The Last Bridge

by Brian Garfield

  Shannon darkened. “Hell, Lieutenant—it’s all fine and all to make jokes. But I’m scared green. What if we get knocked down over North Vietnam or drop right into some Victor Charlie camp? Do you speak Vietnamese?”

  “Sure.”

  “That makes me feel all warm inside,” Shannon said miserably. “I don’t speak a word of it. Only been here three weeks.” He reached forward to correct the mixture on number one. He said, “Hell of a vibration in number two.”

  “A loose mount. I did me best to tighten it down with baling wire.” McKuen made a grimace. “Baling wire.” Then, abruptly, he laughed quietly.

  McKuen tried to take a bearing with the radio direction finder, but the reading was untrustworthy. Silence filled the cabin, in spite of engine drone and the rush of wind past the blunt nose of the plane: silence filled with faintly luminous cloud surfaces in the night and scattered star points on the sky. It came, the silence, of the profound aloneness known to men who sat in a gently vibrating cockpit with a thin column of air suspending them thousands of feet above the invisible black sea. They had the glow of stars, glow of clouds, and yellow glow of wide-eyed instruments. The slow movement of needles across dials, the hum of radio beacons coming in through the headset; the phosphorescence of a dim moon vague behind a high, thin cloud, the steady grip of a pale hand, the jut of the round-faced compass bisecting the windshield at nose-level, the soporific motionlessness of the airplane, tongues of exhaust flame shooting back from the engines and, far off on a mountaintop in the central highlands, the glow of a warning beacon tiny like a fallen cigarette ash.

  McKuen’s face was pale in the light from the instruments, the angles of his features drawn sharp—long, straight nose and long, straight forehead, brush of red hair and the long line of the jawbone unmarred by flesh folds, deep creases running from nostril to lip corners: a young man with drive and a great many violent tempers.

  McKuen said, “I’ve flown some bloody silly missions, but this one takes the prize. No regrets, maybe, but I think I’m getting a little old.”

  “At twenty-six?”

  “Sure. I’m getting settling-down urges. I don’t know. A year ago I wouldn’t have hesitated. This time I had to think about it—I had to let Saville push me into it. It’s no good to get cautious in this game, Mister.”

  Shannon said nothing. He dropped the controls to a slightly lower pitch, and McKuen watched the airspeed indicator climb a notch or two. “I was flying a bunch of Pentagon pencil pushers to Bengasi. We got forced down. That Godawful Libyan desert. At least this time, whatever happens, we won’t have to land on sand. Well, sometime we’ll all die anyway. To be sure.”

  The plane droned north-northwest. In the cargo cabin the five passengers sat on benches along the fuselage walls, surrounded by parachutes and scuba diving apparatus, weapons, and packs. A few lights glowed at irregular intervals in the cabin. The plane’s heat controls did not work, and the five men huddled against the cold night air of seven-thousand-foot altitude. Sky moved slowly by the little windows, and the engines were a loud pounding in the center of the cabin, radiating through ears and vibrating bones. A little electric fan, which did not work, was bolted loosely near the ceiling at the forward end of the cabin; it rattled incessantly like a man shaking a penny around inside a tin can.

  Far back along the passage, near the passenger door in the tail section, Sergeant Khang sat by himself, using a honing stone to sharpen the blade of his bayonet. His eyes sparkled with some secret humor, but he looked very cold and very dark and very much alone just the same. He had his service automatic buckled to his waist and a Russian AK submachine gun lying between his feet. Sergeant Khang was North Vietnamese by birth, but training in the American Army and the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg had made him a member of an extranational club of icemen. He met and held the baleful glance of Sergeant Hooker.

  J. D. Hooker sat farther forward, between the wings, opposite the other three passengers. A thick black hair grew out of his left nostril. He was forever tugging at it. His appearance was bestial; his brutal instincts were tuned fine: J. D. Hooker could feel a man’s pulse beating through six inches of armor plate. His father had been an unidentified Marine who had spent one night in Mobile on his way to Pensacola.

  Theodore Saville had a map in one huge fist. He scratched his drum-taut belly with the other hand. His face was lowered as though he were listening for some alien sound against the steady hum of engines and wind. His massive chest slowly rose and slowly fell with his breathing. He said, “I’d like a beer. We ain’t got any beer, have we?”

  “Coffee in that steel jug,” Tyreen said.

