Free Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel by Kenn Miller

enemy ammo in his rucksack—the gooks searching his body would probably not be too suspicious of that. But it was another thing altogether to carry a written explanation of one of SOG’s sneakier tricks around in his pocket. He didn’t plan to die on this mission, but that was no reason to get careless. Wolverine wouldn’t even have been able to get hold of the bolo beans without Pappy Stagg’s connections—not now, now that he was out of SOG. They were hardly an item to be signed for in supply, not even in the Lurp platoon. Wolverine replaced three of the ammo boxes in the cache with booby-trapped rounds, then fitted the lid back on the crate and pressed it tight.
    Mopar was impressed. He kept his eye on his security zone, but he couldn’t resist peeking over his shoulder at Wolverine.
    “Maybe after this next extension is over I can extend for SOG,” he thought. “If Pappy Stagg and Wolverine put in a word with the right people it shouldn’t be too hard.” It was almost impossible, he knew, to get on a Special Forces “A” Team without going through the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. But with the right clearance, the right experience, and the right references, it shouldn’t be too hard to get in one of the really off-the-wall projects where a man didn’t have to know too much about training indigenous troops, as long as he knew how to patrol and keep his mouth shut. Mopar didn’t know too much about SOG, but from what he heard, it sounded like they had a lot of fun when they were in the rear and didn’t have any superstitious awe of international borders when they went into the field.
    He turned back to his zone of security and watched the stream flow past fast and gloomy, a few meters away through the bush. He hoped that Wolverine would decide to monitor the cache to see if anyone came along to uncover it, even if that meant putting up with the leeches and working off a wire antennae. But Wolverine had other things in mind. After the cache was reburied and the ground had been covered with leaves and the fresh soil scattered, he made another transmission on Marvel’s radio, took down the wire, then motioned for Mopar to move out on point as soon as Marvel had his wire coiled and put away.
    Mopar shrugged to shift the weight of his rucksack, then, when everyone behind him was ready, he moved out along the trail, looking for a narrow place to ford the stream. When he found one he crossed first, then covered the other men as, one by one, they darted across the stream and into the jungle on the other side.
    After another hour of looking for trails, caches, sleeping positions, and other signs of enemy activity—all with negative results—the team moved up to the high ground on the opposite side of the stream from the cache and found a bramble thicket where no one could approach them without making enough noise to betray his presence. After Marvel had made a commo check on the whip antenna, the men put out their Claymores and set up, back to back and legs out like spokes, to wait for the night to filter down through the jungle canopy.
    Gonzales took the first watch. He was still upset over the discovery that the exploding Communist weapons the American Forces Radio Network constantly warned the troops not to fire were not, as he’d happily assumed, explosive merely because they were products of inferior Marxist industry. He glowered and mumbled in Spanish, and Wolverine and Marvel stayed up to console him with their presence as the shadows blended into an impenetrable darkness broken only by the weird glow of rotting vegetation, scattered like shattered radium watch dials on the jungle floor.
    Walking point always kicked his ass the first day in the field, so Mopar went to sleep as soon as he received permission from Wolverine to do so. When Marvel woke him for third watch, hours later, there was already a little moonlight breaking through the canopy and dripping like molten silver on the branches of