Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,79

a terrible wealth of experience fighting real battles in the jungles of the Indochina peninsula. Yes, there behind each of you was another dog. Those other dogs attacked.

You were all driven into the holes.

You were anti-Vietcong specialists, yes, but you weren’t fighting dogs. You knew how to deal with people and minefields, but no one had taught you what to do if you were set upon by another animal like this. And these weren’t ordinary animals; these were creatures of the twentieth century, these were weapons. Modern weapons. And they were like you. Members of the Carnivora order and the Canidae family. Dogs.

You were driven down, underground.

As were your three fellows.

An officer in the North Vietnamese Army stood and watched through a pair of binoculars. Two dogs sat at his feet. Waiting, ready to go. Glancing down from the eyepiece, the officer gave the dogs a sign. “Lure them into the fourth layer! Or under the tiger trap!” he commanded. The two dogs, set loose, immediately dove into the well-hidden holes underground.

What of the other six dogs? Three were skewered with bamboo spears by commie sentries waiting inside the entrances to the tunnels and died instantly. Their bodies tumbled belowground, as if they had simply rolled into a deep, straight hole, disappearing as suddenly as the Vietcong themselves. One of the remaining three fell victim to an identical bamboo-spear attack but didn’t die—was, rather, unable to die—and simply lay there yelping. Three minutes later its lungs filled with blood. It lay there wheezing. Each of the American dogs had been accompanied by an American soldier. Two of these soldiers were panicking. A second before, the dogs had been walking along a few dozen meters ahead—the soldiers usually watched their dogs through binoculars—and now all of a sudden they had disappeared, just like that, or in the case of the fourth dog, been transformed into a wheezer who lay writhing on the ground. Shit, they thought, they’re here! Vietcong nests!

They put in a request for an air sweep to neutralize Vietcong forces.

Two dogs to go.

THESE LOOK LIKE VIETCONG HOLES, the dogs decided, and waited nearby. They stretched out on the ground as a sign to the soldiers following them that they had found something. And they listened to the earth. They heard a sound. Their fellows were being pursued. Their friends, down beneath the ground—BELOWGROUND? BUT HOW? HOW?—were being attacked.

And then the explosions came. One after the other, four grenades landed nearby. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the mission the ten dogs were engaged in—with their pursuit of the commies. But the shock inspired a split-second reaction. The two dogs instinctively leapt down into the holes they had discovered, into the network of tunnels.

A fighter aircraft appeared on the horizon. It was flying extremely low, dropping bombs with minute precision from under its wings. Air-to-surface missiles, ordinary bombs. This jet’s bombing really was marvelously precise—excellent support. Only the areas in the sights, visible in the plane as the coordinates on a map, erupted into a spectacular display. Showtime! The earth crumbled, erupted, heaved, crashed. Fragments of bombs flew, scattered, mixed with ruthlessly torn-up clods of dirt that somersaulted through the air. And the burial began. The underground passageways caved in. The “Vietcong holes,” targeted in a manner intended to cause minimal damage to the surroundings, were sealed off with almost unerring precision.

You were underground then, in the fourth layer.

You, DED, felt the first layer collapse.

Overhead.

For a moment, you lost consciousness. You and the red dogs—there had only been one in the beginning, but somewhere along the way a second had joined the chase—who had pursued you down from the second layer to the third, then finally to the fourth, slammed your heads against the tunnel’s hard rock floor and earthen walls as the jolt of the explosion rocked it. This wasn’t part of the limited bombing that had been requested. This was a separate battle that had started at the same time, and the offensive and defensive maneuvers associated with it would continue for three hours without rest on the ground, over a range of four thousand feet above and below the McNamara line. Two observation towers still under construction were toppled. More than seven hundred sandbags were catapulted into the air. An electrified fence, torn in places, zipped and zapped. Some thirty-three thousand cartridge cases were scattered. Soldiers’ limbs were airborne, then dotted the ground. It was impossible to judge how many humans had been wounded, because of