"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)In AtsugiThe dark plane drifted down, sweeping out an arc of hazy sky to the east of the runway. It had a balsa-wood lightness, a wobbliness, uncommonly long-winged, and it came in over the power pylons that stretched through the rice fields and up into the hills and out of sight. A strange high sound whistled through the air, bringing people out of houses outside the base, men taking bowlegged stances to follow the line of descent-a sound like a gull-shriek endlessly prolonged, caroming through the deep caves set around the base, the kamikaze nests of the second war. Men appeared in barracks windows to catch a glimpse of the landing. A man stood outside the radar bubble watching with folded arms. Two men in utility caps paused outside the mess as the plane glided finally in over the fields and the barbed-wire fences, touching down lightly, its lop-eared wingtips sparking when they scraped the runway, cartoonishly, in the chalk blaze of noon. "The son of a bitch climbs unbelievable." "I know. I heard," Heindel said. "But fast. It's gone before you know it. Never mind how high." "I know how high." "I was in the bubble," Reitmeyer said. "Eighty thousand feet." "The son of a bitch requests winds at eighty thousand feet." "Which isn't supposed to be possible," Heindel said. "I was plotting intercepts. I heard. The mystery man speaks." The first marine, Donald Reitmeyer, had a large squared-off frame and a lazy amble that made him seem to be sinking into the ground. He watched the tractor approach to tow the plane to its remote hangar. The plane would be escorted, the hangar surrounded, by men with automatic weapons. Reitmeyer took off his cap and waved it at someone heading toward them across the fuming tarmac, a slightish man who walked with his head tilted and one shoulder drooping, the Marine who'd been watching from the radar hut when the plane came in. "It's Ozzie. Looking like his usual self." Heindel shouted, "Oswald, move it." "More skosh," Reitmeyer called, using a familiar pidgin phrase. "Show some life." "Show some interest." The three men walked toward the barracks. "We know how high it goes, so the next question," Reitmeyer said, "is how far it goes and what does it do when it gets there." "Deep into China," Oswald said. "How do you know?" "It's logic and common sense. Plus the Soviet Union." "It's called a utility plane," Heindel said. "It's a spy plane. It's called a U-2." "How do you know?" "Common knowledge, pretty much," Oswald said. "You hear things, and the things you don't hear you can find out easy enough. You know those buildings way past the hangars at the east end. That's called the Joint Technical Advisory Group. Which is a phony name where the spies hide out." "You're so fucking sure," Reitmeyer said. "What do you think's there, dormitories for the wrestling team?" "Well just shut up about it." "I go to the briefings. I know what to shut up about." "You see the armed guards, don't you?" "That's my point, Reitmeyer. Nobody gets near this base without clearance." "Well just try shutting up." "Imagine flying over China," Heindel said. "The vastness of China." "China's not so vast," Oswald said. "What about the Soviet Union, for vast?" "How vast is it?" "Someday I want to travel the length and breadth of it by train. Talk to everybody I meet. It's the idea of Russia that impresses me more than the physical size." "What idea?" Reitmeyer said. "Read a book." "You always say read a book, like that's the answer to everything." "Maybe it is." "Maybe it isn't." "Then how come I'm smarter than you are." "You're also dumber," Reitmeyer said. "He's not as dumb as an officer," Heindel said. "Nobody's that dumb," Oswald said. They called him Ozzie the Rabbit for his pursed lips and dimples and for his swiftness afoot, as they saw it, when there was a scuffle in the barracks or one of the bars off-base. He was five feet nine, blue-eyed, weighed a hundred and thirty-five, would soon be eighteen years old, had conduct and proficiency ratings that climbed for a while, then fell, then climbed and fell again, and his scores on the rifle range were inconsistent. Heindel was known as Hidell, for no special reason. He went to the movies and the library. Nobody knew the tough time he had reading simple English sentences. He could not always get a fixed picture of the word in front of him. Writing was even tougher. When he was tired it was all he could do to spell five straight words right, to spell a single small word without mixing up the letters. It was a secret he'd never tell. He had a liberty card, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt that made him feel like an intruder in his own skin, and a window seat on the train to Tokyo. It was Reitmeyer who'd arranged the date, explaining to Lee that all he had to do was show up at the right time and place and flash his heartwarming American smile. A thousand forbidden pleasures would be his. Welcome to JP-land of sliding doors and slant-eyed whores. He walked invisibly through layers of chaos, twilight Tokyo. He walked for an hour, watching neon lights pinch through the traffic haze, with English words jumping out at him, terrific terrific, under the streetcar cables, past the noodle shops and bars. He saw Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen, six doggie bakers and cooks by the look of them, all wearing jackets embroidered with dragons. It was 1957 but to Lee these men had the style of swaggering warriors, combat vets taking whatever drifted into meathook reach. He walked through mazes of narrow streets mobbed with shoppers. He was remarkably calm. There was something about being off-base, away from his countrymen, out of America, that took the edge off his wariness, eased his rankled skin. He checked the piece of paper with her name on it. Lamps were lit along the alleyways. He saw a legless man with an accordion, his torso set on weird metal supports, like a Singer sewing machine-an ideogram sign flapping on his chest. He found Mitsuko all right, a baby-face girl, sort of formless, wearing a skirt and white blouse and a handkerchief on her head, waiting by a sign that read soldiers access, the rendezvous point as devised by Reitmeyer, on a street of cheap arcades. She took him to a pachinko parlor, a long narrow room full of people pressed against upright machines. They were trying to maneuver a steel ball into a little hole. The machines made a factory din, like a stamping plant maybe. When she found a free machine, she pressed a lever that released the ball. This was the signal for nirvana or whatever they call the absolute state. She stared into the gray circle, watching the ball go round and round. People pushed through the room, students, old women in kimonos, men who looked educated, with high-paying jobs, all waiting for machines. They were three-deep in some places, patient in the noise and hanging smoke as if nothing hit upon the skin but the racing gray ball. He checked the paper with her name. Two hours later they were in a room with sliding panels