The Last Bridge

Chapter Twenty-four 1045 Hours

Tyreen gripped the truck tailgate and braced one foot on the bumper. “They’ve had time. Let’s go.”

“Not yet,” said Theodore Saville.

“What?”

Saville shook his head. Silence enveloped them. Sergeant Sun stood by — dark, sensitive, cautious. Something had tickled Theodore Saville’s intuitions. Tyreen saw J. D. Hooker’s eyes reach Saville, full of sullen hatred; he saw the fighting streak along Hooker’s mouth. And Corporal Smith — strain continued to scratch Smith’s nerves; it showed in the broken glitter of his eyes. Only Sergeant Khang seemed unconcerned.

Theodore Saville’s growling voice prowled across the jungle like a stalking cat: “I don’t like it. Something’s missing.”

Ruffled by the sultry silence and his own inability to share Saville’s psychic notions, Tyreen took his foot down and turned his face toward the unseen road, eastward through the rain forest. J. D. Hooker spoke with wicked calm: “Your crystal ball tell you something, Captain?”

“Easy,” Tyreen murmured. “Take it easy.”

The sudden white of Hooker’s cheeks made his sunken eyes seem darker. “I didn’t hire on for voodoo business. What are we sitting here for?”

“We’re playing a hunch,” Sergeant Khang said.

“I don’t get this.”

Hooker’s gaze came around and fastened on Tyreen’s stark features. Sergeant Sun turned frowning toward the trees, taking his submachine gun down from his shoulder, and Tyreen knew he had felt the edge of the same feeling that had touched Saville. Saville’s head bowed seriously. A steady cool breeze flowed through the timber.

Hooker said, “Wait a minute — I hear it. You hear it, Captain?”

Saville lifted his face and then his hand, lying against the truck, stiffened. “I feel it in the ground.”

“Sounds like a Goddamn tank,” said J. D. Hooker.

Tyreen heard nothing but their voices and the rain. He dipped his head toward Sergeant Khang, and Khang went trotting up into the jungle. Saville’s hand closed. “That’s what it is,” he said.

It came to Tyreen after a time of waiting — the unmistakable squealing clatter of a tank. “Coming up from the city,” he said. “We’d have run right into it.”

The tank whined up the steep road, humped onto the flats somewhere nearby out of sight and downshifted. It rumbled nearer, and Tyreen heard the whine of metal grinding on metal, the heavy squeak of steel treads. And Theodore Saville said flatly, “What’s a single tank doing on this particular road right now?”

Hooker said, “The place is swarming with gooks. Somebody tipped them off.”

“Shut up.”

The tank clattered on, going past, going up the road, away. Tyreen discovered his breath pent up in his chest. He let all the air out of his lungs and arched his chest to get wind. He coughed weakly. Sweat was oily along his palms; he wiped them against the sodden thighs of his fatigues and walked around to the front of the truck. “Khang and Sun will ride the seat,” he said. “Move, now.”

Sergeant Khang had ignored the girl. He would have been hard put to describe her. But the map — the map was engraved, hung in a frame before his mind. Every turn, every hill, every landmark he took account of. He felt power in his blunt hands. They moved for him with precision and economy; they turned switches and caressed the wheel. Nhu Van Sun sat beside him, small hands folded calmly in his lap. Khang glanced at him and thought of saying something, but he had nothing to say. His hand dropped from the key to the shift knob. He drove through the mud, humping over exposed roots; the seat bucked like a cockleburred horse. The windshield jumped crazily and gave him a sort of kaleidoscope picture of trees and earth.

Sergeant Sun spoke: he did not like the Montagnard nuoc mam, and he was hungry. He sounded sour. He leaned his head back, and Khang wondered what he saw in the dark ceiling of the cab. The truck bounced over a last rut and into the road. Khang said, “I think we’ve done a Goddamn fine job of finding a puking shortcut from nowhere to nowhere.” He smiled.

“Excuse, please?”

“Never mind,” Khang said. “Manh gioi?”

“I feel well,” Sun acknowledged in Vietnamese. “Why?”

“Gió mua,” Khang muttered, angry with the incessant rain. “Nuc — nuc.”

“There is always rain.”

Black clouds unrolled densely, not far overhead; a heavy mist settled on the hills. The road nosed over a rise, and Khang saw for the first time the spread of the city of Chutrang. He rapped knuckles against the back window and glimpsed Tyreen’s face at the glass. Lighted windows, faint through the rain, were enough to show the crazy pattern of streets; far beyond, the heavier dark mass of mountains sealed the city into its pocket of earth. Nhu Van Sun spoke in Vietnamese:

“You once lived here?”