  There was no more conversation for a while. Another light in the cabin winked out, plunging the tail section into full darkness, obscuring sight of Sergeant Khang. He did not seem to mind; he kept his solitary post there. Forward through the aisle the instrument lights made a faint glow. Saville said, “If another light goes out, I’ll have to read this map by braille.”

  In the bad light, Tyreen’s hair seemed gray, and his long face was blurred and uncertain. There was something of a gloss on his eyes, and his face was not dry. Theodore Saville watched him with quiet concern. Saville folded his map and said, “I remember a plane like this, once. When the Reds shot up my leg in Korea I had a ride to Japan in one of these old crates, with all the lights burned out and all the furniture gone away a long time ago. They hung us in hammocks and I remember a nurse, real pretty brunette. She had a ukelele, and she was singing a bunch of songs. My leg hurt like hell, and the only way I kept from going off my Goddamn head was listening to that girl singing. She had a crummy voice, but she was there. I couldn’t even see her—the lights were even worse than these here. I got a look at her face in the morning when they unloaded us at Itami. She was beautiful.”

  The plane jiggled through a patch of rough air and leveled off sluggishly. Saville opened the coffee jug and filled its lid with coffee and drank.

  Sergeant Nhu Van Sun struck a match and put it to his cigarette. Looking outside, he could see in the light of the engine exhaust flame the gentle up-and-down swing of the aileron tabs, keeping the plane on steady course. He put his nose to the window and looked down past the wing’s trailing edge and saw the top of the velvet rain cloud extending away without a break in all directions, faintly glimmering. The loose fan rattled incessantly in the fuselage; the old craft lumbered through the sky. Sergeant Sun was big and tough, but he had a certain air of youthful curiosity and uncertainty. He came from a town called Ba Dong near one of the mouths of the Mekong Delta: he had been a farmer. He was thinking of his wife and his three infant girls when J. D. Hooker spoke abruptly at him.

  “What do you think you’re staring at?”

  Sergeant Sun said, “Nothing. I not think about—”

  “You Goddamn people never do,” said Hooker. “For two puking cents I’d—”

  “At ease, Sergeant,” said Theodore Saville.

  Hooker’s glance swung toward him. “Captain, you ask me, I’d say don’t trust either one of these peckerheads.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” Saville said. “Button it up.”

  Hooker lowered his thick brows and did not speak again. Sergeant Sun looked at him for a moment; whatever his feelings were, he kept them to himself.

  David Tyreen stood up and went forward to the cockpit. His voice issued back very faintly. “When we pass Da Nang set your course due north across the Gulf of Tonkin. We’ll skirt the west side of Hainan and turn northwest on a heading of three-two-five when we cross the nineteenth parallel. It should put us over the drop zone just before first light. After the drop you’ll have to swing sharp left and climb to avoid the mountains.”

  “How high?” said George McKuen.

  “Some of the peaks are seventy-five hundred feet high. There’s one mountain that’s about eight thousand.”

  “That’s bloody decent. The way we’re flying right now, I’d say the operational ceiling of this airc
raft might be maybe eight thousand feet. Ducky, Colonel, ducky. I can’t get any more power out of number two engine than we’re getting right now. And I am getting the feeling she may conk out.”

  “There’s a guerrilla landing strip back in the mountains,” Tyreen said. “Where’s your chart? … There. If you have to, you can put down on that. It’s an emergency field. One of those perforated-steel-strip runways. It’s not very long, and you have to land uphill.”

  “What?”

  “The strip slopes uphill.”

  “Jesus,” said McKuen.

  “One of our teams is holed up near there. But I doubt you’ll need it. You’ll get home, Lieutenant.”

  Chapter Ten

  0430 Hours

  FORTY minutes beyond Da Nang, and within easy radar range of the Red Chinese air base at Sama on the island of Hainan, the gooney bird’s number two engine sputtered, coughed, spat blood, and finally caught again. It kept running. McKuen kept one eye on it. A jaunty, cavalier, cocked-eyebrow d’Artagnan, he grinned at Mister Shannon and said, “Flying is so dangerous around here, even the bloody pigeons travel on foot.”

  “A guy could get killed,” Shannon complained, “which is no way to die. I thought I was going to puke when that number two cut out on us.”

  The engines chugged reassuringly. They had lost eight hundred feet of altitude, nursing the sick number two; now McKuen climbed again and leveled off at seven thousand feet to cruise. “Look there—break in the clouds.”

