Mark shot him a warning look. “All right. I’ll stop with The In-Laws.” He lay down on the pallet he’d made out of blankets.

“So what are your powers this time, man?” Mark asked, sitting on a crate that was there for the purpose.

Croyd laughed. “Well, I can climb walls like a son of a bitch. And I can catch bugs with my tongue.”

Mark was staring at him. “Hey, you try catching bugs with your tongue. It’s not as easy as it sounds. If you or any of these jokers tried it, all you’d do is just mash ’em into the ground. Don’t want to do that; gets ’em all muddy and gritty.”

“Gak,” Mark said. “You mean, you don’t have any powers?”

“Other than those… none I’ve noticed yet. No levitation, no bolts of lightning from my fingertips, nothing like that. And for once I’m actually weaker than a nat. I thought one time my scales were turning color, but it was just a trick of the light. We get your green-flash sunsets from time to time here in scenic Vietnam.”

“What if Sobel finds out you don’t have any of these ’special abilities’ he was talking about? Unless he’s planning on launching a big bug-eradication campaign, he’s gonna be pissed.”

“Who’s gonna tell him?”

Without waiting for an answer, Croyd placed one hand atop the other and rested his head on them. He knew Mark was no informer.

“Hey!” Mark said. “They way you were acting in there, like you were drunk or something”

“So I was a little giddy,” Croyd said without raising his head.

“You’re not getting sleepy, are you?”

“Nonsense,” Croyd said firmly. “I already told you. Lizards don’t sleep.”

At the next break in the rain a bunch of the new recruits got sent to a rifle range beside the Vietnamese People’s Army camp next door for a little training. The kid with the flesh-bars in front of his mouth eyed his M-16 with disdain.

“Why we gotta fuck with these?” he asked. “I heard they jam all the time. Don’t they use AK-47s around here? Now, those guns are bad.”

The instructor was a tall, narrow joker Brigade original with a squint and bright-green skin. “You’ve been watching 60 Minutes too much, Dillman. The media have distorted the story; as they do anything connected with the Vietnam experience – anything to do with firearms, for that matter.”

“After the M-16’s introduction to combat in the middle 1960s, a number of the rifles experienced failure-to-feed malfunctions, what the layperson will call your jam. Frequently these had fatal results to the shooter. The Army and Colt did a study, announced that nothing was wrong, and proceeded to fix it.”

He smiled without humor. “Since that time the M-16 has undergone a number of improvements and refinements – what you computer types might call debugging. You now have the privilege to be equipped with the very latest rendition, the M-16A2. Consider yourselves fortunate. The Black Rifle is the finest assault rifle in the world. You will treat it with respect.”

“But what about the AK-47?” another kid wanted to know.

“Heft your rifle, soldier. Is it heavy?”

“Uh, not particularly.”

The instructor reached into the duffel bag at his feet, produced a wooden-stock AK. “The Kalashnikov series of assault rifles consists of the AK-47 – which is old and outmoded, people, though the People’s Army still has a lot of them – the AKM, the folding-stock AKMS paratrooper model and the new AKS-74 family, which are in 5.45-millimeter instead of 7.62 like the older ones. They have several things in common. They are no more mechanically reliable than the M-16A2, even under extreme field conditions. They have a safety/single-shot/full-auto selector that is loud enough to wake the dead, which is inconvenient on ambush. And, people, they are heavy.”

He tossed the rifle to Dillman. The kid caught it, then staggered, almost dropping the weapon.

“A fully loaded AK-47 weighs upward of ten and a half pounds. An M-16 weighs less than seven. Those three-pounds-plus seem very, very significant when you have to hump the rifle through elephant grass and up and down hills under our beautiful Southeast Asian sun all day long.

“Do you now understand why you will carry and learn to shoot the Black Rifle?”

The assent was on the muted side. The instructor let it go without comment and proceeded to the instructing part.

Mark took his turn shooting. To his astonishment he wasn’t instantly seized with a desire to run off and start gunning down Vietnamese schoolchildren the instant the piece was loaded, despite the ready availability of Vietnamese schoolchildren. The rifle had very little felt recoil, and wasn’t horribly loud.

It was actually kind of fun.

“As originally issued,” the instructor said, “the M-16A2 had a regulator restricting full-auto fire to three-round bursts. It was observed that the first thing troops did on being issued the weapon was to disable the three-round regulator. Accordingly, the weapons you have been issued can be fired in the unrestricted full-auto mode. You would be well advised not to do so.”

Right. The recruits sprayed bullets downrange on full automatic, a magazine at a time. Mark noticed that even at close range few rounds from a full thirty-round mag hit anywhere near the X-ring when fired flat out. A couple of the young guns managed to miss not only the somewhat macabre black man-outline target proper but the paper border as well with entire magazines.

Mark, obedient to the instructor’s orders primarily because he had no idea what the hell else to do, fired his shots one at a time, aiming each as best he could. Though the others jeered and hooted for him to hurry, he got better than half his shots into the black at twenty-five meters.

“Well, congratulations,” the sergeant-instructor said. “You killed him, instead of just scaring him shitless the way most of these homeboys did. Guess which lasts longer in combat?”

Mark felt both satisfaction and guilt. Though some of his “friends” had taken human life, it was creepy to feel good about shooting anything. He suspected that if it actually came to action, he would flip the selector to Anything Goes and empty his mag with the best of them. And he was unsure he could actually fire at another human with any hope of hitting him. He knew the hot-and-cold rush of combat and knew that the real thing differed from practice as death differs from dance.

It’s nice to have friends, he thought as they packed it in. The rain began to fall again.

“I don’ know but I been told -”

The Ural-375 lurched up the cracked blacktop road, southwest into the Tay Nguyen. The sky was clear. The sun beat on the canvas shell so hard, it seemed damned near as loud as the rain.

“Nat-born woman got no soul.”

It was Mark’s platoon’s turn to be shipped out for what Croyd – just transferred into the same squad as Mark – called sleep-away camp: overnight or longer patrols in the mountainous Central Highlands of Gia Lai-Kon Tum Province. Some regarded the rotation as a welcome break from Venceremos; it was reputedly cooler in the mountains than down by the coast. On the other hand, the inhabitants tended to be Montagnards or ethnic Viets forcibly transplanted from Ho-ville, and not at all welcoming.

“Find me one before I die -”

Sobel and his monitors had been stepping hard the last week or so on rumors that the Highlands were in a state of virtual revolt. There were a few traitors at work, undoubtedly in the pay of the CIA. The populace – the ocean in which guerrilla warriors swam like fish – rejected them roundly.

“Take her down, give it a try.”

Though he said nothing even to Croyd, Mark felt apprehension. He had noticed that often as not, the heavily laden craft taking off from Da Nang rolled out heading inland and came back with their hard-points empty. Maybe there’s a test range in the Highlands, he told himself.