第11章 The Third Burst

Day thirty-seven. The third burst came at fourteen minutes past three in the morning and it was not on the relief column's frequency. Rafe had the set against his chest and had been lying on his back for about two hours with his eyes open in the dark, which he had been doing every night since the sixth, and the thing that woke him was not a sound. It was the absence of one. The hiss that had been running under everything since the second of May stopped dead in the middle of a cycle, the way a pump stops when the current goes, and in the gap there was a carrier that came up out of the floor of the world with a beat in it that a man feels in his back teeth before he hears it. Then a voice that was not the column's voice, and was younger, and was reading. "Firewatch nine, this is the post. Post is established on the Long Trail at the north end, grid reference on the schedule, the grid reference is the one you have been given and it is wrong. Post is established and the post has seen. Out." The carrier dropped away. The hiss came back in at the rise, and then the fall, and Rafe lay in the dark and did not move for a long time. "Captain." "I heard it." "It was not the column. That is not the column frequency and that is not a traffic net. That is a post calling up a fire direction post on a direct frequency and it is the first time in five weeks that anything has come out of the sky in this valley except the column." He was already unrolling the sheet. "And a direct frequency to a fire direction post means somebody knows where this valley is. I have had a sheet of paper with a blue line on it for five weeks and I have believed it and it has been true every single day and now it is not." "It was never true." "It was never true, sir." Rafe's voice was completely level, which was worse than anything else about it. "The schedule. It said the grid reference was the one we had been given and it was the wrong one. Which means a man on a radio has just told a fire direction post that the grid reference he has been using for six weeks is not the right one, in the middle of a transmission, on a frequency that a valley full of people can hear." Ito was on his feet. "How many people can hear that." "The post can. Anything between here and the post on that frequency can, and that is eleven kilometres of ridge." He had the set against his ear again, listening to nothing. "And if the post has called up and given the wrong reference and been told it is wrong, then within about two hours somebody is going to fly that valley properly, and they will do it by walking out of that post on a compass bearing, and they will be walking towards a place that is not on a sheet of paper in this country, and there are six of us and a colonel in the bottom of it." "What time is the post's day." "It does not keep a day. It has not said anything since it was established. Established means tonight." "Meaning tonight, meaning that post was put there tonight, and it is a hundred and fifty metres from the north end of the Long Trail where the French turning circle is, and I have that on a photograph." He was already moving. "Sant, get the file. We are off this shoulder and we are on the track and we are going down to the water, and Rafe you do not put that aerial up one inch higher than your own head for the rest of this." "Why the water?" "Because everything in this country that anybody has ever come up has come up a valley floor, and the valley floor is eleven kilometres south of where the map says the water is," said Ito, "and if a man walks out of a post on a bearing at dawn he is going to walk down onto a valley floor, and there are about nine hundred metres of scrub on the western side of that floor between the top and the trees." They were on the track at four in the morning with six men and no light, and the track came off the ridge at a place where a Frenchman had cut a shelf into the hillside in 1941 and had not bothered to build anything on it, and it went down into four hundred metres of slope in about eleven switchbacks. Tran Minh walked in the middle of the file with his hand on the scrub, in the dark, at fifty-one years of age, and he did not speak from the top of the ridge to the bottom of it. At the bottom they stopped at about the sixth hour and the whole of the valley lay out in front of them in the last of the night, and the river was where it was, and not where the sheet said, and there was no smoke anywhere in it. "Captain." Kowalski had the binoculars. "There is a truck on the west bank road. A truck, and two men, and they are not moving." "Where." "Two hundred metres. Below us. On the road that comes off the switchbacks." Ito took the glasses and looked for a long time, and then gave them back. "That is the relief," he said. "That is nine men out of a truck on a road in a valley at a quarter past six in the morning, and they have been in the water since Wednesday, and they are about four days from anybody and they do not know there is a party of six on that slope above them, and they do not know there is a post on the north end of the Long Trail, and one of those two things is going to kill them and I cannot stop either of them."