“No. I used to visit the city when I was a child.” He did not understand why men had come to this place and built a city. It was unfriendly country, all whipped up and jagged, and half-drowned in jungle. It was a hostile jungle; it started to rot its victims even before it had killed them.

Patches of fog lay on the road, uncut by the rain. Khahg crawled the truck forward. The road dropped into a trough of earth. Rock shoulders squeezed it into a narrow throat, through which he drove with taut care; the walls seemed to crush together like vise-jaws. When they fell away, the road ran out onto a flat cleared of trees. The city lay vaguely in view, misted and wet; and now, seeking landmarks, he turned off into a path winding among huts. Khang ground the stick into a new gear, swinging around a corner that at first seemed too tight for the truck’s length. On his right he saw a long, widening crack in a building wall. The crack remained in his mind for a while like an echo or an afterglow — a great split down the side of the wall, seeming to grow wider in the instant he watched it, threatening to rend the wall apart.

Cold gusts whipped through the paneless window at his shoulder. His attitude of detachment slipped from him; the grin had gone. He said, “Why are we here?” and uttered a Vietnamese oath.

Nhu Van Sun said mildly, “I know why I am here, Sergeant.”

“Bully for you,” Khang said in English. He spun the wheel wildly to avoid a short flight of half-visible steps extending strangely out into the alley. The street looped onto the side of a steep hill above the city. He had nothing to guide him through the mist, only a very poor light scattered by falling rain. At the far end of this, he recalled, the map showed an empty plot of land he had to cross. How long was the street? He could not remember. He dragged a cuff across his mouth. The map picture was dim, moving farther away. With an effort of will he drew it back to him. The wheel jiggled, pummeling his cramped hands. More by feel than by sight, he knew there was a sharp drop-off at his left. He kept the truck edged in toward the hillside on the right. Was there another turn along the side here? he tried to recall. He saw Colonel Tyreen’s angular shadow falling across the map; the path went along the side of the hill here — he saw Corporal Smith’s finger tracing it — and there were four turns in all; had he passed four, or only three? What was happening to his memory?

The truck inched forward on the deserted hillside. The city seemed unconscious. Lights burned, staring winklessly through the rain, fixing the panorama of the city’s shape: a kidney outline, bounded by mountains on all sides. The truck growled, now and then complaining with a squeak or a soft metal clank. The seat jostled him gently.

The flat of land appeared, spreading out to the left of the path. It tipped downward toward the backs of a ragged row of stone buildings. One light brightened a high window; starkly revealed in silhouette, a woman’s high-breasted shape crossed the shade, and the light went out. It was a single glimpse of life going on in the ordinary way, and it was altogether unreal. Khang said, “You do know why we are here?”

It was downhill; he shut off the engine. His foot rode the brake pedal, and his spine pressed into the seat back. Nhu Van Sun said, “We are here to fight our enemies, Sergeant.”

“Enemies,” Khang said. “I was born here.”

The truck coasted down the incline and prowled between two buildings built of stone, neither of them standing quite up-and-down. Sergeant Sun said, “If a man is loyal to his country, then he must be loyal to his government.”

“What?”

“Besides,” Nhu Van Sun said, “we are soldiers. A soldier must be loyal, if he is nothing else. How can you ask why you are here?”

Khang only shrugged. He had trouble making out the shifts of the street. “Cobblestones,” he said, lapsing into English. “We’ll wake the dead.” The narrow street ran between stone houses clinging precariously to sloping ground at either side. Here and there the open front of a shop; a chicken running in wing-lifted panic to evade the truck’s advance; an old man, probably opium-numbed, sprawled over stone steps; deep-set windows like hollow eye sockets; a shaggy cat prowling back and forth at a doorway; the red glow of a cigarette glowing and dimming in a dark window; an ancient temple built of huge stones, each stone fitted perfectly into the others without mortar — “I remember this place,” Khang said. “They use it now for indoctrination meetings.”

The stone structures leaned at lazy angles. Nhu Van Sun said, “Choi oi.”

“What is it?”

“I saw something move — stop the truck.”

“We can’t. They’d know what we were up to if I stopped.”

“Stop the truck,” Sun repeated. And so Khang stopped it.