Jackie’s grinning. He’s carrying a long, muddy rod in one hand: his mine probe. In the other, he’s got a dirty canister about the size of a clay pigeon. He holds it up and waggles it in the air. “Nip mine!” he shouts gleefully.
“Well, put it the fuck down, you asshole!” Doug hollers, “after all these years it’s going to be incredibly unstable.” Then he gets a look of incredulous confusion. “Who the hell set off the other mine if it wasn’t you? Someone was screaming up there.”
“I haven’t found him,” Jackie Woo says. “He stopped screaming.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“No.”
“Did you hear any other voices?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ,” Doug says, “someone’s been shadowing us the whole way.” He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where John Wayne has now probed his way to the edge and is taking this all in. Some kind of hand gesture passes between them (they brought walkie-talkies, but Doug scorns them as a crutch for lightweights and wannabes). John Wayne settles down onto his belly and gets out a pair of binoculars with objective lenses as big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo’s side.
The group in the riverbed probes onwards in silence for a while. None of them can figure out what is going on, and so it’s good that they have this mine-probing thing to keep their hands and minds busy. Randy’s probe hits something flexible, buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel. He flinches so hard he almost topples back on his ass, and spends a minute or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank but suggestive look of sheet-covered corpses. Trying to identify the shapes makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand lightly over this thing. Dead leaves tumble through the water and tickle his forearms. “Got an old tire down here,” he says. “Big. Truck-sized. And bald as an egg.”
Every so often a colored bird will descend from the shade of the overhanging jungle and flash into the sun, never failing to scare the shit out of them. The sun is brutal. Randy was only a few yards away from the shade of the bank when all of this started, and now he’s pretty sure that he’s going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.
Enoch Root starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at him and sees that he’s holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.
An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted in a black-and-orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby rock, and cocks its head at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.
“Down under the rocks and mud there’s reinforced concrete,” Doug says. “I can see the rebar sticking out.”
Another bird or something flashes out of the shadows, headed nearly straight down toward the water at tremendous speed. Amy makes a funny grunting sound. Randy’s just turning to look her way when a tremendous, hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see a blossom of flame strobing out of the slotted flash arrestor on the muzzle of John Wayne’s assault rifle. Seems like he’s shooting directly across the river. Jackie Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who’s squatting, loses his balance from all of this head-turning and has to put out a hand to steady himself, which fortunately doesn’t come down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only her head and shoulders are showing out of the water, and she’s staring at nothing in particular, with a look in her eyes that Randy doesn’t like at all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.
“Randy, don’t do that,” says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the shade, and is only a couple of paces from the curtain of vegetation that hangs over the riverbank.
There is a piece of debris riding on the surface of the river not far from Amy’s face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy moves. Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big silt-covered boulder whose top he can make out through the milky water. He squats on that boulder like a bird and focuses again on Amy, who is maybe fifteen feet away from him. John Wayne fires a series of individual shots from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers, bound to the butt of a narrow stick.
“Amy’s been shot with an arrow,” Randy says.
“Well that’s just fucking great,” Doug mutters.
“Amy, where are you hit?” says Enoch Root.
Amy still can’t seem to speak. She stands up awkwardly, doing all the work with her left leg, and as she rises the arrow emerges from the water and turns out to be lodged squarely in the middle of her right thigh. The wound is washed clean at first but then blood wells out from around the arrow’s shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.
Doug’s engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up above. “You know,” he whispers, “I can tell that this is one of those classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly turns into the actual battle.”
Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands and tries to snap it, but the wood is green, and won’t break cleanly. “I dropped my knife somewhere,” she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making it that way. “I think I can deal with this level of pain for a little,” she says. “But I don’t like it at all.”
Near Amy, Randy can see another silt-covered boulder near the surface, maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full-length into the streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and several inches thick.
“Randy, what you’re looking at is a Nip anti-tank mine,” Doug says. “It is highly unstable with age, and it contains enough high explosive to essentially decapitate everyone in our little group here. So if you could just stop being a complete asshole for a little bit, I’m sure that we would all appreciate it very much.”
Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. “I’m not looking for you to prove anything,” she says. “If you’re trying to say you love me, send me a fucking valentine.”
“I love you,” Randy says. “I want you to be okay. I want you to marry me.”
“Well, that’s very romantic,” Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts crying.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Doug Shaftoe says. “You guys can do this later! Will you ease up? Whoever fired that arrow is long gone. The Huks are guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce.”
“It wasn’t fired by a Huk,” Randy says. “Huks have guns. Even I know that.”
“Who fired it, then?” Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.
“It looks like a Cayuse arrow,” Randy says.
“Cayuse? You think it was fired by a Cayuse?” Doug demands. Randy admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.
“No,” Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the antitank mine. “The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes. What else do we know about him? That’s he’s really good at sneaking around in the jungle. And that he’s so totally fucking crazy that even when he’s been injured by a land mine, he’s still crawling around in the undergrowth taking shots at people.” Randy’s probing the riverbed as he’s talking, and now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. “Not just anyone—he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he’s been watching. He saw Amy sitting next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is take a shot at her.”
“Why does he want to hurt you?” Enoch asks.
“Because he’s evil.”
Enoch looks tremendously impressed.
