Chapter 19 The Rain Stops

Day forty-one. It stopped at about four in the afternoon, and the way it stopped was not a way anything else stops. It did not lessen. It went from a solid grey sheet of water across the whole of the western face to a sound on a roof, and then to a drip, and then in about four minutes there was a wind on the ridge above them that came up out of the north-east at four knots and went through a man's shirt for the first time since the first of May. Rafe sat down in the road and put his head back and shut his eyes, and Sant said afterwards that it was the only time in forty-one days he had seen the man stop working. "It has not stopped," said the colonel. "It has lifted. There is a difference and we shall have it back by Friday." "You have been in this country a long time, sir." "I have been in this country for nineteen years in three separate postings, and I was on the north from 1944 to 1946, and I can tell you exactly what a monsoon lifting looks like on a western face at about sixteen hundred metres in the first week of June." He had his face turned into the wind. "It will be clear until Friday. Four days. And on Friday it will come back at night and it will be worse than it was, because that is what the second half of it is, and everything that comes out of this country in the second half of a monsoon comes out of it in a hurry." Kowalski came down the road at a run, which he had not done once in forty-one days, and he came down it wrong, and Ito caught him by the arm and Kowalski said: "Captain — the river. Come and look at the river." They went up about two hundred metres to the shoulder where the whole valley lay open, and it was the first time in forty-one days that they could see more than forty metres of anything, and the seven of them stood on a road on the top of a mountain and looked at it. The valley of the blind river was eleven kilometres wide and four long and it was white sand and scree and the flattest ground in the country, and there was a river in it. Not in the middle. The map had it in the middle, in blue, drawn in 1948 off an aerial photograph, and it was eleven kilometres south of the middle, at the foot of the northern slope, and it was brown and it was fast and it had cut four feet out of the base of that slope, and you could see exactly where it had been because the old bed was there, a mile of it, pale, with a bar in it and scrub that had grown up in it in six years. Kowalski pointed at the middle of the valley. "That is where it is supposed to be." "That is where it was," said Ito. "Do not go down there." "Ito." The colonel had come up the last of it without any help and was standing with his hand on the same rail of scrub. "Do you know what you are looking at?" "I know what it is, sir. I have had a map of it in my jacket for forty days." "Then look at the north wall." Tran Minh was pointing up the slope above the western bank, at something that was not there ten seconds ago. "There is a line in it. From the first bend at the water to the foot of that spur, and it is about four hundred metres long and it is dead straight, and I have seen that line four times in nineteen years and I have never once been able to explain it to anybody who has not stood in a battery position." It was a road. It was a track, and it had been made by the French in 1941, and it went across the whole of the northern wall of the valley on a contour, and at the eastern end of it there was a scrape in the slope about thirty yards across, and a ring of nine stones round it, and about four hundred metres further east, on the shoulder of the hill above it, there was a second and much smaller ring. Two rings. One at the bottom of the wall and one at the top, and the line of the road between them. Nobody said anything for a long time. "That is a battery," said Ito, at last. "That is a gun position cut into the wall at the bottom and an observation post on the shoulder above it, and the road between them is what they walked on, and the nine stones are not a grave, sir, they are the marks left round a dug pit after the grass had died in a circle." "Captain—" "They have been in that valley since 1941 and it has been a hundred and thirty metres of road and a battery position and a scraped shoulder, and there is a red line on a sheet in a district seat that says the river is in the middle of it, and a man in an office has never once been down this wall." Ito was not being triumphant. He was doing arithmetic. "That is why the post on the Long Trail is where it is, and that is why there is a 1948 survey limit in this valley, and it is not because anybody has been careless. It is because the only way anybody ever saw this wall was from the other side of the river, and the river is not where the map has it." "And we have been walking on the top of it," said Tran Minh, "for nine days, with a colonel and six men and a set, in the dark, on a wall that has a battery on it." "Two batteries," said Ito. "There is a second one on the next spur, and I have been looking at it for about four minutes, and there is a scraped circle round it too, and it is about a kilometre from the first, and a man who is walking a wall at night does not see either of them, because a scraped circle in scrub at four hundred metres in rain is nothing at all." He turned round to the file. "Six of you. Listen." He was talking the way he had talked on the first of May. "Tomorrow we go down this wall in daylight, on the road the French made, and we walk past the pits and we do not stop, and we go faster than we have gone in nine days, because a man on that road in daylight is a man who has been on that road before, and a man on that road in daylight is not hiding, and by Friday it will be raining again and the whole thing will be as it was." "And the post?" said Rafe. "On the ridge above us. Four hundred metres. Now that the rain has lifted, anybody within a kilometre can see a file on that road." "They can," said Ito. "And that is the reason I am going to walk out there in daylight instead of waiting for the rain. Because a patrol that has been in the scrub for forty days is a patrol that is not going to come out in the scrub. A patrol that comes out on a road in the first dry afternoon of a monsoon is a patrol going somewhere, and I have known for six weeks that nobody on that ridge has ever seen anybody do anything on that wall at all, and I am going to be the first." He looked at the sergeant. "I want you to take a piece of board about the size of a ration carton, and I am going to draw two lines on it, and you are going to take it up that ridge in daylight, at the top of the wall, past both pits, and you are going to leave it on the shelf where the observation post was, under a stone, and you are going to come back down. And there is to be a second line on it, and the second line is not the map's, and there is no grid on it, and on the other side of it I am going to write one word, and the word is *counted*."