The Last Bridge

by Brian Garfield

  “It says half a tank.”

  “That ought to be enough.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tyreen said, “You don’t give away much, do you?”

  The Corporal risked a quick glance at him. “No, sir,” he said. “Here’s where we turn off.”

  A sudden fork took them lurching to the left up a steep hill, and abruptly they were enclosed within the rain forest. The truck was clumsy, too big for the road; the track was narrow and rough, two flowing ruts separated by a high hump. Ahead it curled quickly out of sight into thick, obscure timber. Vines crept tightly down the tree trunks; parasites and creepers hung low along the road. A small, furry animal scuttled across the road not far ahead of them. The day was cold and dark and wet; it pressed against Tyreen, and he fought back resentfully. Corporal Smith shifted into one of many gears; the truck lurched. He double-clutched and kept firm grip on the heavy wheel to fight the pull of the uneven road. The truck rocked sluggishly back and forth. Branches scraped the roof, clawed at the tarpaulin, and slapped the windshield, making them flinch. Tyreen’s eyes could not penetrate the thick undergrowth ahead. The tires rolled slowly, grinding down the matted ruts; the engine roared in low gears, and in that manner, slowly and awkwardly, the truck bucked its way into the mountains. The cold, thin air of this high country came through the glassless windows to cut like a blade. The air was soaked, and Tyreen could see his own breath-mist steaming away from his face. Corporal Smith hunched over the wheel, watching the road for sharp bends and wheel-smashing bumps. They reached a fork, and without hesitation the Corporal swung the truck off, swaying crazily, onto the tilting side of the mountain. Trees fell away momentarily. They ran across the flat floor of a long jungle clearing. Below, Tyreen saw the lances and spires of treetops. They broke into the close rain forest again and climbed stiffly in a straining low gear at a speed a walking man could match.

  Corporal Smith said, “I used to be company driver for Colonel Urquhart when he was company commander.”

  “You were in Transportation Corps?”

  “That was before I got busted and volunteered for Special Forces,” the Corporal said. It was impossible to make out any shading of his tone.

  Rain fell steadily on the mountains. They climbed a narrow, rocky trail with a precipice dropping away to the right and no bottom in sight. The road seemed narrower than the truck. Corporal Smith said, “The old time Yards say they never had a cold spell like this. Saying the spirits brought the freeze because they got mad at Uncle Ho. It sure raised hell with all them opium poppies.”

  Tyreen could not make out the cause of Smith’s sudden burst of talk. Smith said, “I hear they’re rigging Colonel Urquhart’s battalion for an air drop into this zone. Big secret invasion. I used to serve under Colonel Urquhart. He—”

  “Where’d you hear that, Corporal?”

  “Hear what?”

  “About an air drop.”

  “I handled the radio for Captain Kreizler. It came in a few days ago, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “How’s that?”

  Tyreen said, “Who sent that message?”

  “Hell, Colonel, I don’t remember. Maybe General Jaynshill’s headquarters.”

  Tyreen said, “I doubt that.”

  “Well, then, maybe it wasn’t.”

  “Colonel Urquhart’s outfit just transferred down to Saigon,” Tyreen said. “They’re in a fight down there. You picked up a false piece of information somewhere.”

  “Yes, sir,” Smith said.

  The truck shot out into the air. Tyreen’s stomach knotted; from the perspective of his seat he could see nothing but the fall beyond. Smith screwed the wheel around. The truck skittered on a tight horseshoe bend, and Tyreen gripped the edge of the windshield. The Corporal shifted down and straightened the wheels and drove into a bush before the truck righted itself. He put it back on the hoad by smashing down a scrub tree. It broke with a crack and an echo.

  From the north face of the mountain Tyreen saw the vast upheaval of peaks beyond. Dark rain forest grew on the slopes like a beard under a pale chin of rock crags and a brown-gray nose of boulders. Above it was a cleft dome of rock and scrub—a high granite monument hewn in half by a slash of sky.

  “Sang Chu gorge,” Corporal Smith said. “Up that way.”

  Across the heaving land between, there was no sign of life. A spindle tracery of plant stalks grew on bald mountains. Below, out of the wind, the jungle lay in a dense mat. Cold chewed into Tyreen, gripping his joints; it whipped a lash against his exposed nose and ears. All he could hear was the rasp of the truck’s high-torque engine.

