The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  Ed waited for Alice’s translation. “No,” he said, looking guilty again. “Not yet. But I know he will.”

  Mrs. Chan nodded solemnly at that. She knew about Ed’s dreams too, and she believed there was something to them. But that didn’t mean that she had to be happy about having Danny sent away.

  “When was the last time you talked to him?” asked Ching.

  “Saturday. I talk to him once a week or so. The time zones make it tricky. He sends his love to all of you.” Ed finally looked up at Mrs. Chan. “What he’s doing over there… it’s pretty important. The whole world depends on it.”

  Mrs. Chan’s lip trembled when Alice finished translating. “I know,” she said in English. Ed seemed comforted by her thin smile. “Next time,” she went on in Chinese, turning to Alice, “you stay home and I’ll do the shopping. No more four hundred tissues.”

  2

  Charlie Brown

  Danny Chan woke up in a hole in the ground. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, forgetting for a moment where he was. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring at the largest spider he’d ever seen. It sat at the edge of his hole, a few inches from his face, and it was looking at him as though it meant business.

  As he was contemplating his options, there was a blur of motion behind the spider. A lizard, yellow with small black spots, gobbled up the spider. Danny could handle spiders, just barely, but lizards were beyond the pale. He leaped to his feet with a high-pitched scream, got tangled up in the plastic poncho he’d been using as a blanket, and fell noisily back down in a heap. The lizard wandered off into the undergrowth.

  “Why you yellin’ at that gecko?” said a voice from behind him.

  Danny managed to untangle his feet from the poncho. He stood up, swatted at a mosquito that was trying to land on his face, and glanced at the brightening eastern sky. The sun would be up before long.

  “You got to leave them geckos alone,” Plotkin was saying. “The geckos eat the cockaroaches.”

  Danny turned and looked to the west. There were mountains that way, big rocky ones that Danny hoped he’d never have to climb. Especially with seventy pounds of gear strapped to his back.

  Angus Blair sat on the ground nearby, smoking a cigarette and humming a tune as he cleaned his weapon. Back home, Angus claimed, he was a concert cellist. Danny knew that wasn’t the truth. Angus played the cello, but never in front of people. He had stage fright.

  Blair was their machine gunner, probably because he was such a big guy. His M60 was a monster, 23 pounds, and Angus treated it like his baby. Danny had never touched Angus’ M60, but he knew how to use it.

  The rest of the men were still waking up. Archie Achtenberg popped a malaria pill and started applying bug juice to his face and neck. Archie was terrified of malaria. He was terrified of a lot of things, and set out every day under the firm conviction that he would not survive to see another sunrise.

  John Hulbert kissed a picture of his girlfriend, which he’d wrapped in plastic, and tucked it into his buttpack for safekeeping. She wasn’t actually his girlfriend, Danny knew, but John was hopeful that that would change when he went back home in another one hundred fifty-eight days.

  Orlando Whitfield was the assistant gunner. He carried spare ammunition belts and an extra barrel for Blair’s M60, and he complained a lot. He only ever thought about two things: his mother and food.

  Sammy Plotkin was finishing up a C-ration. He was Danny’s best friend in the platoon. Sammy knew more Oriental jokes than Danny had heard in his entire life, which was remarkable. But he meant well. Sammy and Orlando argued a lot, mostly about religion.

  Lindy was their medic. He didn’t say much, but he thought a lot. The things he thought about were bloody and gruesome.

  The radio operator was a chubby, baby-faced boy named Brandon Volpe, whom nobody liked. They didn’t like him because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. Danny thought his name was amusing, because Brandon sounded similar to the Cantonese word for ‘stupid’.

  Their CO, Lieutenant Lonnie Metcalf, was studying his maps under a flashlight, hiding the light under his poncho in case of snipers. He had instructed his platoon to call him Lieutenant Metcalf, but they all called him Lieutenant Lonnie. His face turned bright red whenever anyone used that name on him. “Hey, Charlie Brown,” the Lieutenant called softly. “Come over here.”

  Danny began folding his poncho to stuff back into his pack.

