The Last Bridge

Chapter Sixteen 0705 Hours

“What time is it?” Tyreen asked.

Saville looked at his watch. “Five after seven.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Out in the road Sergeant Khang squatted wearily, sifting dirt and pebbles. Saville said, “I don’t know about him. Maybe it was a mistake to bring him in on this. Like trying to court a bull by waving a red blanket at him.”

“He knows the country, doesn’t he?”

“So does Corporal Smith.”

“Smith’s got a wire down in him somewhere,” said Tyreen.

“I don’t know.” Saville was not a man of words. Even pencils always seemed to break in his big hands.

A fury of sweating chills shook Tyreen. Saville, whose eyes never missed much, said, “You didn’t have to take this job, David. Nobody’d care.”

“I care.”

The drizzle kept them damp and discomfited. Wind made ripples through the elephant grass, and Tyreen peered across the road, trying to pick out Nhu Van Sun’s position, but he could not see Sergeant Sun or the machine gun emplacement. That was good; he did not want to be able to see it.

Saville said, “You ought to be back in the States taking it easy.”

“That’s what General Jaynshill thinks.”

“He cut orders on you?”

“Not yet. Next week, I imagine.”

“Uh-huh,” said Saville. “That would just about break you, wouldn’t it? A desk job, I mean. That’s what’s biting you.”

“Theodore, you talk too much. Last time I checked, you were neither my mother nor my keeper.”

Tyreen’s lips pushed rhythmically out and down. He rolled over on one shoulder to stare up the road. “What’s that?”

Sergeant Hooker was behind him. “Sounds like a jeep, sir. Maybe a three-quarter-ton truck.”

“Get back to your post, Sergeant.”

Hooker disappeared, and Saville said, “Get your ass down, David,” in a very mild tone.

Tyreen flattened out. There was a chugging up the road, an unhurried gravel-crunching, and the sound of an engine changing gears. Sergeant Khang got up on his feet and faded back into the brush. Tyreen’s face was sweat-drenched and greenish. They lay in ambush along the road, waiting for an unsuspecting enemy, ready to cut the enemy to pieces — pieces of flesh, Tyreen thought, flesh and gristle, intestines and blood, cracked bones and ripsawed organs and severed joints like butchers’ meat cuts. The mind must lock out the knowledge that enemy soldiers were men.

Tyreen said, “Wait and see if it’s a truck. Let it go by if it’s not big enough to carry the six of us.”

He cleared his submachine gun. His attention narrowed down like a cone on the far bend of the road. The ugly square snout of a truck lunged around into view. “Deuce and a half,” said Saville. “Almost too damned big. Wonder what they’re carrying?”

The truck came grinding up the road, smashing the silence to pieces. Tyreen butted the weapon to his shoulder and laid his cheek along the stock, and then lowered it and ducked his head out of view. He spoke over his shoulder in a calm voice:

“Sergeant Khang.”

“Gung ho, Colonel,” said the Vietnamese. Over the rumbling of the truck Tyreen heard Khang’s boots tramp out onto the road surface. Tyreen slid back and edged his eyes over the breastwork. Saville said, “Two soldiers in the cab.”

The truck was painted battle gray. Its coarse-mesh grille looked like bared teeth. Tires chewed up the road, and the gears shifted down loudly. A hundred feet away, the truck slowed, and a Vietminh soldier in a flat helmet stepped out on the running board with his rifle lifted in one hand. Sergeant Khang stood out in the middle of the road in his undershirt, weaponless, waving the truck down. It stopped with a dusty squeak, and the driver leaned out. Khang started talking loudly in Vietnamese. Tyreen watched the driver’s face. The second soldier got down and walked ahead ten feet to stand in front of Khang and wave the rifle at him. Khang was talking rapidly, using his hands. The soldier shook his head with exasperation and turned around and yelled at the driver; the driver climbed out of his cab, lugging a Chinese machine pistol.

That was when a hand reached out of the truck bed and pushed back the tarpulin flap. A booted leg appeared. Saville murmured in Tyreen’s ear: “Troop carrier. We’re in the soup, David. God knows how many men in there.”

