been loading 40mm grenades into the breech of his rocket launcher and pressing the trigger, and then, satisfied in every way, returned to Scottsdale to be at work by Monday, and spackled and pounded wood, and lifted tile, and drafted at his table, smiling while using the nail gun as if he were born to it, having just fired a sniper rifle in Yuma as if he were born to it. And perhaps it was this, his well-hidden true self, that he couldn’t help communicating to his youngest son, who wanted nothing more than to make his dad happy. Such a good boy.
It was getting warmer. Not much like the tropics here: the air was dry. The twelve-man team crunched through the golden cyprus and bamboo jungle in a single file, practically stepping into the forward man’s boots as they looked out for snakes, for mines, for booby traps, for poison, for punji sticks. Ha Si, who saw everything, cleared the bush, held the relief map, the compass, the watch, keeping an eye out, weapon always pointed. It was as if he had six hands.
“He’s fucking dynamite,” Alexander said, leaning forward to Mercer.
Mercer nodded. “Rumor is,” he said quietly, “he used to be on their side. That’s why he knows everything, can do anything. But we don’t ask. We’re just glad he’s ours.”
“No kidding,” said Alexander, marveling at Ha Si’s innate sense of direction through these impassable parts. Tania should have had him with her when she was lost in Lake Ilmen. Plus a little razor-sharp Bowie knife, a C-ration, Richter’s command-only VHF radio, and a Zippo lighter with the engraved words, “And the Lord said, let there be soldiers, and the fish rose from the sea,” and she would’ve been all set. Alexander smiled. Somehow she had managed, even without.
They walked for three hours. When the
Finally they reached the end of the forest, at the crest of a mountain, and came out onto a long and narrow mesa maybe six hundred feet up over a grassy gorge, at the bottom of which, nested between steep and rising ranges, on the banks of a brown stream, a ville was laid out in the flat, like an enclave. The mountains covered it on all sides, themselves covered in elephant grass and rocks and short pines. A dozen rice paddies were staggered in stair formations cut into the side of the mountain across from the A-team.
“This is Kum Kau?” asked Alexander, looking carefully.
“Yes, according to my specs,” replied Ha Si. “What, too small?”
The village was small, one-sixth the size of their base at Kontum. It was maybe fifty yards on its two longest sides, and twenty to twenty-five yards on the shortest. The thatched huts were built symmetrically— on straight pathways—as if the area were designed by a Parisian architect and sprung all at once, except for the slight arc that followed the curve of the river. It was quiet and no one was out. It looked abandoned.
Alexander watched it for five more seconds before he put down his binoculars. “All my training may have come from a small office in Yuma, Colonel Richter,” he said, “not the ground, like yours, but this below us is no village. It’s a decoy. It’s a fucking army base.”
Richter was doubtful, picking up his own binoculars. “The NVA build gray hooches to hide in. These look like regular civilian huts.” They were so high up, they could talk without fear of being heard down below. Still, they moved a step away from the slope, hunkered down.
“It’s noon,” Alexander said. “Where is everyone?”
“How the fuck should I know? Sleeping? Jacking off?”
“That’s what I mean. It’s a village. The rice paddies are overgrown and waiting. Why isn’t anyone out tending the crops like they’re supposed to? Colonel Richter, in a normal village, in the middle of the day, people are out. They plant, they wash, they cook, they take care of their families. Where is everyone?”
Richter looked through the binoculars. “There. There are women. They’re washing in that mud they call a river.”
Alexander looked. “There are forty huts, and all you see is three old women?”
Ha Si—without binoculars—quietly said, “Colonel Richter, six hundred feet below us, at the base of this southern hill, a dozen men in coolies drawn over their faces are lying on the ground, hidden by bamboo.”
Alexander nodded. “The sentry are spaced fifteen meters apart, like they were at Colditz Castle, the highest security POW camp the Germans had. A civilian village, Colonel?”
“On the plus side,” Ha Si said conciliatorily to a grumpy Richter, “the sentry are sleeping.”
Alexander glanced at him. “I thought you didn’t joke, Ha Si?”
Ha Si was straight-faced. “I’m not joking, sir. They are actually sleeping.” The black irises in his narrow black eyes twinkled a little.
Ha Si had excellent command of English, which the other Bannhas did not speak nearly as well, all except for Tojo, who was apparently fluent in English (and Vietnamese and Japanese, being half-Japanese himself). However, he chose not to speak.
Alexander suspected that while the village slept during the day the place turned into Las Vegas at night. They would have to wait until night to see if his inductions proved correct. Ha Si certainly thought they would: he didn’t take a step without his weapon in hand. Whatever the status of the village, this was Kum Kau. They had to stay long enough to find out if Moon Lai was here.
They scoped out a good central location, cleared a little bush for monitoring activities, found rocks and nice high grass for cover, broke camp, ate. They couldn’t smoke, which made twelve men crazy, but the Vietnamese smelled nothing as well as Western cigarettes. You couldn’t take a puff without the wafting wind blowing it into the nose of the enemy. Alexander said had he known this he might have reconsidered coming.