  “Charlie Brown!” Lieutenant Lonnie said again, a little louder.

  Plotkin came over and flicked Danny in the back of the head. “He’s talking to you, man.”

  “I know,” said Danny.

  It was Plotkin who had come up with Danny’s new nickname. “He looks like a Charlie, but he talks like a New Yawker,” Sammy had said when they’d met at the base in Lai Khe back in January. “He’s Charlie Brown!” Danny had been greatly annoyed at first, but then he’d noticed that Sammy only called people by their real names when he hated them. So he let Sammy call him that. But no one else was allowed to.

  “Private Chan!” Lieutenant Lonnie barked, drawing angry glares from his men. He lowered his voice and said, “Chan, get the hell over here now.”

  Danny obeyed. The Lieutenant was planning the day’s excursion, which would lead them to the top of a thickly-forested hill on the Cambodian border called Hill 734. Most of Lonnie’s men were familiar with Hill 734, because they had taken that same hill just over a month earlier. A small but tenacious North Vietnamese Army unit had been using that hilltop to launch mortar attacks on the roadway below. After winning a vicious battle that had cost them two good soldiers, Lieutenant Lonnie and his men had camped at the hilltop for one night before being picked up by helicopter and taken back to the base camp at Lai Khe. No one had been left to hold the ground they’d gained. The enemy had taken their hill back within two hours.

  Now the American command had decided that hill was important again. The politicians in Washington were on a quest to locate COSVN, the Central Office for South Vietnam, and taking Hill 734 was integral to that plan. COSVN had become Nixon’s obsession, some said. It was rumored to be the biggest Communist stronghold in the south, a nexus for the North Vietnamese command structure and supply chain. If the Americans could destroy COSVN, a magical transformation would occur that would finally give them the upper hand in this war. And so the focus had shifted to Cambodia, where this fabled installation was thought to exist.

  Danny’s platoon was part of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 312th Infantry Regiment. Delta Company was nicknamed the Wet Dogs, because they were the ones who always got sent into the muddiest and most malaria-infested parts of the jungle. There were eighteen men in Lieutenant Lonnie’s platoon. Half of them had split off to the north yesterday, led by an unhappy sergeant named Bottomley. Bottomley’s squad was to circle around to Hill 734 from the east, advancing in concert with Lonnie’s men to converge on the hilltop.

  Sgt. Bottomley had requested to take Danny with him on the northern route. Lieutenant Lonnie had insisted on taking him with the southern detachment, much to Danny’s relief. Bottomley was unpleasant to be around, and Danny wasn’t interested in adding any further unpleasantness to the misery he was already going through in this God-forsaken place. Both officers were interested in Danny for purely superstitious reasons, mainly due to the fact that he had, on two occasions, predicted ambushes that would have meant certain death for all of them. After the second time, Lieutenant Lonnie had included Danny in his daily planning session to get his thoughts on where any future ambushes might await them.

  Danny ducked his head under the poncho. Metcalf was tracing their route on his map under the light of his flashlight, which kept flickering even though he’d just put new batteries in it twelve hours ago. He shook the flashlight every so often, and cursed at it for added emphasis, but it went right on flickering. Brandon Volpe was following along, his PRC-25 radio on the ground next to him.

  Danny had never been trained on the “P
rick-25,” and he’d never touched one, but he knew how to use it. He knew how to thread the antenna through the strap of a rucksack so it wouldn’t stick up over the shoulder, inviting the enemy to attack the unit’s only communications link to the rest of the world. Danny also knew how to swap out the barrel on Angus Blair’s M60 machine gun, and he had a pretty good idea how to administer morphine and patch up a gushing gut-wound. He had learned these things the same way he had learned the secrets every man in his platoon kept hidden, by observing the thought-images that constantly sparked out of each man’s mind. The only man among them with any secrets at all was Danny himself.

  “So where are the ambushes today, Charlie Brown?” Metcalf asked him, pointing the light at the map.

  “I won’t know till we get there, Lieutenant,” Danny replied.

