Turn of the Cards

Chapter Twenty-eight

At the next break in the rain a bunch of the new recruits got sent to a rifle range beside the Vietnamese People’s Army camp next door for a little training. The kid with the flesh-bars in front of his mouth eyed his M-16 with disdain.

“Why we gotta fuck with these?” he asked. “I heard they jam all the time. Don’t they use AK-47s around here? Now, those guns are bad.”

The instructor was a tall, narrow joker Brigade original with a squint and bright-green skin. “You’ve been watching 60 Minutes too much, Dillman. The media have distorted the story; as they do anything connected with the Vietnam experience — anything to do with firearms, for that matter.”

“After the M-16’s introduction to combat in the middle 1960s, a number of the rifles experienced failure-to-feed malfunctions, what the layperson will call your jam. Frequently these had fatal results to the shooter. The Army and Colt did a study, announced that nothing was wrong, and proceeded to fix it.”

He smiled without humor. “Since that time the M-16 has undergone a number of improvements and refinements — what you computer types might call debugging. You now have the privilege to be equipped with the very latest rendition, the M-16A2. Consider yourselves fortunate. The Black Rifle is the finest assault rifle in the world. You will treat it with respect.”

“But what about the AK-47?” another kid wanted to know.

“Heft your rifle, soldier. Is it heavy?”

“Uh, not particularly.”

The instructor reached into the duffel bag at his feet, produced a wooden-stock AK. “The Kalashnikov series of assault rifles consists of the AK-47 — which is old and outmoded, people, though the People’s Army still has a lot of them — the AKM, the folding-stock AKMS paratrooper model and the new AKS-74 family, which are in 5.45-millimeter instead of 7.62 like the older ones. They have several things in common. They are no more mechanically reliable than the M-16A2, even under extreme field conditions. They have a safety/single-shot/full-auto selector that is loud enough to wake the dead, which is inconvenient on ambush. And, people, they are heavy.”

He tossed the rifle to Dillman. The kid caught it, then staggered, almost dropping the weapon.

“A fully loaded AK-47 weighs upward of ten and a half pounds. An M-16 weighs less than seven. Those three-pounds-plus seem very, very significant when you have to hump the rifle through elephant grass and up and down hills under our beautiful Southeast Asian sun all day long.

“Do you now understand why you will carry and learn to shoot the Black Rifle?”

The assent was on the muted side. The instructor let it go without comment and proceeded to the instructing part.

Mark took his turn shooting. To his astonishment he wasn’t instantly seized with a desire to run off and start gunning down Vietnamese schoolchildren the instant the piece was loaded, despite the ready availability of Vietnamese schoolchildren. The rifle had very little felt recoil, and wasn’t horribly loud.

It was actually kind of fun.

“As originally issued,” the instructor said, “the M-16A2 had a regulator restricting full-auto fire to three-round bursts. It was observed that the first thing troops did on being issued the weapon was to disable the three-round regulator. Accordingly, the weapons you have been issued can be fired in the unrestricted full-auto mode. You would be well advised not to do so.”

Right. The recruits sprayed bullets downrange on full automatic, a magazine at a time. Mark noticed that even at close range few rounds from a full thirty-round mag hit anywhere near the X-ring when fired flat out. A couple of the young guns managed to miss not only the somewhat macabre black man-outline target proper but the paper border as well with entire magazines.

Mark, obedient to the instructor’s orders primarily because he had no idea what the hell else to do, fired his shots one at a time, aiming each as best he could. Though the others jeered and hooted for him to hurry, he got better than half his shots into the black at twenty-five meters.

“Well, congratulations,” the sergeant-instructor said. “You killed him, instead of just scaring him shitless the way most of these homeboys did. Guess which lasts longer in combat?”

Mark felt both satisfaction and guilt. Though some of his “friends” had taken human life, it was creepy to feel good about shooting anything. He suspected that if it actually came to action, he would flip the selector to Anything Goes and empty his mag with the best of them. And he was unsure he could actually fire at another human with any hope of hitting him. He knew the hot-and-cold rush of combat and knew that the real thing differed from practice as death differs from dance.

It’s nice to have friends, he thought as they packed it in. The rain began to fall again.

“I don’ know but I been told —”

The Ural-375 lurched up the cracked blacktop road, southwest into the Tay Nguyen. The sky was clear. The sun beat on the canvas shell so hard, it seemed damned near as loud as the rain.

“Nat-born woman got no soul.”

It was Mark’s platoon’s turn to be shipped out for what Croyd — just transferred into the same squad as Mark — called sleep-away camp: overnight or longer patrols in the mountainous Central Highlands of Gia Lai-Kon Tum Province. Some regarded the rotation as a welcome break from Venceremos; it was reputedly cooler in the mountains than down by the coast. On the other hand, the inhabitants tended to be Montagnards or ethnic Viets forcibly transplanted from Ho-ville, and not at all welcoming.

