DANNY MELLIN’S POCKETS were bulging with boiled rice donated by other POWs in their belief that it was going to help one of the rig workers who had been captured first and was therefore the most malnourished POW. But the rice wasn’t for any POW. Instead, Mellin, with the help of Shirley Fortescue, mixed the grains of boiled rice in the mortar used to cement the bricks together for what would be the lower center part of the wall facing the long coils of razor wire that served as the outer main wall of the prison until a proper high-wire wall could be built to replace the wire perimeter.
“So,” Mellin said to Murphy and Shirley Fortescue, who were acting as his cover while he sprinkled another handful of rice in the cement, “I need you to get me a pair of wire cutters.”
“Oh, right,” Murphy said. “I’ll order one from Sears. Just give me the catalogue. I’ll fax ‘em right away.”
Danny ignored the Australian’s sarcastic tone. “Thought you Aussies—”
He stopped as Shirley whispered, “He’s coming.”
Upshut was shouting at one of the POWs, an older man in the brick-passing line who had crumpled with exhaustion. The old man struggled to his feet, a bayonet prodding him sharply in the back, drawing blood. When Upshut saw the waist-high wall of Mellin’s group, the highest wall so far of any of the five prisoners’ huts being constructed, he nodded, adding a grunt of approval.
Mellin smiled accommodatingly, as did Shirley Fortescue, Murphy whispering, “Prick!” when Upshut was out of hearing range. Murphy turned back to Mellin. “So what was that about Aussies?”
Mellin tapped the next brick down with the handle of the trowel. “I thought you Aussies were the can-do sort. Improvise.”
Mellin’s fingers, like everyone else’s, were raw from handling the bricks without gloves of any kind. “If you and another hut boss can lose a couple of trowels, we could make a bloody good pair of cutters.”
“First thing they’d miss,” Shirley said matter-of-factly.
“Shirley’s right,” Danny added. “Every trowel’ll have to be accounted for.”
“Yes,” she said, passing another brick. “For God’s sake, think of something practical.”
“Don’t be so fucking uppity,” Murphy retorted. “Just a thought.”
“All right, you two,” Mellin said. “Knock it off! Shirley, you got any ideas? Using the rice isn’t going to help us at all unless we can cut through the razor wire.”
Now that they were getting near the bottom of the pile, the bricks were covered in mud kicked up by the downpour that had ceased only twenty minutes before, turning the whole compound into a red-colored slush.
“Nothing comes to mind,” Shirley said. “Anybody have a good nail clipper or—”
“Gimme a break,” Murphy said. “You think everyone here was doing their nails when the chinks picked ‘em off the rigs?”
“I don’t know,” Shirley said calmly, “but I know that if they have a nail clipper…” She turned to Danny. “You know, some have a nail file attached.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” Murphy cut in. “Yeah, great idea if we had a year or two to—”
“Just a thought,” she countered, trying not to get angry. Mellin took particular note of this pointed exchange between the two because it reminded him of his sister Angela, before she’d broken up with her one and only boyfriend in the days before she had gone to ‘Nam as a nurse. They used to have the same kind of bitterly sarcastic exchanges during a fight, but then it would soon be over, and though Angela never admitted it to Danny, he was sure their differences had been solved by sex. It was almost as if they had to have a row to deny the intensity of their physical attraction for one another. Danny had become convinced it was the same with Mike Murphy and Shirley. There seemed to be a strong, albeit hidden, sexual attraction between them, with no room for middle ground; it would be either sizzling hot or icy cold.
Then, as if to suddenly confirm his suspicion, Murphy conceded that a nail file, however small, might be of some use after all, not as any kind of wire cutter itself, but as something that could be used to make a cutter.
“Make one out of what?” Mellin pressed.
Mike Murphy grunted, agreeing that it posed quite a problem. “Well,” he said. “There’s only one way.”
“Don’t tell us,” Shirley murmured sarcastically. “It might help us!”
“We steal a cutter,” Murphy answered. Before anyone else could object, the Australian added, “Look, they must have one or more to have set up the coils of razor wire around the perimeter.”
“Makes sense,” Danny conceded. “But I haven’t seen any of Upshut’s guys carrying them about.”
“Neither have I,” Murphy agreed. “That’s why they have to be in the trucks — glove box maybe — or tool kit in the back.”
“I didn’t see any toolboxes in the back of the truck that brought us in,” Shirley said.
“Nor me,” Danny told Murphy, “which means you’re probably right. They must have cutters in the glove box.”
