“Jesus,” J. D. Hooker said in fascination.
Saville ran across the path and took Kreizler’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. Tyreen knelt beside him. Saville said, “Dead. He went right out of his head.”
“No,” said Tyreen. “He did it deliberately. He had it in his head the minute we set him down.”
Hooker came over, slinging his gun. He crouched by Kreizler in disbelief. “What the puke did he do that for, Colonel?”
Tyreen told him, “Captain Kreizler figured he’d slow us down and make our job tougher. He knew we wouldn’t kill him or leave him behind.”
Hooker said, “And he took this way out? Jesus. What an ugly Goddamn way to die.”
“Tell me a pretty way,” Theodore Saville said, and turned his face away.
Hooker got up and moved down the trail like a sleepwalker. Saville said in a low tone, “That’s not why he killed himself, and you know it.”
“Maybe,” Tyreen said. “We’ll never be sure. But the story I gave Hooker is the story we stick by.”
Saville said, “I thought I had you filed. But I guess you never know about a man.”
“We’ll bury him and get out of here. That noise will bring a patrol this way.”
Saville’s face was heavy. Tyreen took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook it out. “Smoke, Theodore?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
Tyreen said, “Smoking’s a bad thing. It can make a man sick to his stomach.”
After a while Saville said, “I guess I will have that cigarette.”
Chapter Forty-four
0915 Hours
Dry cigarette smoke burned McKuen’s throat raw, and he crushed the cigarette out and stood with his attention on the corpse at his feet.
The dead soldier lay on the trail, decapitated, his head between his legs.
Montagnard work, McKuen supposed. He drew a line in the earth with his dragging bootheel. When he took off his hat, the small wind roughed up his hair. He went away, pushing through a brier thicket. His clothes were shredded. When he rubbed his dry lips he felt them crack. For a little while he sat down in the mud and thought, I feel like a bloke in a cataleptic trance. He had developed somewhere the ability to seal himself off from brutality. He felt so accustomed to death that it no longer reached him.
He had come across an open pit by the river bank. A gibbon had crashed through the camouflaged matting and impaled itself on pungi stakes in the pit. It had seemed alive — breathing, but unconscious. There had been no point in rescuing it, because the pungi stakes would be poisoned with tetanus-infected dung, but McKuen had spent a long time lifting the monkey out of the pit. It had not stirred. He had left it by the river bank, where it could reach water.
Now he jerked his chin up. Was I asleep? He backed away from the river and found an opening in the jungle. A slight sound bothered him, and he stopped. It sounded like a car. It was coming definitely toward him. He stood carrying his gun with his lean shoulders pulled together. After a moment he walked away from the river. He moved into a shaft of sunlight and glanced up, and thought, Anyway it’s still morning. His eyes were close-lidded.
He found the road, a green-brown stripe running between walls of heavy rain forest. Deep shadows made a corridor of it. He put his shoulder to a tree, numbed but alerted, and heard the spurt of engine backfires as the nearing vehicle rolled down a slope. He raised his eyebrows and melted back into the jungle. The rumble of wheels grew louder, the scrape of dusty brakes. The nose of a jeep crawled into sight up the road. A swirl of risen moisture hovered around it. McKuen watched through shadow-pearled branches. The shadows seemed to move, converging against him. The jeep went into sunlight, and its windshield was a rectangle of blinding white. Settling spray made a thin, brown mist. A puff of cigarette smoke issued from the jeep window and fled in thin streaks. McKuen closed his fingers tight around the gun.
“Kicks,” he said.
Foliage rattled when he moved. He wanted that jeep. His feet were blistered, his legs were tired. The jeep engine grew louder, picking up revolutions on the flats with a grating noise. Twigs reported the crush of tires. McKuen lifted his gun and waited by the edge of the road.
Chapter Forty-five
0945 Hours
On a sunbaked shelf of yellow rock, Tyreen lay prone with glare narrowing his eyes. Theodore Saville’s basso profundo rumbled softly across the rock:
“It sounds like a jeep.”
J. D. Hooker said, “I don’t see any road down there.”
And Sergeant Khang answered him. “That’s the road they use to reach the bridge garrison. It keeps pretty close to the river.”
The breeze had died. Heat swelled along the rock face. Tyreen studied the jungle treetops with heightened perception that made every object sharp-edged and clearly splashed with color. A stray idea began to cross his mind. It was cut off abruptly by the rattle of a submachine gun and the answer of two or three rifles, not far below in the rain forest.
The jeep had stopped moving. Hooker said, “What now, for Christ’s sake?”
Saville said, “It’s none of our business.”
“Maybe,” Tyreen said. “But it sounds like two or three against one.”
“Some stupid Yard,” said Hooker. “They’ve probably got him by now.”
“If they had him,” Tyreen said, “they wouldn’t be making so much noise.”
A soldier ran into sight forty yards below, stood irresolutely for an instant, and broke into a run with his bayoneted rifle at the ready position. Theodore Saville lifted his chopper and fired a three-second burst. The soldier dropped. Tyreen’s eyes whipped around to Saville’s, and in that moment of interlocked glances they made a wordless decision and scrambled off the rock, running down into the rain forest. Hooker ran after them — after the promise of action — and Khang followed Hooker.
Tyreen stopped by the dead soldier. He heard nothing until a single gunshot sounded, a thinned report through the trees. Tyreen turned around in time to see Hooker, cursing over his submachine gun; it would not fire. Tyreen could not see Hooker’s intended target. A rifle opened up, out of sight; the echoes of its shots rolled through the jungle. Hooker picked up the dead man’s bayoneted rifle and swung back into the trees. Tyreen saw him lift his arm and hurl the rifle like a spear.
Tyreen moved forward, his chopper lifted halfway to the shoulder. He passed a tree and saw Hooker bending over something; Hooker’s knife rose and fell. Someone called out. Tyreen’s attention whipped through the forest, and he saw George McKuen standing splay-footed, arched over his submachine gun. The gun made a racket and quieted down. Tyreen ran through the undergrowth. He saw a boyish grin cut across McKuen’s red-stubbled cheeks. McKuen’s bright flash of hair stood out in wild disorder.
The first thing McKuen said was, “There’s three of them. I killed one.”
“Then they’re all taken out.”
McKuen’s shoulders sagged. “Colonel, you looked like the cavalry coming over the hill.”
“What in blazes are you doing down here?”
“Trying to steal a jeep,” McKuen said. He sat down uncertainly and apologized: “I’m a little tired.”
“Where’s Shannon?”
“He didn’t make it.” McKuen worked his boot around on his foot. “Feet are fine for propping on furniture and pushing pedals, Colonel, but one thing they’re bloody well not made for, and that’s walking.” He shook his head and blinked. “I suppose it wouldn’t be fittin’ for me to ask where you people came from?”