The Last Bridge

by Brian Garfield

  “Thank you.”

  “Be careful, please.”

  He hid the match against his chest and blew it out, and cupped the glowing end of the cigarette in his hand. He coughed. “Where did you get this?”

  “From a dead soldier.”

  “They must make these things out of Ho Chi Minh’s socks.”

  She did not laugh. “You are a brave man. Like my brother.”

  “You’re thinking he died for his bravery.”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  “You’re as brave as he was.”

  “I must finish his work,” she said.

  “Only because you’re brave.”

  “It is not the same. I did not wish this. I do not like it. I would like a house and a husband who is a farmer. And no guns.”

  “That’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t it?”

  “It does not seem right,” she said, “that the strong should fight for the weak. If the strong die in the fight, it is so much more that we lose than if the weak die. My brother was strong, like you—but it only meant that he was so much more likely to die.”

  “Everybody dies.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  He said, “I don’t know the answer to your question, Lin Thao. Maybe things can be better than they are. We fight because we don’t want our children to have to fight.”

  “For some men that is the reason,” she said. “But not for you, Colonel.”

  He murmured, “Your eyes see a lot, don’t they?”

  “I see your pride, Colonel. It is the same with my brother, and with my cousin who was a Vietcong. He was killed in the south. The cause means nothing. It is pride.”

  “Maybe a little more than that. A little better than that.”

  “I shall hope for that,” she said.

  He pulled her forward and kissed her with no excuse and no apology.

  She said, “We are both afraid, then.”

  He thought, In case of accident or death, notify … whom? He said, “We’re a little lonely. At least I am.”

  The girl turned her face against his chest. Her voice came up to him muffled against the cloth of his blanket. “All the men I have loved are dead. It is good that you do not stay here. Perhaps I would love you.”

  “That isn’t what killed them.”

  He felt the even rise and fall of her breathing. He did not understand her mystical notions. She made no sense to him; he did not know her. He said angrily, “Do you really think you’re a jinx?”

  “A what?”

  “The kiss of death. Do you believe your love killed your brother and your cousin and anybody else?”

  “Of course I do not,” she said mildly. She added nothing to it.

  He wondered what she would look like in a clean high-collared ao-dai. Through her shapeless clothes her body felt taut and hard. She said, “Tomorrow I will take you to the bridge, if that is what you wish.”

  “It’s better for you to stay with your people.”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “We owe you a great deal. There aren’t words to thank you.”

  “You have just spoken them,” she said. She uncoiled and got up. Her arm lifted. “That way, you must go over the mountain. When you reach the far side, you will see across the valley to the river Sang Chu and the mountain of the railroad bridge. If you walk slowly, you will need six hours to reach it. There will be many soldiers on the way, and after you reach the bottom of the mountain you must be careful of land mines and traps.”

  He stood up. She said, “We are not so very different, you and I. I have many regrets, Colonel. Just now, one most of all.” She gave him a brief smile. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Lin Thao.”

  She walked across the clearing. She would reach her village before dawn. He watched her until she disappeared.

  He went into the cave and felt his way to the radio kit and took it outside; he read his code book by the glow of his cigarette. He used a telegraph key to transcribe his message onto a miniature tape recorder. After five minutes’ work he attached the recorder to a radio transmitter, connected its batteries, and set a small explosive charge. He took a small packet out of the kit and filled a balloon with helium from a pressure tank no bigger than a pack of cigarettes; he suspended the transmitting apparatus from the balloon and watched it soar away.

  The transmitter would broadcast its message in half an hour, with the wind taking it across the jungle valleys; at the end of the broadcast the small charge of detonating cord would explode the mechanism into a thousand pieces.

  He sat outside the mouth of the cave with his arms wrapped around his knees. The moon was moving west, and he watched the small balloon diminish into the sky.

