The Five Fingers Read online

  Prather carried M-16 ammunition, M-3 clips, and lots of grenades. He took an M-3 as his prime weapon and an M-21 for use at the hit site in case he had to step into the firing line. He carried a lot of pipe tobacco.

  Tan used an adapted M-3 both for the hit and as his prime weapon. He had lengthened the barrel and taken the flash retractor off. He would add a scope for the hit. In addition to standard ammunition, he took two magazines with explosive bullets. He had grenades and Armalite ammunition for Toliver and me. In a backpack, he carried the primers for Jackson's rockets. The small crystal-locked radio receiver he wore attached to the side of the pack. Tan's load was scarcely more than thirty pounds, the lightest any of us traveled. He slung a binocular case loosely over one shoulder; Toliver and I had done the same.

  Jackson's load was twice that. He carried an Armalite and an adapted M-l as his rocket launcher. He wore a flak jacket which he used to support a wooden

  rocket platform that fit across his back. The rockets were Jackson's handiwork. He had loaded them himself with shale wrapped in a light chain; every fourth link in the chain had been weakened with a saw. I had watched Jackson test his rockets on the range. They were devastating. When they went off, the chains whirred like razor blades. Jackson would not trust picking them up at either cache, so we carried them the entire way. They were broken down into three parts for safety and comfort, and he, Morrosco, and Wiley carried them on their backs.

  Toliver carried an Armalite for combat, and M-21 with infrared night sight for sniping and for the hit. In addition to his own ammunition and powder for me, he had M-3 ammunition for the others. He wore a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver on his hip. He had the usual personal gear, plus a soft leather map case with map sections folded like pages in a book, each section in a plastic cover.

  Morrosco carried two big Green Beret medical bags with syringes, morphine, tourniquets, sutures, sterilized knives, quinine, Benzedrine, antiseptic cream, extra insect repellent, all of it packed in sterilized plastic containers. He took an Armalite.

  Wiley carried in addition to his M-3 and ammunition, explosive charges for the rockets, Armalite ammunition, and more medical supplies. He, Jackson, and Toliver carried the satchels of explosives.

  Virtually all our weapons had been adapted for the mission—barrels lengthened or shortened, stocks lightened, flash retractors removed. The M-l rocket launcher broke down into two parts and was carried like my Sahka.

  Despite orders, I took my dog tags, and the others probably did as well. They held my blood type. I was not going to bleed to death for security.

  We trained in full pack over the last several days, learning to disperse the load across our bodies and across the unit. Departure date was May 13. As that day approached, and we rehearsed our moves for the

  hundredth time, the old excitement was rekindled. We wanted to get on with it. But not a man among us was suffering from the tension; that diminished as departure grew near.

  The night of the eleventh, I could not sleep. Toliver gave us a final briefing, a summary of everything we had done. There were no questions, and each of us went silently to his room. My head was whirling. Had I overlooked anything? Had I perfected my moves to the maximum degree possible?

  The last day was like exam time; it was too late to worry. We had done everything we could to prepare ourselves. The colonel gave us a departure briefing which was nothing more than a summary, reassurance, and a chat around. That night I slept better than I had done in three weeks.

  Part 2

  THE HUNTERS

  CHAPTER 7

  At 0430 on the thirteenth, we were jeeped to a waiting C-130 military transport. Our gear was stored in mission packs like canvas yachting bags, then packed in wooden cases. We walked to the aircraft carrying only our weapons. No one came to see us off, not even the colonel. Five minutes later, we had lifted off. The big plane swung out over the China Sea. We were airborne for four hours on a roundabout route to northern Thailand.

  We landed at a small dusty air base between Chiang Khan and the Mekong that the allies used as a jumping-off point for special forces incursions into the north. We attracted little attention; there were lots of Americans about. We piled our gear under a shed, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. While Toliver went to get confirmation from the base radio that our caches had been deposited, we ate, did some last-minute waterproofing, made our loads more comfortable. He returned, then went off to the river three miles to our north to arrange a discreet crossing. We

  were talking little now. The plane ride had passed in almost complete silence.

