Another shock wave passes silently through the ground, setting up a pattern of waves, and reflections of waves, in the water that laps around their knees.
"Things are going to happen very slowly now for a while. Get used to it," says Doug Shaftoe. "Everyone needs a probe—a long knife or a rod. Even a stick."
Doug’s got a big knife, he being that kind of guy, and Amy has her kris. Randy pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of his backpack apart to produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug said, everything is happening slowly now. Randy tosses one of the tubes to Enoch Root, who snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is equipped, Doug Shaftoe gives them a tutorial on how to probe one’s way through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy’s ever imbibed, this one is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main point, which is that you can poke a mine from the side and it won’t blow up; you just can’t poke it vertically. "The water is bad because it makes it hard to see what the hell we’re doing," he says. Indeed, the water has a milky look, probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best; everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. "On the other hand, it’s good because if a mine gets detonated by something other than your foot, the water’s going to absorb some of the blast by flashing into steam. Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an ambush from above left: the west bank. Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he can’t protect that flank anymore. You can bet that John Wayne is covering things on the right as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that’s most vulnerable, we will now head for the bank on that side, and try to reach the protection of the overhang. We should not all converge on the same point; we spread out so that if one of us detonates a mine it won’t hit anyone else."
Each one of them picks a destination on the west bank and tells everyone else what it is, so that they won’t converge on the same place, and then each begins probing his or her way towards it. Randy tries to resist the temptation to look up. He says, after about fifteen minutes: "I know what’s going on with the explosions. Wing’s people are tunneling their way toward Golgotha. They’re going to remove the gold through some kind of an underground conduit. It’ll look like they are excavating it from their own property. But they’ll actually be taking it from here."
Amy grins. "They’re robbing the bank."
Randy nods, mildly annoyed that she’s not taking it more seriously.
"Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward to buy this real estate when it was available," Enoch says.
A few minutes later, Doug Shaftoe says, "To what extent do you give a shit, Randy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?"
"Probably not."
"Would you be willing to kill?"
"Well," says Randy, a bit taken aback, "I said I wouldn’t be willing to die. So—"
"Don’t give me that golden rule shit," Doug says. "If someone broke into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?"
Randy involuntarily looks towards Amy. Because this is not only an ethical conundrum. It’s also a test to determine whether Randy is fit to be Doug’s daughter’s husband, and the father of his grandchildren. "Well, I should hope so," Randy says. Amy’s pretending not to listen.
The water all around them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone cringes. Then they realize that a handful of small pebbles was tossed into the water from above. They look up at the rim of the overhang, and see a tiny, reciprocating movement: Jackie Woo, standing on the top of the bank, waving his hand at them.
"My eyes are going," Doug says. "Does he look intact to you?"
"Yes!" Amy says. She beams—her pearlies are very white in the sun—and waves back.
Jackie’s grinning. He’s carrying a long, muddy rod in one hand: his mine probe. In the other, he’s got a dirty canister about the size of a clay pigeon. He holds it up and waggles it in the air. "Nip mine!" he shouts gleefully.
"Well, put it the fuck down, you asshole!" Doug hollers, "after all these years it’s going to be incredibly unstable." Then he gets a look of incredulous confusion. "Who the hell set off the other mine if it wasn’t you? Someone was screaming up there."
"I haven’t found him," Jackie Woo says. "He stopped screaming."
"Do you think he’s dead?"
"No."
"Did you hear any other voices?"
"No."
"Jesus Christ," Doug says, "someone’s been shadowing us the whole way." He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where John Wayne has now probed his way to the edge and is taking this all in. Some kind of hand gesture passes between them (they brought walkie talkies, but Doug scorns them as a crutch for lightweights and wannabes). John Wayne settles down onto his belly and gets out a pair of binoculars with objective lenses as big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo’s side.
The group in the riverbed probes onwards in silence for a while. None of them can figure out what is going on, and so it’s good that they have this mine-probing thing to keep their hands and minds busy. Randy’s probe hits something flexible, buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel. He flinches so hard he almost topples back on his ass, and spends a minute or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank but suggestive look of sheet-covered corpses. Trying to identify the shapes makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand lightly over this thing. Dead leaves tumble through the water and tickle his forearms. "Got an old tire down here," he says. "Big. Truck-sized. And bald as an egg."
Every so often a colored bird will descend from the shade of the overhanging jungle and flash into the sun, never failing to scare the shit out of them. The sun is brutal. Randy was only a few yards away from the shade of the bank when all of this started, and now he’s pretty sure that he’s going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.
Enoch Root starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at him and sees that he’s holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.
An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted in a black-and-orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby rock, and cocks its head at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.
"Down under the rocks and mud there’s reinforced concrete," Doug says. "I can see the rebar sticking out."
Another bird or something flashes out of the shadows, headed nearly straight down toward the water at tremendous speed. Amy makes a funny grunting sound. Randy’s just turning to look her way when a tremendous, hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see a blossom of flame strobing out of the slotted flash arrestor on the muzzle of John Wayne’s assault rifle. Seems like he’s shooting directly across the river. Jackie Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who’s squatting, loses his balance from all of this head-turning and has to put out a hand to steady himself, which fortunately doesn’t come down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only her head and shoulders are showing out of the water, and she’s staring at nothing in particular, with a look in her eyes that Randy doesn’t like at all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.
"Randy, don’t do that," says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the shade, and is only a couple of paces from the curtain of vegetation that hangs over the riverbank.
There is a piece of debris riding on the surface of the river not far from Amy’s face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy moves. Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big silt-covered boulder whose top he can make out through the milky water. He squats on that boulder like a bird and focuses again on Amy, who is maybe fifteen feet away from him. John Wayne fires a series of individual shots from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers, bound to the butt of a narrow stick.
