The Last Bridge

by Brian Garfield

  “How many?” Saville said.

  “Three men and a machine gun.”

  Corporal Smith tramped back to them, and Saville jerked a finger in signal and turned directly into the rain forest. Smith came right behind him. Treetops shut out the day-light, and the damp half-light was plum-colored. Dark, stinking, mud sucked at his boots. Bent double, Saville rammed through the undergrowth, chilled and half-blind and clawed by tangled thorns. A fine mist of water and mud particles hung suspended in the air. He heard the clacking ratchet of the axle-jack. The sound diminished quickly, absorbed into the matted thickness of the jungle.

  It was midmorning, and yet in the clammy dark there was a visible glow of phosphorescent mold. Vines and briers left welts on his hands and cheeks. He heard the squelch of Smith’s footsteps behind him. A monkey racketed through the branches, tautening his nerves; Smith barged into him, and Saville started off again. He had to rely on an instinctual sense of direction. The packed jungle floor of ancient, decayed leaves lay many feet thick upon the earth; it was like walking on a sodden sponge.

  Smith tapped his shoulder. When Saville looked around, Smith touched a finger to the face of his watch. Saville nodded and hurried forward. He could hear the shallow rushing of Smith’s forced-quiet breathing. A snake wriggled up the trunk of a tree, and Saville made a wide circle around it. There was no trail; he left a backtrack like the route through a maze. His eyes strained through the obscurity and then, abruptly, he heard the sound of voices. He caught Smith’s glance and turned toward the sound, moving his feet with care.

  Light glittered on metal somewhere ahead; it was a momentary vision, immediately blotted out. He put his boots down soundlessly.

  He made his way around a thick brier patch and crouched under a dripping tree. Through branches he could see three soldiers in flat helmets and gray battle fatigues grouped around an ugly machine gun behind a saw-horse roadblock. They stood peering down the road and talking, without great excitement. Saville made brief hand signals to Corporal Smith and watched the Corporal move hesitantly off to the left. Saville moved straight ahead, hearing the truck engine start up somewhere back down the road. The three soldiers straightened, and two of them turned away from the sawhorse to reach for their rifles. Saville crawled like a beetle through the greasy mud. He lost sight of Corporal Smith on his left. The truck came grinding up the road, getting steadily louder. At the edge of the timber, Saville laid down his submachine gun and drew from his belt a short length of nylon cord. He waited, not moving, while one of the soldiers came over to the side of the road to look down past the bend. The soldier turned and spoke to his comrades. There was no reply; the two men readied themselves behind the machine gun, locking a belt of ammunition into the mechanism. When the third soldier spoke again, Saville reached out of the brush and tightened the nylon garrote around the man’s throat.

  The soldier’s brief struggle brought his two companions to their feet. One of them shouted. Saville felt his victim go limp; he let go the cord and stepped forward, pushing the inert soldier ahead of him, holding the man up. He said plainly, “Smith.”

  No one appeared. A rifle came around toward him, and he lifted the strangled soldier bodily and hurled the man across half the width of the road. The body fell across the machine gun, tangled up with both soldiers. Saville ran into the road with his knife. The two soldiers rolled out from under the dead man; one of them was at Saville’s feet, and he plunged his knife into the man’s chest while the other soldier, having no rifle, shoved the dead man away from the machine gun and reached for the grip to turn the weapon on Saville.

  Saville left his knife where it was lodged. He whipped his legs up over the writhing stabbed soldier and kicked the barrel of the machine gun. The gun went over on its side. The soldier let go and rose to meet Saville’s attack, bare-handed. Saville stretched past the man’s short-armed reach and drove four stiff fingers into the man’s throat. The man went down gurgling.

  The truck squeaked to a stop just beyond the sawhorse, and Tyreen swung down from the cab. His voice was matter-of-fact. “Where’s the Corporal?”

  “Something I’d like to know,” Saville said.

  Sergeant Hooker rammed past him and plunged into the jungle. Hooker came out, dragging Corporal Smith by the shirt collar. Smith was swallowing in spasms. Hooker flung the man down into the mud. Saville said, “Where were you?”

