Better Times Than These (46 page)

“He has, has he?” Patch interrupted. “Well that’s just dandy—a Congressman’s son. So where is he now?”

“I suppose he’s with the Chaplain. I brought him in with me on the chopper this morning.”

“Well, I don’t like anybody seeing the damned Chaplain,” Patch said crossly. “If they got that kind of problem, send them to me. This could mean real trouble, Kahn.” Patch stood up and looked out the window, puffing on the cigar.

“Sir, it’s every man’s right to see the Chaplain . . .”

“Yes, yes, I know that. What I mean is, you don’t have to encourage it.”

Kahn said nothing, and there followed a long and annoying silence during which Patch puffed on the cigar and raised a dense cloud of blue smoke.

“All right,” he said finally. “I want you to keep me posted on this boy. No special treatment. Just keep me posted.”

“Yessir,” Kahn said.

“Now,” Patch said. He reached into a drawer behind him and drew out a large terrain map, unrolled it and placed an ashtray over one corner, flattening the other two edges with his hand.

“I was going to save this for a few days, but so long as you are here I might as well let you in on it now. Since you’re so anxious to get the hell off that hill, I’m going to give you a chance—at least, some of you. How would you like to lead a patrol on a special job outside the valley—a nice long patrol?”

Kahn looked at Patch. He was still slightly afraid of him, and disliked himself for it. God only knew what he had in store now. But there was still only one answer.

“Sir, I’d take them to Rangoon if it would get us out of that valley,” he said hopefully. It was a lie, but what else could he say?

“You won’t have to go that far,” Patch said cheerfully, “and you’ll still have to defend the hill with whoever you leave behind. But it might be a pleasant little expedition.”

29

S
ince first gray light they had been climbing higher and higher through the mean tangle of growth that covered the mountain slope like the fur of some bush-dwelling animal. Aside from an occasional burst of profanity, the slip-and-stumble progress of Kahn’s little party had been free of banal chatter as they struggled to crest the hill by noon and meet their next objective: to work through the mysterious, unnamed valley that lay on the other side.

They were to engage any “targets of opportunity,” but the mission was largely exploratory. The valley had been charted only roughly on the current maps. Aerial reconnaissance revealed no signs of population or enemy activity, but it was designated “suspicious” for that very reason. It was approximately eight miles long and three miles wide and there was a river running through it, but beyond that it remained a mystery—a condition especially annoying to military commanders—and General Butterworth had decreed it should not be so any longer. A week earlier, he had ordered Patch to detach a warrant officer from the Topographical Engineers and get up a party to go out there and find out what the hell was going on. Out of this was born The Crazy Horse Patrol.

As Kahn stumbled over a slippery mush of rotting logs and vines, he was wondering how Brill was going to make out back on The Tit. Once he had decided to bring Holden along there hadn’t been much choice, since Brill was senior to the other officers, and aside from the balking incident on The Fake and his occasional unpredictability, Brill had become a pretty tough platoon commander. He inspired an odd kind of loyalty in his own men and handled most of his discipline problems himself, which was more than could be said for the others. But sometimes Kahn wondered about Brill and the balking incident. There were times when he suspected Brill might have put them up to it—or if not, had at least winked at it. He remembered the exchange of glances between Brill and Groutman. But there was no way of proving this, and he had other things to worry about anyway.

“Lieutenant,” a muffled voice said from ahead, “point’s got to the top.” The column had stopped, breathing heavily, looking on both sides into the dark woods. Kahn turned to Hepplewhite, the Clerk.

“Go back and get Lieutenant Holden up here. And pass the word there’ll be a smoke break.” Just as he said it, the sun broke through the tops of the trees—the first time anyone had seen it in weeks. Little patches of brightness grew on the forest floor and danced on the dripping fronds of vines and ferns.

Looking down, Kahn watched his new Executive Officer hauling up the steep slope, rifle slung over his shoulder, .45 strapped on his hip—thin and spare, lean and mean as he climbed past the line of idle men. He certainly did
look
like an Infantry officer.

The view from the crest of the hill was not what anyone had expected.

Instead of a sinister hellhole of twisted jungle, they looked down on an open, green glade, surrounded by majestic jagged mountain peaks, some of them cliff-faced, from which occasional waterfalls cascaded down, pooling up at the bottom, then running in narrow streams into the slow-moving river that meandered down the center of the valley.

Tall pine trees ringed the edge of the valley, and there were clusters of smaller trees around the pools. The earth looked green and solid in the sparkling sunlight, and they saw no signs of cultivation or other human presence. Below them, but still high above the valley, an eagle soared and dipped, casting its shadow on the ground.

“Just look at that, Lieutenant,” Crump said, standing at the edge, looking down. On his shoulder the banana-cat perched precariously, and cheeped and chattered.

“Will you shut that damned thing up!” Kahn said peevishly.

Crump stroked the banana-cat’s head and it fell silent. At the last minute he had decided to bring it along. There was no need to tie it up anymore, because it had become quite tame and was deeply devoted to Crump. Most of the time, not even Lieutenant Kahn seemed to mind having it around. They fed it C rations and it also foraged for mice and frogs that lived in the foxholes, and when Crump took it to the field it liked to ride inside his pack and sleep.

The boulder-strewn slope provided many footholds, and in less than an hour they had descended single file into the pine grove. The valley floor was a plush, spongy carpet of mossy grass, and the sky was bright blue and clear now except for a few wispy cumuli that sailed overhead in the direction from which they had marched. The sunshine was bright and warm but not at all hot, and the air in the valley was as still and fresh as a spring morning. As they moved into the open ground, they heard the barking of deer from the pine grove and came upon various fruit-bearing trees, some containing parrots and parakeets and even an occasional monkey. They stopped for a break at the first pond—a shallow pool with a pebble bottom. In the shadows of reeds around the edges they glimpsed the forms of some large, orange-colored carplike fish.

