Chapter 14 The Ridge Line

Day thirty-nine, later. There is a ridge on the western side of that valley that runs about nine kilometres, and on the northern end of it there is a shelf of bare rock about thirty yards across, and in the middle of the shelf there is a ring of stones. Captain Ito had not seen it in eleven months. He had seen a photograph of it in November 1963 in the back of a Land Rover in An Thuc, and he had stood on it in the rain in the fourth hour of the thirty-ninth day, and the stones were exactly where the photograph said they were. That was the moment. Not the river, not the set on the island, not the post on the Long Trail, not the truck. The moment was a ring of stones on a shelf of rock at the top of nine kilometres of ridge, laid by somebody in 1941 with the same care and a different reason, and the photograph in a Land Rover in 1963 had been the reason he had been able to bring nine men up a mountain in a monsoon at all. He stood in the middle of the ring and looked south-west, and there was the coast. Not a suggestion of it. Not a strip. The whole of it, from the foot of the ridge down about four thousand metres of forest to about nine hundred metres of beach and then about four hundred metres of water, and the water was grey and flat under forty centimetres of rain, and there was a town on it, and in the town there was an airstrip. He got the glasses out and looked for four minutes. "Captain." Kowalski had the whole file on the shelf behind him and none of them had come up onto it, because Ito had come up alone and had held up one finger. "What is it?" "That is where we are going," said Ito. "Captain, that is eleven days on foot." "That is nine days on foot and it is two days shorter on this ridge, because the ridge is the only ground on the whole of that coast that you can see four hundred metres, and you are going to need to see four hundred metres every single day for the next nine days." He put the glasses away. "I have been up one border post on this trail and I came back down it, and the reason I came back down it is that a border post is a place with a road and a gate and two men and a telephone, and I do not want any of you near one of those. But there is a town down there with an airstrip in it and about four thousand people in it and nobody in the world knows that any of us are on that ridge, and I can get six men and a colonel down nine kilometres of ridge in nine days and put them in that town, and the whole thing depends on not being found, and the whole thing has been found twice already this week." Tran Minh came up onto the shelf about twenty minutes later, alone, at fifty-two years of age, in a wet jacket, having come up two hundred metres of slope in the dark because nobody had told him not to. He got to the stones and stopped and looked at them, and then he went round the ring once, all the way, the whole thirty yards of it, counting. "Nine," he said. "Nine stones, and I have counted nine in every photograph I have ever seen of a French position on this coast." "Sir?" "Captain, I was on the general staff in the capital from 1958 to 1961 and one of the two things I actually did in that office was drive a lorry over these mountains four times." Tran Minh had his hand flat on a stone. "And there was a captain of artillery in the north called Bui Van who came out of the north in 1941 with a battery and eleven vehicles and lost six of them, and he put a position in on the northern end of this ridge because a man called Tran Dai had a track up here in the spring and Tran Dai had come up here to be met. And Bui Van built the position and Tran Dai was not on the track, and they went on for another eight months." He turned round. "I have never once been able to find out whether Tran Dai was alive in 1941," said the colonel. "And there are nine stones round a ring on a shelf of rock on the top of a ridge that a French artillery captain chose in the spring of 1941 because a man was coming up a track to meet him, and somebody laid those nine stones, and the stones are not military and they are not a signal. They are a grave marker, and it has been there for twenty-five years, and no army in this country has ever put a road within a kilometre of it, and I would like you to understand that I have just come off a mountain that has been trying to kill me for thirty-nine days and I have just walked on to a piece of ground that somebody built a thing on in 1941 for a man who was not coming." Ito did not say anything. He looked at the stones and then at the coast. "Well, sir," he said at last. "Then we will walk round them and we will go on down." They went round the ring at a distance of about two yards, all of them, in single file, and the colonel was last. He stopped on the far side, turned round, and looked at it for about a minute; then he came back and put his hand flat on the ninth stone, the one at the north end, and said nothing at all while he did it. "Sir, we are on a clock." "I know we are on a clock." He took his hand off. "Captain, in 1945 I was on a lorry that came down this ridge and stopped at this ring, and there were two men with me, and we ate, and a man came out of a tent who was about sixty and extremely angry, and he was angry with the entire world and particularly with me. He said: you are four hours late for a thing that is finished." The colonel looked down the nine kilometres at the coast. "There was an officer there with one battery of guns and about nine men, and a table made out of a crate with a map on it. I remember the map, because it was a 1941 sheet with a red line drawn on it in pencil by a man who was not a draughtsman, and the red line went up this ridge from the bottom left and stopped at the top, and there was nothing at the top." "Tran Dai's position." "Tran Dai's position. The battery captain said a man had come up this track in April and had not come, and that he was not going to hold a position for a man who was not coming, and his instruction was to the effect of a withdrawal. And the man who was angry was the captain, and the captain was right, and the instruction was right, and in the third week of May a battery of four guns was on this ridge and a position was cut into the shelf at the north end, and in the third week of June there was nothing on it, and there are nine stones in a ring on the top of this hill." "It is not the same war." "It is the same war in the same country with the same hills and the same maps," said Tran Minh, "and I have been on both sides of it for twenty-three years. I would like to go down to that town without stopping for one hour on any account whatever, and I would like you to walk past the stones, and I would like it recorded that I did not stop." They did not stop. They went down the western face over the following nine days at about three kilometres a day, and Tran Minh walked nine kilometres of ridge in a monsoon at fifty-two years of age and did not fall once. On the sixth day he told Rafe, unprompted, that there was a place in the town at the bottom of the ridge where they sold a kind of bun he had not eaten in nineteen years, and that if they got in before the fourteenth of June he was going to buy eight of them, and Rafe said that would be the first good thing to have happened to anybody in forty days, and the colonel said: it will be the first good thing, and it will cost me eleven kip, and you will pay your half.