With the two big Jimmies shut down, the only sounds in the cramped pilothouse where Tag Sherman sat came from the sweep motor grinding away inside the radar display unit. It was one of those bottom-of-the-well, pitch-black nights on the Long Tao. The surface of the river itself was indistinguishable from the motionless curtain of sodden night air and the black line of steaming vegetation on the near banks. Near banks, hell, Sherman thought. The Long Tao was only a hundred yards wide here just below the S-turn. The scale of the radar screen reproached him -- he had it on the two-hundred-yard scale. Much too close to the bank. Ambush city.

He squirmed in the driver's chair of the sixty-foot-long gunboat, his khaki trousers sticking to the seat. He had to sit almost sideways to keep his head hunched over the hood that shielded the amber radar screen to his right. His left hand rested loosely on the engine start buttons. He could hear and feel the subtle movements of the rest of the Swift boat's crew through the thin aluminum superstructure. Above the pilothouse, just behind his head, he sensed Gunner's Mate Second Kelly shifting around in the cage of the twin 50 machine-gun mount, training the heavy black barrels in a gentle sweeping motion from side to side, the roller path of the cage so heavily greased that it made little sucking sounds when the guns moved. Back down behind him in the cabin, Radioman Second Ryker would be kneeling on the starboard-side bench seat, hunched over an M60 machine gun stuck through the little window, his headset wire stretching over to the HF radio set. Gunner Jarret, desperate for a cigarette, would have the port side covered with an M16 set on full auto, a backup magazine taped to the bottom of the service clip. Engineman First Keene would be on one of the bunks down in the tiny, stuffy cabin beneath the pilothouse. As the off-duty driver, Keene technically was supposed to be sleeping, but more likely he was fully awake, sweating in his combat gear and cradling his beloved captured Kalashnikov.

Back on the fantail, Boatswain Second Yanckley would be sitting on an upended mortar crate, pointing the Hotchkiss gun to starboard, a full-pack white-phosphorous round loaded in its 81-mm mortar tube and a prodigious chew stuck in the side of his mouth. Sherman grinned in the darkness. With the turretlike armor-plated jacket and a steel helmet big enough to accommodate both his sound-powered phones and his large, many-chinned, round head, the bosun would look like a big armor-plated toad back there on his ammo crate. But with that mortar, Yank was the Man: He could hit a palm tree at a thousand yards, as a few Victor Charlies had learned just before they went to see Baby Jesus in a cloud of superheated white phosphorus. Or maybe over here it was Baby Buddha.

Sherman took a deep breath and let it out quietly. The stinking wet air gave his lungs little satisfaction, and there was a persistent metallic taste on his tongue. He screwed his ears on even harder, trying to sift out any human sounds coming through the pilothouse doors on either side from the nearby reed beds and palmetto grass. With the engines shut down, they were unable to maneuver, and they had drifted in much closer to the shoreline than was wise. He could smell the banks of the river now that the ebb tide had begun in earnest, the muddy, earthy smell of an ancient swamp, threaded now with the stink of Agent Orange and the sewery effluvium coming down from Saigon, some twenty miles upstream.

Ordinarily, they would keep themselves precisely out in the middle of the river, but not tonight. They were drifting on purpose, fully darkened, all electronics running on the batteries, while they slipped downstream at the whim of the Mekong tidal currents. Their mission tonight was a SEAL pickup. Three nights ago, they had come roaring up the Long Tao through this same area, making lots of noise, lights on, the big 39 boat throwing up a powerful wake, which chased the monkeys off the banks and caused the smaller crocodiles to grunt in irritation and slither into the water. One mile above the S-turn, they had slowed to idle speed and then, when darkness fell, shut her down, going dark and quiet, to begin the slow drift back toward the insertion point at the top of the S-turn.

Tag could still conjure up an image of the SEAL sitting all the way at the back of the boat, perched on top of the mortar ammo locker in the familiar costume: an olive green floppy hat and T-shirt, khaki swim trunks, flip-flops, and a knife strapped to one ankle. No guns, radios, flippers, masks, or anything else. And no talk. And no face -- just eyes. The man's facial features had been obscured by the floppy hat and heavy daubs of green and brown paint, but Tag remembered those eyes: bright, dark, intense eyes, looking right back at you. Tag and his crew had done six SEAL insertions in the Rung Sat over the past year, and he had never heard one of them speak more than about three words.