The men lay around in the sunshine, smoking, some eating C rations, talking and laughing and filling their canteens from the clear mountain water. The change in the weather and the benevolent lushness were acting as a marvelous restorative serum, and they began to resemble the rough-and-tumble nineteen-year-olds Kahn remembered from when he had first joined the Company—so long ago it seemed, but only a little more than a year. There were some new faces now, and ones missing, but even the familiar ones had changed. Perhaps it was the light of the sun, which had not shone upon them for so long. It gave a burnished, glowing cast to the skin and made them squint. Still, there was something in those faces that no amount of sunshine could have put there—or taken away: a dark, almost haunted look of an animal that has slaughtered its first prey.

Kahn yawned. The sun felt good on his face. The warrant officer from the Office of Topographical Services walked up beside him with a folding drawing board on which he had taped the old map of the valley.

“See that hill range over there?” the warrant officer said. “Now look at it here on this map: they only got four crests—and you can see at least seven from here.”

Kahn looked at the chain of mountains stretching westward. They glowed a deep blue-green.

“And see this river here: they say here ‘fifty meters’—couldn’t be more than twenty.”

“What’s this?” Kahn asked, indicating a grease-pencil notation on the face of the map.

“Just clowning around a little,” the warrant officer said. “Thought I’d give the place a working name.”

Under the legend, he had written in the name “Happy Valley.” He had also given names to the major terrain features.

The stand of tall pines was called the “Yum-Yum Woods,” and the stream running through the center was the “Crystal River.” The peaks to the right were the “Sugar Plum Mountains,” and the long, wavering hill to the south he had named “Candy Cane Ridge.”

“We never really get to name stuff in my shop,” the warrant officer said, “just numbers is all. Can’t go on the update, but it might stick for you guys.”

Kahn nodded and told the warrant officer about naming The Tit, and the various other names they had thought up for the valleys and ravines around it.

“That’s one thing they’re real serious about in my shop,” the warrant officer said. “You can’t name anything dirty or obscene.”

“What’s so obscene about a tit?” Kahn frowned.

“I don’t know,” the warrant officer said, “but they wouldn’t let you put it on a map.”

They pressed on into the afternoon sun, and the farther they marched, the lovelier the valley seemed to be.

Exquisite orchidlike wild flowers grew in abundance, and some of the men began adorning their clothing and gear with them. After a mile or so, many were festooned as if in an Easter parade, and there was laughter and whistling and horseplay, and several times Kahn had to bawl them out about keeping discipline in ranks.

Even so, he felt the carnival spirit himself. The mood of blackness that had hung over them for so long seemed to have lifted. No longer were they acting like press-ganged laborers; now they were behaving more like a troop of Boy Scouts on a day’s outing. But they were not, of course. They were infantrymen with mortars and rifles and hand grenades, and that was how they would have looked, despite how they might have felt, to anyone watching them move across the valley from above.

They saw great flocks of a large, pinkish heronlike bird poking at the edges of the pools. Occasionally one of these would flap its wings and strut around almost as if it were making a gesture of welcome.

Kahn had been toying with a geologic explanation for the valley. His theory at this point was that at one time it had probably been filled with water—a huge mountain lake fed by the springs that now tumbled down from the Sugar Plum Mountains. Some time ago, perhaps less than a hundred years, the water had eaten through some permeable rock—probably limestone—at the base of Candy Cane Ridge and the lake had drained westward beneath the mountains, leaving only the Crystal River, which he was certain would disappear underground as they reached the end of the valley.

Near sundown they stopped by a clear, shallow pool. The sky had turned deeper blue, and the sun still cast a warm glow over the mountains. Kahn gave permission to go swimming and even took a dip himself in the cool water. They discovered that the sluggish carplike fish in the shallows could be caught by hand, and that night they dined on delicious fried fish and cooked bananas and wild date nuts, and the war seemed very far away.

As darkness came, a sliver of moon appeared above the jagged peaks and the sky filled with billions of bright stars. Lying on his back looking up at the spectacle, Kahn felt a peculiar surge in his brain; a sudden, startling tremor of knowledge that he had seen this place sometime, somewhere before, but could not remember where or when.

In all of us, he thought, there must be some long-forgotten cell that carries a wisp of the past; a legacy transmitted from our progenitors fifteen million years ago . . .

In that instant he had seen the picture so clearly, the same one they had seen then: this moon, these stars above the ragged peaks. It had finally penetrated after millions of years, an infinitesimal impulse; flashed once, then receded forever into the electric-charged tissue of his brain . . .

But why now? Why here?

And the picture of a huge ship appeared, its gray belly churning relentlessly across a bottomless ocean chasm, propellers throbbing—soundless in the depths . . . but recordable and recorded nonetheless in the mind’s eye of some Devonian creature fishtailing its way in the opposite direction . . .

. . . and passed on, an impulse of fragmented light and heat—protons and electrons spinning in their own chaotic order, embedding themselves deeply in a single cell among billions . . . and some small part of that, a tiny glimmer, would find its way out at a later time by way of a process so old and terrifying it could not be understood collectively but only individually by someone who has actually experienced it . . .

The tropic stars looked cold and hard, and Kahn closed his eyes. Soon he was sleeping as peacefully as a baby.

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