Chapter 1 The Seven

Day three. Delta-9 lost the trail at ten in the morning and at four in the afternoon it had lost the ground it had lost it on, and Captain Ito stood at the edge of a clearing with the map unrolled across his knee and watched the rain take the last of the prints out one at a time. He did not fold the map. That was the thing about him that Rafe could never get used to, and it was the reason Rafe was still alive on the thirty-ninth day: Ito did not fold the map when the trail went, he knelt down over it in the mud and worked, the way a man works on a table, and the rain came down on the both of them and ran off the sheet and took the ink with it. The ink was already gone in three places. The sheet had come from the rear on the first day, folded into a stiff card with a rubber band, and the rubber band had perished in the rear months ago and gone to powder, and the card had spent three days in a wet pack and it had warped and gone soft and the ink had lifted off it in long soft streaks like something coming off a window in the sun. Ito put a thumbnail on the valley of the blind river. There was not much left of it. The line was there — blue-black, a quarter of an inch, laid down by somebody in an office four hundred miles south-west who had never seen the place — and the line was where the river had been in 1962. The river was eleven kilometres south of the line and it was not eleven kilometres wide and it was not going back. "Sir." Rafe was eight feet down the slope with the set in a plastic bag under his coat, and he had the bag open and the aerial out and the whole of it going in and out of the wet, and he came up the slope on his knees. "Nothing since Tuesday." "Keep it open." "It *is* open. It's been open since Tuesday. That's what I'm telling you. It has not said anything since Tuesday and I have been sitting here with it open for three days." "Keep it open," said Ito, and Rafe went back down the slope, and that was the whole of the conversation. Seven of them had gone out of An Thuc on the first day. Seven was the number command had given them and the number command would go on giving them until it gave them another one, and the other six were Sant at the point, Linh, Pham, Duc, Kowalski, and a man from the province called Reefer whom they had picked up at the second checkpoint because he had a foot that had gone bad and there had been nobody else to carry him, and who was, as far as anybody on earth was concerned, the eighth man. Colonel Tran Minh walked in the middle. That was Ito's own rule and he had told the colonel so on the first day and had not repeated it since. *You walk in the middle, sir, because in the middle there is nobody in front of you and I can see you.* Tran Minh was fifty-one and had been a colonel for nineteen of those years and he had not argued once, and the not-arguing was the thing about him that the other five found hardest to sit with. He walked like a man who had been told where to put his feet and was obeying to the inch, and he carried no weapon, and there was a gold fob on a cord round his neck under his shirt that all six of them except Rafe had seen and that none of them had ever once mentioned. Ito looked at the map for perhaps four minutes and then he rolled it up, wet, and put it inside his jacket against his chest, which put the rain on his own skin and not on the paper, and which was the single most Ito thing about him that Rafe had ever seen. "Sergeant." "Sir." Sant came out of the tree line with the point held low and his elbows up, the way they had all seven of them learned to walk in three days of rain. "We go north-east. Off the paper, towards the ridge. Four days, if it lets us." "That's the Long Trail." "That's the Long Trail." Ito got the compass out and put it on his palm and did not look at it, which was a thing he had not done in front of the other six since the twentieth day and which they had all noticed and none of them had ever mentioned. "It's four days to the ridge at this rate. Four days of this." "And then?" "And then we find out what is on the other side of it, and it will not be on the paper." He put the compass away. "Fall in. Single file. Reefer goes in second and Linh keeps his hand on his pack and nobody speaks above a whisper from here to the ridge, and if the set says anything Rafe tells me and nobody else, and if the set says anything at all we do not answer it, because the firewatch does not answer." Nobody asked why. They had asked him once, on the ninth day, about the fob, and he had said *because the firewatch must stay silent*, which was not an answer, and after that Rafe had understood that the answer was that the man on the ridge four hundred metres above them could see a light, and that a light is the only thing in the world that both sides can see, and that the whole of the three days had been an argument with that fact. They went up the slope in single file in the rain, seven of them, with an eighth man on the second pair of boots.