The Naked and the Dead (89 page)

            Gotta go. He said this automatically but it released new currents of will. The resistance he had created inside himself mounted against it and then collapsed. He took a step forward, then another, and the effect was broken. He moved on down the crude footpath the Japanese had worn in the grove, debouched after a minute or two into a clearing beyond the forest. He was in the pass now.

            The cliffs of Mount Anaka had taken a turn to the right, were parallel again to his route. On the other side, to his left, were some steep, almost precipitous hills which rose abruptly into the Watamai Range. The channel through the mountains was about two hundred yards wide, an ascending avenue lined by tall buildings. It was uneven with rolls and dips, great boulders and slattern mounds of earth, pocked here and there in the rock crevices with spates of foliage like the weeds that grow from the cracks in concrete. The moonlight was clearing the invisible peak of Mount Anaka, lancing downward into the pass and dappling the rocks and knolls with shadows. It was all very bare, very cold; Martinez felt a thousand miles from the stifling velvet night of the jungle. He moved out from the protection of the grove, advanced a few hundred feet and knelt in the shadow of a boulder. Behind him, near the horizon, he could see the Southern Cross, and instinctively he noted its direction. The pass ran due north.

            Slowly, reluctantly, he moved up through the defile, proceeding cautiously along the rocky littered floor of the pass. After a few hundred yards the pass bore to the left and then to the right again, narrowing considerably. In places the shadow of the mountain covered the corridor almost completely. He progressed at an uneven pace, loping forward almost recklessly for many yards at a time and then pausing fearfully for seconds which elapsed into minutes while he lashed himself to advance again. Every insect, every tiny animal he roused in its burrow startled him, unmanned him with the noise of its movement. He played a continual deception with himself, deciding to go on only to the next bend in the pass, and when he had reached it and the ground traversed had been harmless, he would pick another objective and proceed on to it. In this way he covered perhaps a little over a mile in less than an hour, climbing upward almost all the time. He began to wonder how long the pass might be; despite his experience he was teasing himself with the old trick of imagining that each crest before him was the final one and beyond would be the jungle, the rear of the Japanese lines, and the sea.

            As time passed without incident, as more and more of the pass was set behind him, he grew more confident, more impatient. His halts became less frequent, the distance he would traverse each time became greater. At one point the pass was overgrown with tall kunai grass for a quarter of a mile, and he plodded through it confidently, knowing he could not be observed.

            Until now there had been no place where the Japanese could have established an outpost, and his caution, the elaborate observation he made, had been more from terror, more from the unassailable silence of the mountain and the pass, than from any suspicion of an enemy site. But the terrain was changing. The foliage had become thicker and covered more area; in several places it was extensive enough to conceal a small bivouac. He scouted them cursorily, entering the little groves in the shadow, moving in a few yards, and then waiting for several minutes to see if he could hear the inevitable sounds of men sleeping. When nothing moved but the leaves and birds and animals, he would stalk out and continue his advance up the pass.

            At a turn it narrowed again; the opposing cliff walls were not more than fifty yards apart here, and in several places along the route the defile was blocked by a patch of jungle. It took him many minutes to pass through each grove and the strain of passing through the brush without making noise was great. He reached a section which was comparatively open again and moved forward with a sense of release.

            But at another turn he saw before him a tiny valley limited by the cliffs on either side and plugged by a small wood which grew completely across the gap. In the daylight it would have a fine field of view. It was the best position he had seen for an outpost, and he was certain, immediately and instinctively, that the Japanese had retreated to here. He felt it with a start of his limbs, an acceleration of his heart. Martinez examined the grove from the lee of a rock, staring across the moonlight, his face pinched and tense. There was a band of deep shadow at his right where the cliffs filleted into the base of the pass, and smoothly, not allowing himself to think about it, he glided around the rock, and crept along in the darkness on his hands and knees, keeping his face low. With fascination he found himself watching the ragged borderline between the moonlight and shadow, and unaccountably he felt himself moving toward the light once or twice. It seemed alive, with an existence as acute as his; his throat was tight, almost swelling, and he watched the shimmer of the moonlight with a dumb absorption. The grove came nearer, was twenty yards away from him, now ten. He paused at the edge of it, and examined its periphery for a machine-gun emplacement or a foxhole. In the darkness he could see nothing but the dark bulk of the trees.

