The tank whined up the steep road, humped onto the flats somewhere nearby out of sight and downshifted. It rumbled nearer, and Tyreen heard the whine of metal grinding on metal, the heavy squeak of steel treads. And Theodore Saville said flatly, “What’s a single tank doing on this particular road right now?”
Hooker said, “The place is swarming with gooks. Somebody tipped them off.”
“Shut up.”
The tank clattered on, going past, going up the road, away. Tyreen discovered his breath pent up in his chest. He let all the air out of his lungs and arched his chest to get wind. He coughed weakly. Sweat was oily along his palms; he wiped them against the sodden thighs of his fatigues and walked around to the front of the truck. “Khang and Sun will ride the seat,” he said. “Move, now.”
Sergeant Khang had ignored the girl. He would have been hard put to describe her. But the map—the map was engraved, hung in a frame before his mind. Every turn, every hill, every landmark he took account of. He felt power in his blunt hands. They moved for him with precision and economy; they turned switches and caressed the wheel. Nhu Van Sun sat beside him, small hands folded calmly in his lap. Khang glanced at him and thought of saying something, but he had nothing to say. His hand dropped from the key to the shift knob. He drove through the mud, humping over exposed roots; the seat bucked like a cockleburred horse. The windshield jumped crazily and gave him a sort of kaleidoscope picture of trees and earth.
Sergeant Sun spoke: he did not like the Montagnard nuoc mam, and he was hungry. He sounded sour. He leaned his head back, and Khang wondered what he saw in the dark ceiling of the cab. The truck bounced over a last rut and into the road. Khang said, “I think we’ve done a Goddamn fine job of finding a puking shortcut from nowhere to nowhere.” He smiled.
“Excuse, please?”
“Never mind,” Khang said. “Manh gioi?”
“I feel well,” Sun acknowledged in Vietnamese. “Why?”
“Gió mua,” Khang muttered, angry with the incessant rain. “Nuc—nuc.”
“There is always rain.”
Black clouds unrolled densely, not far overhead; a heavy mist settled on the hills. The road nosed over a rise, and Khang saw for the first time the spread of the city of Chutrang. He rapped knuckles against the back window and glimpsed Tyreen’s face at the glass. Lighted windows, faint through the rain, were enough to show the crazy pattern of streets; far beyond, the heavier dark mass of mountains sealed the city into its pocket of earth. Nhu Van Sun spoke in Vietnamese:
“You once lived here?”
“No. I used to visit the city when I was a child.” He did not understand why men had come to this place and built a city. It was unfriendly country, all whipped up and jagged, and half-drowned in jungle. It was a hostile jungle; it started to rot its victims even before it had killed them.
Patches of fog lay on the road, uncut by the rain. Khahg crawled the truck forward. The road dropped into a trough of earth. Rock shoulders squeezed it into a narrow throat, through which he drove with taut care; the walls seemed to crush together like vise-jaws. When they fell away, the road ran out onto a flat cleared of trees. The city lay vaguely in view, misted and wet; and now, seeking landmarks, he turned off into a path winding among huts. Khang ground the stick into a new gear, swinging around a corner that at first seemed too tight for the truck’s length. On his right he saw a long, widening crack in a building wall. The crack remained in his mind for a while like an echo or an afterglow—a great split down the side of the wall, seeming to grow wider in the instant he watched it, threatening to rend the wall apart.
Cold gusts whipped through the paneless window at his shoulder. His attitude of detachment slipped from him; the grin had gone. He said, “Why are we here?” and uttered a Vietnamese oath.
Nhu Van Sun said mildly, “I know why I am here, Sergeant.”
“Bully for you,” Khang said in English. He spun the wheel wildly to avoid a short flight of half-visible steps extending strangely out into the alley. The street looped onto the side of a steep hill above the city. He had nothing to guide him through the mist, only a very poor light scattered by falling rain. At the far end of this, he recalled, the map showed an empty plot of land he had to cross. How long was the street? He could not remember. He dragged a cuff across his mouth. The map picture was dim, moving farther away. With an effort of will he drew it back to him. The wheel jiggled, pummeling his cramped hands. More by feel than by sight, he knew there was a sharp drop-off at his left. He kept the truck edged in toward the hillside on the right. Was there another turn along the side here? he tried to recall. He saw Colonel Tyreen’s angular shadow falling across the map; the path went along the side of the hill here—he saw Corporal Smith’s finger tracing it—and there were four turns in all; had he passed four, or only three? What was happening to his memory?