“Find me one before I die —”

Sobel and his monitors had been stepping hard the last week or so on rumors that the Highlands were in a state of virtual revolt. There were a few traitors at work, undoubtedly in the pay of the CIA. The populace — the ocean in which guerrilla warriors swam like fish — rejected them roundly.

“Take her down, give it a try.”

Though he said nothing even to Croyd, Mark felt apprehension. He had noticed that often as not, the heavily laden craft taking off from Da Nang rolled out heading inland and came back with their hard-points empty. Maybe there’s a test range in the Highlands, he told himself.

“Sound off!”

“One, two!”

Two squads, about twenty men, were jammed into the Ural. Its wood floor and metal sides rubbed Mark raw at the tailbone and lower back. Gilbert — in command of the platoon with the apparent rank of first lieutenant — bragged on it as the most powerful and capable utility truck in the world. That might be true, but it didn’t seem to be designed for hauling humans. Maybe the Network had secretly sold the Sovs a design meant for rhomboidal life-forms.

“Sound off!”

“Three, four!”

“Sound off!”

“One, two three, four, one, two — three, four!”

“Y’know,” said Croyd, stirring beside Mark, where he had been slumped the past half hour seemingly asleep or dead, “that’s kind of catchy”

Mark grimaced. The marching song had a nasty edge to it, in the tone in which it was sung and in lyrics that smacked to him of rape. It made him uncomfortable.

Seated across the truck-bed, Dillman gave Mark his death’s-head grin. “You’re not singing, Meadows. What’s the matter? Don’t like our little song?”

“Hey,” another kid said, “you know how clannish nats are. They always stick together in the face of nasty, dirty jokers.” He and Dillman made a big show of working the bolts of their M-16s. It didn’t really matter — they didn’t have any ammunition — but to Mark it was the thought that counted. He spent the rest of the ride with one hand in his pants pocket, wrapped around a vial of powder. It was orange, and he just hoped the rain held off until the trip was over.

Their new forward base camp was at a gutted church, on a hill surrounded by mountains and overlooking a vast expanse of tea bushes. Croyd paused a moment to light a stogie and gaze out at the vista. Like the rest of rural Vietnam that Mark had seen, the mountains and the plantation were green, more shades of green than he had ever known existed, and all so lush they hurt the eye.

Dirt roads crossed the green tea fields, red and raw as the marks of a whip. The straw hats of black-clad workers bobbed among the waist-high plants.

“Lordy, look at all them slaves just a-workin’ away on de old plantation,” Croyd intoned in a terrible Amos ’n’ Andy accent.

“It’s not a plantation,” Mark said. “It’s a collective farm.”

Up until that moment Mark hadn’t known Croyd could move his rather forbidding-looking eyebrow ridges. He raised one now. The effect was as if the pon farr had hit Mr. Spock while he was visiting the Gorn homeworld, and the resultant offspring was trying to mimic Daddy’s trademark “highly illogical, you dumb Earthling fucks” look.

A rain squall swept the plantation — no, commune — workers from view as though washing them away. Luce Gilbert emerged from the lead Ural of their two-truck platoon convoy. He wore a cammie baseball cap and a camouflaged uniform whose creases you could shave with. It was obviously tailored; it had sleeves for his upper two sets of arms, the functional ones, and little tuck-and-roll pouches for the lower, semi-vestigial sets. He began to yell orders for his troops to unass the Urals from Hell and get his H.Q. tent set up among the bullet-pocked stone walls and fallen blackened timbers of the church.

Mark turned around to help unload the gear. A touch on his biceps stopped him. He whirled to find Osprey standing beside him. His talons were lustrous black, with white feathers between. They gripped Mark lightly by the ann.

Mark’s eyes rolled. His hand hunted wildly through his pants pocket. Those claws could take a man’s throat out like that. A spatter of rain hit his cheek. No, orange won’t do, the rain’d be like an acid bath to J. J. Flash. And the sun’s still shining, so Moonchild’s out … Jesus, does this mean my only chance is to turn into Aquarius?

“Don’t be afraid,” Osprey said. His huge, hooked beak was anything but reassuring. “I won’t hurt you.”

He steered a still-quivering Mark to one side. “Look, what happened back at Rick’s … we didn’t know you, man. Didn’t know who you were. We know now. We remember what Cap’n Trips did for Doughboy when the nats were ready to toast him, man. We don’t forget our friends.”

“Uh — thanks, man.”

“Now, the way some of these young bloods talk” He shook his magnificent eagle head — “Be aware you don’t have to worry about us, man. But keep an eye on your back, just the same. Some of these kids look at you, they see nothing but nat meat. Know what I mean?”

Mark nodded nervously, glanced around through the downpour. Nobody was paying any overt attention to him. “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

“The Rox lives, man.” Osprey gave him a feathered thumb up and drifted away. Mark stood watching him, with his boonie hat collapsing around his ears from the weight of the water falling from the sky, fingering the vials in his pocket.

Okay. If somebody tries anything, I turn into Aquarius and hope for the best.

Why did trying to do good have to be so complicated?