第13章 The Fourth Burst

Day thirty-nine. The fourth burst came at four in the afternoon and it came on the relief column's frequency, and it was the longest of the four, and Rafe had it written on the back of his left hand in six weeks' worth of pencil. "Delta Nine, this is the Column. Column is clear of the water and on the west bank road at the second bend. Column is receiving infantry. Column requests resupply by air at the valley floor, co-ordinates on the schedule. We are not using the schedule. Co-ordinates are, from the water at the second bend, one two three zero zero, bearing four seven five, two thousand. Confirm. Out." Then nothing, and then a second transmission on the same net from a different voice, and Rafe's hand stopped moving because it was not a man asking anybody to confirm anything. "Column, this is the post. Post cannot accept those co-ordinates. Post has a schedule and the schedule is the only co-ordinate in this valley that has been surveyed. Repeat your co-ordinates on the schedule or hold. Out." "Negative. One two three zero zero, bearing four seven five, two thousand is the position of this column and it has been verified by a man on the ground. Confirm." "Post will not confirm. Post cannot confirm. Out." "That is a man reading to you off a map," said Ito, from about a foot behind him. "One two three zero zero. Say it again." "One two three zero zero, bearing four seven five, two thousand." "Four seven five is north-west, and there is nothing north-west of the west bank road at the second bend except eleven kilometres of ridge and then the coast." Rafe had his thumb on the paper. "Captain, the column is on the west bank road. The column is on the same road as the truck we watched at six o'clock yesterday morning, and the column is asking for a bombing run on a bearing into the ridge behind us." "And there is a post on the ridge behind us telling them no." "There is a post on the ridge behind us telling them no, in the middle of a transmission, on a frequency that we can hear, eleven kilometres from here, and both of those men have just told the truth on an open net." "They have not told the truth," said Ito. "They have told two different truths and the difference between them is going to kill somebody." He took the sheet out of his jacket. It was in pieces by now, the folds gone, the ink gone off the valley entirely, and he carried it in four separate pieces in four pockets because he would not carry a map on his person where it could be read. "If the post does not confirm, the air does not come. If the air does not come, the column does not move, and the column is on a road with infantry on it. And the post is not wrong about the schedule, the schedule is a 1948 survey and there is no way on earth to fly on it, and everybody in this valley now knows that the two sides of this war are holding two different pictures of where they are, and one of them is a picture of 1948." "Then the schedule is the thing that has to be fixed," said Rafe. "Yes," said Ito. "And we are six men and a colonel and a field telephone on an island in a river." Rafe looked up. He had not told anybody about the island. "You told me the set was on the island at the tenth hour of the thirty-eighth day and I said come back for it within the hour," said Rafe. "I have not been able to go back because there are men on that road and I have been listening to them, and because I made a mark on a tree at four inches past two on the thirty-eighth and I have the bearing and I have a watch, and I have been standing here for twenty-nine hours working out whether I can do it tonight." "Tonight the column is on that road with infantry." "Tonight the column is on that road with infantry and an aircraft is going to come over that valley at first light because somebody has just given a bearing out on a net that I can hear," said Rafe. "And that is the only night there is going to be. If the aircraft comes in at first light and it comes in on four seven five, then this valley is fine and the post is a fool and the column is alive. And if it does not come, then the column is on that road in the morning, and I will be the man who could have sent it and didn't." He got up before Ito could answer. "Captain, I am not asking for permission, I have decided, and if you want to court-martial me you can do it on the far side of this river in about four days." He had the aerial off the stick and the stick under his arm. "The set is under a snag on the third island from the south bank, at about two hundred and forty metres, and I marked the tree, and the current takes a man to the south, so you walk downstream when you come out. Give me four hours." "You will not have a set on the rock while you are gone," said Ito. "Whatever happens on that net at first light, you will not hear it from up here, and I want you to understand that I am telling you that on purpose." "You do not want me to know whether it came in." "I do not want you to be standing on a piece of rock listening to a thing you cannot help," said Ito. "You have been listening to things you cannot help for forty days, and it has put you in a river twice, and it is going to put you somewhere worse before this is over. I am not going to help you along with it. Take the whole team and the stick and go down, and if you hear anything at all then you will hear it from the bottom of a hill with nine hundred metres of hill in between you and it." Rafe got up and took the aerial down, and it took him longer to take it down than it had ever taken him to put it up. "Ito," he said. "Yes." "Everything I have done on this trail I have done because you made a decision at about nine o'clock the night before and told me about it in the morning." He had the stick under his arm and the set in the plastic. "I would like it on the record that I did not ask to be on this patrol and that I would not go back to the unit if you gave it to me." "Go down the hill, Rafe." "Yes, sir," said Rafe, and went down it. They were off the shelf by the fourteenth hour and about a kilometre down, and Ito put them in a drainage under a bamboo thicket and told them to sleep. Four of the six slept. The colonel sat with his back against the bank looking at a kilometre of slope, and Ito lay four feet away and did not sleep at all. At about the twentieth hour the colonel said, without preamble, in an entirely ordinary voice: "You have been awake for thirty-four hours." "You have been counting." "I have been watching a man count things for thirty-nine days." Tran Minh was looking at the rain coming through the bamboo. "You count hours. You count men in a file, cells in a set, days a man has been walking. In four days you will be able to tell me how long ago a thing happened without looking at anything, and I do not think you know that you do it." "I have always counted." "Yes. That is the whole of what is wrong with the world and nobody in it will ever fix it." The colonel put his hands flat on the bank. "In 1944 I was a lieutenant in the north and there was a village called Binh Thuy with about four hundred people in it, and a list came down from the general staff with a number on it, and the number was about eleven hundred, and I wrote on the margin that I could not account for the difference and sent it up, and it came back with a note in a different hand that said noted, reconcile locally." He was quiet for a moment. "I never went back. There was no time. And in 1963 I signed a table with a column of figures in it that was wrong by about a third, because the figures came up from a province, and a province is not a man you can ring up at eleven o'clock at night." He turned his head. "You count things because you are the only man in four years who has been counting things, and I have not done any of it, and I have been a signature in a room with a table in it at every hour of the four years before this one. Whatever happens at four o'clock this afternoon, Captain, I have got out of the room. There is a piece of gold round my neck that a man in Brussels is waiting for, and I have not been in a room with a table in it since the twenty-ninth of April, and if you are on that ridge at four o'clock this afternoon for any reason at all, then I would like you to know that it is not for me. It is for the count." Ito did not answer for about a minute. "Then I will be on the ridge," he said, "and I will count, and I will not send anything, and I will not answer anything, and if the aircraft comes in and if it does not come in, then it will be on my own report and nobody else's." "Good," said Tran Minh, and lay down in the bamboo, and slept for nine hours, which was the longest any of them slept between the second of May and the forty-second.