Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

This book is for five people. It is for Shan Botley, who shared with me the frustrations and joys of the writing. It is for August Lenniger, who sold it. It is for Charles Heckelmann, who edited it. And it is for my mother and father, without whom the others would have had nothing to do.

Colonel David Tyreen stood at the window and looked past his gaunt reflection at the slashing monsoon rain. His eyes were hooded, and cigarette smoke was strong in his nostrils. He pursed his lips waspishly, glanced at his watch, and turned his back to the window. Ceiling bulbs pulsed faintly with the rhythm of throbbing diesel generators beneath the building: this quarter of Saigon had no city electricity after dark.

David Tyreen crushed out his cigarette and crossed the room to a corner half in shadows. A freckled sergeant sat by the telephone, scrubbing his hands, gazing at the silent black phone with the studied concentration of a monk attending his breviary.

The sergeant spoke without looking up. “It’s nineteen hundred hours, Colonel.”

“You can’t make the damned thing ring, Harris. Relax.”

“I guess there’s time yet,” said Sergeant Harris. The sleeves of his fatigues were rolled up. His hands were red from squeezing. “This is a bitch of a night, ain’t it, sir?”

Tyreen searched the wall map of Vietnam. Red-ink circles marked seven areas, all of them north of the 17th parallel. It was the northernmost target-area that held Tyreen’s attention.

Sergeant Harris said, “We should’ve heard from them by now, sir.”

Within the red circle, crosshatched railroad tracks curved through mountains, intersecting the jagged blue thread of the Sang Chu River. Contour lines, indicating altitude, crowded close together — the sign of steep, broken country. Harris said, “That bridge ain’t no crackerbox. I guess it takes time. But I wish the Goddamn phone would—”

“Shut up,” said David Tyreen.

Rain spattered the roof monotonously. Tyreen whistled a French tune. It fluted loudly around the room. He shut his mouth abruptly. Harris looked at him. Tyreen turned his lip corners down and returned to the window.

A patrol of Canh Sat police pedaled by on bicycles, rain-slickers over their white uniforms. They flashed fragmented reflections. Floodlights threw into relief the main gate a hundred yards away.

David Tyreen was a gaunted man in a trim green jacket. His mouth was bracketed by deep creases. He stared out the window with half-shuttered dark eyes. His skin was beaded with an overlay of sweat; hair the color of old stained leather made a sidewise slash across his forehead. He looked as though he had gone a long time without sleep.

Sentries stood guard around a hangar where most of the command had assembled to watch a USO show. The post was quiet. Two infantry officers passed the window, their helmets bowed against the rain, gesturing in conversation, absently answering the salute of a passing enlisted man. Far to the west, on high ground, Tyreen could see faint white flashes on the horizon: the reflection of white phosphor mortar shells or thermite grenades. Flares arced across the jungle.

Rain trickled down the windowpane and Sergeant Harris sat over the telephone, pawing his brown-freckled face. Tyreen peeled back his sleeve to study his watch. He spoke sotto voce: “Come on, Eddie.”

The telephone rang. Harris snatched it up, and Tyreen strode across the room. The Sergeant spoke a few curt words and hung up. Harris said, “Weather report. All we damn well need right now. Colonel, where’s Captain Kreizler? Where in hell is he?”

Tyreen’s eyes flashed. Harris looked away, toward the wall map. Tyreen’s hand reached the desk and he gripped its edge. A wave of faintness broke over him. He swiveled on one heel and braced a hip against the desk. When the dizziness passed, he stood up with care and walked deliberately toward the door. He turned through it and stopped by the water cooler to fill a paper cup. Inside his pocket, his hand opened a tin and palmed a five-grain quinine sulfate capsule. He slipped it into his mouth and drank.

The hall was empty. He stood by the water cooler, unnaturally tense, as though afraid his body might betray him by faltering. He began to shake, seized by alternate heat and cold. He had to lean against the water cooler.

He heard the creak of the metal door. A shadow filled the opening, outlined in falling rain: a soft-cheeked man in the unmarked fatigues of a war correspondent. “Christ, it’s wet.”

The seizure kept Tyreen silent. The correspondent said, “Lots of weather we’re having.”

Tyreen stood straight. “I thought you people never crawled out of your bottles before midnight, Harney.”

“Haven’t had a chance to get started yet.”

Harney had a round pink face. His eyes seemed to leer at all times. A strong aura of whisky hung suspended around him. “You okay, Colonel?”

“Tired.”

“Sure. Everybody’s tired. Seen the weather report? Typhoon coming off the South China Sea. Due to hit the coast tomorrow morning, up around Da Nang.”

Tyreen glanced through the inner door. Sergeant Harris stared unblinkingly at the wall with one hand across the phone.

“Christ,” said Harney, for no evident reason.

Tyreen plugged a coin into the candy machine and bent to fish out a packet of peanuts. He threw back his head, tossed a handful in his mouth, and chewed with bovine deliberation. His dark eyes seemed to recede back along dark tunnels in his face. He watched Harney sit in a canvas chair and pull out a flat pint bottle of whisky.

Harney said, “I’d say as a general rule Vietnamese women are really beautiful. You find damned few skinny ones or fat ones. Which is more than you can say for any other corn-patch I can think of.” He offered the bottle to Tyreen.

Tyreen declined. Harney droned, “Quart a day keeps the medic away. I go through hell keeping a supply of this rotgut.” He waved a hand around. “ We seek no wider war,” he quoted in a singsong drawl. “Crap. Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“I just had a physical.” Harney thumbed a cigarette out of a mangled pack. “Want to know what the doctor said to me? He said, ‘Harney, you’ve got a liver that won’t quit. You’ve got a Goddamn pool -shaped liver.’” He burst into laughter, dragged a sleeve across his face, and drank from the bottle.

Tyreen sweated. He leaned against the candy machine, weak and drowsy. Harney said, “You feeling all right? Scout’s honor?”

“What are you rooting around for, Harney?”

“A story. What else?”

“Knowing you, the possibilities are limitless.”

Harney chuckled politely. “Everybody’s on the lip of something, and I’m out of it. I don’t like being out of it. I don’t get paid not to know things.”

Tyreen said absently, “Let the magazine save some paper this time around.”

“That’s like telling a fellow to stop his watch to save time.” Harney sat back and sucked at his bottle, looking like a man ready to relax and reminisce. Tyreen looked into the office again; the phone was still on the hook. The chills came again. He said, “I’ll take one of your smokes now.”

Harney tossed him the pack and a book of matches. “A fellow gets sick of living on press-release handouts from MAC–V and the Dien Hong palace, Colonel.”

“Sorry, Harney.”

“Security,” Harney said, and sighed. “You can’t blame me for asking. You’re about as lavish with information as a Goddamn Vermonter. You come from New England?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You talk like a cracker. Texas?”