He heard the chopping of Shannon’s weapon. Shannon moved from one side of the plane to the other as it swung its tail around. Ahead of McKuen the descending lip of the precipice swam into view, faintly visible through the rain. It was a downsloping runway from here. The plane was moving, crawling; over his shoulder he saw the guerrillas break away from the protection of the trees and run forward, shouting and firing. Muscles knotted in his stomach. He leaned forward as if to add his straining energies to the halting acceleration of the aircraft. Number two coughed, and he jerked spasmodically. The old plane gained slow momentum, and sweat burst out in a flood on his face. A bullet glanced off the right-hand window, tracing a long furrow in the glass. He was halfway, now — halfway to the cliff, and the speed indicator hovered at forty miles an hour. His face whitened, and he said over and over again, “Oh Jesus— Oh Jesus— Oh Jesus.”
Little gashes of earth sprayed up in front of the wings — bullets seeking the plane. The tail came up, and a part of his mind wondered with complete abstraction why the wheels had not left the ground. The cold engines were not giving what they could. He changed pitch and flooded the fuel mixture; nothing seemed to work: the gooney bird crawled toward the cliff, bumping solidly along the ground. Sixty and seventy miles and eighty miles an hour. Had bullets chewed into the engines? He pummeled the throttles, bruising his hand. The carbine fell out through the window; he heard it clang when it hit the surface of the wing. Wind sliced at him through the open window and through the punctured windscreen. The wheels scratched along the metal runway. He hauled the wheel back at a sharper angle. “Oh Jesus!”
In a roar of sound the plane pitched over the cliff. He felt the wheels lose contact, felt the plane sag beneath him; he thought calmly, “Okay... okay.” But the high-pitched props cut big holes in the air, and the plane dipped away from the cliff with a heavy graceful swoop. McKuen leveled off twenty feet below the altitude of the rim and made a slow turn to the right to pass between two mountains. He brought the gear up, but he did not hear the right-hand wheels lock under the wing; he continued his turn, banking with the left wing high, and when he looked through the window he saw dim orange flashes at the rim of the cliff, bullets aimed at him from much too far away.
He put the fragile plane into a slow climb and pointed it west by southwest. “Shannon!”
Mister Shannon’s voice replied from right behind his shoulder. “Something leaking out from under number two, Lieutenant. Maybe hydraulic fluid for the landing gear. The wheels didn’t go all the way up.”
McKuen looked around at him. “Are you hit?”
“I think I am.” Shannon slid into his seat. He was still clutching his empty carbine; he put it down with care and fumbled with his jacket. McKuen’s hands spidered over the controls. Airspeed built up to one-forty; altitude seven thousand, then seventy-three hundred — it was all he seemed able to get out of her. He said, “How you makin’ it, Mister?”
When he turned to look, Shannon was slumped in his seat with his eyes shut.
Chapter Twenty-four
1045 Hours
Tyreen gripped the truck tailgate and braced one foot on the bumper. “They’ve had time. Let’s go.”
“Not yet,” said Theodore Saville.
“What?”
Saville shook his head. Silence enveloped them. Sergeant Sun stood by — dark, sensitive, cautious. Something had tickled Theodore Saville’s intuitions. Tyreen saw J. D. Hooker’s eyes reach Saville, full of sullen hatred; he saw the fighting streak along Hooker’s mouth. And Corporal Smith — strain continued to scratch Smith’s nerves; it showed in the broken glitter of his eyes. Only Sergeant Khang seemed unconcerned.
Theodore Saville’s growling voice prowled across the jungle like a stalking cat: “I don’t like it. Something’s missing.”
Ruffled by the sultry silence and his own inability to share Saville’s psychic notions, Tyreen took his foot down and turned his face toward the unseen road, eastward through the rain forest. J. D. Hooker spoke with wicked calm: “Your crystal ball tell you something, Captain?”
“Easy,” Tyreen murmured. “Take it easy.”
The sudden white of Hooker’s cheeks made his sunken eyes seem darker. “I didn’t hire on for voodoo business. What are we sitting here for?”
“We’re playing a hunch,” Sergeant Khang said.
“I don’t get this.”
Hooker’s gaze came around and fastened on Tyreen’s stark features. Sergeant Sun turned frowning toward the trees, taking his submachine gun down from his shoulder, and Tyreen knew he had felt the edge of the same feeling that had touched Saville. Saville’s head bowed seriously. A steady cool breeze flowed through the timber.
Hooker said, “Wait a minute — I hear it. You hear it, Captain?”
Saville lifted his face and then his hand, lying against the truck, stiffened. “I feel it in the ground.”
“Sounds like a Goddamn tank,” said J. D. Hooker.
Tyreen heard nothing but their voices and the rain. He dipped his head toward Sergeant Khang, and Khang went trotting up into the jungle. Saville’s hand closed. “That’s what it is,” he said.
It came to Tyreen after a time of waiting — the unmistakable squealing clatter of a tank. “Coming up from the city,” he said. “We’d have run right into it.”
The tank whined up the steep road, humped onto the flats somewhere nearby out of sight and downshifted. It rumbled nearer, and Tyreen heard the whine of metal grinding on metal, the heavy squeak of steel treads. And Theodore Saville said flatly, “What’s a single tank doing on this particular road right now?”
Hooker said, “The place is swarming with gooks. Somebody tipped them off.”
“Shut up.”
The tank clattered on, going past, going up the road, away. Tyreen discovered his breath pent up in his chest. He let all the air out of his lungs and arched his chest to get wind. He coughed weakly. Sweat was oily along his palms; he wiped them against the sodden thighs of his fatigues and walked around to the front of the truck. “Khang and Sun will ride the seat,” he said. “Move, now.”
Sergeant Khang had ignored the girl. He would have been hard put to describe her. But the map — the map was engraved, hung in a frame before his mind. Every turn, every hill, every landmark he took account of. He felt power in his blunt hands. They moved for him with precision and economy; they turned switches and caressed the wheel. Nhu Van Sun sat beside him, small hands folded calmly in his lap. Khang glanced at him and thought of saying something, but he had nothing to say. His hand dropped from the key to the shift knob. He drove through the mud, humping over exposed roots; the seat bucked like a cockleburred horse. The windshield jumped crazily and gave him a sort of kaleidoscope picture of trees and earth.
Sergeant Sun spoke: he did not like the Montagnard nuoc mam, and he was hungry. He sounded sour. He leaned his head back, and Khang wondered what he saw in the dark ceiling of the cab. The truck bounced over a last rut and into the road. Khang said, “I think we’ve done a Goddamn fine job of finding a puking shortcut from nowhere to nowhere.” He smiled.
“Excuse, please?”
“Never mind,” Khang said. “Manh gioi?”