and straw mats. Something told him the place wasn't hers. It looked imitation Japanese. A silk roll hung from the wall, except it probably wasn't silk. He caught a glimpse of a pinup calendar above a dressing table, some bars of Lifebuoy soap. She took off her open-toed shoes. It was a little hard to believe he was on the legendary verge of getting laid. The subject of a million words, noises, laughs and shouts in the sandlots and barracks of his experience. He felt a stillness, looking at his first naked girl, grown-up, outside a magazine. There was something serious about a woman nude. He felt different, serious, still. He was part of something streaming through the world. Then her hand was in his pants, matter-of-fact, like she was turning on a tap. He took off his clothes, folded the shirt with the windswept palms. The moment had been waiting to happen. The room had been here since the day he was born, waiting for him, just like this, to walk in the door. It was just a question of walking in the door, entering the stream of things. Was he supposed to give her money? Reitmeyer hadn't said. He saw himself having sex with her, He was partly outside the scene. He had sex with her and monitored the scene, waiting for the pleasure to grip him, blow over him like surf, bend the trees. He thought about what was happening rather than saw it, although he saw it too. He had a duty weekend coming up but was back in Tokyo the first possible chance. It turned out she took his money only to play pachinko. She was a pachinko fool, a total addict of the form, standing for hours in a raincoat that wasn't hers. He'd go out, come back, go out again, checking the strip joints and cowboy bars. He'd stand near the entrance and watch her play. People pressed into the room. Now and then somebody won a prize, a packet of leaf-shaped sweets. He watched her raise her right foot behind her, absently scratch the other ankle. Strange days in the fabulous East. This time she took him to a room in a large apartment block set near factories and oil-storage tanks. The air smelled of sulfur and tidal scum. He could see a river from the window but didn't know what it was called. She told him she was thirty-four years old. Strange days and nights. Some time after they were dressed again, a man came in, moving through the shadows, young, lean, familiar with the room, seeming to take Lee for granted, acting as if he knew everything Lee had ever said and done. He was looking for his raincoat. Lee never understood the man's connection to Mitsuko. A brother, cousin, lover, a handler or protector of some kind, although not a pimp (if she didn't take money). Lee saw him several times over the next couple of weeks. He was an interesting guy, last name Konno, with wavy hair and dark glasses. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, knew American jazz, names that Lee was at a loss to identify. They talked politics. They drank beer and gin, which Lee brought to the room but only sipped to be polite. Konno's English was okay, better than rudimentary. He wore shabby clothes and shoes and a black silk scarf, always, outdoors and in. The autumn damp took hold. Lamplight shimmered in networks of alleys crowded with wooden houses and shops. They'd taken away his American space. Not that it mattered. His space had been nothing but wandering, a lie that concealed small rooms, TV, his mother's voice never-ending. Louisiana, Texas were lies. They were aimless places that swirled around the cramped rooms where he always ended up. Here the smallness had meaning. The paper windows and box rooms, these were clear-minded states, forms of well-being. Mitsuko took him into the land of She did none of the things Reitmeyer had said she'd do, and Ozzie didn't ask. In the bubble he worked in a hot glow, marking intercept paths, checking the oscilloscope for traces of electron motion that represented air traffic within a given sector. Through the all-night watches he engaged officers in conversation, asked them questions about world affairs. It turned out he knew more than they did. They didn't know the basic things. Names of leaders, types of political systems. The younger officers were the worst informed, Joe College types, which served to justify some old suspicion of his about the way things work. A crackling voice requesting winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, a voice outside the dome of night, beyond the known limits. There were bars and bar girls near the base but he preferred going to Tokyo, alone, where he visited Konno in the huge development near the factories. The coppery smog was so thick it obscured the setting sun. Konno smoked Luckies and talked about the struggle to exist. He worked only part-time, an elevator operator, because the country was awash in college graduates. Sometimes Mitsuko showed up and she and Ozzie made love to Thelonious Monk records, weird plinking and bonging blues, sort of Japanese come to think of it. Other times Konno took him to the Queen Bee, a nightclub with elaborate floor shows and gorgeous women drifting through the smoke like one hundred slit-skirt versions of a Howard Johnson's hostess. It occurred to Lee that he ought to wonder what an elevator man and a pfc. were doing in a place like this. Konno would slouch in, taking off his raincoat and dragging it along the floor as they were led to a table in a platformed area above the tourists, the Japanese businessmen, American officers, contract pilots (recognizable by their drab short-sleeve shirts and fancy sunglasses, whatever the weather). Konno pocketed checks without seeming to pay and one night introduced Lee to a hostess named Tammy, a woman in a silver dress and shiny face paint. Konno believed in riots. Konno believed the U.S. had used germ warfare in Korea and was experimenting with a substance called lysergic acid here in Japan. Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history. To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea. He was a member of the Japanese-Soviet Friendship Society, the Japanese Peace Council, the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association. Foreign capital, foreign troops dominate modern Japan, he said. All foreign troops are U.S. troops. Every Westerner is an American. Every American serves the cause of monopolistic capital. Tammy took Lee to a Buddhist shrine. One night at the Queen Bee, Konno announced that MACS-1, Lee's unit, would soon leave for the Philippines. This was news to the young Marine, He was beginning to like Japan. He liked coming to Tokyo. He counted on these discussions with Konno, who was able to argue Lee's own positions from a historic rather than a purely personal viewpoint, from the ashes, the rebuilt waste of a blasted landscape and economy. Why were they shipping him out, now, of all times, when things were going well for a change, when he had things to look forward to, a woman, now and then, to crawl into bed with, people to talk to who did not see him as a figure in the shadows? They went to the flat near the river. Konno paced