Pt. VIII
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There is a smell to the air of the Underworld beneath New York City. To be frank, it fucking stinks. The populace of this fair? reality have stopped noticing. As a newcomer, Rick is finding it difficult to take. If you asked him what it smells like, he’d say something like “spoiled pudding on fire.”
And that is really an apt description. It is also hot and humid and generally not very pleasant. It is within these atmospheric rules that allow for air travel. Zeppelins mainly, powered by gnome ingenuity, and hot greasy air. The same ingenuity that created the giant pistons holding New York City aloft. The gnomes are also the reason that those pistons are needed in the first place, but let's not confuse things.
Rick doesn’t know any of that yet anyway. He won’t really care when he does learn. To be frank, he would prefer it not to smell so badly.
Because there was really only one question on his mind.
“My son?” Rick questions the gnome in Red. “Emperor of the Under World?” Nothing made sense anyway, why not have this be true? The putrid air, the dangerous-looking contraption attached to his shoulder, his son not just being a professor of mythological literature but some king or emperor to these people?
“Cogsdale!” Stupid Lady yells. “Look, it is too late. The ugly human thoroughly believes his son might be emperor of the Underworld.” Stupid Lady approaches and places a hand on his shoulder. “Look, Cogsdale lies about everything. We’ve never even heard of your son, before meeting you.”
They are laughing at him now and he doesn’t like it. He is bouncing between the idea he is dead or in some kind of deep coma. This sure as shit feels like some kind of sick afterlife joke to pay him back for all his misdeeds. Especially for the ones he did in Nam. Specifically, the one where he made his son with a woman desperate for comfort and safety.
He doesn’t like thinking about Vietnam. About all that lost time and all the lies used to get him to maim and kill the enemy. And he was good at killing. Willing also, which is really the hardest skill to come by. The Army can’t teach a killer instinct. Yet here he is, mind dark with the one memory he wishes he could forget.
“Rick,” the voice is his company commander from sixty-four years ago. “You’re going out.”
Going out meant get your kit and make peace with your God.
“Sir, yes sir,” he salutes at attention and moves off at a double time. Yah, he was that squared away. The tent flap opens into the gloom. It’s a temporary base of Operations. They don’t stay in the same place long. Dangerous for them and very dangerous for the unit they crash with. A week tops and they move on somewhere else. Tents and provisions are handled by the host unit. Everything except his kit.
His kit consists of:
(1 each) Map (0.1 lbs), compass (0.2 lbs), sextant (2.5 lbs), secure radio (2 lbs), binoculars (1.5 lbs), range finder (1 lb), compact spotting scope (1.5 lbs), semi-automatic Beretta M9 9mm lightweight (2.6 lbs) with three full 20-round magazines (3 lbs), Kabar knife (1.2 lbs), firestarter (0.1 lbs), package of water purification tablets (0.1 lbs), compact fishing kit (0.5 lbs), basic first aid kit with morphine (1 lb), camo poncho (1.5 lbs), canteen (3 lbs), roll of ripcord (0.5 lbs), all-weather notebooks and water-resistant pencil,(0.5 lbs), one set of ripstop tiger stripe BDUs (2 lbs), one pair of canvas-topped steel mesh-soled jungle boots (2 lbs).
And nine high-calorie protein bars (2 lbs).
The total weight he brings with him is 31.3 lbs.
Everything, except the BDUs and sidearm, gets shoved into the frameless rucksack in a particular order. Everything is meticulously maintained. Metal is taped to avoid jingling or glinting in light. Items are folded just right to minimize spatial impact. It’s not a lot of weight, but after a while, it becomes a bitch like anything else. So it has to sit perfect. It’s all he will own until he is pulled out. Maybe a week, maybe more.
His ruck packed, dressed, and face painted, he steps out of the barracks he shares with the other LRRPS and heads over to the company area. Every mission, Rick gives the company clerk the same letter, sealed and ready to be sent free of charge to an address in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He wrote the letter six years previous before going out on patrol with his first unit. The letter was to his dad, who asked for only one promise before Rick shipped out.
“If you die, I want it to be you who tells me,” Impossible old man was already dead when he made it back to the States with Junior. But that’s nine months later, and some changes later.
Infantry patrols were a dream compared to what he was about to do. But the fear he felt then was still as palpable today. He was always certain he was going to die. He never does, which does not make him feel better, just that it was still due to come true one day.
The wait was torture.
But it was the LRRPS life that prepared him for the streets. Being homeless was just another mission. Been there, done that.
The only difference was in name, he had a job to do. Blow shit up. Covertly kill people. Basically, terrorize and record intel. Be a ghost in the woods. At his size, it was surprising to most that he was as good at this, yet he was. “The trick,” he would tell someone decades later, “is just to kill them before they see you.”
The army trained him well. Airborne School, Ranger School, SERE School, Sniper School, Navigation and Orienteering, Close Quarters Battle, Communications Training, Jungle Warfare School, Desert Warfare School, Arctic Warfare School. Every year he was out of the nam was filled with training to get better at the Nam. He knows what to do because in the army every cog has to perform perfectly for the entire machine to work.
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His specific goal while out was to break shit,
The clerk in what would turn out to be his last unit, 187 Rakkasans, is at work in Headquarters company. He is a corporal, “Hey sergeant. Got the finger, huh?”
Rick nods and wordlessly puts the letter on the counter.
The clerk placed it under his typewriter and promised, “I’ll keep it safe till you get back sergeant.”
“Thank you, Pedro,” he says to the boy who is not named Pedro nor even Mexican. And honestly, Rick knows the nickname comes from the fact he smells like beans. Beans cold right out of the can.
“No worries, Sarge. Duty 222 waiting in the jeep.”
