As he finally approached the bivouac site in the twilight, he scanned desperately for signs of life. He had not seen a single helicopter in flight. No vehicles stirred the dust along the portage roads. Crazily, he walked faster, almost running, staggering, his damaged back stiff, as though the spine had been fused into a single piece.
Surely, they would not have left him behind.
Water.
Rest.
He trotted dizzily around the spur of waste that shielded the field site from view.
And he staggered as though punched hard in the chest. Then he sat down in the dirt, staring.
The support site had been turned into a blackened scrapyard. Wrecked helicopters and vehicles sat in jagged repose amid shredded tentage and camouflage netting.
They had not heard his broadcast warnings. Or they had not reacted in time. Or they had been caught out by the same technological imbalance that had swept his troop from the sky.
Eventually he picked himself up, dizzy, and wandered about the ruins of his army. Not everything had been destroyed. Vehicles, a field kitchen, miscellaneous field gear, even a precious water buffalo had simply been left behind. No bodies, though. In the American tradition, the survivors who had pulled out had taken their wounded and their dead. But precious little else. Atop the two-story administration building, a red and white cavalry pennant hung limply from its pole, forgotten.
Taylor realized that it must have been very bad. But he could not quite feel sympathy for them, or outrage. He simply felt sick, with all the self-focus illness brings. He drank water too quickly from the tap of the water buffalo, then let the liquid stream over his head. He could tell from the pain the coolness produced that he was badly sunburned. But it seemed so minor a problem that he wasted no further thought on it. He wanted to rest.
The African darkness fell with the swiftness of a heavy curtain released from above, and Taylor stumbled through the litter of the administrative building up onto the flat roof where the cavalry guidon hung. He hoped that no creatures would pester him there. He had degenerated into a childish terror of all small crawling things, even of flies. He felt as though he had been overloaded with nature's horrors, and he wanted only to be left in peace for a little while.
The sun woke him. He jerked up from the concrete bed of the roof. Helicopters. He heard helicopters. But, even as he struggled to his feet to search the sky, he realized that the sound was only the buzzing of flies.
His legs were very weak, and he had to go down the stairs carefully. He drank more water, tasting it now, sour and warm. Stacks of ration cartons had been knocked about by the kitchen trailer. But the thought of food sickened him. Still, the day seemed hopeful. He was alive. And he could take his choice from a number of vehicles in operative condition. He could take a truck if he wanted. Or a lighter utility vehicle. It struck him that he might just survive after all.
He moved slowly, but he tried to move methodically. He loaded a light, all-purpose truck with boxes of rations, I with ten-gallon fuel cans, with water cans. He worked through the wreckage of the helicopters, searching out forgotten emergency kits. Ammunition, matches, first-aid kits, flare guns. It was possible to salvage something from even the worst wrecks. But he could not find a working radio. The late-model sets that had been left behind had been cleared, deprogrammed. Someone had been thinking about operations security.
There were civilian phone lines in the administrative building, but they were dead. Still, he was able to lift a decent set of maps from the abandoned stock, some outdated, others with broad expanses where there was no detail, yet far better than the single local flight map disintegrating in his pocket. He made a plan. No point heading for Kolwezi without adequate knowledge of the combat situation. Better to head north, roughly along the Lualaba, as the backcountry roads and trails allowed. In the wreckage of the tents, he sifted through the burned duffel bags and kits. His own oversize aviator's bag had burned, but he found stray uniform pieces of the necessary sizes where the enlisted tents had stood. He could even have taken a supply of pornographic magazines, but he settled for loading a sleeping bag onto the truck.
He was ready to go. He still felt weak, but he was convinced that he was going to make it. He could almost feel a spark of his old fire, thinking: George Taylor versus Africa, round two. He folded the local map sheet and tucked it in by the gears. He had loaded himself down with pistols and knives like a cartoon cowboy. He started the engine. But a last glimpse of the abandoned cavalry banner on the roof stopped him.
Laboriously, he reclimbed the stairs. He grabbed the fabric in one hand and cut it free from the pole with a sheath knife, noticing with his first smile in days that some young soldier had inked into the fabric, in small block letters, the informal cavalryman's motto:
IF YOU AIN'T CAV, YOU AIN'T SHIT.
Taylor folded up the guidon and slipped it into one of his oversize uniform pockets. Moments later he had left the scene of defeat behind, on his way to conquer a continent.
His journey took four months. He had hoped to link up with U.S. forces at a corps support command site at Lubudi, but he found only a dump of pallets and blivets, repair tents, and a plundered medical support site, all abandoned by the U.S. military and now inhabited by local squatters. The native dead lay casually about the compound, victims of RD that no one else would touch, let alone bury. Taylor sped off, trying to bathe away any contagion in the rush of air moving over the vehicle, unwilling to risk the contact questions would have required.
He followed the river. His fellow Americans were somewhere to the west or northwest, but he had no way of knowing how far back the war had carried them. The river, with its necklace of remote, fetid towns, was his only hope. Bukama, too, was dying, but the remnants of government and a few Belgian missionaries were fighting back, burning the corpses. Taylor had smelled the stench miles before he reached the straggling edge of the town, but nothing in his experience had allowed him to identify it. At a ferry crossing, a Lebanese wanted to purchase anything Taylor would be willing to sell from the stock aboard the vehicle, but Taylor was determined to husband his riches, rationing himself on the long progress toward Kinshasa. In response to Taylor's pidgin questions about Americans, the Lebanese responded angrily in French overgrown with localisms, so that all Taylor could make out was that the Lebanese did not know where there were any Americans and did not care where there were any Americans. Beyond that, Taylor could only catch the word death, which came up repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, just as the landscape was going bad, Taylor's vehicle stopped in the middle of a dirt track. Nothing he could do would make it start again, and he had no choice but to abandon the riches the Lebanese had so badly wanted to buy.
He continued on foot, bartering for occasional rides on ancient trucks, on ferries and riverboats seeping with plague. He had diarrhea, but it passed over him in cycles, hitting him hard, then weakening, then punishing him again. Each new surge of pain teased him with the thought that he was coming down with Runciman's disease. But he never sickened beyond stomach cramps and the breakdown of his bowels as his belly filled with parasites. Far from his dreams of military glory, he killed his first enemy in a filthy cafe, shooting the bandit in the instant before he would have been shot himself, then shooting the bartender-accomplice a moment later, watching an old hunting rifle slip from the man's hands. One more trap for travelers in a dying land.
He traveled over a thousand winding miles to the great falls and the ghostly city of Kisangani, its population first thinned by AIDS, now slaughtered by Runciman's disease. There was no help for him there, but the whores desperately trying to make a living along the enfeebled trade route told him that, yes, there was a very big war.