Key to the Door (60 page)

“We ought to get the VC for this,” Cheshire grinned.

“They could stuff it,” said Baker.

“Let's find them bastards,” Brian said, “and get out of it.”

They began the descent, slithering on an altered compassbearing. Since Gunong Barat, they had developed an instinctive feeling for the shape of the earth under its great wadding of ponderous trees, sensed like ants in the gloom of thistle-strewn hillocks the easy climbs or pitfalls of a quick descent long before they were seen or felt by the feet. To Brian the smell, humidity, quality of travail, the intense silence of desperation felt whenever they paused to rest, seemed now like home and second-nature, an acknowledged fight on the earth connected to a lesser-known and felt contest in the jungle deep within himself, a matching that in spite of his exhaustion made the trip seem necessary and even preordained.

At dusk, his eyes lost their sharp vision—as if he needed glasses to make leaves and the hats of the others clear again. They watched the sun setting over Pulau Timur, the length of the distant island settling into the sea like a silent deserted raft. Clouds above were spearheads pointing down the sea, so vividly red that it looked as if, while they stared, a tremendous sausage of blood had just burst over the island's black hills and rolled a lava of sunset into its concealed valleys.

By seven it was too dark to go on searching, and Baker worked on the radio to make contact with Knotman's party (the others sitting around as if, in the dark forest, he were trying to get through to some listening God for instructions), until Knotman answered: “That you, Baker? As if I didn't know. We haven't seen anything yet, so we'll bed down for the night. Went up to the north ridge and looked into the next valley. So now we're halfway to the bottom again. Did you see the sunset over Pulau Timur? It looked like the end of the world from this side. We contacted the army an hour ago, and they'll stay with us tonight, moving in your direction in the morning. I think we're about a mile away, but you can't tell in this.”

Brian spread his ground-sheet and blanket in the undergrowth and drifted along tunnels of weird dreams, emerged into the dazzling half-light and half-dark of a snowstorm, heavy white flakes falling thickly around and chilling him to the bone as he fought against it. When the storm stopped, the fields were white over, the sky a milk blue, low and still threatening. But the snow-covered fields, in spite of his shivering, felt good to be in.

He opened his eyes to wonder where he was, and the warm smell of the jungle told him. Someone else was awake, sitting with hands clasped around his knees nearby. Hoping it was almost dawn, Brian looked at his watch: four-thirty, its luminous hand glowed. He felt for his rifle, and cursed to realize it was the first thing he thought of. I should throw it away. “How long do you guess this search'll go on?”

“It depends on our luck,” Odgeson said. “We could be kept knocking around for a fortnight.”

Brian lit a cigarette, and threw one over: “It's a long time to be slogging around in this.”

“We'll be relieved in a few days,” Odgeson guessed. “Somebody else will take over.”

“Not that I couldn't go on for weeks. It's funny the way I feel in two minds about it.” Like everything, he added to himself.

“I suppose we all do,” Odgeson said. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness, red flies helicoptering on the warm buoyancy of their thoughts. Odgeson fell asleep but Brian smoked half a tin of cigarettes before it got light.

At six Knotman came through on the radio: the two parties would descend and make contact with the jeeps in a couple of hours. Another jungle-rescue unit had been flown up from Singapore and would join the search. Odgeson acknowledged and they set off.

After a sweet breakfast of canned milk, and the sun's warm penetration to his rheumatic bones, Brian felt renewed. Yet in the first hour he was plunged to the senile age of ninety. He felt weak and nondescript, was already fed up with the zigzag futility of the trip. Scabs were forming in his armpits, sore from the sweat of continual movement, and now the same mechanical ascendency over the chafing pain had to be won as over the blisters on his feet the previous day. The six days on Gunong Barat seemed by comparison an easygoing romp in which he had held out fine against the rigours of jungle travel, even though he'd lugged twice the weight on his donkey-back. “I can't see why they didn't hold us in the village until the planes had spotted something,” he called out at the first rest, as if to make it a subject of general discussion.

