Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Dieter turned, his mouth quivering with fear and disgust.

“I’ll kill you, man!” he shouted mockingly back at Hicks. That’s the slogan of this stupid age! The land of dope and murder! You accuse me of coveting this filth?”

“You’re the greatest show on earth,” Hicks said. “But you’re not conning me out of that pack.”

Dieter’s legs trembled.

Hicks lowered his good shoulder to cradle the stock under his arm and started down the steps. “Bring it here, Dieter.”

“It goes,” Dieter said. “You’re stoned, you’re delirious.”

He backed further away, toward the door. “Dope is not what I’m all about,” he said. “What I’m all about is much stronger than this.” He drew himself up and closed his eyes for a moment, trying for instant serenity. “This is one I have to win.”

He turned and walked carefully out the front door and down the steps.

Hicks sauntered after him.

The space outside the mission building was bathed in light from the spotlights on the tower. Dieter was striding purposefully across the plaza toward the cliff. Darkness commenced about thirty feet ahead of him, and the paths down began in that darkness. Hicks smiled at Dieter’s cleverness.

“Hey, Dieter. You’re not gonna make it, man.” He released the safety and brought the clip up into Fire position.

Well, they just kept coming, he thought, one of them after another. Pieces and bayonets, lies and cunning and deviousness but none of them were worth a shit. None of them could take him off.

“You’re not gonna make it, Dieter.”

Dieter stopped and turned toward him.

Hicks sighed and sat down on the top step.

“Please,” Dieter said. His own spotlights dazzled his eyes. He raised a hand to shield them. Hicks laughed. “No, Dieter. No, Dieter. You just bring that on back

here, man.” Dieter performed a fat man’s shuffle and began running for darkness. Hicks spread his legs out behind him on the top step and crouched over his weapon. He brought the barrel up.

All right—

Dieter made for the darkness, for a moment he was out of sight. A moment later his running figure was visible against trees, totally available against the moonlit sky.

You dumb—

A little man running against the trees, Hicks thought, I’ve hit that one before. And Dieter wasn’t so little, he was paunchy and slow.

Son of a bitch.

Look at his dumb ass up against that pretty sky.

All right you dumb son of a bitch.

An automatic round — it sprayed him with shells and splintered the fence he was trying to climb. Hicks walked down the steps through the smoke and over the still clattering cartridges. He went across the plaza toward the cliff. In Nam, he would have fired another two clips into the darkness as he came.

Dieter was lying on his belly under the remnants of his fence. His wrist jerked. Hicks walked up and kicked him. The pack was not beneath his body.

After a while, Hicks found it, quite near the cliff edge.

So he threw it, Hicks thought. He was running for the edge and he threw it. “For Christ’s sake,” Hicks said.

Dieter had not been taking him off. Of course not. Not Dieter.

It was a gesture. A gesture — he was going to throw it over because there was no fire for him to throw it in.

Throw it over was what he had said. A gesture.

“What the hell, Dieter,” Hicks said. “I thought you were taking me off.”

It was one he had to win. He was trying to get it on again. He was being stronger.

Damn it, if you’re going to make a gesture you have to have some grace, some style, some force. You have to have some Zen. If you act like a drunken thief, and people haven’t seen you in a while, they’re likely to think that’s what you are.

He had certainly fucked his gesture.

“Semper fi,” Hicks said. The pain came up again, he sat on a standing part of the fence in the rain.

Lousy stupid thing. like the Battle of Bob Hope. like everything else.

During the long and painful time it took to get the pack on his back, he put it out of his mind.

Walk.

The first part of the walk was through happy forest; Dieter’s knickknacks flickered in the moonlight and the earth was soft and mossy under his feet. He fell several times, experiencing with gratitude the tenderness of the ground and its reluctance to injure. Disneyland. Each time he had to stand up again, he felt the throb and although it was diffused, its fangs drawn by the drug, he was sorry that it had happened.

Another sort of light was creeping up on him; it seemed at first to come from the trees. Morning. In spite of what it meant, he was innocently glad to see it

His satisfaction in the coming light made him feel like an ordinary man with a child at his core, out walking one morning for pleasure. He was tempted by anger and self-pity.

The light was not good news and the sentiments were the stuff that killed, the warrior’s enemy.

Hungry bluejays chattered. He touched his side and felt blood flowing. When the pie was opened, his child’s voice prattled, the birds began to sing. He wondered if in their hunger and ferocity the screeching jays might not be tempted by the blood and the mauled flesh. There were things that lived in wounds.

At the edge of the trees was a cattle gate strung with wire. He unhooked the wire loop and stepped carefully over a rusted grid and into a high meadow where the tall dew-covered grass soaked his trouser legs. The sun was rising over purple hills behind him; the track ahead led down ward into a canyon that was crowned with tortured rock spires like the towers of the pagodas along the Cambodian Mekong.

He walked down on his heels, arching his back to support the weight of the pack, gripping the stock of his slung M-70 to keep it from knocking against his thigh.

The Fool.

Down had a rhythm of its own, bad for discipline because the lowered foot on striking sloping ground caused the body to lurch and lose cadence, broke up concentration. The temptation was to coast, let the feet find their own quick way down — an ankle buster. To hold back and descend deliberately was work. He detached, thought of the water that would be at the bottom, watched for rattlesnakes, and imagined the wild pigs whose tusks had tested the trail for buried oak balls. By the time the rising sun touched the tops of the pagoda spires over the canyon, he was into shade. The canyon bottom was cool, but windless and rank smelling. It filled him with suspicion and he walked tensely, ready to crouch and unsling his weapon.

The canyon opening was a hole in the wall, so narrow that he had to turn sideways to advance through it. When he was out, he saw the flat before him. The near edge of it was still in shade; across its yellow stony surface, balls of tumbleweed ran before a wind he could not feel in his protected place. At the end of it were round brown mountains; they were an insupportable distance away, but he would not have to walk that far to reach the road. Miles out, the dun color of the ground gave way to something unearthly, a glowing twinkling substance without color that grew brighter as the sun strengthened and sent off waves of heat that made the mountains shimmer. A line of rusted tracks, supported by mummified crossties, shot dead straight across the barren.

Between the desert and himself were shaded grass and a small stream that ran down from red boulders to nourish three cottonwoods and a lone stunted oak. He followed the stream and rested among the trees, ran the cold water over his face and filled his canteen. In trying to drink from it, he did a foolish thing. As he lowered his face to the water, the backpack slid forward over his neck and the strap tightened on his torn underarm; the pain made him straighten up and increased the pressure. He let himself slip into the water and got the pack so that he had it hanging from one strap balanced on his right shoulder. The water hurt at first, but in a few moments it felt very good indeed. When he climbed out, he noticed for the first time how swollen his left arm was and that he could not move it, not at all. Spot of bother.