The truck inched forward on the deserted hillside. The city seemed unconscious. Lights burned, staring winklessly through the rain, fixing the panorama of the city’s shape: a kidney outline, bounded by mountains on all sides. The truck growled, now and then complaining with a squeak or a soft metal clank. The seat jostled him gently.
The flat of land appeared, spreading out to the left of the path. It tipped downward toward the backs of a ragged row of stone buildings. One light brightened a high window; starkly revealed in silhouette, a woman’s high-breasted shape crossed the shade, and the light went out. It was a single glimpse of life going on in the ordinary way, and it was altogether unreal. Khang said, “You do know why we are here?”
It was downhill; he shut off the engine. His foot rode the brake pedal, and his spine pressed into the seat back. Nhu Van Sun said, “We are here to fight our enemies, Sergeant.”
“Enemies,” Khang said. “I was born here.”
The truck coasted down the incline and prowled between two buildings built of stone, neither of them standing quite up-and-down. Sergeant Sun said, “If a man is loyal to his country, then he must be loyal to his government.”
“What?”
“Besides,” Nhu Van Sun said, “we are soldiers. A soldier must be loyal, if he is nothing else. How can you ask why you are here?”
Khang only shrugged. He had trouble making out the shifts of the street. “Cobblestones,” he said, lapsing into English. “We’ll wake the dead.” The narrow street ran between stone houses clinging precariously to sloping ground at either side. Here and there the open front of a shop; a chicken running in wing-lifted panic to evade the truck’s advance; an old man, probably opium-numbed, sprawled over stone steps; deep-set windows like hollow eye sockets; a shaggy cat prowling back and forth at a doorway; the red glow of a cigarette glowing and dimming in a dark window; an ancient temple built of huge stones, each stone fitted perfectly into the others without mortar— “I remember this place,” Khang said. “They use it now for indoctrination meetings.”
The stone structures leaned at lazy angles. Nhu Van Sun said, “Choi oi.”
“What is it?”
“I saw something move—stop the truck.”
“We can’t. They’d know what we were up to if I stopped.”
“Stop the truck,” Sun repeated. And so Khang stopped it.
Chapter Twenty-five
1055 Hours
J. D. HOOKER dropped off the truck clutching his blunt-snouted gun. He stood at the tailgate until Tyreen’s face appeared. “Sergeant Sun spotted something. Have a look.”
“You trust that bastard, Colonel?”
Saville jumped down past Tyreen. “We’ll do this without noise, understand?” Saville’s face was calm and round, but here and there a tight line crossed it. “Leave that thing here.” He put his hand on the muzzle of Hooker’s submachine gun. Hooker’s grip tightened. Saville’s brute strength depressed the barrel, and Hooker let go; Saville passed it to Tyreen and then walked forward beside the truck.
Sergeant Sun said, “I see two men by corner there.”
The whole conversation
took place in muted whispers. Saville’s arm lifted and made motions. J. D. Hooker thereupon put his back to the truck and moved away, keeping the truck interposed between himself and the corner where Sun said he had seen men. Hooker walked steadily to the shelter of a sagging stone house and went around it briskly. The North Vietnamese field jacket, taken off a dead man an hour ago, flapped as he ran. He broke into a dogtrot, and his lips lashed back from his teeth; he jerked the pistol from his holster and reversed it in his fist like a short club. His feet rose and fell against the uneven ground. He curled around the second corner of the house, picked a path through creepers and brush, found the far end of the building, and turned slowly past the corner. Probing the mists with eyes and ears and nose, he found nothing. He moved with alert care toward the street. Rain compressed around him. He arrived at the street, having come all the way around the house, and saw nothing except the mass of Captain Saville’s figure by the corner.
Hooker stood a moment regaining his breath. “He never saw nothing. The puking little gook lied in his teeth.”
Saville spoke very quietly. “Put that thing away.” Hooker slipped the automatic into its scabbard. They walked back to the truck, Saville shaking his head and making horizontal motions with his hands. Hooker climbed up. “Wild-goose chase. He never saw nothing.”
“Maybe,” said Tyreen.
