Chapter 5 The Checkpoint at An Thuc

Day thirty-one. They had started from An Thuc on the first of May and they came back to it on the first of June, and in the thirty-one days between, nobody in that valley had expected to see any of them again, which was the whole of the plan. The checkpoint was a concrete pier on the east bank, put in during 1962 by a programme that ran out of money in 1964, and it went out into the river about thirty feet and stopped, and there was a jetty ladder down the last eight feet of it and a hut at the root made of sheet metal with a stovepipe through it. Two men stood on the pier. They had stood there since the second day, which was the day after Delta-9 went out, which meant that one of the district sergeant's men had ridden out from the district seat on the second of May and put himself on that pier because a captain with a colonel and a microfilm had gone north up the Long Trail, and had stayed there for twenty-nine days. He had not been relieved. There was no one to relieve him with. The post had two men on paper and one man on the pier and a hut with a stove in it and a chair, and he had been living in the chair. The problem was not the two men. The problem was that the post had a telephone, and the telephone went back to the district seat, and the district seat had a duty officer in it, and the duty officer had a list of the seven men on the sheet in An Thuc, and the seven names on that sheet were the seven names of a patrol escorting a colonel who had walked out of the capital on the twenty-ninth of April and had not walked back. There are three ways to get a patrol across a checkpoint at a concrete pier in one day and none of them are good. "You can go round," said Sant. "Round is nine kilometres of bank and there are four men in it who have been walking for a day and a half," said Ito, "and Kowalski will be found on a bank nine kilometres from a post in daylight, and then it is a report and the report is a week, and a week is the whole of the mission." "Then we go across in the dark." "In the dark, at a concrete pier, under two lamps, with a river coming over the stones at the rate it is coming over them now." Ito shook the water off the map. "That is not a crossing, Sant, that is an event." "Then we go across in daylight and we say who we are." "Say who we are and the duty officer in the district seat has a telephone and a man on a pier in twelve minutes, and then there are two companies coming up the road to a village where four hundred people live." He folded the sheet. "We do not lie. We are going to be a patrol from An Thuc that has been on the trail and has come in out of the north-east. That is true, and it is checkable, and it is the only version of it that does not end with a fight in a village. But we do not lie about the nine days in between, and that is where this is difficult." "And the colonel." "Colonel," said Ito, "is a Vietnamese officer of the Republic of Vietnam, and has been one for nineteen years, and is on a sheet in a district seat as having walked out of the capital on the twenty-ninth of April. If the man on that pier looks up the road and sees a Vietnamese colonel in a wet jacket, then the whole of it is finished at two hundred metres, and there is nothing I can do about it and there is nothing you can do about it." "So he does not come." "He comes, and he goes in the middle, and he is a colonel of the Republic of Vietnam walking in the rain outside a checkpoint, and a man on a pier in the rain for twenty-nine days sees a white man and a green man and a colonel and does arithmetic about the number of men." He looked up the bank. "That is the only version of it. We walk in together, we walk to the pier together, and we stand on it together, and the colonel says what he is, in Vietnamese, to a Vietnamese sentry, in a plain voice, like a man buying tobacco." "And if the sentry has a telephone." "Then the sentry has a telephone and a colonel in wet clothes and eight men behind him, and the sentry is a man who has stood on a pier in the rain for twenty-nine days and has watched nine of the seven men go out on the first of May and has not seen any of them come back," said Ito, "and a man in that position has exactly one piece of information that is worth anything, and it is that he is a soldier and there are soldiers on his pier, and he is going to want to be one of them by lunchtime." Tran Minh did not like it. He said so, and he said it at length, and he said it three times over two days, and Ito listened to all of it and then told him the thing that ended the argument. "Sir, you were going to be arrested in a room with a table in it, and you have said so to me yourself, and you have said that you walked out of the capital on the twenty-ninth of April rather than be walked in front of people you know." Ito rolled the map. "This is a room with a table in it. It is a pier and a man with a telephone, and the difference between those two rooms is that I am in the middle of this one with eight men and I did not build it, and if it goes wrong I will be on it too, and so will a sergeant of nine months and five privates." They went down to the water at half past four in the afternoon on the first of June, in single file, in the rain, in daylight, at a slow walk, with the packs on and their feet in the mud to the ankle, which is what a patrol looks like when it comes off a trail. The sentry on the pier was about twenty-five and he stood up when he saw them, and he took about four seconds to do the arithmetic, and Rafe watched him do it and watched the exact moment he stopped doing it. Then he said, to Ito, in English, which he had certainly not been taught by the army: "Captain. You are very late."