Chapter 16 The Anti-Defector Round

Day forty, after four o'clock. They put the correction off at four minutes past four in the afternoon from a spur two hundred metres below the shelf of bare rock, and it took nine seconds, and the gun line acknowledged it, and Rafe was off the air and down the slope before the acknowledgement had finished coming back. That was the easy part. What happened over the following nine hours was the part that Ito had been putting off thinking about since the seventh hour, and he was still putting it off at midnight. "You understand what you have done," he said to Rafe, at about the eleventh hour, in a drainage four hundred metres below the shelf. "You have given a gun position a correction it did not have and it has placed a shell two hundred metres from a column, and the column does not know that the shell was friendly, because the column does not know there is a friendly anything within forty kilometres. So at eight o'clock this evening a column on a road thought it had been shelled by a battery that does not exist, and it will have dug in, and it will have sent infantry out to the tree line, and it will have lost the road it was on. And at about midnight a patrol from that column will have walked up the western face of this ridge to find the battery, because that is what a patrol does." "And it will find us." "It will find us, or it will find the set on an island, or it will find nine stones in a ring with a man's bootprint all round them," said Ito. "And I told you at the seventh hour that I did not want anybody's aerial within four hundred metres of that rock until the fortieth of June, and I said it because I had already worked this out, and you were on the hill and I did not say it in the way that would have made you stay off the air." "You told me to go down the hill." "I told you to go down the hill so that you would not hear what happened at first light. I did not tell you why, and I have been doing that for forty days, and today it finally mattered." He did not raise his voice; he never did. "Rafe, the whole of what I have done since the first of May has been to make every decision at the last possible minute so that I would never have to defend one of them. And that is a way of not being a soldier, and it has worked for forty days, and tonight it stops working." Somewhere above them, north-east, about a kilometre and a half up the western face, something came off a ridge and came down through the scrub towards them, and it was not the wind. "Sergeant." "Sir." Sant was on his feet with the point before Ito had said another word. "One man. About a kilometre, north-east, coming down. Two more at about eight hundred metres, spread, coming left." Ito had his hand flat on the ground. "They are not walking. Listen." They listened. The rain had not let up for forty days and they had all learned to hear a man in it the way a man who has been blind learns to hear a room, and what they heard in the next ten seconds was one man in the scrub making no noise at all. "He is good," said Rafe. "He is very good," said Ito, "and he is very good because he has been doing it every night for as long as there has been a war on this ridge, and we have done it for forty days, and one of those two things is a trade and the other one is a mistake." "Where are the other two." "Spreading left. He will want them in a line at about three hundred metres so that he can walk them onto us. He has done that in better ground than this." Ito was already moving them. "Down. All of you. Down the slope, not across it, and do not break the scrub, and Kowalski you take the colonel and you go first and you go slow." They went down about eighty metres in about four minutes, which was the slowest four minutes of the whole of the forty, and at the bottom of it there was a line of rock and forty metres of scrub below that, and they lay in the wet in a line and waited. At about the second hour the man above them came out of the scrub at about a hundred and forty metres and did not come any further. He stood on a rock in the rain with a rifle across his body and he looked at the spur for about a quarter of an hour. He did not use a torch. He waited for a lightning flash, or he simply moved at the times when it flashed, and every time he moved it was toward a place and not away from one, and after about an hour and a half of that he put himself down in the scrub on the far side of a rock and stopped moving altogether, and he stayed there until about the fourth hour, and then he left the way he had come. Nobody in the line below breathed properly for an hour after that. "He knew," said Duc, eventually, in a whisper. "He did not know," said Ito. "He suspected. He came up a hill in the dark on suspicion and he did not find anything, and he is going to come up it again, and in about three days he will come up it with somebody. And by then we will be four kilometres down the western face, and that is the entire difference between this night and the next one, and it is the only thing that has kept any of us alive since the first of May." Tran Minh had not moved at all in four hours. He was lying on his back in the wet with the fob under his shirt and his hands folded on it, and when it was light enough to talk he said: "He would have found it in about eleven minutes if it had been raining any harder." "Yes, sir." "It is a piece of gold on a cord," said the colonel, "and it is the only thing any of us are carrying that is worth anything to anybody, and for forty days I have told myself that the reason we were not found was skill, and it was not skill. It was weather, and it was a war between men who did not want to be on that hill in that rain, and I have been a colonel for nineteen years and I have never once been in a situation where the deciding factor was the rain." "You have been in one now." "I have been in one now," said Tran Minh, and lay down in the wet with his hand flat over the fob under his shirt, and did not say anything else that night.