“I feel well,” Sun acknowledged in Vietnamese. “Why?”
“Gió mua,” Khang muttered, angry with the incessant rain. “Nuc — nuc.”
“There is always rain.”
Black clouds unrolled densely, not far overhead; a heavy mist settled on the hills. The road nosed over a rise, and Khang saw for the first time the spread of the city of Chutrang. He rapped knuckles against the back window and glimpsed Tyreen’s face at the glass. Lighted windows, faint through the rain, were enough to show the crazy pattern of streets; far beyond, the heavier dark mass of mountains sealed the city into its pocket of earth. Nhu Van Sun spoke in Vietnamese:
“You once lived here?”
“No. I used to visit the city when I was a child.” He did not understand why men had come to this place and built a city. It was unfriendly country, all whipped up and jagged, and half-drowned in jungle. It was a hostile jungle; it started to rot its victims even before it had killed them.
Patches of fog lay on the road, uncut by the rain. Khahg crawled the truck forward. The road dropped into a trough of earth. Rock shoulders squeezed it into a narrow throat, through which he drove with taut care; the walls seemed to crush together like vise-jaws. When they fell away, the road ran out onto a flat cleared of trees. The city lay vaguely in view, misted and wet; and now, seeking landmarks, he turned off into a path winding among huts. Khang ground the stick into a new gear, swinging around a corner that at first seemed too tight for the truck’s length. On his right he saw a long, widening crack in a building wall. The crack remained in his mind for a while like an echo or an afterglow — a great split down the side of the wall, seeming to grow wider in the instant he watched it, threatening to rend the wall apart.
Cold gusts whipped through the paneless window at his shoulder. His attitude of detachment slipped from him; the grin had gone. He said, “Why are we here?” and uttered a Vietnamese oath.
Nhu Van Sun said mildly, “I know why I am here, Sergeant.”
“Bully for you,” Khang said in English. He spun the wheel wildly to avoid a short flight of half-visible steps extending strangely out into the alley. The street looped onto the side of a steep hill above the city. He had nothing to guide him through the mist, only a very poor light scattered by falling rain. At the far end of this, he recalled, the map showed an empty plot of land he had to cross. How long was the street? He could not remember. He dragged a cuff across his mouth. The map picture was dim, moving farther away. With an effort of will he drew it back to him. The wheel jiggled, pummeling his cramped hands. More by feel than by sight, he knew there was a sharp drop-off at his left. He kept the truck edged in toward the hillside on the right. Was there another turn along the side here? he tried to recall. He saw Colonel Tyreen’s angular shadow falling across the map; the path went along the side of the hill here — he saw Corporal Smith’s finger tracing it — and there were four turns in all; had he passed four, or only three? What was happening to his memory?
The truck inched forward on the deserted hillside. The city seemed unconscious. Lights burned, staring winklessly through the rain, fixing the panorama of the city’s shape: a kidney outline, bounded by mountains on all sides. The truck growled, now and then complaining with a squeak or a soft metal clank. The seat jostled him gently.
The flat of land appeared, spreading out to the left of the path. It tipped downward toward the backs of a ragged row of stone buildings. One light brightened a high window; starkly revealed in silhouette, a woman’s high-breasted shape crossed the shade, and the light went out. It was a single glimpse of life going on in the ordinary way, and it was altogether unreal. Khang said, “You do know why we are here?”
It was downhill; he shut off the engine. His foot rode the brake pedal, and his spine pressed into the seat back. Nhu Van Sun said, “We are here to fight our enemies, Sergeant.”
“Enemies,” Khang said. “I was born here.”
The truck coasted down the incline and prowled between two buildings built of stone, neither of them standing quite up-and-down. Sergeant Sun said, “If a man is loyal to his country, then he must be loyal to his government.”
“What?”
“Besides,” Nhu Van Sun said, “we are soldiers. A soldier must be loyal, if he is nothing else. How can you ask why you are here?”
Khang only shrugged. He had trouble making out the shifts of the street. “Cobblestones,” he said, lapsing into English. “We’ll wake the dead.” The narrow street ran between stone houses clinging precariously to sloping ground at either side. Here and there the open front of a shop; a chicken running in wing-lifted panic to evade the truck’s advance; an old man, probably opium-numbed, sprawled over stone steps; deep-set windows like hollow eye sockets; a shaggy cat prowling back and forth at a doorway; the red glow of a cigarette glowing and dimming in a dark window; an ancient temple built of huge stones, each stone fitted perfectly into the others without mortar — “I remember this place,” Khang said. “They use it now for indoctrination meetings.”
The stone structures leaned at lazy angles. Nhu Van Sun said, “Choi oi.”
“What is it?”
“I saw something move — stop the truck.”
“We can’t. They’d know what we were up to if I stopped.”
“Stop the truck,” Sun repeated. And so Khang stopped it.
Chapter Twenty-five
1055 Hours
J. D. Hooker dropped off the truck clutching his blunt-snouted gun. He stood at the tailgate until Tyreen’s face appeared. “Sergeant Sun spotted something. Have a look.”
“You trust that bastard, Colonel?”
Saville jumped down past Tyreen. “We’ll do this without noise, understand?” Saville’s face was calm and round, but here and there a tight line crossed it. “Leave that thing here.” He put his hand on the muzzle of Hooker’s submachine gun. Hooker’s grip tightened. Saville’s brute strength depressed the barrel, and Hooker let go; Saville passed it to Tyreen and then walked forward beside the truck.
Sergeant Sun said, “I see two men by corner there.”
The whole conversation took place in muted whispers. Saville’s arm lifted and made motions. J. D. Hooker thereupon put his back to the truck and moved away, keeping the truck interposed between himself and the corner where Sun said he had seen men. Hooker walked steadily to the shelter of a sagging stone house and went around it briskly. The North Vietnamese field jacket, taken off a dead man an hour ago, flapped as he ran. He broke into a dogtrot, and his lips lashed back from his teeth; he jerked the pistol from his holster and reversed it in his fist like a short club. His feet rose and fell against the uneven ground. He curled around the second corner of the house, picked a path through creepers and brush, found the far end of the building, and turned slowly past the corner. Probing the mists with eyes and ears and nose, he found nothing. He moved with alert care toward the street. Rain compressed around him. He arrived at the street, having come all the way around the house, and saw nothing except the mass of Captain Saville’s figure by the corner.
Hooker stood a moment regaining his breath. “He never saw nothing. The puking little gook lied in his teeth.”
Saville spoke very quietly. “Put that thing away.” Hooker slipped the automatic into its scabbard. They walked back to the truck, Saville shaking his head and making horizontal motions with his hands. Hooker climbed up. “Wild-goose chase. He never saw nothing.”
“Maybe,” said Tyreen.
Hooker moved forward under the tarp with willful anger clouding his face. He heard Saville settle down and felt the truck begin to move.