  Chapter Forty

  0330 Hours

  MCKUEN sat in the branch of a tree and listened to the soldiers move through the rain forest. He thought, Odds are I’ll never be seein’ daylight, and he grinned. The soldiers were moving away; they had not found him. But the woods were full of them, and he knew they would be back.

  He thought he heard a noise. He held his breath, listening. No sound reached him. Flame burst in his chest; he had to breathe. He turned his head slowly. An earthy scent, dark and damp and cold, issued from the jungle. His lips pursed, and he squinted a little. Suddenly he distinguished something moving, almost directly in front of him and not far off. His breath caught in his throat. There was a dry rustle; there was a tiny metal click. McKuen pointed his service automatic at the moving shadow.

  The faintest of moonlight poked down through the treetops. A shaft glanced off the metal of a military helmet or perhaps a gun barrel. The figure moved closer.

  McKuen pulled the trigger.

  The automatic roared in his fist, knocking his hand up. It seemed louder than it should have been. It made a brief flash of light. The soldier fell down and started to crawl around. Somewhere in the distance, boots started to crash through the undergrowth. McKuen jumped down out of the tree and felt quick pain shoot up his bruised leg from the kneecap. He dragged himself over to the struggling soldier and shot the man in the face.

  He squatted frozen during a terrified span of time. The soldier died with a bubbling sound. McKuen took away the man’s submachine gun and ammunition magazines; he spun away in panic and ran blindly through the jungle. His foot caught on an exposed root: he landed belly-flat in the mud, bruising his face. His hands clawed the earth. The chopper was hard and cold, underneath him; he rolled off and got it in his grasp and peered around him with wide eyes.

  Voices called querulously back and forth across the night. McKuen rubbed the stubble along his jaw. Everywhere he looked, he thought he saw figures moving through the woods. Paralyzing fear rippled through him, gripping him by the groin. He fingered the cold submachine gun and looked around furtively. What now? Do I sit and wait and win the prize?

  “To hell with that,” he muttered. Arrogant temper pressed his lips together. He moved away from the dead man and, abruptly, a remembered deviltry sparkled in his eyes. He exhaled a fluttering gust of air. The jungle hummed with a light wind, and a wicked flame leapt in him. He stabbed his legs into the ground and broke into a wild run.

  Up and running, he wondered why he was doing this. He felt like a pinned insect. He dropped flat.

  Far to his right a rifle opened up, steadily pounding the air. He could not see its muzzle flame. It did not seem to be directed at him. He got up and ran across an open quagmire of mud and went into the trees like a racing diver. He hit flat on his chest and slid across slimy liquid; he scrambled past a tree and lay with blood pumping red in his eyes and his body heaving. The gunfire stopped. Someone was moving through the jungle, and he looked around until he thought he saw something; he trained the submachine gun on it and held the trigger back.

  The gun rocked against him, coughing, and in the blinking flashes he saw a helmeted soldier collapsing a joint at a time in little jerky moments of light like a very old silent moving-picture.
And then darkness and silence again.

  Hostile bullets broke the night up, seeking him furiously. They rattled around the jungle, cut down a branch overhead, and dropped the branch on him. He huddled with his knees drawn up against his chest, his back to a tree. The guns quieted down, dissatisfied. An insect crawled over the back of his hand. The afterglow of one muzzle’s flame remained in his vision, and he tried to remember exactly where it had been in the woods. He lifted the chopper slowly and aimed it in that direction and held it, not firing, not knowing what he was going to do until someone stepped on something that snapped. The rifle he had looked for fired. McKuen, sitting still, heard a man’s scream of pain. It echoed in his mind and he thought, They’ve killed one of their own men. He heard the scratching of slow movement and realized that the soldier was not dead, but off there bleeding. The soldier’s moan came to McKuen’s ears. He tried to put it away, but after a little while he lifted the chopper’s muzzle half an inch and pressed the trigger. He bit his tongue and swept the jungle with fire until the chopper ran out of bullets.