“It isn't always easy to see things in the jungle, as you know,” Odgeson answered, “even from the air. In any case, I imagine the CO knows what he's doing. We don't have all his headaches, do we?”

“I suppose the CO and his pals couldn't wait to start moving pins about on the maps,” Brian said.

Cheshire stood up with mock pride: “It's the first time I've been a pin on a map.”

“I don't suppose it'll be the last time,” Baker retorted. “You're a regular, aren't you, you poor sod?”—which brought no answer.

“It'll be the last time for me, though,” Brian affirmed.

“You can never be sure about that,” Odgeson said in a tone of resentment, as if they were blaming him for their hardship.

“I can.” Brian felt a sudden hatred of Odgeson, who, he realized, would never forget whose side he was on.

“That remains to be seen, Seaton.”

“It don't.” Blind obstinacy brought the words out, as well as the conviction that what he said would come to pass. Even no backing from Baker or Cheshire could not weaken his words: I'm on my own, he thought, and don't need help from anyone. “We ain't been told to write
ON ACTIVE SERVICE
on our letters for nothing, and we ain't lugging rifles this time to fire at shadows or fireflies.”

Odgeson saw what was wrong. “I'm not interested in discussing politics. All I want is to get these chaps out of that plane. In other words, while we're up here, you'll do as I tell you to do.”

“All I said,” Brian said, “was that this was the last time I'm going to be a pin on a bloody map. And I mean it. And nobody's going to stop me saying what I feel.”

“All right, so you've said it. But if you say it once more, you'll be on a charge when we get back to camp. I don't care how near the boat you are.”

Brian was the last to move, looked through the trees over the three of them forming the bottom loop of a letter S—Odgeson leading. We argue and the slob throws his rank, but I've got something to throw at him in my hand: I could put a bullet into his sanctimonious mug and nobody would be much the wiser. I can't think of any better reason for carrying this lead-heavy rifle and fifty shells. You've got a mouth to speak with and good cause for opening it, and even when what you say's got nothing to do with tearing your guts out to find that aircrew, you still get told to wrap-up. You might as well be in the grave if you don't open your trap.

Baker had taken the lead, but everyone at the same time saw an enormous wound in a tree before them, bleached by some meteor-scoop from the sky. The uppers of the tree were ripped down, flayed open and back like the rough parting on a doll's head long after Christmas. Brian's heart beat heavily, and a slice of steel was nicked into sudden glinting light by the sun. Their troubles seemed over. “It's trying to send morse to us,” he thought. Under the dark shed of the trees the hillside flattened, became more varied instead of the common up or down, and they followed a ploughed lane of cracked twigs and creepers, snapped so that sap and juice still stained the white ends and were sticky to the touch. A shallow trench of iron-coloured upturned soil started and finished after a few yards, and embedded in a bank was the battered and clawed-at nacelle of an aircraft engine. It lay well into the clay, as if it had been shot dead before swallowing the hard bite of earth it had gone mad for and crashed down from the sky to get. They stood amazed and awed, in spite of having expected eventually to find something like it, at seeing a piece of marvellous engineering planted in the middle of this primeval smell. “Now where's the rest of it?” Odgeson wondered.

“Scattered all over the mountain,” Baker said. “We'll have to sweat blood for every piece.” Brian was past caring: “What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo?”

“You're right: the bits that count can be miles away,” Odgeson said to Baker. They separated, split four ways like a signpost and agreed to meet at given whistle-signals.

Brian was alone and liked it, walked from the nacelle with a feeling of ease as if taking a stroll on a quiet afternoon. The landscape was different, humid and arduous still when he had to clamber up a bank, yet being beyond the sight and sound of the group was an immense relief. The jungle appeared less alien, and he felt that it was somehow tamed for him, that he was beginning to understand even the harmlessness and maybe necessity of it. Voluminous leafage moved back to his advance, and the underfoot smell had a richness of decay that no longer held a threat of fever, equal to fresh air since the wind was still, and it took away his incentive to peer up through the tall trunks for a pinprick glimpse of the sky. Water dripped slowly down a rockface and, finding no stream bed, he churned the soil into a red mud that hung on to his boots like manacles—much as he'd sought to enjoy every street pool with his wellington boots as a small boy.

