The Last Bridge

Chapter Thirty-seven 1345 Hours

It was a wild journey.

The Chinese jeep’s canvas top and doors were spattered with mud; the only visibility was through a single arc of wiper-cleared glass. It was hard to see out, but no one could see in. Saville and the girl and Hooker sat squashed together, holding Eddie Kreizler across their laps. Sergeant Khang, in his North Vietnamese uniform, sat in the passenger seat.

Tyreen pressed the clutch and said, “The damned gearshifts are never where you expect them to be.” They had to cross the length of Chutrang, and the city was littered with roadblocks. He put the jeep into the head of the boulevard. It bucked and swayed, battering all his hurts; it made a red haze swim before his eyes; it made him blink back tears of pain and fatigue and impatient, edgy rage. Walls of yellow stone and cracking stucco lurched by. He almost collided with a buffalo-drawn wagon. Through it all, he felt the unreasoning push of time driving forward. His face was pallid and wet, and he could not put out of his head the image of the dying red cast of the eyes of the soldier whose back he had knifed.

He swung the jeep into a side street and squinted ahead. The half-mile of visible pavement seemed clear of roadblocks. He rammed forward, slipping wildly around a delivery van parked in the street and trusting pedestrians to dodge out of his path. The street lay cluttered with obstacles — motor scooters, parked vehicles, ox-drawn equipment, an enormous ancient tractor-trailer rig. After eight or nine blocks he judged he had been on the street long enough. He turned off, narrowly avoiding a crash with a farmer’s cart.

The jeep jockeyed in and out of alleys and short streets. Rounding a corner, he felt the pull of his arm and shoulder muscles; fifty feet ahead of him he saw a line of sawhorses across the road, two riflemen, and a machine gun. “Sergeant.”

“Gung ho, Skipper.”

Tyreen slowed smoothly. Before the jeep stopped, Khang was half out of the door, hanging onto the windshield and spitting fast, hard talk at the soldiers. The corporal in charge made a ragged salute and shoulder-slung his rifle to swing the sawhorses open. Khang got inside and closed the door. They drove through. Tyreen kept his head down. Khang had swung the steel-frame canvas door open to look back; he said, “They’re talking it over. Giving us a pretty hard look, Colonel. Better give it a little more gas.”

Tyreen downshifted and pressed the accelerator. Khang’s voice lifted sharply. “They don’t like it. They’re swinging that machine gun around. Get off this road, sir!”

Tyreen spun the wheel. The jeep went across the street at a sharp angle, and he cranked it around into the mouth of a cross street. The machine gun started to bang. He heard bullets scream off the walls. He was racing down the narrow street at high speed. The jeep took a corner raggedly; he heard Saville talking in back, but he paid no attention to the big man’s words. He whipped the jeep in and out of intersections, laying a zigzag pattern of travel through the oldest part of the city. Pedestrians scrambled out of the way. They began to climb, going up the eastern hill that would take them out of the city. He glimpsed a roadblock four blocks ahead and turned off. Aching weakness flowed through all his fibers. He roared uphill through a crazy turn into an avenue and found himself not a dozen yards from another roadblock.

Saville barked something. Tyreen rammed the accelerator to the floor. He saw the soldiers’ mouths drop open. The jeep blasted a path into the sawhorses. A splinter of wood came up, clung momentarily to the windshield, and slid away. The impact flung him against the wheel. The wooden horses flew aside, and he heard the clatter of a machine gun flopping in ungainly spin across the pavement. One soldier was rolling out of the way. He wheeled the jeep into a wide square, cut across it with the engine roaring, scattered pedestrians in flight. Bullets whacked into the jeep. He swayed it into a lane and went up the hillside at a precarious pitch, spraying mud out from the wheels.

Saville was squirming around, plugging up a bullet hole in the fuel tank with a wad of cloth. Tyreen shouted above the din:

“Anybody hurt?”

“All present and accounted for,” said Saville.

The clouds were moving fast. A shaft of sunlight came down, hard and unbearably bright. It changed the looming hills into a brass surface that boiled to liquid before his eyes. His vision seemed to darken slowly with spreading poison. One side of the jeep lifted off the street in a curve. Tyreen clenched back his pain and urged the roaring jeep up the hill. He could see Saville’s matter-of-fact face in the chattering mirror. The wheels began to skid around in mud, but then he was onto the main road, flipping over the hilltop, and Chutrang was below them. Tyreen went wheeling past a litter of huts, crossed a narrow plateau and a rock field, and plunged into a series of wicked turns. Sergeant Khang was talking:

“A couple jeeps coming after us, Colonel.”

The girl spoke quickly. Tyreen said, “What?”

Khang said, “She says turn off to the left down here.”

It was a narrow, rutted track, twining into the jungle. Tyreen slid the jeep into it. They rushed breakneck across jagged lifts and drops. Matted treetops shut out the sun. The girl spoke instructions, and Tyreen took a left fork, another left fork, a sharp right turn. At every fork the trail became narrower and rougher. The tires clawed across foot-high roots. Branches scraped the canvas at both sides. The dark speckling of light made everything hard to see. At a tight bend in the road, Tyreen swiveled the jeep hard against a tree. He jammed the shift lever around, hunting for reverse gear. The engine roared and quit.

In the sudden silence Theodore Saville said, “I think we ran out of gas. Must be another puncture down low in the tank someplace.” He got out to have a look. Tyreen stood in the mud rubbing his face. Saville said, “All dried up, David. We’re out of gas.”

Tyreen held up his hand for silence. He was listening for the sound of vehicles in pursuit. “Hooker.”

“Sir?”

“Hear anything behind us?”

“No sir. Not right now.”

“Maybe we lost them,” said Theodore Saville.

Tyreen said, “It won’t take them long to find our tracks in the mud.”

The girl climbed out of the jeep. She had lost her hat. Her dark hair hung tangled over one shoulder. She said, “We could not have driven much farther. The path becomes thin. I will show you the way to the caves.”

Hooker said suspiciously, “What caves?”

“We use them for hiding,” was all she said.

Hooker was in the back seat with Captain Kreizler’s head in his lap. “What about him?”

“We’ll carry him,” Tyreen said. “Let’s go.”

“What about all this demolition equipment, Colonel?”

“We lug that too.”

“Jesus,” said Hooker.