Page 29 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)

THE TAN SON NHUT Air Base was located in the middle of the city. As soon as the convoy passed through the gates of the airport, they were in what the French had once called the Pearl of the Orient.

Saigon was a bustling city in transition.

Caught between old and new, it had become the treasured jewel in a conflict they had not asked for, a prize of the Cold War, a place where the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States had turned hot.

Colonial-style buildings stood in opposition to the encroachment of modern structures in various stages of construction.

The roads were paved and surprisingly smooth compared to the potholed streets around Phu Bai.

The sidewalks were still made of dirt and packed red clay.

They lumbered along, passing storefronts with awnings where women window-shopped and children played at their feet.

Tom wondered how the kids kept their white T-shirts and tan pants so clean.

Peugeot, Renault, Citroen, and Simca vehicles that looked like they belonged in a previous decade clogged the boulevards, as motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles ridden by people wearing the traditional nón lá wide conical hats of bamboo, straw, or palm leaves wove in and out of the traffic, through the dust and exhaust that filled the air, with what appeared to be a careless abandon.

Tom gazed at one motorbike that was stacked with a family of six.

Unbelievable. Adding to the contrast between old and new were occasional horse-drawn carriages.

Motorized and pedaled rickshaws ferried passengers through the chaos.

The potent French influence, once a mighty symbol of imperial prestige, was now a sad reminder of the limits of empire. A legacy in ruin. A vestige of imperial hubris.

I wonder if we are on the same path?

They maneuvered through a large roundabout surrounded by buildings adorned with billboards. Tom couldn’t believe they made it through without crushing a scooter or rickshaw.

He looked at Amiuh, who shook his head. The Montagnard tribesman was not comfortable in the city.

The convoy slowed to a stop and Tom stood up in the back.

“What’s up?” he asked the gunner, who had lit another cigarette.

“Nothin’. Just some construction. Gonna reroute.”

The lead vehicle had come to a stop at a roadblock. The street was being repaved. Tom watched as Captain Lam turned and motioned with his hand to the truck behind him that they were going left.

“This normal?” Tom asked.

“It isn’t not.”

Tom shot him a puzzled look at the use of the double negative and then moved his eyes to the structures to their right and left before sitting back on the bench across from Amiuh.

“Tommy-son?”

“Detour,” Tom responded.

Amiuh shook his head.

“I don’t like it either,” Tom said. “We’ll be there soon.”

The big vehicle surged from first gear to second as it took a left and followed the three vehicles in front down a narrow side street. It was less populated than the one they had been on moments earlier. Almost abandoned.

“Stay alert,” Tom told the MPs, wishing he had one of their rifles.

“Tommy-son.”

“I know.”

Tom stood again and looked at the U.S. jeep between them and the ARVN cargo truck that held their prisoner. He could see Quinn arguing with Eldridge.

The two MPs were standing now as well, tense and on edge.

Only the .50 gunner looked relaxed.

The bus appeared with surprising speed from a perpendicular side street and collided with the lead jeep. The noise of breaking glass and bending metal was horrific. The bus pushed the smaller vehicle across the street and sidewalk, into a bakery, and came to a stop blocking the narrow road.

The ARVN cargo truck attempted to push through, but was going at such a low rate of speed that it came to a stop, its heavy diesel engine straining against the crushed side of the bus.

“Contact,” Tom yelled, jumping to his feet. “Reverse out! Reverse out!”

Tom turned to their six in time to see a cement mixer pick up speed.

“Gunner, contact rear!” Tom yelled, pulling Amiuh down into the deck of the open-air back of the truck.

The .50 gunner rotated the weapon to the rear and opened up on the fast-approaching cement mixer.

John Moses Browning’s Ma Deuce was developed as an antiarmor weapon at the request of John Blackjack Pershing near the end of the First World War.

There was a reason it was still in service in 1968; she had yet to find her equal.

The reverberations and concussions from the muzzle blast hit them like a sledgehammer.

The large-caliber rounds tore into the cement mixer’s engine block and then moved to the front window, splintering glass and removing the driver’s head.

The Eve of Destruction had already started to reverse, unaware of what was behind them.

“Hold on!” Tom shouted.

Even though the cement mixer had slowed after the introduction of the .50 caliber projectiles, the combined force of the two vehicles colliding still ejected the gunner from his position behind the formidable machine gun and sent him crashing into the bed of the truck with his passengers.

“Everybody okay?” Tom yelled, his hearing still impaired by the assault of the .50 cal moments earlier.