  Watching Corporal Smith, he had no clue to the Corporal’s character, but he admired a man who could maneuver a two-and-a-half-ton truck up a road meant for oxcarts. Smith’s temper seemed to alternate like a pendulum, but his square hands worked the wheel boldly.

  The broken surface of the high ground swelled and dipped away in all directions. It was all cross-canyons and earth standing on its end and spires thrusting up as though poked through ragged holes in the undulating quilt of the heavy rain forest. He saw no room for a town or a railroad. If the Sang Chu flowed down out of the high gorge, then it had to be hidden under the forest canopy, arched over by treetops and never touched by the sun.

  The road went down into the forest. Corporal Smith’s eyes strained into the troughs ahead. Roots of jungle trees writhed above the ground, thicker than a man. Fungus and slime crawled onto the road. Gibbons moved through the branches, vague flickering shadows against a violet ceiling. Tyreen had parachuted into Burma in 1945, and it reminded him of that. He lighted a cigarette and sat with it uptilted between his teeth. His eyes slid shut, and he had a fractured moment of unconsciousness; then the truck jolted him, and he almost bit through the cigarette. Its inch of ash spilled on his pants. He chewed the end off and spat it out.

  Corporal Smith said, “I used to race jalopies when I was a kid.”

  “How old are you, Corporal?”

  “Twenty-four, sir. Going on a twenty-fourth of my life I been in this stinking jungle.”

  “Where do you hail from?”

  “Albuquerque.” A rock in the road made the truck jump. Tyreen threw out the butt of his cigarette. Smith said, “I used to think driving was fun. Used to race jalopies around like the sun was going down and never going to come up again. But no fun in this. No speed, you know?”

  “Speed enough.” Tyreen coughed and said, “The speed of death,” and then laughed at himself.

  Smith said, “What, sir?”

  “Nothing.”

  The road ran up a sudden pitch and flopped over a bald crest and for that instant, hanging suspended with a drop before them so steep that Tyreen could not see the road for the hood, he had a fleeting picture of glittering tracks in a valley, rails worn smooth by hard use. The image came to him through a notch in the mountains; it disappeared as soon as the road left the summit. They dropped into a narrow passage walled by rock. Uneven turns volleyed the truck back and forth; it jounced on its stiff springs. They curled once more into the jungle on a flat basin floor with the big engine sawing like a giant grinder. Rocks popped, crushing audibly under the tires. The wind here was not quite so cold or so cutting. The rising sun made a faint luminescence in the clouds, visible now and then through holes in the treetops.

  “Colonel,” said Corporal Smith.

  “What?”

  “You got one of those poison things in your tooth?”

  Tyreen said, “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Captain Kreizler had one. I don’t see how a man could do that. Swallowing poison on purpose, I mean. You get to thinking a lot about dying and things like that. I figured for a while maybe I had some kind of charm—some lucky piece like maybe a rabbit’s foot or something. Been up here a year and never even got scratched yet. Last night, the whole outfit got wiped out. But not me. I figure I’m due for rotation any time now, and every day I get scared a little more.
I want to get back to my wife. She’s in Albuquerque, my wife. Went back there when they sent me to Fort Bragg. Year and a half ago, that was. She’s a sweet kid, my wife.”

  Tyreen thought there was something strange about the way Smith’s talky spells switched on and off as if they were connected to a time clock.

  For a while neither man spoke. They drove into a mossy obscurity of rot and tangles. It startled Tyreen when Corporal Smith blurted:

  “Colonel, I got something to say.”

  “All right, go ahead.”

  “I wasn’t just lucky last night.” Smith licked a corner of his mouth. “I took a dive. I stayed in the brush until the shooting quit. I didn’t move. I was just laying there, crying. I was crying, sir. I heard them shooting the boys up. I kept my eyes closed tight. I had my hands on my head. Kept crying like that. It was like somebody pushed me down flat and I just couldn’t move. I looked up a couple times and saw what was happening, but I didn’t lift a Goddamn finger.”

  He glanced swiftly at Tyreen. “I keep telling myself it wouldn’t of done nobody much good if I’d shot back at them.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have.”

