Keeping Watch by Laurie R. King Page B

for the gunships, Second Platoon would have been overrun—give them their due, First Cav might have twitchy fingers when it came to their own side, but the bastards had balls. Near dawn, the besieged platoon was an island in a lake of fire, napalm on one side and mortars on the other, but once the jets came in, ripping the air with the sound of a stupendous bolt of silk tearing and leaving in their wake the superheated mushrooms of serious firepower, Charlie called it quits, and left the shaky GIs to lick their wounds.
    They got the emergencies off in the medevacs, then the priorities and the body bags, and when the wounded were safely off their hands they went outside the perimeter to see what the enemy had left for them.
    Most of them were NVA, with tire-soled sandals and flat-top haircuts. They went over the dead like ghoulish scavengers, emptying pockets, gloating over information (and, occasionally, souvenirs), feeling nothing at the sight of the dead but satisfaction that it was someone else.
    Allen, standing with his M16 in his arms while the sergeant rifled a man’s pockets, noticed a patch of something light in the bushes.
    â€œAnother one over there, Sarge,” he said. Sergeant Keys used the dead soldier’s AK47 to lift up the branch, revealing a crumpled figure even smaller than the men they’d been seeing on the battlefield.
    â€œIt’s a kid,” Keys said.
    Allen went down on one knee.
    â€œHang on.” The sergeant put out a hand to stop him. “Under the bushes like this, damn thing could be booby-trapped.”
    Allen nodded, and bent his head to examine the front of the child’s garment without touching it.
    The boy wore a long, ragged T-shirt that had once been printed with a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
    â€œAh, damn it,” Allen said. “This kid followed us from that last ville.”
    â€œFollowed us, or came back?”
    â€œHe disappeared during the afternoon.”
    It was all he needed to say. The two men gazed at the dead child who had brought the enemy to their wire. The Snakeman’s words ran through Allen’s mind like a song’s refrain:
Even the babies’ll kill you. Never trust a kid. Even the babies’ll kill you.
    What remained of Second Platoon was finally lifted out that afternoon, abandoning the hard-fought hill to its dead guardians, one of them a handsome child who had gleefully scrounged chocolate bars from the passing Americans.
    But Hill 117 wasn’t quite through with them.
    One by one the Hueys lifted off. Someone on the ground gave them a farewell fusillade, pings off their side that made the men inside cringe, but which did no harm.
    Except for the round that passed through one small but vital part of the last chopper off the ground.
    Allen was in the air when he felt the man beside him go stiff, and he whirled around, thinking his companion had taken a bullet through the floor. But the man’s face and outstretched hand had Allen whipping back the other way, leaning to see out the Huey’s open door, past the gunner to the copter behind them. The last Huey leaving the LZ was in trouble; every man there knew it was the one in which Lieutenant Woolf was riding. It faltered and tipped in the air, its stuttering rotors fighting for control, then tipped farther. A figure separated from the dying ship, jumped or shaken loose, and then the machine gave a shrug and dove after him, falling from the sky like a dropped house. The jungle where it came down erupted, a huge paw of flame that reached up for anything else it might grab, stretching out and out—until with an inaudible
pop
the cloud of flame collapsed back on itself and winked out, leaving only a wide circle of black vegetation and the first exploratory tendrils of smoke.
    The body of the door gunner was the only one later recovered from the smoldering wreckage. Even it was charred beyond recognition by the heat of the fire.

Chapter 10
    Bravo