Garden of Lies (38 page)

Then all hell broke loose.

More popping of automatic rifles, then the darkness exploded in a deafening blast of orange

fire.
Mortars, oh Jesus, they’re shelling us.
For one hellish instant, night switched to day, and the

jungle seemed to leap out at Brian in a Technicolor blaze. Branches and vines twined together

like snakes, veiled in mist and silhouetted by the Halloween afterglow of mortars. No sign of the

enemy—but, God, it sounded like hundreds, those popping rifles, spitting fire from every bush,

every goddamn tree. Chunks of red clay flying, stinging his face. A crater the size of a freshly

dug grave not ten yards to his left, naked tree roots clawing their way to the surface like huge

skeletal fingers. Farther down the line, men were screaming. Wounded. Some probably dying.

Others already dead. He heard their gunner, Dale Short, open up on the brush with a round of

Quad-50 fire.

Brian’s mind spun like an empty gunbarrel. A numbing terror seized him.

[223]
They were lying in for us. The river. We’re never going to make it to the river.

He heard a high gurgled scream, saw Jackson buckle to his knees as if in prayer.

One whole side of Jackson’s skull was blown away.

Oh holy Christ, no ... no ... no ...

A thin film of gray came scudding across Brian’s vision. His ears were ringing. His rifle

suddenly felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Everything seemed to be taking place in slow

motion. As if in a nightmare. Making sense only as dreams do, with a kind of existentialist

rationale.

Where the fuck is Lieutenant Gruber? Why isn’t he giving orders?

Another blinding orange-red mortar blast, and he heard the crackle of Matinsky’s radio, and a

voice not Matinsky’s booming into it, “Delta Bravo, come in, come in, do you read me? Delta

Echo here. We’re hit. Looks like they’ve got us flanked on all perimeters. We’re gonna need a

medevac in here, and pronto. Coordinates are VD 15-oh ... Holy sh—”

The voice was cut off.

Surrounded on all perimeters.
Christ, if only he could
see
them. Brian let off a round of M-16

fire into the bush. Beneath him he felt the earth convulse with the impact of the enemy’s AK-47s.

He tried not to think about the body leaking its brains into the mud beside him. He was afraid he

might be sick.

Then he
was
sick, vomiting up the stink of cordite, blood, and scorched flesh.
Sweet Jesus,

they’re picking us off like ducks in a shooting gallery.

Digging his elbows in, Brian belly-crawled into the bush, a tangle of vines and elephant grass.

He stopped, bile rising in his throat again. A pair of sightless eyes stared up at the sky not two

meters away. Gruber. Oh God. The rain was falling against his staring eyes, pooling in the

sockets.

Brian felt a scream gathering force in his solar plexus. A scream that would rip the roof right

off what remained of his sanity.

But something was gripping his shoulder, forcing him down. Brian twisted his head around,

and was confronted by a sharp Oriental face streaked with orange mud, a pair of impenetrable

black eyes. A face like a rusty ax blade. Trang.

“Mau lên!”
Trang hissed, motioning off into the thicket of [224] bamboo that lay to their left,

two, maybe three dozen yards away. “River this way. Follow me.”

Brian looked back. In the hellish glow, he saw their perimeters seemed to have dissolved. No

visible line of support, no voice of authority calling out flanking maneuvers. Gruber dead. The

Prick-25 strapped to Matinsky’s back shot to hell, a gut-sprung tangle of copper wires, circuit

boards, buckled plastic casing. Sergeant Starkey lying dead beside it in a puddle of blood, the

handset clutched in his frozen grip. Shot before he could radio in their coordinates.

The river. Yeah. If he and Trang could make it to the river. There was a sandspit on the

opposite bank where a chopper could land, Dickson had said. If he could sit still long enough to

pop open a heat tab and scoop a hole in the ground for it, the chopper’s infrared might pick them

out.

Brian yanked a frag grenade from his belt, popped its pin, and lobbed it into the brush to clear

their way. A strobe flash of white boiling up into red smoke, a split second later a thunderous

boom.

