A matter of time

24 December 1967

"Shit, Mike," said Caldwell. "They're making an early start this week."

"Eh?" Cash glanced up as Snake lowered himself painfully from the crack in the barracks wall. Dawn shoved a broken finger inside.

"Bashful’s making his rounds. Got the colonel, Captain Richards, and Commander Wainwright already."

"Shit." Cash tried to shrink into his pallet, to twist himself into a fetal ball too tiny to be found. His turn would be coming up again soon. He had stopped hurting. Except around the hunger knot in his stomach.

"Going to be a big show. Dopey, Doc, and Sleepy are with him."

Michael shuddered. "I can't take much more, Snake." The polite, smiling, nameless little brown men never let up. They looked like comic opera or movie gooks in their baggy uniforms, carrying their antique rifles, but their humorousness ended in interrogation. "What the hell do they want?"

Any military information they possessed was far out of date. And any forced confessions to imaginary war crimes would be believed by no one.

"It don't make sense, Snake."

"Shut up, you guys," Koester growled from his pallet. "And for Christ's sake quit whining, Cash."

He was getting a reputation for that, and for malingering. But what could he do?

"They're just trying to get even," said Cantrell. His eyes were questioning as they rose to meet Michael's.

Did he suspect?

Michael had just about decided to cooperate.

The door creaked inward. Bashful made a black silhouette against the pale light. "Caldwell. Cash. Koester. DeLosSantos Zachary." He needed to say no more. The prisoners knew the drill.

The dwarves had collected twenty-three men already, including all the senior officers.

"Big party," Cantrell observed, as he and Michael fell in at the rear of the column of twos. Dopey made a threatening gesture with his bayonet. "Stick it where the moss don't grow, asshole." Snake said it like, "Good to see you again." Bashful was the only dwarf who spoke any English. "Hey, group, what say we have a little Bridge music?" He began whistling,

Michael turtled his chin down into his filthy collar. Snake just wouldn't learn.

Captain Richards quickly took up the tune, and the other navy flyers followed his example. Bashful's shoulders tightened, but he didn't turn around. He couldn't club them all. Not right now. Soon even Michael was whistling.

"Sesu Hayakawa he ain't," said Snake when the party, swollen to forty of the camp's eighty-plus inmates, halted before a strange, bespectacled little man. The commandant hung around him like a nervous puppy anxious to please.

"A Chink," said Cantrell. "And a wheel. Maybe if I kiss his ass, he'll get me a guitar. Or let me have the harmonica back."

The drill resembled an inspection. Spectacles passed through the ranks. The commandant and a translator followed, playing Pete and Repeat before each prisoner. The dwarf called Grumpy hung around with a stack of file folders, some of which Spectacles inquired into when examining lower grade officers and enlisted men. In most cases he just grunted what seemed to be Chinese for yes or no.

Once he finished, Bashful called names. There were fifteen. Michael Cash was the fourteenth.

"Shit. What the fuck? Snake…"

"Just hang tough, Mike. It'll be all right."

"I'm scared shitless, Snake." He eyed the battered Russian-made bus coughing toward them.

"Probably just a working party. Fix a road or power station the airedales blew away. You better move out. The dwarves are getting restless."

Bashful reassembled those who had made the cut and herded them aboard the bus.

Four men in regular North Viet officer's uniforms, with AK47s, watched over them. None, apparently, spoke English. They didn't try to control the murmuring of their charges.

It had to be something new, something special. This was the first time Cash had been taken anywhere without having to walk.

The journey north had nearly killed him. He still hadn't recovered completely.

The bus rumbled through hills, jungles, and paddies for two hours, till it reached a deserted airstrip. Four MiG 21s lurked beneath camouflage netting at one end; two SAM sites and several AA positions could be discerned. Base personnel were remarkable primarily by their absence. ' Spectacles had arrived already. He stood at the foot of a ramp leading to the passenger section of an old Ilyushin with Chinese markings. The four officers shepherded the prisoners into the aircraft. Spectacles took the weapon from one officer while he and the bus driver pulled the cabin hatch shut.

The ship's engines roared.

The confused Americans sought seats. No one said a thing. Their guards took predetermined posts and, one by one, exchanged their Viet tunics for Chinese.

The Ilyushin grumbled and shuddered down the runway, staggered into the morning sky. One engine coughed and sputtered uncertainly at times. Loose rivets rattled. There were places where Cash could look through cracks in its skin.

Michael felt a brief moment of hope when navy F4s slid in on the quarters to see who had the balls to fly their sky in broad daylight. The Chinese pilot just kept heading for the border. Navy eyeballed the plane's markings, then departed in search of prey on the politicians' approved list.

The Ilyushin was old and slow. The flight, including a fuel stop at another deserted airstrip, took sixteen hours. The thoughtful Chinese had provided a bucket which, when the pressure became unbearable, had to be used in full view of all aboard. There were no meals.

Cash missed Snake. They all could use a little of his irrepressible defiance here.

It was deep night when the aircraft reached its destination. The pilot did not kill his engines, remained on the ground only long enough to discharge his cargo. The passengers never saw him, nor he them.

"Merry Christmas," Captain Richards told each man as he descended into the chill air of an apparent desert. The pilots and navigators studied the skies as if seeking a guiding star.

Michael Cash was too frightened to give a damn what day it was, or where he had been taken.

XV. On the Y Axis;