Afterburn by Colin Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

shut. The soldiers kept a watchful eye over all of this activity. Chickens strutted about the packed earth. An old man smoothed long lengths of green bamboo with a double-handled drawknife. The food-gathering and fortification activity may have meant the Vietcong feared American ground forces were closing in. They had positioned Soviet M-46 130-millimeter field guns on the perimeter of the village. Two Chinese trucks sat axle-deep in dry mud near the edge of the forest. Perhaps the village lay along a spur line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, within ten or fifteen miles of the Laos border, one way or the other. If American forces were near, and if the rough-cut jungle roads remained difficult, air recon would pick up the trucks.
     
    A DAY LATER they took him out of the cage and sat him down in a hootch. The B-52 pilot was lying on a mat, breathing faintly, his exhalations not moving the flies about his mouth and eyes.
    "You have to help that man."
    The B-52 pilot was dragged outside into the sun.
    Then they started on him again. The older man with the slim book.
    "You say what is F-4 approach altitude."
    He shook his head.
    "What is approach speed? How much fuel fly from Ubon to Hanoi? You must say."
    When he refused again, they tied his arms tighter behind his back, so tight his elbows touched. They bound his feet and connected a rope from his ankles to the ropes around his wrists. Then they tied another rope to his wrists and ran this up his back and around his Adam's apple. Any movement tightened one rope or another, causing him to feel the connections of bones and cartilage and muscle. Something in his back, he knew now, was broken.
    He didn't say anything for the first hour. He was trying to think about it. He was trying to understand the pain so that he could find a way not to feel it. He believed that he was using his best thinking, but it was not working. When he tried to sleep, they poured hot water on his head. Not boiling but very hot. His thinking was no good now. The soldiers put a stick through the ropes and carried him back to his hole in the ground.
    It rained. He licked the slats of his cage. Every minute that I live, I can live another. Soldiers stood next to the cage and laughed.
     
    A DAY , a night, a day, a night, perhaps another day, followed by another night, or was that day a night previous, or was that night a day ago the same one from which he'd just awoken? He tried to count sunrises and sunsets, but his systems of remembrance collapsed into their own complexity, and he was left muttering a number, forgetting what it signified and why he cared. His limbs had stiffened so that he could not quite stand. Even after the ropes were removed, he couldn't bring his arms forward of his ribs. The ropes had rubbed through his flight suit into his skin. Each time the soldiers untied him, they hit him. The tied position became easier. He hated it but he also waited for it. His lips were crusted. He was caked with mud, not the silty brown mud of his youth (not the mud near the river where they played on the tire-swing, arcing high over the water, plunging into the dirty warm current, scrambling up the slick banks to the swing again), but lumpy ooze in which red worms twitched. The villagers trudged by in their conical hats, and the children no longer found him interesting. His shit went from soft to hard. The pain in his stomach started and he would follow it as it dropped through his bowels, and when the ropes came off, he would pray that he could shit the pain out. When he was dragged from his cage, they rinsed him with a bucket of water and put a wooden bowl near his face. Bamboo gruel, rice, dead flies. He was expected to eat it like a dog, and he did.
     
    SOME BOYS POKED A STICK into the body of the B-52 pilot and it exploded in gas and stink.
     
    THERE WAS GREAT HURRY. There was no hurry. Night and then day. He knew that.
     
    THEY BROKE HIS ARMS and he said yes, he flew a plane that dropped