IT+CONSPICABITVR+POTESTATEM+INFINITAM. Whosoever shall cause the spirit Luccae to cry "Master!!" shall glimpse unbounded power.
This line drew Hermann's eyes as the Great Bear does a mariner's and as he read and reread it he began to tremble at its implications. No longer did he dream of the Earth, its castles and fertile vales, but of power that stalked among the aeons and diced with suns.
In the end he turned again to the ointment and the purple whispers that never questioned, never advised, only answered the questions put to them with a hard, icy truth. He was afraid, now; for though Hermann had no conception of the fullness of the forces he dealt with, he knew of Luccae and dreaded it. But to stop was to die in his own time, and the pride was on Hermann to take what fate offered. And so the tower, and so the dreams; in the morning his fear was greater for knowing more of his task, but he began his preparations.
And this too was a slow business, for it demanded much of the true mercury with which to lay out the pentacle. If Luccae was to be caught there must be no chance for it to escape later. First the hydragyrum, then the two spells to commit to memory. The first to send him into the place, the time where Luccae danced and waited for the sun to explode; the second to return him and it, at the split-second that would leave Luccae within the pentacle and Hermann outside it: else the magician could crouch in lone safety while all the world besides melted into unholy alchemy.
So Hermann waited until the pentacle was ready and the stars had united in such a way to make the unthinkable possible. Then he spoke three words that stilled the mutter of the city around him, three words and a fourth that was drowned in the thunderclap which tore a hole in the universe and hurled him through it.
The great sun hung right overhead, a gorgon that licked at the sky with long serpents of fire. Across the barren rocks writhed the shadows of the three dancers: the first, washed purple by the deep red light, pounded his splay feet in time to the sound that howled through his nose, as long as he was tall. The second pranced, goat-footing it over rocks that sparked beneath him. His mouth was twisted into a rictus of delight and never a sound came from it.
The third was perched on a low pedestal: it was Luccae and only its face danced. One eye, as moribund as the sun, burned in the center of a thousand shifting patterns; every one of them a dead damned soul, each of them Hermann himself.
But Hermann stood and whispered the syllables of return without a pause or stumbling. The wailing and click of hooves continued but only Luccae remained, only its face warping and growing and weaving a net for Hermann's soul. But he was drunk with dreams of power and could not be bound; the words rippled off his tongue heedless of the shape that expanded before his eyes until it filled the whole world. As the final word rang out in the sudden silence Hermann stepped back without looking and the sound of sea crashed around him.
He was safe, and Luccae glared within a prison as ceaselessly changing as its own face.
And then to the mastering. For the first time the magician's dream spiral failed him and he woke from his stupor with nothing but the memory of fruitless chittering. Hermann was numb with terror by then, but he could not stop; Luccae squatted in his mind though he had curtained off the pentagram. Sooner or later he would make a mistake, would break the line. Unless…
Hermann's lore was as great as his recklessness in using it to do what his dream had told him could not be done: to crush Luccae to the point it must admit his dominance and lordship. And here Hermann misunderstood as he had been intended; but it was too late by then and his fate was closing on him.
He took a great smoky garnet and strung it on a silver wire to the ceiling. From his cabinets he took a tiny box of orange crystals and a phial of deep blue liquid. The box he opened and set beneath the stone. Then, though he need not have done so, Hermann ripped away the hangings between him and Luccae. The red eye glared at him and the garnet blazed back. Hermann unstoppered the phial and began chanting the words of congruity. On the twenty-first syllable he tilted the liquid into the box and stepped back as a serpent of smoke shot up to seize the garnet.
For all the power of Luccae it was trapped beyond self-preservation, for the stone was dead and the smoke that hissed about it was horribly alive. The psychic leverage on the garnet washed Luccae's face to a frozen gray, glazed the fire of the single eye, and held the flicker of souls to a muddy trembling. A minute, another minute – and Luccae spoke.
It was a sound without earthly counterpart, but Hermann heard it and understood in the final instant his mistake. Then the sea and rock boiled together as Luccae's Master came to free His liege.
The Dancer in the Flames
I spent most of 1970 as an interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The experience changed my life in many ways, some of them good.
Most of the changes were not good. When I hear people quote Nietzsche, "What does not kill us makes us stronger," I always think "Yeah, but stronger what?" Not stronger human beings, of that I'm sure.
