After we set up for the night, Ondine broke out a map and conferred with Pink in the fading light. Early the next afternoon we skirted the bunker where the snatch had been made. An hour later the team was poised on a hill overlooking a huge NVA base supply camp that was a beehive of transport and supply activity. Buried in a narrow valley, the camp was surrounded on three sides by mountains. A well-guarded single-lane road hidden by triple canopy jungle allowed truck traffic into the camp from the north, while narrow speed trails, too small for trucks or tanks, fed into I Corps to the south. Not only was the NVA able to move fresh troops and resupply into Vietnam, the base had a hospital complete with doctors, nurses, and sterile operating rooms. There were dozens of women, in fact. Undoubtedly the base served as a safe haven for the troops to R&R after excursions into I Corps. Judging by the look of relaxation on the faces of the NVA, it did not appear they had been receiving much in the way of harassment. Pink used his own binoculars to scout the surrounding valley. He marked possible target positions on Ondine’s map with a red pencil. He was lining up shots at three, five, and seven hundred meters. The shot he liked best he penciled in last. It was a spot approximately one hundred meters behind the hospital. Ondine shook his head, like “no way!” Pink pointed to the heavy cloud cover and made hand signals to indicate rain and fog. We were far enough from the base to break out a hi-fi and have a party, but Pink was cautious to the point of paranoia. He was so quiet in fact that everyone on the team was beginning to get spooked. Not only had Ondine been acting strange, no one was overly thrilled with the fact that we were in Cambodia. Normally you could blame this sort of weirdness on the new guy, but while Pink may not have been an impressive physical specimen, he certainly had his shit together. While Ondine began to diagram a plan to provide Pink with diversionary fire, the rest of the team contented themselves passing the binoculars back and forth. We saw a pair of dog teams come into the compound followed by an NVA assault team. Felix T. nudged Ondine and said, “Look, Sergeant, those are our gooks!”

A few seconds later, General Deng stepped out of a fortified bunker, one that Ondine figured to be an ammo dump. “There he is,” Felix said. “Goddammit, motherfucker!”