Dawson said, “I’m gonna pop smoke. Pick a flavor.”

“Wait. They need to get closer. They don’t want more than three minutes between smoke and pickup, or they get pissed off and go home.”

I listened to the approaching choppers, counted to sixty, then popped a yellow smoke canister. The billowy plume sat on the ground in the damp, windless air, then began to rise into the mist. At some point, it must have broken through the top of the gray fog because very quickly the sound of the choppers got very loud. A few seconds later, I could see a huge shadow overhead, and the mist started swirling like a tornado was coming through.

The first chopper was twenty meters away looking very ghostly in the gray mist as it settled toward the earth. The second was about twenty meters farther.

Dawson and I sprinted toward the first chopper, making hand signals toward the crew to make them understand there were only two of us, and waving the other chopper off. Someone understood because the second chopper lifted off before we reached the closest one. Our chopper hovered five feet off the ground, and I slapped Dawson ’s ass indicating he was first. He reached up and grabbed the hand of the crew chief. His feet found the chopper skid, and he was in the cabin in about two seconds. I was right behind him, and I think I actually high-jumped into the cabin, calling out above the noise of the blades and engine, “Only two! Eight dead! Go! Go!”

The crew chief nodded and spoke into his radio mouthpiece to the pilot.

I sat cross-legged on the floor as the chopper rose quickly through the mist.

I looked at Dawson, who was kneeling on the floor of the cabin and already had a cigarette lit. We made eye contact, and he gave me a thumbs-up. Just as the chopper lifted out of the misty depression, Dawson ’s cigarette shot out of his mouth, and he pitched forward, his face falling in my lap. I shouted, “Fire!” as I grabbed Dawson ’s shoulders and rolled him on his back.

He stared up at the ceiling of the cabin, blood running from the exit wound in his chest.

Both door gunners had opened fire with their machine guns raking the forest below as the Huey shot forward away from the area. The Cobra gunships fired their rockets and Gatling guns into the surrounding terrain, but it was mostly for show. No one knew where the shot had come from, though I did know who fired it.

I got down close to Phil Dawson, face to face, and we stared into each other’s eyes. I said, “You’re okay. You’ll be fine. We’ll go right to the hospital ship. Just hold on. Hold on. A few minutes more.”

He tried to speak, but I couldn’t hear him above the noise. I put my ear to his mouth and heard him say, “Bitch.” Then he let go and died.

I sat beside him holding his hand, which was getting cold. The crew chief and the door gunners kept stealing glances at us, as did the pilot and copilot.

The magic carpet landed at the field hospital first, and medics took Sergeant Dawson’s body away, then the chopper skimmed over the base camp and deposited me at the landing zone of the Lurp Headquarters.

The pilot had radioed ahead, and Colonel Hayes-Royal Duck-was there to meet me in his Jeep. He was alone, which I thought was a nice touch. He said, “Welcome home, Lieutenant.”

I nodded.

He asked me to confirm that I was the only one left.

I nodded.

He patted my back.

We got in his Jeep, which he drove directly to his hootch, a little wooden structure with a tin roof. We went inside, and he passed a bottle of Chivas to me. I took a long swig, then he steered me to a canvas armchair.

He asked, “You feel like talking about it?”

“No.”

“Later?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He patted my shoulder and went toward the door of the single-room shack.

I said, “Woman.”

He turned to me. “What’s that?”

“Female sniper. A very dangerous woman.”

“Right… take it easy. Finish the bottle. See you when you’re ready. In my office.”

“I’m going back to get her.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it later.” He gave me a concerned look and left.

I sat there, thinking about Dawson, Andolotti, Smitty, Johnson, Markowitz, Garcia, Beatty, Landon, and Muller, and finally about the sniper.

After I made my report, the Air Force carpet-bombed the area of my patrol for a week. The day the bombing ended, we sent three two-man antisniper teams into the area. I wanted to go back, but Colonel Hayes vetoed that. Just as well, since only one team made it back.

We kept people out of the area for a few weeks, then sent in an infantry company of two hundred men to locate and recover the bodies of the eight guys left behind, and also, of course, to look for the lady with the gun. They never found the bodies; maybe the bombs and artillery obliterated them. As for the lady, she, too, seemed to have vanished.

I went home and put the whole thing out of my mind. Or tried to.

I stayed in touch with a lot of the Lurp guys who were still in ‘ Nam when I left, and they’d write once in a while and answer the questions I always asked in my letters: Did you find her? Did she get anyone else?

The answer was always “No” and “No.”

She seemed to have disappeared or gotten killed in subsequent bombings or artillery strikes, or just simply quit while she was ahead. Among the guys who knew the story, she became a legend, and her disappearance only added to her almost mythical stature.

To this day, I have no idea what motivated her, what secret game she was playing, or why. I speculated that probably she’d had family killed by the Americans, or maybe she’d been raped by GIs, or maybe she was just doing her duty to her country, as we did ours.

I still have the brass cartridge I’d picked up on the river-bank, and now and then I take it out of my desk drawer and look at it.

I didn’t want to obsess on this, but as the years passed, I began to believe that she was still alive and that I’d meet up with her someday, someplace, though I didn’t know how or where.

I knew for certain I’d recognize her face, which I could still see clearly, and I knew she would recognize me-the guy she let get away, to tell her story. Now the story is told, and if we do ever meet, only one of us will walk away alive.

WHAT SHE OFFERED by THOMAS H. COOK

Sounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Outside, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

“So what happened?” my friend asked.

This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The people around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyielding as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they finally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.

I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. People were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleeting. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mattered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.