I don't think it ever occurred to me to send "The Dancer in the Flames" anywhere but to Stu Schiff. F amp;SF would've taken six months or more to reply, and I assumed the reply would be a rejection.
Now I'm not quite so sure. It surprises me that a number of people with backgrounds in literature praise this story as a study in alienation, when I thought it was just a fantasy about Viet Nam.
To me, Viet Nam was alienation. I wish it had been a fantasy.
The viewpoint character is an officer. I was not. The setting, incidents, and attitudes depicted are all real. If you ask Nam vets what the most popular song In Country was, they'll all tell you, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place."
This isn't a story which I like very much. One of the reasons is that I don't much like the person who lived the background I'm writing about here. We've been stuck with each other since 1970, though.
The flames writhing out of the ashtray were an eyeball-licking orange. For an instant Lt. Schaydin was sure that the image dancing in them was that of the girl he had burned alive in Cambodia, six months before. But no, not quite; though the other's face had been of Gallic cast too.
The two enlisted men had turned at the sound of the officer brushing back the poncho curtain which divided his tent from the rear compartment of the command track. Radios were built into the right wall of the vehicle above a narrow counter. On that counter rested the CQ's clipboard and a cheap glass ashtray, full of flame. The men within-Skip Sloane, who drove the command track and was now Charge of Quarters, and the medic Evens-had been watching the fire when Schaydin looked in. It was to that ten-inch flame which the lieutenant's eyes were drawn as well.
He stared at her calves and up the swell of the hips which tucked in at a waist that thrust toward him. She looked straight at Schaydin then and her mouth pursed to call. Above the image hung the black ripples of smoke which were her hair. Abruptly the flame shrank to a wavering needle and blinked out. The compartment was lighted only by the instrument dials, pitch-dark after the orange glare. The air was sharp with the residue of the flame; but more than that caused Schaydin's chest to constrict. He remembered he had called out some joke as he touched the flamethrower's trigger and sent a loop of napalm through the window of the hooch they were supposed to destroy. The Cambodian girl must have been hiding in the thatch or among the bags of rice. She had been all ablaze as she leaped into the open, shrieking and twisting like a dervish until she died. But this tiny image had not screamed, it had really spoken. It/She had said "How did you do that?" Schaydin gasped.
The enlisted men glanced at each other, but their commander did not seem angry, only-strange. Sloane held up a twenty-ounce block of C-4, plastic explosive. Sweat rolled down the driver's chest and beer gut. He wore no shirt since the radios heated the command vehicle even in the relative coolness of the Vietnamese night. "You take a bit of C-4, sir," Sloane said. His hairy thumb and forefinger gouged out an acorn-sized chunk of the white explosive. Another piece had already been removed."It takes a shock to make it blow up. If you just touch a match to it in the open, it burns. Like that."
Sloane handed the pellet to Schaydin, who stood with a dazed look on his face. The C-4 had the consistency of nougat, but it was much denser. "We ought 'a air the place out, though," the driver continued. "The fumes don't do anybody much good."
"But how did you get it to look like a woman?"Schaydin demanded."I could see her right there, her face, her eyes… and she was saying…"
Evens reached past the lieutenant and flapped the poncho curtain to stir the dissipating tendrils of smoke."C-4makesa pretty flame," the stocky medic said, "but you don't want to get the stuff in your system. We used to have a mascot, a little puppy. She ate part of a block and went pure-ass crazy. Seeing things. She'd back into a corner and snap and bark like a bear was after her… Middle of that afternoon she went haring out over the berm, yapping to beat Hell. We never did see her again."
The medic looked away from his CO, then added, "Don't think you ought to breathe the fumes, either. Hard to tell what it might make you see. Don't think I want to burn any more C-4, even if it does make the damnedest shadows I ever hope to see."
The lieutenant opened his mouth to protest, to insist that he had seen the image the instant he pushed the curtain aside; but he caught his men's expressions. His mind seemed to be working normally again. "You guys just saw a-fire?"
"That's all there was to see," said Evens. "Look, it's late, I better go rack out." Sloane nodded, tossing him the part block of explosive. The medic edged past Schaydin, into the tent and the still night beyond.