            Once more Martinez entered a grove and stood waiting for sounds. He could not hear anything at first, and he advanced a cautious step, parting the brush with his hands, and then moved forward another and another. His foot trod on a patch of worn earth, explored it with fright. He knelt and patted the earth, fingered the small leaves of a bush at his side. The ground was trampled, and the bush had been beaten to one side.

            He was on a newly formed trail.

            To corroborate it, a man coughed in his sleep not five yards away. Martinez stiffened, almost jumped as though he had touched something hot. The flesh on his face became stretched and taut. He could not have uttered a sound at that moment.

            Automatically he took a step backward, and heard someone else turning over in his blankets. He did not dare to move for fear of swiping a branch and arousing them. For at least a minute he was wholly paralyzed. He felt it impossible to turn back. He could not have explained it; his fear of retreating from the grove was great but it was not so intense as his terror at the thought of moving forward. And yet he could not go back. A part of his mind played with incredible rapidity the scene where he would tell Croft.

            "Japbait no fuggin good."

            But there was something wrong with moving ahead. He could not perceive it clearly, his head felt as if it were churning through oil, but there was a reason. He could not think it out. With loathing, with a suppressed hysteria of his flesh as if he were trodding barefoot over a field of bloated maggots, he extended his leg, and then the other one, pacing forward with separate violent demands on his mind. In a minute he advanced not more than ten feet, the perspiration smarting his eyes. He felt as if he could detect each droplet starting out of his pores, joining with the others to wash down the damp river bed of the lines in his face and body.

            One thing he realized intuitively. The Japanese would have tramped out only two trails by now. One would be perpendicular to the pass, a yard or two behind the border of the grove, facing the valley. The other would lead through the grove to the other side, joining the first one in a T. He was on the head of the T now, and would have to progress along it until he reached the stem. He could never go through the brush; even the slight noises he made would be heard, and there was always the chance of blundering into something.

            He crept along, on his hands and knees again. The seconds passed like individual units, almost as if he heard a clock ticking. He could have sobbed every time he heard a man mutter in his sleep. They were all around him! He seemed to exist in several parts now; there was the sore remote protest of his palms and kneecap, the choking swollen torment of his throat, and the unbearable awareness of his brain. He was very close to the final swooning relaxation a man feels when he is being beaten unconscious and no longer cares whether he can get up. Very far away he could hear the murmuring of the jungle in the night.

            At a curve in the trail he halted, peered around, and almost screamed. A man was sitting at a machine gun about three feet away.

            Martinez's head darted back. He lay on the ground waiting for the soldier to pivot the machine gun, fire at him. But nothing happened. He peered around again and realized the Jap had not seen him, was sitting at a slight angle to him. Behind the machine gunner was the stem of the T. He would have to get past him, and it was impossible.

            Now, Martinez knew what had been wrong. Of course. They would have a guard posted along the trail. Why hadn't he thought of it?
El juicio.
With all his fright was another fear to be examined later; like the murderer remembering all the obvious things he had forgotten while he committed his crime, Martinez felt a dull dread leavened into his terror. What else,
por Dios,
what else? He peered again at the machine gunner, watching him with an absorbed fascination. If he desired he could reach out and touch him. The soldier was a young man, almost a boy, with blank young features, dull half-closed eyes, and a thin mouth. In the moonlight that sifted through the borders of the grove he looked half asleep.