  We left the air base just after midnight and reached our crossing point at 0100 hours. We climbed into a Bailey amphibious craft operated by an American crew. Half an hour later, we beached in Laos, in a dry riverbed. The crossing was so simple as to be almost casual.

  We struck up what must have been the bed of a feeder stream to the Mekong. The stream cut through a shallow valley that was sparsely populated. We moved quickly, protected by thick undergrowth along both banks. A few miles inland we left the stream bed to turn due north. We were pioneering, taking bearings almost at the run, moving at a tremendous pace. We skirted a few farms and the occasional hamlet without being observed.

  We marched in total silence until 1100 hours the next morning. We were not concerned greatly yet about a low profile: most of the combat activity was southeast of us toward Cambodia, which was one reason why we I off from Thailand rather than walking

  up the neck of Laos. We made steady progress north, moving on a low-lying ground west of a range of hills that was spotted with farming hamlets. We broke and slept for four hours through the heat of the day.

  For three days we walked on riverbeds up a wide valley, around the village of Ban Hinkang Na, and past several riverheads that spilled into the main stream. We came to a fast-running tributary on the east bank that corresponded on our maps to a stream passing the village of Ban Muang Fuong several miles east of us. We walked two miles up the tributary stream, found the hill we were looking for, took a bearing, and walked its reciprocal. In ten minutes we had found our first cache, well hidden in the riverside foliage.

  There was material enough for us to re-equip completely, with the exception of Jackson's rockets and my shotgun ammunition. All we could use were three rucksacks of food—salt beef in gauze, dried meat, canned

  and dehydrated vegetables, malt biscuits—and fresh canteens to replace ours, which were quickly oxidizing. We pushed what we did not want far into the undergrowth and moved back down to the main stream at double time. We did not know who might be watching the cache.

  We walked from bearing to bearing ten hours at a stretch, with a fifteen-minute break every four or five hours and a half-hour pause every afternoon for radio transmission. It was easy going now; we were route-marching almost at the double. We kept a party head two hundred yards out in front who never stopped moving. If anyone dropped out to drink or relieve himself, he had to catch up; the line never stood still. We ate on the march.

  The pace was not tiring us. It was pleasant in a way, almost like a glorified hunting party, except that we were under forced march. There was no time to negotiate small inclines; we ran up them. No leisurely wading in a cool stream; we cut them and kept moving. We were marching at ten-yard intervals, very vigilant, weapons always at the ready. This was the easiest way to carry our arms on a quick march; a slung weapon was clumsy and uncomfortable.

  We talked very little. We were primed, like sprinters just broken from the block. Time became a substance we were pushing against. We had three weeks. We wanted to break the back of the race early on and allow for delay later.

  We moved half a day from the cache and stopped for our first meal. As we walked, we gathered broad beans and a sweet wild cabbage similar to pua. We threw these in a pot with the meat and cooked up a delicious stew.

  On the fourth day, we moved into higher ground. There were peasants about. We were in close country now, t
oo thick to penetrate except by river bottom or jungle trail; we were exposed to head-on confrontation at every twist in our route. The riverbeds were the safest place to move at this time of year. The rivers

  were reduced to trickling streams that wound back and forth across wide, flat shingle beds. Heavy undergrowth near the banks made fine cover. The washes would be roaring rivers in the rainy season, but they were virtually hard-surfaced highways now. We had to be cautious; the peasants washed and fished in the rivers and used them for roads. We approached the Nam Lik— "Nam" meaning "river" in Laotian and Vietnamese. We covered eighty miles in three and a half days, but we accepted that the easiest was behind us.

  So far, our movement had been remarkably close to the hypothetical timetable we had set. We had come across the hamlets where and when we expected to find them; we had moved cautiously around them, then streaked across the empty landscape. The sparse population had been confined to small, self-contained farming communities, with few people straying far from home. We came off the high ground nine miles short of the Lik and joined a trail that led to our crossing point.