"Time for a guard check," Sloane said awkwardly and reseated himself before the microphone. One by one the heavy-set man began calling the vehicles sited around the circular berm. The tracks replied with the quiet negative reports that showed someone was awake in each turret. The CQ did not look up at his commander, but when Schaydin stepped back from the compartment and turned away, he heard a rustle. Sloane had pulled the poncho closed.
Schaydin sat down on the edge of his bunk, staring at the morsel of explosive. He saw instead the girl he had glimpsed in the flame. She had danced with her body, writhing sinuously like a belly dancer as her breasts heaved against the fire's translucence. Schaydin couldn't have been mistaken, the girl had been as real as-the Cambodian girl he had burned. And this girl's expression was so alive, her fire-bright eyes glinting with arrogant demand. What had the Cambodian girl been crying? But her eyes were dulled by the clinging napalm…
The pellet of C-4 came into focus as Schaydin's fingers rotated it. All right, there was a simple way to see whether his mind had been playing tricks on him.
Schaydin set the ball of explosive on top of a minican, the sealed steel ammunition box prized as luggage by men in armored units. C-4 burned at over 1000 degrees, the lieutenant remembered, but it would burn briefly enough that only the paint would scorch. The flame of Schaydin's cigarette lighter wavered away from the white pellet and heated the case in his hand. Then a tiny spark and a flicker of orange winked through the yellow naphtha flare. Schaydin jerked his lighter away and shut it. Fire loomed up from theplastique. Its hissing filled the tent just as the roar of an incoming rocket does an encampment.
And the dancer was there again.
The engineer platoon ran a generator which powered lights all over the fire-base through makeshift lines of commo wire. Left-handed and without looking at it, Schaydin jerked away the wire to his tent's light bulb. The sputtering fire brightened in the darkness, and in it the girl's features were as sharp as a cameo carven in ruddy stone. But the mouth moved and the dancer called to Schaydin over the fire-noise, "Viens ici! Viens a Marie!" Schaydin had studied French as an undergraduate in divinity school, enough to recognize that the tones were not quite those of modern French; but it was clear that the dancer was calling him to her. His body tensed with the impossible desire to obey. Sweat rimmed all the stark lines of his muscles.
Then the flame and the girl were gone together, though afterimages of both danced across Schaydin's eyes. The lieutenant sat in the dark for some time, oblivious to the half-movement he might have glimpsed through a chink in the poncho. The CQ turned back to his microphone, frowning at what he had watched.
Schaydin was more withdrawn than usual in the morning, but if any of his fellow officers noticed it, they put it down to the lieutenant's natural anxiety about his position. The next days would determine whether Schaydin would be promoted to captain and take on for the rest of his tour the slot he now held in place of the wounded Capt. Fuller. Otherwise, Schaydin would have to give up the company to another officer and return to Third Platoon. Schaydin had thought of little else during his previous week of command, but today it barely occurred to him. His mind had been drifting in the unreality of Southeast Asia; now it had found an anchorage somewhere else in time and space.
The thin lieutenant spent most of the day in his tent, with the orange sidewalls rolled up to make its roof an awning. The first sergeant was stationed permanently in the Regiment's base camp at Di An, running an establishment with almost as many troops as there were in the field. In Viet Nam, even in a combat unit, a majority of the troops were noncombatants. Bellew, the Field First, was on R amp;R in Taiwan, so an unusual amount of the company's day-to-day affairs should have fallen on the commander himself.
Today Schaydin sloughed them, answering the most pressing questions distractedly and without particular interest. His eyes strayed often to his minican, where the paint had bubbled and cracked away in a circle the size of a fifty-cent piece.
She had seemed short, though he could not be sure since the image had been less than a foot tall when the flames leapt their highest. Not plump, exactly, for that implied fat and the dancer had been all rippling muscularity; but she had been a stocky girl, an athlete rather than a houri. And yet Schaydin had never before seen a woman so seductively passionate, so radiant with desire. Every time Schaydin thought of the dancer's eyes, his groin tightened; and he thought of her eyes almost constantly.