  Shannon looked down. “Ship down there,” he said, “or a big boat. See the lights?”

  “That’ll be one of those Russian trawlers. They must catch a lot of fish. I flew over one of them just out at the three-mile limit at Guam. Plenty of radar domes on them, but not a stick of fishing tackle.”

  They passed over the opening in the clouds underneath. Shannon spoke slowly: “What do you think of our chances, Lieutenant?”

  “I came, didn’t I?”

  Shannon’s face moved. He looked out at the night. “I’m cold,” he said. “I wish the heat worked. I don’t think we’ve got the chance of a chicken in a fox’s den of getting this thing back to Da Nang, typhoon or no typhoon. That number two engine’s going to pack up damn soon.”

  “It’s human to sweat a little,” McKuen said cheerfully.

  “What about you, Lieutenant? Do you sweat?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t show it.”

  McKuen said, “There ain’t much that can harm you after you’re dead, darlin’.” The plane slid between layers of wispcloud, cutting off the star shine. The plane became a raft isolated on a black sea. There was the smell of rain, but no water on the glass. McKuen’s face was reflected faintly in the window. Another break in the lower cloud deck showed nothing but darkness; the clouds sealed up once again. Shannon’s hand moved to rotate the stabilizer wheel back a fraction of a revolution. Before McKuen’s feet the rudder pedals moved slightly, one in and one out, under Shannon’s direction. Engines throbbed monotonously. Shannon said, “I’m getting spooky.”

  “You’ll steady down.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look at it this way,” said McKuen. “If you get killed, at least you won’t have died of anything serious.”

  “You are very funny, Lieutenant.”

  McKuen looked sharply at him. After that he said nothing until, with the clouds pinching in on them from above and below, he said, “Switch on the receiver. I want to get a weather report.”

  The earphones crackled and he heard a distant voice: “Tighten up this formation. Jimmy, I want your wingtip in my Goddamn window.”

  McKuen said, “Wrong band, Mister,” in a very gentle voice and watched Shannon’s nervous hand twist the radio dials. After a moment he looked at his watch and said, “Ought to be a report about now.”

  The radio only blatted landing and takeoff instructions. He listened to it with half his attention and muttered aloud: “Manifold pressure.” He moved the throttles. “Twenty-two hundred rpm—how’s that number two behaving?”

  He was remembering a blonde in San Francisco who had left his quarters at 5 a.m., thereby earning for him the silly admiration of his acquaintances. Shannon’s voice broke in:

  “I’m as jumpy as a virgin in a men’s room.”

  When McKuen made no reply, Shannon said, “I was thinking about getting married before I left the States. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “And leave my girl a widow?”

  “At least she’d have a pension,” McKuen said.

  “Do you think women go for Army pilots?”

  “Well, now,” McKuen said, with his brogue waxing, “I was after takin’ a survey of seventy-five young ladies on that very question, would you believe it? And seventy-three of them responded the same way. Would you be wantin’ to know what it was they said? They said, ‘Shut up and rape me, darlin’,’ is what they said.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Gee, I wish I’d said that. Hold on.” McKuen’s hand snapped to the radio dial, and he tuned it with slow care. The headset scratched in his ear:

  “Typhoon Carlotta has changed course and speed, is now expected to hit the Vietnamese coastline north of Da Nang at approximately oh-six-thirty hours this morning. Repeat, the typhoon is expected to strike the coast near Hué at approximately oh-six-thirty hours this morning. All operational aircraft are ordered to ground at runways of opportunity. All takeoffs after oh-five-thirty hours are canceled by order of …”

  McKuen took the headset off and slung it on its hook. He looked at Shannon and said, “What ho.”

  Shannon’s face was dour. McKuen said, “What’s your opinion, Mister?”

  “I don’t get paid for opinions, Lieutenant. Just follow orders. But if I was to think about it, I might suggest hara-kiri.”

  “Very good, Mister. Take the wheel, like a good fellow.” McKuen unstrapped himself, climbed out of the pilot’s seat, and made his way back into the passenger cabin.

  “That typhoon must be due south of us right now, sir,” McKuen said to Colonel Tyreen. “Due to strike Hué at six-thirty. Sir, it’s ten after five right now, and by the time we reach your drop zone it’ll be six o’clock, at least. I’d like permission to abort, sir. If we turn around and hightail back right now on a course of one-nine-oh we can land on one of those emergency strips in South Vietnam west of Hué before the typhoon gets there.”

