Tyreen got up. He made a low whistle, and J. D. Hooker’s head swiveled around inquiringly. Hooker nodded and picked himself up and walked forward. Tyreen reached for his pack. His submachine gun lay on the ground. Saville said, “I’ll carry the pack.”
“I’ll lug it awhile.”
He picked up the pack and got one arm into the harness, and then Kreizler was rolling over, grabbing up the submachine gun. He lurched to his feet and hobbled across the trail with his legs apart; Tyreen dropped the pack and swung toward him. Kreizler’s gun swayed toward J. D. Hooker, and Kreizler started to talk very fast, not making any sense. His finger whitened on the trigger, and he sprayed bullets into the ground. Their geyser-tracks marched toward Hooker’s feet and Hooker, roaring with rage, whipped his chopper up. There was a tearing blast of submachine gun fire. It lifted Kreizler off his feet and slammed him back against the trees. He fell down with his mouth open.
“Jesus,” J. D. Hooker said in fascination.
Saville ran across the path and took Kreizler’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. Tyreen knelt beside him. Saville said, “Dead. He went right out of his head.”
“No,” said Tyreen. “He did it deliberately. He had it in his head the minute we set him down.”
Hooker came over, slinging his gun. He crouched by Kreizler in disbelief. “What the puke did he do that for, Colonel?”
Tyreen told him, “Captain Kreizler figured he’d slow us down and make our job tougher. He knew we wouldn’t kill him or leave him behind.”
Hooker said, “And he took this way out? Jesus. What an ugly Goddamn way to die.”
“Tell me a pretty way,” Theodore Saville said, and turned his face away.
Hooker got up and moved down the trail like a sleepwalker. Saville said in a low tone, “That’s not why he killed himself, and you know it.”
“Maybe,” Tyreen said. “We’ll never be sure. But the story I gave Hooker is the story we stick by.”
Saville said, “I thought I had you filed. But I guess you never know about a man.”
“We’ll bury him and get out of here. That noise will bring a patrol this way.”
Saville’s face was heavy. Tyreen took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook it out. “Smoke, Theodore?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
Tyreen said, “Smoking’s a bad thing. It can make a man sick to his stomach.”
After a while Saville said, “I guess I will have that cigarette.”
Chapter Forty-four
0915 Hours
DRY cigarette smoke burned McKuen’s throat raw, and he crushed the cigarette out and stood with his attention on the corpse at his feet.
The dead soldier lay on the trail, decapitated, his head between his legs.
Montagnard work, McKuen supposed. He drew a line in the earth with his dragging bootheel. When he took off his hat, the small wind roughed up his hair. He went away, pushing through a brier thicket. His clothes were shredded. When he rubbed his dry lips he felt them crack. For a little while he sat down in the mud and thought, I feel like a bloke in a cataleptic trance. He had developed somewhere the ability to seal himself off from brutality. He felt so accustomed to death that it no longer reached him.
He had come across an open pit by the river bank. A gibbon had crashed through the camouflaged matting and impaled itself on pungi stakes in the pit. It had seemed alive—breathing, but unconscious. There had been no point in rescuing it, because the pungi stakes would be poisoned with tetanus-infected dung, but McKuen had spent a long time lifting the monkey out of the pit. It had not stirred. He had left it by the river bank, where it could reach water.
Now he jerked his chin up. Was I asleep? He backed away from the river and found an opening in the jungle. A slight sound bothered him, and he stopped. It sounded like a car. It was coming definitely toward him. He stood carrying his gun with his lean shoulders pulled together. After a moment he walked away from the river. He moved into a shaft of sunlight and glanced up, and thought, Anyway it’s still morning. His eyes were close-lidded.
He found the road, a green-brown stripe running between walls of heavy rain forest. Deep shadows made a corridor of it. He put his shoulder to a tree, numbed but alerted, and heard the spurt of engine backfires as the nearing vehicle rolled down a slope. He raised his eyebrows and melted back into the jungle. The rumble of wheels grew louder, the scrape of dusty brakes. The nose of a jeep crawled into sight up the road. A swirl of risen moisture hovered around it. McKuen watched through shadow-pearled branches. The shadows seemed to move, converging against him. The jeep went into sunlight, and its windshield was a rectangle of blinding white. Settling spray made a thin, brown mist. A puff of cigarette smoke issued from the jeep window and fled in thin streaks. McKuen closed his fingers tight around the gun.
“Kicks,” he said.
Foliage rattled when he moved. He wanted that jeep. His feet were blistered, his legs were tired. The jeep engine grew louder, picking up revolutions on the flats with a grating noise. Twigs reported the crush of tires. McKuen lifted his gun and waited by the edge of the road.
Chapter Forty-five
0945 Hours
ON a sunbaked shelf of yellow rock, Tyreen lay prone with glare narrowing his eyes. Theodore Saville’s basso profundo rumbled softly across the rock:
“It sounds like a jeep.”
J. D. Hooker said, “I don’t see any road down there.”
And Sergeant Khang answered him. “That’s the road they use to reach the bridge garrison. It keeps pretty close to the river.”
The breeze had died. Heat swelled along the rock face. Tyreen studied the jungle treetops with heightened perception that made every object sharp-edged and clearly splashed with color. A stray idea began to cross his mind. It was cut off abruptly by the rattle of a submachine gun and the answer of two or three rifles, not far below in the rain forest.
The jeep had stopped moving. Hooker said, “What now, for Christ’s sake?”
Saville said, “It’s none of our business.”
“Maybe,” Tyreen said. “But it sounds like two or three against one.”
“Some stupid Yard,” said Hooker. “They’ve probably got him by now.”
“If they had him,” Tyreen said, “they wouldn’t be making so much noise.”
A soldier ran into sight forty yards below, stood irresolutely for an instant, and broke into a run with his bayoneted rifle at the ready position. Theodore Saville lifted his chopper and fired a three-second burst. The soldier dropped. Tyreen’s eyes whipped around to Saville’s, and in that moment of interlocked glances they made a wordless decision and scrambled off the rock, running down into the rain forest. Hooker ran after them—after the promise of action—and Khang followed Hooker.
Tyreen stopped by the dead soldier. He heard nothing until a single gunshot sounded, a thinned report through the trees. Tyreen turned around in time to see Hooker, cursing over his submachine gun; it would not fire. Tyreen could not see Hooker’s intended target. A rifle opened up, out of sight; the echoes of its shots rolled through the jungle. Hooker picked up the dead man’s bayoneted rifle and swung back into the trees. Tyreen saw him lift his arm and hurl the rifle like a spear.
Tyreen moved forward, his chopper lifted halfway to the shoulder. He passed a tree and saw Hooker bending over something; Hooker’s knife rose and fell. Someone called out. Tyreen’s attention whipped through the forest, and he saw George McKuen standing splay-footed, arched over his submachine gun. The gun made a racket and quieted down. Tyreen ran through the undergrowth. He saw a boyish grin cut across McKuen’s red-stubbled cheeks. McKuen’s bright flash of hair stood out in wild disorder.
The first thing McKuen said was, “There’s three of them. I killed one.”
“Then they’re all taken out.”
McKuen’s shoulders sagged. “Colonel, you looked like the cavalry coming over the hill.”
“What in blazes are you doing down here?”
; “Trying to steal a jeep,” McKuen said. He sat down uncertainly and apologized: “I’m a little tired.”
“Where’s Shannon?”
“He didn’t make it.” McKuen worked his boot around on his foot. “Feet are fine for propping on furniture and pushing pedals, Colonel, but one thing they’re bloody well not made for, and that’s walking.” He shook his head and blinked. “I suppose it wouldn’t be fittin’ for me to ask where you people came from?”
“Lieutenant,” Tyreen said, “I’d explain it to you if I thought I’d believe it myself.”
He was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. He watched the others come up—Saville and Sergeant Khang and, finally, Hooker cursing in a lackluster monotone and trying to clear a dented cartridge out of his submachine gun.
Saville started talking to McKuen. Tyreen walked away and stopped Sergeant Khang. “Does that road go by the water station on the railroad?”
“Yes, sir. Two, three miles back.”
“Find out if that jeep’s still working.”
McKuen was speaking loudly to Saville: “I want to resign, Captain. I want to quit.”
Looking pleased, Saville said, “Sure, George. Just wait a minute, and I’ll call you a taxi.”
It was the first time in a long time that Tyreen had seen Saville smile.
Chapter Forty-six
1015 Hours
THE water tank was a solitary structure in the rain forest, deserted and silent. They got out of the jeep, and Sergeant Khang was complaining: “Maybe it worked for us once, Colonel, but that kind of stunt can’t work twice in a row. We’ll get our pants shot off.”