As Murphy passed another brick for what would be their prison’s wall, and its rough surface tore a small flap of skin, he cursed the lack of gloves once again, adding, “Only chance we’ll have will be slop parade.” He meant the five o’clock ration of rice and tea. “Somebody’ll have to get under the truck and try—” They stopped talking as one of the guards ambled closer. As the guard moved farther away, Murphy said, “We’ll have to get in the passenger side and have a look-see in the glove box.”
Shirley nodded. “We could create some kind of diversion— get people to crowd around the truck.”
Murphy frowned at the idea. “Problem is, we’d have to let more people in on our plan.”
“I didn’t know we had one yet,” Shirley quipped.
“Well,” Murphy retorted, “I take it we’re going to bust out the hut wall, then cut through the wire. Don’t have to be a fucking genius to figure that out. Except—” He looked now at Danny. “—you’d better be right about that fucking rice, mate, otherwise we’re dead as fucking doornails.”
Danny said nothing, nor Shirley, who was too disgusted with Murphy’s bad language.
“I don’t like your silence, mate,” Murphy said as he took hold of another brick. His thumb was now bleeding. “C’mon, Danny, tell us. You ever done this before — the old rice trick?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing! Jesus Christ, Danny! Whole fucking plan depends on you and the friggin’ wall, mate!”
“I know that,” Danny replied tartly. “You think I—”
Upshut was coming back on his rounds, so they fell silent, Murphy still cursing under his breath about the lack of proper gloves for handling the bricks.
Gloves, or rather a glove — an asbestos one — was on the mind of the third M-60 assistant machine gunner in the Echo column west of Dien Bien Phu. He’d lost the glove — supplied so that in a firefight you could quickly change a red-hot barrel for the cool, spare one in less than three seconds. Somehow, the piece of green fishing line that he normally used to attach the glove to his kit had been severed from the pack — probably twisted in underbrush and giving way when he’d moved forward quickly after a “sit and listen.”
The assistant gunner knew that if it was discovered missing by any of the other Special Forces, he would henceforth be called TOM — turd of the month. It was serious business if you couldn’t change the barrel. The time lost could be responsible for a lot of men killed, causing your position to be overrun, letting the enemy inside your perimeter, from where he could wipe out the entire column, with the machine gunner’s buddies having only one corridor of retreat: in front of their own “overlapping-fire” claymores.
In the jungle five miles to the south of Echo and beyond the Laotian-Vietnamese border, Kacey, the remaining Ranger of the two-man warning squad sent by Delta’s Major Roscoe to warn Foxtrot, had moved well off the trail from where he’d seen the young girl. Advancing slowly, silently, on a line parallel to the trail, the Ranger could see a clearing — several huts, and now, coming down the trail, a squad of five, no six, men, Khmer Rouge, led by a brother — a black man — or was it the heavy mud camouflage? — no, he was black — and the little seven-year-old girl in front of him nudged along by the barrel of the man’s AK-47.
Suddenly, the Khmer squad stopped about a hundred feet from where the Ranger had seen the little girl earlier, the Khmer patrol now using the girl as a shield. The point man inched ahead, covered by the other six Khmer. The Khmers stopped again next to where the Ranger had been hiding. They were checking out her story — probably using the girl’s family as hostages back in the village, the Khmer point man wanting to see where the dead pig was and so see if anyone had been hiding by the trail. Kacey knew it would take only a few seconds for the Khmer to discover broken twigs and bruised underbrush and conclude that someone had been hiding there and had taken her grenade. The Khmer’s leader gave a spread-out hand signal, and in seconds the other six men of the enemy squad had disappeared into the jungle beneath the high canopy of trees.
Kacey was caught in a dilemma: the only way for him to move fast enough to warn Foxtrot column that their general position was now known by the enemy would be to break cover and move quickly down the trail. Yet to do that would put him in danger of running smack into another enemy patrol and/or booby traps. He knew he had to risk it — the closer he got to Foxtrot, the better the chance of warning them to split in time and head back for pickup along with Echo and Delta columns.
Still moving slowly and well in from the trail, he could see the six Khmer spread out in a line about seventy yards behind him as he neared the edge of the bare ground around the village huts, working his way carefully around its perimeter. In between the huts he saw there were patches of bare ground all but devoid of the dead leaves one usually saw. He guessed that they were punji traps, the teepee-shaped bamboo stick cages that normally identified the booby traps for the village children now removed. Kacey was sweating profusely, not only because of the sticky heat, but from the growing anxiety that was creeping up on him as surely as the seven Khmer coming up behind him.