After a quick smoke he swung himself under and over creepers, going up another bank until, reaching leveler ground at the top, he saw someone staring from between parted leaves. It was a white face below short black hair, gaunt yet with the sort of calm experience and gentleness that becomes ferocious when roused for no plain reason. Brian also noticed that he wore a green shirt, before sliding to lower ground with the intention of taking cover by a tree. But the man was already leaping, a kris poised.

An overwhelming grenade of sick fear burst in his stomach, yet within this cloud he felt himself struggling free of his pack and shouting wildly, hoping the others weren't too far off, in a long high meant-to-be-everlasting yell that carried little distance through the trees and undergrowth. His pack rolled, and while discarding he had considered the wisdom of hanging on to it; he only now knew this feeling to have been reasonable when he saw his rifle sliding away at the same time.

He reached level earth, fear and hysteria in every extremity of his limbs. Yet he felt himself existing in different zones of consciousness, waiting and watching his chance instead of backing away on the chance of escaping the deathly feel of the blade. The tree, soil, bushes, and smell of the jungle, the dank fatigue-memory of the fruitess search, became locked in his senses. The man grunted (The daft bastard thinks we're going to hurt him. Why?) and the split-second in which the kris stayed poised was a long enough time in the soundless trees to make him pleasantly surprised at taking in so much detail—a lightning speed of animal assessment extracted from his unwritten nightmare journal of afterwards.

The wavy blade of the kris was rusty, as if it had been left uncovered in jungle rain, though it was grey near the edge to show it had lately been sharpened. I'm finished, he thought—a short message flashed by the enemy part of himself—I'm going to be killed. He shouted out in terror, catching the man's emotion, who breathed heavily and grunted as he struck. His hands went out, as if the fires of survival had set themselves alight in his brain.

Both sprang together: his arms sped with uncanny precision towards the blade—an old ruse of unarmed combat taught him by Bill Eddison at the cardboard factory years ago. He fastened both wrist and elbow of the wiry arm gripping the kris, and pressed them with all strength away and backwards. Terrified that the trick had worked, the sweat of control poured from him and he fought as much to keep up his determination to carry it through as to vanquish the actual danger.

He fixed his eyes on what was visible of the blade, which stayed so long in place that he had a desire to laugh at the possibility of it's being glued there, resisting this weakness because it would rob him of strength. The man grunted and kicked, swayed the trapped arm and struck out with the one still free, but Brian ignored the smashing of his ankles, and the kris didn't stay long enough in place for the man to think of trying to reach it by the blade-end. The more Brian ground his teeth and pressed, the easier it became to make his attacker drop the kris. It seemed a stupid task, as if the man's arm would break, because all the brute force of his labouring days was behind the pressure and he knew that no one could stand it for long. He wanted to laugh and let the arm go, tell the man to blow town and not be so bleeding daft. The kris slid into the leaves and he pushed the man back, rammed like lightning with his fist and boot, then drew away. His fear returned now and, gasping and stumbling against his pack and rifle, he watched the man free himself from the bush and search among the undergrowth.

Brian picked up the rifle: he's a nut case and might try something else, but if he does I'll bash him over the skull with this. I'll plaster his loaf all over the trees. Why did he want to come for me like that? He drew back the bolt, slotted it in, a mechanical noise whose significance he only realized as its clear echo died away, retrieving a picture of a dog by his DF hut lying like a length of rag and floorcloth with a hole in its head. The Chinese dropped the kris, stayed a dozen yards off with lifted hands, close enough for Brian to see the left side of his lips twitching on an otherwise hard and resigned face. What's he put his hands up for? Why don't he get running? He drew back the catch to safety, unwilling to press the trigger by accident and be brought up for murder: that's a charge Odgeson wain't be able to put me on. The silence grew: Brian shifted his stance, cracked twigs.