  “But I don’t get paid to lie on my belly and cry.”

  Tyreen stirred up the energy to say, “You did the right thing, telling me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I doubt it will go against you. A man freezes up in combat—it happens, Corporal.”

  Smith flicked him a glance that might have been sardonic. Tyreen said, “Nothing you could have done would have made much difference.”

  “I might have got greased.”

  “We’re all lucky you didn’t.”

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Smith said. He was watching the dark corridor of the road. His mind had receded, and he did not speak again.

  You fought, Tyreen thought. You fought; you ran; you killed. Now and then you laughed. Finally, if you were not killed, you endured.

  Chapter Eighteen

  0845 Hours

  J. D. HOOKER kept staring at Saville. Hooker’s little eyes glowed in their sockets. The truck bed jounced under them; the two Vietnamese sergeants rode at the corners of the tailgate, watching the track unroll behind. The bullet-shredded tarpaulin flapped at both sides.

  Hooker said, “You never liked me much, right, Captain?”

  “I never thought much about it, Hooker.”

  “You’re a liar. You’ve always hated my guts.”

  Saville said, “This time, I didn’t hear that, Sergeant. Next time will be the last. Just as sure as there’s a hole in your ass. Do you tune me in loud and clear, soldier?”

  Hooker held up both hands with the fingers splayed. “That’s how short I am, Captain. You can count the days on your fingers. So why’d you have to go and pick me for this dirty job?”

  “Sergeant, it’s not your business to question me. I get paid to earn the difference between your pay and mine.”

  The jungle jolted past the open endgate; the hard floor rebounded against their bodies, and there was no position in which a man could avoid punishment. Saville looked at the two Vietnamese, and he did not like the knuckle-white grasp of Nhu Van Sun’s fists on the submachine gun. Saville watched the dark jungle and remembered the rains on Guadalcanal and a battalion that had expended forty-eight hours, a hundred lives, and a shipload of ammunition to capture sixty yards of jungle from the Japanese. He wondered who owned that strip of ground now.

  Twenty years ago, he had been positive about everything. He had known right from wrong.

  J. D. Hooker had a hand clasped on the combat harness where he had torn off a grenade. Hooker said, “Captain, this Goddamn puking Army ever do anything for you? Never give me nothing but trouble. Like you, come at me from behind, last night. Got me when I wasn’t looking. I’d been looking at you, Captain, you’d be back in that alley right now, and I’d be drinking my beer. You was lucky. Just lucky.”

  “No,” Saville said. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so damned proud of myself if I was you, Captain.”

  “Maybe you would. If you were me.”

  Hooker grinned unpredictably. “Could be,” he said. “Can’t fool a man like you, Captain. You’re good, and you know you’re good. Maybe I couldn’t have licked you—front or back.”

  Settling the issue seemed to satisfy Hooker; he became more placid. Hooker was a competitor. He believed only in the survival of the fittest; he was wholly incapable of friendship.

  Hooker’s expression of respect did not gratify Theodore Saville, but it made him feel less uneasy. He said, “You just start using your head right, Sergeant, and you’ll get through this job. But pull another stunt like what you did with that grenade, and the Colonel and I will feed you to the dogs.”

  “Okay,” Hooker said mildly. He had a rasping, penetrating voice, as if his larynx were scraped raw. He said, “I ain’t anxious to make no down payment on a six-by-two ranch. Listen, Captain, what about the old man up front? What’s he doing along? He’s going to be a Goddamn drag on us.”

  Saville said, “The day you can keep up with Colonel Tyreen will be a pretty good day in your book, Sergeant.”

  “Come off it, Captain. I seen the way he sweats. I seen malaria before. Had it, once. Took six months to clear it out of me in the evacuation hospital. And I didn’t have it near as bad as the Colonel. Sometime today, sometime tomorrow, he’s going to drop down and not get up again. Then what do we do?”

  “I wouldn’t waste too much time worrying about the Colonel,” Saville said.

  “Begging the Captain’s pardon. But I know what I see.”

  Saville’s mouth was tight and straight. Presently he said, “The Colonel made the death march on Bataan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They put him on a freighter with sixteen hundred POWs. It was headed for Japan. The Japs didn’t give them any food or anything to drink. They drank each other’s urine.”

