Read Online Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel by Kenn Miller - Free Book Online

lunch on the trail. Even though there were no sounds of rattling mess kits or of chopsticks clicking against rice bowls—even though there was not a trace of the pungent scent of Nouc Mam sauce, or anything else suspicious in the air—Mopar was hot to sneak a peek at an enemy meal, or failing that, a good, hard-surfaced, high-speed trail. But there was nothing—nothing under the break in the canopy except dead branches, and dead leaves, and thousands of little green grass shoots that had just sprung forth from the soil displaced by the stray artillery round that had rent the canopy. There was nothing else of interest on the entire crest of the ridge; no enemy troops on chow break, no high-speed trails—not even an animal path. But it wasn’t until the team had zigzagged back and forth on the crest for ninety minutes without turning up the slightest sign of passage that Mopar was willing to concede defeat. At the first rest after moving back down the slope on the far side of the ridge Wolverine passed him a note of consolation: “Aerial recon unreliable. Need Lurps on the ground.”
    Mopar had no interest in counting abbreviations, but he found it strange that Wolverine insisted on passing notes when it was becoming obvious, just from the stale feel of the air, that there wasn’t an enemy troop within earshot, and there probably wouldn’t be any in the whole Recon Zone, even down next to the stream.
    Farley had been a lot more reasonable about whispering in the field, and if the pilots flying the day he got killed had had the balls to come in on the secondary LZ as requested, instead of hovering out over the scrub to drop a ladder, Farley would still be running Two-Four with an almost pristine field notebook in his breast pocket, and Wolverine would probably still be back in Special Forces, or sitting around the operations bunker swapping lies with Pappy Stagg. It was silly to pass notes and use hand signs where there was obviously no one in the area, and cupping his hand next to Wolverine’s ear, Mopar said so.
    The hard look he got in reply to his whispered opinion was enough to stiffen the hairs on his neck and send him teetering on the brink of another sullen snit, but he was too proud of his field discipline to let his resentment simmer very long, and after a second or two he merely nodded and told himself that Wolverine would have to be broken in slowly. Sooner or later, even a hotshot lifer E-6 with three tours in Special Forces behind him would have to come around and start doing things the way everybody else did.
    Following the proposed route of march they’d decided on when preparing their map overlays, the team moved down the slope and into the dank, dripping, leech-infested jungle that filled the draw between the ridge they had just inspected and the ridge to the south. It was a difficult descent. The ground was slippery, and it was sometimes necessary to grab a vine or a low sapling to keep from sliding, bumpity-crash-bump, feet first and ass down, into the trees. Marvel Kim was worried about losing commo in the draw. Twice during the descent he signaled for Mopar to halt while he got commo checks, first with the whip antenna he’d used on the ridge, then, two-thirds of the way down, off the pole antenna he carried broken down and folded in his rucksack.
    It was hard to move in the jungle with pole antennas. They weren’t flexible and they snagged on the vegetation. So before setting off on the last leg of the descent, Marvel took down the pole and ran out a wire antenna. He slung the wire over a tree branch and got another commo check, and without waiting for Wolverine’s permission or to check the coordinates with him, he also reported the team’s position and situation. From now on until they regained the high ground there would be no instantaneous communication with the radio relay. As he pulled down the wire antenna and coiled it on top of his radio, Marvel smiled and giggled at the absurdity of