Into Vietnam. Shaun Clarke

      

      Into Vietnam

      SHAUN CLARKE

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1995

      Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1995

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

      Cover photographs © MILpictures/Tom Weber/Getty Images (soldier); Shutterstock.com (textures)

      Shaun Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008155421

      Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155438

      Version: 2015-11-02

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Prelude

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

      

       Chapter 8

      

       Chapter 9

      

       Chapter 10

      

       Chapter 11

      

       Chapter 12

      

       Chapter 13

      

       Chapter 14

      

       Chapter 15

      

       Chapter 16

      

       OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

      

       About the Publisher

       Prelude

      The Viet Cong guerrillas emerged from the forest at dawn, with the mist drifting eerily about their heads. There were nearly fifty men, most dressed like coolies in black, pyjama-style combat gear and black felt hats, with sandals or rubber-soled boots on their feet. Nearly all of them were small and frail from lack of nourishment and years of fighting. Their weapons were varied: Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK47 machine-fed 7.62mm assault rifles; 7.62mm RPD light machine-guns with hundred-round link-belt drum magazines; 7.62mm PPS43 sub-machine-guns with a folding metal butt stock and thirty-five-round magazine; Soviet RPG7V short-range, anti-armour, rocket-propelled grenade launchers; and, for the officers only, Soviet Tokarev T33 7.62mm pistols, recoil-operated, semi-automatic and with an eight-round magazine.

      As the VC left the forest behind them and crossed the paddy-field, wading ankle deep in water, the officers quietly slid their Tokarevs from their holsters and cocked them.

      The Vietnamese hamlet was spread over a broad expanse of dusty earth surrounded by trees and its edge was about fifty yards beyond the paddy-field. With thatched huts, communal latrines, some cultivated plots, a regular supply of food from the nearby paddy-field, and a total of no more than fifty souls, it was exactly what the guerrillas were looking for.

      Though this was an agricultural hamlet, the VC had been informed that the peasants had been trained by the CIA’s Combined Studies Division and Australian Special Air Service (SAS) teams in hamlet defence, including weapon training, moat and palisade construction, ambushing and setting booby-traps. The peasants were being armed and trained by the Americans in the hope that they would protect themselves against guerrilla attacks. What had been happening in practice, however, is that the VC, more experienced and in much greater numbers, had been destroying such hamlets and using the captured American arms and supplies against American and South Vietnamese forces elsewhere.

      This was about to happen again.

      The first to spot the VC were two peasants working at the far edge of the paddy-field. One of them glanced up, saw the raiding party and hastily waded out of the paddy-field and ran back to the hamlet. The second man was just about to flee when one of the VC officers fired at the first with his Tokarev.

      The sound of that single shot was shockingly loud in the morning’s silence, making birds scatter from the trees to the sky, chickens squawk in panic, and dogs bark with the false courage of fear.

      The