Come to me… Come to Marie…
The activities of the firebase went on as usual, ignoring Schaydin just as he did them. Second Platoon and some vehicles from Headquarters Company bellowed off on a Medcap to a village ten kilometers down Route 13. There the medics would dispense antibiotics and bandages to the mildly ill. The troops would also goggle at ravaged figures whom not even Johns Hopkins could have aided: a child whose legs had been amputated three years past by a directional mine; a thirty-year-old man with elephantiasis of the scrotum, walking bowlegged because of the bulk of his cantaloupe-sized testicles…
Chinook helicopters brought in fuel and ammunition resupply in cargo nets swinging beneath their bellies. Schaydin did not notice their howling approach; the syncopated chop of their twin rotors as they hovered; the bustle of men and vehicles heading toward the steel-plank pad to pick up the goods. The lieutenant sat impassively in his tent even when the howitzer battery fired, though the hogs were lofting some of their shells to maximum range. The muzzle blasts raised doughnuts of dust that enveloped the whole base. Schaydin's mind's eye was on a dancing girl, not men in baggy green fatigues; the roar he heard was that of a crowd far away, watching the dancer… and even the dust in Schaydin's nostrils did not smell like the pulverized laterite of Tay Ninh Province.
"Time for the officers' meeting, sir," Sloane murmured.
Schaydin continued to sit like a thin, nervous Buddha in a lawn chair.
"Sir," the driver repeated loudly, "they just buzzed from the TOC. It's already 1500 hours."
"Oh, right," muttered the lieutenant dizzily. He shook his head and stood, then ran his fingertips abstractedly over the blackened minican. "Right."
The Tactical Operations Center was merely a trio of command vehicles around a large tent in the middle of the firebase. Schaydin had forgotten to carry his lawn chair with him. He pulled up a box which had held mortar shells and sat facing the acetate-covered map with its crayoned unit symbols. The afternoon rain started, plunging sheets of water that made the canvas jounce like a drumhead. It sounded like an angry crowd.
The Civil Affairs Officer and the lieutenant from the military intelligence detachment shared a presentation on the results of the Medcap. They proved that zero could be divided in half to fill twenty minutes. Then the Operations Officer described F Troop's morning sweep. It had turned up two old bunkers and some cartridge cases, but no signs of recent occupation. The sector was quiet.
The balding S-3 switched to discussing the operation planned in two days. When he directed a question to Schaydin, the lieutenant continued to rock silently on his box, his eyes open but fixed on nothing in the tent.
"Schaydin!" the squadron commander snarled. "Stop sitting there with your finger up your butt and pay attention!"
"Yes, sir!" Schaydin's face flushed hot and his whole body tingled, as if he had just been roused from a dead faint. "Would you please repeat the question, sir?"
The meeting lasted another ten minutes, until the rain stopped. Schaydin absorbed every pointless detail with febrile acuteness. His flesh still tingled.
After Col. Brookings dismissed his officers into the clearing skies, Schaydin wandered toward the far side of the defensive berm instead of going directly to his tent. He followed the path behind one of the self-propelled howitzers, avoiding the pile of white cloth bags stuffed with propellant powder. The charges were packed in segments. For short range shelling, some of the segments were torn off and thrown away as these had been. Soon the powder would be carried outside the perimeter and burned.
Burned. A roaring, sparking column of orange flame, and in it Schaydin cursed. He was sweating again.
Three ringing explosions sounded near at hand. The noise had been a facet of the background before the rain as well, Schaydin remembered. He walked toward the source of the sounds, one of First Platoon's tanks. It had been backed carefully away from the berm, shedding its right tread onto the ground, straight as a tow line between the vehicle and the earthen wall. Four men hunched behind a trailer some yards from the tank. One of them, naked to the waist, held a detonator in his hand. The trooper saw Schaydin approaching and called, "Stand back, sir. We're blowing out torsion bars."
The lieutenant stopped, watching. The trooper nodded and slapped closed the scissors handle of the detonator. Smoke and another clanging explosion sprang from among the tank's road wheels. The enlisted men straightened. "That's got it," one of them murmured. Schaydin walked to them, trying to remember the name of the tall man with the detonator, the tank commander of this vehicle.
"What's going on, Emmett?" Schaydin asked.
None of the enlisted men saluted."Emery, sir," the TC corrected. "Our tank had six torsion bars broke, so she steered and rode like a truck with square wheels. Back in the World they've got machines to drift out torsion bars, but here we're just using a couple ounces of C-4 to crack each one loose." The tall noncom pointed at the block of explosive dropped on the ground beside him. Its green sandwich backing had been peeled away from both sides, and half the doughy whiteplastique had been pinched off. Several copper blasting caps lay on the ground beside the C-4.
