The Last Bridge

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.”

“How many?” Saville said.

“Three men and a machine gun.”

Corporal Smith tramped back to them, and Saville jerked a finger in signal and turned directly into the rain forest. Smith came right behind him. Treetops shut out the day-light, and the damp half-light was plum-colored. Dark, stinking, mud sucked at his boots. Bent double, Saville rammed through the undergrowth, chilled and half-blind and clawed by tangled thorns. A fine mist of water and mud particles hung suspended in the air. He heard the clacking ratchet of the axle-jack. The sound diminished quickly, absorbed into the matted thickness of the jungle.

It was midmorning, and yet in the clammy dark there was a visible glow of phosphorescent mold. Vines and briers left welts on his hands and cheeks. He heard the squelch of Smith’s footsteps behind him. A monkey racketed through the branches, tautening his nerves; Smith barged into him, and Saville started off again. He had to rely on an instinctual sense of direction. The packed jungle floor of ancient, decayed leaves lay many feet thick upon the earth; it was like walking on a sodden sponge.

Smith tapped his shoulder. When Saville looked around, Smith touched a finger to the face of his watch. Saville nodded and hurried forward. He could hear the shallow rushing of Smith’s forced-quiet breathing. A snake wriggled up the trunk of a tree, and Saville made a wide circle around it. There was no trail; he left a backtrack like the route through a maze. His eyes strained through the obscurity and then, abruptly, he heard the sound of voices. He caught Smith’s glance and turned toward the sound, moving his feet with care.

Light glittered on metal somewhere ahead; it was a momentary vision, immediately blotted out. He put his boots down soundlessly.

He made his way around a thick brier patch and crouched under a dripping tree. Through branches he could see three soldiers in flat helmets and gray battle fatigues grouped around an ugly machine gun behind a saw-horse roadblock. They stood peering down the road and talking, without great excitement. Saville made brief hand signals to Corporal Smith and watched the Corporal move hesitantly off to the left. Saville moved straight ahead, hearing the truck engine start up somewhere back down the road. The three soldiers straightened, and two of them turned away from the sawhorse to reach for their rifles. Saville crawled like a beetle through the greasy mud. He lost sight of Corporal Smith on his left. The truck came grinding up the road, getting steadily louder. At the edge of the timber, Saville laid down his submachine gun and drew from his belt a short length of nylon cord. He waited, not moving, while one of the soldiers came over to the side of the road to look down past the bend. The soldier turned and spoke to his comrades. There was no reply; the two men readied themselves behind the machine gun, locking a belt of ammunition into the mechanism. When the third soldier spoke again, Saville reached out of the brush and tightened the nylon garrote around the man’s throat.

The soldier’s brief struggle brought his two companions to their feet. One of them shouted. Saville felt his victim go limp; he let go the cord and stepped forward, pushing the inert soldier ahead of him, holding the man up. He said plainly, “Smith.”

No one appeared. A rifle came around toward him, and he lifted the strangled soldier bodily and hurled the man across half the width of the road. The body fell across the machine gun, tangled up with both soldiers. Saville ran into the road with his knife. The two soldiers rolled out from under the dead man; one of them was at Saville’s feet, and he plunged his knife into the man’s chest while the other soldier, having no rifle, shoved the dead man away from the machine gun and reached for the grip to turn the weapon on Saville.

Saville left his knife where it was lodged. He whipped his legs up over the writhing stabbed soldier and kicked the barrel of the machine gun. The gun went over on its side. The soldier let go and rose to meet Saville’s attack, bare-handed. Saville stretched past the man’s short-armed reach and drove four stiff fingers into the man’s throat. The man went down gurgling.

The truck squeaked to a stop just beyond the sawhorse, and Tyreen swung down from the cab. His voice was matter-of-fact. “Where’s the Corporal?”

“Something I’d like to know,” Saville said.

Sergeant Hooker rammed past him and plunged into the jungle. Hooker came out, dragging Corporal Smith by the shirt collar. Smith was swallowing in spasms. Hooker flung the man down into the mud. Saville said, “Where were you?”

Tyreen said, “Never mind, Theodore. I had to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?” Saville was angry. He turned on Tyreen. “You should have let me know. For Christ’s sake, David!”

“If I’d warned you, you’d have looked out for him. You didn’t have time for that.” Tyreen slung his weapon over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. “I had you covered, Theodore.”

Corporal Smith lay breathing shallowly in the mud, full of misery. Tyreen said, “Pour him in the truck and let’s go. Sergeant Sun, you’ll drive.”

J. D. Hooker turned hotly. “Colonel, how many of us got to break before you quit trying to kill us all?”

Saville stepped across a dead Vietnamese and struck Hooker an openhanded blow across the face. Hooker spilled into the sawhorse and knocked it down. Saville took a step toward him, and Tyreen said gently, “Theodore.”

Hooker climbed to his feet and rubbed his jaw, not looking at anyone in particular. Saville said, “Drag these bodies off the road.” He picked up the sawhorse and threw it into the trees.

Sergeant Khang, saying nothing, helped Corporal Smith to his feet and led the man toward the truck. Saville squatted, braced a knee down, and yanked his knife out of a dead man’s chest. When he stood up he found Tyreen looking at him, and he said, “I was trying to remember how many years it took to learn where to put the knife to kill the man fast.”

“Easy,” Tyreen murmured.

Saville watched Corporal Smith get into the truck. He said, “David, the chances are if you swing too hard you’ll strike out. You had no right to take that chance with me.”

“I’m the master of this ship, Theodore. I had to know about him, and I didn’t have time to find out any other way.”

“Time,” Saville said. “God damn it, there are some things that just won’t happen as fast as you want, David. You can’t get nine women pregnant and expect a baby in one month.”

He stared at Tyreen, and the space between them became stuffed with a padded silence. Finally Tyreen said, “Let’s go.”

Nhu Van Sun climbed into the driver’s seat and sat staring at his hands on the wheel. It had not stopped raining. Saville took the heavy machine gun with him toward the back of the truck. Tyreen paused with one foot on the running board. “I had you covered, Theodore.”

“You said that before.”

Tyreen met his glance and climbed into the seat.

Saville tossed the machine gun into the truck bed and climbed in after it. He made a cursory effort to wipe some of the mud off his clothes. J. D. Hooker climbed in and looked at Corporal Smith, crumpled in a forward corner. Hooker said, “Captain, I doubt you’ll get a chance to court-martial me.”

“You’d better hope I do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hooker. “But I think you and me both know the truth about the Colonel.”

The engine started up, and Saville braced himself against the tailgate. Sergeant Khang came away from Smith and said, “I guess he’s kind of shook up.”

“I guess he is,” Saville said.

“You ever get the feeling you’re about to roll boxcars, Captain?”

Saville did not answer him.