the room, tugging at the ends of his silk scarf. He hinted there were others who knew about Pfc. Oswald and admired his political maturity. He said there were things that could be accomplished by people with similar ideas on world affairs, people situated in certain places, within easy reach of each other. He gave Lee a pistol, small and silver-plated, a derringer, a gift, modest, two-shot, and asked him to pick up some Luckies back at the base. Reitmeyer tried to pick him up and turn him upside down, grabbing from behind, at the crotch and the shirt collar, basic aimless ballbreaking fun, but he messed it all up, ending with one hand gripping Ozzie's side pocket and the other in an armpit, with the victim more or less parallel to the ground, flailing for a door jamb. At first Ozzie reacted with good-natured yelping surprise, out for a midair swim; then, as Reitmeyer manhandled and yanked, refusing to see it wouldn't work, trying to cartwheel him halfway around, he complained in fierce whispers, with ultimatums and unfinished threats; then struggled hard to free himself, close to bursting into frustrated tears, a snared and wriggling kid, pink with rage; then, finally, and this brought forth a certain lurking satisfaction, familiar, falsehearted, awful, he went completely limp. One night he wandered into a Tokyo bar that was either a queer hangout or some kind of kabuki show or maybe a little of both. The customers were all male and the hosts or hostesses-they looked increasingly like men as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark-wore bright kimonos and high swirling wigs, their mouths precisely painted, faces layered in chalk. Educational. Someone rustled nearby, a costumed man waiting to lead him to a table, but Ozzie walked quietly to the door, feeling watched, odd, peculiar, quaint. When he opened the door he saw a familiar figure in the street. It was a Marine from his unit, Heindel, just walking on by. Ozzie had a moment of small panic. He didn't want to be seen coming out of a place like this. They'd mop the barracks with him if word got out. They'd have a hog-wallow of gruesome fun. The oddball loner caught sneaking out of a swishy bar. He moved back into the dimness and ordered a beer, keeping an eye to the street. Hidell in a dark jacket with a pouncing tiger on the back. Ozzie drank his beer and got his bearings. The darkness was creepy. Whining music came from the walls. He found a taxi and headed out to Konno's district. Chemical smoke pouring off the shipyards and factories. Skinhead kids on bikes shooting out of alleys, coming at a racing slant over the pot-holed streets. Hidell means don't tell. No one was home. He walked for miles, lost, before he found another cab. He went to the Queen Bee, greeted by a hostess whose sole duty was to bow to entering guests. Konno was alone at a table near the rear. They talked a long time. Girls in swimsuits passed across the stage, each throwing a hip toward the audience of businessmen and U.S. brass. It was a vast place, a noisy crowd. Konno was tired and hoarse, coming down with something. A silence at the table. Then Lee let it be known that he'd seen something interesting in Atsugi one day, a plane called a U-2. He paused, measuring how he felt. Inside the bouncy music and applause, he occupied a pocket of calm. He was not connected to anything here and not quite connected to himself and he spoke less to Konno than to the person Konno would report to, someone out there, in the floating world, a collector of loose talk, a specialist who lived in the dark like the men with bright lips and spun-silk wigs. He pointed out that the plane climbed right off the radarscopes. He said it reached an altitude almost five miles above the known record. He suggested it was armed with amazing cameras and headed for hostile soil. He barely noticed himself talking. That was the interesting part. The more he spoke, the more he felt he was softly split in two. It was all so remote he didn't think it mattered what he said. He never even looked at his companion. He sat in a white calm and let the sentences float. Konno studied him, listened, jittery, needing a shave, sniffing the nicotine on his fingers, a habit of his that seemed to imply there was never enough-enough of what you craved. Lee talked softly on. Ten thousand years of happiness, or whatever it means when they say He let it be known that he'd figured out the U-2's rate of climb. He didn't say what it was but went into detail on other, minor matters, testing Konno's knowledge of technical things, lecturing a little, pointing out flaws in the base's security. A man in a white tuxedo introduced the bathing beauties by name. Sincere applause. The two men went into the chill night. It was late and quiet and Lee pulled his windbreaker tight around him. Konno stood smoking, hunched away from the wind, knees bent, looking down an empty neon street. Take the double-e from Lee. Hide the double-/ in Hidell. Hidell means hide the L. Don't tell. White ideograms. Roman letters ticking in the dark. Konno said they were waiting for one of the hostesses, Tammy, and he looked a little dejected about it, maybe because he needed sleep. She came out a side exit wrapped in plastic rainwear including a hat and floppy booties, and seemed ready for some hard-earned relaxation. She thought she knew a pachinko parlor that might still be open. She wanted to play pachinko. A radarman named Bushnell was climbing the exterior stairs of his barracks when he heard a sharp noise, a single hard rap, like a ruler striking a desk. On second thought, no, that wasn't it. More like a little popping sound, a two-inch firecracker maybe. Except that wasn't it either. That wasn't even close. Maybe just a slamming door actually. He went inside and saw Ozzie sitting on a footlocker, alone in the squadbay, showing his funny smile. He had a little bitty pistol in his hand and there was a streak of blood across his left arm, above the elbow. "I believe I shot myself," he said. Bushnell studied the perfect little scene. He thought Ozzie's remark sounded historical and charming, right out of a movie or TV play. "Where did you get the gun is what I'm thinking if I'm the duty officer and just happen to come around." "Meanwhile would you do something?" "What do you want me to do?" "Get a corpsman would be fine with me." "What's it doing? Is it bleeding? Looks like a shaving cut to me." "There's a hole in my arm." "You shave yet, Ozzie? I hear your mother shaves but you don't. What happens when they see the gun?" "It was an accident." "Bullshit. You should have used your.45." "And blow my arm off." "It's government issue, shitbird. What are you supposed to tell them, I found the gun on a sidewalk at high noon?" "I did find it." "Christ, Ozzie, you make me sick. You're sitting here all alone. What if I don't come in? You just sit and wait? If there's anything I don't respect, it's bad planning." "Meanwhile I am shot." "Well big fucking deal." "I am bleeding, Bushnell." "You deserve to bleed. You deserve to go white and fucking