  Like an ejaculation, the burst of fire left him limp and uninterested. Nothing stirred. The chopper was hot under his hand; smoke bit into his nostrils. He released the magazine and replaced it. The dying soldier moaned once, and was still. McKuen became violently sick. He retched into the mud.

  Afterward he rolled away from the smell of it, but the smell came with him. He turned to his left and moved slowly through the trees. The gun was heavy, and the air chilled his sweating face. His mouth tasted terrible: dry, sticky, foul, morbid.

  He swung behind a tree and searched the dark. Impatience boosted him away. He walked around, putting an unlit cigarette between his teeth. His feet followed each other into the night. He had lost his bearings, but it did not seem to matter. His face was streaked with sweat and dirt.

  A small movement halted him. A man—or a branch stirred by wind? His damp clothes clung flat to his back. He shifted his weight. That small sound made the shadowed mass move in his vision, and he saw the fragmentary race of light along the length of a gun barrel. Curious, cautious, the other stepped forward into better light, and McKuen shot him down.

  He dropped prone and wriggled to the base of a thick tree, half submerged in mud. Three rifles and an automatic weapon were talking, all of them aimed at the spot where he had stood a moment before. That’s all of them, he thought calmly. Four men. He fired a long burst at one of the flashing rifles and the rifle went silent; McKuen rolled away from the tree and ran humpbacked through the jungle while the three remaining guns, none of them very far away, increased their fire angrily. He tripped, and felt a soft object under him. One of the men he had killed. The man carried a pair of grenades.

  McKuen tossed one of them at the chattering automatic weapon. He thought, I’ve got a Goddamn charmed life. Nothing can touch me. The grenade did not go off. He pulled the pin of the second grenade and threw it after the first.

  The explosion lit up the jungle. Something stung his ribs along the right side of his body. The automatic weapon went silent and so did one of the rifles nearby. McKuen thought, I’m hit. He saw the one remaining rifle chugging red blossoms off at an angle, not shooting toward him at all. McKuen chopped down with the submachine gun and braced it against his arm and held the trigger back, sweeping the district until all the guns but his own were dead.

  He wheezed like an engine and sat down crosslegged in the forest. His side was bleeding, cut open along a ragged scratch. Not a bullet, he thought. Not a bullet. Shrapnel from that Goddamn grenade I threw. Hoist by me own bloody petard.

  He made a bandage and lay back chewing on the unlit cigarette. That was when his hand began to shake. The tremor came slowly and grew worse. Presently his body shook. He had to lie flat. His lips jerked into a grin. “I am a bloody hero. Who’d ever believe that? A bloody war hero.”

  He stood up. “A bloody dead hero’s what I am,” he muttered. The jungle was impenetrable. It was four o’clock in the morning, and there was no light. He did not know how far he had come away from the Sang Chu gorge. He did not know which way to go. But he turned around on his heels, a full circle, and he said, “That way,” and he walked into the jungle, dragging the submachine gun by its barrel.

  Chapter Forty-one

  0400 Hours

  “TAKE ten,” Tyreen said. He put his back to a rock and slid down to sit on the damp earth. Forty yards below him the jungle began again, unrolling across the valley. He could see the mountains a dozen miles away, the upper end of the high gorge breaking starkly out of the forest.

  Saville and Hooker laid down the stretcher and Eddie Kreizler rolled his head toward Tyreen. “Magiccarpet treatment,” Kreizler said. His tone bespoke his belligerent fight against the effects of pain.

  Nguyen Khang climbed higher on the mountain to search the valley. Tyreen sat back and let his chugging lungs settle down. He swallowed a capsule and felt the small number of them left in the tin in his pocket; he allowed himself a dreary moment’s anticipation of the hours ahead. Kreizler said, “I’m hungry as hell,” and Saville found a ration for him. J. D. Hooker’s cropped head tipped forward against his chest; his flat face was dull. Across the valley the rough hat and spear contours of the heights stood against a mottled, half-broken sky, graying up in false dawn. Flows of mist filled pockets on the hills, and when Sergeant Khang came sliding down from his reconnaissance he said, “Going to warm up today, I think. Can’t see much down there.”

