第8章 The Second Burst

Day thirty-four. The second burst came at nine minutes past six in the morning, and it came while the whole of Delta-9 was lying in a drainage below the Long Trail with sixty men passing along the top of the ridge three hundred metres above them, and it was the loudest thing that had happened to Rafe in four years of service. "Delta Nine, this is the Column. Column has crossed the ridge and is in the valley at the river. Water is high, the crossing is out, and we are holding under the north wall. Holding as long as we can and not one minute past that. Relief is on the trail and coming down from the north. Out." Then nothing. Rafe lay in six inches of water with the receiver against his head and his hand flat on the set, and he did not move for about four minutes, and then he took the headphones off and put his face in the mud for a moment because he was twenty-two years old and he was frightened, and then he got up on one elbow and said, to nobody, in the low voice: "They're in the valley." They came up through the scrub in the dark and Ito made the file on the line of two buttress roots about four feet high, and Rafe went to him and put the paper in his hand, and Ito read it by feel in the dark and did not ask for it twice. "Water is high and the crossing is out." Ito said it to nobody in particular. "Say that again, Rafe. That is the second time in a month somebody has told me a river is in a different place." "Sir, the column is in the valley. At the river. The water is high and the crossing is out, which means they are on the wrong side of it, because the crossing they use is four kilometres down where it has always been and if the water is up four kilometres of valley is a river." "Then they are below us and they cannot get out." "They are below us and they cannot get out, and the relief is coming down off the top of this ridge to bring them out, and the relief is going to be on the Long Trail at about the south end of it by dark." Ito sat down in the wet. None of them had seen him sit down before, in thirty-four days, and Kowalski — who was nineteen and who had been in the service eleven weeks — said afterwards that it was the thing that frightened him more than anything else on the whole trail. "You have got sixty men coming down that ridge in about nine hours," said Ito, "and there are eight of us in a drainage under it, and one of them has been walking for thirty-four days on a foot that is not his, and the other seven have not been dry since the nineteenth." "Sir, they will not see us." "They will not see us," said Ito. "That is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that in about nine hours there will be sixty men on this ground who are going to be told, by a man, that this ridge is clear. And that man will be looking for a party of eight with a colonel in the middle of it, because somebody in the chain of command has been putting a sheet of paper in front of a different man for six weeks, and if that sheet has got our names on it, then we are not a thing to be missed on this ridge. We are a thing to be looked for." Tran Minh said, from the dark, very quietly: "It has my name on it." "Yes, sir, it has," said Ito, "and it has had your name on it since the twenty-ninth of April, and there is no version of the next nine hours in which that is not true." He got up out of the wet. "So we are not on the Long Trail at nine hours. We are off it. We are off it now, and we are in the scrub on the west side, and we go down and we go west, and that is off every sheet of paper in this country, and it is the reason the Long Trail is a good road for a column and a bad place for a man who does not want to be found." They came off the trail in twenty minutes and went down into the scrub on the west side, which is not a slope and is a wall, and it took them until about the twentieth hour to get two hundred metres down it and find any ground that a man could stand on with a pack. They lost Reefer at about the seventeenth hour. He did not fall and he did not cry out. He stopped, in the middle of a file of seven men on a wall of scrub, and he sat down, and he said, "That is all right, that is all right," twice, to nobody, and Linh went back down to him. The foot had gone from the ankle to the middle of the shin in the last four days and it had gone bad at the heel, and the fob — no. Reefer had a cloth on it and the cloth had been wet since the nineteenth day and the shin behind the cloth was the colour of the inside of a paper bag and it was hot to put a hand on. "Captain." Linh had him on the ground. "Captain, it's the leg." "I know what it is." "That is not a leg, sir. That is four days of a man's leg and he has been putting weight on it since the nineteenth and it has had nothing on it but a wet cloth." "Then it is four days of a man's leg and it is still a leg," said Ito, "and it is not nine legs, and we have got a colonel in the middle of this file who cannot walk on his own feet, and I am not going to leave a man on a wall in this country in the dark for the sake of a schedule." He looked west, into about ninety metres of nothing at all. "Kowalski. Pham. Take his pack. Duc, take the other. We go at half pace and we do not put him down again until we are on ground, and if it takes us four hours to do four hundred metres then it takes us four hours." They carried him down the wall for about two hours. Kowalski took the leg and Pham took the shoulders and Ito walked ahead with a hand on the scrub in the dark, moving a foot at a time, because there was nothing else to go on, and the colonel of the Republic of Vietnam walked in front of a nineteen-year-old private from Ohio and put his hand on the roots for him.