Emery ignored the lieutenant's sudden pallor. He stopped paying attention to Schaydin entirely since it was obvious that the officer was not about to help with the job. "Come on, snakes," Emery said, "we got a lot to do before sundown."
The crewmen scrambled to their fifty-ton mount, hulking and rusted and more temperamentally fragile than any but the men responsible for such monsters will ever know. Schaydin's staring eyes followed them as he himself bent at the knees and touched the block of C-4. Its smooth outer wrapper was cool to his fingers. Without looking at the explosive, Schaydin slid it into a side pocket of his fatigue trousers. He walked swiftly back to his tent.
Tropic sunset is as swift as it is brilliant. It crams all the reds and ochres and magentas of the temperate zones into a few minutes which the night then swallows. But the darkness, though it would be sudden, was hours away; and Schaydin's pulsing memory would not let him wait hours.
Sloane was radio watch this afternoon. The driver sat on the tailgate of the command vehicle with his feet on the frame of his cot. He was talking to the staff sergeant who would take over as CQ at 2000 hours. They fell silent when Schaydin appeared.
"Go ahead, Skip, get yourself some supper," the lieutenant said stiffly. "I'll take the radio for a while."
"S'okay, sire, Walsh here spelled me," Sloane said. He pointed at the paper plate with remnants of beef and creamed potatoes, sitting on his footlocker. "Go ahead and eat yourself."
"I said I'd take the radio!"Schaydin snapped. He was trembling, though he did not realize it. Sloane glanced very quickly at his commander, then to the startled sergeant. The driver lowered his feet from the cot and squeezed back so that Schaydin could enter the track. The two enlisted men were whispering together at the open end of the tent when their lieutenant drew the poncho shut, closing off the rest of the world.
It was dim in the solid-walled vehicle, dimmer yet when Schaydin unplugged the desk lamp. Radio dials gleamed and reflected from the formica counter, chinks of light seeped in past the curtain. But it would serve, would serve…
The texture of the C-4 steadied Schaydin's fingers as he molded it. The high sides of the ash tray made it difficult to ignite the pellet. The hot steel of the lighter seared his fingers and he cursed in teary frustration; but just before Schaydin would have had to pull away winked the spark and the orange flare-and in it, the girl dancing.
Her head was flung back, the black, rippling, smoky hair flying out behind her. Schaydin heard the words again, "A Marie! Ici! Viens ici!"The radio was babbling, too, on the command frequency; but whatever it demanded was lost in the roar of the crowd. Passion, as fiercely hot as the explosive that gave it form, flashed from the girl's eyes. "Come to me!"
The flame sputtered out. Schaydin was blind to all but its afterimage.
The compartment was hot and reeking. Sweat beaded at Schaydin's hairline and on his short, black moustache. He stripped the backing away from the rest of the explosive and began to knead the whole chunk, half a pound, into a single ball.
"Battle Six to Battle One-Six," the radio repeated angrily in Col. Brookings' voice. "God dammit, Schaydin, report!"
The ashtray had shattered in the heat. Schaydin swept the fragments nervously to the floor, then set the lump of explosive on the blood-marked formica. A shard of clear glass winked unnoticed in the heel of his hand. He snapped his lighter to flame and it mounted, and she mounted – and she called. Her hands could not reach out for him but her soul did and her Hell-bright eyes. "Viens ici! Viens!"
The dancer's smooth flesh writhed with no cloak but the flame. Higher, the radio dials melting, the lizard-tongue forks of the blaze beading the aluminum roof-Schaydin stood, his ankles close together like hers. He did not reach for her, not because of the heat but because the motion would be-wrong. Instead he put his hands behind his back and crossed his wrists. Outside the curtain, voices snarled but the dragon-hiss of the C-4 would have drowned even a sane man's senses. She twisted, her eyes beckoning, her mouth opening to speak. Schaydin arched, bending his body just so and "Come!"
– and he went.
The poncho tore from Col. Brookings' fingers and a girl plunged out of the fiery radio compartment. She was swarthy but not Vietnamese, naked except for smoldering scraps of a woolen shift. Neither Brookings nor the enlisted men could understand the French she was babbling; but her joy, despite severe burns on her feet and legs, was unmistakable.
No one else was in the vehicle.
On October 14, 1429, the assembled villagers of Briancon, Province of Dauphine, Kingdom of France, roared in wonderment. The witch Mariedela Barthe, being burned alive at the stake, suddenly took the form of a demon with baggy green skin. The change did not aid the witch, however, for the bonds still held. Despite its writhing and unintelligible cries, the demon-shape burned as well in the fire as a girl would have.
Firefight
One of the best of many good things that's happened in the course of my writing career is that I got Kirby McCauley for an agent. (And incidentally, if these intros don't make it clear that I've been amazingly lucky all my life, then they're distorting a truth that I feel all the way to my bones.)
After Mr. Derleth died, I had to look for new markets. I managed to sell a story toF amp;SFbut a lot of short fiction was being published in one-shot anthologies that I wasn't even going to hear about before they closed. I thought about agents, but I didn't really know how to go about getting one and I felt (rightly) that anybody who took me at that stage of my career was a pretty doubtful prospect himself.
A pulp dealer friend, Richard Minter, mentioned that a correspondent from Minneapolis, Kirby McCauley, had started representing fantasy writers. He was agent for a number ofWeird Talespros (Carl Jacobi, for example), but he also had new Arkham House writers like Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley in his stable.
Would he represent me? Did I really want an agent? And perhaps most important, how painful would it be to be turned down? Pretty painful, I suspected, but I could delay the event by not writing McCauley.
Two things happened. F amp;SFpublished a Cthulhu Mythos novelette by Brian Lumley. Since the 1950s, the only Lovecraftian stories in the magazine had been parodies-it was far too sophisticated for "pneumatic prose" to quote one editor's comment about Lovecraft's own style. Yet here was an unabashed pastiche. I could only assume that Mr. Lumley's agent was an incredible salesman. (Oddly enough, that was precisely the correct assumption to draw from the event.)
Second, Marvel Comics brought out a digest-sized fantasy magazine, The Haunt of Horror. Much of it was written in-house by comics scripters, but there was also a new story by Ramsey Campbell. Mr. Campbell's agent was obviously on top of things.
Furthermore, I learned thatThe Haunt of Horrorwas being killed after the second issue (which was already at the printers). I'd missed my chance at a sale because I didn't have an agent like Kirby McCauley.
I didn't think I could simply write Kirby (well, Mr. McCauley) and tell him I wanted an agent. I'd just finished a story ("Contact!") that I intended to send to Analog. I sent it to Kirby with my query letter instead.
He wrote back with great enthusiasm (Kirby does everything with great enthusiasm; you can question his judgment sometimes, but never his gusto), saying that he was already aware of my writing and had intended to approach me shortly. He thought the story was great (he sent it on to Analog and got an acceptance by return mail, the fastest I've ever had in my life) and looked forward to a long and profitable association.
We've had that, though it was a lot of years before I made enough money to justify Kirby and his sister Kay keeping me on as a client. Kirby went from success to success, ratcheting clients up by orders of magnitude whether they started from nothing (like Karl Wagner) or from something already impressive (like Stephen King, who became Kirby's client after his early six-figure book deals).
In the course of his other activities, Kirby edited original anthologies. I wrote "Firefight" for the first of them, "Frights." The incident of a kid in the flame track breaking up an attack was quite real, though of course the enemy was an NVA battalion rather than anything supernatural.
As a matter of fact, the whole background is real. I look back at that time and realize that it was a completely different world.
But at the time it was the real world, and the only world I had.
"Christ," Ginelli said, staring at the dusty wilderness, "if this is a sample, the next move'll be to Hell. And a firebase there'd be cooler." Herrold lit a cigarette and poked the pack toward his subordinate."Have one," he suggested.
"Not unless it's grass," the heavy newbie muttered. He flapped the sleeveless flak jacket away from his flesh, feeling streaks of momentary chill as sweat started from beneath the quilted nylon. "Christ, how d'you stand it?"
Herrold, rangy and big-jointed, leaned back in the dome seat and cocked one leg over the flamethrower's muzzle. Ginelli envied the track commander's build every time he looked at the taller man. His own basic training only four months before had been a ghastly round of extra physical training to sweat off pounds of his mother's pasta.
"Better get used to it," Herrold warned lazily. "This zippo always winds up at the back of the column, so we always wait to set up in the new laagers. Think about them-pretend you're a tree."