  When we got a glimpse of the Lik in the distance, we left the trail for the trees, then moved forward in silence. Toliver, walking point, suddenly turned and waved us down. He disappeared in the ground cover and crawled back to us.

  "There's people in the river," he said. "Military?" asked Jackson.

  "I don't know. They haven't posted any guard. There's about a dozen men and a woman. Bathing and swimming around. They look like peasants." That meant only that they were not in Pathet Lao or government uniform. Half the opposition we faced were peasant armies of one kind or another.

  We inched forward to the riverbank. The bed of the Lik was a hundred yards from shore to shore, the running stream often no more than ten yards wide as it coursed among the flat stones. Just in front of where we hid, the water had scooped a small bowl from the shingles, making a chest-deep pool for the naked men who were splashing in it. They were young,

  mostly teen-agers. A young woman squatted fully dressed on the opposite bank by a pile of clothing. There was no way to know if they were a peasant work party, a Pathet Lao patrol, or free-booting tribal mercenaries.

  Whoever they were, they were cutting our only route. The terrain to the east was very close. We would have difficulty in reaching the river floor, which ran in a ravine for several miles. A detour to the west would cost us half a day.

  "We'll give them twenty minutes," Toliver said.

  "Jackson, you and Wiley take the left flank. If we go, hit the woman first. Tan, you and Rivers take the right. We'll cover the middle. I don't want any of them leaving the water."

  As we started to break up, I saw Tan grab Toliver's arm.

  "Look!" he said. A second woman had joined the first. She was carrying half a dozen automatic weapons cradled in her arms.

  "Hit them," Toliver said.

  I had just taken a firing position when Jackson and Wiley downed the two women with what sounded like one shot. The men in the river started shouting and scrambling toward their weapons, which lay scattered around the two women. The men were tightly bunched; as they struggled against the weight of the water, Tan blew them over with automatic fire. Wiley stood up and biffed two grenades among them. The naked bodies lifted in the swell from the muffled explosions, then rolled over and drifted slowly downstream. Jackson shot the last two as they dragged themselves out on the rocks. The rest of us never fired our weapons.

  We slid down the bank and sprinted toward the stream that now ran red with blood for a hundred yards, checking quickly that no man was left alive. I ran to the two women. Both lay dead with gaping holes in their chests. Toliver waved, and we moved out to the east along the riverbed. We made no attempt to

  hide the action; it could have been the result of any / regional dispute. We wanted distance, and we moved at i a jog for about an hour before breaking. I knew there would be little said about this action even though it was our blooding as a unit, because it was a classic ambush executed with the precision I had expected from the unit. One round each took out the people r with weapons. Two grenades and spare automatic fire r had put down ten men in less than three minutes. No one had survived to expose our presence. And we did i not have a scratch. There was nothing to say about it. Special forces men talked about the ones that went J wrong. I felt no more than that peculiar emptiness * that followed in the wake of my first killing, eighteen months earlier.

  It was my first combat mission, a reconnaissance patrol into Indonesia from Terendak. We were in the jungle at night. Eight of us ran head-on into twenty Indonesian terrorists moving in an arrowhead formation. We saw them and went to ground before we were spotted. The main party went through us. But one of the out-riders came straight at me, face-on. He was going to walk on top of me.

  The simple logic was that if I did not kill him, he was going to kill me. I did not have the luxury of analyzing why he and I were fighting each other. That had been done before the mission began.

  I let him walk right up on me. I stood up, grabbed him by the hair, and broke him backward over my knee. The myth about cutting a man's throat is not quite accurate. If I had done it the way people imagine, he would have been heard by everyone on Sunday. I stabbed my knife in the side of his neck and ripped it out the front, severing the windpipe and jugular with one quick stroke. He could not even make a choking sound. The whole thing took about five seconds. I leaned too far over the man, and when I did him, a fountain of blood exploded in my face. Somehow I managed to cut two fingers on my left hand. I

  was a proper mess. The Indonesians never missed the man. We got clean away.

