Yeager's Getaway, page 9
part #3 of Abel Yeager Series
It didn’t matter to Danny Osterchuk. He missed it all, lying in a hospital bed.
On December 24th, 1968, Ngo Pham, a buddy of Osterchuk’s and fellow member of Combined Action Platoon Hotel 6, had invited Osterchuk to dinner at the home of one of his cousins. Combined Action Platoons were an amalgamation of a Marine rifle squad and local militia known as Popular Forces, or PFs. They worked together to deny the VC operational support at the village level and ran interdiction and combat patrols throughout their assigned area. Ngo wasn’t a Christian, but he saw how glum the big-eared kid from Minnesota was at being away from home on the holiday. In Ngo’s tin-roof shanty on stilts by the Troui Lagoon, Osterchuk ate exotic fish coated in pure fire and washed his burning tongue with warm beer. Seated on a wood plank floor, he and all of Ngo’s extended family held a three-legged conversation with Ngo translating and Osterchuk sweating an ocean. Osterchuk sang Christmas carols, and the family clapped along, chiming in at fa-la-la, which left Osterchuk rolling on the floor, laughing so hard he pulled a muscle.
Late that night, he and Ngo left the shack and headed for their racks. It was dark as a coal mine at midnight. A narrow country lane connected the village to Route 1, which would take them west, back to their base six klicks east of Phu Loc. They carried only sidearms, and both wore civvies. In retrospect, those were stupid choices—given the tension and enemy activity—as well as a violation of regulations, but it was Christmas Eve, and Osterchuk wanted to set the war aside for a time.
He was more than a little drunk, and his reactions might not have been at their fastest as he walked next to the tiny—by comparison—Ngo Pham. He blundered into Ngo and knocked the smaller man to the ground when Ngo stopped in the middle of the dirt road without warning.
Three figures detached from the darkness beside the road. Osterchuk gaped, boggle-eyed and woozy. Blades glinted in the moonlight. Were they Communist infiltrators, VC, or street thugs?
Ngo and the three men jabbered back and forth. The words made no sense, but Osterchuk recognized the tone: Give us your money, or else. They were street thugs, then.
Lance Corporal Danny Osterchuk had a bit of a temper in those days. This was his second time as a Lance Corporal, since he’d been busted for breaking the jaw of a stupid shit stain from Brooklyn in a bar fight over a hooker. A rage demon lived deep inside Danny Osterchuk. When it possessed him, Osterchuk transformed from a human being to a wrecking ball. He felt no pain. He lost all reason and all memory. He lived to hit people and break things. He’d fought the red demon inside him all through high school and basic training and the first six months of his deployment and, with rare and notable exceptions, had won that battle.
When one of the scrawny thugs waved his knife under Ngo’s chin, Osterchuk felt the demon take him. His face burned hot, and the pressure inside him expanded the way a steam boiler overheated. One second he was sane. The next, he was not.
With one mighty fist, he launched the nearest mugger like an Atlas rocket. Bones crunched at the impact, and Osterchuk knew in his gut that he’d broken the man’s neck. And his demon rejoiced.
Secret fact and the reason he kept his demon under control: Osterchuk liked hitting people. He could hit people harder than a falling telephone pole. Yes, he could.
The rest of the fight blurred to a series of snapshot images. He remembered glimpses of it later, but he couldn’t put together a coherent narrative. Later, Ngo told him he’d ignored the jabbing and slashing knives and thrashed the remaining two thieves as though possessed by a mighty dragon—a thing known as a long—and wreaked such destruction that the earth trembled. Osterchuk doubted that last part and told Ngo he was full of shit.
But secretly, he liked it. Yes, he did.
Ngo had sprinted the three miles to the village of Ngoc Ngot and raced back with a corpsmen, who patched Osterchuk’s leaking holes. By the time help arrived, the red demon had faded, and Osterchuk lay in the dirt, cold and shivering, his blood soaking the clay soil. He was only vaguely aware of the corpsman yelling at him to stay awake.