  Tyreen said, “Never mind, Theodore. I had to make sure.”

  “Make sure of what?” Saville was angry. He turned on Tyreen. “You should have let me know. For Christ’s sake, David!”

  “If I’d warned you, you’d have looked out for him. You didn’t have time for that.” Tyreen slung his weapon over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. “I had you covered, Theodore.”

  Corporal Smith lay breathing shallowly in the mud, full of misery. Tyreen said, “Pour him in the truck and let’s go. Sergeant Sun, you’ll drive.”

  J. D. Hooker turned hotly. “Colonel, how many of us got to break before you quit trying to kill us all?”

  Saville stepped across a dead Vietnamese and struck Hooker an openhanded blow across the face. Hooker spilled into the sawhorse and knocked it down. Saville took a step toward him, and Tyreen said gently, “Theodore.”

  Hooker climbed to his feet and rubbed his jaw, not looking at anyone in particular. Saville said, “Drag these bodies off the road.” He picked up the sawhorse and threw it into the trees.

  Sergeant Khang, saying nothing, helped Corporal Smith to his feet and led the man toward the truck. Saville squatted, braced a knee down, and yanked his knife out of a dead man’s chest. When he stood up he found Tyreen looking at him, and he said, “I was trying to remember how many years it took to learn where to put the knife to kill the man fast.”

  “Easy,” Tyreen murmured.

  Saville watched Corporal Smith get into the truck. He said, “David, the chances are if you swing too hard you’ll strike out. You had no right to take that chance with me.”

  “I’m the master of this ship, Theodore. I had to know about him, and I didn’t have time to find out any other way.”

  “Time,” Saville said. “God damn it, there are some things that just won’t happen as fast as you want, David. You can’t get nine women pregnant and expect a baby in one month.”

  He stared at Tyreen, and the space between them became stuffed with a padded silence. Finally Tyreen said, “Let’s go.”

  Nhu Van Sun climbed into the driver’s seat and sat staring at his hands on the wheel. It had not stopped raining. Saville took the heavy machine gun with him toward the back of the truck. Tyreen paused with one foot on the running board. “I had you covered, Theodore.”

  “You said that before.”

  Tyreen met his glance and climbed into the seat.

  Saville tossed the machine gun into the truck bed and climbed in after it. He made a cursory effort to wipe some of the mud off his clothes. J. D. Hooker climbed in and looked at Corporal Smith, crumpled in a forward corner. Hooker said, “Captain, I doubt you’ll get a chance to court-martial me.”

  “You’d better hope I do.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hooker. “But I think you and me both know the truth about the Colonel.”

  The engine started up, and Saville braced himself against the tailgate. Sergeant Khang came away from Smith and said, “I guess he’s kind of shook up.”

  “I guess he is,” Saville said.

  “You ever get the feeling you’re about to roll boxcars, Captain?”

  Saville did not answer him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  0915 Hours

  MCKUEN paused to extract a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his face dry. He sat astraddle the number two engine nacelle, with the cowling open and his hands grease-black. He felt a deep ache in his long back.

  Mister Shannon stood on the metal-mesh runway below him, festooned with small arms. Rainwater dripped off the bill of Shannon’s cap. He said, “How abo
ut it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ll not be making any promises. I ain’t a bloody mechanic.”

  “Can we get her airborne?”

  “And what if we do?” McKuen snorted, and bent forward to bolt the cowling down.

  Shannon started to talk again; McKuen paid no attention to the words until suddenly he shot upright and said, “Quiet.” He turned his head slowly to catch the warning sound again on the flats of his eardrums, and finally he found it, a faint buzzing hum in the sky. “Piston engines,” he said. A transport, or a lonely reconnaissance bomber. “Can’t see us through the soup, anyhow. And it’s thankful I am.”

  He held on to that hope while the airplane noise advanced, growing louder in the obscure sky, until he knew the plane was close overhead. And thereupon the wingtip lights appeared over the mountain, vague within the clouds, moving smoothly across his range of vision. “Twin-engine Ilyushin,” he said. “Maybe fifteen hundred feet up. He’s looking for something.”

