Red Flags by Juris Jurjevics Read Free Book Online

corrugated metal roof. Overhead rose a thirty-foot mast with a two-panel antenna grille pointed toward Signal Hill at Pleiku, fifty miles away, ten miles farther than by rights it should have reached. The antenna was stretched past its limits, like all our signal equipment in Viet Nam.
    We glanced into a pair of metal shelters, heavily layered with sandbags and steel plate, connected by a corridor of more sandbags to a wooden shed between them. The Mickey-6 in the first van transmitted and received encrypted messages in high-speed bursts that punched themselves into paper tape from which they were printed out by a teletype machine. The facing rig was paneled floor to ceiling with racks of electronics carrying the teletype transmissions and six radio-voice channels up into the rectangular antenna.
    We proceeded down the short corridor and stepped inside the signal shack. Half a dozen signalmen stood to attention. The shack was crowded with replacement parts and GIs. Two M-14 rifles and ammo pouches hung from pegs. A library of Signal Corps manuals filled a wooden ammo box mounted above an obsolete switchboard, and a large pot of chickenless Army chicken soup simmered on a small hot plate. A helmet parked on top was inscribed
Make Fuck, No Kill.
    I put the men at ease and Miser took the report from Sergeant Rowdy, a buck E-5. He couldn't have been more than twenty and was a three-striper already. He had high clearances and ran the crypto rig, encoding and transmitting the classified traffic.
    The other experienced man was a spec-4 called Geronimo, though he wasn't an Indian or even American. His name was Macquorcadale and he was Canadian, evidently a point of pride with him, as he boasted that there were "more f-ing Canucks in Viet Nam than candy-ass draft dodgers in Canada." Miser liked the tall, brash kid right off, I could tell. The rest were privates: two regular Army and two draftees.
    Miser, Sergeant Rowdy, and I went out back to a sandbagged firing position surprisingly close to the chest-high steel-plank wall that circled the compound. Beyond it lay the broad, curving Ayun River, where we'd seen the bodies.
    Rowdy gave us the rundown on equipment and warned us against inspecting the backup generators.
    "They out of commission?" Miser said, hackles rising.
    "No, Sergeant." Rowdy was all business. "Cobras."
    "As in hooded?" Miser growled. "As in snake charmers?"
    "Yes, Sergeant. Two, we think. We ran the generators several nights this week and they must've liked the warmth."
    "Great," Miser said. "Cobra fuck buddies."
    "Well," I said, "at least we don't have to worry about rats."
    Miser and I excused ourselves to walk the compound.
    "Sarge, what do you need from me? What signal work do you want me to do?"
    "As little as possible,
Captain.
Sign the paperwork and stay out of the way. Stick to the intel charts-and-darts. We're spread thin. We got three jobs now. Your cover job, my cover, and our fucking chore for Jessup. Looks like that's going to be on you. I have my damn hands full."
    "You remember enough to run the commo crew?"
    "In my sleep. So long as we don't get attacked and bum-fucked."
    "Not liking the odds here, Sarge?"
    He shook his head. "This is fucking Fort Apache without the defenses. No mines, no flares, no claymores, not a single mortar."
    We walked toward the perimeter. There wasn't much to the compound: a water tower, a couple of scraggly trees, hootches for the enlisted, the main generator shed, several sandbagged bunkers shored up by ten-foot-long perforated steel planks driven vertically into the hard earth, some laid across like beams for roofing. Villas in Saigon boasted more grounds and security.
    "Yeah." I had to agree. "If Charlie's willing to face the morning after, he can absolutely have his way with us."
    "Once the dumb-ass monsoon grounds our air support, they could screw with us easy."
    He was right. Small units in the hinterland were expendable. No big deal if we got overrun. It was just a