Osterchuk had killed three men, and not with the pistol at his waist but with his fists. His knuckles resembled raw meat. He had sixteen stitches in his colon, and sixty-eight more decorated his body in a railroad-track map.
His knife wounds earned him a trip to the Naval Support Activity Station Hospital in Da Nang, where he stayed long enough to miss the destruction of his unit. Ngo Pham died on 7 January, when a swarm of one hundred fifty VC overran the hamlet of Ngoc Ngot and decimated CAP Hotel 6.
He ate ice cream and sucked soup while the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines counterattacked the NVA in Hue City and beat them back into the jungle.
Osterchuk had kept his demon under control ever since.
SINCE HE AND PETTIGREW had approached the camp from the south, Yeager arbitrarily assigned their starting point as the six o’clock position. He numbered the structures clockwise—his recon had circled behind building four and building three. His stalk around the perimeter of the camp had ranged to the twelve o’clock position and uncovered a number of new facts.
Pettigrew, moving clockwise, would have rounded behind building one and two.
Yeager’s reconnaissance had located a fifth cabin, smaller and more compact than the others and set farther back, tucked between buildings two and three. It had its own generator, which kicked on less frequently than the larger one attached to building three. Dim lights glowed from inside. Their random flickering indicated the presence of someone moving around the interior. The rumble of a deep voice reached Yeager as he passed the place, too far away and too low to make out.
Yeager found a good observation point near the skeletal remains of a dead tree and settled in to wait. His muscles complained form the strain of hours of belly crawling and constant vigilance. There was no sign of Pettigrew.
He tried to relax and let his body recover. From his vantage point, Yeager had a good view of the back of the small cabin, which he designated as building five.
Another discovery: all along the northern side of the camp, a steep cliff fell away into a big, deep, empty bunch of nothingness. Yeager had found the drop by almost crawling directly into space. It was too dark to see the bottom, but a few experimental stone drops gave him a best guess of around a forty-yard fall.
Particularly stupid to situate a camp with no back-door escape route.
Then he found the back-door escape route. At some point in history, a chunk of the cliff wall had fallen away, leaving a wedge cut in the rock face. A natural trail led down from the ridge like a chute filled with gravel and overgrown, in places, with Hawaii’s tenacious and ever-present ferns. Yeager had hiked a good ways down the cut, far enough that he was relatively sure the route would provide a second egress from the campsite. The fissure started at approximately the one o’clock position and pointed almost due north.
A quick peek at his phone under the cover of his shirt revealed the time as 2:20 a.m. The guards had changed over at midnight and not since. Four-hour rotations? If so, that was a long stretch to remain on sentry duty. Longer shifts typically meant fewer personnel, so maybe there weren’t as many terrorists as Yeager had at first feared.
There was no sign of the hostages, though Yeager had convinced himself that one of the two central barracks housed the prisoners. Based on the guard positions, he would put his money on building two. There were no back doors on the buildings he had reconnoitered.
Yeager spotted Pettigrew only because he was looking for movement and knew about where to look. The old vet was slithering along, visible by his tan jacket and not much else. Yeager rattled some brush to get the man’s attention.
Pettigrew shifted direction, and when he approached, Yeager gestured and led them both to the back-door cut he had found in the ridge. Going down, they were at least able to stand and work their way toward the bottom in a more human fashion. Both maintained their silence until they reached the end of the rockslide, a solid quarter-mile from the lip of the ridge.
When Yeager turned right and kept going, Pettigrew whispered, “You know where you’re going?”
“Think so.”
After nothing else came for a time, Pettigrew grunted. “Huh. Well, okay, then.”
Yeager hiked along the base of the cliff for a solid ten minutes. The effort was rewarded when his ears picked up the hiss of falling water.
“Is that—” Pettigrew said.
“Waterfall.”
Another five minutes brought them to a pool fed by a thin stream of water from the bluff above. Yeager had to restrain himself from diving headfirst into the hot-tub-sized pond. He dropped to his belly and cupped water out with his hands, drinking in deep, sloppy gulps. Pettigrew was quick to copy him.