"Amy’s been shot with an arrow," Randy says.
"Well that’s just fucking great," Doug mutters.
"Amy, where are you hit?" says Enoch Root.
Amy still can’t seem to speak. She stands up awkwardly, doing all the work with her left leg, and as she rises the arrow emerges from the water and turns out to be lodged squarely in the middle of her right thigh. The wound is washed clean at first but then blood wells out from around the arrow’s shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.
Doug’s engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up above. "You know," he whispers, "I can tell that this is one of those classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly turns into the actual battle."
Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands and tries to snap it, but the wood is green, and won’t break cleanly. "I dropped my knife somewhere," she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making it that way. "I think I can deal with this level of pain for a little," she says. "But I don’t like it at all."
Near Amy, Randy can see another silt-covered boulder near the surface, maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full-length into the streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and several inches thick.
"Randy, what you’re looking at is a Nip anti-tank mine," Doug says. "It is highly unstable with age, and it contains enough high explosive to essentially decapitate everyone in our little group here. So if you could just stop being a complete asshole for a little bit, I’m sure that we would all appreciate it very much."
Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. "I’m not looking for you to prove anything," she says. "If you’re trying to say you love me, send me a fucking valentine."
"I love you," Randy says. "I want you to be okay. I want you to marry me."
"Well, that’s very romantic," Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts crying.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Doug Shaftoe says. "You guys can do this later! Will you ease up? Whoever fired that arrow is long gone. The Huks are guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce."
"It wasn’t fired by a Huk," Randy says. "Huks have guns. Even I know that."
"Who fired it, then?" Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.
"It looks like a Cayuse arrow," Randy says.
"Cayuse? You think it was fired by a Cayuse?" Doug demands. Randy admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.
"No," Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the antitank mine. "The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes. What else do we know about him? That’s he’s really good at sneaking around in the jungle. And that he’s so totally fucking crazy that even when he’s been injured by a land mine, he’s still crawling around in the undergrowth taking shots at people." Randy’s probing the riverbed as he’s talking, and now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. "Not just anyone—he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he’s been watching. He saw Amy sitting next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is take a shot at her."
"Why does he want to hurt you?" Enoch asks.
"Because he’s evil."
Enoch looks tremendously impressed.
"Well, who the hell is it?" Amy hisses. She’s irritated now, which he takes to be a good sign.
"His name is Andrew Loeb," Randy says. "And Jackie Woo and John Wayne are never going to find him."
"Jackie and John are very good," Doug demurs.
Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. "That’s the problem," Randy says. "They’re way too smart to run around in a minefield without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn’t give a shit. Andrew’s totally out of his fucking mind, Doug. He’s going to run around up there at will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I’d wager that Andy with one foot blown off, and not caring whether he lives or dies, can move through a minefield faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care."
Finally, Randy’s there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward, places a hand on each of his shoulders, and rests her weight on him, which feels good. The end of her ponytail paints the back of his neck with warm river water. The arrow’s practically in his face. Randy takes his multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the shaft of the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays her hand out, winds up, screams in Randy’s ear, and slams the butt of the shaft. It disappears into her leg. She collapses over Randy’s back and sobs. Randy reaches around behind her leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead, grabs the shaft and yanks it out.
"I don’t see evidence of arterial bleeding," says Enoch Root, who has a good view of her from behind.
Randy rises to his feet, lifting Amy into the air, collapsed over his shoulder like a sack of rice. He’s embarrassed that Amy’s body is basically shielding his from any further arrow attacks now. But she’s making it clear that she’s in no mood for walking.
The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. "A land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?" Randy says. "If I step on one, it won’t kill Amy."
"Not one of your better ideas, Randy!" Doug shouts, almost contemptuously. "Just calm down and take your time."
"I just want to know my options," Randy says. "I can’t poke around for mines while I’m carrying her."
"Then I’ll work my way over to you," says Enoch Root. "Oh, to hell with it!" Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.
"Fucking amateurs!" Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down at Randy’s feet and begins probing.
Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the bank. "I’m going to ascend the wall here," he says, "and go up and reinforce Jackie. He and I’ll find this Andrew Loeb together." It’s clear that "find" here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn’t want to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe’s daughter. Doug is stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short distance he’s able to reach a tangle of tree roots that’s almost as good as a ladder to the top.
"She’s shivering," Randy announces. "Amy’s shivering."
"She’s in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high," says Enoch Root. Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood-greased leg.
One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed. Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three-ball. He’s wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud, which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he totters to a standing position. He’s got a great big pole, a wizard’s staff. He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand-over-hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred-dollar silk necktie that Randy’s pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty-free shops. This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg and using the wizard’s staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he is carrying a great big knife: Bowie-sized, but with all of the extra spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really top-of-the-line fighting and survival knife.
Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he’s got the mental stance now. But he doesn’t have the means.
And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to have the means.
Andy’s looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he’s kind of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip for whatever kind of attack he’s about to make. It is this detail that finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward and plants his wizard’s staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills in, of course. Now Andy’s standing there like a stork, having miraculously kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy, then does it again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew Loeb has become a red, comet-shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist gripping the huge knife.
Randy turns around and looks at Amy. She’s levered herself up on one arm. In her opposite hand she’s got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.
Something’s moving in the corner of Randy’s eye. He turns his head quickly. A coherent, wraith-shaped cloud of smoke is drifting away from Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into the sun where it is suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45 and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.
Andrew’s fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.