“Hey, buddy!”
It sounded like an obscenity, so unexpected was it. Kacey froze. It was definitely an American voice — not a trace of a foreign accent. It had to be the black man he’d seen. Kacey said nothing. He couldn’t see the speaker, and presumably the speaker couldn’t see him, otherwise Kacey knew he would now be dead.
“Hey, man,” the voice called out again. “I got a deal for you.” There was no echo, the disembodied voice quickly lost in the sudden hush of the jungle.
“You come out, man, or the girl gets it. You understand?”
There was nothing mysterious about it — a straightforward threat, and not even for a split second did Kacey doubt that the other black man meant exactly what he said. And not for a second did the Ranger doubt that if he didn’t get to warn Foxtrot column, then thirty men would become the victims rather than the executors of a fatal ambush. It was the girl or the column.
But what if he didn’t answer the black man? What if he simply kept quiet? How could the black man and the remainder of the enemy patrol be sure he was still in listening range, that he’d heard the black man’s threat? For all they knew, he could have been well back on the trail by now, hightailing it in the direction he’d come from — to Delta in the marshland below Dien Bien Phu.
“You hear me, man?” came the black man’s call.
Kacey, his finger on the trigger guard of his HKMP 5, said nothing. Two could play this game.
Though the tail of the monsoon had now passed over the POW camp at Ningming, the ground was muddy, and several of the weaker prisoners slipped on the way to the “slop” truck for the bowl of rice and cup of tea, the truck being mobbed as cover for Murphy to slip under the tailgate, quickly wriggling forward on the passenger side. He heard the shouting of the guards at the back, Upshut among them, and several warning shots fired. He rolled out, got up, tried the passenger door. It opened and he was inside the truck’s cabin. Two things caught his eye at once: a small, battered, dirty plastic toolbox in the passenger’s foot well, and a bunch of keys hanging from the ignition, the gate through the razor wire being fifty yards away. A run for it — crash through the friggin’ one-arm barricade and drive like hell. He was excited, but he wasn’t dumb. Probably wouldn’t make it anyway. Besides, there was the minor matter of leaving everyone else behind. Not nice. There were no wire cutters in the toolbox. Shit. He grabbed a pair of pliers, a file, snatched the keys and got out of the truck.
In all it had taken less than a minute. From underneath the truck Murphy could see a thicket of legs. One of the POWs whom Danny Mellin had designated as a lookout saw Murphy under the tailgate and shouted, “C’mon, hurry up there! I’m starving!” This was immediately followed by a surge of bodies around the tailgate and Murphy scrabbling amid the legs, only to surface as the guards began pushing the line back while clubbing several POWs to the ground.
“You get wire cutters?” Mellin asked, handing the Australian his rice bowl and plastic spoon.
“No cutters,” Murphy told him, “but I swiped the truck’s keys. Silly bastards left ‘em in the ignition.”
“They’re going to shoot people when they, find them missing.”
“You don’t say,” Murphy said. “But first the driver’ll get shit and he’ll wonder whether he left ‘em in the truck or wherever. You know how it is when you’ve lost your keys?”
“Yeah, but when he’s sure they’ve been stolen, they’re gonna shoot people.”
“Exactly,” Shirley chimed in.
“All right, you two,” Murphy snapped. “Cool it. Ya don’t think I haven’t thought that out?”
“So what are you going to do with them?” Shirley asked. “Hold out for a reward?”
“Very fucking amusing.”
“All right, Mike,” Danny cut in. “What’s your plan?”
“Well, first we get a good impression of the key. Surely to God we’ve got someone in this camp who can make a duplicate — can do it from wood if you get a good impression.”
“And how—” Shirley began, but the Australian didn’t let her finish.
“Mud,” he said. “Fucking compound’s a sea of mud, if you hadn’t noticed. We get a good impression — mud on a brick— anything’ll do.”
Shirley Fortescue conceded it was the obvious thing to do.
“Then return the keys?” Danny asked.
“Right!” Murphy said. “Only we don’t have to be particular. I mean we don’t need to get anyone back into the cabin. Just toss the keys outside the truck by the driver’s running board. He’ll figure he dropped them getting out.”
“Okay,” Danny agreed, “but move fast. We’ll have all the POW huts up by tonight.”
“Good as done,” Murphy quipped, gripping the keys and disappearing into the crowd of POWs.