“Probably get the shits,” Yeager said after he’d slurped enough water to wash a buffalo. “But that’s the least of our problems.”
“Roger that.” Pettigrew splashed water on his face, scrubbing with both hands. He blinked, and droplets fell from his eyebrows. “Did you find anything helpful? Besides this here water, I mean. I didn’t see much on my side...”
Pettigrew’s report mirrored Yeager’s observations. Five buildings—one short and four long—fanned out in an irregular spread that surrounded the central clearing. Overhead was camo netting with sod piled on top.
“These boys are ready for overhead surveillance,” Yeager noted.
“Agreed.”
Two guards were visible, one rover and one posted and within sight of each other except when the rover went around building two on his patrol route. They were armed with AKs and sidearms, with radios clipped to their belts.
Yeager and Pettigrew settled on a flat rock near the pool, and the older man fired up one of his diminishing pack of Marlboros. “We can get the rover when he goes around the building,” Pettigrew said, though he didn’t sound thrilled by the idea. He sucked a deep drag and exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
“Then we have to get the other guy right away.” Yeager lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He stared at the vast blanket of stars. “So, one for you, one for me. With what? Rocks?”
“Better than spitting on them.”
“Mm. Say that happens. Then what? Will they have keys on ’em? If not, we have to bust the lock off the door.” Yeager sighed. “That’s a lot of noise.”
“Uh-huh. Every injun in the teepee be on us.”
Yeager’s eyelids grated, heavy as steel doors. He was tired to the core. Short night, long day, no food, and lots of exercise had taken a toll he couldn’t afford to pay. He allowed his eyes to slide closed, took a deep breath... and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Charlie huddled with Betty and four other hostages in a rear corner of the barracks. The group constituted an ad hoc leadership council, elected more through their willingness to lead than any democratic process. She and Betty sat side by side on the rear-most camp bed while the others either used the next bed over or squatted in the gap between the two. Many people rested on their cots, leaving Charlie and the others alone in the back.
Dave Draper, still shirtless, tended to be the most vocal and had been beating the same drum for the last ten minutes. “All I’m saying is, who’s next? I mean, that guy, he could... take anybody. Anybody.”
“We know that, but what are we going to do about it?” Dominick Migliozzi repeated for the third time in his thick Jersey accent. But whadda we gonna duabowddit? With olive skin, jet-black hair, and a tough-guy face, Migliozzi gave off the vibe of a full-on tommy-gun-toting, East Coast mobster. As it turned out, the guy owned a small chain of bakeries and designed wedding cakes for a living.
Charlie smiled, imagining Abel and Migliozzi attempting a conversation. It would be like a mule trying to understand a monkey. Abel. She turned her attention to the high, narrow window slit. He was out there somewhere. Charlie felt it in her bones. He might be unpolished—really, he was as rough as raw granite—but when it came to protecting his people, he wouldn’t bend, he wouldn’t break, and he wouldn’t back up. It warmed Charlie on the inside to know she topped the list of his people.
She studied the floor between her toes, having long since given up listening to the circular arguments among her fellow “leaders” of the captives. The floor consisted of two-by-six boards, she guessed, and based on the lack of give, they were nailed to joists. Below that? Dirt. Their group would have to somehow pull up a couple of boards then tunnel their way out. The Great Escape, Hawaiian Style.
The walls, now... The cot creaked when Charlie stood and stepped close to the wall. She felt Betty’s eyes on her as she examined the construction, which was like an unfinished house with exposed studs of two-by-four lumber framing the building. Horizontal cross pieces ran the length of the walls every two feet from top to bottom, creating a grid pattern of raw lumber. To that framework, twelve-foot-long one-by-six boards had been nailed vertically. Windows had probably been added afterward, cut out with a reciprocating saw and framed with more two-bys.
I’ve been watching Abel do home renovation more than is healthy. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have known a reciprocating saw from a banjo.
The builders had used nail guns to attach the one-by-six slats. She noted that at least two nails sticking through the boards had missed the frame, and they were tacky with the gluey substance she’d seen when Abel used a nail gun. He had also used colorful language to describe his thoughts about not hitting what he intended.
