第15章 The Fifth Burst

Day forty. Rafe came back out of the river at about the seventh hour on the fortieth day with the set in a plastic bag held against his chest and about a metre of the aerial missing, and he came out ninety metres downstream of where he went in, exactly as he had said he would, because he had said it and because he was twenty-two. He did not say anything about it for about ten minutes. He got the set out, wiped it down, put a fresh set of cells in it from the last four he had, and put the aerial back up on a stick lashed with aircraft wire out of a ration tin, and made it work, and then he sat down in the wet and put his head on his knees for a minute and a half with his face in the rain, and got up. "It came in," he said. "It came in." "First light. One aircraft, one pass, from the east, and it dropped on four seven five at about the second bend on the west bank road, and it dropped it on the second attempt, and it was a four hundred pound load and it went in about four hundred metres from the road on a bearing of four seven five from the water at the second bend." Rafe had it on the back of his hand. "And the post called it. The post came up on the relief net at four minutes past six and gave a bearing and the aircraft went round and came in, and the whole of it took about nine minutes and I heard every second of it from an island in a river." Nobody spoke for a while. "And the column?" said Ito. "The column did not call and the column did not need to call, because an aircraft does not come in on a bearing a man invented at two o'clock in the morning." He turned the paper over. "Captain, I have been listening to this net for five weeks. It has two languages in it. The post talks like a man reading. And everything else talks like a man who has been on the ground and is tired." "And the sixth burst is still to come." "The sixth burst is still to come, and it is coming tonight, and it is coming for the reason they always come." Rafe put the set down on his knees. "Sir, I have been able to do a thing that nobody else in this valley can do, and I have been doing it for five weeks in a plastic bag against my chest, and I have not told one person in this file what I can do, and I am telling you now, at the seventh hour on the fortieth day, because I have got a man on a post on that ridge who has been right twice and who is going to be asked a third time, and if he is asked a third time in the same way then he is going to be standing on a ridge with a schedule in 1948 and a column on a road in 1965, and one of those two men is going to be standing there when the wrong thing comes over the top of it." He put his hand flat on the set. "I can talk to that post." Ito sat down on the rock. "Explain it to me," he said, "and then explain what happens if you do it, and then I will tell you no, and you will do it anyway, and I would rather have had the explanation than not." Rafe did not sit down. "The post has been transmitting on a direct frequency to a fire direction post, and it has been transmitting on the relief net, and both of those are net traffic and net traffic goes to whoever is listening, and everything either side has said has been heard on the air by at least the other side." He was not hurrying. "There is a third thing. There is a direct frequency that a post uses to talk to the platform that gives it its guns, and it is not a net, and it is not a broadcast, and it is keyed, and it is very short, and if you can get a signal off it once and it does not answer then it does not know you are on it. But if you can get a signal off it and it does answer, then you have spoken to a gun line, and a gun line does not care who it is talking to. It cares what time it is." "You would be using a friendly gun position's fire control net." "I would be using it for about four seconds, once, and I would be giving them a correction on a bearing they have already got a bearing on, and they would put a shell two hundred metres from a column that has just been resupplied, and neither side would know it happened." Rafe's hands were flat on the knees. "And then they would know. Because a gun line that gets a correction off an unknown station writes it down. That is the whole of what a gun line is. It writes it down, and it files it, and in about four years somebody in an office will go through the firing tables for this valley and find that on the fortieth of May in 1965 a correction came in from a station that was not on the plot." "And they will come up this ridge looking for that station." "They will come up this ridge looking for that station," said Rafe, "and I will be on it, and so will you." The rain came off the shelf in a rope. The coast was four thousand metres below and flat and grey and did not have anything to do with any of it. "Do it," said Captain Ito. He did not say it straight away, and when he said it he was looking at the ring of stones, and Tran Minh was standing at the far side of the shelf with his back to both of them, on purpose, which Rafe noticed and Ito did not. "Sergeant Sant is going to be on the aerial with you," said Ito, "and he is going to be on it the whole time, and he is going to be the one who stops it, and you are not to argue with him about that, and if you argue with him about it I will take the set off you myself and put it in the river. Do you understand me?" "Yes, sir." "Four seconds, and then you are off the air, and then you are down that slope and out of this valley, and I do not want anybody's aerial within four hundred metres of this rock until the fortieth of June." He got up. "And Rafe. When you have done it, and when we are all down on that coast, I am going to write a report and I am going to say that a specialist of this corps used a friendly fire-control net without authority at the fourth hour on the fortieth of May, and I am going to say that I was present and that I gave permission, and I am going to put my own name under yours." "Then I am not doing it alone either," said Rafe. "No," said Ito. "No, you are not."