Chapter Fourteen
0640 Hours
Tyreen sneezed. The air was damp, and he felt the touch of chills under his sea-soaked clothing. He moved through the elephant grass, batting it aside furiously. Sergeant Sun was bellied down behind the machine gun. Tyreen came by and stood above him. “All set, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know how to handle that thing, do you?”
“I learn in jump school.”
“Good. Remember not to fire until I start shooting.” Tyreen gestured with his chattergun.
“I remember, sir.” Nhu Van Sun watched him with boyish anxiety.
“You have a family, Sergeant?”
“Fam-lee?”
“Wife. Children.”
“Oh, yes.” Nhu Van Sun smiled. “Wife, children. I have. In town call Ba Dong. Wife, three little girl.”
“I hope you get back to them in one piece,” Tyreen murmured, and moved away. His body had no spring left in it. He cursed his weakness with rising anger.
He looked both ways and crossed the road boldly. Theodore Saville lay burrowed into position in the ditch beside the road, concealed by a wadding of turf he had upheaved as a breastwork. The submachine gun looked like a toy in Saville’s enormous hands. Tyreen spraddled his legs and stood looking up the road. “What time is it?”
Saville did not look at his watch. “Quarter of seven.”
“Think there’ll be anything coming down this road that we can use? We can’t get far in an oxcart or a motor scooter.”
“Something had better come along, David, because you’re not going to make it from here to Chutrang on foot under full pack.”
Tyreen said very distinctly, “Theodore, I can outwalk you and outclimb you and Goddamn it I don’t want to hear any more about that from you.”
“All right,” Saville said mildly.
“If I get knocked off, you’ll have to take over. You know that, don’t you?”
“I figure to see to it you don’t get knocked off.”
“I wish I could find some way to hate you,” said Tyreen. He walked up the road a few yards and turned into the bush. He made a full circuit, inspecting his men in their positions, and returned to Saville’s post, bellying down beside the big man and wiping his face with a crumpled handkerchief. “What time is it?”
“Five of.”
“Five of what?”
“Zero-six-fifty-five,” said Saville.
“Sorry,” Tyreen snapped.
“Okay.”
Saville put down his gun and took out his waterproof cigarette pack. He offered one to Tyreen. They lit up, and Saville said, “I ran into Harry Green last night. Drunk out of his mind. An M.P. told me he’d lost half his company out in the boondocks. Harry was in pretty bad shape.”
“That’s what you get for being soft,” Tyreen said.
“Uh-huh,” Saville said listlessly. “I wonder what’s bugging Corporal Smith.”
“He’s on the near edge of combat fatigue.”
“I wish we could send the kid home.”
“We can’t.”
“David.”
“What?”
“Suppose we can’t get Eddie out of there.”
“The orders are to silence him.”
Saville nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
Tyreen swore. “Jaynshill’s got something in the hole. He knows a lot more than what he let me see in his hand. He’s too anxious to shut Eddie up. I’m an old hand, Theodore, but I don’t see butchering your best friend, no matter what excuse you’ve got. If it was my job, I’d do my damnedest to get him out, and then if I failed I’d let it go at that.”
“But it isn’t your job,” Saville said. “So quit worrying about it. We’ve got our orders, that’s all.”
“No,” Tyreen said. “That isn’t all.”
“What else is there?”
Tyreen made no answer. His hand shook. He swallowed a quinine capsule, and Saville, witnessing his act, said: “Better go easy on those. You don’t want to pass out on us.”
“Worry about your own skin, all right?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Tyreen’s tongue licked the poison tooth in the back of his mouth. Storm clouds were socked right down on the mountains and coming forward, toward the sea. A flight of birds soared overhead in close formation, white bellies and wings against a gray sky, moving without sound. Tyreen turned his head slowly to watch them glide out of sight. He glanced up the road; the light was murky and uncertain, a poor light for shooting. Sleepy, he opened a ration and ate. Saville said, “How much time do you think we ought to give it?”
“Another half-hour. Then we’ll pull out.”
“I hate to think of what the gooks can do to Eddie Kreizler in the hour we waste here.”
“I hate to think what they could do to him in the time it would take us to get to Chutrang on foot,” Tyreen answered. “It’s worth the risk.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have to decide that.”
J. D. Hooker snaked into sight through the grass. “Something coming up the road, sir.”
“I don’t hear anything,” said Tyreen.
“Some kind of wagon, I guess.”
“All right. Get back to your post.”
Hooker disappeared. Grass waved, marking his route. In time a faint squeaking reached Tyreen’s ears, and Saville said, “Hooker’s’ got radar. Like a bat.”
A fat water buffalo came around the bend and plodded up the road, pulling a cart with two huge wooden wheels. A wizened little Vietnamese walked along beside the animal. “Let them go by,” Tyreen said.
At a leisurely gait the cart rattled by and presently disappeared to the north, leaving deep ruts in the muddy road. After it was gone, nothing remained but the silence and a needle-thin beginning drizzle. Tyreen’s vision swam, and he closed his eyes until the spell passed. Saville said, “Well, we might try praying.”
Tyreen said nothing. It had not occurred to him to pray. He had always found the idea of God vaguely improbable; he did not believe in a benevolent deity who laid down millions of years of evolution in order to prepare for Ho Chi Minh and the submachine gun, and General Jaynshill’s order to free Kreizler or, that failing, kill him.
Tyreen believed in one thing: he believed that what he did would leave its mark. It was as unquestionable as the stones in the road.
Chapter Fifteen
0655 Hours
Captain Eddie Kreizler’s face was a bitter mask. The narrow cell was crowded and smelled of many things. It had a small population of rats that had to be driven back into their holes periodically. The darkness was almost complete; there was only the small slot-shaped hole in the door. If a man listened above the snores and groans of other prisoners, the growling of their bellies, and the occasional exhausted whispers, he could hear a sound or two that came from outside and gave reassurance that the world still turned: the drip of rain on the roof, an occasional tramping of boots across the compound, now and then the rumble of a motor vehicle.
The others were North Vietnamese political prisoners, crowded in like corpses. A young man kept talking nervously to Kreizler until Kreizler spoke rudely to him. The young man spat on him. “Dey kok me-ey,” he said — “American imperialist.” The young man’s teeth were black from chewing betel nuts. He climbed over several prisoners, stepped on a rat and squashed its head, and hunkered down in a far corner.
Offensive smells assaulted Kreizler’s nose, and he wondered what the PANVN interrogators had done to his executive officer, Lieutenant Chinh. He rubbed his aching jaw. The North Vietnamese captain had bruised him painfully, prying his mouth open and extracting the cyanide pill before Kreizler had got a chance to work it out and swallow it.
Eddie Kreizler thought, They won’t get a thing out of me.