Red Flags by Juris Jurjevics Read Free Book Online Page B

all hands to the wire. Some things were the same all over Viet Nam.
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    The mess hall was modest and served all ranks. Oilcloth covered a dozen tables. French-era Sten guns hung around the pastel walls, below the screens and shutters of the window openings.
    "Decoration?" I asked Checkman.
    Checkman shook his head. "More like fire extinguishers, sir. They're oiled and loaded."
    Dinner in the mess hall was thoroughly cooked and tasteless. The meat was white, the mashed potatoes white, the French beans albino. Miser and I declined the cream sauce. The potatoes, like the milk, were dehydrated and then reconstituted from powder and water. Forensics couldn't have identified the meat.
    Miser eyed his portion suspiciously. "This looks like it's been done with an acetylene torch."
    "No germs, that's for sure."
    "Tastes just like chicken," he said.
    Whatever unimaginable creature or organ we were eating, Miser always made the same observation. This time it actually was chicken. You could tell by the drumsticks. We went through the motions of eating and looked for the bar.
    A side door opened onto a modest concrete slab roofed and sided with thatch, not much more than a screened-in patio with half a dozen stools and a small bar that served all ranks. Team 31 was far too small to have separate drinking establishments for enlisted, noncoms, and officers. Over the bar hung Christmas-tree lights and a hand-forged VC submachine gun, its trigger housing and magazine holder welded to a gun barrel made from a lead pipe. Crude but lethal. The ashtrays were empty c-ration cans, with linked rounds of spent machine-gun ammo snapped shut in a ring around each one.
    Miser eyed the handcrafted receptacles skeptically. "Glad to see the campers are keeping busy."
    The bartender was a huge black guy named Westy whose chief jobs were keeping the main generator running and the water tower filled and treated.
    "What can I do you gents?"
    "Larue," I said. Everyone concurred and he served up bottles of cold Tiger beer all around.
    We were joined by the intel sergeant, Joe Parks, who was celebrating twenty-four years in the Army and his third war in Asia. Parks declared himself a homesteader who rarely left the compound. A major once, he'd been caught in the downsizing after Korea and given the option of leaving the Army or accepting a severe reduction in rank. Parks stayed, as a sergeant E-7.
    He unfolded a sheet of paper and slipped it in front of me. "No doubt you've seen these before," Parks said. Prominent in the middle, my rank and name—
Di Uy Erik A. Rider
—and the bounty on my head: sixty thousand piasters. Something like three hundred bucks, a small fortune in Indochina.
    He passed Miser one too. "Your reputation precedes you, Sergeant."
    Miser beamed when he saw the price on him. "I'm at a hundred thou!"
    I leaned over Miser's sheet. "
Ellsworth
Miser?" I said. He snatched it back.
    We carried on like it was funny, but here we were in the back of nowhere, and the VC knew us by name.
    "Makes you feel kinda important," Miser said. "Gives me the fucking creeps."
    Back in country less than forty-eight hours and the sarge and I were already on the local hit list. A cheap propaganda psych-out, but it worked. We needed to watch our asses if we didn't want to finance some VC farmer's next planting season. I slid off the barstool, took our sheets over to the one solid wall shared with the mess, and added our bounty chits to the two dozen others pinned around a red battle flag with a large yellow star in its center.
    As the light faded, several Montagnard aborigines drifted past, dark-complexioned and black-haired, their skin like bark. Three Montagnards, barefoot, dressed in black long-sleeved native shirts and matching loincloths trimmed in red. The fourth wore a French military shirt and shorts. An old soldier. All four shouldered or cradled vintage bolt-action rifles and smoked homemade pipes as they strolled.
    "Our night guards," Parks said