Afterburn by Colin Harrison Read Free Book Online

exhausted, but finally his hands were working. He figured the soldiers must be headed toward Laos, going nearly due west and toward the spine of mountains that marked the eastern border. They climbed higher along the spur as the light failed. He needed food and sleep. The night was clear; behind him, to the south and east, he saw a wide expanse, dark and undulating. The soldiers dropped the other pilot to the ground and camped. They ate cold sticky rice and took turns sleeping. He was made to sit near a ledge, his arms roped to a tree, his back grinding when he shifted. They gave him one cupful of rice.
    Sometime during the night a huge soundless explosion bloomed to the south, maybe thirty miles away. Just a sudden ball of light, followed by lesser explosions, each eerily beautiful, rendered silent by the distance. In the morning he was not sure if he had dreamed them, or even slept.
    He missed his children, their mouths and noses and eyes. Daddy, Daddy.
     
    THE NEXT DAY they came to a village. He was dragged to a livestock pen with a galvanized trough of water. Three huge water buffalo stood to one side, hoof-deep in mud, switching their tails, the earth around them pocked by great flat turds. Using the same small book the first officer had used, an older Vietcong soldier tried to teach him the history of Vietnam through the millennia, fighting aggressors: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japanese Fascists, the French imperialists, and now the Americans. Each foreign country, the soldier said in an up-and-down voice, had some pretext for war—the conquest of spice routes, Catholicism, the French mission civilisatrice , the "protection of freedom"—and each time the Vietnamese (the Vietcong saw no difference between the North and South Vietnamese, only that one part was trying to free the other from the Americans and their "puppets") repelled these attempts. "We fight for ten, twenty, fifty year. Your government want war over quickly. No know Ho Chi Minh! We lose ten men for every one of you, we still win."
    Reading set phrases, the man insisted that Charlie appear on Hanoi television and renounce the United States. A crowd gathered outside the pen, faces crowded to the slats. More questions. Approach altitudes, fuel requirements. Decoy formations of missions over Hanoi. He shook his head. The man sang on, getting angrier. The villagers outside the pen began to yell, and the men forced his head closer to the trough, where a scum of dead flies, manure, and buffalo hair floated.
    "You say!"
    He shook his head.
    They shoved him deep into the trough. He counted to fifteen.
    He was yanked out of the water. "Say! What formation!"
    They forced him under again. He held his breath, a matter of concentration, conserve, relax, do not use oxygen . . . surely they would bring him up . . . his lungs burned . . . purple darkness crowded his mind . . . They pulled him up from the trough. His breath burst.
    "Say!"
    They gave him no chance to respond. This time his lungs began to burn almost immediately. He could feel water trickling between his lips, his knees sagged, his head was expanding . . .
    They forced him underwater dozens of times, then suddenly stopped and dragged him to a small pit caged over with bamboo near the buffalo paddock. He could walk at a stoop. Here they left him alone, though some of the villagers approached the cage to stare. He forced his head against the bars on the high side of the pit, where he could see the village and surrounding area. In a marshy field below, young women winnowed rice by tossing it on flat baskets. Soldiers with machine guns over their shoulders stood idly by, talking, smoking small pipes. Farther up the hill, a group of villagers dug into the mountain with hand tools. The entrance to the shelter was reinforced with wooden beams laid across one another; women pushing wheelbarrows emerged from the hole. Other villagers poured rice into burlap bags, which they then sewed