The broken surface of the high ground swelled and dipped away in all directions. It was all cross-canyons and earth standing on its end and spires thrusting up as though poked through ragged holes in the undulating quilt of the heavy rain forest. He saw no room for a town or a railroad. If the Sang Chu flowed down out of the high gorge, then it had to be hidden under the forest canopy, arched over by treetops and never touched by the sun.
The road went down into the forest. Corporal Smith’s eyes strained into the troughs ahead. Roots of jungle trees writhed above the ground, thicker than a man. Fungus and slime crawled onto the road. Gibbons moved through the branches, vague flickering shadows against a violet ceiling. Tyreen had parachuted into Burma in 1945, and it reminded him of that. He lighted a cigarette and sat with it uptilted between his teeth. His eyes slid shut, and he had a fractured moment of unconsciousness; then the truck jolted him, and he almost bit through the cigarette. Its inch of ash spilled on his pants. He chewed the end off and spat it out.
Corporal Smith said, “I used to race jalopies when I was a kid.”
“How old are you, Corporal?”
“Twenty-four, sir. Going on a twenty-fourth of my life I been in this stinking jungle.”
“Where do you hail from?”
“Albuquerque.” A rock in the road made the truck jump. Tyreen threw out the butt of his cigarette. Smith said, “I used to think driving was fun. Used to race jalopies around like the sun was going down and never going to come up again. But no fun in this. No speed, you know?”
“Speed enough.” Tyreen coughed and said, “The speed of death,” and then laughed at himself.
Smith said, “What, sir?”
“Nothing.”
The road ran up a sudden pitch and flopped over a bald crest and for that instant, hanging suspended with a drop before them so steep that Tyreen could not see the road for the hood, he had a fleeting picture of glittering tracks in a valley, rails worn smooth by hard use. The image came to him through a notch in the mountains; it disappeared as soon as the road left the summit. They dropped into a narrow passage walled by rock. Uneven turns volleyed the truck back and forth; it jounced on its stiff springs. They curled once more into the jungle on a flat basin floor with the big engine sawing like a giant grinder. Rocks popped, crushing audibly under the tires. The wind here was not quite so cold or so cutting. The rising sun made a faint luminescence in the clouds, visible now and then through holes in the treetops.
“Colonel,” said Corporal Smith.
“What?”
“You got one of those poison things in your tooth?”
Tyreen said, “Why?”
“I don’t know. Captain Kreizler had one. I don’t see how a man could do that. Swallowing poison on purpose, I mean. You get to thinking a lot about dying and things like that. I figured for a while maybe I had some kind of charm — some lucky piece like maybe a rabbit’s foot or something. Been up here a year and never even got scratched yet. Last night, the whole outfit got wiped out. But not me. I figure I’m due for rotation any time now, and every day I get scared a little more. I want to get back to my wife. She’s in Albuquerque, my wife. Went back there when they sent me to Fort Bragg. Year and a half ago, that was. She’s a sweet kid, my wife.”
Tyreen thought there was something strange about the way Smith’s talky spells switched on and off as if they were connected to a time clock.
For a while neither man spoke. They drove into a mossy obscurity of rot and tangles. It startled Tyreen when Corporal Smith blurted:
“Colonel, I got something to say.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“I wasn’t just lucky last night.” Smith licked a corner of his mouth. “I took a dive. I stayed in the brush until the shooting quit. I didn’t move. I was just laying there, crying. I was crying, sir. I heard them shooting the boys up. I kept my eyes closed tight. I had my hands on my head. Kept crying like that. It was like somebody pushed me down flat and I just couldn’t move. I looked up a couple times and saw what was happening, but I didn’t lift a Goddamn finger.”
He glanced swiftly at Tyreen. “I keep telling myself it wouldn’t of done nobody much good if I’d shot back at them.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have.”
“But I don’t get paid to lie on my belly and cry.”
Tyreen stirred up the energy to say, “You did the right thing, telling me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I doubt it will go against you. A man freezes up in combat — it happens, Corporal.”
Smith flicked him a glance that might have been sardonic. Tyreen said, “Nothing you could have done would have made much difference.”
“I might have got greased.”
“We’re all lucky you didn’t.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Smith said. He was watching the dark corridor of the road. His mind had receded, and he did not speak again.
You fought, Tyreen thought. You fought; you ran; you killed. Now and then you laughed. Finally, if you were not killed, you endured.
Chapter Eighteen
0845 Hours
J. D. Hooker kept staring at Saville. Hooker’s little eyes glowed in their sockets. The truck bed jounced under them; the two Vietnamese sergeants rode at the corners of the tailgate, watching the track unroll behind. The bullet-shredded tarpaulin flapped at both sides.
Hooker said, “You never liked me much, right, Captain?”
“I never thought much about it, Hooker.”
“You’re a liar. You’ve always hated my guts.”
Saville said, “This time, I didn’t hear that, Sergeant. Next time will be the last. Just as sure as there’s a hole in your ass. Do you tune me in loud and clear, soldier?”
Hooker held up both hands with the fingers splayed. “That’s how short I am, Captain. You can count the days on your fingers. So why’d you have to go and pick me for this dirty job?”
“Sergeant, it’s not your business to question me. I get paid to earn the difference between your pay and mine.”
The jungle jolted past the open endgate; the hard floor rebounded against their bodies, and there was no position in which a man could avoid punishment. Saville looked at the two Vietnamese, and he did not like the knuckle-white grasp of Nhu Van Sun’s fists on the submachine gun. Saville watched the dark jungle and remembered the rains on Guadalcanal and a battalion that had expended forty-eight hours, a hundred lives, and a shipload of ammunition to capture sixty yards of jungle from the Japanese. He wondered who owned that strip of ground now.
Twenty years ago, he had been positive about everything. He had known right from wrong.
J. D. Hooker had a hand clasped on the combat harness where he had torn off a grenade. Hooker said, “Captain, this Goddamn puking Army ever do anything for you? Never give me nothing but trouble. Like you, come at me from behind, last night. Got me when I wasn’t looking. I’d been looking at you, Captain, you’d be back in that alley right now, and I’d be drinking my beer. You was lucky. Just lucky.”
“No,” Saville said. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“I wouldn’t be so damned proud of myself if I was you, Captain.”
“Maybe you would. If you were me.”
Hooker grinned unpredictably. “Could be,” he said. “Can’t fool a man like you, Captain. You’re good, and you know you’re good. Maybe I couldn’t have licked you — front or back.”
Settling the issue seemed to satisfy Hooker; he became more placid. Hooker was a competitor. He believed only in the survival of the fittest; he was wholly incapable of friendship.