Hmm. A nail was not a box cutter, but it was better than harsh words and wishful thinking. Charlie pinched a nail between her fingers and gave it an experimental wiggle. Snug, but not immobile. Could she work it loose enough to pull through the board? It would require wallowing out the hole by working the shaft without bending it, widening it enough to pull the head through. She picked at the wood surrounding the protruding nail, earning a splinter in her finger for her trouble.
A presence appeared at her shoulder. Montelle.
“Would this help?” The soft-spoken singer held up a shiny object on a silver chain around his neck—a tiny spoon no more than three inches long.
A coke spoon? It has to be. Why else would you wear a spoon around your neck?
The singer offered a wicked grin. “They missed this when they searched me.”
YEAGER SNAPPED AWAKE in a full-body jerk. It was dark. The crushing sensation of having forgotten to do something very important squeezed his chest. His memory and situational awareness clicked into place like a mosaic of still images. Hawaii. Charlie held hostage. Pettigrew. Waterfall. Lying on a rock by a pond.
His jaw clenched. How could he fall asleep knowing Charlie was—once again—being held by people with bad intentions? She was undergoing a hellish experience, and here he was, having a nice nap by a tropical pool. Stupid, lazy...
The clock on his phone revealed he had slept about an hour. Dawn was not far off. Pettigrew snoozed cross-legged with his arms across his knees and his head down.
Yeager sat up, and every muscle from scalp to heel sang a ballad of pain—a whole choir of Oh, hell no—that hurts. Please don’t! He ignored the aches and shoved himself upright. His legs vibrated like tuning forks until he shook off the weakness and paced in a circle to get the blood moving again. Yeager stretched his calves by leaning against a tree. The aches receded as he warmed up the muscles. Quad stretches came next, followed by hamstrings and thighs.
Pettigrew looked up with bleary eyes. “We moving again, Staff Sergeant?”
“I am.” Yeager glared at the ridge top as though he could see the encampment with its guards and hostages. “Charlie’s waiting for me. First thing I’m gonna do is get me a firearm or two, then I’ll see what happens next.”
“Mm. Great plan, Sergeant. Why didn’t they make you an officer, tactical genius like that?”
Yeager twitched a smile at the old man. “I got a friend you need to meet. You and Por Que would be the best of buddies in no time. Yeah, the plan sucks. Sitting on my ass sucks worse. I want to start thinning out the herd up there. You need to slip around, get back to the trail so you can guide in the cavalry.”
“Jus’ in time to save the Lone Ranger from the injuns, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“You gonna get killed.”
“Look.” Yeager collected his thoughts. “Charlie’s been in a situation like this before. She still wakes up from nightmares after being kidnapped by a pair of lunatics.” Yeager’s hands closed to fists, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “She won’t tell me everything that happened that night, but I’m pretty sure one of them tried to... assault her. She’s tough,” he admitted with more than a little pride. “She killed both those fuckers. I hear the deputy that responded to the scene puked his guts out when he got a look at what she’d done. But... damn. I didn’t... couldn’t do anything to protect her that time.”
“Not again, huh?”
“Not again.”
“You sure this is your brain talking and not your balls?” Pettigrew asked.
“I’m a Marine, remember? Pretty sure they didn’t issue me a brain.”
KIMO EKEWAKA THREW his trash over the side of the ravine and listened to it bash and thump along the side of the cliff, ending with a muffled whump somewhere far below. He scratched his bare chest, yawned, and returned to what he called the commander’s cabin. The smaller hut was set back from the four longer barracks and contained amenities like a refrigerator, a microwave, a desktop fan, and a real bed with a mattress. The hut had its own personal generator-supplied power, so he had lights and a small television connected to an HD antenna.
He stripped the messy sheets off the bed and tossed them in a wadded ball into a corner. Some of the fluids had soaked through to stain the mattress. Kimo unrolled his sleeping bag over the gunk and lay down on top of it, wearing only his white boxers, letting the breeze from the small fan cool the sweat on his body.
