Chapter 18 The Gold Fob, Again

Day forty-one. The colonel gave it to him at about the seventh hour, in flat grey light, with a river a kilometre and a half below them and a ridge four hundred metres above them and nobody else within nine hundred metres. "Sit down, Captain." They sat down on a rock on the western face of that ridge, five hundred metres above a slope, in the first dry air any of them had been in since the second of May. The colonel unbuttoned the wet shirt and took the cord over his head and put the fob in Captain Ito's hand. It weighed almost nothing. That was the first surprise. It was gold, and it was a curved fragment about two inches long with the stem still on it, and a man who had carried a thing for forty days in a monsoon expected it to be heavy. "The seam," said Ito. "Open it. I have opened it four times and I can do it with a thumbnail and it takes about a second." Tran Minh was not looking at it. "I did it in a hotel in Saigon in April and I did it on a road at Kontum and I did it twice in this country, and there is a reel in there and it is the only copy in the world and I have not read a word of it and neither have you." Ito found the seam with his thumbnail and it came open exactly as the man had said, in about a second, and inside the two halves of the fob there was a small brass can the size of a tobacco tin, and the can had a screw lid, and the screw lid had been undone a great many times and had thread damage to show for it. He took the lid off. The reel was about two inches across and the film on it was wound tight, and it was grey, and there was a strip of masking tape on the flange with writing on it in a hard pencil. It was microfilm. There was perhaps forty feet of it, which is not a great deal of paper, and it was the whole of a thing that a man had been willing to walk out of a capital for, and it was sitting in a brass tin in a gold fob on a rock on a mountain in a country where somebody would have killed two men for the tin alone. "Sixty pages," said Tran Minh. "Sixty pages of station strengths, and radio schedules, and the names of eleven men in two provinces, and the location of a radar station which is not called a radar station anywhere except on that film." He was still not looking at it. "I did not read it. That is the one thing I want said about me. I have carried it since the twenty-eighth of April and I have not read it, and I could have read it in a hotel room in Saigon in eleven minutes, and I did not, because a man who reads it is a man who is carrying it for himself." "Then what were you carrying it for, sir." "I have been asking myself that since the second of May and I have got to an answer and I do not like it," said the colonel. "I was not carrying it for Brussels. I was carrying it because a man in Brussels was going to be told, by a man who had carried it, that it had not been thrown away. I have not seen that man and I did not know his name until the seventh hour of the sixth day, when your radio operator put his hand on a piece of string and looked at the ground instead of at me." Rafe, eight feet away, did not move. "Whatever that film is worth, sir," said Ito, "it was worth a man four days in a river this week, and a boy of nineteen under a stone on the thirty-fifth of May, and eight of us walking a mountain for forty days for no reason at all except that somebody in Brussels wanted to be certain." "Yes," said Tran Minh. "And I would like it understood that the man in Brussels is not going to be able to use any of it, because the moment those two men on that road worked out on the evening of the fortieth that a battery which does not exist had shelled them, the entire question of whether there is a reel of film in this country became a question for men with artillery, and not for anybody in Brussels." He put his hand out. "Then it is finished," said Ito, and gave the tin to him. Tran Minh took the two halves of the fob, and set the can on the rock, and stood up, and looked down nine hundred metres of western slope at four thousand metres of forest and then at a coast. "Not while there is a man on a ridge four hundred metres above us," he said. He put the reel in the hollow of a rock, on a shelf, in the open air, and he did not put a match to it. "It will not burn," he said. "Microfilm is acetate and it will not burn, it will melt, and it will go to a clear soup and it will make a smell that four hundred metres carries in a still hour, and in this wind it will go down." He set the fob on the rock above it. "So it goes where the rain goes, and the rain has been going down this mountain for forty days, and there is a river at the bottom of it that is eleven kilometres from where the map has it, and in about ten days there will be a town on the coast with an airstrip in it and about four thousand people in it." He put his hand flat over the fob, and did not take it away for some time. "That is not destruction," he said. "I want to be accurate about that, because I have watched men destroy things for forty years and I have never once seen one of them do it accurately. That is a man putting a thing into a river on purpose and hoping that eleven days is enough, and it is the best that is available, and you may put it in whatever report you like, Captain, and I will not read it." They left it at about the eighth hour, and the colonel went down the slope on his own two feet, and he did not look back at it, and four hundred metres above them a man on a ridge was putting a piece of paper with two blue lines on it into a hut, and neither of them ever knew it.