Chapter Forty-three
0830 Hours
Hooker and Khang, stumbling at times, carried the litter. Tyreen walked ahead, stooping to search spots where twigs poked up from the path, where vines across the track might be trigger-threads, where an interwoven mat of fallen twigs and branches might conceal a pit bottomed with barbed pungi stakes. Saville guarded the rear: Saville walked along burdened with his own pack and the heavy sackful of explosives and the radio equipment — and after the second hour’s march, without comment, Saville had taken Tyreen’s pack as well, and Tyreen had been unable to raise the will to object.
It was slow traveling along the trail searching for traps, suspicious of every leaf and vine; it would have been slower yet to break trail through the rain forest.
There was no deadline to speak of Tyreen knew the last freight of the day would reach the water tank late in the afternoon. The night train was a passenger train to Haiphong, and it would not do to hijack a passenger train.
But the hours were enemies, and Tyreen hurried.
He hurried as much as he could — foot-weary, raw-eyed, and weak with malarial fevers. He snapped at the two sergeants to keep up. He snapped at himself when his foot, too heavy to clear a root, snagged and almost toppled him. He snapped at the deceptive twigs and vines and mats of branches on the path. He snapped, under his breath, at Eddie Kreizler, whose head rolled from side to side and whose mouth was pinched grimly shut. He was about to snap at Theodore Saville, but when he looked at the incredible heap of equipment piled on top of Saville he held his tongue.
Squinting and blinking painfully, Tyreen plodded on a slightly down-tilted jungle track and listened to the rasp of his own breathing. He gave himself a reluctant thought. The General will say, “You ought to be shot.” He will be right.
Maybe I will be shot, he thought. He did not overestimate his chances of survival.
He suspected there was a blister on the back of his left heel. He clenched his toes to keep the boot from rubbing. The trail was never visible more than ten feet ahead at most. Moss, vines, trees, ferns, mud, roots, ants and snakes and centipedes and leeches, tangled thorns, thickets of bamboo stalks eight inches thick, the soaked red-black earth — all of it was covered with a thin excremental slime, slightly green, like dirty motor oil.
The temperature was moderate, but in the steamy motionless air he would have sweated violently even without fever. He swallowed salt tablets and canteen water, and his cuffs were sodden from wiping his eyebrows to keep sweat out of his vision.
Here and there, the morning sun streamed through apertures in the treetops. The trail curled back and forth until it stretched out, straight and level, over a distance of twenty-five or thirty feet. The surface was rocky just here. Tyreen swung out of line and waited for the others to pass. “Set him down and take a break.”
Saville came up, big as a Clydesdale. He lowered his load to the ground. He was not even breathing hard. He said, “You may break, but you won’t let yourself quit.”
Tyreen said, “Put pressure on a man, and you begin to find out what he’s worth. It works on the rest of you — it works on myself, too.”
“Most of all,” Saville said. He sat down beside Tyreen. “I wish I knew what in hell you’re trying to prove, David.”
Kreizler was listening. Kreizler’s voice croaked at them: “A pillar of strength, David?”
Tyreen looked at him. Kreizler said, “The Colonel wants to stand like an oasis of honor and courage and strength. You’d be all right, David, if you didn’t have such a big conscience breathing down your neck.”
Tyreen looked at Sergeant Khang. “Let’s have a little security.”
Khang walked forward along the trail. Hooker, without expression, got up and walked back the way they had come, and sat down facing away from the rest of them.
Kreizler said, “Old Ironbutt didn’t know you were going to head this thing up yourself, did he?”
“No,” Tyreen said.
“Even the old man’s not that crazy.” Kreizler’s head was tilted speculatively. “You still don’t know what this is all about, do you, David? Your honest little brain hasn’t got it figured out yet.”
“Got what figured out?”
“The whole thing. It’s a puppet show, you and me and the rest of us. General Jaynshill’s been pulling the strings on the whole damned show. This was set up. It had to be. I was in a position where it was more than likely I’d fall into enemy hands. Knowing that, the General still saw fit to convey important strategic information to me by radio. Information that turned out to be false — information the enemy would be bound to get out of me if they captured me. Does it start to become clear yet, David?”
Tyreen said, “You’re wrong, Eddie.”
“Then quit frowning.”
Tyreen hunched his knees up and took off his boots. His feet smelled as acrid as strong vinegar. His heel was raw; a blister was starting to come up.
Kreizler said, “And you’re busting your ass trying to do a good job for Old Ironbutt. He’s shafted you, David. Screwed the whole lot of us.”
Tyreen said, “What would you do, Eddie?”
“Quit humoring me.”
“All right. Just tell me. What would you do?”
Kreizler said in a level tone, “I’d make it count. I’d take those damned explosives in that sack and I’d smuggle myself into Hanoi and blow up the Goddamn premier’s palace. To hell with a crummy railroad bridge. Who gives a shit? They’ll rebuild the thing in a little while. Just give me one crack at old Uncle Ho — and then watch the fur fly.”
Kreizler smiled weakly. “But you won’t do that. You won’t even think about that. You’ve got your orders and your Goddamn conscience. It comes with a colonel’s eagles.”
Tyreen said nothing. Kreizler said, “What about you, Theodore? What do you think?”
Tyreen slipped his boot on. “It doesn’t matter what Theodore thinks. I’ll give the orders a while longer yet. Eddie, when the manager says sacrifice, you bunt — you don’t make wild swings hoping for a home run.”
There was a trick he had learned from a truck driver. He let his cigarette burn down to a stub and sear his fingers. The pain, a new pain, would wake him up. He felt jittery, the result of too many quinines and Benzedrines and too much sickness. And, perhaps, fear.
Kreizler said, “We’ve been used, David. All of us.”
“No,” Tyreen said. “If you were a gift to the enemy, Eddie, the General wouldn’t have been so anxious to break you out and get you home. They don’t do this kind of thing for every P.O.W.”
Kreizler said, “Exactly, David. They don’t. That’s just my point. There’s only one reason you were sent up here to bust me out. It was to tell the enemy how important I am. How valuable I am. How much my information means. When you busted me loose, it was the final straw, for them. It convinced them my information was worth acting on. The information they had to torture out of me because I didn’t know it was a Goddamn puking lie.”
He added more quietly, “If this wasn’t premeditated, David, then why did the General make plans two weeks ago to shift the positions of all our teams up here?”
Tyreen’s eyes lay fixed on the implacable dark jungle. Kreizler murmured, “Maybe it comes as a shock to you, though God knows why it should. We are no better than they are. We are no different from them, David. We—”
“Shut up, Eddie.”
“Never interrupt a dying man, David.”
“You’re not dying.”
“I’m in limbo, right now. David, if you weren’t so pathetic, I’d laugh at you. We’ve taken a patient with a wooden leg, two blind eyes, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and athlete’s foot. We’ve cured the athlete’s foot. Hell, we haven’t accomplished a thing. And how many got killed? How many got hurt?”