  “Jesus,” said J. D. Hooker.

  “Our own planes bombed the ship and killed a few hundred of our men. The Colonel survived that, too. He swam ashore, and the Japs picked them up again. They put them on boxcars and rode them down to another freighter and threw them in the hold. That time they got as far as Formosa before our planes bombed them. It killed another hundred men or so. The Colonel lived through that. He got away from the wrecked boat and drifted in a lifeboat with three other officers. They were on the ocean three days before the Navy picked them up. The Colonel was down to eighty-five pounds. I wonder if you could live through anything like that, Sergeant?”

  Hooker said, “That was twenty years ago. Twenty-three years.”

  “It takes more than arithmetic to make a man tough. You can pick your own horse, Sergeant, but my money’s on Colonel Tyreen.”

  Hooker nodded, thinking about it. “He got a wife, the Colonel?”

  “He did have.”

  “Me too. My wife bugged out on me. Run off with a Goddamn Marine. Just like my old lady—she had it for gyrenes, too. My old lady was quite a bitch. So the Colonel’s lady bugged out, hey?”

  “Shut up, Hooker.”

  Hooker sliced his hand sideways as if making a quick sweeping judo chop. “Maybe if he had a wife to go back to, he might not be so puking anxious to get us all killed.”

  Saville said, “If you want to stay alive, Sergeant, you’d better forget that. If there’s one man who can get you out of here and home free, it’s the Colonel.”

  “I don’t need no Boy Scout’s help to get across the street. I look out for myself first. I figure everybody else does the same. The Colonel’s about to have enough trouble looking after his own hide.”

  Hooker looked aft. He leaned forward confidentially. “And the same for you and me, Captain. Them two gooks back there. You understand what I mean, sir? Strike you funny, don’t it, the way that machine gun got jammed so handy? And the way that other gook was shooting, it seemed like he was trying on purpose to miss. Sir, seems to me
we got trouble—up to here. We don’t need no more help from them gooks. Captain, if I was—”

  “You’re not,” Saville barked softly. “Hooker, it’s one of a sergeant’s duties to keep his stupid opinions to himself.”

  “Since when did Moses trot out an Eleventh Commandment?” J. D. Hooker demanded. “Captain, think about this—how many Vietnamese you know you can trust?”

  Saville said, “You’re up as of right now for a Company Court, Sergeant. And a few more remarks will get you a Summary Court Martial. Clear?”

  Hooker did not answer. But his eyes shifted toward the two Vietnamese, and his righteous expression made his thinking obvious. Saville thought, a jackass with chevrons was still a jackass. He growled in his throat. “Just keep your Goddamn mouth shut, Sergeant.”

  Hooker sat like a Buddha, his eyes like a pair of black olives. Khang and Sun guarded the open endgate, their profiles as complementary as Greek masks: Khang’s mouth was upturned with defensive dry humor, and Sun’s mouth curved down.

  The truck jammed to a halt. It upset Saville, jarred him; it brought him up on one knee, scooping up his weapon. He moved his agile bulk toward the back of the truck, glimpsing Sergeant Sun’s alert stare and the bright flash of Khang’s excited, strained grin. Hooker grumbled something behind him. Saville vaulted the tailgate and dropped to a crouch behind the truck, sweeping the jungle with sharp inspection; he braced the submachine gun stock inside the crook of his elbow, and his finger whitened on the trigger.

  Boots trotted alongside the truck. He heard David Tyreen’s calm, practical voice: “Heads up, now.”

  Tyreen wheeled around beside him. “Roadblock about four hundred yards ahead.”

  “Where are we?”

  “About two miles short of the bridge. Sergeant Khang!”

  “Right, sir.” Khang dropped to the ground.

  “Take the jack up front and jack up the front axle. Pretend you’re changing the left-hand tire.”

  Khang crouched under the truck to unhook the axle-jack. Tyreen said to Saville, “They’ve seen us from the roadblock. Changing a tire ought to keep them from getting too suspicious. Theodore, you take Corporal Smith and work your way up to the roadblock. Set yourselves to jump them. Knives and garrotes—we’re too close to the bridge for noise. I’ll give you five minutes to post yourselves. Then we’ll drive up to the roadblock. When we’ve got their attention, jump them.”