The Last Bridge Page 4

  The General spread his hands and smiled without humor. “David, I don’t give a damn what the man wants. If Kreizler talks to the Reds, he can wipe out six months’ work. And he will, if they’re given enough time to work on him. He’s got to be freed. Freed or silenced.”

  “Silenced,” Tyreen echoed. “With all due respect for your rank, sir—”

  “That’s enough.” General Jaynshill sat down and spoke distinctly: “You’ve got your orders, David. I want Kreizler taken care of, one way or the other. I want that railroad bridge blown up. And I want it done immediately. If Major Parnell wants the job, that’s fine—and if he doesn’t, you’ll have to find another man for it. It’s in your lap. If there’s nothing else on your mind, you’d better be on the run, now.”

  Tyreen took in a breath and let it out. “There’s one thing. I need written authorization to use a jet trainer and pilot from Bien Hoa up to Nha Trang, to talk to Parnell. There’s a chickenshit Air Force captain on duty out there who won’t give me the plane without your signature.”

  “That’s the kind of soldier I can understand,” the General said, and reached for his desk pen.

  Chapter Four

  2200 Hours

  THE French-style phone, almost antique, cackled in Theodore Seville’s ear: “Di dai.”

  “Sergeant Khang?”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice said guardedly.

  “Captain Saville here. Everything all right?”

  “I guess so, Captain.”

  “Sergeant Nhu Van Sun. He get there yet?”

  “Just walked in,” Khang said, and even on the thin twang of the wire Saville detected reserve in Khang’s voice. Saville said immediately:

  “Get along with him, Sergeant. He’s a good man.”

  “Yes, sir,” Khang said stiffly. “What’s up?”

  “You two saddle up and get yourselves out to Tan Son Nhut airport. There’s a C-47 in one of the overhaul hangars near the new jet strip. You’ll find a couple of Army Aviation pilots there. Report to them and wait for me. The senior pilot’s Lieutenant McKuen. Got that?”

  “I’ve got it,” Khang said. There was a constant overlay of resentment on his voice whenever he spoke.

  “You stick to that airport hangar like flies on sugar until I get there. I’ll be along as soon as I can—maybe an hour. You can shove off right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Khang said, and the phone clicked dead.

  Saville cradled the receiver and stepped out of the M.P. booth. Two Canh Sat policemen stood on the street corner, sheltered under a Japanese-style awning at the entrance of a beer club. Cheap dives lined both sides of the narrow street. Saville nodded to the M.P. sentry, took the man’s salute, and turned into the saloon row. The pair of Canh Sat officers came to attention; the soggy, laden air made their white uniforms limp and creaseless. Saville walked past them, speaking a brief Vietnamese courtesy, and turned into the first bar doorway, his hat and shoulders dripping.

  A rangy Army captain, stumbling through the crowded haze, collided drunkenly with Saville and whooped. His face was bruised and cut. A half-empty bottle of Vietnamese whisky hung precariously in his grasp. The captain straightened up and brushed at Saville’s raincoat. “Theodore—Theodore. God damn it, Theodore. Where in hell you been?”

  “I didn’t figure to find you around here. What in hell do you think you’re doing, Harry?”

  “What’s it look like? I’m throwing myself a party.” Harry belched and grinned with foolish slackness. “Let it never be said that Harry Green could hold his liquor. Here you go, Theodore. Try a swig of this. This stuff comes from the rubber plantations. In ten minutes it’ll make you forget your own name. Here—drink up.”

  “Not now,” Saville said. From the vantage point of his great height he examined face after face in the smoky, narrow barroom.

  Harry leered vacuously at him; Harry’s fist grabbed Saville’s raincoat. Saville said, “What happened to your face?”

  “I went to a new barber.” Harry laughed. “Who cares?”

  “You look like you slid in to third base on your face, Harry.”

  “Well, maybe I did. Hell, I don’t remember. Come on.” Harry tugged Saville toward the near end of the bar.

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  “Changed my mind. ’S a free country, right?” Harry braced himself against the bar and lifted his head with enormous dignity. “I am going to stand right here on this spot,” he said, “and ossify my Goddamn liver.” He pounded his fist on the bar. “Innkeeper!”

  The crowd swelled and drifted, pressing the two men against the bar. Harry said, “How do you like your whisky?”

  “In a glass.”

  “Funny,” Harry said, and laughed. He was on the brim of hysteria.

  “Harry.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Hell, you know me, Theodore. I’m a puking karate expert. Every time I salute, I just about kill myself.” Harry’s eyes teared with laughter. Abruptly he gripped the front of Saville’s coat with both hands. His eyes went wide and round. “I’m drunk, Theodore. I’m plowed under. Jesus, Theodore. Sometimes I forget what this puking war’s all about. You know?” He shook his head. “I can’t finish this bottle of tiger sweat. You take it with you, okay? I’ve had it, Theodore. Get me a couple M.P.s to take me home and pour me into bed. No, no—on second thought, you can’t have the bottle. It might stunt your Goddamn growth.” Harry gave out a bray of laughter and sagged against the bar.