“Yeah, man,” the gunner said, straightening his helmet.

“Get back on the gun!”

Tom looked at the cement mixer and heard the straining engine of their gun truck.

From the front of the convoy came the sounds of gunfire and the launching of an RPG or recoilless rifle followed by an explosion

You can only deal with one thing at a time, Tom.

One of the MPs held his arm, grimacing in pain as the other stood up to get his bearings.

Have to get that truck out of the way, or we are all going to die.

Tom grabbed the M16 from the hurt soldier and leapt onto the hood of the cement mixer.

Clutching the roof with his left hand to steady himself, he depressed the trigger and sent a full-auto burst into the passenger side of the cab.

Glass can have an unpredictable effect on bullet trajectory, so Tom pushed the muzzle of the rifle through one of the holes in the splintered windshield and ran the magazine dry.

Dropping the weapon, he swung himself off the hood, but instead of hitting the street like he anticipated, he crashed into a person, a man with an SKS rifle.

The man seemed almost as surprised as Tom.

Get control of the gun.

Tom landed on top of the smaller man, who wore tan pants and a green canvas chest rig over a black T-shirt.

Tom smashed the side of his head into the bridge of the smaller man’s nose and felt the bones and cartilage break as blood began to flow like a faucet, coating the side of Tom’s face.

He continued to grind his head into his adversary, hearing other smaller bones break as he trapped the rifle to the man’s chest.

Get off the ground. If he has a friend behind him, you are dead.

Tom chanced a glance up but there was no one else bearing down on them.

Frogman luck.

Instead of going for the small cathouse gun in his pocket, which was smashed up against his opponent, Tom reached behind his back with his free right hand and unsnapped the button on his EK knife.

He withdrew the blade and inserted it just above the clavicle at the base of his enemy’s neck.

He sunk the sharp blade into the soft flesh, watching the eyes of the man below him open wide in a mix of surprise and terror.

That mix turned to fear as the blade sliced through muscles, veins, and connective tissue until it pierced the upper reaches of the heart.

Tom continued to apply downward pressure and began pivoting the blade back and forth, tearing the aorta, pulmonary artery, and superior vena cava to shreds.

The man’s eyes froze over in a vacant state of horror as life left him, his mouth agape, never having had the strength to cry out.

Might be more assaulters back here.

Tom sheathed his blade and removed the SKS from the dead man, confirming it had a full magazine and that it had a round in the chamber.

He turned back to the gun truck in time to see the .50 gunner’s head explode.

The uninjured MP began firing his M16 down at targets on the opposite side of the cement mixer.

Tom didn’t see Amiuh.

The SEAL pushed to the rear of the cement mixer and cleared the area behind it. He then rounded the far corner and saw two enemy combatants firing up at the armored bed of the truck.

Tom raised the rifle and put three rounds into each of their upper backs, which sent them to the ground.

They both lay sprawled half on the pavement and half on the dirt sidewalk, one attempting to crawl away.

Tom moved his aim to the moving man’s head and sent two rounds into his brain stem.

He stopped moving. Tom ran toward the front of the big truck and put two rounds into the other man’s head as he passed.

“Friendly!” he called, not wanting to get his own head blown off by his own side.

“Tommy-son!” came the reply.

Tom rushed to the back of the truck and pulled down the tailgate. The gunner was dead, as was one of the MPs who had taken multiple rounds to the chest. Amiuh had the dead MP’s M16 in his hands.

Tom could hear the vehicle’s engine strain against the mass of the cement mixer, trying to reverse out.

“I’m going to move this truck!” he yelled, opening the right-side door and pulling out what was left of the passenger. He crawled into the cab, slipping on the floor, awash in blood. It smelled of copper and excrement.

He reached across the bullet-ridden headless torso of the driver, opened the door, and pushed the remains out into the street.

Now, how do you drive this thing? Good thing I’m not an officer, Tom thought, having driven his share of six-bys in the Navy.

The cement mixer had stalled out in the chaos of the previous action, so Tom stepped on the clutch and reached for the key.

“Tommy-son!” Amiuh screamed.

He looked up to see a man with a recoilless rifle on his shoulder emerge from an alley to his eleven o’clock.

Time seemed to slow as he saw the man depress the trigger.

Tom observed the thick dark smoke spew from the back of the tube, signifying that a large-caliber projectile had been propelled directly at the cement mixer.

He knew exactly what would come next. Impact.