die. This is a stunt. It is just the oldest stunt in the world. How do you expect them to walk in here and say all right you're shot, Oswald, so you stay here and the rest of them have to ship their asses out to sea." "Because I am shot. That's how I expect them to say it." "Completely ignoring the fact you hit only flesh, which it looks like it to me. It's a court-martial offense, I guarantee, the minute they see a weapon that's not authorized." "I took the gun out of the footlocker to turn it in when it went off." "Tell us how small and cute it is." "I am bleeding." "You'll be hit with wrongful conduct, regardless. Same as if you had a riot gun." "It went off when I dropped it. I picked it up off the floor, which at the time I felt dizzy and thought to myself I'm in a state of shock so I closed the footlocker in an attempt to sit down, which is how you found me." "Don't tell me. Tell them, shitbird." "Just get me a corpsman, Bushnell. Somebody has to treat me. I'm a wounded Marine." DIAGNOSIS: WOUND, MISSILE, UPPER LEFT ARM GUNSHOT, NO A OR N INVOLVEMENT #8255 Within command-work. Patient dropped 45 caliber automatic, pistol discharged when it struck the floor, and missile struck patient in left arm causing the injury. NARRATIVE SUMMARY: This 18 year male accidentally shot himself in the left arm with a sidearm, reportedly of 22 caliber. Examination revealed the wound of entrance in the medial portion of the left upper arm, just above the elbow. There was no evidence of neurologic circulatory, or bony injury. The wound of entrance was allowed to heal and the missile was then excised through a separate incision two inches above the wound of entry. The missile appeared to be a 22 slug. The wound healed well, and the patient was discharged to duty. SURG: 10-5-57: FOREIGN BODY, REMOVAL OF, FROM EXTREMITIES, LEFT UPPER ARM #926 Postcard #1. Aboard the USS "What do you say I teach you to play chess?" "Fuck you." "It's for your own stupid good, Reitmeyer. Plus we have to pass the time somehow." "Take a flying fuck at the moon." "The best players in the world are generally Russian." "Fuck them, in spades." Men sit dazed in the streaming light. Postcard #2. Corregidor, among the war ruins. John Wayne comes to visit the homesick leathernecks of MACS-1, interrupting work on a movie being shot somewhere in the Pacific. Ozzie has mess duty, he has mess duty all the time now, but he sneaks a look at the famous man eating lunch with a group of officers-roast beef and gravy that he has helped prepare. He wants to get close to John Wayne, say something authentic. He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It's remarkable and startling to see the screen laugh repeated in life. It makes him feel good. The man is doubly real. He does not cheat or disappoint. When John Wayne laughs, Ozzie smiles, he lights up, he practically disappears in his own glow. Someone takes a photograph of John Wayne and the officers, and Ozzie wonders if he will show up in the background, in the passageway, grinning. It's time to get back to the galley but he watches John Wayne a moment longer, thinking of the cattle drive in One thing about Konno. He never talked to Lee in a personal way. He seemed to be reciting, talking into a Dictaphone. There was no flexibility in his manner. He didn't see the individual. One other thing. He was in over his head, technically speaking. He didn't know the terminology, all the phrases and labels in aviation electronics, high-altitude reconnaissance. An elevator operator. Ha ha. Lee didn't let on that he'd wounded himself with the derringer Konno had supplied. First because the strategy had failed to keep him in Japan. Then, too, he didn't want Konno to know he'd been under his influence. No talking. You stand at attention until assigned. You do not step on white paint at any time. Segments of the floor are painted white. Do not touch white. There are white lines running down passageways. Do not touch or cross these lines. Every urinal is situated behind a white line. You need permission to piss. You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won't show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon. If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it. There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage-names with a vivid history familiar from the movies. You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms. You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm's length, shouting This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turnkey's area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin. Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things- things you could crack between your fingernails and they'd break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard. They whispered to each other in the night. "Are you saying when you kill them, they multiply?" "I'm saying you can't kill them. Some things too small." "Sleep on top of the blanket," Oswald told him. "They get on through. They bore through." "That's termites, that bore." "Hey, Jim, I live with these things for years." "Put the blanket on the floor. Sleep on the floor." "Half the floor is white lines, like they foreseen. Which anyway the lice jump down on top of me." A nearly bare place, simple objects, basic needs. Oswald's senses were fearfully keyed. He tasted iron on his tongue. He heard the voices from the chicken wire, guards grumbling like heavy dogs. When they hosed down the floor of the cell block he smelled the earth embedded in concrete-pebbles, gravel, slag and broken stone, all distantly mixed with ammonia, like contempt blended in. Dupard was from Texas. "Leads the nation in homicides," Oswald said. "That's the place." "Whereabouts?" "Dallas." "I'm from Fort Worth, off and on, myself." "Neighbors. Ain't that something. How old is a kid like yourself?" "Eighteen," Oswald told him. "You a baby. They throw a baby into prison. How much time you bring with you?" "Twenty-eight days." "What's the charge?" "First I accidentally shot myself in the arm, which they court-martialed me for, but suspended the sentence." "If it's accidentally, what's their point?" "They said I used an unregistered weapon. I had a private weapon." "Which they never handed out." "Which I found. But that doesn't matter in their eyes as long as the weapon is not registered." "But they suspend the sentence, so then what?" "Then there was a second court-martial." "Sound like somebody push his luck." "Based on an incident. That's all it was." "I believe it." "There's a sergeant, Rodriguez, that's been giving me mess duty all the time. Doesn't like me, which I guarantee it's mutual. So we had words more than once. I let him know how I felt about being singled out. He told me it's the court-martial that's keeping me out of the radar hut, plus general standards, which he's saying I don't dress or behave up to standards. I saw him at a local bar and went right over. I told him. I said get me off these menial jobs. We were standing jaw to jaw. He thought I'd say my piece and back off. But I stood