And the bridge held firm.
There was a racket of falling metal. McKuen’s chute sprang open. He saw jungle rushing upward. There was a sudden jolt. The silk billowed out overhead. He heard a crack of steel — the broken rudder plane fell away from the bridge. He had a distinct image of the bridge, crippled but intact, its span dented and buckled, but unbroken. The rudder plane fell spinning.
McKuen dangled from the shroud lines, swinging from one end of an arc to the other; he swung across once, reached the apex of the swing, and then the black-green jungle whipped up.
Branches and limbs beat against him. His head rocked back; his shins stung. He plummeted through leaves, breaking off branches, bruising every inch of his body. The harness jerked him up, stopping his fall; he hung twenty feet above the ground.
He caught his breath. He heard a continuing distant rattle of crashing metal. The pieces of the airplane were coming down the cliffs, bouncing from rock to rock. He said, “You got to be kidding. How come my neck isn’t broke? You got to be kidding. You got to be.”
He swung himself back and forth like a boy on a swing. He got a grip on the twisted trunk of the big tree and lodged himself there in a groined limb, getting out of the shroud harness. Sharp pains burned in every part of him. His kneecap felt paralyzed by pain. Both hands were bleeding. “Mother of God,” he murmured. He sat in the angle of the tree limb and cried.
He climbed down into the undergrowth. He pulled out his shirttail and cut a long ragged cloth from his undershirt; he tore it in two and wrapped the cloth around his hands. He thought, “What in God’s name came over me? What in hell am I trying to do flying airplanes into bridges? McKuen is off his bloody skull.”
He stood up straight and felt the forty-five automatic in its holster. “They saw me come down,” he said quietly. “All right. So how in the hell am I going to get out of this?”
He pushed into the steam-misty jungle. Shannon’s dogtags were tangled around his left wrist.
Chapter Thirty-six
1300 Hours
David Tyreen slid the garage door shut. “Headlights.” He heard someone climb into the truck; there was a squeak of springs. Switches clicked. No light came on. He stood in the dark and heard Sergeant Khang speak:
“Snafu, Colonel. I guess the damned battery’s gone dead on us.”
“Bitching,” said J. D. Hooker.
Tyreen struck a match and moved around the garage, cupping the small flame. “No lamp bulb in the light socket.” The match burned his fingers, and he struck a new one. He found an oil lamp and picked it up. It held no oil.
Theodore Saville said, “We’ll have to give the truck a push to get it started.”
“Sure,” said Nguyen Khang. “Right down the middle of Main Street, hey, Captain?”
Saville was kneeling by Captain Kreizler on the floor. Tyreen’s match went out. He heard Saville talk softly: “How you making it, Eddie?” Kreizler did not reply.
Tyreen said, “I’ve got to talk to him, Theodore.”
“Do you want me to slap his face, or what?”
“Let me know as soon as he starts to come around.”
A gray faint line of light showed under the door. Tyreen’s eye began to adjust to it. J. D. Hooker was complaining: “What you figure to do now, Colonel? Sit here and wait for the gooks to surround the place?”
“Relax, Sergeant. Nobody knows we’re here.”
“Nobody but that gook dame. Who says she won’t spill the beans to the comrades?”
“She won’t,” said Nguyen Khang.
“Anybody ask you, peckerhead?”
“Hooker, by God, I’ve had just about—”
Saville said, “Shut up, God damn it.”
Tyreen went around lighting matches. The place was a repair garage; perhaps there were batteries about, or a battery-charging machine. But he found nothing. The place had been stripped — by vandals, or by the government. A few tools lay haphazardly on the floor, rusty beyond use. Pools of grease puddled the uneven surface. Tyreen blew out the match. There was just enough light to move around. He said, “We’ve got to get Eddie out of here and get back to that bridge. We can’t do it on foot.”
Saville said, “Maybe we ought to get back to that staff car we left back there.”
“That car’s hot, Captain,” Sergeant Khang said. “Real hot. Like a nympho’s pants. We need something clean, like an oxcart or something. A tank, maybe, hey?”
Khang chuckled and added, “Don’t anybody move too fast — I bruise easy.”
Saville came across the room and spoke softly to Tyreen. “Maybe we ought to curl up and get some sleep. You need it, God knows. So do the rest of us, for that matter.”
“Think we can run that radio from in here?”
“I don’t know. We’ll need someplace to run up the antenna.”
“There’s a potbellied stove over in the corner.”
J. D. Hooker hissed across the floor: “Company.”
After a while Tyreen heard the rattle of a vehicle, the chug of an engine with a faulty muffler, and the crunch of slow-moving tires. A moth flipped by his face, brushing him, making him recoil. The rumble of wheels grew louder and stopped, quite close by; the engine ran a moment longer and was switched off; soft voices ran through the air. Boots tramped the wet pavement outside. Tyreen heard the thud of a heavy object being dropped. He moved carefully to the door and began to pull very slowly at the clumsy hasp. He made a slit wide enough for his eye to peer through. Saville was at his shoulder. Tyreen’s fingers tightened against the door. He saw the heavy outline of a jeep, and just beyond it a machine gun on its low tripod. Two men threw wooden horses across the narrow street; a third man crouched by the gun; a fourth waited beside the jeep with a steel helmet on his head and an automatic carbine across the bend of his elbow, leaning back, lighting a cigarette, laughing quietly at something said by one of the others.
Tyreen pushed the door shut silently and latched the hasp. He went back and spoke in a monotone. “Roadblock. I suppose they’re setting them up all over the city, trying to snare us. It’s about thirty feet down from the door.”
Khang said, “And no back door to this joint.”
Saville said, “We could wait them out.”
J. D. Hooker said, “We could blow them up with a couple grenades.”
“Sure,” Khang jeered, “and bring a whole Goddamn platoon down on us before we got two blocks away.”
Saville said, “What about it, David? Eddie’s in no condition to move, anyway. I’ll stand guard. The rest of you sack out a few hours. Maybe they’ll move the roadblock after that. They won’t wait forever, if we don’t show up.”
Tyreen said, “It’s too risky. They’ll be starting a house-to-house search pretty soon, if they haven’t already. If we can steal that jeep and those fresh uniforms, it might give us a break. But we’ve got to do it without noise:”
Khang said, “Hooker can blow on them and knock them down with his Goddamned breath.”