  Tyreen said, “Negative.”

  “Colonel, this plane can’t swim.”

  “You’ll make the drop on schedule, Lieutenant. After that it’s up to you. I’d suggest you bring her down on that airstrip up in the mountains—the one I pointed out to you on the map. That’s friendly Montagnard country up there, and as I said, we’ve got an ‘A’ Team operating in the area. They’ll pick you up and look after you.”

  The plane vibrated strongly. McKuen had one hand braced against the slope of the ceiling, his back bent and his head tilted down to catch the run of Tyreen’s voice. McKuen said, “And what then, sir?”

  “If you’re picked up by the ‘A’ Team, put yourself under their orders. If not, stand by the plane and listen to the weather reports. If the typhoon1 moves on before the Reds come up to find out who you are, you can just take off and go home. If the Reds come first, your orders are to disable this aircraft and then get the hell out.”

  “On foot?”

  “On foot.” Tyreen’s eyes were dark and bleak. “You’ve got another option if you prefer. You can head out to sea after you drop us. If you’re lucky you may be able to find some elements of the Seventh Fleet cruising the Gulf of Tonkin. You can ditch in the Gulf and be picked up by the Navy.”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “You’ve got life jackets and parachutes. You won’t have to swim.”

  “And what if we cruise out over the Gulf and don’t happen across any Navy ships? What then, Colonel, sir?”

  “Then you run out of gas,” Tyreen said.
“You yell for help, Lieutenant, and then you float around and maybe pray a little.”

  “I wish I had enough gas to fly around until that typhoon went away. But we’re pretty close to the fuel limit just getting you to your drop zone and then going home. Only there isn’t any home left to go back to.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What happened to your Irish accent?”

  McKuen flushed. “Sometimes I tend to forget it. You’ll be understandin’, sir?”

  Tyreen gave him a grin with his teeth. “It’s your choice,” he said.

  “For which I’m greatly obliged to you,” said McKuen sourly. He turned around and went forward.

  Theodore Saville said, “The poor kid. I’m glad I ain’t in his shoes.”

  J. D. Hooker snapped an irritable glance at him. “You think we better off jumpin’ into North Vietnam, Captain? Me, I’d sooner take my chances with the Lieutenant.”

  McKuen was coming back from the cockpit. He said, “I forgot to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead,” said Tyreen.

  “Suppose I drop you people and then head out to sea. Once I’m away from your position, I can break radio silence and get in touch with the Seventh Fleet. They can tell me where to find them.”

  Tyreen said, “If that’s what you want to do, go ahead.”

  McKuen frowned. “What’s the catch?”

  “The minute you open up on that radio, Lieutenant, the Reds will know this isn’t one of their planes. They’ll let you have it with everything they’ve got. The Chinese have got a whole wing of MIGs stationed at Sama. They’d shoot you down before you got within miles of a Navy ship.”

  “Well, and thanks again to you,” McKuen said, and went forward again.

  Saville said, “In a way, this may be a break for us. That storm could play hell with Ho Chi Minh’s radar.”

  The plane bucked with turbulence. Tyreen sat braced against the fuselage and let his attention rove among the four soldiers. Each of them had been selected, screened, culled, and filed. He had used Hooker before, and he knew Saville. He did not know either one of the two Vietnamese sergeants, but their records were impressive. Nhu Van Sun was an ex-farmer, brawny and evidently childlike, but the record said he liked gadgets and knew how to rig booby traps and handle any kind of communications equipment ever made. He was expert in the many forms of deadly hand-to-hand combat; and while he had never been to America, he spoke passable English, which was sometimes important in a team where the American members might speak uncertain Vietnamese at best. Tyreen spoke good Vietnamese; Saville, who was a diligent, deliberate student, spoke not only Vietnamese, but French and one dialect of Chinese as well. Sergeant Hooker spoke a few common words of Vietnamese, and bad English. Sergeant Khang had been in the States long enough to be comfortable with barracks slang. The record stated that Khang was a good guerrilla soldier, and that was a valuable quality; it took a special kind of mind to make a man a good guerrilla fighter, and Khang had that talent. But his greatest usefulness of the moment was his intimate knowledge of the terrain around Chutrang and the Sang Chu gorge; he had been born and raised there.