He was thick-chested, long-legged. A small premature bald spot showed at his scalp lock. He had shrewd eyes and a square, amiable face, very wide across the cheeks and forehead. His nose was hooked; his mouth was made for easy smiling.
When the PANVN soldiers brought Lieutenant Chinh back to the cell, Kreizler focused his full attention on the South Vietnamese officer. They opened the door and pushed Chinh inside and slammed the door; made of metal, it clanged like a Chinese gong. Lieutenant Chinh sprawled across a prone man too starved and sick to move away. Chinh picked himself up and stood there, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He did not seem badly hurt. They had bandaged his wounded arm. Kreizler’s solemn features lost their weariness, and he watched with great care, trying to catch some hint of expression on Chinh’s cheeks.
Chinh threaded a path forward. No one moved aside; a hoarse voice cursed him. He sat down beside Kreizler and did not speak; his unrevealing eyes looked at nothing in particular.
Kreizler said, “What did you tell them?”
“Nothing.”
Lieutenant Chinh had a narrow, handsome face and a thin body, lithe and wiry. A trimmed mustache graced his upper lip. He held up his hands, and even in the false light Kreizler could see matted blood over the knuckles and cuticles. The fingertips were already beginning to swell over the nails. Chinh put his hands down with care and smiled with his teeth. “I tell them nothing.”
“You will.”
“No. Nothing.”
Kreizler said, “They’ll take me out and soften me up, and then they’ll throw me back in here to think about it while they take you out again. Next time they’ll go to work on your feet and maybe stick a red-hot iron up your ass. Then they’ll toss you in here again and let me look at you and stew for a while. They’ll take me out again and give me the same treatment. They’ll have us working on each other.”
Chinh’s glance came up. “What do they want?”
“They want to know what I know.”
“What do you know, Captain?”
“A few things I don’t want them to know.”
“You can lie to them?”
“Not for very long. They know how to bust a man up.”
“And you do not trust me. You think I will talk.”
“Sure you will,” Eddie Kreizler said.
Chinh’s proud eyes flashed. “Not before you.”
“Maybe. But today or tomorrow you’ll tell them anything they want to hear.”
“No. I tell nothing.”
“Sure you will,” Kreizler said again. “And so will I. I told you, Lieutenant. They know how.”
“Drugs?”
“Anything that’ll work. They’re adaptable.”
He gave Chinh time to think about that. Then he said, “You never know where loyalty ends and cowardice begins. Every man has a limit.”
After a while Chinh asked, “What must we do?”
Kreizler said, “If you can’t raise the bridge, you lower the river.”
“What?”
“They’re not getting any information out of me.”
“Then what you do?”
“When the guards come to take me out for interrogation, we jump their leader.”
“But they will shoot us. If we try that, they will kill us.” Kreizler only watched him calmly. Chinh said, “They kill us.”
“I know.”
Chapter Sixteen
0705 Hours
“What time is it?” Tyreen asked.
Saville looked at his watch. “Five after seven.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Out in the road Sergeant Khang squatted wearily, sifting dirt and pebbles. Saville said, “I don’t know about him. Maybe it was a mistake to bring him in on this. Like trying to court a bull by waving a red blanket at him.”
“He knows the country, doesn’t he?”
“So does Corporal Smith.”
“Smith’s got a wire down in him somewhere,” said Tyreen.
“I don’t know.” Saville was not a man of words. Even pencils always seemed to break in his big hands.
A fury of sweating chills shook Tyreen. Saville, whose eyes never missed much, said, “You didn’t have to take this job, David. Nobody’d care.”
“I care.”
The drizzle kept them damp and discomfited. Wind made ripples through the elephant grass, and Tyreen peered across the road, trying to pick out Nhu Van Sun’s position, but he could not see Sergeant Sun or the machine gun emplacement. That was good; he did not want to be able to see it.
Saville said, “You ought to be back in the States taking it easy.”
“That’s what General Jaynshill thinks.”
“He cut orders on you?”
“Not yet. Next week, I imagine.”
“Uh-huh,” said Saville. “That would just about break you, wouldn’t it? A desk job, I mean. That’s what’s biting you.”
“Theodore, you talk too much. Last time I checked, you were neither my mother nor my keeper.”
Tyreen’s lips pushed rhythmically out and down. He rolled over on one shoulder to stare up the road. “What’s that?”
Sergeant Hooker was behind him. “Sounds like a jeep, sir. Maybe a three-quarter-ton truck.”
“Get back to your post, Sergeant.”
Hooker disappeared, and Saville said, “Get your ass down, David,” in a very mild tone.
Tyreen flattened out. There was a chugging up the road, an unhurried gravel-crunching, and the sound of an engine changing gears. Sergeant Khang got up on his feet and faded back into the brush. Tyreen’s face was sweat-drenched and greenish. They lay in ambush along the road, waiting for an unsuspecting enemy, ready to cut the enemy to pieces — pieces of flesh, Tyreen thought, flesh and gristle, intestines and blood, cracked bones and ripsawed organs and severed joints like butchers’ meat cuts. The mind must lock out the knowledge that enemy soldiers were men.
Tyreen said, “Wait and see if it’s a truck. Let it go by if it’s not big enough to carry the six of us.”
He cleared his submachine gun. His attention narrowed down like a cone on the far bend of the road. The ugly square snout of a truck lunged around into view. “Deuce and a half,” said Saville. “Almost too damned big. Wonder what they’re carrying?”
The truck came grinding up the road, smashing the silence to pieces. Tyreen butted the weapon to his shoulder and laid his cheek along the stock, and then lowered it and ducked his head out of view. He spoke over his shoulder in a calm voice:
“Sergeant Khang.”
“Gung ho, Colonel,” said the Vietnamese. Over the rumbling of the truck Tyreen heard Khang’s boots tramp out onto the road surface. Tyreen slid back and edged his eyes over the breastwork. Saville said, “Two soldiers in the cab.”
The truck was painted battle gray. Its coarse-mesh grille looked like bared teeth. Tires chewed up the road, and the gears shifted down loudly. A hundred feet away, the truck slowed, and a Vietminh soldier in a flat helmet stepped out on the running board with his rifle lifted in one hand. Sergeant Khang stood out in the middle of the road in his undershirt, weaponless, waving the truck down. It stopped with a dusty squeak, and the driver leaned out. Khang started talking loudly in Vietnamese. Tyreen watched the driver’s face. The second soldier got down and walked ahead ten feet to stand in front of Khang and wave the rifle at him. Khang was talking rapidly, using his hands. The soldier shook his head with exasperation and turned around and yelled at the driver; the driver climbed out of his cab, lugging a Chinese machine pistol.
That was when a hand reached out of the truck bed and pushed back the tarpulin flap. A booted leg appeared. Saville murmured in Tyreen’s ear: “Troop carrier. We’re in the soup, David. God knows how many men in there.”
The PANVN soldier climbed out of the back of the truck — a captain, by his insignia. He looked around the tail edge and said irritably, “Cha di mo? Sao!”