Sherman shifted his flak jacket and scratched his neck where some insect had just achieved a blood meal. He tried to remember if he'd taken his malaria pills. The interesting thing was how surprisingly normal these guys looked, as opposed to being huge, bandoliered macho monsters. Like this guy they were picking up tonight: He had been listed on the mission brief sheet as Hospital Corpsman First Class Galantz. He was not quite Sherman's size: five eight, maybe five nine, 150 or 160 pounds. Average-sized American military guy, maybe a little more muscle than most, but other than that, altogether unremarkable -- except for the way he sat back there, still as a statue, totally self-contained.

The insertion drill was always the same: After making a big, noisy deal of transiting through the intended drop zone, they'd shut everything down and drift back with the current under the cover of darkness. Sometime during the drift, they would feel the stern tip ever so slightly, indicating the SEAL had gone over the side. Sherman shuddered at the very thought of going into the black waters of the Long Tao, a venomous stew of toxic leeches, sea snakes, mangrove pythons, and, of course, the crocs. They must call these guys snake eaters for a reason.

Three, sometimes four nights later, they would execute the same maneuvers for the pickup. If the guy was a no-show, they would try once more the following night. After that, he was on his own. Or dead. Or, worse, much worse, a prisoner. The VC were afraid of the SEALs, and reportedly, they would skin one alive and take a month to do it if they ever captured one.

Sherman expanded the radar display scale out to a half a mile and scanned the glowing details painted on the radar screen, orienting himself on the bank features leading into the S-turn at the top of the screen. The whine of the motor generator dipped momentarily when he made the display adjustments. After eleven months, he knew the river pretty well, and he could tell where they were with one quick glance at the radar. There was no point in looking through the windows. As the driver, he had to sacrifice his night vision in favor of the Decca radar screen, like an airplane pilot flying on full instruments. He shifted the scale back to two hundred yards. The Decca was a beauty of a radar. At this scale, he could make out individual logs as they bumped along the undercut banks.

"Boss?" said Yank, speaking on the sound-powered intercom.

"Yeah?" Sherman pulled the mouthpiece up to his lips. He kept his eyes on the radar screen and wiped a curtain of sweat off his lower face to keep from shorting out the phones.

"Ain't we awfully close here? I can hear the freakin' frogs."

"Yeah, well, you wanta paddle? We do a drift ex, we go where the river takes us. Just let me know when our guy is back, and we'll didi-mau the hell out of here."

"I hear that," Ryker chipped in.

"Okay, knock it off, everybody," Sherman ordered. "Only targets make noise in the Rung Sat at night."

The circuit went quiet. Sherman knew everyone was tense, and the urge to talk was strong. But sounds carried on the river. The radar showed that they were only fifty, sixty feet away from the right bank. He flipped on the fathometer just to make sure. The orange water-depth marker flickered at thirty feet. About right. He shut off the fathometer and wiped off some more sweat. Another thirty, forty minutes and he'd call it off, which was the decision Yank undoubtedly had been trying to provoke with his question. But they had to give the snake eater a decent shot at getting back. There was no telling where he would come out of the weeds, or in what condition.

After a year of operations, and despite what the Saigon propaganda boys said, all the Swifties knew that the Rung Sat at night was Charlie's country. It was an area of dense mangrove swamp, encompassing the bulk of the jungle twenty miles on either side of the Long Tao and extending from Saigon to the sea. It was mostly water, littered with small hummocks of semi-dry land. By day, the American Army helos and the Navy's Swift boats owned the Long Tao and the surrounding bayou channels. By night, however, it was all up for grabs. Charlie came out of his spider holes and island tunnel complexes to move his endless ant columns of guerrilla logistics. Precious rice and dried fish went north to the cadres fighting up-country. Ammunition, weapons, wounded, and replacements moved south. All movement in the Mekong Delta at large meant boats -- usually small sampans powered by ancient French outboards, which the VC piloted in the darkness through the twisting network of side streams and mud flats. It was the American gunboats' mission to prowl the rivers at night like big gray water spiders lurking out on the river, spiders with magic Decca eyes. Ordinarily, the Swift boats would skulk along the main channels, waiting with muffled engines until a sampan got itself smack out in the middle of the river. Then the gunboats would thunder to life and swoop down, searchlights stabbing out to transfix the small boat with its four or five occupants. The lights would be followed by the hellish roar of the twin 50s tearing men, supplies, and the boat to pieces, until the wreckage disappeared under the bows of the gunboat. Then, searchlights off, reverse course, and tear up the banks on either side with the 50s and the big mortar to keep any support troops' heads down. After a minute or so of suppression fire, slow down and retrieve some evidence of the kill -- bits of boat, clothes, body parts, boxes of supplies bobbing in the water. Body parts were tough: This had been going on for long enough that the crocs now knew what all the noise meant. Body parts, you did with a boat hook, and there were times you relinquished the boat hook if a big-enough croc clamped onto it at a critical moment.