The PANVN soldier climbed out of the back of the truck — a captain, by his insignia. He looked around the tail edge and said irritably, “Cha di mo? Sao!”

The driver said, “Om dau, Dai-uy.”

“Di di” the captain snapped. He marched forward and grabbed the driver by the shoulder and propelled him back toward the truck. “Di di.” The captain strode on toward Khang.

“Time to bail him out,” Tyreen murmured, and stood bolt upright, locking his submachine gun down toward the PANVN captain. Tyreen said, “Dai-uy!”

Saville stood up beside him and trained his gun on the truck. The driver stood frozen with his hand on the windshield.

The captain wheeled away from Khang. When his glance found Tyreen, his body became totally still. Tyreen spoke in Vietnamese: “Tell your men to surrender.”

For a long instant of time, the captain’s eyes bored into Tyreen’s across the thirty feet of ground separating them. Sergeant Khang turned and walked off the road into the elephant grass. A moment later there was a loud clack as Khang fed a round into the chamber of his submachine gun. The North Vietnamese captain had not spoken or stirred.

“Now!” Tyreen said.

The captain’s head revolved slowly from right to left and then, abruptly, he barked a swift command and launched himself in a swift dive away from the road.

The submachine gun bucked like a jackhammer in Tyreen’s fists. It sewed a ragged stitch of bullets across the captain’s combat jacket. The captain collapsed on the far edge of the road, and the helmeted soldier, trying to bring his rifle to bear, dropped like a plumb stone under the attack of Sergeant Khang’s weapon. Theodore Saville’s gun rattled like an electric typewriter. The driver pitched away from the truck cab, and Saville laced a neat line of holes low along the tarpaulin that covered the truck bed. There was a lot of shouting inside the truck. A large hole appeared in the tarp, smoking around its edges: someone inside was shooting blindly. Three men leaped from the tailgate with rifles, and one of them went down, shot, before he had a chance to use his weapon. The other two dived for the far side of the road, and Tyreen heard the slow thudding of a 7.62 submachine gun, probably Corporal Smith’s. Tyreen turned to add his own fire to Saville’s, raking back and forth the length of the truck bed, and over the deafening pound of it Tyreen heard Saville’s angry roar.

“Where in hell is that machine gun?”

A spray of bullets from J. D. Hooker’s position cut ugly white scars across the metal of the truck bed and back fender. Hooker appeared on the road, jerking a grenade off his combat harness, and Tyreen slapped his voice at Hooker: “Cut that out, you fool!” Hooker did not hear him; the squat-browed Sergeant started running toward the truck, bent low and weaving. Theodore Saville wheeled past Tyreen and sprinted onto the road to intercept Hooker. Tyreen covered him with a tearing blast of fire into the tarp-covered truck. A body sagged against the tarp from inside, bulging it out. Saville made a low dive at Hooker’s knees and spilled the man down. The grenade rolled out of Hooker’s fist, and its handle popped away. Saville scrambled after it, got a grip on it, and threw it overhand down the road.

Tyreen saw it arc through the air; he dived flat and covered his head with his wrists. The explosion rocked the earth. He heard fragments swish through the elephant grass. When he lifted his head, Saville had rolled under the truck and Hooker was lurching to his feet. Tyreen could hear every syllable of Hooker’s savage curses. Saville yelled once and then, holding it by the muzzle, whacked his submachine gun out against Hooker’s shins. Hooker cried out and fell down. Saville dragged him under the truck.

Tyreen had a bad moment fumbling a new magazine into his weapon. Sergeant Khang was still putting bursts of fire through the tarpaulin. There was a single ragged after-volley of 7.62 fire from the bush across the road. Someone in the truck was moaning. When Khang’s gun ran dry, there was no shooting. Tyreen trained his sights on the tailgate, but no one put a foot out. He got up and made hand signals to Saville, under the truck. Saville shoved Hooker out of his way and crawled out, got to his knees, and moved softly alongside the truck, keeping his head down below the edge of the tarp. When he got to the tailgate, he locked his grip onto the submachine gun and wheeled upright, spraying a wicked flash of fire directly into the truck, playing his muzzle back and forth across the opening in the pulled-back tarp.