And he was. Rick jumps into the passenger’s seat with his gear on his lap. The L.T. drives through the camp fast, like he was the only one going anywhere. People scream, other vehicles honk, he creates bedlam in his wake. They don’t talk and Rick’s mind is completely blank, a skill the army bestows on all their enlisted soldiers. Blind loyalty. He never really thought about the war politically. Until he got back to the States with his son. Up till then, it was a job he was exceptionally good at.
The plane is on the airport runway idling, waiting for him and any other fool getting dumped over a jungle. A small shack where parachutes are folded into packs sits right off the tarmac. He is always asked to save his chute, and so far he has never lost one.
“Evening Sergeant. Last bag of the night. How much you weigh again?” He takes down the offered 240 knowing it was a lie, and with a sigh says, “I’ll have to adjust some things, just a minute.”
Outside he knows the C-130 crew has notified he is here when the engines begin to pick up power.
“The pilots obviously want to get this op over with,” he says to the tech-four.”
“Flying at night in a slow-ass cargo plane is like being in the middle of a lake with no paddle when the anti-aircraft guns start firing. No sir won’t ever catch me up there like that.”
Rick always hoped to be out of the plane when the anti-aircraft started. Not fun to find the thing keeping you a few thousand feet in the air developing new holes in its fuselage.
It takes the rigger about fifteen minutes to do the additional deed and help Rick into the pack. He makes sure everything is secure and done right. Afterward, he steps back and salutes, “Knock ‘em dead, Sir!”
Rick doesn’t salute back, He is enlisted after all, but he does shoot the soldier, younger by four years, a smile because he gets the joke. He’s a sergeant, he works for a living, hahaha, but honestly, Rick loves what he did. This was adventure beyond all expectations.
He climbs onboard, takes his seat and ignores the safety briefing. His only job is to wait for the red light to turn green. It’ll be an hour or so. Until then, he naps.
Static line jumping is more loud than it is scary, at least at this point in Rick’s military career. He’s even forgotten the exact number of jumps he’s done. A thousand? Maybe.
The pilot knows for sure where to green light him and sure enough, the strobe light goes red and the crew chief opens the door. Rick stands, kit between his knees, and shimmies through the blast of wind. The chief yells go, but Rick was already gone. Soaring through the air weightless for a couple moments before the parachute catches with a jerk and he floats down to the rice paddy below him.
Humid wind caresses him as he settles down into a paddy already picked by a pathfinder likely still in the area. They won’t meet. Once Rick is on the ground, he heads directly into the woods and the Pathfinder heads to where ever he was told to go catch an LZ.
It’ll be the same scenario for Rick when he finishes his mission. A ride out on a Huey with no seats and an even bigger target on it than a C-130.
Once on the ground, the real work began.
Long-range recon is grueling. He’s fifty clicks over the border. The plane doesn’t even need to slow down to get rid of him and looking up to find would be a waste of time. Once down he hustles into a thick treeline, stows his chute and waits. In his left hand is his kabar. In his right the Berreta. He misses Betsy. He only brings it now when he is on patrol with his team. Four grunts, all sergeants. When they go out together shit burns down.
He waited holding his breath to listen carefully. He hears farm life happening nearby. The complaints of the oxen. The only heavy equipment farmers get in Northern Vietnam. He hears a family inside happily sharing a meal. He is a bit jealous. His only family is his dad, but every time he gets to come back to Vietnam, he knows it just might be the last time he sees him. He is thinking about his father and looking as he looks at the map marked with his objectives. He chooses one of the closer ones, refolds the map, and stows it in the cargo pocket on his left thigh.
Then he almost died.
A squad of Vietcong walked right passed him. Four men all with AK-47s. Sandaled feet and the only giveaway, the thing that saved Rick’s life, a half-full canteen sloshing with every footstep. He’ll find out later they were all conscripts. No rank. Probably AWOL or whatever the North Vietnamese called it. Cowards and deserters, it’s probably the same in English also, worthless and dangerous men.
From the shadows he watches them approach the farm. He decides they must be hungry and desperate for food. After a brief communication, one of the men kicked in the front door of the farmer’s hut. The terror inside was immediate.
And Rick stood to be a good guy.
I won’t bore you with the details. I will just point out one tiny factoid. A kabar is one of the world's best knives for killing your enemy close-up. It’s the plunging power of a solid unbreakable rib of sharpened steel. The slashes engraved near the hilt break the suction when in the body and allow for it to be easily removed and thus reapplied to whichever vital spot was picked for destruction. That's what Rick did to the last soldiers. The two who didn’t make it into the hut. Their lives ended less than two seconds from one another. A bullet stopped the third’s life. And the fourth knew he was fucked and pulled out a grenade.
“You can’t believe anything Cogsdale says. There is something wrong with him”
This pulls him out of the memory. He knows he wasn’t here for a bit and isn’t sure if they answered his question. So he says, “My son is a professor of literature at Fordham University.”
“I know. Fordham. You mentioned him over and over again while you were out and we were working on you. I didn’t care then and I sure as shit don’t give a fuck now.”
Rick is still shaking off Vietnam and doesn’t respond. When he thinks of it, it is really like going back there for him. “What happened to the three that contracted WorkForce for me?”
“They weren’t eaten by the lizard? Not like a gnome to leave a lizard's body behind. Probably was already leaning toward running. Honestly looking at you, I’m surprised they even succeeded in getting you down here. What are you, 450 pounds? Anyway, that arm ain’t free. We need to talk about what you owe me.”
“Not 450 pounds. Not even with Rat standing on my shoulders--- Rat!” Last he saw him he was about to throw some lead into some aeroship-pirates. “Where’s Rat? Where’s the guy that you nettled up here with me?”
She gets real uncomfortable at the question and answers in a soft empathetic voice, “He didn’t make it.”