Death in the Jungle Gary Smith (mobi reader txt) 📖

of movement on the water. Spotting nothing, I glanced back to where movement then reigned, which was in the night air. There I saw more tracers, and finally there was a bigger glow, which I knew was a para flare.

After a few more minutes, I heard .50s firing. This told me the PBR was arriving to extract the team. The guns continued blasting for a couple of minutes, then all was quiet. Very quiet.

I started looking around more intensely, especially upstream to my right in the direction of Second Squad’s clash. I could only guess from all the shooting that they had encountered more than just one sampan or a couple of VC. In the event that they had met with a few sampans and several enemy, one or two crews may have escaped the SEAL ambush. If so, and if they stayed on the water, they’d be approaching our ambush site soon. I slowly swung Bad Girl’s double barrels in half a circle to my right, as a gut feeling was speaking to me loud and clear. I just knew the enemy was coming. He will come, he will come, I repeated over and over.

An hour slowly drifted by, and the only thing that came was the tide. The water rose and crested over the bank of the stream, but only a few inches. The peak hit at 0100 hours, and I sat in half a foot of water. It was enough to wet me down, and along with a sudden strong breeze, it was enough to make my teeth chatter. I sang a couple of old country-and-western songs under my breath to the syncopated rhythm.

An hour later, the water began receding rapidly the way it always did when there was a ten-to-twelve-foot difference between high tide and low. Water rushing and gurgling everywhere made it difficult to hear any other noises in the night. I did, however, pick up the sounds of amphibious lung fish flopping in the mud and splashing into the water. Every now and then I heard the clicking noises of nearby crabs. During one short stretch, several crabs joined together in what sounded like a group of percussionists testing their castanets for speed. Thereafter, however, things began to quiet down. Even the wind backed off until an eerie silence encompassed the area.

The silence lasted almost an hour, then like all silent times, it was overcome and broken. The culprit this time was a slightly errant paddle striking against the side of a sampan to my right. I turned my eyes toward the noise. About seventy-five feet away, I vaguely saw a sampan on the starlit water with a man seated forward and another aft. My heartbeat instantly did double-time and my hands took a firmer grip on the M-16/XM-148, which was resting on my lap with its barrels pointing downstream—in the wrong direction.

Damn it all, I swore inside myself, angry that I had moved my weapon to this position only ten minutes earlier. Now I had to swing it back around with two VC right on top of me. In the starlight, there was a chance they’d see me. Maybe they’d even shoot first before they moved into our kill zone. Hell, they were going to pass by me at a distance of fifteen bloody feet or less.

I slowly pivoted Bad Girl toward the oncoming enemy, but before I got her fully turned around, the sampan turned toward the bank of the stream and the bow ran up on the beach just ten yards from my bugged-out eyeballs. The occupants remained in the grounded boat and whispered frantically to one another. Believing that they’d seen me and were plotting to shoot at me in a moment, I clicked my M-16 from semi- to full automatic. I seized the moment out from under the gooks and squeezed the M-16’s trigger. Spraying the sampan from end to end, I fired the entire 30-round magazine.

In the midst of my firing, the two men tumbled out of the sampan and into the water. I moved my finger forward to the XM-148 trigger and fired a 40mm HE round to the outboard side of the sampan. It blew, visibly rocking the sampan and setting it free from the shore.

I fell to my left side on the muddy bank, keeping a low profile as I inserted another 30-round magazine in the M-16 and loaded a second 40mm canister round in the grenade launcher. Before I finished, Ty opened up with his M-16 and shot up the sampan some more as it floated past him.

As I sat up from reloading, someone down the line sent up a para flare, which brought artificial daylight to the situation. I looked downstream about forty feet and saw a human head pop up in the water. I instantly fired a 40mm round to within a foot of the head; simultaneously, McCollum shot a 40mm round into the stream on the opposite side of the head. The two grenades exploded together, and when the water settled down, there was no trace of humanity left to be seen.

A few seconds later, a package of some sort surfaced about forty meters downstream. Muck and I again fired 40mm rounds beside it and blew it sky-high. This time when the water calmed, I could see a few pieces of the bundle drifting away in the current.

Twenty seconds later, as the para flare petered out, word was passed from Mr. Meston that Ty and I were to swim out and retrieve the sampan. I hustled to slip on my fins while Ty stood over me just watching. He had no fins, which would be a big detriment in the swift stream if we had to swim some against the current.

“Let’s go,” I said as I climbed to my feet with my knife in my right hand. Just then, a second flare ignited high above the stream. Ty and I wasted no time in dropping down into the water and beginning