Free Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel by Kenn Miller Page B

rules. But there isn’t anything J. D. can do about that, and even less we can do. And anyway, old J. D., he didn’t seem too unhappy about the situation, even after the major cheated him out of the guns. It can be good, or it can be bad, but a guy like the major—a guy like J. D.—can make his own luck in this life.”
    Mopar had had enough of Marvel’s horseshit. It was bad enough for him to be gushing over that do-rag jigaboo madman J. D. when he’d never really been able to appreciate him before. But Mopar was outraged that Marvel would gush over the major, who may not have been a non-Airborne Leg but was the next thing to one, with his false-hearted, good leader, ho-ho ways and his staff of snotty wizards. Now the major was breaking all the rules of the game, refusing a team fire support as requested.
    “You’re talkin’ out your ass again. Go on, crash. I’m on top of things now and don’t need your bullshit to keep me awake. If we keep whispering we’re gonna wake up Wolverine!”
    Marvel sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was tempted to stay up and try to explain what he meant about a man making his own luck to Mopar. Sometimes he suspected that Mopar understood luck almost as well as he did, but just refused to admit that there was such a thing as luck at all. Luck wasn’t something a man could bully and push around, so Mopar wasn’t interested. But Marvel was too tired to waste sleep-time talking. He stretched his legs, careful not to rattle the brambles, then rested his head on his rucksack, pulled his half of the jungle blanket up to his chest, and went to sleep hugging his rifle.
    For the first hour of his watch Mopar sat with his back against his rucksack and his rucksack against Wolverine’s, and every time there was traffic on the radio Wolverine seemed to stir and tense up, as if listening to the radio through his sleep. During the second hour of Mopar’s watch, Wolverine slept like an old lion, never stirring, but threatening at any point to break out with a sudden sawstroke of snore and wake up half the jungle. Mopar didn’t nudge him, even when he started to exhale with a wet hiss, even when he snorted and smacked his lips in his sleep. There was nobody but the Lurps to hear Wolverine, even if he took to snoring like a sawmill. But out in RZ Zulme, things were getting even tighter. J. D. was only breaking squelch, and didn’t dare risk a whisper into the headset now that the motorcycles were past and the traffic on the trails was thinning out.
    Mopar could hear the relay team breaking squelch to acknowledge J. D.’s squelch breaks, and he could hear the traffic between the relay team on Culculine and Pappy Stagg back in the rear. But he couldn’t hear J. D., and he was too late to hear the motorcycles, so he sat with the headset next to his ear and his rifle across his lap and wondered just what in the hell was really going on out there in J. D.’s Recon Zone.
    If the gooks really had been going by with motorcycles loaded down with cargo slipping and falling and getting stuck in the mud—running headlights no less, and making no effort at noise discipline—then why hadn’t J. D. figured out what those motorcycles were hauling? If the gooks were as close as J. D. said they were, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a good look or two from the shadows under the bushes—at the very least get some detail into the reports. But J. D. didn’t seem concerned enough about detail. Wilkinson—J. D.’s rear security, his tailgunner—never went on a mission without one of those mini-Starlight scopes. Why wasn’t he using it now to find out what the bikes were hauling and what the gooks were humping on their backs?
    Mopar ran a list of twenty things through his mind and still couldn’t figure out what the gooks were carrying. But it was easy to guess what sort of things they had on the bikes: Rockets and recoilless rifles and mortars and rice. There’d even be coffins, perhaps, to boost their