Night Fighters 6 Charlie don't live here anymore by David Sherman

Author:David Sherman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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It was mid-afternoon by the time they reached a place where the A Shau Valley spread out before them. The valley floor for as far as they could clearly see to the north was a rolling plain, though it seemed to roll more violently in the southern end than it did farther north. It seemed somehow quiet there, not that it was, just that there weren't as many birds crying and insects buzzing or lizards fuckyooing. Other noises, human and mechanical noises, were an undercurrent, but they were not close and didn't immediately register on Bell's consciousness. Bell oriented himself to the valley and his map. Then he lay prone and focused his field glasses on a compound a kilometer away. It was exactly where Houng's information said it was supposed to be. From ground level he could see the bunkers and tents under the trees, bunkers and tents invisible to anyone looking down from above. Men in the black pajama uniforms with the red armbands of the Vietcong moved about the compound. There didn't seem to be barbed-wire barricades around it, though Bell did see what looked like pointed stake walls here and there, barriers that probably had been placed to funnel an attacking force into prepared killing zones. He wondered what kind of booby traps might be in place. "Looks like we're here," he said to his men, who had gathered close around him. Randall tapped Bell on the shoulder and pointed to the right. The sergeant swung his glasses in that direction, and suddenly the human and mechanical noises he'd earlier ignored seemed to leap about fifty decibels. His stomach sank. Trucks were trundling from place to place, some of them out in the middle of the valley rather than under what cover the edge of the forest offered. A distant bulldozer belched smoke as it built up earthwork defenses. Here and there he spotted an antiaircraft gun pointing skyward. It was the first time he'd seen heavy equipment and weapons larger than a 60 mm mortar or 50-caliber machine gun in the enemy's possession. They must feel very confident of their ability to hold and move about this valley if they have all this big stuff here, he thought. He watched five trucks rumble in convoy across the valley. The A Shau must be the VC-NVA equivalent of Da Nang, he thought. And I'm leading a six-man team into it. I must be fucking dinky dau. He shifted his glasses to the left. A few soldiers were escorting some prisoners across the bottom of the valley a kilometer away. Probably the same ones we saw earlier, he thought. "Keep an eye on them," he told Randall. He wanted to complete his eyeball reconnaissance and wanted to know where the POW train disappeared to if it went out of sight before he returned his attention to it. Several minutes of careful looking in a sweep to the south revealed no enemy positions in that direction. Bell lowered his glasses and chewed on his lower lip for a long moment, lost in thought.

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