right there. There were people pressing close. My mind was already working. Potential witnesses. I told him what I thought. That's all. I didn't wise off. I was simple and clear. I said I wanted fair treatment. I told him. I didn't bait him. He said I was baiting him. He said I wouldn't get him to fight. More trouble than it was worth. Lose him a stripe or something. Some guys egged us on. They told Rodriguez whip him good. But I wasn't trying to get him to fight. I was stating my case in the matter. He called me "Regulate the voice," Bobby whispered. "So that was the second court-martial. But I defended myself this time. I questioned Rodriguez on the stand. I was proved not guilty of throwing my drink on him, which is technically an assault charge." "How come here we are, having this talk?" "They said I was guilty of a lesser charge. Wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer. Article one seventeen. Bang." "Slam the gate," Bobby said. He wore faded utilities that still carried the imprint of long-gone sergeant stripes and he worked in the fields, clearing stones and burning trash. The guard wore a.45 and kept his gun side turned away from the prisoners. There was no talking or rest. They worked in the rain. There were great billowing rains that first week, rain in broad expanses, slow and lilting. Smoke drifted over the men, smelling of wet garbage, half burnt. Their useless work trailed them through the day. He thought there was a good chance he would go to OCS. He'd passed the qualifying exam for corporal before shipping out. He'd be in good shape if it wasn't for the shooting incident and the spilled-drink incident. He could still be in good shape. He was smart enough to make officer. That wasn't the issue. The issue was would they let him. He cut brush and cleared fields of heavy stones. The issue was would they rig the thing against him. "I landed here like a dream," Dupard whispered that night. "I figure I'm already dead. It's just a question they shovel the dirt in my face." "What did they charge you with?" "There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak." "But you did it." "It's not that easy to say. I could go either way and be convinced in my own mind." "You're not sure you really wanted to do it. You were just thinking about doing it." "I was like, Should I drop this cigarette?" "It just seemed to happen while you were thinking it." "Like it happened on its own." "Did the rack go up?" "Scorch some linen was all. Like you fall asleep a tenth of a second, smoking." "Why did you want to start a fire?" "It's a question of working it out in my own mind, the exact why I did it. Because the psychology is definitely there." "Then what?" "Mainly one thing. I deserted." "Why?" "Because I want to book on out of here," Bobby said. "I am not a Marine. Simple. They ought to see that and just call a halt. Because the longer it goes on, there's no chance I deal with this shit." In the prison literature he'd read, Oswald was always coming across an artful old con who would advise the younger man, give him practical tips, talk in sweeping philosophical ways about the larger questions. Prison invited larger questions. It made you wish for an experienced perspective, for the knowledge of some grizzled figure with kind and tired eyes, a counselor, wise to the game. He wasn't sure what he had here in Bobby R. Dupard. The next day he came back from a work detail and found two guards in the cell pummeling Dupard. They took their time. It looked like something else at first, an epileptic fit, a heart attack, but then he understood it was a beating. Bobby was on the deck trying to cover up and the two men took turns hitting him in the kidneys and ribs. One guard sat on Oswald's bunk, leaning way over to throw short lefts like a man trying to start an outboard. The other guard was down on one knee, biting his lip, pausing to aim his shots so they wouldn't catch Bobby's crossed arms. Bobby had a look on his face like this is bound to end someday. He was working hard to keep them unfulfilled. They called him Brillo Head. He showed a little smile, as if only the spoken word might perk his interest. They went back to pounding. Oswald stopped at the white line outside the cell. He thought if he stood absolutely still, looking vaguely right or vaguely left, waiting patiently for them to finish what they were doing so he could request permission to cross the line, they might be inclined to let him enter without a beating. He hated the guards, secretly sided with them against some of the prisoners, thought they deserved what they got, the prisoners who were stupid and cruel. He felt his rancor constantly shift, felt secret satisfactions, hated the brig routine, despised the men who could not master it, although he knew it was contrived to defeat them all. When a man was returned to his unit from the chicken-wire enclosure, a man from the cells took his place. When a man in the chicken wire fouled up, he got a cell of his own, C-rats to eat, close and horrendous attention. When a man from the cells fouled up, he was thrown in the hole, a junior-size cell with a dirt floor and a cat hole to crap in. Because of the overcrowding, there was constant shifting of prisoners, many ceremonial occasions at white lines, inspections, friskings, shakedowns, foul-ups. The night of the beating, Dupard had nothing to say, although Ozzie knew he was not asleep. He tried to feel history in the cell. This was history out of George Orwell, the territory of no-choice. He could see how he'd been headed here since the day he was born. The brig was invented just for him. It was just another name for the stunted rooms where he'd spent his life. He'd once told Reitmeyer that communism was the one true religion. He was speaking seriously but also for effect. He could enrage Reitmeyer by calling himself an atheist. Reitmeyer thought you had to be forty years old before you could claim that distinction. It was a position you had to earn through years of experience, like winning seniority in the Teamsters. Maybe the brig was a kind of religion too. All prison. Something you carried with you all your life, a counterforce to politics and lies. This went deeper than anything they could tell you from the pulpit. It carried a truth no one could contradict. He'd been headed here from the start. Inevitable. Trotsky in the Bronx, only blocks away. Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id. He wasn't sure he knew exactly what the id was but he knew it lay hidden in Hidell. A naked bulb burning in the passageway. He watched Dupard in the shadows, sitting on the infested cot, showing an empty stare. His bony wrists dangled out of the faded shirt. He had a gangliness that made him seem sixteen, rompish and clumsy, but he moved well running-running in the compound, running to the head, eyeing those white lines. A long face, hangdog, sad-sack, and dusty hair, reddish brown. Eyes suspicious and hurt, quick to look away. Oswald lay still, aware of a drone in the block, a heaving breath, grimness, massive sleep. Dupard undressed, got under the blanket and began to masturbate, turned toward the wall. Oswald watched his top shoulder twitch. Then he turned to his own wall, closed his eyes, tried to will himself to sleep. Hidell means don't tell. The id is hell. Jerkle and Hide in their little cell. Oswald stood at the white line in front of the urinal. A guard moved alongside, peering in that inquisitive way, like what do we have here to pass the time. Oswald requested permission to cross the line. "I'm looking at your hairline, shitbird. What is supposed to be the length of the hair in the area of the nape of the neck?" "Zero length." "What do I see?" "I don't know." The guard pushed him stumbling across the line. When he turned to recross he looked directly in the man's face. A long-headed type, half intelligent, small bright eyes. Oswald turned to face the urinal, requested permission to cross. "I'm looking at your sideburns. What am I looking at?" "My sideburns." "The hair on your sideburns will not exceed what length when fully extended." "One-eighth inch." The guard extended the hair between his thumb and index finger, twisting for effect. Oswald let his head lean that way, not so much to ease the pain, which was mild, as to show he would not accept pain stoically in these circumstances. The guard released and then popped him in the head with the heel of his hand. Oswald requested permission to cross the line. "The length of the hair at the top of the head will not exceed how many inches maximum." "Maximum three inches." He waited for the guard to grab a handful. "The fly of the trousers shall hang in what kind of line and shall not do what when they are what." "The fly of the trousers shall hang in a vertical line and shall not gap when they are unzipped." The guard reached around and grabbed him by the nuts. "I know the type." "Aye aye sir." "I spot the type a mile away." "Aye aye sir." "The type that can't stand pain." "Aye aye sir." "The sniveling phony Marine." A prisoner approached the second white line, requested permission to cross. The guard looked over, slowly. He let go of Oswald's crotch. It was raining again. He detached the billy club from his belt and approached the second prisoner. "What's your name?" "Nineteen." "Don't you know the code, Nineteen?" "I requested permission to cross the line." "You didn't request permission to talk." The guard jabbed him lightly in the ribs. "Prisoners are silent. We observe the international rules of warfare in this head. This is my head. Nobody talks without my say-so." He jabbed the prisoner with the billy club. "Prisoners run silent. They fall to the deck silent when struck. Do you know how to fall, Nineteen?" The guard jabbed twice, then three more times, harder, before Nineteen realized he was supposed to fall down, which he did, crumpling slowly, in careful stages. His right shoulder touched the white line. The guard kicked him back over. "We observe the principles of night movement in this head. What is the first principle of night movement, Nineteen?" "Run at night only in an emergency." The guard swung the club without bothering to lean toward the prisoner, using a casual backhand stroke, grazing the man's elbow. The guard did not look at the man as he swung. This was one of the features of the local style. The guard looked at Oswald. "Why did I hit him?" "He recited principle number two." The guard swung the club, hitting the man in the shoulder. "In this head we know our manual word for word," the guard told the crumpled man, standing with his back to him. "We say nothing in this head that does not come from the manual. We kill silent and with surprise." Oswald needed desperately to piss. "In the final assualt," said the guard, "it is the individual Marine, with his rifle and his what, who closes with the enemy and destroys him." "Bayonet," the prisoner said. "A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can do what, what, what." Silence from the man on the deck. He tightened his fetal knot a second before the guard stepped back half a stride and swung the club in a wide arc, striking the knee this time. Oswald was eager to be called. The guard looked at Oswald, who said at once, "A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can strike terror in the ranks of the enemy." The guard swung the club backwards once more, striking Nineteen on the arm. Oswald felt a slight satisfaction. The guard made a point of gazing into the distance as he struck his blows. Oswald sensed the guard's interest shift his way. He was ready for the question. "Principle number one." "Get the blade into the enemy." "Principle number two." "Be ruthless, vicious and fast in your attack." The guard took half a step, switched the billy to his left hand and swun'g it hard, striking Oswald's collarbone. He was genuinely surprised. He thought they'd reached an understanding. The blow knocked him back three steps and forced him to one knee. He'd thought he was through getting hit for the day. "There are no right answers," the guard advised, looking into the distance. Oswald got to his feet, approached the white line, stood staring at the urinal. He requested permission to cross. "To execute the slash, do what." "One, assume the guard position." "Then what." "Two, step forward fifteen inches with the left foot, keeping the right foot in place." The guard swung the club, hitting him in the arm. He was sweaty with the need to piss, his upper body moist and chill. "There are no right answers in this head. It is the stupidest arrogance to give an answer that you think is right." The guard jabbed him in the ribs with the butt end of the stick. The other man, Nineteen, was still crumpled on the deck. The guard swung the club, smashing Oswald on the upper back. The idea seemed to be why bother with questions. Oswald made a decision to let the piss come flowing out. It was an anger and a compensation. He felt it flow down his leg, knowing deep relief, deliverance, good health everywhere, long life to all. The guard swung the club, hitting the side of Oswald's neck. He put his hands over the back of his head, covering up. The last blow put the guard strangely on edge. He stood looking into the distance but was different from before, mouth hanging open, a dead spot in his eye, and Oswald knew they were all one word away from a private carnage of the type you hear about from time to time, nameless and undetailed. He watched the puddle take shape on the floor, his arms crossed at the back of his head. He needed a moment to think. He sighed deeply, stepping up to the white line. He looked straight ahead and lowered his hands slowly to his sides. It was his sense of things that if he moved slowly and openly and did not show terror, the guard would stand off. The guard's mental condition had to be taken into account. They were all here to see to it that the guard came through. Oswald believed that the man crumpled on the deck knew this as well as he did. He sensed the man's awareness of the moment. They had to let the moment cohere, build itself back to something they all recognized