‘Yessir.’
‘Meantime I’m sending an extra detail. And I want you up on that hut roof with your eyes in the back of your head, Wace, and not let anyone near this place till the patrol gets here. Not anyone! O.K.?’
‘What about the extra detail, sir?’
‘What about it?’
‘How do I recognise it, sir?’
The officer looked at him sharply, then nodded: ‘I’ll be back with them myself. I’ll flash my lights twice at the end of the track. Now get on the roof!’ He turned and jumped into the jeep, and was already backing it round as Wace shouted, ‘McCulsky!’
One of the men at the end of the hut came lumbering through the mud, not bothering to salute. ‘What’s the beef, sarge?’
‘You heard the man. They’re sending up an extra detail. Maybe they don’t trust us.’ He looked at the steel doors behind him and shrugged: ‘What the hell they got in there, anyway? He said a full colonel and a forklift truck to move the stuff! Must be something mighty special.’
‘Maybe it’s the latest issue of Playboy?’ McCulsky’s grin was invisible under his helmet.
‘Yeah, so why they flyin’ it out then?’ Wace said irritably. He glanced up at the roof: a good twelve feet high, with no parapet, no cover of any kind. Those motherin’ big brass-arses from MACV! he thought sourly. Someday he was going to get even with some of the officers that ran this airfield. He turned to McCulsky. ‘Help me up,’ he said, putting the gun on to safety and slinging it round his neck. McCulsky cupped his hands into a stirrup and Wace sprang on to his shoulders, almost snapping off a length of guttering as he pulled himself up over the edge.
He knew at once that the roof was not safe. It was a rough concrete surface, slightly convex to allow the rain to drain off, but so badly built that more than half of it was under at least an inch of water; and as he took a step forward he felt the whole structure give under his weight like a diving board. Wace had lived long enough on a farm to take a simple pride in a job well done, and his anger switched now to embrace the whole local population. Good Federal taxes handed out in subcontracts to these goddam gooks! he thought. The concrete had been so watered down that it was more like plaster.
He took another step and there was a dull cracking sound under his boot. He flung his arms out with a yell, as a great slice of roof came away with him, and he fell into darkness.
He landed half upside down, looking up at McCulsky’s big helmeted face hanging above in the jagged frame of what was left of the roof.
‘What happened, sarge? You O.K.?’
Another set of flares had burst in the sky, this time very much closer, and in the few seconds of livid purple light, Wace was able to sit up and take stock of his surroundings. His first impression was that the hut was empty, the rectangular walls of the same featureless breezeblock as on the outside, the floor spattered with loose concrete and a slush of rainwater.
‘You O.K., sarge?’ McCulsky called again.
Wace made an effort to haul himself up, wincing with pain. ‘Get a light, will yer?’ he shouted, ‘I think I’ve gone an’ busted my foot.’ He sat back and began to swear, his legs stretched in front of him, his weight supported on his hands. ‘Motherin’ gooks!’ he groaned, listening to McCulsky scrambling down the wall outside. He looked down suddenly. His hand had slipped under a sheet of torn paper. The flares were dying slowly and in their flickering glow he noticed now that the whole floor seemed to be covered in paper — uneven black rectangles of it, stretching away like badly-laid flagstones. He examined the torn sheet under his hands. It was stiff and charcoal-grey with a slightly furry texture like sealskin, which he recognised as the waterproof wrappings they use for ammunition cartons.
But these were no ordinary cartons that Wace was lying on. He had only a glimpse of what lay underneath, before the flares died altogether; and for several seconds he just sat there in the dark, his hand still holding the torn paper, his ears beginning to sing.
A powerful torch beam came on above, dazzling him. Instinctively he pushed the flap back into place, as McCulsky called: ‘Can you make it to your feet, sarge?’
Wace put his hand across his eyes. ‘Just drop the light.’ It fell a few feet from him, rolling away into a corner, and he began to crawl painfully after it, his fingers tracing the tight-packed edges under the paper, each about the size of a small brick. He was panting when he reached the torch and turned the small square of light on to the wrappings under his hands. ‘Hey sarge!’ he heard McCulsky cry, but the voice was a long way off. Wace’s fingernail was already sawing through the stiff silken paper.
‘Sarge, it’s the extra detail!’
But this time Wace did not even hear. He was kneeling now, staring at the fresh slice he had just torn in the package under him. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle!’
PART 1: ‘IN A COUNTRY THAT NEVER WAS’
CHAPTER 1
Murray Wilde was almost the last passenger to leave the plane, followed only by an old woman with blue-black hair and a pig, which had spent the two-hour flight strapped upright with an extra seatbelt, its nether quarters wrapped in sackcloth.
He was a long-limbed man of about thirty-five in a biscuit-coloured suit, carrying a
