He couldn’t know that now. Might never know. But the agent was right, wherever she was coming from.
He was the captain.
The responsibility was his.
The bangs sounded tinny and remote. He had time for a couple of breaths between each round; the Mark 45 fired slowly for a fully automatic gun. They sounded too distant and trivial to be seventy-pound chunks of steel and high explosive going out at three thousand feet per second. Reaching out in ballistic arcs over the dark sea, as second after second ticked out. Sensing their target, and calculating the distance. Until a circuit closed.
One after the other, green returns blossomed around the contact. Soundless. Almost lost, in the speckle of heaving sea.
When at last they faded, the pip was no longer there.
30
The train didn’t stop again for two days. More Vietnamese died, and were stacked at the far end of the car. Teddy could hardly smell them over the stink of the rest of the locked-in POWs. All that time the train climbed. It got colder, until breath crackled and urine froze on the steel floor. He slept spoon-fashion with Pritchard, who talked less and less as time went on.
But the day finally came when the train jolted to a halt again, and they were rifle-butted out into a blinding daylight.
To Camp 576.
His first impression was of a teeming of gray lice festering a desolate landscape of gravel and sand. Vertical walls of pinkish crumbling rock surrounded an immense bowl amid gray hills. The eroding walls looked natural, but were still fearsome barriers. A dull explosion reverberated as the guards herded the prisoners down a barbed-wire lane from the rail spur down into the depression. A trooper with a Kalashnikov watched each fifty yards.
On a second look down, Teddy changed his mind. This gigantic hole in the earth had been scooped out by human effort. The thin wind was chilly, the sky russet with the same shade of fine dust he’d seen in eastern Afghanistan. Beyond the pinkish outcrops rocky hills undulated toward the horizon. Past them, in the far distance, rose jagged, uneven intaglios of mountain, deep-cut ravine-shadows intercutting black with indigo and rose-petal.
As the prisoners were mustered into lines and counted, he wondered dully where exactly they were. Somewhere in far northwestern China was as close as he could come.
“Gankai! Gankai!” He knew what that meant now. “Hurry up!” But he couldn’t hurry. He had to drag the ruined foot behind him, with it bent to the side opposite where the tendons had been torn from the bone. Walking on the butt end of his tibia, each step was a stabbing agony. He didn’t want to be beaten again. They got enthusiastic with those rifle butts. But he was going to be tail-end Charlie in any line.
Not a good place to end up. Not if he wanted to survive.
Did he?
“Give us an arm, mate,” Magpie Pritchard said, beside him. Another explosion thumped the air. It didn’t sound far off, but it was strangely subdued. Neither artillery nor mortar. The Australian pulled Teddy’s arm over his shoulders, but it didn’t work. He towered above the Vietnamese, above the Chinese guards. “You stand out like a fucking lighthouse, Maggie,” Teddy told him.
“Chenmo, chenmo!” the guards shouted. He knew that, too — it meant “shut up.” Whoa, getting fluent, Obie. Another in your long list of fucked-up accomplishments.
The day progressed. They were herded into a corral and made to squat in the blowing grit, hands behind their heads. The guards strolled among them, slugging anybody who relaxed the posture. One by one, the POWs passed down a disassembly line of what he assumed were convict trusties. Many had flatter faces and darker complexions than the guards. Tibetans? They shaved his head, then made him throw all his clothes onto a fire. He was hosed down with icy water, then issued a thin gray cotton uniform. The pants hems came only to his shins. A Chinese character was stenciled on the back. No sign of underwear or socks, which wasn’t going to be good if it got colder. Teddy kept pointing to his foot, but no one seemed to care. He was issued faded, torn blue canvas shoes with white rubber soles, like a geezer would wear in Palm Beach. And a pair of brand-new, beautifully sewn goatskin gloves with decorative red beads sewn on the back. They looked like high-end gardening gloves. He stood in line for a ladle of the same thin white corn mush they’d gotten on the train.
The guards pushed him down to a squat on the ground in front of a desk. The official, on a wooden chair, tried Teddy in Chinese, then in what must have been Vietnamese, because the other POWs in line giggled. The official reddened. He called over another man, maybe his supervisor. This latter fished a booklet from a pocket and leafed through it. Frowned down at Teddy, and said, enunciating very carefully, “You… American?”
“Yes. American. Prisoner of war.”
“American criminal of war.”
Teddy spoke slowly and loudly. “Prisoner of war. I need medical treatment. Geneva Convention.”
The guy consulted his booklet. Looked pissed off. Finally he said, “Here at Camp Five Seven Six, work. What can do?”
“Not much. Not with this.” Teddy lifted his leg; the official glanced at the dangling appendage. “POWs are entitled to medical attention.”
“You bing hao?”
“Excuse me?”
“You sick one. Half food.” He spoke to the guy at the desk, who nodded and made a note.
“Oh, fuck me,” Teddy mumbled.
“You say what?” The official spat orders at two guards, who came to attention. “Fuck me? You say, fuck me? Guanjao ta!”
The beating this time was prolonged, severe, and by men who didn’t care about leaving marks. When it was over they dragged him to a gravel pile and left him there spread-eagled, like a poster child for Bad Prisoners.
He got some sleep. Not exactly restful, but it was nice to stretch out without someone else’s dick pressed to your asshole.
Only when dark approached did a hand touch him. Help him up.
He pried open swollen eyelids to see Maggie, plus three of the Vietnamese he’d been chained up with on the train. “Come on, mate. They assigned us a doss. Let’s get you under some shelter.”
Their “doss” was a corrugated iron lean-to built against one of the inner walls of the depression. Blackened rocks circled a fire pit. Behind the roof, which formed a six-by-four partially sheltered anteroom, a cave went back about fifteen feet into the rock. The ceiling was just high enough that he could sit upright but couldn’t stand. Dried turds littered the ground between it and the next cave. The hut-caves stretched out of sight around the jut of the bluff. A guard tower loomed at the top. Dried grass and a couple of weary quilted-cotton blankets constituted their bedding. Once again, he slept nestled with Pritchard and the Vietnamese, and was glad of the warmth.
The next dawn they were shouted out by a ragged little squint-eyed Chinese carrying a stick. A stakebed truck idled at the bottom of the bluff. Most of the Vietnamese climbed up onto the bed. Teddy was pushed up into a much-abused Toyota pickup. Where the inevitable shackles waited. Pritchard tried to go with him, but the Chinese whacked and shouted him into the big truck, with the Viets.
The pickup drove slowly, rocking and creaking on clapped-out shocks. Glancing sideways as they trundled along a bumpy gravel track, he gradually grasped the layout. The camp proper was built around an open pit mine. The whole operation was much larger than he’d guessed the night before. It had to cover many square miles. He couldn’t tell what they were mining, and didn’t have the vocabulary to ask. An explosion thumped, not far away, but again, oddly muffled. He realized he’d been hearing them all night long, though at longer intervals. They were working a graveyard shift, too. At the far end of the vast depression, the glitter of sheet glass. Buildings? Maybe where the guards lived, where the camp was administered. If there was a road to anything like a town, it would lie in that direction. He glanced up at the sun for his bearings, but got a sharp “Yangjing-lay!” More than one rifle butt had taught him what that meant: “Drop your head, eyes down.”