Chapter 10 The Trailhead

Day thirty-six. They came out of the scrub above the trailhead at about the sixteenth hour and the trailhead was a gap in the ridge where a track came off the western side and went down into four hundred metres of slope into a valley with a river in it, and there were about eleven hundred metres of it in view from where they lay, and at the bottom of it there was a village and about four hundred people in the village, and Ito lay on a rock above it for forty minutes and looked at the smoke. There were four smoke stacks going. It was about the fourth hour of the afternoon, which meant the fires were lit, and it meant somebody down there was cooking for a number of people at the fourth hour of the afternoon, and in a valley in the north-west in June that is a village with a market, and a market on a day that is not a Sunday means a day of week, and a day of week in a village means people coming in from four or five kilometres of scrub, and people coming in from four or five kilometres of scrub come in on tracks. There were four tracks. Three of them came in from the north and one came up the valley from the west, and Ito counted them and counted them again and could not find a fifth, and the fifth was the one that mattered, because the track that came off the Long Trail on this side was a French track and it had been down the whole western face of that ridge since 1941 and it had become a road, and a road on a western face in this country in June is a place where a vehicle can go, and a vehicle makes ruts, and ruts do not go away in a monsoon, they get worse. Rafe had the set out and the aerial flat and the whole of it wrapped in his coat, and he had it open for the twentieth consecutive day. "Captain." "Go on." "Nothing since the sixth, that is the eighth day, and it is going to go on going." He put the headphones down on his knees. "I have worked it out. The column burst on the sixth, and again on the thirty-fourth, which is four weeks, and the whole of the rest of it is the firewatch, which does not transmit on that frequency at all, and which is not supposed to. So we have had two bursts from the column in twenty-nine days, and there is a piece of paper in a district seat that says the column is in the valley, and the piece of paper has been in a district seat since the last burst somebody wrote, and the paper is what the relief has been walking on for four weeks, and the relief came down off the top of this ridge yesterday and went into the water at the crossing and it has just discovered the crossing is out." "How long is it out for." "Long enough to matter and not long enough to starve, and that is a thing a fire direction post can wait out, and it is the reason nobody in this valley is in a hurry tonight." Rafe turned the radio over in his hands. "But somebody in this valley is going to be told, in about two days, that there is a party of eight with a colonel in the middle of it somewhere between here and the coast, and that party is going to be described by a man who has seen a column, not by anybody who has seen us. And I would like to walk down that road at night and into a village of four hundred people, and I would like to do it on a night when there is no column walking in it, and there is no column walking in it tonight, and there will not be one tomorrow either, because the column is in the water at the crossing and the relief is in the water at the crossing and both of them are holding." "You have worked out the relief's position off two bursts and a road." "I have worked out that a man with a map in 1948 would not know there was a river in this place until he got to it, and that is what is going to happen to the relief on Thursday unless somebody draws a line for it." Tran Minh was lying on the rock between them and had been listening with his eyes shut. "There is something you have both missed," he said. "The village has four hundred people in it and it is four hundred metres from the bottom of that road, and there is a man on the ridge above this valley who was told that this valley was empty two days ago, and I want to say to you that the man on that ridge does not care what is in that village. I have signed the orders. He cares what is in this valley. And a village is not a valley." Then he opened his eyes and said the thing he had been building toward since the sixth day, and he said it to Ito and not to Rafe. "Captain. If I walk down that road tonight with six men, then I am a colonel of the Republic of Vietnam coming out of the mountains with a United States patrol, and there is a man four hundred metres above us who is looking for exactly that, and it is a four-minute thing and it will be over before I have got my boots off." "You are not walking down the road tonight." "I am not walking down the road tonight," the colonel agreed. "And I am not walking down it tomorrow, and I am not walking down it at all, and there is a valley on the other side of that ridge four days away with about nine miles of open ground in it, and I have been walking towards it since the first of May, and I would like you to hear me say that I know what I am asking and that I am asking it anyway." Ito looked at the smoke for a while. "There is a truck road on the other side of that ridge," he said, "and it is a road for about four miles and then it is a track, and the track runs south off every sheet of paper in this country and it comes out eleven kilometres south of us at a border post. And I have been up one border post on this trail and I came back down it, and it is not a way out." "Then I have been walking towards something that is not there for forty days," said Tran Minh, "and I would be obliged if you would tell me about that at some point in the next four days, Captain, because I am not able to read a map and I have been pretending to." "You are not able to read a map, sir. That is not a fault. That is why you are here and I am not."