Faint abrasive sounds came out of the jungle. A few birds whistled. Khang went down to the edge of the trees and disappeared in darkness. Tyreen leaned his head back and closed his eyes momentarily. The sky threw a steady growth of illumination across the landscape. Tyreen’s eyes slid open, and he found J. D. Hooker studying him. Hooker possessed an unbreakable solemnity; Tyreen could never remember seeing him laugh. Hooker’s face was the cold color of marble. He said in a half-cranky tone, “It’s getting late to be hanging around here. Sir.”
When Tyreen said nothing, Hooker’s chin thrust forward. Always ready to pick a fight, Tyreen thought. Theodore Saville said, “You ought to pick your enemies with more care, Hooker.”
“What?”
“Can’t hate everybody, can you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Forget it,” said Saville. Hooker looked away incuriously. Darkness gave ground quickly, and on the eastern horizon a pale yellow band appeared and spread out, quite rapidly, along the hilltops.
Tyreen saw Hooker’s gun muzzle move. His eyes caught a movement that disappeared in the trees and presently came in sight again. Tyreen moved his body to one side to have better control of his submachine gun. After a moment he relaxed. “All right. It’s Khang.”
Sergeant Khang paused at that moment, on the edge of the trees, and studied the shadowed rocks with care. Tyreen’s voice crawled softly down to him: “Come on up.”
Khang slid into the rock’s overhanging shadow with the smell of his exerted sweat pumping out. When his breathing had softened, he said, “Nobody around. There’s a trail, but I think it may be mined.”
Violet shadows crept backward across jungle depressions, in fast-moving retreat. Tyreen shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand. The red rim of the ascending sun came over the horizon and flared against his face. He put his head back against the hard, grainy rock; his legs flopped out straight, and he lay as though collapsed. A loose tangle of memories crowded paths through his tired mind, of times and places that had nothing in common with this time and this place. He heard Kreizler murmuring to Saville about his wife back home, and he heard Saville’s grunts of reply. He thought of the few women he had known, and wondered why he had been unable to stay with any of them, or they with him. Odd thoughts, stray images — he had for one instant a clear vision of Saville on a swaying boat deck off the Korean coast, firing a semiautomatic rifle with deadly, methodical precision into the trees above a thin band of beach.
He opened his eyes, and the red disk of the sun was balanced on the horizon. The slanted rays turned the far mountain of the Sang Chu gorge crimson and violet. They splashed the faces of his companions with a ruddy flush, all except Kreizler’s, which lay in shadow and remained pale and strained.
Saville moved his weight up to the rock. “David, you been giving any thought to what we do when we get there?”
“We blow up the bridge.”
“While two hundred People’s Soldiers twiddle their thumbs and cheer us on?”
Tyreen drew a picture on the ground. “This is the gorge. The bridge crosses it here. On the south side there’s a big shelf, maybe a hundred yards deep and a quarter mile long. That’s where the troop barracks are. Fortifications and the rest. On the north side there’s a small guard tower. It’s all they’ve got room for. The tracks make a small turn and go into a tunnel maybe fifteen yards from the bridge. The tunnel comes out on the north side of the mountain. It’s about a third of a mile long.”
“I know all that,” Saville said.
“Sometimes it helps to draw a picture.”
“Okay. What do you figure to do? Make our approach through the tunnel?”
“Exactly.”
“It’ll be guarded. Probably machine gun emplacements at both ends — maybe more than that.”
“Guarded against what?” Tyreen said.
“People like us.”
“But it’s not guarded against trains.”
Saville’s head skewed back. “Trains?”
Tyreen pointed at his drawing. “Tracks go up a steep grade to get to the tunnel. A train going southbound would be slowed to a crawl by the time it got near the top.”
“And you want to play Jesse James and steal a Goddamn train.”
“And rig our demolitions on the engine,” Tyreen said, “and set the whole thing to blow sky-high when it rolls onto the bridge.”
Saville said, “It’s a good plan — a great plan, except for maybe three or four dozen holes in it. David, you must be out—”
Tyreen cut him off: “If it was your tunnel and your bridge, would you expect anybody to try a stunt like this?”
“I guess not.”
“Then they won’t expect it either.”
Saville growled, “What the hell difference does that make? There’s only four of us. And Eddie. How in hell do we steal a train? How do we get on board without anybody knowing we’re there?”
Tyreen pointed across the valley. “The trains stop at the bottom of the grade to take on water. They still use steam engines up here. We jump them at the water tank.”
Saville shook his head. “When the troops up there hear us shooting it out with the train crew, they won’t just scratch their heads and shrug. The minute we fire one shot, they’ll have half the North Vietnamese army up our ass.”
“Then we’ll have to make it our business not to fire one shot,” Tyreen said. He shouldered into his pack and got to his feet. “Time to move out.”
Chapter Forty-two
0415 Hours
The rising sun gave George McKuen no comfort. There was a dull ache along his ribs; the shrapnel cut had not altogether stopped bleeding. He stumbled forward through the jungle, and the dancing light of recklessness was all gone from his eyes. The heavy, sticky rain forest trapped him. Mist cleared slowly out of slimy bogs. The stub-barreled chopper hung across his back on its canvas sling. Both his hands were cut and half scabbed, knotted with cloth. He paced a slow track through fungus and sludge. His mind executed quick, disordered jumps. He felt exposed in the steamy daylight. His eyes sought mines and traps in the earth.
Shortly after dawn he stopped and lighted a cigarette. He pulled up his pants legs and deliberately burned eight leeches off his legs with the end of the cigarette.
His expression was wooden. He had nothing to eat, and he did not know which jungle fruits to trust. The complete silence of the day’s first hour seemed terribly dangerous. The gunsling bit into his shoulder, and he shifted it. He opened his jacket to look at the wound in his side. The wadded cloth against it was rust-brown.
He felt the residue of night chill, but the temperature was climbing sharply. He rolled his pants down and stuffed them into his boots and walked on, threading the jungle without strength or purpose. He knew from the angle of the sun, visible now and then in brief glimpses, that he was heading north. He would go north until he was beyond the mountains, and then he would turn east to the sea. That was as far as his thinking took him.
He came to the river, and it seemed deep and treacherous. Instead of trying to get across, he stayed on the bank and went along the river. He knew the river flowed into the sea. The jungle was too thick to travel the river bank. He had to circle back and forth. Keeping the river in earshot was enough. Perhaps he would come upon a sampan.
He almost stepped on a scorpion. The river was deep and gentle, not particularly noisy. He moved slowly across the patchwork shadows of the forest tops. Footing was spongy, and he had to use his knife continually. It was slow going, and he wished he had a machete. The jungle was lonely and unfriendly, and fatigue, long overdue, had crept into his muscles and heavy-lidded eyes. He stopped reckoning time.