Free Nature of the Game by James Grady

it was just another jungle jump-up and God please don’t let there be any patrols, there weren’t supposed to be. Not tonight. Not according to the briefing given Jud and Curtain.
    Jud had strapped a knife to his right boot. A second knife hung butt down from a sheath above his heart. For safety, he carried a razor knife in a zippered side pocket. To cut free of the chute, to let him use the three hundred feet of climbing rope packed ready to spill out from his waist under his reserve chute.
    Jud looked over at the Nungs—men whose ancestors had walked from China to Southeast Asia. These four had not done their ancestors proud. Murderers and thieves, they’d looked up from their North Vietnam death-row prison hole weeks ago and there had been Jud, beckoning, the cell door swinging open, their jailer slumped against a far wall. They’d gone, believing there was no worse hell than the cell.
    Now, huddled in the belly of the B-52, Jud wagered they weren’t so sure. There’d been ten. The handlers washed four out right away; where they went, Jud didn’t know. Number five washed out because he couldn’t learn enough about weapons. The sixth left when Jud saw the wrong terror in his eyes. That left four, the mission needed four, so Jud made them make it. Babied them through their only other parachute drop: hooked up to an open canopy before dawn when the other troops at the Okinawa jump school slept, then shoved off the platform for a three-hundred foot controlled drop to the sand.
    â€œTell ’em it’s like Disneyland,” Jud ordered the interpreter who was coaxing the Nungs onto the jump platform. Jud spoke almost none of the Nungs’ dialect; gambled on hand signs, obvious common interest, and their hunger to interpret divine will to get the team through the mission. “Tell ’em anything, but make sure they understand I am head fuckin’ Mickey Mouse.”
    No one mentioned High-Altitude, Low-Opening alternatives.
    They’d been on three patrols together, trial runs based from Da Nang, safaris into Indian country. The Nungs showed a crook’s instincts for stealth, slaughter, and survival. They slept in a circle with Jud at the center—their choice. He rewarded them with beer and Thai whores who didn’t speak their dialect.
    Crouched now on the plane, Jud shifted his weight and felt the black canvas bag on his shoulder that held his silenced Russian AK-47. In a shoulder holster underneath his jumpsuit was a fourteen-shot, Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic. A holster on his belt cradled a .45 automatic. He’d rigged a holster next to his naked left thigh for a two-shot derringer guaranteed to put a .22 long inside your skull and keep it bouncing around until your brain turned to mush. The derringer’s slugs were coated with shellfish toxin from the same Langley lab that in 1960 dispatched lethal bacteria to an assassination team targeting Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. Jud could pull the trigger without drawing the derringer, send a slug into his leg. The Wizards promised him results in sixty seconds and didn’t know Jud knew they lied about the agony.
    A black nylon HALO chute and special breathing apparatus rode on the team’s backs. Oxygen masks had been rigged into the bomb bay for the flight, but no internal radio links.
    We have no need to talk anyway, Jud thought, remembering when he and Curtain met the B-52’s crew, told them sketchy cover stories, and memorized trivia about each of the fly-boys to con an NVA interrogator into thinking Curtain and Jud belonged on the plane. Photos of Jud and Curtain with girls and football buddies were taped on the plane wall, just as two real crewmen might have done. Faked pictures, faked girlfriends. In case the bomber survived being shot down.
    Don’t think about anything you don’t need to think about , Jud warned himself, and he remembered a girl in high school he’d