Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

“David, you’re not exactly fit for a hike like that. Maybe—”

Tyreen went right on: “There’s a Montagnard camp above Chutrang — friendlies; Kreizler was working with them. They’ll have to help us get into the city without making waves. There’s a fuel storage depot above town, and I think we’ll send Hooker up there to blow up the big tanks. The racket ought to make people dizzy. Anyhow, we’ll need some sort of diversion like that, to get them off balance.”

“How do we get into the compound where they’ve got Eddie?”

“There are no easy ways.”

“What else is new?”

“If we can steal a couple of North Vietnamese uniforms to fit Sun and Khang, they can act like a pair of Vietminh who captured us. They’re bringing us in — that gets us into the army post. When we get that far, we’ll have to improvise — it will depend on where Eddie’s locked up and what the guard arrangements are.”

“An awful lot of playing by ear,” Saville said. “But suppose it works. Don’t leave me in a minor key, David — I don’t want to get stuck with this operation without a road map if you get picked off.” He spoke in a practical voice. “If I euchre us into the wrong spot, they’ll start playing marbles with our eyeballs. Point me in the right direction.”

“You don’t need a weather vane,” Tyreen said. “Give yourself a little more credit, Theodore.”

Saville stood backed against the wall, hands in the front pockets of his fatigue trousers. “I guess I know my limitations as well as you do.”

Tyreen shrugged. “Certain things you just can’t plan. If we get out of Chutrang with Eddie, we plant a false trail of some kind to throw them off, and we get up the Sang Chu to the bridge as fast as we can. I haven’t seen the place, and there aren’t any worthwhile photographs of it. It’s heavily guarded, but it’s got to have some vulnerable point. We make it up as we go along. It’s the only thing we can do.”

“Is that a royal ‘we’ or an editorial ‘we’?”

Tyreen passed a hand over his face. “Theodore, if you can’t ride the horse you’re on, you get off and walk. What more can I tell you? If they could blueprint this kind of operation, they wouldn’t need people like us.” His chiseled face was dismal.

The luminous dial of George McKuen’s watch read 0240 hours. In a thick, false brogue he said, “At me back I hear time’s winged chariot hurryin’ near, darlin’.” He considered the silent instruments. The night sky, low overcast, was the color of a spent lead bullet. Beside him Mister Shannon sat strapped in, beginning the control check with skilled efficiency. McKuen said, “Okay, pipe the admiral aboard.”

“Already on board,” said Colonel Tyreen, entering the passage behind McKuen’s right shoulder. “All set, Lieutenant.”

“Ah, funerals,” said McKuen. “But you fine people haven’t a thing to worry about. Parachutists have no problems. The bloody ground will always break your fall.”

Tyreen said, “Check your de-icers, Lieutenant.”

“What?”

“Squall season. You don’t know what kind of weather you may hit over the mountains.”

McKuen said, “Are you nuts? Oh, hell, why do I bother to ask.”

Tyreen smiled vaguely and turned back toward the passenger cabin, holding his body tautly rigid.

McKuen began to untangle wires, putting on his headset, moving the seat-adjustment levers, switching on the panel lights, going through the checklist with Shannon. Afterward Shannon said, “We’re sitting still with the engines off and the artificial horizon jumps.”

“Sure, and what’d you expect?”

“What if it jumps out altogether?”

“Boxcars,” replied McKuen. He was inspecting the deicing equipment. “The rubber boots expand all right. No way to tell about the hot-air blowers. They’re probably shot — I can’t figure any Vietnamese mechanic staying up nights to repair the bloody things. I wish we had anti-ice chemicals to paint the wings with. Ah, well, I’m thinking we don’t have to fly around hunting for ice, just to see if it’ll work.”

There was no door on the pilot’s compartment. He leaned into the corridor and shouted back through the plane, “Everybody snug?”

No one answered. He shrugged, glanced at Shannon, saw Shannon’s firm hands against the controls, and said, “All right. Let’s be starting up number one and see if it goes around in a proper circle.”

The engines sputtered into life, running raggedly. Shannon said, “I hope we know what we’re doing.”

“That makes two of us. You ready, darlin’?”

“Yes.”

“That makes one of us,” McKuen said, and switched on the radio. “Hello, Tower — this is Yankee Six Four.”

“Go ahead, Irish.”

“Time to go,” said McKuen.

After a moment the headset crackled. “All right, Yankee Six Four, you’re cleared for takeoff on Runway Four.”

“With another bloody crosswind. I’m so obliged to you.”

“So long, Irish.”

He flipped the radio switch. Wipers flapped back and forth across the windshield. He pressed the throttles forward and taxied away from the hanger. “Flaps, Shannon.”

“Aye,” said Mister Shannon. “Aye.”

The senile gooney bird cleared the phone wires by a narrow airspace and banked around toward the northeast, scrambling upward through rain until it broke out above the clouds over the South China Sea. They crossed the 13th parallel and set a course north-northwest, cruising at seven thousand feet under a sky partially clouded and partially dotted with stars. “Cirrus,” McKuen said. “I don’t see any sign of that typhoon. Maybe it’ll beat us back here.”

“And maybe not,” said Shannon. “Why worry about it?”

“Mister, I think you may be too casual sometimes.”

“Coming from you, I take that kindly. But there’s nothing casual about this job.”

McKuen said, “It would be nice if the autopilot worked. Where d’you suppose the gooks dredged up this heap of junk?”

“Well,” Shannon observed sagely, “it flies.”

“Like a bloody cow.” McKuen put his attention on the glowing circles on the dash and above the windshields.

“I don’t believe you trust this airplane,” said Shannon.

“Don’t you, now.”

“You can always bail out.”

McKuen glanced at him. “Tickle me — I hate to be rude.”

Shannon darkened. “Hell, Lieutenant — it’s all fine and all to make jokes. But I’m scared green. What if we get knocked down over North Vietnam or drop right into some Victor Charlie camp? Do you speak Vietnamese?”

“Sure.”

“That makes me feel all warm inside,” Shannon said miserably. “I don’t speak a word of it. Only been here three weeks.” He reached forward to correct the mixture on number one. He said, “Hell of a vibration in number two.”

“A loose mount. I did me best to tighten it down with baling wire.” McKuen made a grimace. “Baling wire.” Then, abruptly, he laughed quietly.

McKuen tried to take a bearing with the radio direction finder, but the reading was untrustworthy. Silence filled the cabin, in spite of engine drone and the rush of wind past the blunt nose of the plane: silence filled with faintly luminous cloud surfaces in the night and scattered star points on the sky. It came, the silence, of the profound aloneness known to men who sat in a gently vibrating cockpit with a thin column of air suspending them thousands of feet above the invisible black sea. They had the glow of stars, glow of clouds, and yellow glow of wide-eyed instruments. The slow movement of needles across dials, the hum of radio beacons coming in through the headset; the phosphorescence of a dim moon vague behind a high, thin cloud, the steady grip of a pale hand, the jut of the round-faced compass bisecting the windshield at nose-level, the soporific motionlessness of the airplane, tongues of exhaust flame shooting back from the engines and, far off on a mountaintop in the central highlands, the glow of a warning beacon tiny like a fallen cigarette ash.