4

The ambulance wailed past the communications truck, speeding back toward town, three lorries rumbling up behind it, loaded with civilians, some complaining loudly, shouting indistinctly at the National Guardsmen along the road. Directly after the lorries two state cruisers swept by, keeping watch on them all. Teasle stood at the side of the road, the headlights flashing by him in the dark, shook his head and walked slowly over to the truck.

'No word yet how many more were shot?' he asked the radioman in the back.

The radioman was haloed by the glare of the lightbulb dangling farther inside. 'Just now, I'm afraid,' he said, slowly, quietly. 'One of them. One of us. The civilian was hit in the kneecap, but our man got it in the head.'

'Oh.' He closed his eyes a moment.

'The ambulance attendant says he might not live to reach the hospital.'

Might, nothing, he thought. The way things have been going the last three days, he won't make it. There's no doubt. He just won't make it.

'Do I know who he was? No. Wait. You'd better not tell me. I already have enough men dead that I knew.

Are those drunks at least all gathered up now so they can't shoot anybody else? Was that the last of them in the lorries?'

'Kern says he thinks so but he can't be positive.'

'Which means there could still be as much as another hundred camped up there.'

Christ, don't you wish there was another way to do this, that it was just you and the kid again. How many others are going to die before this is over?

He had been walking around too much. He was going dizzy once more, leaning against the back of the truck to hold himself up, legs becoming limp. His eyes felt like they would roll up into their sockets. Like doll's eyes, he thought.

'Maybe you ought to climb back inside and rest,' the radioman said. 'Even when you're almost out of the light, I can see you sweating, your face, through the bandages.'

He nodded weakly. 'Just don't say that when Kern's here. Hand me your coffee, will you?'

His hands were shaking as he took the coffee and swallowed it with two more pills, his tongue and throat balking from the bitter taste, and just then Trautman returned from where he had been speaking with the shadowed forms of National Guardsmen down the road. He took one look at Teasle and told him, 'You ought to be in bed.'

'Not until this is over.'

'Well, that's likely going to take a while longer than you expect. This isn't Korea and the Choisin Reservoir all over again. A mass-troop tactic would be fine provided you had two groups against each other: if one flank got confused, your enemy would be so large that you could see it coming in time to reinforce that flank. But you can't do that here, not against one man, especially him. The slightest bit of confusion along one line and he's so hard to spot he can slip through your men without a signal.'

'You've pointed out enough faults. Can't you offer something positive?'

He said it stronger than he intended, so that when Trautman answered 'Yes,' there was something new, resentment, hidden in that even voice: 'I have a few details to settle on yet. I don't know how you run your police department, but I like to be sure before I go ahead on something.'

Teasle needed his co-operation and immediately tried to ease off. 'Sorry. I guess it's me who sounds wrong now. Don't pay attention. I'm just not happy unless I get miserable every once in a while.'

Again it came, that strange intense doubling of past and present: two nights ago when Orval had said 'It'll be dark in an hour,' and he himself had snapped 'Don't you think I know it' and then had apologized to Orval in almost the same words he had just said to Trautman.

Maybe it was the pills. He didn't know what was in them, but they certainly worked, his dizziness leaving now, his brain slowly revolving to a stop. It bothered him that the periods of dizziness were coming more and more often and lasting longer, though. At least his heart was not speeding and missing anymore.

He gripped the back of the truck to climb up, but he did not have the strength to raise himself.

'Here. Take my hand,' the radioman said.

With help then, he managed to get up, but too fast, and he had to wait a moment before he was steady enough to go and sit on the bench, shoulders at last relaxing against the wall of the truck. There. Done. Nothing to do but sit, rest. The pleasure of fatigue and relief he sometimes had after vomiting.

Trautman climbed up with apparently unconscious ease and stood at the back, watching him, and there was something that Trautman had said a while ago that puzzled Teasle. He could not decide what it was. Something about — Then he had it.

'How did you know I was at the Choisin Reservoir?'

Trautman looked in question.

'Just now,' Teasle said. 'You mentioned —'

'Yes. Before I left Fort Bragg I called Washington and had your file read to me.'

Teasle did not like that. At all.

'I had to,' Trautman said. 'There's no need to take that personally either, as if I was interfering in your privacy. I had to understand what kind of man you were, in case this trouble with Rambo was your fault, in case you were after blood now, so I could anticipate any trouble you might give me. That was one of your mistakes with him. You went after a man you didn't know anything about, not even his name. There's a rule we teach — never engage with an enemy until you know him as well as yourself.'

'All right. What does the Choisin Reservoir tell you about me?'

'For one thing, now that you've told me a little of what happened up there, it explains part of why you managed to get away from him.'

'There's no mystery. I ran faster.' The memory of how he had bolted in panic, leaving Shingleton, made him disgusted, bitter.

'That's the point,' Trautman said. 'You shouldn't have been able to run faster. He's younger than you, in better condition, better trained.'

The radioman had been sitting by the table listening to them. Now he turned from one to the other and said, 'I wish I knew what you guys were talking about. What's this reservoir?'

'You weren't in the service?' Trautman said.

'Sure I was. In the navy. Two years.'

'That's why you never heard of it. If you had been a marine, you'd know the details by heart and you'd brag about them. The Choisin Reservoir is one of the most famous marine battles of the Korean war. It was actually a retreat, but it was as fierce as any attack, and it cost the enemy thirty-seven thousand men. Teasle was right in the center of it. Enough to earn a Distinguished Service Cross.'

The way Trautman referred to him by name made Teasle feel strange, as if he were not in the same place with them, as if he were outside the truck listening, while Trautman, unaware he was being overheard, talked about him.

'What I want to know,' Trautman asked Teasle, 'was Rambo aware that you were in that retreat?'

He shrugged. 'The citation and the medal are on my office wall. He saw it. If it meant anything to him.'

'Oh, it meant something to him, all right. That's what saved your life.'

'I don't see how. I just lost my head when Shingleton was shot, and ran like a goddamn scared rat.' Saying it made him feel better, publicly confessing it, out in the open, nobody criticizing him for it when he wasn't near.

'Of course you lost your head and ran,' Trautman said. 'You've been out of that kind of action for years. In your place who wouldn't have run? But you see, he didn't expect you to. He's a professional and he naturally would think that somebody with that medal is a professional too — oh, a little out of practice and certainly not as good as him, but still he would think of you as a professional — and it's my guess he went after you on that basis. Did you ever watch a chess match between an amateur and a pro? The amateur wins more pieces. Because the pro is used to playing with people who have a reason and pattern for every move, and here the amateur is shifting pieces all over the board, not really knowing what he's up to, just trying to do the best he can with the little he understands. Well, the professional becomes so confused trying to see a nonexistent pattern and allow for it, that in no time he's behind. In your case, you were in blind flight, and Rambo was behind you trying to anticipate what somebody like himself would do for protection. He would have expected you to lie in wait for him, to try to ambush him, and that would have slowed him down until he understood, but then it would have been too late.'