第12章 The Blind River

Day thirty-eight. They went down to the river at about the eighth hour and got into it at the tenth, and the crossing was four hundred metres below where the map said it was, and the map had it in blue, and the blue line went across eleven metres of clear water with a bar on the north side and a gravel beach on the south side and a track coming down to it. There was no bar. There was no beach. There was a four-foot bank and about ninety metres of brown water moving at two knots past a bank that had been cut in six years, and the water came over the top of the flat and went along it about four inches deep for thirty metres and then went away. "Nine feet and the far bank is moving," said Ito, at the edge, with the glasses. "That is a bad crossing and it is not a dangerous one. It is slow and it is wide and it is moving the whole time and a man with a pack is a problem for about four hours a day." "It is not a crossing," said Tran Minh. "It is a river. There is no crossing on this river for eleven kilometres and there has not been since 1959 and everybody who used to live in that village used a rope on a bamboo raft two kilometres down where it is shallower, and I know that because I have been told about it by three different people on this trail and I did not believe any of them until the twenty-eighth day." Rafe was up the bank with the set wrapped in his coat and the aerial down, and he had been up there for about forty minutes. "Sir, I want to report that I have a decision to make and I would like to make it in front of you." He had it out and holding it in two hands. "The post came up at twenty past three last night and I have not heard it since, and I have been sitting on this hill since first light with the set off, deliberately off, and I want to say out loud that I have made that decision because a grid reference was wrong on a schedule, and not because there is a party of six on this bank, and I would like somebody in the service to hear me say it in those words." "And what is the decision." "I am not carrying it across the water." He held it up. "This is nineteen pounds in a case and it has been on my chest for thirty-eight days. If I go in the water with it on, then I have put a transistor in a river. And there is a bank of scrub on that island in the middle of that river about three hundred metres out, and I have been looking at it for forty minutes, and I can put this on that bank and come back for it when we are on the far side and I will know the bearing of that bank from this side and from the far side, and it is a hundred yards of dead ground on a river in a monsoon and I have got a compass and I have got a place where I put my hand on a tree this morning at about four inches past two and I have got a watch." "It will be a hundred and fifty yards by the time you get to it, in that water, on that current." "It will be a hundred and fifty yards," Rafe agreed, "and if it is not there then it is at the bottom of the river, and the river is not nine feet deep anywhere, it is two feet over a gravel bar, and the only thing about a river that keeps a thing for a long time is a snag, and there is a snag on that island and I have been watching the water go through it since half past five." Ito looked at the man for a while, and it was a long time, and Rafe stood there and did not put it down. "Do it," said Ito. "Not in the case. Wrap it in a plastic bag, and wrap that in the shirt, and take the aerial off the stick and lash the stick to the pack, because if the stick goes in that river then the aerial is of no use to anybody including me. And you will come back for it, and if you do not come back for it within an hour then I am going to have to decide whether the last hour of this is spent on a transistor." "I will come back for it," said Rafe. He went in. The current was two knots and the crossing was ninety metres and it took him a long time; the worst of it was about the middle, where the water came over the flat and the man who was not a strong swimmer would have gone down, and he did not go down, and he came out on the island at about the twelfth hour and put it in the snag and marked the tree and came back, and it took him the same ninety minutes and it was the last of his strength. Tran Minh watched all of it from the bank. "That boy," he said, when Rafe was back and had taken about four minutes to get his breath, "has just left a field telephone in a river in a monsoon in order that six men may be able to hear a column, and the practical effect of which is nothing, because there is no column within four days of us and none of us is going to be here in four days." "Yes, sir," said Rafe. "And he did it because you told him to, Captain, and you did not have to, and I have been on a mountain for thirty-eight days watching you make every single one of these decisions at the last possible moment so that you will never have to defend one of them afterwards." The colonel sat down on the bank. "I want to say one thing about that, and then I will not say anything more about it for four days." "Sir." "It is the only professional thing I have seen since the first of May," said Tran Minh.