Pumo yelled Spitalny’s name, but Spitalny only turned his head and kept on running. Running with his head turned, he looked like an image on a frieze.
The three men disappeared into the cave.
Poole turned back to the village and saw Tim Underhill trudging toward him through the smoke.
Both men heard a muffled rattle of fire come from the cave. It died with such swiftness it seemed never to have been. Behind them came the snapping and crunching of a hootch falling in on itself. The villagers continued wailing. From the cave came again the muffled sound of an M-16 firing in bursts. Poole’s mind and body unfroze, and he began to run through the smoke toward the cave. He dimly saw the old man who must have been the village chief stand up in the middle of the circle. He held the charred piece of paper in his hands, and was yelling something in a squeaky high-pitched voice.
The brush still burned, sending runners of sparks along the blackened stalks. Here and there the ground itself was burning. Trees had keeled over and collapsed into themselves like cigarette ash. A cloud of smoke blocked the narrow entrance of the cave, and as Poole ran toward it, he heard enraged painful screams coming from behind the unmoving cloud.
A second later Victor Spitalny came windmilling through the smoke. His face was bright red and he was screaming as if he had been tortured. Spitalny moved in an irregular series of agitated, aimless hops and jumps, like a man being given a series of powerful electrical shocks. He must have been hit somewhere, but there was no blood on him. He was uttering a series of high-pitched syllables which at length resolved themselves into “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Then he lost his footing and fell into the ash near the mouth of the cave. He began to thrash around, incapable of controlling himself enough to get back on his feet. Poole pulled his groundcloth out of his pack, flipped it open, and bent over Spitalny to roll him up inside it. Raised red welts covered Spitalny’s face and neck. His eyes were swollen shut.
“Wasps!” Spitalny shrieked. “All over me!”
Through the smudges where the hootches had been, Poole could see all the villagers standing up, straining to look toward them.
He yelled a question about the lieutenant and Dengler, but Spitalny kept shaking and jerking. Spanky Burrage had knelt down and was pounding the groundcloth all over Spitalny’s chest, flipped him over and began beating on his back. Then he burst out laughing. “Fool, there ain’t nothin’ in there but you.”
“Look inside here and count all the dead wasps,” Spitalny said.
Poole stood up just as Dengler emerged through the cave’s narrow opening. He looked whiter than ever, almost grey under the dirt. His rifle dangled from his right hand, and his eyes seemed blurry with shock or exhaustion.
“Koko,” Dengler said, and half a dozen men looked at each other.
“What?” Poole asked. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“You waste Elvis?” asked Spanky Burrage.
“Nothing happened,” Dengler said. He took a few steps, stirring up sparks and ashes with his boots, and looked over the expanse of destroyed earth to the old people, all of them now standing in the center of what had been their village and looking straight back at him.
Poole heard the villagers shouting something, but it took him a moment to separate the voices enough to make out the words. What they were yelling was “Numbah ten!”
“Who was firing?”
“The good guys,” Dengler said, giving a faint smile to the reeking, smoke-filled air between himself and the village.
“Is the lieutenant okay?” Poole wondered what he really hoped the answer to that question would be.
Dengler shrugged.
“You numbah ten!” came from the villagers, repeated in a ragged random chaos of high-pitched voices.
Poole realized that at some point he would no longer be able to delay going into that opening in the rock. He would go in and a child would stand before him holding out its hand in the darkness.
“You know something?” Dengler spoke in a monotone. “I was right.”
“You were right about what?”
“I was right about God.”
Now Spitalny stood in the sunlight with his shirt off, breathing hard. Red swellings puffed out his shoulders, arms, and back, and his face was a collection of large, red, angry-looking lumps. He looked like a plateful of yams. Norm Peters had begun to spread a greasy white ointment over Spitalny’s shoulders.
Poole turned away from Burrage and walked across the smoking ground toward the medic and Spitalny. After a second Burrage came too, as unwilling as Poole to go into the cave.
Poole had taken only a few steps when he heard the approaching helicopter and looked up toward a gnat- sized black dot in the sky. Wrong, he thought, go away, go back.
4
“I can’t figure this out,” Peters was saying. “Will you look at this? It doesn’t make sense, not to me it doesn’t.”
“Is Dengler out?” Spitalny asked.
Poole nodded. “What doesn’t make sense?” But as soon as he had asked the question, he saw. Spitalny’s narrow sharp-featured face had begun to reappear as the swellings sank down into it. His eyes were visible now, and his forehead no longer bulged out in a series of lumpy corrugations but ascended almost smoothly through eruptions like undeclared pimples to his black widow’s peak.
“These aren’t wasp stings,” Peters said. “They’re hives.”
“Fuck you, they ain’t wasp stings,” said Spitalny. “The lieutenant ain’t outa there yet. You better wrap yourself up in something and drag him out.”
“Even if they were wasp stings, the stuff I’m putting on wouldn’t reduce the swelling, it’d just reduce the pain. You see how these things are going down?”
“Suck my dick,” Spitalny said. He held out his skinny arms and examined them—the swellings had shrunk to the size and shape of leeches.
“You tell me,” Poole said. The helicopter had grown in the distance to the size of a housefly.
“Wasps,” Spitalny insisted. “Man, I’ll bet the Lost Boss is in there, down and out, man. We gonna get us a new lieutenant.”
He looked at Poole with the sort of expression a dog wears when you are made to realize that it too can think. “The good part of this is obvious, isn’t it? You can’t court-martial a dead man.”
Poole watched the poisoned red lumps shrink into Spitalny’s filthy sallow skin.
“There’s one way out of this, and you know what it is as much as I do. We put it all on the lieutenant. Which is exactly where it oughta be.”
The helicopter was huge in the sky now, descending toward them through the harsh sunlight. Beneath it the grass flattened out in sealike waves and ripples. Beyond the ruined village, beyond the ditch, lay the meadow where the oxen grazed. Far to the left, the forested hillside they had descended appeared to continue the waves and ripples caused by the helicopter far out beyond the valley.
Then he heard Harry Beevers’ voice, loud and jubilant. “Poole! Underhill! Give me two men!” When he saw that they were gaping at him, he grinned. “Jackpot!”
He came striding toward them. The man was
Poole motioned to Burrage and Pumo, who began to move toward the cave.
“I want everything out of that cave, and I want it piled up right out here where everybody can see it. Troops, we’re going to make the six o’clock news.”
Troops? Beevers had never seemed more like an alien visitor who had learned earthling “ways” from television programs.
“You numbah ten!” an old woman shouted at them.
“Number ten on your programs, number one in your hearts,” Lieutenant Beevers said to Poole, then turned
