Slice

THE RUNG SAT SPECIAL ZONE (1965)

The LZ, which is named with some ridiculous woman's name, is perhaps fifteen clicks out and the birds change pitch and it signals his on-line terminal that this is the time he hates about to materialize and manifest itself in the sudden drop to the decks, and suddenly your lunch is in your throat and before you can drop your socks and grab your rocks the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) has set them down through the small opening in the green, and a commo “adviser,” a marine sergeant, is yelling at them to double-time it to the blue feature.

They are soon jammed onto a PACV from some riverine unit and roaring up the snaky waterway into the Long Tao's ranged mouth. The Hovercraft is called a patrol air-cushion vehicle and Chaingang thinks of the blue feature as a water snake, winding the way a serpent will, flowing and twisting into the Rung Sat.

These are spooky Charlie-held streams that weave a web of blue and brown lines through the jungle delta and sprawling Vietnamese marshlands. There will be no medevac back in here. No arty. Nor resupply. This is a lonely game to be played by the chosen few. What did they say on the commercials? The few—the proud. If you get your ass kicked back in here you are permanently fucked up.

Chaingang sees the tributaries as a thousand water snakes, their names sounding like notes played on a busted musical instrument by a deaf man without hands, music that reverberates and twangs and echoes shrilly with Asian monkey vibes of bad luck and slow death and omens of evil.

Water snakes feeding into the arms of Satan. Warping the drug-ripped minds of these children. Injecting them with massive shots of instant paranoia and fear tremors that rumble deep in the gut like the New Madrid Fault Line, and the boys hope they can get their fatigues off before the fear erupts, because as everyone knows Ho Chi Minh's revenge takes no prisoners.

The PACV comes coasting into the Long Tao at dusk in a ratfuck of off-loading mania and hand signals and everyone sweating bullets, wishing they were aboard her when the chief petty officer makes her a memory. And the team is moving out to dig in the night positions before the blackness of Victor Charlie country comes to blind and befuddle.

They are moving into the darker green of the Jungle. Wet. Soggy. Putrid. Foul vegetation and rotting plant life and dead fish clog the humid air, making it impossible to breathe from the stink and the asphyxiating humidity. And this is the GOOD time. When that tide goes out the Rung Sat becomes a barf city mudhole of the most evil and poisonous stench the devil ever shit on earth. Stinking slime pops like the sound of enemy coming, and you can only hope that the worst thing in your nightmares will be the red ants and leeches and venomous snakes and big, growling man-eaters and alligators as big as Chryslers and vampire bats that come to suck human blood.

Charlie lives here. It is his base camp. Ammo dump. His triage. His resupply. Charles’ R & R. Charlie owns this bitch. Welcome to the Rung Sat Special Zone. Four hundred square miles of the most frighteningly dangerous, stinking, deadly mangrove swamps and river delta in the Nam. The name translates as the Assassin's Forest. A slimy, smelly, murderous mass of vampire feces that lies along the Long Tao, connecting Saigon to the South China Sea.

331/STAR RACER is an operation being run up the VC's nostrils by the U.S. Naval Advisory Group, the Crotch, and assorted spooks, grunts, and snake-eaters from various units. Because the mission is aimed through, if not around, certain elements of the ARVN, it becomes the property of one covert spike team, carried on the books as M-1350, written in invisible ink and guaranteed to NOT go down in history.

The Hoi Chanh dinks have butt-fucked intelligence once again, and the unit is wasted. Its ass is well and truly waxed, and Chaingang, who is a self-contained hunter-killer unit moving slower than the pack, never following fee path of least resistance, working solo, is now operating alone. No radio. No spike team. No chopper. No boat. Surrounded by VC and worse—he is in the heart of an NVA base camp—and the monsoon rains will come soon.

Somewhere, GHOST TOWN, the exfiltration team, awaits the radio signal. A coded crackle of words sounding like routine grid coordinates: India—Whiskey—November—Yankee—Zulu—Foxtrot—Golf—Papa—Lima—Golf—Papa—India. Twelve simple words. IWN. YZF. GPL. GPI. What could be simpler to remember? But there is no mike to key. Not static-filled radio to speak the exfiltration sign into. No way to tell them. So he will WALK out of the Rung Sat. He will KILL his way out.

He makes his way again to the edge of the shadowy tree line and comes out at the edge of a rice field, moving quickly across the muddy paddy dike. Sweating profusely in the scorching heat and energy-sapping humidity of the dreaded RSSZ. Fifteen quintuple-E bootprints mashing down in the muddy earth, leaving a trail that is dangerously clear. He wishes he had extra grenades or even a pie or two, which is what he calls the claymores, that he could use to leave a little surprise in his pathway. To “close the back door” behind him.

But he is out of ‘nades, mines, even ammo. Worse—although he prefers the personal killing modes—he has lost his long-range destroyer. It is his tool for dispatching the little people as the current situation and terrain dictated and he missed the comfort of the weight on his left shoulder.

It had been R & D'd by the Bridge Tool and Die Manufacturing Company, of Philadelphia, Pa., and made by Inland Steel—the Inland Manufacturing Division of General Motors—and it was Chaingang's pig, the M-60 LMG. Twenty-four pounds of slope killer. A gas-operated, 550-round-per-minute, 43 1/2-inch death machine fed by a disintegrating link belt system, which the government had phased in to replace the venerable .30 Browning.

Under ordinary field conditions the M-60 would easily lift a hundred-round bandolier vertically, and the auto-fire recoil was sufficient to actually hold the weapon in place when fired from the hip, making it the most reliable heavy-duty piece that was sufficiently mobile for a single man to carry into combat.

