Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

Kreizler moved his arms and lay with his hands behind his head, looking at the treetops as though printing poems on the sky. His voice clacked abruptly: “You can’t take me along on this train caper. I can’t chase after a train or jump off a train. You’ll have to ditch me somewhere. Might as well be right here.”

“We’ll see,” Tyreen said. “We may leave you at the water tank. But we’ll be back for you. I promise you that.”

“Sure,” Kreizler said. “And if you’re not back in twelve hours, I’m to call the man from U.N.C.L.E. I don’t believe you’ll make it, if you want my honest opinion. I don’t think you really know the odds against you.”

“I don’t play the odds,” Tyreen said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake take off your blindfold. You could blow up a thousand bridges, and it wouldn’t change a thing.”

Tyreen said slowly, “I’m in command, Eddie.”

“In command of what? Everything but yourself.”

There were times when a man had to make a quick decision and then stick to it for the rest of his life. Tyreen sat silent, measuring the flow of time and fixing a limit after which he would step away and lead them into the jungle.

Kreizler said, “I guess it’s too late for you to start thinking.”

You had to fight, and you had to believe there was a point to it. If that was blind dedication, then Kreizler was right, it was too late to worry.

Kreizler said, “I like to hope, too.”

Theodore Saville said, “We’re not paid to think about things, Eddie.”

Kreizler’s eyes flicked around. “Live long enough, Theodore, and you’ll decide to let some other fool do the dirty jobs.”

Tyreen said, “I always thought it ought to be the other way around.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kreizler said disgustedly. “David, today means more than yesterday. Why don’t you get Theodore and those other two out of here while you can?”

Tyreen said, after a moment, “There are worse things than dying, Eddie.”

“For me. Not for you.” Kreizler moved himself around on one hip. “Last night I was going to lift Theodore’s gun. To get it over with, get myself out of your way. But I just couldn’t do it. I guess they’ve made oatmeal out of me.”

“They?”

“Colonel Trung and Old Ironbutt. Not much choice between those two. But that doesn’t matter, not to you. You’re thinking about that Goddamn railroad bridge, and as far as you’re concerned it’s just one more river to cross. One last bridge to blow. David, you ought to have your Goddamn head kicked in. You’re a gentleman, and that’s a puking tragic thing. There’s no place left for gentlemen. Who do you think you are, David — General Robert E. Lee?”

The pupils of Kreizler’s eyes were pinpoints; the irises around them seemed enlarged, and a bright glint pushed out of them. His face was flushed, and earnest taut anger was ground into the pain-tracked lines around his mouth. He reached out and took a powerful grip on Tyreen’s wrist. “Get them home — before you have them on your conscience, too.”

Tyreen gave him a bloodshot look. Kreizler removed his hand, and Tyreen’s face hardened. Kreizler said, “You’ll never square it with that conscience of yours.”

Tyreen got up. He made a low whistle, and J. D. Hooker’s head swiveled around inquiringly. Hooker nodded and picked himself up and walked forward. Tyreen reached for his pack. His submachine gun lay on the ground. Saville said, “I’ll carry the pack.”

“I’ll lug it awhile.”

He picked up the pack and got one arm into the harness, and then Kreizler was rolling over, grabbing up the submachine gun. He lurched to his feet and hobbled across the trail with his legs apart; Tyreen dropped the pack and swung toward him. Kreizler’s gun swayed toward J. D. Hooker, and Kreizler started to talk very fast, not making any sense. His finger whitened on the trigger, and he sprayed bullets into the ground. Their geyser-tracks marched toward Hooker’s feet and Hooker, roaring with rage, whipped his chopper up. There was a tearing blast of submachine gun fire. It lifted Kreizler off his feet and slammed him back against the trees. He fell down with his mouth open.

“Jesus,” J. D. Hooker said in fascination.

Saville ran across the path and took Kreizler’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. Tyreen knelt beside him. Saville said, “Dead. He went right out of his head.”

“No,” said Tyreen. “He did it deliberately. He had it in his head the minute we set him down.”

Hooker came over, slinging his gun. He crouched by Kreizler in disbelief. “What the puke did he do that for, Colonel?”

Tyreen told him, “Captain Kreizler figured he’d slow us down and make our job tougher. He knew we wouldn’t kill him or leave him behind.”

Hooker said, “And he took this way out? Jesus. What an ugly Goddamn way to die.”

“Tell me a pretty way,” Theodore Saville said, and turned his face away.

Hooker got up and moved down the trail like a sleepwalker. Saville said in a low tone, “That’s not why he killed himself, and you know it.”

“Maybe,” Tyreen said. “We’ll never be sure. But the story I gave Hooker is the story we stick by.”

Saville said, “I thought I had you filed. But I guess you never know about a man.”

“We’ll bury him and get out of here. That noise will bring a patrol this way.”

Saville’s face was heavy. Tyreen took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook it out. “Smoke, Theodore?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

Tyreen said, “Smoking’s a bad thing. It can make a man sick to his stomach.”

After a while Saville said, “I guess I will have that cigarette.”

Dry cigarette smoke burned McKuen’s throat raw, and he crushed the cigarette out and stood with his attention on the corpse at his feet.

The dead soldier lay on the trail, decapitated, his head between his legs.

Montagnard work, McKuen supposed. He drew a line in the earth with his dragging bootheel. When he took off his hat, the small wind roughed up his hair. He went away, pushing through a brier thicket. His clothes were shredded. When he rubbed his dry lips he felt them crack. For a little while he sat down in the mud and thought, I feel like a bloke in a cataleptic trance. He had developed somewhere the ability to seal himself off from brutality. He felt so accustomed to death that it no longer reached him.

He had come across an open pit by the river bank. A gibbon had crashed through the camouflaged matting and impaled itself on pungi stakes in the pit. It had seemed alive — breathing, but unconscious. There had been no point in rescuing it, because the pungi stakes would be poisoned with tetanus-infected dung, but McKuen had spent a long time lifting the monkey out of the pit. It had not stirred. He had left it by the river bank, where it could reach water.

Now he jerked his chin up. Was I asleep ? He backed away from the river and found an opening in the jungle. A slight sound bothered him, and he stopped. It sounded like a car. It was coming definitely toward him. He stood carrying his gun with his lean shoulders pulled together. After a moment he walked away from the river. He moved into a shaft of sunlight and glanced up, and thought, Anyway it’s still morning. His eyes were close-lidded.

He found the road, a green-brown stripe running between walls of heavy rain forest. Deep shadows made a corridor of it. He put his shoulder to a tree, numbed but alerted, and heard the spurt of engine backfires as the nearing vehicle rolled down a slope. He raised his eyebrows and melted back into the jungle. The rumble of wheels grew louder, the scrape of dusty brakes. The nose of a jeep crawled into sight up the road. A swirl of risen moisture hovered around it. McKuen watched through shadow-pearled branches. The shadows seemed to move, converging against him. The jeep went into sunlight, and its windshield was a rectangle of blinding white. Settling spray made a thin, brown mist. A puff of cigarette smoke issued from the jeep window and fled in thin streaks. McKuen closed his fingers tight around the gun.