The tracks came out of the jungle, passed the tall water tower, and plunged back into timber and undergrowth. The river lapped its banks. A tiny wooden dock jutted out into the water.
Tyreen told Khang, “Loosen some wires under the hood, in case they want to check your story.”
The jeep stood beside the tracks. Khang threw up his hands. “Colonel, I’ve known since we left Saigon that you were out of your gourd. But I’m still alive, playing it your way. So whatever you say, sir.”
Tyreen said, “There ought to be a freight along soon. Hooker …?”
Hooker put his ear to the track and got up shaking his head. George McKuen, a disheveled scarecrow in tattered cloth and bandages, sat on the front fender. Saville gave him a package of rations, and McKuen attacked the food like a drug addict snatching an overdue fix. But other than hunger he revealed all the feelings of a cement slab. Tyreen’s lips pushed out and down, keeping time. He took note of the lifelessness of McKuen’s expression. Don’t think about it, he thought. There was too much to think about. He pictured Nhu Van Sun and Corporal Smith and Warrant Officer Shannon and the delicate features of Lin Thao. And the echoes of Captain Eddie Kreizler’s talk kept banging around. Who do you think you are—General Robert E. Lee?
He realized that McKuen was talking to him:
“… have to fill it in a little slow for us country boys, Colonel, but do we by any chance have the wherewithal to be extractin’ ourselves from this bloody hinterland?”
Saville answered the question. “We got our orders this morning by radio. Blow the bridge and get down the river. A submarine from the Seventh Fleet will pick us up at midnight at the mouth of the Sang Chu.”
“Blow the bridge,” McKuen said, “and travel forty miles of jungle river. In—what?—twelve hours, maybe? Thirteen hours? Captain, I could conceivably be wrong, but nobody here looks like Tarzan to me.” He considered it. “Still and all, I’m thinkin’ if we don’t get there by midnight, we won’t get there at all. Am I right, gentlemen?”
No one troubled to answer him. McKuen nodded as if to confirm his estimate.
Tyreen said, “There may be a flatcar back near the tail of the train with an antiaircraft crew. Theodore, that’s your job. Sergeant Hooker, you’ll have about eighteen minutes to set your charges on the engine. And remember this: a nearmiss counts in a game of horseshoes, but not up here. Use a sixty-second fuse, and don’t light it until you get my signal. As soon as the fuse is lit, we leave the train. Sergeant Khang and I will keep the engine crew occupied. Any questions?”
McKuen said, “What about me?”
“You’re just along for the ride, Lieutenant.”
“That’ll be bloody refreshing for a change.”
But McKuen’s eyes were bloodshot, and his tone was dull, and the slack attitude of his body belied the good humor of his words.
Tyreen nodded to the others and crossed the tracks. He took a post, hidden in a thicket of bamboo, and waited for the others to join him. “Relax. Smoke if you want. Hooker, check your equipment.”
George McKuen’s sudden grin was a spasm of clenched teeth and drawn lips. “This time,” he said, “I’ll see that bridge smashed to bloody hell, or know the reason why.”
Chapter Forty-seven
1050 Hours
THE train reached its sliding halt with a sigh of brake shoes. Smoke chuffed from the engine stack, and Tyreen saw the inscription on one slat-sided boxcar: Hommes 52-56, Chevaux 12. The train curved away into the jungle; its rear end was out of sight. Faintly, over exhalations of steam, Tyreen heard Sergeant Khang on the far side of the train talking to the engineer. The engineer and the fireman and the armed guard all crowded over to the far side of the engine to talk to Khang. Tyreen made a brief hand signal and stepped out of the bamboo.
He crossed the five-yard distance with rapid strides and followed Saville up into the engine cab. Saville had his gun braced on his hip. The tone of Khang’s voice changed, and the engine guard stiffened. Saville spoke calmly in Vietnamese and reached around to relieve the guard of his weapon.
Hooker and McKuen climbed up. Sergeant Khang looked both ways along the track and swung up. He said, “Take on water and proceed. We are not here. You understand?” He was talking to the engine driver.
The engineer was a middle-aged man with watery eyes and sloping chin. He blinked rapidly. His face was whipped red by wind. Tyreen’s gun muzzle lifted to cover the crew. The fireman was a hard chunk of a man with a keen, violent temper mirrored in his face. George McKuen said, “I’m thinking we’ll be doing our own coal-shoveling before this ride’s over, Colonel.”
“Watch him,” Tyreen agreed.
J. D. Hooker crouched down to lay out his equipment. Tyreen braced himself on the tender platform, giving Hooker room to work. Tyreen said, “All right, Theodore.”
Saville dropped off the engine and trotted back alongside the train. Sergeant Khang tied the sentry with his own belt and bootlaces. The man spoke bitterly.
The fireman rammed his shovel into the tender’s coal with a blow that could sever a man’s body. Sergeant Khang spoke a mild command; the engineer reached for his throttle. His tongue licked out rapidly.
Air brakes wheezed, and the big wheels spun before they took a grip on the tracks. The engine ground forward. Back half the length of the train, Theodore Saville reached for a boxcar ladder and swung up as the car rolled past. Saville swarmed up to the top of the car and ran back along the swaying catwalks. Tyreen lost sight of him around the curve in the track.
McKuen said, “The good Captain’s one landmark I didn’t expect to raise again. What happens if he has to fight a duel with an antiaircraft gun?”
Hooker made a pattern of tamping jelly, explosive blocks, wires and fuses and caps. Sergeant Khang bent down and rolled the trussed guard off the train. The guard’s angry shouting followed them. Wheel-trucks chattered on the rails. A red blaze glared in the open firebox, shining on Hooker’s face. Like a young spider, he seemed to thrive on the oppressive heat. The roadbed traveled a soggy, uneven course through jungle corridors. The engineer clutched his throttle; his eyes drained, and he stared petulantly straight ahead past the boiler.
A demolition cap rolled with the motion of the engine, and Hooker made a grab for it. The fireman’s quick eyes did not miss that; his powerful grip tightened on th
e coal spade. Iron wheels drummed on rail-splices, gathering speed. Tyreen spoke to Nguyen Khang: “Tell him to keep his speed down.”
Khang yelled in the engineer’s ear. The engineer answered quickly, resentfully. Khang stepped back and bellowed above the noise: “He says we got to have speed to make it up the grade.”
“All right. Hooker?”
“I’ll get it done,” said Hooker without looking up.
“Shape your charge to direct the force straight down. We want to blow the bridge, not the roof of the engine.”
“By God, don’t you think I know that much?”
Hooker worked on his knees with professional deliberation. When the fireman’s full shovel of coal passed by his face, Hooker hardly blinked; his concentration was complete.
The train made a thirty-five-mile clip. Branches sprang off the cab. Tyreen could see the engine’s weight depressing the ties on their soft bedding. The shoulders of the lower gorge rolled toward them, and the tracks swung away from the river and started their turn into the upgrade. The heavy smell of the jungle developed a sting from the added bite of coal smoke and intense dry heat. There was one length of straight track, curving upward in a bow. When Tyreen searched the length of the train, he found no sign of Saville.
McKuen said, “I don’t see any antiaircraft car.”
“Maybe.”
“Could be the beggars haven’t got enough of them to go around. Anyhow, we can always hope.”
Tyreen’s hope was that a low-hanging limb had not swept Saville off the train. The firebox guttered raw scarlet light across the cab. The train clicked along; the engine, fighting a stiffening grade, began to lose speed. Couplings crackled in brittle strain. Tyreen shifted his weary grip on the gun. “Four or five minutes, Hooker.”
The fireman rammed his shovel into the tender. His tongue licked a thin line across his soot-dark lips. Tyreen turned his attention momentarily to the engineer. That was when the fireman turned with a full shovel of coal and sprang catlike at J. D. Hooker. Hooker somehow felt the threat; he pulled up a shoulder and launched himself forward under the swing of the shovel. Before Tyreen could move, Hooker’s head butted the fireman’s belly and the fireman sailed back. The shovel dropped loosely across Hooker’s back. The fireman dropped out of the cab and kept himself on board only by the precarious grip of one hand against the handrail. Sergeant Khang whipped around; McKuen lifted his gun. Tyreen, who was closest, deliberately stepped in front of McKuen’s gun. For one moment he locked glances with the fireman. The fireman shouted at him. Tyreen slammed the side of his gun barrel savagely against the fireman’s knuckles. It broke the fireman’s hold. He fell away backwards. His cry was brief; he plunged down the embankment, striking on one shoulder. His head rolled loosely. He rolled to the bottom, and his shape receded along the train.
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