Free The Day Before Midnight by Stephen Hunter

call him sir, or colonel, or what.
    Puller went back to his binoculars. Above him the mountain loomed, white and pristine. The red aerial stood out like a candy cane. He could see no movement.
    There was one road up, through rough ground. Halfway up it just stopped, where Aggressor Force had blown it. Smart. No armor would come their way, at least not today.
    He looked at his watch—1124. A little more than twelve hours to go. And Delta still wasn’t on the damned ground,this sorry-dick Maryland Guard unit was trying to get its act together, 3rd Infantry was fucking around somewhere on the road, and the only good news was that his Ranger battalion was at least airborne for its cross-country flight and now had an ETA of 1600 hours.
    Twelve hours, he thought again. His expression was grim, but this was nothing new: Dick Puller’s expression was
always
grim. He was born grim. Whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself, although the tension in his face and the way it drew the color from his skin and pulled his muscles taut and his mouth flat suggested something.
    At last he asked, “Any word on those locals yet?”
    “State police still knocking on doors,” Uckley said.
    Puller’s first move was to send state policemen into the town of Burkittsville on a fast canvass of old-timers. Who knew that mountain? What was there? How did you get up it? What was inside it? Dick didn’t trust maps. It was an old ’Nam habit, where a bad map had once almost killed him. It was one of the few mistakes he’d made in his career.
    Richard W. Puller was a stern, rangy man of fifty-eight with a gunmetal-gray crew cut that revealed a patch of scalp up top. He had remarkably forceful dark eyes and a way of moving and walking that suggested if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. Someone—not an admirer—once said of Dick Puller, “You’d have to put a full magazine into the bastard to stop him from coming at you, and then his shadow would cut your throat.” He was not a well-liked man and he did not like many people: a wife, his two daughters, a soldier or two along the way, mainly the tough old master sergeant types that got the killing done in the hairy moments and a few guys in elite units the world over, such as SAS, where he’d done a tour of exchange-officer duty.
    He also had a talent for the truth. He would tell it, regardless, a gift that did him little political good in the Army, where you had to go along to get along. He was hated by all manner of people for all manner of rudenesses, but particularly for his willingness to look anybody straight in the eye and tell them they were full of shit. He was, in short,exactly the sort of man made for war, not peace, and when a war came, he had a great one.
    He was in-country from 1963 to 1970; he did two tours with the 101st Airborne but spent most of his time leading A-team detachments way out off the maps, interdicting North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia or training indigenous troops—Nungs and Montagnards—to fight against the hated North Vietnamese. He got stuck in a long siege in a big A-camp up near the DMZ and with a twenty-four-man team and three hundred indigs he held off a North Vietnamese division for thirty-eight days. When an airborne unit finally fought its way through to relieve them, he had seven Americans and one hundred ten Nungs left alive.
    He also worked for MACV’s Special Observation Group, the mysterious, still-classified intelligence unit that sent ops all over ’Nam, some said even up north. Puller then had a long and flashy career running a Mike Force battalion, a quick reaction team that helicoptered to the relief of A-team detachments in the soup and proceeded to do maximum damage in minimum time. He was an exceedingly aggressive officer, but not a sloppy one. He’d been hit three times, once with a big-ass Chinese .51, the shock of which would have killed most men. It didn’t matter. If you were professional,