  Faint abrasive sounds came out of the jungle. A few birds whistled. Khang went down to the edge of the trees and disappeared in darkness. Tyreen leaned his head back and closed his eyes momentarily. The sky threw a steady growth of illumination across the landscape. Tyreen’s eyes slid open, and he found J. D. Hooker studying him. Hooker possessed an unbreakable solemnity; Tyreen could never remember seeing him laugh. Hooker’s face was the cold color of marble. He said in a half-cranky tone, “It’s getting late to be hanging around here. Sir.”

  When Tyreen said nothing, Hooker’s chin thrust forward. Always ready to pick a fight, Tyreen thought. Theodore Saville said, “You ought to pick your enemies with more care, Hooker.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t hate everybody, can you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Forget it,” said Saville. Hooker looked away incuriously. Darkness gave ground quickly, and on the eastern horizon a pale yellow band appeared and spread out, quite rapidly, along the hilltops.

  Tyreen saw Hooker’s gun muzzle move. His eyes caught a movement that disappeared in the trees and presently came in sight again. Tyreen moved his body to one side to have better control of his submachine gun. After a moment he relaxed. “All right. It’s Khang.”

  Sergeant Khang paused at that moment, on the edge of the trees, and studied the shadowed rocks with care. Tyreen’s voice crawled softly down to him: “Come on up.”

  Khang slid into the rock’s overhanging shadow with the smell of his exerted sweat pumping out. When his breathing had softened, he said, “Nobody around. There’s a trail, but I think it may be mined.”

  Violet shadows crept backward across jungle depressions, in fast-moving retreat. Tyreen shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand. The red rim of the ascending sun came over the horizon and flared against his face. He put his head back against the hard, grainy rock; his legs flopped out straight, and he lay as though collapsed. A loose tangle of memories crowded paths through his tired mind, of times and places that had nothing in common with this time and this place. He heard Kreizler murmuring to Saville about his wife back home, and he heard Saville’s grunts of reply. He thought of the few women he had known, and wondered why he had been unable to stay with any of them, or they with him. Odd thoughts, stray images—he had for one instant a clear vision of Saville on a swaying boat deck off the Korean coast, firing a semiautomatic rifle with deadly, methodical precision into the trees above a thin band of beach.

  He opened his e
yes, and the red disk of the sun was balanced on the horizon. The slanted rays turned the far mountain of the Sang Chu gorge crimson and violet. They splashed the faces of his companions with a ruddy flush, all except Kreizler’s, which lay in shadow and remained pale and strained.

  Saville moved his weight up to the rock. “David, you been giving any thought to what we do when we get there?”

  “We blow up the bridge.”

  “While two hundred People’s Soldiers twiddle their thumbs and cheer us on?”

  Tyreen drew a picture on the ground. “This is the gorge. The bridge crosses it here. On the south side there’s a big shelf, maybe a hundred yards deep and a quarter mile long. That’s where the troop barracks are. Fortifications and the rest. On the north side there’s a small guard tower. It’s all they’ve got room for. The tracks make a small turn and go into a tunnel maybe fifteen yards from the bridge. The tunnel comes out on the north side of the mountain. It’s about a third of a mile long.”

  “I know all that,” Saville said.

  “Sometimes it helps to draw a picture.”

  “Okay. What do you figure to do? Make our approach through the tunnel?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’ll be guarded. Probably machine gun emplacements at both ends—maybe more than that.”

  “Guarded against what?” Tyreen said.

  “People like us.”

  “But it’s not guarded against trains.”

  Saville’s head skewed back. “Trains?”

  Tyreen pointed at his drawing. “Tracks go up a steep grade to get to the tunnel. A train going southbound would be slowed to a crawl by the time it got near the top.”

  “And you want to play Jesse James and steal a Goddamn train.”