  Metcalf didn’t like that answer, but he left it alone. He pointed to a spot near the foot of the southern slope of Hill 734 and said, “This is where we’ve got to be by nightfall. We’ve been ordered to camp on this flat area here by the river, where there’s no line of sight from the hilltop.” He looked at Danny. “Charlie Brown, I want you within five meters of me and Volpe at all times. You see the slightest sign of trouble, I want to know about it. Got all that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They set out as the sun was coming up. Archie Achtenberg walked point, muttering to himself about booby-traps and dinks lurking in the underbrush. “I’ll be dead by lunchtime,” Danny heard him say. “Then the fuckers will walk off with my lunch too, you just watch.”

  Behind Archie, the rest of them spread out and walked in single file along a dusty track that wound uphill between two bamboo thickets. It was already hot, and their boots kicked up red dust that soon covered them from head to foot. The dust kept getting into Danny’s throat and making him gag. He wondered how much of it he’d consumed already during his three months in the field. His lungs and stomach were probably coated with it.

  “You really oughtta talk to Jesus, Sammy,” Orlando was saying. “Jesus’ll get you through this if you talk to him.”

  “Bullshit,” said Lindy the medic. “If some chink shoots a hole in your head, Jesus won’t do a thing for you. You just die if that happens. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

  “Of course he won’t stop a bullet,” Orlando replied. “That ain’t how he works. Bullets are bullets. I’m talking about what happens after that bullet hits you. When you go meet him, that’s when you realize you shoulda been talkin’ to him all along.”

  “I’m a Jew,” Plotkin objected. “I don’t talk to Jesus. I go straight to the main guy.”

  Orlando shook his head. “That just ain’t right,” he said. “He don’t want you talkin’ to him directly. What about you, Charlie Brown? Do you pray?”

  Danny worked some moisture into his mouth. “Nah. We’re all Buddhists in my family.”

  “Well… don’t you pray to Buddha?”

  Danny pondered that. “My mom does, I think” he said. “I don’t have a whole lot to say to Buddha.”

  Angus Blair caught up with them from behind. “Maybe it’s Buddha who tells him when the gooks are about to ambush us,” he pointed out.

  “Not Buddha,” Orlando said. “Jesus.”

  They fell silent for a while. Boredom set in quickly. It was boredom undercut by fear and exhaustion and heat and choking dust, but it was boredom just the same. Danny’s mind wandered back to New York, to his mother’s big new house in New Rochelle, to the brand new alarm clock he’d bought at Woolworth’s just before leaving for Basic Training at Fort Dix. Thoughts of that alarm clock led to thoughts of sleeping, and Danny forced his mind back to attention. Sleeping on your feet was not advisable in this environment. But try as he might, he couldn’t stay focused on what he was doing. He drifted into a daydream.

  “There’s something I need your help with,” Ed Terwilliger had said to him. It was September, and Danny had just had a bullet removed from his spleen. “Whatever you need,” he had replied, but he’d been completely unprepared for what would come next.

  “I need you to help me find something,” said Ed.

  Danny had not been in a very good state of mind at that time. The anesthesia hadn’t worn off yet. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about this Ed person, who was supposed to be named Blake, and who had been showing up in Danny’s dreams since childhood. But he’d agreed to help.

  So here he was, tired as he’d ever been in his life, choking down the red dust as he humped along a dirt road in Vietnam, looking for a monkey.

  “It’s a monkey,” Terwilliger had said. “A green one.”

  Danny shifted his position in the hospital bed, but moving around only made the dull pain in his gut turn to sharp pain. “Green, like jade? My mom probably has one. I can ask her. We used to have a shop―”

  “No,” said Terwilliger. “It’s not something you can find in a store. It’s in Vietnam.”

  Danny grunted. “That’s funny. I almost had to go to Vietnam. I got a draft letter, and this man Driscoll…” He trailed off at a dark look from Sarah.

  “I know Driscoll,” said Ed.

  “He got me out of it. Part of the deal I made.”

  “To help him find me. I know.” Ed didn’t seem upset by it. Sarah, though, had clearly not forgotten.

