The Last Bridge

Chapter Twenty-one 0940 Hours

“That’s it,” said David Tyreen. He reached around behind him and slapped the tarpaulin. Saville poked his head out.

The truck crawled up a curved incline, bending back away from the Sang Chu gorge. The great cloven rock of a mountain stood high above them, two upraised monoliths like immense wrecks on a forgotten field of battle. The twin gray ridges curved in toward each other like clasped hands; they seemed almost to touch at the top.

Through a thin pattern of branches Tyreen made out the fragile ribbon of the railroad embankment, a parapet lancing upward along the inner side of split rock thighs. The single delicate track curled up the mountainside at a steep grade, perhaps twenty degrees of climb. It threaded in and out of timber patches and shot across rock slopes, supported on brittle cantilevered foundations, a breathtaking piece of engineering; it climbed gingerly onto the face of the western slope, poised itself a thousand feet above the white-water rush of the river’s cascades, and soared boldly across a slender arc of steel to the face of the eastern cliff; there it made a small, hesitant bend before it plunged out of sight into the dark mouth of a tunnel.

At the western pier of the bridge stood a tiny plateau of rock, supporting a switch and a stub of a siding, and a fortified cluster of structures half-visible where they loomed above the brink of the gorge. Above them the peak soared upward, curving in to meet its mate across a narrow band of cloud. The snouts of mountain howitzers reared around the bridge piers. Sentries moved slowly back and forth across the bridge, pausing at intervals to sweep the country with field glasses. An armored half-track waited at the western end, the helmeted figure of its observer just visible on his perch. The district was overseen by a cement-block command post hanging on the upper cliff as if suspended from a wall peg. Antiaircraft guns bristled along the crest of the mountain higher up; there was a circling radar scanner at the tip. And descending the line of the silver tracks was a regular spotting of blockhouses guarding the roadbed.

The bridge across the Sang Chu gorge was an arch of wrought iron. It appeared to be less than three hundred feet in length. Cement-block piers at either end supported guard and observation towers; the weight of the bridge hung from twin parallel arches that had their anchors in the block piers well below the roadbed. From the anchors the arches curved out, intersecting the roadbed from underneath and then rising above it to arch over the center of the bridge. The truss was reinforced by zigzag lacings of iron.

It reminded Tyreen of the bridge across Sydney Harbour in Australia: a bulky cross-hatching of metal, heavy but somehow delicate, imposing but fragile.

He had time to see the gorge, the railroad, the bridge, the sentries, and the guns; and then the road took the truck up a steep tilt of earth that blocked it all from view. They climbed north, circling away from the river, slowing to a gear-meshing crawl on the high pitch of the road. Tyreen swung out on the running board and crawled through under the tarpaulin into the bed of the truck. He said to Theodore Saville, “Did you get a good look at it?”

“Good enough. It’s a crackerbox — if we can get at it.”

J. D. Hooker said, “Wrought iron, Colonel. Put a small charge on one pier and a big charge in the middle. It’ll break in half like a puking doughnut.”

Tyreen broke open his clasp knife and tore a shredded hole in the forward hang of the tarpaulin. It opened his view through the small window in the back of the truck cab; he could see Sergeant Sun’s shoulder and had a view of the road through the windshield. Sergeant Sun turned his head and shot a swift, expressionless glance through the glass.

Corporal Smith crawled anxiously out of his corner, bracing himself against the lurch and sway of the truck. His face was flushed. “Permission to speak, Colonel?”

“What is it?”

“I got no right to another chance, sir. But I’m all right now. I’m okay. I can feel it. I’m okay now.”

J. D. Hooker said, “Why don’t you sit down before you fall down, kid?”

“All right, Corporal,” said Tyreen. “We’ll see.” He caught Saville’s speculative squint. He said to Corporal Smith, “Suppose you climb up front and ride with Sergeant Sun. You know the route.”

“Yes, sir,” Smith said. He climbed outside with grateful alacrity.

Theodore Saville said, “You can’t depend on him, David.”

“What do you want me to do? Shoot him?”

J. D. Hooker said, “He’s dead weight, Colonel.”

Sergeant Nguyen Khang sat at the back of the truck with one hand on the jouncing machine gun. He spoke up: “Once a guy cracks up, you’d have to be out of your cotton-picking gourd to trust him again, sir.”

Hooker turned on him: “Nobody asked you to put in your two cents, peckerhead.”

Khang got his feet under him. It was the first time Tyreen had seen him angry. Tyreen said, “Settle down, both of you.”

Khang said, “Maybe you feel like letting him get away with that, Colonel, but not me.”

Tyreen said, “If I had time, Sergeant, I’d be pleased to let the two of you fight it out of your systems. I haven’t got time.”

Hooker stood bent over beneath the tarp, fixing Khang with a bellicose stare. Theodore Saville pushed him down roughly. “You heard the Colonel. You’ve hocked your stripes already — don’t start fooling with a guardhouse term, Hooker.”

Khang settled back slowly and braced one foot against the machine gun. After a moment he lighted a cigarette and grinned brashly. He looked like a man who did not believe in tomorrow — or if he did, he didn’t care.

Tyreen turned his attention through the forward window. The road was a rutted path scudding across a rock-strewn mountainside. Distant peaks were dark suggestions through the drizzling cold rain. The obscurity of the weather was a blessing, but Tyreen had to fight off irritation with it. His face was glazed and dour. Once he raised his head sharply, thinking he saw a light far ahead, but it did not reappear. The air was layered in misty velvet, and he might have been an island in the midst of a silent, hostile ocean. The truck clattered through a short, high-sided defile, and Theodore Saville said, “Can’t be far now.” A sluggish current of air curled in under the shredded hang of the bullet-torn tarp; it chilled Tyreen’s sweaty skin. He wanted to swallow a quinine capsule, but he put it off. He felt blindfolded by the pressure of the tarpaulin. Feeling crowded, he disliked the feeling with unreasonable impatience. He felt Saville stir, as though scenting imminent trouble, but there was nothing in sight or earshot. The road turned, sidling against timbered hillsides, descending a series of switchbacks into the violet half-light of the rain forest. Every shadow seemed to conceal a threat hiding from discovery. Nguyen Khang’s shadow at the back of the truck was gray and indistinct. Tyreen peered ahead and said abruptly, “Take your posts. I see some houses ahead.”

There was a scrape of movement behind him. He cleared his gun. Seen closer, the jungle huts sat perched on hillsides as if they were about to fall off. Here and there smoke lifted sluggishly through a thatched roof. Theodore Saville peered through a pushed-back corner of the tarp; his steady eyes watched everything, and Tyreen could not escape the conviction that every detail was being indelibly absorbed into the big man’s memory.

The truck came to a slow halt. The morning was deep and still. Sun’s voice and Corporal Smith’s voice ran through it softly, apprehensively. Tyreen spoke from the window. His words sprawled softly and easily: “It’s nothing, just a bunch of poppy farmers crossing the road — I think they’re a little drunked up.” The truck started moving again, and he put down the gun. They passed the village. The Montagnard tribesmen gave as little attention to the army truck as they might have to a buffalo cart.

The smell of the jungle was oppressive. Saville moved close to Tyreen and spoke quietly. “Smith ain’t the only one.”

“Everybody’s scared,” Tyreen said.

“What are you scared of?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re scared to give in, David. Scared to admit it when you get too sick and too beat-up to fight. You used to be the best fighter there was.”

“I still am.”

“No. But you’re scared just the same.”

Tyreen said, “I’ll tell you something, Theodore. Not one of us would have come on this mission if we hadn’t been scared of something.”