            Martinez had a sense of unreality. What was to keep him from touching him, from greeting him? They were men. The entire structure of the war wavered in his brain for a moment, almost tottered, and then was restored by a returning wash of fear. If he touched him he would be killed. But it seemed unbelievable.

            He could not go back now. It was impossible to turn his body around without making some small sound, enough in any case to alert the machine gunner. And it was impossible to pass him; the trail skirted the lip of the machine-gun emplacement. He would have to kill him. Even at the thought Martinez's overpitched senses rebelled. He lay there shuddering, conscious suddenly of how weak, how tired, he felt. There seemed no strength, no capacity for effort left in his limbs. He was reduced to peering through the foliage at the moonlight on the soldier's face.

            He had to hurry. At any moment the machine gunner might stand up and go to awaken the next man for his turn at guard, and he would be discovered. He had to kill him right away.

            And again there seemed something wrong in his calculations. He felt that if only he could shake his head or flex his limbs this would become clear to him, but now he was caught. Martinez reached back for his trench knife, slipped it softly out of the scabbard. The handle felt uncomfortable in his palm, alien; although he had used it a hundred times for other purposes, opening cans or cutting something, he did not know how to hold it now. The blade kept reflecting a sliver of moonlight, and he held it under his forearm at last, staring with terrified stricken eyes at the soldier in the gun hole. Already he felt as if he knew him well; each of his slow leisurely motions traced a familiar route in Martinez's mind -- as the Jap picked at his nose delicately a grin was wrenched from Martinez's mouth. He was not even aware of it except for the fatigue in his cheek muscles.

            I go kill him, he commanded himself, but nothing happened. He remained lying on the ground with the knife concealed beneath his arm, the damp earth of the trail chilling his body slowly. At alternate instants he felt in fever and then cold. The moment had become unreal to him again, and he had the qualified controlled terror that he knew in his nightmares. It was not real, and he shuddered once more, thinking of turning back. Slowly -- it took him over a minute -- he got to his hands and knees, brought one foot under him, and swayed there, no more certain of attacking or retreating than a coin on edge about to fall. He became conscious of the knife in his hand again.

            "Never trust a goddam Mex when he's got a knife."

            It spilled into his mind, a long-concealed fragment from a conversation he had heard between two Texans, and he felt a choked resentment. Goddam lie, and then it was lost in the realization of what he had to do. He swallowed. He had never felt so numb in all his life. Behind it all was a confused bitterness toward the knife, an almost paralyzing fear, and the moonlight tantalizing him. He searched for a pebble, found one, and before he was quite willing his fingers had flipped it away to the other side of the machine-gun emplacement.

            The Jap soldier turned at the sound, put his back to him. Martinez took a step forward silently, halted, and then lashed his free forearm around the soldier's neck. Dumbly, almost leisurely, he placed the point of his knife in the angle between the man's throat and shoulder, and pushed it in with all his force.

            The Jap thrashed in his arms like an unwilling animal being picked up by its master, and Martinez felt only a detached irritation. Why was he making so much trouble? The knife would not go in far enough, and he tugged at it until it was loose, and then plunged it down again. The soldier writhed for a moment in his arms, and then collapsed.

            With him went all of Martinez's strength. He looked stupidly at him, reached down for the knife, and tried to pull it free, but his fingers were trembling. He felt blood dribbling over his palm, and he started, wiping his hand on his trousers. Had anyone heard them? Martinez's ears were recalling the noise of their struggle as if it had been an explosion he had seen from some distance away whose report he was waiting for now.

            Was anyone moving? He could hear nothing, and realized that they had made very little sound.

            And then he felt the reaction. The dead sentry was loathsome to him, something to be avoided; he had the mixture of relief and revulsion a man feels after chasing a cockroach across a wall and finally squashing him. It affected him exactly that way and not much more intensely. He shuddered because of the drying blood on his hands, but he would have shuddered as much from the roach's pulp. Abruptly, the only important thing was to move on, and he darted down the stem trail, almost running.