  We hugged the north wall of a steeply sided ravine as Toliver led us down the dry bed of the Nam Lik. The sheer cliffs shielded us from a trail paralleling the river but committed us to the Lik for the next twenty miles. The Lik wove a capricious course, traveling northeast for several miles, then bending swiftly to the north, then east again, and once more to the north. Then the river divided, one arm continuing north, a branch more directly on our route swinging sharply eastward. We took the northern arm toward Ban Namon; the eastern branch swept past Vangvieng, a regional headquarters for the Pathet Lao and tribal mercenaries working south and west of the Plain of Jarres.

  Our plan was to stay with the Lik until near its junction with Highway 13, then walk the lower slopes of the ranges paralleling the highway to the west, keeping the river between us and Highway 13 all the way to its junction with highways 4 and 7. When the new highway formed by these three turned due west toward Luang Prabang, we would cut river and highway and strike north. This meant leaving the Lik at the last hamlet below Ban Namon. We were scheduled to skirt the hamlet by night, but we were already there by late afternoon of the fifth day. We watched the hamlet, no more than a few scattered huts at river's edge, from the opposite bank while waiting for night to fall. In the hours before dark, two Pathet Lao patrols passed through. Both left toward the west, where we were headed. Beyond the hamlet our maps indicated at least two hours of open ground to cover. We would have to move with extreme caution.

  "Eighteen men," Tan counted as the second party left. The first had been half that size. Tan watched through a pair of enormous binoculars.

  "What in hell are those?" Morrosco asked him.

  "They are World War II glasses. They belonged to a German admiral."

  "Where did you get them?"

  "I bought them in Tokyo."

  "See any battleships?" Morrosco asked.

  "I see eighteen men moving out on our route," Tan i answered.

  Morrosco's smile faded away.

  I watched the departing patrol through my own I small, high-powered German glasses. The party was led J by an agitated young man who pushed and shouted I at the men as they filed out of the hamlet. The higher-ranking Pathet Lao officers were sophisticated and knew how to command respect. The young officers I were often peasants and had a hard time exercising j their
rank coolly. It gave them an almost comic : appearance to the initiated. I knew better. These small units—usually thirty men or fewer—were highly i disciplined and dedicated to their cause and, despite i appearances, there was a well-defined chain of com- 1 mand. Even in combat they were so strictly controlled I that their fire patterns could be almost stingy. They ' maintained good regional communications and intelligence. They were very tough, but they fought a con- ' ventional type of guerrilla warfare, unlike their ] mercenary counterparts, that I found bordered some- : times on the predictable.

  When night fell, we slipped down to the river. The safest crossing point was five hundred yards upstream, where the banks on both sides were less than a man's height. Between lay a hundred-yard dash across flat pebbles, with a narrow knee-deep stream near its middle.

  We stayed under cover until past midnight, when the hamlet finally grew still. Toliver sent Jackson and Morrosco across. They were down the banks, over the flat stones, and up on the other side in less than a minute. We all lay silent for fifteen minutes before Wiley and Prather moved. Then Tan went alone. Three quarters of an hour had passed before Toliver and I moved out last.

  I was pleased with Toliver's obsession for cover.

  The only way we could survive was by remaining invisible. A small team could walk through an enemy patrol, breathe right down its neck; if they were not known, they could pull it off. But when people were looking for a seven-man team, the world was not big enough to hide it.

  I scrambled up the riverbank, then fell still on the ground. We were bunched tightly on the bank, and I suddenly realized we were three too many bodies. They were peasant men, their clothes soaked in blood. Without a word, Jackson and I pulled the bodies into the undergrowth and stripped them of their rings and wallets, which we would throw away on the march. The villagers would blame bandits.