Saville ducked back around the fender and crouched by the rear tire, waiting. There was no response from inside.

Impatient, Tyreen walked onto the road. Hooker was crawling out from under the truck, all tangled up with the body of the dead driver. Up the road a few yards, Sergeant Khang stepped into sight and stood with his legs apart, gun braced on his hip. Tyreen hopped across a puddle and went past Hooker and climbed into the truck cab. There was a little window in the back of it, but the tarp came down just behind the window and he could not see into the bed of the truck. He slid across the seat and got out the far side of the truck, walked back to the tailgate and flipped the corner of the tarp back with his gunbarrel. Someone made a small sound, low in the throat. There was no shooting. The acrid stench of sulphur fumes was strong in Tyreen’s nostrils.

He pulled the tarp back with his fist and walked around behind the truck, pointing his gun and his eyes into the interior. There were three soldiers on the floor. Two of them were obviously dead. The floor was awash with blood. The third man lay broken across one of the others. He had two bullet holes in his face, but he was moaning softly.

Tyreen nodded to Saville. The big man climbed up inside and toed one of the dead men. He knelt over the wounded soldier, but the man was dead when Saville touched him. He had a brief look at the third man and climbed out of the truck.

Tyreen said, “Better check on Corporal Smith and those two that dived off the road. And find out why that machine gun wasn’t firing.”

Saville went into the grass. Sergeant Khang came up and Tyreen said, “Crawl underneath and see if we put any holes in the gas tank.”

“Sure,” said the Sergeant. “Just a cakewalk, right, Colonel?” There was a reckless shine in Khang’s eyes. He slid under the back of the truck.

Hooker sat out in the road massaging his shins. Tyreen stopped by him and looked down at the man with flat, angry eyes. “If you’d thrown that grenade in there, we’d have had a wrecked truck on our hands.”

“Better’n getting killed, Colonel.”

“Next time you’ll obey orders, Sergeant, or I’ll shoot you myself. Understood?”

Hooker’s eyes climbed up Tyreen’s body to his face. He did not speak. Corporal Smith came out of the bush and said, “Anybody hurt?”

Tyreen said, “What happened to those two soldiers?”

“One of them bought it,” said Smith.

Hooker said, “I guess that does it, then.”

“The hell it does,” said Corporal Smith. “The other one got away in the bushes. I couldn’t find him.”

“He’ll be raising the alarm, then,” Tyreen said. “We’ll have to get moving.” He put his eyes, hard as iron bullets, on J. D. Hooker. “You are in trouble with me as of right now, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Khang jackknifed out from under the rear axle and stood up, brushing himself off. “No damage under there,” he said. “None that I can see, anyway.”

Tyreen walked past the truck into the bush and strode through the grass with swimming motions. Combat tension glazed his cheeks. He found Saville kneeling beside the bipod-mounted machine gun. Sergeant Sun was sitting a little way back, his eyes round and anxious. Saville said, “He says the gun wouldn’t fire. I’m trying to find out what fouled up.” He was pulling the mechanism apart.

“Forget it,” Tyreen said. “One of them got away. They’ll have an alarm out within an hour or two. Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute.” Saville lifted the trigger mechanism and turned it over in his big hands. “Firing pin bent all out of shape. That’s what hung it up.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Not right away. Not without tools.”

“Then leave the thing here,” Tyreen said. “Let’s go.”

When they reached the road, Khang and Smith had dragged the three dead men out of the truck bed. Sergeant Sun looked at the corpses, and the light changed behind his young eyes. Corporal Smith said, “What about burying these, Colonel?”

“Roll them off the road. We’re clearing out.”

Sergeant Khang’s head swiveled around. “Leave them out to rot?”

“I didn’t make the rules, Sergeant, I only live by them. Pile into the truck, everybody. Corporal Smith, you drive — you know the roads. I’ll ride with you in the cab.”