Ginelli followed his TC's finger toward the eight giant trees in the stone enclosure. It didn't help. Their tops reached a hundred feet into the air above the desolate plain, standing aloof from the activity that raised a pall of dust beside them. The shadows pooling beneath could not cool Ginelli as he squatted sun-dazzled on the deck of the flame track.
At least Colonel Boyle was just as hot where he stood directing placements from the sandbagged deck of his vehicle. Hieu stood beside him as usual. You could always recognize the interpreter at a distance because of the tiger fatigues he wore, darkly streaked with black and green. Below the two, radiomen were stringing the last of the tarpaulin passageways that joined the three command vehicles into a Tactical Operations Center. Now you could move between the blacked-out tracks in the dark; but the cool of the night seemed far away.
On the roof, Boyle pointed and said something to Hieu. The dark-skinned interpreter's nod was emphatic; the colonel spoke into his neck-slung microphone and the two vehicles ahead of the flame track grunted into motion. Herrold straightened suddenly as his radio helmet burped at him. "Seven-zero, roger," he replied.
"We movin'?" Ginelli asked, leaning closer to the TC to hear him better. Herrold flipped the switch by his left ear forward to intercom and said, "OK, Murray, they want us on the west side against that stone wall. There'll be a ground guide, so take it easy."
Murray edged the zippo forward, driving it clockwise around the circuit other tracks had clawed in the barren earth. Except for the grove within the roomy laterite enclosure, there was nothing growing closer than the rubber plantation whose rigid files marched green and silver a mile to the east. Low dikes, mostly fallen into the crumbling soil, ordered the wasteland. Dust plumed in the far distance as a motorbike pulled out of the rubber and turned toward the firebase. Coke girls already, Ginelli thought. Even in this desert.
Whatever the region's problem was it couldn't have been with the soil itself; not if trees like the monsters behind the low wall could grow in it. Every one of the eight the massive stonework girdled was forty feet around at the base. The wrinkled bole of the central titan could have been half that again.
The zippo halted while a bridge tank roared, churning the yielding dirt as it maneuvered its frontal slope up to the coarse laterite. The ground guide, a bare-chested tanker with a beaded sweat band, dropped his arms to signal the bridge to shut down, then motioned the flame track in beside the greater bulk. Murray cut his engine and hoisted himself out of the driver's hatch.
Common sense and the colonel's orders required that everyone on a track be wearing helmet and flak jacket. Men like Murray, however, who extended their tours to four years, tended to ignore death and their officers when comfort was at stake. The driver was naked to the waist; bleached golden hairs stood out wirelike against his deep tan."Dig out some beers, turtle," he said to Ginelli with easy arrogance. "We got time to down 'em before they start puttin' a detail together." Road dust had coated the stocky, powerful driver down to the throat, the height he projected from his hatch with the seat raised and the cover swiveled back. Years of Vietnamese sunlight had washed all color from his once-blue eyes.
An ACAV pulled up to the flame track's right, its TC nonchalant in his cupola behind the cal fifty. To Ginelli's amazement, the motorbike he had seen leaving the rubber plantation was the next vehicle in line. It was a tiny green Sachs rather than one of the omnipresent Honda 50s, and its driver was Caucasian. Murray grinned and jumped to his feet."Crozier! Jacques!"he shouted delightedly."What the hell are you doin' here?"
The white-shirted civilian turned his bike neatly and tucked it in on the shady side of the zippo. If any of the brass had noticed him, they made no sign. Dismounted, Crozier tilted his face up and swept his baseball cap away from a head of thinning hair. "Yes, I thought I might find you, Joe," he said. His English was slightly burred. "But anyway, I would have come just to talk again to Whites. It is grand to see you."
Herrold unlashed the shelter tarp from the load and let it thump over the side. "Let's get some shade up," he ordered.
"Jack was running a plantation for Michelin up north when we were in the A-Shau Valley," Murray explained. "He's a good dude. But why you down here, man?"
"Oh, well," the Frenchman said with a deprecating shrug. "Your defoliation, you know? A few months after your squadron pulls out, the planes come over. Poof! Plantation Seven is dead and I must be transferred. They grow peanuts there now."
Herrold laughed. "That's the nice thing about a job in this country," he said. "Always somethin' new tomorrow."
"Yeah, not so many VC here as up there," Murray agreed.