Hooker moved forward under the tarp with willful anger clouding his face. He heard Saville settle down and felt the truck begin to move.
Tyreen wore a hat taken from the dead PANVN captain—like an Australian bush hat, it had a wide, soft brim, which he turned down to conceal part of his face. He crouched by the front corner of the tarp, ready to flip it back. The truck coasted downhill; now and then a vehicle went past, and Tyreen found himself sweating with more fear than fever. They swayed around a sharp corner, and Saville murmured, “Not many blocks from here to the compound.”
“Thank God for this fog. What time is it?”
“Time for the lights to go out,” Saville said. “Time and then some. It’s almost five after eleven. I wonder what happened to those Yards.”
“Never trust a Goddamn gook,” J. D. Hooker said. It was a tired refrain; no one responded.
Saville said, “Kind of strange to think Eddie Kreizler’s just a few hundred yards from here.”
And Tyreen said, “I’m trying not to think about what he looks like by now.”
They went around a building and down a street, crawling past a buffalo-drawn cart. Pedestrians were scattered along the street; Tyreen could see them past the open back of the truck. He kept his hat pulled down and his head tucked in. It was dark under the tarp, and no one looked at them closely. Tyreen was thinking, it was a damned good thing the Chutrang population was not expecting trouble close to home. The war was a long distance away from these mountains.
Someone on the street called out. Tyreen heard Sergeant Khang shout a reply, but he could not make out the words. An inch of water sloshed around in the bed of the truck; his feet were soaked, had been soaked ever since his parachute drop into the Gulf five hours ago. His hands were softened and wrinkled by the hours of wetness; everything they touched was soaking wet.
He was looking out at the street when he saw the lamps go out. It started a hubbub of talk along the street. People gathered in clusters, gesturing. Their faces were afraid. He saw dripping hatbrims bob up and down. J. D. Hooker said, “I hear something popping. Maybe grenades up the hill. Where’s that power station?”
“I guess they did it,” Saville said.
They drove several blocks; the street widened and leveled off. Glancing upward under the tarp, Tyreen observed the clouds moving eastward; there seemed to be a faint break in the weather coming from the west. He scanned the street ahead through a fold in the tarp; a motorcycle roared toward them and went by, leaving a spray of water in the air. It whined up the street splashing pedestrians. The driver carried an automatic rifle over his shoulder. “Headed for the power station,” Saville said. “There’ll be a lot more of those in a few minutes. When the hell do we get off this boulevard?”
Corporal Smith crouched silently under the tarp’s deepest shadows; he had kept unbroken peace ever since they had left the Montagnard camp. His left hand, forgotten, held tightly the machine gun, to keep it still. He sat in water and seemed unaware of it.
They wore a tattered assortment of captured Vietminh hats and jackets; Tyreen tried to picture the sight as it might strike a casual observer behind the truck. How convincing were they? The hat and coat were far too small for Saville—the hat perched ludicrously atop Saville’s big head, and his back had split the fatigue jacket in two; the sleeves hardly enclosed his elbows.
A rumble of noise came up the street toward them. Tyreen put his face close to the small rear window and looked ahead through the windshield. “Steady,” he said. Coming toward them was a convoy of hastily assembled vehicles—two armored troop carriers and half a dozen six-by-six trucks crowded with soldiers. Pedestrians in loose clothes and wide anthill hats crowded close to the buildings. Sergeant Khang leaned out his window to yell at them; he steered the truck in close to the wall to give the convoy passing room. “Steady, now,” Tyreen said again. Theodore Saville moved past Corporal Smith; Saville draped a bullet-torn blouse casually over the machine gun and turned the camouflaged weapon toward the street, ready to fire if he had to. Smith squirmed back toward the rim of the truck bed and clutched his submachine gun defensively. J. D. Hooker’s face was out of sight under his hat; Hooker said, “Just keep moving right on by, gents.” Tyreen thought, at least faintheartedness was not among Hooker’s vices.
