Lawrence Block - The Scoreless Thai (aka Two For Tanner)

In perfect formation the U.S. aircraft peeled off and dived for the trail. A pair of jet fighters led the way, flying directly into the stream of flak, peppering the trail with machine-gun shells. Behind them fighter bombers laid their eggs.

It was just what I thought it would be. Napalm.

The jungle burst into flame. “Fall back,” I told Tuppence and Dhang. “Don’t even worry about the soldiers. They couldn’t care less right now. Just get the hell out of the way of that fire.”

We scattered like field mice in a burning barn. More planes passed over the trail, and from the heart of the napalm fire came the report of high-impact shells. Now and then the antiaircraft fire found its mark. One of the fighter-bombers took a blast in its middle and broke in half. A fighter evidently caught some flak in the cockpit, went out of control, and spiraled insanely off to the north, crashing and bursting at once into flame.

But the planes were giving better than they got. Three of the T-34’s were out of action in no time at all, two taking direct hits, the third getting the backlash of the bomb that landed square atop the troop carrier in front of it. The ground troops screamed and died in the fire that raged around them.

We missed most of what happened, running crazily through the brush. We outran the napalm, then sprawled at last in a tangle of vines. And lay there, deafened by the sounds of battle, hearts shaken by the combined effect of exertion and panic, until the last burst of ground fire was still and the last plane flew south.

We had hated the jungle. Slogging through it, through the mud and the snakes and the insects and the treacherous vines, we had personified it and cursed it as an enemy. Now we crept toward the ruined army column and looked upon the alternative to the jungle. Acres of plant growth had been burned out of existence. What had been green was burned black, with little vestigial fires still raging at the perimeter. The air was filled with the scent of burning vegetation and the more pungent stench of roasted flesh. The wounded shrieked in agony or moaned in the throes of death. The dead were mercifully silent.

Those Vietnamese who remained unimpaired were unequal to the task of coping with the situation. We watched them from the sidelines, less afraid now of discovery. I scanned the row of ruined jeeps and antiaircraft guns and troop carriers and tanks.

“That’s it,” I said.

“What?”

“Our passport. They got three of them, but one’s still operable. All we have to do is get into it and roll.”

Tuppence looked at me as though I had gone over the edge. “You rest a minute,” she said. “The fever-”

“No fever. I’m talking about the tank.”

“Huh?”

I pointed. “The T-thirty-four,” I said. “The tank. That’s our out. It doesn’t matter what color you are inside one of those. We’ll all be invisible. We can cut right through North Vietnam and across the demilitarized zone without anyone wondering who we are.”

“How do we get one?”

“Change places with the clowns inside it.”

“Suppose they don’t go for the idea?”

“They’re probably dead,” I said. “They probably got cooked. If they don’t come crawling out in the next few minutes, we can count on it. The napalm generates a hell of a lot of heat. But that last tank never took a direct hit, and the machinery should be all right. Sooner or later it ought to cool off. By that time the rest of the column should be long gone.”

“Have you ever driven one of those things?”

“No.”

“Groovy.”

“I never paddled a dugout, either. Maybe I can figure it out.”

“You really think so?”

“Do you want to walk the rest of the way?”

“No.”

“Then it’s worth a try.”

We waited on the sidelines while the uninjured soldiers and walking wounded rounded up as many of their wounded fellows as they could and made their way back north again. The air attack had been a fairly comprehensive success. What had begun as a motorized column left on foot, with all of their vehicles abandoned. Almost everything had been destroyed, and it was only barely possible that the one undamaged tank was still functional. But it seemed like a good gamble.

Around us the cries of the remaining wounded gradually faded. Some of them metamorphosed statistically from Wounded In Action to Killed In Action, dying quietly on either side of us. Others either passed out or gave up moaning when no one came to aid them. After a while I took a gun from a dead soldier, told the others to wait, and headed across the napalm-scorched clearing to the abandoned tank. From the ground a badly burned soldier called to me. There was nothing I could do for him. I went to the tank, and the metal hatch was still too hot to handle. The hatch was unfastened, which meant either that those inside had not bothered locking it, since after all they were not engaged with ground forces, or that they had escaped from the vehicle, or that they had died while trying to escape. I couldn’t tell without opening the hatch. There was a general stench of burned flesh, but there was no way of knowing whether it came from within the tank or was merely part of the general aroma of roasted humanity that pervaded the entire region.

I went back to Tuppence and Dhang. It had been a while since our last meal but no one was very hungry. Tuppence was particularly shaken. Her eyes swept the battlefield, and she kept shaking her head. “Why doesn’t everybody leave everybody alone,” she said. “I do not dig jungles. Remember how I told you they ought to take every jungle and rip it up and pave it with asphalt?” She had said this several times in the course of the journey. “I’ll take it all back now. Any jungle’s better than this.”

“All the jungles will be gone soon.”

“Because of this? Bombs?”

“Not just that. Call it the advance of civilization. There’s no room for jungles anymore. Too many people. There won’t be any jungles or deserts left. We’ll clear the jungles and irrigate the deserts, and I suppose someday we’ll even level all the mountains, except for the ones we save for ski slopes. And instead of snakes and insects and animals and birds, there will be rows and rows of little square houses where there used to be jungles and deserts and mountains. And everyone will have enough to eat, and no one will die of sickening diseases, and everyone will speak Esperanto and have 2.7 children and pensions when they’re old and nondenominational services when they die. And they’ll all join bowling leagues and complain about crabgrass and watch color television, and when they talk to each other, Esperanto will be as good as anything else because they won’t really have anything to say.”

“Evan-”

“Every town will have a park for the children to play in, and the park will have trees and shrubs for the people to look at. And the larger towns will have zoos so that the children can go to them and look at all the birds and animals that used to inhabit the earth. Everybody will buy frozen food at the supermarket and drink dietetic cola and get thirty-four percent fewer cavities and die of lung cancer. Everybody will be able to travel to far-off countries where everybody else lives in the same houses and goes to the same schools and speaks the same language and eats the same food.” I looked at the scorched earth, and I turned around and looked at the wild green jungle. “And it doesn’t even matter who wins here,” I said, “because either way it will turn out the same. If America wins, they’ll pour in foreign aid until the whole country turns into one big Levittown. If the Communists win, they’ll create the sort of worker’s paradise you find all over Eastern Europe, with every house a perfect gray concrete block cube. It’ll take them longer because they don’t have as much money, but they’ll make up for it by making it even uglier. There’s a suburb of Cracow built since the war that looks as though it belongs on the outskirts of Cleveland. You can’t blame it on any one nation. It’s creeping monotony, it’s the wave of the future.”