It had sounded so simple, so coldly logical. Now it seemed highly unlikely and absurd, infuriating in its stupidity and typical American arrogance. Sisyphus had been yet another cruel fraud invented by the United States Army…
The Lizard Man, the obdurate North Vietnamese commandant of La Hoc Noh, raised a white stone game marker and decisively put one of Hudson 's black stones in check.
There was a hard
The North Vietnamese prison guards, all dressed in muddy black pajamas, tipped homemade rice wine from long-necked green bottles. They snorted out ridiculing laughter at this obvious mismatch of competitors.
The camp commandant was frightening, swift, sure of his game moves. He was on a different skill level, Hudson understood that.
According to the strict rules of Go, the game should have been played with a sizable handicap called
“Yow play!” the Lizard Man once again screeched. “Yow play now!”
He wanted his victory now-the cruel bloodletting, the slow death for the loser in the festering jungle swamps just beyond the prison camp.
The guards were physical extensions of their leader's personality. They, too, became impatient now, grumbling and growling for faster action, like spectators at a cockfight who weren't getting the fix of swift, bloody action they needed.
David Hudson finally made a ridiculous, arbitrary move on the game board. He smiled crookedly at the commandant, as if he'd suddenly turned the game in his favor.
“
The Lizard Man was momentarily confused, clearly so. Then he howled shrill, birdlike laughter.
The Vietnamese soldiers howled high-pitched laughter as well. They inched even closer to the two players as the commandant made a surprisingly conservative move with one of his white stones.
Disappointment immediately etched itself across the soldiers' faces. Here was uncertainty for the first time. David Hudson was amazed at the commandant's sudden hesitation.
“Yow!” Lizard Man screamed. “Fast play! Yow play riii now!”
“Fuck you, asshole… Watch this one.”
A faint smile, hollow and incomprehensible, slipped across David Hudson's blistered white lips. Once again he made a bizarre and seemingly pointless and foolish game move.
“You play!” he said in a barely audible whisper. “You play
The Lizard Man squinted and studied the exquisite, highly reflective teak board more closely. He gazed into Hudson 's bloodshot eyes, then looked down again at the Go board.
The North Vietnamese guards crushed in closer.
This was getting better, much more dramatic, finally. A real game was starting to develop.
The soldiers began to whisper conspiratorially among themselves. They were like the professional gamblers, the unsavory flotsam always crowded into the fan-tan parlors of Saigon.
Something interesting and very curious was happening in the game now. Even the wily camp commandant was confused, troubled for the moment by his American opponent, by his seemingly unfathomable moves.
For the first time, one of the prison guards offered a side bet on the American soldier. The commandant threw the soldier a threatening glance.
Suddenly, then, so smoothly and so coolly, as if he were performing an ordinary movement such as lighting a cigarette, Captain David Hudson removed the revolver from one of the Vietnamese soldiers' loosely dangling holsters.
Hudson swiveled back to face the hated Lizard Man.
Once again, the faint half-crazed smile crossed David Hudson's blistered lips. “Fucker. Miserable shit fucker.”
A heartbeat later, the revolver thundered.
It was like an army field cannon in the tiny bamboo room. White smoke blossomed everywhere around the game table.
The commandant's small head flew back. Bone cracked hard against the wooden wall's main support post. The commandant's military hat sailed away, saucer style, across the smoking hut.
A dark hole gushed in the Vietnamese officer's forehead. The Lizard Man's mouth dropped open, to show broken, ugly yellow teeth. A lathering, pale white tongue flopped out.
David Hudson reflexively fired the service revolver a second time. And a third time. He felt like a confused child-playing with a toy gun.
He thrust the point of the revolver directly into the frozen wide eyes of a guard. The man's face shattered like delicate pottery. Skull, flesh, bone, flew apart.
He shot another guard in the throat.
The two remaining guards had dropped their near empty liquor bottles; they were struggling frantically to get out their holstered revolvers.
The next three deafening gunshots tore through a chest, pierced the other's stomach, then his heart. The foul-smelling, boiling jungle hut was suddenly a bloody, smoking abattoir.
Shakily, David Hudson ran outside the command hut. He was limping badly, as if his legs belonged to someone else. He stumbled, scrambled forward, on the unfamiliar, unsteady supports. His legs were like wooden stilts.