“Well, who the hell is it?” Amy hisses. She’s irritated now, which he takes to be a good sign.
“His name is Andr
ew Loeb,” Randy says. “And Jackie Woo and John Wayne are never going to find him.”
“Jackie and John are very good,” Doug demurs.
Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. “That’s the problem,” Randy says. “They’re way too smart to run around in a minefield without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn’t give a shit. Andrew’s totally out of his fucking mind, Doug. He’s going to run around up there at will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I’d wager that Andy with one foot blown off, and not caring whether he lives or dies, can move through a minefield faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care.”
Finally, Randy’s there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward, places a hand on each of his shoulders, and rests her weight on him, which feels good. The end of her ponytail paints the back of his neck with warm river water. The arrow’s practically in his face. Randy takes his multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the shaft of the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays her hand out, winds up, screams in Randy’s ear, and slams the butt of the shaft. It disappears into her leg. She collapses over Randy’s back and sobs. Randy reaches around behind her leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead, grabs the shaft and yanks it out.
“I don’t see evidence of arterial bleeding,” says Enoch Root, who has a good view of her from behind.
Randy rises to his feet, lifting Amy into the air, collapsed over his shoulder like a sack of rice. He’s embarrassed that Amy’s body is basically shielding his from any further arrow attacks now. But she’s making it clear that she’s in no mood for walking.
The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. “A land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?” Randy says. “If I step on one, it won’t kill Amy.”
“Not one of your better ideas, Randy!” Doug shouts, almost contemptuously. “Just calm down and take your time.”
“I just want to know my options,” Randy says. “I can’t poke around for mines while I’m carrying her.”
“Then I’ll work my way over to you,” says Enoch Root. “Oh, to hell with it!” Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.
“Fucking amateurs!” Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down at Randy’s feet and begins probing.
Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the bank. “I’m going to ascend the wall here,” he says, “and go up and reinforce Jackie. He and I’ll find this Andrew Loeb together.” It’s clear that “find” here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn’t want to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe’s daughter. Doug is stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short distance he’s able to reach a tangle of tree roots that’s almost as good as a ladder to the top.
“She’s shivering,” Randy announces. “Amy’s shivering.”
“She’s in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high,” says Enoch Root. Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood-greased leg.
One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed. Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three-ball. He’s wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud, which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he totters to a standing position. He’s got a great big pole, a wizard’s staff. He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand-over-hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred-dollar silk necktie that Randy’s pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty-free shops. This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg and using the wizard’s staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he is carrying a great big knife: Bowie-sized, but with all of the extra spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really top-of-the-line fighting and survival knife.
Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he’s got the mental stance now. But he doesn’t have the means.
And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to have the means.
Andy’s looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he’s kind of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip for whatever kind of attack he’s about to make. It is this detail that finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward and plants his wizard’s staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills in, of course. Now Andy’s standing there like a stork, having miraculously kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy, then does it again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew Loeb has become a red, comet-shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist gripping the huge knife.
Randy turns around and looks at Amy. She’s levered herself up on one arm. In her opposite hand she’s got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.
Something’s moving in the corner of Randy’s eye. He turns his head quickly. A coherent, wraith-shaped cloud of smoke is drifting away from Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into the sun where it is suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45 and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.
Andrew’s fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.
BLACK CHAMBER
* * *
“WELL,” WATERHOUSE SAYS, “I KNOW A THING OR two about keeping secrets.”
“I know that perfectly well,” says Colonel Earl Comstock. “It is a fine quality. It is why we want you. After the war.”
A formation of bombers flies over the building, rattling its shellshocked walls with a drone that penetrates into their sinuses. They take this opportunity to heave their massive Buffalo china coffee cups off their massive Buffalo c
hina saucers and sip weak, greenish Army coffee.
“Don’t let that kind of thing fool you,” Comstock hollers over the noise, glancing up toward the bombers, which bank majestically to the north, going up to blast hell out of the incredibly tenacious Tiger of Malaya. “People in the know think that the Nips are on their last legs. It’s not too early to think about what you will be doing after the war.”
“I told you, sir. Getting married, and—”
“Yeah, teaching math at some little school out west.” Comstock sips coffee and grimaces. The grimace is as tightly coupled to the sip as recoil is to the pull of a trigger. “Sounds delightful, Waterhouse, it really does. Oh, there’s all kinds of fantasies that sound great to us, sitting here on the outskirts of what used to be Manila, breathing gasoline fumes and swatting mosquitoes. I’ve heard a hundred guys—mostly enlisted men—rhapsodize about mowing the lawn. That’s all those guys can talk about, is mowing the lawn. But when they get back home, will they want to mow the lawn?”
“No.”
“Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great when you’re sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts.”
One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse shrugs it off. “Could be I’ll hate it,” he concedes.
At this point Comstock sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets fatherly with him. “It’s not just you,” he says. “Your wife might not be crazy about it either.”
“Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn’t care for cities.”
“You wouldn’t have to live in a city. With the kind of salary we are talking about here, Waterhouse—” Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces, and lowers his voice another notch “—you could buy a nice little Ford or a Chevy.” He stops to let that sink in. “With a V-8 that would give you power to burn! You could live ten, twenty miles away, and drive in every morning at a mile a minute!”