The Last Bridge

Chapter Forty-four 0915 Hours

Dry cigarette smoke burned McKuen’s throat raw, and he crushed the cigarette out and stood with his attention on the corpse at his feet.

The dead soldier lay on the trail, decapitated, his head between his legs.

Montagnard work, McKuen supposed. He drew a line in the earth with his dragging bootheel. When he took off his hat, the small wind roughed up his hair. He went away, pushing through a brier thicket. His clothes were shredded. When he rubbed his dry lips he felt them crack. For a little while he sat down in the mud and thought, I feel like a bloke in a cataleptic trance. He had developed somewhere the ability to seal himself off from brutality. He felt so accustomed to death that it no longer reached him.

He had come across an open pit by the river bank. A gibbon had crashed through the camouflaged matting and impaled itself on pungi stakes in the pit. It had seemed alive — breathing, but unconscious. There had been no point in rescuing it, because the pungi stakes would be poisoned with tetanus-infected dung, but McKuen had spent a long time lifting the monkey out of the pit. It had not stirred. He had left it by the river bank, where it could reach water.

Now he jerked his chin up. Was I asleep? He backed away from the river and found an opening in the jungle. A slight sound bothered him, and he stopped. It sounded like a car. It was coming definitely toward him. He stood carrying his gun with his lean shoulders pulled together. After a moment he walked away from the river. He moved into a shaft of sunlight and glanced up, and thought, Anyway it’s still morning. His eyes were close-lidded.

He found the road, a green-brown stripe running between walls of heavy rain forest. Deep shadows made a corridor of it. He put his shoulder to a tree, numbed but alerted, and heard the spurt of engine backfires as the nearing vehicle rolled down a slope. He raised his eyebrows and melted back into the jungle. The rumble of wheels grew louder, the scrape of dusty brakes. The nose of a jeep crawled into sight up the road. A swirl of risen moisture hovered around it. McKuen watched through shadow-pearled branches. The shadows seemed to move, converging against him. The jeep went into sunlight, and its windshield was a rectangle of blinding white. Settling spray made a thin, brown mist. A puff of cigarette smoke issued from the jeep window and fled in thin streaks. McKuen closed his fingers tight around the gun.

“Kicks,” he said.

Foliage rattled when he moved. He wanted that jeep. His feet were blistered, his legs were tired. The jeep engine grew louder, picking up revolutions on the flats with a grating noise. Twigs reported the crush of tires. McKuen lifted his gun and waited by the edge of the road.