  Saville disengaged Harry’s fists from his coat. Harry muttered at him, “I want to put in for a transfer to the Pentagon latrine corps. Effective immediately. See what you can do, Theodore, all right?”

  “Shut up a minute,” Saville told him. His eyes swept the room, not missing a single face. Satisfied after his survey, he put an arm around Harry and effortlessly took the smaller man outside.

  He walked Harry to the M.P. booth. The guard corporal saluted and watched Harry expressionlessly. Saville said, “You know him, Corporal? Know where he lives?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Green’s been down here three days now. We’ve been watching out for him. He had half his company shot out from under him last week.”

  “Get him home, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks. Good night.”

  Saville turned away. Harry called after him, “G’night, Theodore. Have yourself a Goddamn ball.”

  Saville went on down the street and turned into another club. He walked through it, using elbows and shoulders to make a path in the crowd. He did not find the face he sought; he returned to the street and continued his inspection in the next club. The place was full of servicemen and Vietnamese girls. He found a corporal whose name he knew: “I’m looking for Sergeant Hooker. Seen him?”

  “J. D. Hooker? He was around here a while back, Captain. Don’t see him now. He’s prob’ly on the street somewheres.”

  Saville turned to retrace his path. A piece of conversation reached his ears: “Me? Hell, I’m the greatest Goddamn swimmer you ever saw. I swam ten miles once, with a puking safe on my back.” Saville walked outside, into the rain. A boisterous racket started up, and he turned his face to the left. The noise came out of a doorway across the street. He quartered across the cobblestones toward the commotion. Before he reached the door, two Vietnamese soldiers tumbled out the doorway, propelled by a powerful roar from within the place.

  There was hardly any light in the street. The two Vietnamese picked themselves up and started to limp away. A simian figure filled the doorway, outlined in its light. One of the Vietnamese blundered against Saville in his flight; Saville knocked the man aside with the heel of his hand and strode straight up to the doorway. The heavy man in the door leaped at him with a growl. Saville blocked the man’s fist, wheeled past, and bent the man’s arm up behind, almost to the shoulder blade; Saville put his knee in the man’s back and held him that way, helpless.

 
“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.”

  Chapter Five

  2245 Hours

  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:

  “Patch it with mud if you have to, for the time being. Let’s get those planes down. We can worry about a pretty paving job when we’ve got time for it.”

  He listened to the phone for a moment. Tyreen felt the touch of malarial weakness. The Captain s
aid sarcastically, “You do have shovels down there, don’t you, Lieutenant? Then God damn it, quit jaw-assing over this telephone and get your balls in gear.”

  He dropped the receiver into place and swung his head around, balefully searching for an ashtray.

  The phone rang again. Grove let his ashes drop by his toes and grabbed the instrument. “What is it?” His eyes widened, and he handed the phone to Tyreen.

  It was Harris. “Captain Saville just reported in. He’s over at Tan Son Nhut in a hangar. Left his phone number for you to call.”

  “All right,” Tyreen said. “Give me the number.”

  Captain Grove was across the room, shading his eyes with his face close to the observation window. Tyreen hung up and went to him. “Sorry to trouble you, Captain.”

  “Never mind,” Grove said.

  “I’ll need the use of a scrambler phone.”

  “In the ops office,” the Captain said. He waved toward a door in the back of the room; he was already on his way to the radio operator, his voice preceding him: “Have you got those three 102s on beam yet?”

  Tyreen walked past a row of radar screens, each with an airman intent on its nebulous patterns of light. Voices called across the tower, and Tyreen walked through into the cramped ops office.

  A man lay asleep on a folding cot in one corner—the traffic control officer, asleep in his uniform, looking deep in coma. Tyreen closed the door and went to the desk.

  He spoke a number into the phone and said, “Scramble this, please.” An operator’s voice answered, and in a few moments he heard the line ring. He glanced at his watch: 2312. When the phone clicked he said immediately, “Theodore?”

  “Right, sir. Are we scrambled?”

  “I hope so,” Tyreen said. “Go ahead.”

  “Corporal Smith reported in by radio. Eddie Kreizler’s being held for interrogation in the Chutrang barracks.”

  “Yeah,” Tyreen said, expecting it.

  “His exec’s a peckerhead lieutenant by the name of Chinh. They captured him too. I figure the Reds won’t work them both over at once. They’ll interrogate Chinh first because they’ll figure it’s easier to break him down.”