  The plane changed course, moving in a slow circle. “Looking for us,” said Mister Shannon on the ground. They waited motionless with their heads thrown back. Rain slanted against their faces; McKuen blinked. The Russian-built search plane circled the mountains, moving in and out of view in the clouds; finally it zigzagged out of sight past the mountains, and McKuen said, “They didn’t spot us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” McKuen said. He slid back along the wing to the trailing edge and dropped to the ground. “I think maybe we ought to sit tight for a while. If we take off now, they’ll pick us up on radar—they’re waiting for us.”

  Shannon said, “I’m hungry.”

  “Anyone for pinochle?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “What?”

  “Suppose we get her off the ground. What then?”

  “We point ourselves across the mountains and try like hell to get to Laos before the Reds can get fighters on our tail.”

  “Lots of luck,” Mister Shannon said.

  “Aye. And then some.” McKuen batted his arms together. “Let’s not be standing out here all day in this freezing bloody rain.”

  Chapter Twenty

  0920 Hours

  LIEUTENANT Chinh sat guarding his tortured hands. He said irritably, “Why do they not come for us?”

  “Trying to make us sweat,” said Eddie Kreizler.

  The cell stank of sweat and human filth and the exhalations of twoscore raw-gummed mouths rotted by bad food. The crowded prisoners had made a circle of space for Kreizler and Chinh. No one spoke to them or looked at them; they were outsiders, even among prisoners—the American imperialist mercenary and the Vietnamese traitor to the people.

  Lieutenant Chinh said, “I have think.”

  “And?”

  “I not do what you say.”

  “I see,” said Kreizler.

  “I am not a traitor,” Chinh said. “Not what you think.”

  “I know you’re not a traitor, Lieutenant. I know you too well to think that.”

  “This my country, not yours. But it is a sin, what you say. To kill self is a sin.”

  “All right, Lieutenant.”

  “They will torture me long time. Maybe they make me talk. But when I talk I tell lies.”

  “Tell them the truth. Nothing you can tell them will hurt our side very much.”

  “I heard radio talk. The Colonel Urquhart come. The paratroop attack. I lie to them about that.”

  “They’ll know you’re lying, Lieutenant.”

  Chinh had a stubborn look. He said, “What you do?”

  “I’ll jump them alone. They’ll have to kill me.” He smiled. “I know—it sounds like a coward’s way out. Maybe it is.”

  “No.”

  I wish they’d get it over with, Kreizler thought. A rat scurried across someone’s legs and there was a feeble shout; someone threw a sandal at the rat. It broke for cover. Kreizler stood up and found spaces big enough for his feet; he crossed the room to the door and peered out through the open slot. His face seemed amiable and unconcerned. He put one hand against the cold iron of the door. Outside, within the restricted arc of vision, he could see a pair of sentries at the gate and the electrified wire fence that ran around the little jail. Beyond the fence, a squad of Vietminh guerrilla soldiers marched in ragged double file across the compound toward a supply shed. Lights burned in the headquarters building a hundred feet away. That was where they would interrogate him. He slid his mind away from that—they wanted him to think about that. The trick was to divorce mind from body. If you did not think about pain, you did not suffer.

  There was no way of reckoning time. He stood by the door until his knees began to ache. With his nose close to the open slot, breathing was more tolerable. He looked back, and he could faintly see Lieutenant Chinh’s face. The handsome detail of the Vietnamese officer’s features seemed reposed, resigned, closed up. Kreizler thought, You’re a good man, Lieutenant, and it’s a Goddamn crying shame.

  A slim officer stepped out on the porch of the headquarters building and stood under the lights in a mandarin-style, cream-hued uniform with the collar standing up around his neck. He slapped a swagger stick into his open palm, looked over his shoulder and spoke a few words. A quartet of soldiers came out of the building and followed the officer when he stepped down off the porch. They came toward the guardhouse. Eddie Kreizler let his hand drop away from the door; he glanced at Lieutenant Chinh and nodded. He thought he saw a break in Chinh’s expression. He looked through the slot again: the officer was talking to the gate sentries, and after a moment one of the sentries saluted and unlocked the gate. Kreizler felt weight beside him, and when he turned his head he saw Lieutenant Chinh standing at his shoulder. “Go back and sit down. Stay away from the door.”

  “I no use back there,” said the Lieutenant.

  “You know what I’m going to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” said Kreizler.

  The sentry walked from the gate to the jail door. Kreizler took a pace back. He heard the officer speak, and then the rattle of a key in the door. The door squeaked, swinging outward. Kreizler braced his feet to jump, but then a swift figure lunged past him, shouldering the door away, and as Kreizler launched himself through the opening he saw Lieutenant Chinh flail into the four soldiers like an Indian running a gantlet. Chinh bellowed, and rifles cracked. Kreizler plunged after him. He swung his fist at the sentry’s startled face. Another gun went off; he saw Lieutenant Chinh lose his footing and slip down. Someone uttered a sharp command. Kreizler turned to attack the officer. He had a brief look at a cool, narrow face, drily smiling at him, and then one of his arms was jerked up painfully behind his back and there was a gun muzzle against his belly. He strained in taut struggle, shouting obscenities in Vietnamese, but the soldier did not shoot him; his arm was pulled up toward his shoulder blade, and he felt it crackle with hot pain. The officer’s amused face moved close, and a gloved hand slapped him twice across the cheeks. “Stop that, Captain. You cannot force us to kill you.”

  The rifle was taken away from his stomach. He felt his arm close to breaking; he felt faint. The officer said something in a nasal voice, and Kreizler quit struggling.

  Someone pushed him roughly. He stumbled forward. His toe rammed into a soft object, and he saw Lieutenant Chinh before him in the mud. Chinh was dead, shot several times. The North Vietnamese officer spoke behind him: “Your friend was fortunate, don’t you agree, Captain?”

  They prodded him across the compound and into a small room within the headquarters building. He heard the officer’s British accent: “Make yourself comfortable, Captain.” Then the officer spoke in Vietnamese: “Stay here.” He was speaking to the soldiers. When Kreizler turned around, he was alone in the room with the officer.

  There was a low hard cot, a chair, a ceiling light. The room had no windows. Kreizler said, “You left the door open.”

  “Did I?”

  “Go back and c
lose it—from the other side.”

  “Do not be flip with me, Captain.”

  Kreizler sat down on the straight-back chair and fixed a bland stare on the officer. The three silver buttons on the officer’s uniform indicated that he was a colonel. He said, “Stand up, please.”

  “Why?”

  The Colonel’s face was pale, ascetic. He flashed his swagger stick against Kreizler’s face and Kreizler, not expecting it, could not avoid the blow. It crushed his nose with a searing flash of pain.

  He heard the Colonel say, “Stand up, please.”

  He got to his feet and stood unsteadily. The Colonel’s voice reached him: “I am unaccustomed to repeating myself, Captain. I trust you will not make it necessary again.”

  Kreizler’s vision cleared. He lifted a hand to his face and took it away. There was a little blood on his palm.

  The Colonel said, “Sophocles observed that there is one thing worse than dying, Captain. Do you know what that is?”

  “I’m a little rusty on my Greek,” Kreizler said. His voice sounded as though he had a bad cold. He breathed through his mouth. His nose throbbed and pulsed.

  “The thing worse than dying,” the Colonel murmured. “It’s wanting to die, Captain—wanting to die and not being able to.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  0940 Hours

  “THAT’S it,” said David Tyreen. He reached around behind him and slapped the tarpaulin. Saville poked his head out.

  The truck crawled up a curved incline, bending back away from the Sang Chu gorge. The great cloven rock of a mountain stood high above them, two upraised monoliths like immense wrecks on a forgotten field of battle. The twin gray ridges curved in toward each other like clasped hands; they seemed almost to touch at the top.