He’s gone about as far as he can go. Cade’s mind played with the song from Oklahoma! He hadn’t gone as far as he had to go himself. The lines the Red Chinese and North Koreans held lay just ahead, between him and the American trenches he needed to reach.
Here and there, he could see faint red glows among the Communist positions. Some of those, the ones that brightened and faded, would be cigarettes. Others were more constant. If you put kerosene or fat in the bottom of a can and added a wick, you had a lamp or even a puny stove. The soldiers wouldn’t need to be so careful about hiding the lights from behind as they were from ahead.
Not much shooting was going on. For one thing, it was 0130. Men on both sides would be at the low ebb of energy and alertness. For another, the Korean War had turned into a backwater fight. It had dominated the world’s attention all through its first six months. But then the atom bombs started falling. The big brawl broke out in Europe. And with that donnybrook in full swing-which was about as much as Cade knew about it-the Americans, if not the Chinese, wouldn’t worry so much about things here.
If Cade was ever going to do this, he had to go forward. He walked straight down the muddy dirt track that led to the front here. He’d given the U.S. Army parka to his Korean buddies. He’d hacked off his beard. In quilted jacket and fur hat, with a Russian submachine gun in his hands, he looked like somebody who belonged here till you got close enough to see his nose. He hoped like hell nobody would.
If the Reds caught him, they could shoot him for wearing their clothes. Of course, if they caught him, they could shoot him for the fun of it. They probably would, too.
He didn’t worry about it. Whatever happened would happen, that was all. He’d been on the run ever since things went sour south of the Chosin Reservoir. He wondered how many other dogfaces had managed to get away. Not a lot. He was sure of that.
When he started getting close to those red glows, he stepped off the path and began to crawl. Some snow still lay on the ground. He wondered whether Korea was ever free of it. He knew which way he’d bet.
Here and there, snores rose from foxholes. Cade was glad to hear them; they kept him from making what would be his last dumb mistake. A couple of men talked quietly in singsong Chinese. Now he could tell the difference between that language and Korean from only a handful of syllables. He sure hadn’t been able to when the fighting here started. He still didn’t speak more than a few words of either tongue. Even that little was more than he’d looked for.
The front here wasn’t multiple rows of trenches on both sides, the way it had been in France during World War I. Cade gathered it was like that on some stretches of the line. His guide had brought him here because things were looser in these parts.
Somebody called out something. A challenge? Whatever it was, Cade froze-not hard to do in this weather. The Red Chinese soldier called out again. This time, Cade heard, or thought he heard, a questioning note in the man’s voice.
Nobody fired off a flare to light up the landscape. Nobody started spraying bullets around as if from a garden hose. After fifteen motionless minutes, Cade slithered forward once more. His thumb hit a pebble. It clicked when it caromed off a bigger rock. He froze again.
Then, to his vast relief, a dog started barking not far away. The beast probably stayed near the soldiers to eat whatever they threw away. It took its chances, though. It would have been safer with the Americans. With these guys, it could end up simmering over one of those makeshift stoves.
But if they went after the dog, they wouldn’t stumble over him…unless they found him by accident while they were hunting it. Bite your tongue, he thought. He did. It hurt. He was still alive, then. He wanted to stay that way.
On he crawled. His hand hit a metal post. Both sides used them to anchor their belts of barbed wire. He had a wire cutter. He got to work with it. The strands parted with twangs he would have thought you could hear in Guam, if not in Honolulu. No flares hissed out over no-man’s-land, though. No machine guns started chattering, either.
A barb on the wire skewered his finger. He howled and swore-inside his own mind. The stuff was bound to be filthy and rusty. His last tetanus shot, just before he went into action, had left him miserable and feverish for a couple of days. Now he was damn glad that bored Army doc had stuck him.
Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Freeze. What was that? Oh-they were going after the dog. Crawl. Snip. Crawl.
Suddenly, no more wire to snip. He’d made it through the Reds’ belt. If he kept going, he’d find the American entanglements pretty soon. How jumpy were the GIs on the far side? Would they open up with everything they had when they heard him coming?
He dreaded that more than anything else. He’d made it all this way, dodged the enemy’s hunters down most of the peninsula. Now, at last, he could see rescue, see safety. How cruel would the irony be if his own side ventilated him, thinking him a Red?
He discovered the American wire with his forehead. The blood trickling down his cheek was warm. He hoped the gash wouldn’t leave a nasty scar. Your face usually healed up pretty well, but usually wasn’t always.
Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. He moved as quietly as he could. He heard low voices ahead of him. They were speaking English. Not Chinese, not Korean, not even mangled Latin. English!
He cut one more strand and crawled forward again. He didn’t come up against any more wire. He was through! Nothing at all stood between him and his own countrymen-except their fear when they finally heard him coming. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That had been FDR, back when Cade was a baby. He’d been way too little to remember it himself, but it was the kind of thing you heard all the time.
“Hey!” he called. Why not? The Reds were several hundred yards behind him. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” Sweet Jesus! English felt strange in his own mouth, it had been so long since he’d used it.
Sudden silence slammed down ahead, silence mixed with scrambling noises. No, they’d had no idea he was out here. If he’d been a Chinese raiding party, a lot of these guys would be talking to their undertaker.
Somebody chambered a round. The sharp snick! was much too audible. Then somebody else did. “Don’t shoot!” Cade repeated, more urgently than before. “Honest to God, I’m an American.”
Through the silence, someone called, “Okay, asshole, who played in the Series last year?”
They’d asked the same kind of question to trip up English-speaking Japs in the last war. Cade thanked heaven he was a fan. “Yanks and Phillies,” he answered. “Yankees swept.”
After a pause, that same voice said, “Okay. Come on. We won’t plug you till you get here, anyway.”
Cade came. He remembered to leave his Russian submachine gun behind. It wouldn’t create the impression he wanted. He tumbled into a foxhole. A GI lit him up with a flicked Zippo. The flame was dazzling.
“Fuck me,” the dogface said. “He is an American-I think. Scrawny SOB, whatever he is.” The casual scorn was the most wonderful thing Cade had ever heard.
9
A bus ran from Fakenham to Norwich. It was about twenty-seven miles from the small town to the city. The bus always stopped in Bawdeswell, halfway between. Every once in a while, it would stop without intending to. All the buses on the route dated from the 1930s, and they’d all seen hard service since the day they were built. No wonder they broke down from time to time. The wonder was that they didn’t do it more.