In the heartbeat of quiet that followed the grenade explosion, he heard it, the sweet sound of

rushing water. So close. Not more than a hundred yards. But it might just as well be a hundred

miles. They might make it to the river, all right. But in one piece?

Nevertheless, he followed Trang, now crawling low and silent as a lizard, cutting a diagonal

path through the brush. Ahead lay the dense thicket of bamboo, a Crosshatch of shadows

tantalizing as a mirage.

Pop. A bullet whined past his ear. Brian kept low, his belly to the ground, taking the impact of

each exploding mortar like a dull kick in the pit of his stomach. He used his knees and elbows to

propel himself forward, foot by painful foot, branches and roots clawing at his face, the gritty

taste of dirt in his mouth.

Don’t think about dying. Don’t think about heaven or hell, or anything except getting out of

here.

He kept his eyes trained on the dark lizard shape of Trang ahead, hardly daring to blink for fear

of losing sight of
him. Just a little bit farther. Please, God. Just a few feet more.

Now tiny razor-edged leaves slicing, stabbing his face. Slender stalks of bamboo glinting like

polished jade, falling away on either side with a dry rattle. His knees sank into slimy river mud

rank with [225] the smell of decomposition. The sound of rushing water swelled in his ears, the

sweetest sound in the world.

Through the bamboo, he could see it, moonlight gleaming on black satin, oh Jesus, the river.

His heart leapt. On the other side stretched a long spit of sand, wide enough for a helicopter to

land.

Like a prayer answered in a miracle, Brian heard the distant whumping of rotor blades

overhead.
They’re looking for us.
Relief backfired through him. He fumbled inside his flak jacket

for a heat tab.

His hands were trembling as he tore open the foil packet, and frantically pawed a hole in the

sludgy earth. The enemy wouldn’t see it, but the infra-red on Spooky could pick it up.

Just then Trang’s slender form unfolded from the ground into a crouch, moving like oil

skimming the surface of water to the river’s edge.

Suddenly the bamboo exploded in a corona of red fire. Brian felt something slam into him, a

train going a hundred fifty miles an hour.

Then a huge whistling blackness, falling like a guillotine’s blade, severing him from

consciousness.

When he came to, it felt like a huge red-hot stake had been driven through his stomach, pinning

him to the earth. He tried to scream, but there didn’t seem to be any air in his lungs. There was

only this vast burning gulf of agony he had somehow tumbled into.

His mind skated to the gray edge of unconsciousness once again. Dimly, he heard noises. Men

shouting. The strafe of Gatling guns.

Slowly, agonizingly, fighting the gray tide that pulled at his brain, Brian managed to drag

himself into a sitting position. He stared down at the shredded remains of his poncho. Oh Jesus,

he was hit bad. Blood. There was a lot of blood. He wondered if he was going to die.

He had never been so scared. He didn’t want to die. Most of all he didn’t want to die here, in

this godforsaken shithole, a leftover going putrid on a dirty plate.

I promised Rose I would come back, I promised
—

Brian heard an agonized moan, and his eyes searched the darkness. Then he saw. Trang. Face

down in the slime, a shank of splintered bone sticking out where his right foot had been.

[226]
Oh Jesus
... a
mine. He tripped a mine.

Ignoring the white heat gnawing and twisting in his gut, Brian crawled over and hooked an arm

under Trang’s slender shoulders. Kneeling, he pulled Trang up so his head rested against his

thighs.

“Gotta get out of here, buddy,” he gasped. “Gotta get to the other side.”

Brian peered up at the sky. He saw the red lights of a Cobra assault helicopter swing in a wide

arc, then bank, followed by an explosion, huge white and orange blossoms of fire unfurling over

the trees like some beautiful poisonous flower out of Rappaccini’s garden.

“Didi mau! Didi mau!”
Trang was shaking his head, his face an ashen circle in the semi-

darkness.

“No,” Brian panted, “no way I’m ditching you.” Trang had saved his life once. Brian had not

forgotten.