Crozier grimaced."The VC I am able to live with. Like them? No. But I understand them, understand their, their aims. But these people around here, these Mengs-they will not work, they will not talk, only glare at you and plant enough rice for themselves. Michelin must bring in Viets to work the rubber, and even those, they do not stay because they do not like Mengs so near."
"But they're all Vietnamese, aren't they?"Ginelli asked in puzzlement."I mean, what else could they be?"
The Frenchman chuckled, hooking his thumbs in his trouser tops. "They live in Viet Nam so they are Vietnamese, no? But you Americans have your Indians. Here are the Montagnards-we call them the Mountaineers, you know? But the Vietnamese name for them means 'the dirty animals.' Not the same folk, no no. They were here long before the Viets came down from the North. And the Meng who live here and a few other places, they are not the same either; not as the Viets or even the Montagnards. And maybe they are older yet, so they say."
The group waited a moment in silence. Herrold opened the Mermite can that served as a cooler and began handing out beer."Got a church key?"he asked no one in particular. Murray, the only man on the track with a knife, drew his huge Bowie and chopped ragged triangles in the tops. Tepid beer gurgled as the four men drank. Ginelli set his can down.
"Umm," he said to his TC, "how about the co-ax?"
Herrold sighed."Yeah, we don't want the son-of-a-bitch to jam."Joints popped as he stood and stretched his long frame.
Crozier gulped the swig of beer still in his mouth. "Indeed not," he agreed. "Not here, especially. The area has a very bad reputation."
"That a fact?"Herrold asked in mild surprise. "At the troop meetin' last night the ole man said around here it'd be pretty quiet. Not much activity on the intelligence maps."
"Activity?"the Frenchman repeated with raised eyebrows."Who can say? The VC come through the laborers' hootches now and again, not so much here as near A-Shau, that is true. But whenI first was transferred here three years ago, there were five, maybe six hundred in the village-the Mengs, you know, not the plantation lines."
"That little place back where we left the hardball?" Ginelli wondered aloud. "Jeez, there's not a dozen hootches there."
"Quite so," Crozier agreed with a grave nod of his head. "Because a battalion of Communists surrounded it one night and killed every Meng they found. Maybe twenty survived."
"Christ," Ginelli breathed in horror, but Herrold's greater experience caused his eyes to narrow in curiosity.
"Why the hell?" the tall track commander asked. "I mean, I know they've got hit squads out to gun down village cops and headmen and all. But why the whole place? Were they that strong for the government?"
"The government?" the civilian echoed; he laughed."They spat at the District Governor when he came through. But a week before the Communists came, there was firing near this very place. Communist, there is no doubt. I saw the tracers myself and they were green.
"The rest-and this is rumor only, what my foremen told me at the time before they stopped talking about it-a company, thirty men, were ambushed. Wiped out, every one of them and mutilated, ah… badly. How they decided that the Mengs were responsible, I do not know; but that could have been the reason they wiped out the village later."
"Umm," Herrold grunted. He crumpled his beer can and looked for a litter barrel."Lemme get on the horn and we'll see just how the co-ax is screwing up." The can clattered into the barrel as the TC swung up on the back deck of the zippo again. The others could hear his voice as he spoke into the microphone: "Battle five-six, track seven-zero. Request clearance to test fire our Mike seven-four."
An unintelligible crackle replied from the headset a moment later. "No sir," Herrold denied, "not if we want it working tonight." He nodded at the answer. "Roger, roger." He waved. "OK," he said to his crew as he set down the radio helmet, "let's see what it's doin'."
Ginelli climbed up beside Herrold, slithering his pudgy body over the edge of the track with difficulty. Murray continued to lounge against the side of the track. "Hell," he said, "I never much liked guns anyway; you guys do your thing."Crozier stood beside his friend, interested but holding back a little from the delicacy of an uninvited guest. The machine gun had once been co-axial to the flamethrower. Now it was on a swivel welded to the top of the TC's dome. Herrold rotated it, aiming at the huge tree in the center of the grove. A ten foot scar streaked the light trunk vertically to the ground, so he set the buckhorn sight just above it. Other troopers, warned by radio what to expect, were watching curiously.
The gun stuttered off a short burst and jammed. Empty brass tinkled off the right side of the track. Herrold swore and clicked open the receiver cover. His screwdriver pried at the stuck case until it sprang free. Slamming the cover shut, he jacked another round into the chamber.