as a rainy Wednesday in Japan. He stood at the white line and waited. Dupard whispered in the dark. "I definitely get the idea they want to send me home in a box. LIBRA • The first minute I put on the green service coat, I look like I'm dead. It's a coffin suit for a fool. I seen it on the spot." "I liked the uniform," Ozzie told him. "It was great how it looked. I was surprised how great I felt. I kept it cleaned and mothproofed. I kept heavy objects out of the pockets. I looked in the mirror and said it's me." "Nice joke. They told my mother. Get him in the service, Mrs. Dupard. The streets of America getting crazy by the day. Your boy is safe with us." "That's what they told my mother." "They sent me to JP to save me from West Dallas niggers. Believe this booshit? They put me behind bars so nobody slips off with my wallet and shoes." "It's the whole huge system. We're a zero in the system." "They give me their special attention. Better believe." "They watch us all the time. It's like Big Brother in "I used to read the Bible," Bobby said. "I used to read the manual. I never looked at my schoolbooks but I read the Marine Corps manual." "Make you a man." "Then I found out what it's really all about. How to be a tool of the system. A workable part. It's the perfect capitalist handbook." "Be a Marine." "Orwell means the military mind. The police state is not Russia. It's wherever we have the mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing." "Where's this Stalin, dead?" "Dead." "I thought I heard that." "But Eisenhower's not. Ike is our own Big Brother. Our commander in chief." They lay in the dark, thinking. Because of what they did to us. The way she had to work and quit and take care of me and get fired and work and quit and pick up and leave. Let's pick up and leave. Scraping up pennies for the next move somewhere. Daily humiliations all her life. This is known as ground down by the system. Except she never questions that. It is only the local conditions. It is Mr. Ekdahl and his puny divorce settlement. It is the whispering behind her back. It is the neighbors with their Hotpoint washers and Ford Fairlane cars, which she competes against the only way she can. "My boy Lee loves to read." His mother never-ending. Three days running, for no special reason, every meal was rabbit chow-lettuce, carrots, water. Oswald ran past the chicken wire, turned into the cell block, stopped at the white line. Dupard was in the cell wearing skivvies and sitting on Oswald's rack. Dupard's mattress was smoldering. Oswald watched the pale smoke collect in the air. His cellmate just sat there, hangdog, thoughtful, picking at his feet. "Bobby, how come?" "You want your rack?" "Stay there." "We're not supposed to talk." "You're only making things worse." "I'm evicting lice, that's all. They're boring into my skin. Time to rid the premise, man." "Did you ask for a new mattress?" "I axed. They punch my face." He was calm, a little sullen, mainly thoughtful and resigned. "They'll only extend your time." "In my own mind this is nothing to excite themselves. I don't feel like there's any guilt to be handed out whereby I'm punished. I'm fumigating these lice on out of here. In other way of saying it, it's like I'm doing their job for them." "This is your second fire." "Regulate the voice." "Well I don't see the point of mattress fires, frankly." "Stop talking, Ozzie. They kill your ass." Two guards came down the passageway, brushed past Oswald and entered the cell. The fire was so insignificant they were able to delay getting water until after they'd spent five grim minutes pounding Dupard. Oswald stood at the white line, looking away. They moved him out to the chicken wire. Not only guards but fellow inmates, all those bodies to avoid, those eyes and inner melodies-terror, gloom, psycho violence. The trick inside the wire was to stay within your own zone, avoid eye contact, accidental touch, gestures of certain types, anything that might hint at a personality behind the drone unit. The only safety was in facelessness. He developed a voice that guided him through the days. Forever, endless, identical. The brig was so unthinking it eventually drove out fear. He ran in the passageways, he ran in place. He scrubbed the brightwork in the head, squared away his area, made up his rack. The point of the brig was to clean the brig. He drew his bucket from the storeroom, stood at the white line. They'd built the brig just to keep it clean. It was where they put their white lines. Everything depended on the lines. The brig was the place where all the lines that were painted in the military mind were made bright and clean forever. Once he understood that, he knew he had their number. He sat in the TV room watching reruns of Dick Clark's Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers' village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here. He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn't supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories. Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs. On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting. She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn't expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed. "And you are Oswald, Lee," she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange. There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table. He told her he wanted to defect. "I've been thinking this is the step to take, that I'll never be able to live in the U.S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It's the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the masses right there in front of me, including my own mother in her struggle to raise three children against the odds. These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I'm learning the full force of the system. There is something in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed. Nobody knows how I feel about this. I'm sincere in my ideal that this is what I want to do. This is not something intangible. I'm ready to go through pain and hardship to leave my country forever." That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he'd approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s. There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right. She had a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive. He told her he was serious about learning Russian. At the Queen Bee he waited for Tammy to finish work and he spent the night with her in the flat she shared with two of her sisters. They had sex, more or less furtively, as the sisters watched TV. Curled in a corner of the room, unable to sleep, his head in the crook of his lover's arm, he thought of a number of things Dr. Braunfels didn't know. She didn't know he'd been on mess duty since the first court-martial. Mess duty, guard duty, a series of shit details-everything but Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee? Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs. Ozzie thought, What if she's only interested in twisting me dry? He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite. "You are much greater value," she said, "going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad." "What if I'm determined to go?" "This is not the time for you." "Couldn't they train me there, then send me back?" "You are already back." A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he showed his good will by reporting the number and type of aircraft in his squadron and the squawk codes for aircraft entering and exiting the identification zone. He did not tell her everything he knew about the U-2. He told her a few technical things, studying her reaction to the terms. He told her there was talk around the base that the plane's cameras scanned through multiple apertures. How wide a track? He hated to say he didn't know. She asked the names of U-2 pilots. She wanted technical manuals, instruction sheets. He gave the impression that further information would be available in the normal course of things, depending. He definitely wanted instruction in Russian. He'd brought along an English-Russian dictionary. The sight of it made Dr. Braunfels sink deeply into her raincoat. She told him never to do that again. She would bring whatever books were needed. They sat at the table in dim light going over pronunciations. She seemed impressed by his efforts. If he was willing to keep studying on his own, without attracting attention, she would give him as much help as she could. She talked about the language for some time, seemingly against her better judgment, drawn by his earnest desire to learn. Working with her, making the new sounds, watching her lips, repeating words and syllables, hearing his own flat voice take on texture and dimension, he could almost believe he was being remade on the spot, given an opening to some larger and deeper version of himself. The language had a size to it, a deep-reaching honesty. He thought she was a good teacher, firm and serious, and he felt a small true joy pass between them. He said to her, "A thousand years from now, people will look in the history books and read where the lines were drawn and who made the right choice and who didn't. The dynamics of history favor the Soviet Union. This is totally obvious to someone coming of age in America with an open mind. Not that I ignore the values and traditions there. The fact is there's the potential of being attracted to the values. Everyone wants to love America. But how can an honest man forget what he sees in the daily give-and-take that's like a million little wars?" Reitmeyer listened to the greetings, which were followed by a halting dialogue, with hand gestures, between his off-and-on buddy Oswald and a corporal named Yaroslavsky. He thought it was curious that a pair of U.S. Marines would turn up at muster every day chatting in Russian. It annoyed Reitmeyer. It definitely rubbed him the wrong way, the private joke they made of it all, laughing over certain phrases, calling each other comrade. They seemed to think this was hilarious. Seven, eight, nine days running. This half-ass foreign gibberish. Only in America, as the saying goes. Except this is Japan, he reminded himself, and every day is a strange day in the fabulous East. He watched Tammy apply eyebrow pencil to her lips, a fad among teen-age girls in JP that year. She was younger than Mitsuko but not that young. Mitsuko had vanished into the floating world and it was possible Tammy would follow any time. She posed for him now in a fluffy blouse and toreador pants. It no longer made Ozzie feel self-conscious to be seen by other Marines with a woman who was put together so well. The guys in MACS-1 couldn't figure it out. She took him to a place called the Loneliness Bar, where the hostesses wore swimsuits treated with a chemical substance. The idea was to strike a match on a girl's backside as she walked by your table. Four Negro GIs went apeshit striking matches on sleek bottoms. There were matches jutting from the knuckles of every hand. They hooted and laughed, could not contain their amazement. They were young Southern Negroes, awkward and spindly, with a likable slapstick manner, and they made him wonder what had happened to Bobby Dupard. It put a kind of doom on the evening. He sat drinking beer in the stink of all those blistered match-heads, explaining his past to Tammy in simple phrases. A night in the life of the Loneliness Bar. Three days later he felt a stinging heat when he pissed. It burned inside. Two days after that he couldn't help noticing a thick discharge from the selfsame organ. He went to the head in the middle of the night to study the fluid, a dreadful yellowish drip. At the lab they took a series of smears and cultures, gave him nine hundred thousand units of penicillin, intramuscular, over a three-day period, and returned him to light duty. Ozzie had the clap. The pilot arrives in an ambulance, with armed guards. He wears a white helmet that is sealed to his airtight suit and he strides to the unmarked plane without delay. The ground crew and guards back off as the engine emits the high-pitched signal that always brings a few men slouching out of the radar shack to watch the black-bandit jet streak down the runway. It's over almost at once, the shrill sound rising, the strut-and-wheel devices keeping the long wings level until flying speed is reached. Then the plane is up, the pogos drop off, the men try to keep track of the fast steep climb, the brilliant leap into another skin. They scrunch up their faces, peering into the haze. But the object is already gone, part of the high quiet, the flat and seamless sky out there, leaving behind a string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief. The pilot, sooner or later, whoever he is, whatever his base or his mission, thinks about the items stored in his seat pack. Water, field rations, flares, a first-aid kit; a hunting knife and pistol; a needle tipped with lethal shellfish toxin and concealed in a fake silver dollar. ("We'd just as soon they didn't get a chance to interrogate you guys, not that we think you'd breathe a word.") There is also the delicate charge of cyclonite that will pulverize the camera and electronic equipment an undetermined number of seconds after the pilot activates the timer and gets his feet into the stirrups of the ejection seat, should the remote possibility arise that any such maneuver is necessary. ("Now, you people understand the ejection seat can cause amputation of the limbs if things don't work just perfect, so maybe you ought to figure on slipping quietly over the side, like you don't want to wake the kids.") He can't help thinking, sooner or later, about the worst that could happen. A stall at extreme altitudes. Or an SA-2 missile just happens to detonate nearby, knocking out a stabilizer. ("Not that the bastards have the know-how to go that high.") Next thing he knows he is out in the stratosphere, sky-hiking with a pack on his back, and he tries to convince a somewhat dreamy hand to jerk the pull-ring. At fifteen thousand feet it happens automatically, |
||
|