Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

They wore a tattered assortment of captured Vietminh hats and jackets; Tyreen tried to picture the sight as it might strike a casual observer behind the truck. How convincing were they? The hat and coat were far too small for Saville — the hat perched ludicrously atop Saville’s big head, and his back had split the fatigue jacket in two; the sleeves hardly enclosed his elbows.

A rumble of noise came up the street toward them. Tyreen put his face close to the small rear window and looked ahead through the windshield. “Steady,” he said. Coming toward them was a convoy of hastily assembled vehicles — two armored troop carriers and half a dozen six-by-six trucks crowded with soldiers. Pedestrians in loose clothes and wide anthill hats crowded close to the buildings. Sergeant Khang leaned out his window to yell at them; he steered the truck in close to the wall to give the convoy passing room. “Steady, now,” Tyreen said again. Theodore Saville moved past Corporal Smith; Saville draped a bullet-torn blouse casually over the machine gun and turned the camouflaged weapon toward the street, ready to fire if he had to. Smith squirmed back toward the rim of the truck bed and clutched his submachine gun defensively. J. D. Hooker’s face was out of sight under his hat; Hooker said, “Just keep moving right on by, gents.” Tyreen thought, at least faintheartedness was not among Hooker’s vices.

The convoy came roaring up the street at high speed, headed for the ambushed power station on the mountain. Tyreen identified 50-millimeter guns mounted on both armored vehicles. He let the tarp corner fall into place and returned to his vantage point at the small window. Khang’s hands on the steering wheel were knotted with ridged veins. He steered close enough to the wall to scrape a fender. The convoy barreled up the middle of the road, intent on speed and contemptuous of civilian pedestrians. Men dived into doorways and alleys; one fat man in a business suit and flapping raincoat flattened his back against a building across the street, and then Tyreen lost sight of him as the lead truck came through, its engine buzzing at high speed. The gun observer sat high on the first armored troop carrier, his helmet firmed down by its chinstrap; the observer stared intently into the cab and turned his head slowly to keep his gaze on Sergeant Khang as the troop carrier loomed alongside and roared past. The noise was intense. There was a good deal of calling back and forth. Tyreen’s finger reached the trigger of his submachine gun, but the trucks kept rolling by, and no one stopped. Sweat stood out on Theodore Saville’s face.

The last truck passed, leaving a wake of heavy spray. Tyreen had a glimpse of the fat pedestrian against the far wall, soaked to the skin. Saville’s voice reached him: “Close enough.”

The truck turned quickly into a rutted alley, wheels crunching on stones. “This will be the place,” Tyreen said, and moved toward the back of the truck. It slowed and made a careful turn into the open barn door of a stone-walled garage built against the side of a steep hill. The light dimmed as they stopped within the garage.

“End of the line,” said Tyreen. “Let’s go.”

Cold and wet, the rain and thin air rushed through the airplane. Engines throbbed unevenly. A heavy fog of condensation clouded the cockpit. McKuen batted at it with a frozen hand; there were mountains in the vicinity, and he was not above the highest of them. He did not look to his right — Shannon’s last cry still echoed through his head, and Shannon had died, quickly, in a single spitting shriek of terror. But in McKuen’s mind it took Shannon a long time to die, at the end of which time McKuen stared out of charcoal-hollow eyes into the opacity of the sky and finally realized that a friend, a comrade, was dead.

It was one thing to maintain courage in the midst of a crowd of fighting men. It was another thing to maintain it alone. There was no one to see the sucking spasms that distorted McKuen’s mouth. He rode in a dying airplane, in a seat beside a dead man, imprisoned in his chair. He could not leave the controls even to move Shannon’s body out of sight — and if he had, it would have served no purpose. Shannon was dead, and it made no matter where his corpse lay.

He told himself, “You’ve got to let him die, McKuen. A soldier’s got to accept the loss of another soldier.” He asked himself, “By the Lord above, why this ? Why me ?” He found himself humming a tune he did not like, and went on humming it because he was afraid to stop.

“Shannon, you poor ignorant bastard,” he shouted. “Why didn’t you keep your bloody ass down?”

He laughed hysterically: “He’s got thirty percent more cavities, by God!” And his face stiffened in horror. “Jesus — Jesus. What are you talking about? God, forgive me.”

He looked at Shannon. “I didn’t mean it, Mister. I didn’t mean it, for God’s sake. You know me, Mister — I never know when to keep my mouth shut. Shannon...?”

He slapped himself across the side of the face. A downdraft of cold, heavy air made the gooney bird plummet. His stomach turned. Something stood beyond the swirl of rain — a heavier mass. He saw it once, and again, and lost it in the weather; but it was there, dark and solid in the sky, a mountain. He kicked the pedals and banked the wheel; he went into a climbing turn, but the spiral was a feeble one; number two was half-choked, and the gooney bird would not reach for higher altitude. His eyes flashed from the gray obscured sky to the instruments over again. He kicked the throttles up and back, trying to flush the clogged engine clear. The compass was swinging around dizzily. Number two roared with a burst of vigor, and he pulled the wheel into his belly, trying to gain altitude while the balky engine’s enthusiasm lasted. The altimeter needle swayed back and forth across the dial; he had the feeling he was somewhere above seventy-five hundred feet, climbing for eight thousand. It was hard to breathe; the plane’s speed sucked air out of the cockpit through the dotted streaks of bullet holes. He fought his way through a violent fit of trembling and reached under the seat for the Thermos jug of coffee. It made him think about Shannon. He said, “Mister, you were lucky after all. I don’t even know which direction we’re after.” He shook his head slowly. He said, “A fella wishes he’d had the chance to know you better, Mister.” He had not known Shannon well at all; he missed the man terribly. He would have to write to Shannon’s fiancée. He wondered what he could say. The whole world was tied up in a knot of rope and labeled “ Classified — not for fiancées.” He uncapped the coffee jug and lifted it to his blue lips.

That was when he heard the crack of ice on the wings.

There was no sound like it; no one could mistake it for anything else. He read the outside-temperature gauge: twenty-nine degrees, if the gauge could be relied on.

The gooney bird ran in and out of thick clouds. It slammed around in the air, unsettling him; he heard a splintering racket, a rending crack. It stretched through time like the magnified noise of a long sliver being pulled slowly away from a dry wooden board. The plane rocked. Flying ice banged against the fuselage like the sound of empty metal drums falling down a long cement stair. The plane lurched as it lost the weight of ice chunks; he felt the slow, hard pull of the controls that came from a thickness of ice blunting the leading edges of the wings.

And he was afraid.

Ice could coat the propellers. It could weigh down the wings. It could form on the windshield and blind him. It could fill the engine airscoops, blocking the flow of air to the carburetors and killing the engines. It could coat the ailerons and elevators, the vital control surfaces by which he guided his flight. It could do any of these things; it could do several of them; it could conceivably do all of them. That was ice. And he was afraid.