  Danny took a sip of tepid water from a cup on the bedside table. “Anyway. I didn’t have to go fight in the war. Off the hook, you know?”

  Terwilliger had started looking guilty at that point. “This monkey… it’s important that we find it. I don’t know why, not exactly. All I know is that you’re the only one who can find it.”

  “Wait,” said Danny. “Are you saying you want me to go there?”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “To a war zone? To look for a… a…”

  “A green monkey.”

  A nurse poked her head into the room. “Visiting time is done,” she said quietly, then went away again.

  “Tell him about your dream, Ed,” Sarah said.

  A vague sense of wrongness shocked Danny out of his sleepwalking reverie. He tried to call out to the Lieutenant, but his throat was parched and no sound came out.

  Danny reached out with his mind, trying to find whatever it was that had caught his notice. Until recently, he would have had to sit still and focus deeply to reach a state where he could detect the thoughts of others. But here, in his constant condition of adrenalized exhaustion, the state of concentration came easily to him. He knew the patterns that came from his fellow soldiers. They were familiar patterns that reminded him of home, and he sometimes took comfort in glimpsing the little bits of the other men’s lives that flashed through his mind late at night as they all dreamed. But there was something foreign here, a stream of thoughts that felt almost alien. One image kept reappearing to him: that of his own unit drawing closer to someone who was watching from above.

  He looked into a dense bamboo thicket. No enemies were visible, but they were there. Unable to find his voice amid the dust, he hissed sharply until the Lieutenant stopped and turned around.

  “What, Charlie Brown?” Achtenberg was in the lead, and Metcalf was a few paces behind him with Volpe, their Radio Telephone Operator, not far behind. The RTO had an especially heavy load to carry, and was clearly struggling under the weight of the equipment on his back. Danny was next in line behind him. They all stopped when Danny hissed.

  He swallowed several times, coughed thickly, swallowed again. His throat was coated with the red dust. “Enemy, sir,” he managed to get out before the sharp crack of an exploding booby-trap made them all turn around in time to see Archie Achtenberg being torn apart by shrapnel from a jury-rigged artillery round. The enemy found unexploded rounds sometimes, and had come up with ways to turn them into deadly traps.

  “He was right,” Danny rasped as he watched Archie’s blood flow across the parched ground in little dark rivulets. “Not even lunchtime.”

  * * *

  Elmer No
sgrove was driving through the Catoctin Mountains, seventy miles outside of the District. The scenery in this part of rural Maryland would have been considered quite beautiful by someone who cared about such things. Nosgrove did not care. He ignored the sweeping views of lushly forested valleys and rocky mountaintops. These were irrelevant to him. He was focused only on getting as quickly as possible to his destination: a secret facility locked away behind a sturdy metal gate, on a side road that was nearly impossible to find. He paid no attention to the speed limit. There were no police out here, and even if there were, he could handle police.

  It had been several months since he had checked in on his most valuable program. In the midst of his other activities, he had been too busy. He liked to come here every now and then, always telling the staff that he was an employee of the Government Accountability Office taking an inventory of equipment and supplies. He made notes on a clipboard and everyone ignored him.

  Elmer always missed the entrance the first time. He drove past it and had to turn back. It was concealed among the trees: a narrow dirt road that ran, twisting and turning, downhill from the main road. It was necessary to get out of his car to unlock the gate. He got back in the car and drove down the steep slope, letting gravity pull the car faster and faster down the hill. The vehicle rattled and bumped over the pitted and rocky road. Nosgrove didn’t care about the car. It was a government car, therefore not his concern.

  At the bottom, he had to swerve sharply to avoid hitting a big tree. He always waited until the last possible instant, so he could feel the skidding of the tires on the gravel as he took the turn. Billows of gray dust filled the air, kicked up by his wheels.

  The road ended at the bottom of the valley. Nosgrove followed it to the end and parked in a small gravel parking lot under the shelter of some trees. He could tell something was wrong as soon as he got out of the car. There were other vehicles parked in the small parking area, but they did not appear to have been driven in quite some time. There were weeds growing up through the gravel.