He liked the weight of it on the special shoulder pad. He enjoyed the way it felt cradled in his arms as he thought about how easily he could cut a man in half with the projectiles from this tool. How easy it would be to stitch a line of bullets through the middle of a human, blasting him apart with the mere touch of a trigger.

But his M-60 and ammo were gone. No pies. No ‘nades. Not even his Hi-Standard with the suppressor. Only a pitiful Colt Woodsman and half a dozen .22 rounds, his chain, and his blade.

He stepped over a deep set of ruts. Tracks had been along through here and there was water in the deepest ruts. He spotted the shotgun shells, but to him it was the spent brass that you see everywhere after a mad minute. The litter of a firefight, perhaps.

Everywhere he looked he saw the trash that was the calling card of both the multimilitary and civilian incursion/occupancy/habitation. The whole country was a garbage heap. He looked for bootprints, broken limbs, disturbed nature, as he tromped down away from the beaten path, his sensors purring as he moved toward the blue line.

Nature's noises were building in intensity the way they do the deeper you go into the boonies, and Chaingang thought he might be nearer the big ditch than he'd calculated. It looked just like a steep ditch bank and he was surprised not to see water as he came up over the rise, moving cautiously, keeping his boonie-rat cover down even with the surrounding tree and bush line, taken aback to see the huge, dry creek bed and the remnants of a blown bridge. He eased down into the fly-infested hollow. Eyes scoping across the cracked mud floor for sign. He found more shells. Spent brass from another firefight. The whole thing could be a bomb crater. He crossed the expanse of mud and pulled himself up the other side and felt something. He stopped.

There was somebody, something nearby, a living thing. He neither saw nor heard anything—just that stab of awareness. He felt it like a chill on his skin and it froze him to the spot. Absolutely motionless.

Stilling slowing stilling the vital signs. Breathing twice as deeply but half as often, slow, heavy, measured intakes of air, filling the immense lungs and slowing stilling slowing the heartbeat as he tuned in on the presence. He stayed frozen so long the birds began singing loudly as they will if you remain unmoving for several minutes. He heard loud animal noises, faraway engines, a chopper high in the sky and far away, and something moving close by. The killing hand held the taped tractor-strength chain, his “flexible club,” in a steel death grip and whatever it was was right beside him now and he tensed and it moved slightly and the camouflage was so good it had been very close all this time, and he had to stifle the cough of laughter as he spotted the tiny brown furry creature in the deep weeds.

Very carefully and gently his left hand reached down and scooped under the baby rabbit and he lifted it up to his level and looked at it like he'd never seen one before. He poked around in the weeds but could not find the mother or any other babies, so he tenderly sat it back down in the deepest thickest weeds he could see and backed away. His hands had become so toughened he had not felt the soft fur or the barely discernible thumping of its tiny heart. It was the first rabbit he'd seen in-country in a long while. The baby rabbit hunkered down in the weeds, having a small heart attack as the giant human moved off.

He thought about how they mistreated the animals here. Especially our soldiers. He enjoyed thinking about the one boy who had teased the duck. He watched him later, and when he went into a latrine to shit he rapidly fragged the door and when the punk came out ... He had to pull his twisted thoughts off the fragging of the punk, something was demanding all the powers of his concentration.

Chaingang was all but impossible to booby-trap. He could be shot, bombed, fragged, destroyed in any number of ways. But to expect him to step on a poisoned bamboo stake or to trip a bouncing betty or a whip or any of the hundred other traps they could deliver to the unwary, was simply to underestimate his abilities. So at one with his environs was this killer that the slightest off-key factor—the smallest detail out of harmony with its surroundings—and he would see it as if it wore a bright flag. The other thing man has never duplicated is nature, be it camouflage or neorealist art, and however impressive, man's artifice could do no better than a shiny wax apple.

It was not the fear of mines or bidden chi-coms that nagged at him. He had yet to put a label to it, but he knew that to ignore such vibes was to do so at his own peril. It could be this piece of ground. For just as there are persons in whom the trace of evil is prominent and assertive there are geographic locales in which that trace is strong. And as the men and women and children touched by evil reflect no obvious commonality, the traces can be found anywhere. At the bottom of the sea, in a complex of cities long buried by the winds of time and evolution, in a certain desert, or on a variety of hills, valleys, ravines, mountains, temples, desolate landscapes, shores, wastelands, swamps, urban sky-rises, remote countrysides, and boondock ditch banks alike. This was one such locale.

He tasted it, smelled it, it prickled his skin as the synergy of the place and person combined to form a deadly bond. He also was beginning to sense that unnamed thing again, and be realized what it was when he came over the next steep bank and saw that he was at the ditch. There was a Cong fishing boat, or what was left of one, tied to the overhanging willows by a piece of rope that had all but rotted through.

He pulled the boat up onto the bank easily and tipped it over on its edge, a 275-pound wooden jon boat, tipping it like it weighed fifty pounds, letting it plop back down in the muddy water. It had been badly caulked and the caulking was only partially holding in the cracks, but it appeared to still be halfway sound. Bunkowski checked to see how the bottom looked and, satisfied, he gingerly stepped in, propelling his bulk into the middle section of the boat. It didn't sink to the bottom with him, which he considered a good sign.

There was a broken piece of oar and a couple of old cans and milk jugs, which had probably been used to bail the old leaky tub with. He picked up the oar and shoved off from the bank. The water was probably quite shallow along here, he thought, with the bank only ten or twelve feet high and maybe—tops—six or seven feet of water beneath the boat.

Silently, with the powerful arms and wrists and back that possessed superhuman strength, the behemoth dipped the piece of wood into the water and sent the rowboat gliding upstream, aiming quietly in the direction of the enemy's heartbeat.