Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

“All right, Sergeant. Cut it out, now.”

“You let go my arm, God damn you.”

“If ever a sergeant was begging to be busted, Hooker—”

“What the hell? Who are you? Captain Saville?”

“That’s it.” Saville released Hooker. The squat Sergeant retreated into the doorway, massaging his arm. He had the biggest nose Saville had ever seen; he had inky fingernails; he needed a thorough laundering. His face was not very bright. He wore his hair cut short, but just the same, there was a lot of it. He stood five-and-a-half feet tall and probably weighed two hundred pounds.

“Jesus, Captain. You come on like Tarzan. Where’d you learn to fight?”

“From a tougher man than you.”

“You tricked me — nobody ever beat me in a fair fight.”

“Sergeant, you never gave anybody a fair fight. We take it for granted you’ve got guts. You don’t need to prove it by fighting our own people.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but they was gooks. They was peckerheads. And I...”

“Save your assaults for the enemy, Sergeant. Understand?”

“Okay, Captain. Send me to military school.” Saville murmured, “Let’s not have a brouhaha, fella.”

J. D. Hooker had large, greasy pores on his nose. He said slowly, “You let them two peckerheads get away from me. If you wasn’t an officer, you could lose some teeth that way.”

“As you were, Sergeant. Where’s your hat?”

“Inside.”

“Get it.”

Saville waited at the door. When Hooker came out, tugging on his cap, Saville turned to face the man squarely. “You’re on duty as of now.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a new ‘A’ Team flying out of here tonight. You’re on it.”

Hooker stopped in his tracks. “Wait a minute,” he said, and considered it. “Wait a minute. I’m short, Captain. Only got two weeks to go on this tour of duty. I don’t aim to get greased, not in no two weeks, not after all the crap I been through. I’ve had all the gung-ho I can use.”

Saville had a voice like a bassoon. He put his big fleshy face close to Hooker’s. “You’re volunteering for this one, Sergeant, or we’ll have a Summary Court Martial for you about those medical supplies missing from the Surgeon General’s warehouse. Make up your mind — right now.”

“Jesus,” Hooker said.

“Don’t complain, Sergeant. You’ll get an extra fifty dollars a month hazardous-duty pay.”

“For doing what?”

“Demolition work.”

A slow smile peeled back J. D. Hooker’s thick lips. “Bet your ass,” he said. Then he flattened his mouth. “Who’s on this team besides us, Captain? Any peckerheads? I ain’t going to work with peckerheads. You can’t trust none of them gooks.”

“You’ll work with whoever you’re told to work with,” Saville told him.

“Piss on that noise. I ain’t going to have no—”

Saville took one step forward. “I want you to listen to me real close, Sergeant, in case this comes as news to you. You do not question the orders of a superior officer, and you do not make any remarks about Vietnamese where I can hear them. Is that clear?”

“You got a nice loud voice, Captain.”

“For a fact,” Saville said. “Now come on.”

David Tyreen felt a sour taste in his mouth. The jeep bucked to a halt outside the airfield’s operations building, and Tyreen made a dash for the Quonset-covered doorway, his head bowed against the steady rain. Braving the weather, aircraft landed and took off with steady frequency, guided by runway lights and the hard shine of flares. Crash crews, soaked to the skin, waited by their emergency vehicles. From here he could clearly see flashes of artillery and mortar explosions to the west where Colonel Farber’s battalion fought a pitched engagement against the Vietcong.

Tyreen reached for the doorknob and stopped there, rain runneling off the awning above him. He watched a crippled F-102 careen down out of the low cloud-cover toward the far runway. The Delta Dagger was limping badly, one wing fluttering toward the ground as it fought to level out. Fire trucks chased the ambulance, wheeling away from their stations with a drumming of skidding tires and the shriek of sirens and clang of bells. The wounded jet fighter struck the ground on one wheel and a wingtip. Sparks scaled along the ground from the tearing wing. The ship nosed over on its back and skidded, spinning, with an explosive sound of ripping that deafened Tyreen. The plane settled, upside-down and propped up on its tail like a man on one crutch. Tyreen’s breath hung up in his chest, but there was no explosion. Crash trucks rocked into position around the plane; a crew of men ran out a pair of hoses and doused the plane with a flood of foaming chemicals while medics in protective suits ran in under the barrage of liquid to pry the canopy open and extract the pilot like men jimmying a locked-in ice cube out of a hard-frozen tray.

The rescue crew emerged from the foam and Tyreen saw them set a man on his feet; the man stumbled once or twice, threw his head back in laughter, and walked over to the ambulance between two medics.

Tyreen palmed the knob and stepped inside. A sentry stopped him in the corridor and he had to show his pass. He hung his cap and raincoat on a peg and climbed to the tower, stopping twice to show his papers.

In the traffic control tower half the men were hard against the window, watching the activity out by the crashed jet. One man at a desk talked calmly into a microphone, pinching his temples and grimacing as if he had a bad headache. A technical sergeant sat by a radio, listening intently to voices on the headset. He jotted something on a card and passed the card to the man at the microphone.

Raindrops ran down the outside of the big in-tilted observation windows. A young shirt-sleeved Air Force captain came swinging away from the crowd of people, talking irritably:

“All right — all right. Let’s everybody get on the stick. We’ve got work to do.” He picked up a telephone and yelled into it: “Lieutenant, I want a cleanup crew out on that runway, on the double. Get that wreckage off the tarmac. We’ve got five planes coming in from Qui Lai, and they’re all low on fuel.”

The Captain slammed down the phone and turned. He walked toward Tyreen with a careless salute. “You’ll be Colonel Tyreen,” he said; he did not have to add, You’re all I need right now.

“That’s right. Captain Grove, isn’t it?”

With a dry glance Tyreen handed over a requisition form with General Jaynshill’s bold signature.

The Captain flapped the paper up and down and glanced at Tyreen with no show of friendliness. “Okay,” he said.

“Have you started to shave yet, Captain?”

“What?”

“They promote you people pretty fast in the Air Force, don’t they?”

The young Captain let it slide off. “You may be in for some trouble, Colonel. I’d figured to give you Peters as pilot. He’s been in the air seven hours today, on nine flight missions, but that’s less than any other pilot around here right now. But that was Peters you saw crack up out there. He may not be badly hurt, but he’s damn sure too shook up to do any more flying today.”

An airman yelled the Captain’s name, and Grove wheeled away with a snap of his trim shoulders. Tyreen pushed out his arm to look at his watch. Just past eleven. Time to call Harris. Captain Grove was listening to the telephone, trying to light a cigarette one-handed; his hand trembled with the matchbook. Circles of fatigue underscored his eyes. Tyreen took the matchbook and lighted the Captain’s cigarette — a calculated gesture: sometimes little courtesies were enough to blunt the edge of a tired man’s enmity. The young Captain nodded a perfunctory thanks and barked into the telephone: