第2章 The Gold Fob

Day nine. Rafe saw the fob on the ninth day, and the reason he saw it was that a gold cord is the only thing on that mountain that holds its shape in the rain. Tran Minh had set his pack down on a flat stone at the fourth hour and taken the fob off over his head and put it on the stone, on its side, to sit on. Not a weight for the strap. A thing to sit on while he ate, the way a man will put down his watch. Rafe was eight feet away, working the aerial into a fork, and he looked at it because it was gold and because everything else in the valley was the colour of a cigarette. It was about two inches long, a curved thing, a fragment of a fob watch with the stem still on it and the watch gone. The cord was a plain gold chain, short, and it had been cut and rejoined once with a splice you could see from three feet. The colonel was not looking at it. He was looking down the valley, and his hand was on the fob, and he did not pick it up when Rafe's aerial came out of the fork and swung and made the chain move on the stone. That was the thing. The colonel had watched nine days of rain and had not once moved a thing off a stone before it was needed, because everything on a mountain that is not strapped down is lost to the first slope you sit on. And this man had put a piece of gold on bare stone in the middle of a valley in a monsoon and had not watched it, and had watched a stranger's aerial swing at three feet instead. Rafe put the aerial down. He came over and crouched by the stone and made a show of packing the set, and the colonel went twelve feet down the slope to piss, which was the ordinary human reason a man goes twelve feet down a slope, and Rafe had it in his hand and out of the collar in about four seconds. It was gold and it was solid and it had a seam down the long side, and the seam was soft, and it had been opened before and closed again by somebody who had done it more than once, because there was a scratch on the lip of the seam that had been scratched on by a blade, at an angle, in one pull. Rafe had been in the service four years. He had carried mail. He knew what a thing that had been opened and reclosed with a blade looked like in his hand, and he knew that there were perhaps three kinds of thing that came out of the South Vietnamese intelligence office in the capital in 1965 that were the size of a fob watch, and only one of them was worth a man being sent up the Long Trail in the rain with six others. He put it back on the stone in the same attitude, at the same angle, with the chain falling the same way to the right. The colonel came back up the slope and sat down and picked it up and put it over his head and under his shirt in about a second and a half, without looking at it, and said: "Your set's getting wet, Rafe." "It is, sir." "Dry it in your shirt. Under the arm. Wax and skin and a shirt is better than a bag." Tran Minh unwrapped his rice. "And don't wrap the base. The base is the one that gets wet and the base is the one that stops working." "Sir," said Rafe. They ate in the rain sitting up against the pack with the tarp over their heads, and Ito came by at about the eighth hour and looked at the two of them and did not sit down, and Tran Minh said, in the middle of a mouthful, "Your man has been very kind about my collar." "He is a good man," said Ito. "He has an eye," said Tran Minh. "I have been watched by better eyes than his and I have been watched by worse, and I have never been watched by one that looked at a piece of string and then looked at the ground." He put the rice down. "You have thirty days of this, Captain, and you have a man with an eye, and I am going to ask you a question and I would like you to answer it as if it did not matter, because it does not matter, and because it is the only thing I am going to say to you about it." "Ask." "You have thirty days of this, Captain, and you have a man with an eye, and I am going to ask you a question and I would like you to answer it as if it did not matter, because it does not matter, and because it is the only thing I am going to say to you about it." "Ask." "The fob," said the colonel, It is not my father's. There is nothing in it that belongs to me and nothing in it that anybody can hang on me, and I have been carrying it up a mountain for nine days so that a man on a ridge with a radio can see that somebody is carrying it, and so that the man behind me knows that if I am taken, it is not taken off me in a room with a table in it." Ito did not say anything for a while. The rain came off the tarp in a rope at the corner. "Then say it again at the ridge," he said, "and I'll answer it." "You will, my son," said Tran Minh, and went to sleep. He slept for four hours in the wet under a tarp that had been made in 1961, and Rafe sat the other side of the same tarp with a piece of microfilm in his shirt pocket and did not sleep at all, and worked out, over the course of about three hours, that he was now a man in the United States Army Signal Corps who was carrying evidence against the intelligence service of a sovereign state, on a mountain, in the rain, with six men and a colonel and no possible way of getting any of it anywhere. He had a whole night for the arithmetic and he got to the same place three times and the place was the same each time. If the fob had microfilm in it, then there was a reel in a can, and a can in a vault in the capital, and the vault had a list, and the list had a number on it, and the number was on a piece of paper in the same building. If the colonel had been taken, the can would have been opened and the film would have been developed and the number would have been found, and the name that went against the number would have been the last name on the list. They were not going to develop anything in a room with a table. They were going to look at a gold cord round a man's neck on a mountainside, and they were going to want somebody to have seen it. And the only man on that mountain who had ever put his eyes on it properly was sitting six feet away with a pencil stub and a piece of paper on the back of his hand. At about two in the morning Rafe got up and went and sat down on the flat stone where it had been, in the dark, in the rain, and he put his hand flat on it, and he found the seam with his thumbnail, and he looked at a gold thing on a stone for about a minute and a half. Then he went back and lay down beside a sleeping colonel, and he did not sleep, and toward dawn he made the decision that he was going to keep, and it was not a good decision and he knew it was not, and it was this: he would not touch it again, and he would not speak about it, and he would carry it up the mountain, and if the day ever came that a man with a warrant put a hand on the colonel's collar he would walk up the slope and stand next to him and say out loud, in front of everybody, in a voice that carried, that he had seen the fob on the ninth day and that it was a broken watch with nothing in it, and that he had put his own hand on it and opened it with a thumbnail. And then they would take him as well, and that was the whole of it, and he lay in the wet and thought that he was twenty-two years old and had eleven weeks of service and did not know a single person in the capital, and that it was on the whole the only plan he had, and that it was not one he would have believed at the second hour of the sixth day before he saw a piece of gold on a stone.