“Extreme unction, Maguire would tell you,” Janson replied softly. He had always been fond of Hardaway, but this evening his friend seemed unusually distracted.

“Hey, they don’t call it the Holiness Church for no reason. You come to Jacksonville, I’ll take you one Sunday.” Hardaway bobbed and clapped to a rhythm in his head. “‘Sanctify my lord, sanc-tify my lord.’”

“Hardaway,” Janson warned, putting a hand on his gear belt.

The crack of a rifle told them that the enemy had learned of their presence. They would have to dive to the ground, to take immediate evasive action.

For Hardaway, however, it was too late. A small geyser of blood erupted from his neck. He staggered forward several yards, like a sprinter who had crossed the finish line. Then he collapsed to the ground.

As Maguire’s machine gun began to fire bullets over their heads, Janson scrambled over to Hardaway. He had been struck in the lower outside part of his neck, near his right shoulder; Janson cradled his head, applying pressure with both hands to the pulsing wound on the front of his neck, desperately trying to staunch the flow.

“Sanctify my lord,” Hardaway said weakly.

The pressure was not working. Janson felt his shirt becoming warm and wet, and he realized what was wrong. There was an exit wound, at the back of Hardaway’s neck, perilously near his spine, from which bright arterial blood was gouting.

In a sudden display of strength, he wrenched Janson’s hands from his neck. “Leave me, Janson.” He was trying to shout, but it came out as a low rasp. “Leave me!” He crawled away a few feet, then used his arms to raise himself, his head swiveling around the tree line as he tried to make out the shapes of his assailants.

Immediately, a blast hit his midriff, slamming him to the ground. His abdomen had been torn apart, Janson saw. Recovery was out of the question. One man down. How many more?

Janson rolled behind a thornbush.

It was a goddamn ambush!

The VC had been lying in wait for them.

Dialing his scope furiously, zooming through the marsh grasses and palms, Janson saw three VCs running down a jungle path directly toward him.

A direct assault? No, he decided: it was more likely that the raking overhead fire from the M60 had caused them to change their position. A few seconds later, he heard the sharp thwack of bullets hitting the ground near him.

Dammit! There was no way the fire could be this heavy and well targeted unless Charlie had received advance word of the infiltration. But how?

He shifted his rifle scope rapidly to different directions and focal points. There: a hooch on stilts. And just behind it, a VC aiming a Chicom AK-47 in his direction. A small, skilled man who must have been responsible for the last blast that had hit Hardaway.