第17章 The Sixth Burst

Day forty, after the rain had gone on for another nine hours. The sixth burst came at twenty past two in the morning of the forty-first day, and Rafe heard it lying on his back in a line of rock four hundred metres below a shelf of bare rock, and he did not have to sit up to hear it, and it was the last transmission of the war in that valley for thirty-one days. "Firewatch, this is the post. Post has been shelled at the second bend, four hundred metres from the column position, at twenty-one hundred six. One battery, four guns, no forward observation post on the net. That shell was not ours. Out." Then nothing for about forty seconds. "Post, this is the Column. Confirm not yours. Out." "Column, this is the post. The shell was not fired by this post. This post has two guns and neither of them is in a position to fire on that bearing. Out." "Post, this is the Column. Then where is it from. Out." Rafe lay in the wet with the receiver against his head and listened to eleven seconds of nothing, and then to a voice he had not heard before on that net at all, older, and slower, and speaking as though the whole thing were a matter of administration. "Column, this is Base. Base acknowledges. Base has no battery in that sector and Base has not fired on that bearing. Base advises the column that the position given at one two three zero zero is outside the 1948 survey limit and that no forward party has corrected it. Base advises the column to cease movement on that road until a survey party arrives. Base out." It was the first time in six weeks that anybody on any net had said the words *1948 survey limit* out loud, and Rafe wrote them on the back of his left hand, and then he wrote a line under them, and he sat there in the dark for a while with the set on his chest. Then he said, to nobody, in the low voice: "I told you about the sheets." "You told me," said Ito. "You told me in a barn — no, you told me on a river bank and you told me to be quiet about it, and you were right, and that is not what I am talking about." Rafe's hand was flat on the paper. "For six weeks that net has had two pictures of this valley in it. The schedule says 1948 and the post says 1948 and the column says one two three zero zero because a man on the ground invented it in a truck. And tonight a man at Base has said out loud, on a net, to a column, that the position is outside the 1948 survey limit and no forward party has corrected it. And the column has a road and infantry on it and no food since Wednesday, and it has just been told by its own people that the ground it is standing on is not on the map." "Then the column stops." "The column stops," said Rafe, "or the column sends a man forward to find out, and if the man goes forward then he comes up a hill, and if he comes up a hill then he comes up this one, because this is the hill." Nobody said anything for a while. "It is over," said Sant. "It is not over," said Ito. "It is over on that net and it is over for that column, and in about eleven days somebody will fly a survey party into this valley and correct the schedule, and there will be a new sheet in An Thuc with a blue line on it in the right place, and every man who reads it will believe it, and in four years it will be wrong again." He got up in the wet. "But it is not over tonight, and there is a man on a hill somewhere above us who has just been told by a man at Base that the position he is calling is not on his own schedule, and I want you all to understand what that does to a man of twenty-two on a radio in a hut on a ridge." "It makes him a traitor," said Rafe. "It makes him a traitor with a schedule in his hand and a voice in his ear telling him he is wrong," said Ito, "and I have no idea which of those two he will become by morning, and I have an idea which of the two he will be by the second of June, and it depends entirely on whether anybody ever tells him that a soldier on this ridge was on the same side as him." He said it, and then he said the other half of it, which he had not said at the seventh hour and which he had thought about for nineteen hours. "The rest of it is this," said Ito. "There is a man on a ridge four hundred metres above this line who has been told by a man at Base that he has been calling a position that is not on his own schedule. And at about the fourth hour this morning a man came up this hill in the dark on suspicion and did not find us, and he will come up it again with somebody in three days, and when he does, he will not go down that slope again empty." "That is a patrol, Captain. It is not a post." "It is a man of twenty-two on a radio, and I have not spoken to him, and I cannot, and there is a piece of paper in An Thuc that says this valley is empty, and the whole of the last six weeks has been that piece of paper being true, and tonight it stopped being true on an open net." He turned the paper over and looked at what he had written. "And I have been trying since the third of May to work out how to get word to him, and I have not done it, and I have not done it because I did not trust the schedule, and because a friendly correction is four seconds and a friendly voice is four minutes, and because I could not make four minutes safe on a ridge in a monsoon." "You could not." "I could not. And that is the correct answer and it is also a coward's answer, and the two of them are the same thing, and I am going to be able to tell which of them it was in about three weeks when I am writing it out." He folded the sheet. "Sant. Wake Rafe. I want a schedule that is not the schedule, drawn on the back of a ration carton, with the 1948 line on it and the real line on it, and no grid references on either, and I want it in my own hand, and I want you to carry it." "That is a piece of paper with two lines on it." "It is the only thing I have got," said Captain Ito, "and I have been counting things for forty days and it is the first one I have made."