The convoy came roaring up the street at high speed, headed for the ambushed power station on the mountain. Tyreen identified 50-millimeter guns mounted on both armored vehicles. He let the tarp corner fall into place and returned to his vantage point at the small window. Khang’s hands on the steering wheel were knotted with ridged veins. He steered close enough to the wall to scrape a fender. The convoy barreled up the middle of the road, intent on speed and contemptuous of civilian pedestrians. Men dived into doorways and alleys; one fat man in a business suit and flapping raincoat flattened his back against a building across the street, and then Tyreen lost sight of him as the lead truck came through, its engine buzzing at high speed. The gun observer sat high on the first armored troop carrier, his helmet firmed down by its chinstrap; the observer stared intently into the cab and turned his head slowly to keep his gaze on Sergeant Khang as the troop carrier loomed alongside and roared past. The noise was intense. There was a good deal of calling back and forth. Tyreen’s finger reached the trigger of his submachine gun, but the trucks kept rolling by, and no one stopped. Sweat stood out on Theodore Saville’s face.
The last truck passed, leaving a wake of heavy spray. Tyreen had a glimpse of the fat pedestrian against the far wall, soaked to the skin. Saville’s voice reached him: “Close enough.”
The truck turned quickly into a rutted alley, wheels crunching on stones. “This will be the place,” Tyreen said, and moved toward the back of the truck. It slowed and made a careful turn into the open barn door of a stone-walled garage built against the side of a steep hill. The light dimmed as they stopped within the garage.
“End of the line,” said Tyreen. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-six
1110 Hours
COLD and wet, the rain and thin air rushed through the airplane. Engines throbbed unevenly. A heavy fog of condensation clouded the cockpit. McKuen batted at it with a frozen hand; there were mountains in the vicinity, and he was not above the highest of them. He did not look to his right—Shannon’s last cry still echoed through his head, and Shannon had died, quickly, in a single spitting shriek of terror. But in McKuen’s mind it took Shannon a long time to die, at the end of which time McKuen stared out of charcoal-hollow eyes into the opacity of the sky and finally realized that a friend, a comrade, was dead.
It was one thing to ma
intain courage in the midst of a crowd of fighting men. It was another thing to maintain it alone. There was no one to see the sucking spasms that distorted McKuen’s mouth. He rode in a dying airplane, in a seat beside a dead man, imprisoned in his chair. He could not leave the controls even to move Shannon’s body out of sight—and if he had, it would have served no purpose. Shannon was dead, and it made no matter where his corpse lay.
He told himself, “You’ve got to let him die, McKuen. A soldier’s got to accept the loss of another soldier.” He asked himself, “By the Lord above, why this? Why me?” He found himself humming a tune he did not like, and went on humming it because he was afraid to stop.
“Shannon, you poor ignorant bastard,” he shouted. “Why didn’t you keep your bloody ass down?”
He laughed hysterically: “He’s got thirty percent more cavities, by God!” And his face stiffened in horror. “Jesus—Jesus. What are you talking about? God, forgive me.”
He looked at Shannon. “I didn’t mean it, Mister. I didn’t mean it, for God’s sake. You know me, Mister—I never know when to keep my mouth shut. Shannon …?”
He slapped himself across the side of the face. A downdraft of cold, heavy air made the gooney bird plummet. His stomach turned. Something stood beyond the swirl of rain—a heavier mass. He saw it once, and again, and lost it in the weather; but it was there, dark and solid in the sky, a mountain. He kicked the pedals and banked the wheel; he went into a climbing turn, but the spiral was a feeble one; number two was half-choked, and the gooney bird would not reach for higher altitude. His eyes flashed from the gray obscured sky to the instruments over again. He kicked the throttles up and back, trying to flush the clogged engine clear. The compass was swinging around dizzily. Number two roared with a burst of vigor, and he pulled the wheel into his belly, trying to gain altitude while the balky engine’s enthusiasm lasted. The altimeter needle swayed back and forth across the dial; he had the feeling he was somewhere above seventy-five hundred feet, climbing for eight thousand. It was hard to breathe; the plane’s speed sucked air out of the cockpit through the dotted streaks of bullet holes. He fought his way through a violent fit of trembling and reached under the seat for the Thermos jug of coffee. It made him think about Shannon. He said, “Mister, you were lucky after all. I don’t even know which direction we’re after.” He shook his head slowly. He said, “A fella wishes he’d had the chance to know you better, Mister.” He had not known Shannon well at all; he missed the man terribly. He would have to write to Shannon’s fiancée. He wondered what he could say. The whole world was tied up in a knot of rope and labeled “Classified—not for fiancées.” He uncapped the coffee jug and lifted it to his blue lips.
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