Ha Si said, “I thought you didn’t joke, sir.”
“Who is joking?” Alexander had not been this long without a cigarette since Berlin. Nothing to do now. Cigarettes or a search for his son.
It was around noon and too warm. They thoroughly cleaned and inspected their weapons and then sat and tapped on their knees in the coarse yellow grass. The grass was thick, growing to ten feet tall in places, its razor-sharp edges making it almost impossible to penetrate. Richter, who hated to sit still, went himself—the height of foolishness— with three of his Yards to scope out the hill and help clear a swath through the grass down to the village, in case there was trouble and they needed to run back up in a hurry. Of course, if they could run up the trail, the Charlies chasing them could also move up the trail. So Ha Si and Alexander—who could sit still but hated to—planted Harry’s punji sticks into the ground halfway up. Then they quietly moved through the grass down almost to where the sentries were snoring and Claymored the lower portion, stretching the thin tripwires fifty meters across. “The Charlies step on this wire,” whispered Ha Si, crouching not five meters away from the slumbering men, “and for a hundred-meter radius they are eating small steel balls for breakfast.” He almost smiled. “We will stagger the mines uphill, too. If this lower pass does not get them, the one ten meters up will, and then will come the punji sticks, and then we will set up the rest of our Claymores up top.”
“We should really mine the entire perimeter,” Alexander said, looking across the grassy hill and around the village.
“We do not have enough mines.”
“You’re right.” Alexander was getting carried away. “One every hundred meters along the bottom of this hill will be fine. We’ll need five. And then four more, ten meters up. And then three more at the top of the hill, near our trail. We have enough.”
“We will forget where we put them,” said Ha Si.
“Better not.” Alexander winked.
“We do not have enough tripwire.”
“Stretch it as far as you can.”
“Many precautions, no?”
“Yes.”
Ha Si nodded. “Preparing for the worst, Commander?”
“Preparing for the worst, Ha Si.”
It took them two hours of stealth and great care—in case the hill was already booby-trapped—to do it.
After they meticulously marked the location of the tripwire, they cleared a separate, secret path through the elephant grass and, pleased with their work, went back to their encampment, sat down and had a drink. But not a cigarette. Alexander would have given up drink for life to have a cigarette. At least one pair of binoculars remained trained on the ville at all times. It was quiet: only sporadically did some women, young and old, creep out to the thick slow river to wash and quickly return to their huts. None of the women looked like the woman the soldiers were looking for—though two had been maimed: each was missing a leg. The guards below continued to sleep peacefully, with their Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles in their hands and their hats covering their faces from sunlight.
At three in the afternoon, Ha Si said, “Heads up. Major Barrington, take a look. Could this be the one?” And he didn’t even have binoculars!
They looked.
A small white shape emerged from a far hooch on stilts near the river and walked toward them, to the row of huts closest to their side of the mountain. She was wearing a white coolie and a white dress. She was small and thin—was easily overlooked, like a peony. But she was pregnant. Alexander noticed that first—how ver
“Bullseye, baby,” said Elkins.
Bullseye indeed. Alexander could not look away from her belly.
Carrying something, she made her way down the path in front of the sentries, stopped, stood for a few moments as if getting her bearings, and then disappeared inside the last hooch in the row. The U.S. soldiers waited, Alexander nearly not breathing.
She reappeared twenty minutes later, still carrying something, and made her waddling way back. Through the binoculars Alexander could now see her right hand—missing the pinky and ring fingers. To him she looked heavier than when she went in, as if suddenly acquiring gravity that pressed down not on her belly but into her shoulders, sloping her to the ground from which she did not—or could not—lift her eye.
“If we don’t hurry,” said Elkins, “she’s going to have the kid right in front of us.”
Alexander wished he didn’t have to look at her to make such an assessment. He watched her walk across the four rows of huts to the river and rinse the things she had been carrying. A small child of two, maybe three, ran up to her. She helped him in the water, splashed him a little. They sat by each other. They were alone.
Richter, Elkins, Mercer, Ha Si watched her quietly, sitting by Alexander’s side. “I’m sure that’s not her kid,” said Richter, glancing anxiously at Alexander. “It’s probably her sister’s kid. Sister’s dead, now she takes care of him.”
No one spoke then.
Alexander did not speak most of all. He turned away from the village, from the girl, he turned his back, he leaned against the rock, and said, “Richter, man, if I don’t have a fucking cigarette, I’m going to die.” He closed his eyes.
Alexander didn’t have a cigarette and hours later night fell.
Richter ordered his men into sleep and sentry. Two Yards were on watch, everyone else was sleeping, except Alexander. The camp transformed. Bugles blew faint reveille, lights went on, men appeared, moving in and out of huts, there was motion, activity; there was carrying, organizing, adjusting; even the perimeter guards awoke. They relieved themselves where they stood and some of the women (who now numbered in the dozens) brought them food and ate with them. Alexander watched it all through his green-eye StarLights, the night-vision goggles that magnified light up to 10,000 times, but even without them it was plain to see that in this place, in Kum Kau—night was day, and day was night.