第7章 The Long Trail

Day thirty-three. They came onto the Long Trail at about the eleventh hour of the thirty-second day and by the time they had been on it for two hours it had stopped being a trail and started being a knife. It ran along the top of the ridge at about fifteen hundred metres, and it was not a path. It was a line of ground — a break in the scrub where the wind had come over the top of that ridge from the north-east for a very long time and had taken everything off it but the rock — and it was about a boot wide in places and four yards wide in others, and for sixty kilometres it was the only ground in the whole of that country that a man could walk on and see four hundred metres, and Ito had learned it in November 1963 in one afternoon from a district officer in An Thuc who had driven him out there in a Land Rover and shown him a photograph. "French road," the district officer had said. "Nineteen forty-one. They took their trucks along the top of that and drove to the shoulder at the north end where there is a spring, and then they turned round and came back, and they did it about four times a day for two years, and there is a turning place at the north end that is thirty yards across and is the only place on that whole ridge where you can get a truck off your line." "Where is the spring now?" "Dry in 1961. There's a stone circle round it. French did that too." The officer had put the photograph away. "I would not send anybody up there." "Why not?" "Because there is nowhere to go," he said, and had driven home. They went up it in single file with Reefer third, because Reefer could not keep up at the back and could not go first, and Rafe in the middle of them all with the aerial lashed to the stick held at a low angle where it would not catch the light. The whole point of the Long Trail was the four hundred metres, and the four hundred metres worked in their favour and against them at the same time from the first hour. It worked in their favour because they saw Duc first, at about two hundred and fifty metres, on the far shoulder of a side drainage, walking up out of it in single file, and Ito put a fist up and the whole file stopped dead in about a second and a half, which was the fastest stop in the thirty-three days and was entirely down to Rafe. He had not seen Duc. He had seen the aerial. "It is him," said Rafe, very quietly. "It is him and it is four behind him and it is the column, or it is a section of it, and they are on foot and they have not seen us." "How do you know you have not been heard." "Because if we had been heard we would not be looking at them, we would be behind us." He put the aerial down flat against the rock. "They cannot see a thing lying down. Nobody on this ridge can see anything lying down, and that is the entire reason the French drove along the top of it and not along the side." Ito went forward on his belly to about ninety metres and lay there for a quarter of an hour and came back. "Seven men," he said. "The third one is carrying something on a stretcher between two of them. They are not in a hurry. They have been in a column since before first light and they have done about two thousand metres." "The column." Tran Minh was flat on his face in six inches of water and he said it into the rock. "That is the column." "That is a section of the column, and the column is supposed to be three days behind the water at Co Tinh, and it is now on this ridge." Ito did not move. "So the relief did not come through the valley. The relief came the other way round, over the top, from the north, and it has put sixty kilometres into four days and it has got somebody on a stretcher, and that means the fighting is north of us and behind us." Nobody said anything for a while. Below them the whole of the valley of the blind river lay in the rain, eleven kilometres wide, and the river was where the map said it was not, and it was the only flat ground within forty kilometres, and there were sixty men on the top of the ridge above it who had not been told there was anybody on the ridge. "Forty minutes," said Ito. "We go up the trail for forty minutes and then we get off it and we go into the scrub and we sit there until the light goes. And nobody lights anything, and nobody stands up, and Rafe does not put that aerial up another inch than it is." "It is a dipole. I cannot hear anything on a dipole." "You can hear them on the ground. That is what a dipole is for." He had the set out of the plastic and lying on its face on the rock with the aerial down flat, and he had been at it for a full minute without moving it, which was not what anybody else on that hill would have done. "Hold still and do not talk. The noise the set makes when nothing is on it is a hiss with a rise and a fall in it, and the rise and the fall come from a machine about eleven miles away that is turning over, and if a man is talking into a set on a frequency anywhere near us the hiss changes shape and you can hear it change with your eyes shut. It is not a trick. It is just listening for the difference." Rafe held still. Behind his eyes there was a hiss with a slow rise and a fall in it, and in the middle of the rise, on a flat rock, two hundred and fifty metres away, there was a man walking up out of a side drainage in single file, and the hiss did not change at all. "He has not got a set on," said Rafe. "He has got a radio telephone and it is off, and he is carrying it switched off, which is a thing a man does when he has been told he is not to use it." "Then he is a man who has been told things." Ito had not moved. "Keep listening." And the thing that Rafe could not have explained to anyone afterwards, and never did try to explain to anyone, was that for about four minutes in the middle of that, on a wet ridge three hundred metres below sixty men, the column came up through the hiss and out of it and went on up the far side of the drainage, and for about a second and a half he could hear the sound of a hundred and some men being dry in a place where nobody was dry, and it was the best thing he had ever heard in his life, and it went past and never came back, and he was twenty-two. "That is the whole of it," Rafe said afterwards, to nobody, lying in the mud. "A second and a half of somebody else's luck. That is what a set is for. Everything else is just waiting." "You cannot hear anything on a dipole in the rain, at four hundred metres, off a wet rock, with sixty men walking," said Rafe. "Correct," said Ito. "I am going to keep saying it anyway."