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

going to the field. Maybe now you’ll listen to me and start planning for your old age.”
    Mopar put a finger to his lips and frowned, but he didn’t wake Wolverine, and he didn’t tell Marvel to shut up with his bullshit about grandchildren and old age.
    “Twenty-one,” he thought silently, “just let me live to be old enough to buy a beer in the supermarket and I’ll be satisfied.”
    All the next day the team stayed in its night halt position with a wire antenna slung over a tree branch in hopes that by some fluke of the airwaves they’d be able to pick up a message from J. D. that the radio relay and the Birddog spotter plane that was now flying over his Recon Zone might miss. It was a slow and funereal day, gloomy with fog until well after noon and made chill and unpleasant by intermittent rains once the fog was gone, and everyone except Gonzales was certain that J. D. and his whole team had been killed.
    Once, just after returning to station after refueling, the spotter plane picked up a signal that it took to be J. D.’s ultrahigh frequency emergency radio. But before the pilot could fix on it the transmission stopped, and only Gonzales, bullheaded in his belief that the comunistas— any comunistas— were no match for a crafty dude like J. D., had any faith that J. D. would come back on the airwaves, alive and all right. The other men were already beginning to wonder why the Birddog didn’t give up on raising J. D., go back to the airbase, and come back with a couple of jets to lay a little napalm along the riverbank, where, judging from J. D.’s last transmissions, there must have been at least a thousand NVA hiding under the canopy. If J. D. were dead—and it was becoming more and more certain that he was—there was nothing to do but avenge him.
    But the lieutenant, or the major in the Two Shop, or whoever was making the decisions, did not see things with such a clear eye. And so the Birddog stayed over J. D.’s Recon Zone, while the gooks rested and cleaned their weapons and rehearsed their assault on Firebase Culculine.
    Shortly before dusk Wolverine had Mopar move the team to the crest of the ridge and fifty meters northeast, to the very edge of their Recon Zone. Here, in the thickest bush they could find, they sat up for their second night in the field.
    Commo was excellent. Marvel could get the relay team easily with the whip antenna, and Pappy Stagg answered his first commo check on the pole antenna without going through the relay. But Wolverine insisted that he run out the wire—just on the long shot that they might be able to pick up J. D. when no one else could. The Birddog had already returned to the airbase, the clouds were heavy and low, and J. D.—if he was still alive and trying to transmit—would need every ear that could be spared.
    Once again Mopar was the first man to go to sleep. He rested his head on his rucksack, cradled his weapon in the crook of his left arm, covered his face with his jungle blanket, and dreamed that he and Tiger were in the field together on a point recon and walked through a space/time warp that took them to the porch outside Sybill Street’s apartment. It was an old dream of Mopar’s and he’d had it many times before, usually when napping back in the rear. But this time he and Tiger actually got inside Sybill’s apartment and Tiger had a chance to lift his leg against Sybill’s kitchen table before the dream clouded up and dissolved into something different and unpleasant and impossible to remember on waking.
    A soft rain was falling on the upper reaches of the canopy and dripping through the branches and leaves when Marvel Kim shook Mopar awake. Mopar shivered, pulled his jungle blanket tight around his shoulders, and sat up, stiff and cramped and miserable and wet. He peeled back the knit band he wore to cover the radium dial of his watch and checked the time. It was still an hour until his scheduled turn at watch, so he knew immediately that