‘You can get accreditation for me?’ Church said.
‘As a writer, maybe. If you’re ready to take the risk.’
‘Ten thousand Americans have already died there this year,’ Church said. ‘The chances of getting out alive aren’t good.’
Tom nodded. ‘Then it’s a suicide mission. Can I have your Frank Sinatra records?’
26
Vietnam, 31 January 1968
A heat haze hung so heavily over the thick jungle vegetation that Vietnam appeared to be boiling in the afternoon sun. In the sweaty, oppressive atmosphere clothes became sodden in minutes and Church’s brain thudded inside his skull with every beat of his heart.
As he looked out across the treetops from the open door of the chopper, Church accepted that while he thought he had come to understand despair on the long, weary road from the Iron Age, he hadn’t really come close. Below him, soldiers were being slaughtered, blown apart, tortured, burned alive, turned into quadriplegics. Civilians were being murdered, their livelihoods destroyed. Troops turned against their own leaders. Countrymen killed each other by the thousand. And as the sickening death toll mounted day by day, and the waves of escalating violence washed out across the region, across the world, it was clear there was no point to it at all. Vietnam was a machine fuelled by human suffering and it would go on for ever if they let it.
Church knew from the hindsight of history that it wouldn’t. Instead, the Enemy would get smart and simply shift the conflict to new venues around the globe, from Africa to the Middle East, a perpetual world tour of misery.
‘Are you ready for this?’ Gabe was checking his camera equipment in the next seat.
‘As much as I’ll ever be.’
They’d only been in Vietnam a few weeks, but already Church could see the horrors they’d witnessed etched into Gabe’s once-innocent face. His fears for Marcy had turned him into a different person. No longer the laid-back hippie with the JFK fixation, he made contacts, wheeling and dealing and bribing military men jaded by the rigours of war, doing anything he could to find leads to the Libertarian’s whereabouts.
The intelligence had been sketchy, but there had been a few references to spiders in Vietcong transmissions coming out of what had been known as the Iron Triangle, a highly dangerous area of forty square miles bordered by the Saigon River to the west and the Thi Tinh River to the east.
And so Gabe had spent several hundred dollars buying them places on a small incursion into the heart of the area: just twenty-seven soldiers and a handful of men from the 1st Engineer Battalion to investigate some of the 1,000 miles of Vietcong tunnels that crisscrossed the area.
‘The mirror’s still working?’ Gabe asked quietly.
Out of sight of the soldiers in the helicopter, Church showed Gabe the artefact he had retrieved from the Market of Wishful Spirit. A bright light glowed in the centre.
The choppers came down one by one in a clearing in a dense part of the jungle that had not been razed to the ground during Operation Cedar Falls the previous year. The troops piled out, keeping their heads low beneath the whirling blades. Church and Gabe were amongst the last on the ground.
‘Dust-off in six hours!’ the captain yelled before the helicopters took off into the haze.
The captain was college-educated and had a decent nature, but couldn’t mask his belief that he was out of his depth. Like many officers, he hadn’t had the chance to build up any experience before being thrown into the thick of combat. ‘Stay close. Don’t wander off the track,’ he said to Church and Gabe. ‘This area is rife with booby traps. We’re supposed to have cleared out the VC, but nobody believes that. There’ll probably be snipers.’ He eyed his men, the majority of whom were not yet out of their teens and as green as he was. ‘We’ve been tasked to head south. There’s been some kind of vague intel that Hanoi’s planning an offensive. That’s all crap. It’s Tet. There’s a ceasefire every year so the Vietnamese can observe their holiday.’
Church kept a poker face: he couldn’t reveal that the Tet Offensive in 1968 would be the turning point in the war. The all-out military assault by the North Vietnamese Communists finally showed the American public they weren’t winning the war and brought despair to the US homeland.
‘If they’ve been told to head south, we need to go north,’ Church said to Gabe.
‘You think the Enemy knows we’re here?’
‘I don’t think the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders cares where we are any more, but their surrogates in the military and the CIA aren’t going to let anybody get too close to their operation.’