Brian clamped his arm tighter about Trang, and felt the stake in his gut give a savage twist. He

went faint, a high-pitched whine in his head like a swarm of jungle mosquitoes. He steeled

himself against it.

Later, man, you can’t lose it now. You’re too close. Nobody quits on the finish line.

The river, the river.

Gotta make it to the other side.

His right arm hooked under Trang’s armpits, using his left elbow as leverage, Brian began the

slow dragging crawl through the muck and bamboo to the water’s edge less than five yards away.

The pain rose, poised on a crystal-shattering note. His mind looped in and out of delirium.

Christ ... He walked on water, turned it to wine ... Old Man River, he just keeps rolling ...

rolling ...

Trang was heavy, so heavy ... how could that be ... a sliver of a kid like him?

Then his knees were sinking in deep sludge, and water filled his mouth, his nostrils. Brian

pulled his head up, choking, coughing. The gray mist behind his eyes rolled away, and he saw

that he was waist deep in water.

The water folded its wings about him, lifted him up, and it was all he could do to keep the limp

weight of Trang from being dragged [227] off by the sluggish current. He struggled to keep them

both afloat, straining his head back as the black water crept up over his mouth, leaking into his

nostrils.

Staring straight up, he saw that the clouds were breaking up. The sky underneath the color of a

fading bruise, yellow and pink, a few stars poking through like splinters of bone. Almost

morning.

He began to cry. So close. And he wasn’t going to make it. He could feel the last of his

strength ebbing downstream with the current. And the pain rising, huge and terrible, a mountain

made of broken glass he must climb on bare hands and knees.

Then he heard a voice, distant but clear as an echo at the end of a long corridor. Rose’s voice.

You promised, Brian. You promised me you would come back. You promised. ...

But his promise didn’t count anymore. It had been so long since he had held Rose. Somewhere

in that endless corridor of time he had lost her. Or she had lost him.

She had stopped loving him. ...

And now it was time to let go.

He
wanted
to let go. Let go of this burning agony, and just drift, peaceful, borne weightless as a

twig or a blade of grass along the slow-moving current.

Then he felt Trang struggle weakly in his arms, and knew he couldn’t let go, not yet. For

Trang’s sake, at least.

Brian, summoning a strength he didn’t possess, his heart nearly bursting with the effort of

keeping the both of them afloat, began to swim.

Chapter 13

TIEN SUNG, 1969

The corpses were stacked like cordwood against the concrete wall of the operating room. Their

olive-drab fatigues stiff with dried blood, their sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling with blank milky

stares. Rachel drew close, and saw that one of the bodies on top was still alive. She froze with

horror. His eyes were rolling in a face that wasn’t a face at all, but a mask of caked blood. Now

she was reaching out, her arms made of elastic, stretching on and on forever before her hands

finally closed about his shoulders. She struggled desperately to pull him free. Maybe she could

still save him, maybe there was still time. Then tears began spilling from his eyes, cutting in

muddy creeks down the ruined wasteland of his face. His mouth fell open, and he cried: “Why

did you let me die? I am your son. Why did you
—
”

Rachel came awake with a sudden bolt. She shot upright in her narrow iron cot, bathed in cold

sweat, heart lodged like a dry stone in her throat. She scrubbed at her eyes with sticky, trembling

hands.

A nightmare, just a stupid nightmare,
she told herself. But, oh God, so
real.
And that face. That

bloody mask. She knew him.

The boy she had killed.

He called himself my ... but no, I won’t think about that. If I start thinking about the abortion

again on top of all this, I’ll go crazy.

A rattling sound now. Someone hammering at the door.

“Dr. Rosenthal!” a woman’s voice called. The hammering stopped, and the door cracked open

a few inches, a head silhouetted in the crack. Delicate features, straight hair pulled back in a knot.

One of the Vietnamese nurses. “Doctor ... please, you must come!”

“Wha ... that you, Lily?” Rachel felt groggy, disoriented. Her body leaden, as if shot full of