Every object he saw now seemed part of a blurred, impossible dream. Everywhere he looked, there was harsh unreality. A late afternoon sun flared orange and bright red over the dense wall of jungle green. Screeching monkeys skittered away. Insects buzzed angrily between the trees.
The humidity, stifling, choking, filled his lungs. He thought he would surely drown in the moist weight of this awful air.
Machine-gun fire suddenly erupted from a bamboo guard post overhead, a control post that subtly blended into the dark green of the jungle.
David Hudson awkwardly weaved back and forth across the exposed exercise yard. Prisoners cheered from their locked cells, their bamboo animal cages.
He ducked into the thick jungle that kept threatening to swallow up the prison camp and served as a natural barrier against escape for all the prisoners. David Hudson lunged forward. He tripped ahead, anyway.
He had no choice now.
Nowhere else to go but into the terrifying jungle.
Death in the jungle.
He was breathless, crashing clumsily against trees and through thick, tangled jungle brush. He kept running, faster than he thought possible. Dizziness grabbed and clawed at him. Whirling bright, then rolling colors came. Shivering cold flashes. Diarrhea. Vomit that wouldn't stop flowing. He kept running, zigzagging forward. As the jungle foliage got thicker, the trail became darker-almost complete blackness less than three hundred yards from the Vietnamese camp.
He ran forward, anyway. A half mile, a mile-he had no idea of time or space now.
A cold, paralyzing thought struck him. They weren't even chasing him… They weren't even giving chase.
Hudson continued running-falling and picking himself up.
Then it was so dark that it seemed as if there were suddenly nothing left in the world. Hudson kept running all the same. Falling, picking himself up. Falling, picking up. Falling, falling, falling…
A song from the Doors played in his head: “Horse Latitudes”… Then nothing at all…
Hudson woke with a nightmarish jolt. A scream never quite made it out of his tight, dry larynx.
Long grass was stuck to one side of his face. Sticky, gummy tears had formed in his half-closed eyes. Fat black flies had attached themselves to his lips and nostrils. Hundreds of black flies were plastered all over his body.
Trying to right himself, he nearly laughed. It was exactly as he'd always believed this putrid affair called life to be: resolutely unfair, pointless in the end, and in the beginning, and in the middle, too. Anyone with any reason could see the absurd eternal pattern. David Hudson fell away into the unrelenting darkness once again. “Horse Latitudes” played again. Why that fucking song now?
Strangely for him, the incessant fighting, the mind-numbing combat, the suffering and death in Vietnam, had worked for a time against the bitter truth of his life. It had distracted him from his natural cynicism, the overwhelming pessimism. his natural self-destructiveness.
Just before his capture, he'd been secretly dreading going back to the States, trying mentally to fit himself into civilian life somehow, even into the droning subexistence of the peacetime army… He knew a lot of others who felt as he did. A lot of his men felt that way…
He woke again. Wildly confused. Unnaturally alert. He had to concentrate everything, every trace of energy he had now. He wrestled with himself to stay awake, to hold on to a thin, sane lifeline. Tormenting waves, disconnected images and thoughts, kept coming. Ghosts just beyond his full comprehension. Raging rivers of shadowy, half-formed images, words, hellish fantasy shapes. Almost a psychedelic experience. As if he'd been smoking the strongest Thai sticks. Shooting scag… There was no sense of real time or spatial relationships out here. He was on sensory deprivation overload. He had this shifting, disturbing sense of place.
He began to gag. His entire body squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and painfully released.
This was so horrible, too horrible, too much for anyone to take much longer. What did it feel like when you cracked wide open?… The severe gagging stopped as soon as he put it out of his mind.
David Hudson began to scream. He was swimming toward some kind of release. Eternity was rushing forward-leaping at him in the form of a sea of leeches; screeching, clawing monkeys; indistinct, shadowy jungle insects; and reptiles. He screamed for hours and hours. The hallucinations were so powerful and real, they became his only reality.
They were there! The prison guards! On him! Everywhere!
They'd finally come to take him back. Busy hands were scrabbling, poking, reaching all over his body… Hot hands were probing, poking him continually. Blood roared in the funnels of Hudson 's ears. The vicious leeches were crawling all over him, too. Sharp little leech strings. Strong hands were suddenly lifting him.
Then whispering, almost choral voices. There were no distinct, recognizable words.
