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The Fragility of that Bright Tomorrow
by Allthinky
The Fragility of that Bright Tomorrow
Kelly
There's something so satisfying, thrilling, even, about heading out pre-dawn, and you've got the coming sunrise to look forward to even as the adrenaline rush primes you for silent running in the dark. Takes a minute to get the mind focused on just what's necessary - and away from all of the things that could go bad.
It's a good plan, given the intel they have. Of course, there's never any guarantee about intelligence. That's the point of contingency plans - and brilliant partners. He's never known anyone with a mind like Scotty's. When he first found out just how untried the guy was - no military service, and an egghead's pedigree - he had to bite his tongue. Good thing he did - Scotty's not just the best partner he could imagine, he's been an unbelievable friend.
Like Johnny, in a lot of ways. Chung Wen became John Chung when his parents fled Taiwan for America ... got some help, there, actually. Because the Chungs had fled Mao's Revolution in China first, and then the political turmoil in Taipei - Uncle Sam had some real use for them. And so Johnny had grown up with apple pie, baseball, and the kind of honor that most of Kelly's white American friends were so lazy about. It was a particular point of pride for Kelly that he'd been the one to divine the secret of Johnny's name. Chung Wen had been a John Wayne fan for as long as he could remember, which Kelly always found hilarious, until he learned Johnny's Chinese name. And rather than get embarrassed or deny the truth of the connection, Johnny had only drawn a pretend six-gun and called Kelly "pilgrim".
Like Scotty, Johnny's a linguist prodigy - speaks American English without any noticeable accent, but still maintains fluent Cantonese as well as Mandarin, and half a dozen other languages Kelly wouldn't even recognize. Chung and Robinson floated around the Southeast Asian ports collecting minor intelligence and major hangovers for several months before he and Scotty got assigned to the field. All his life, he's been just smart enough to be lazy; Chung and Scott have turned everything he thought he was upside down. He has to scramble to keep up with either one of them, and he can't imagine anything better.
Kelly thus feels like the luckiest, most undeserving example of American spyhood to date. And if all he can do on this assignment, setting off at oh-four-hundred on a Wednesday morning in April, is keep these two miraculous examples of humanity safe and unharmed, then he figures he'll never have anything to complain about, ever again.
***
Scotty
He hates these pre-dawn beginnings of uncertain operations. He always feels jittery, like something has gone extremely wrong to make being awake and active at this time of morning necessary. Different when he was in school, and woke up this early - or never even went to sleep - to read and think and write. This creeping around in the dark puts him off-kilter, and with a mission this reliant on third-party intelligence, that off-kilter sense is enough to kill all of his natural optimism.
He's never felt so far from home, either, as he feels in this little fishing boat off of Deo Hai Van. Hong Kong and Tokyo might be further from home in miles, but they functioned according to familiar rules. Not home, but merely foreign. Here, between the secrecy and the fact that they've been on every type of conveyance known to the twentieth century, he knows they're in alien territory. Military transport to Manila, smaller plane to Pattle Island, big fast boat from Pattle to Hon Son Tra - less an island than a lump of grassy jungle sticking up out of the China Sea - and now a tiny fishing boat at approximately 4 a.m.
He just needs to hold it together for four more hours, and then they'll have completed the insertion and can reverse direction - back through the Paracels, from which a chopper will deliver them to Manila - where Kelly will make the usual joke about a dry martini. He can't believe that Chung is willing to hike in to Hue, but his Vietnamese and Chinese are both excellent, and Scotty figures he's got his reasons for doing it.
This place is so far from home, he feels alien; he can't imagine feeling less welcome, and it's making his skin crawl.
***
Kelly
He shouldn't be digging this so much, he knows - Scotty and John are so cool, so professional about this, but Kelly can't help feeling like he's in one of those comics he lost himself in as a kid. It's been twenty years or more, but the jumpsuit, the backpack, the automatic rifle - he's not just an agent, he's an adventurer.
Which he knows to be a deadly attitude to run on.
There's maybe another half hour of darkness, but they're close, according to Scotty's calculations. Johnny jokes, quietly, that they must be close - he can detect the unmistakable scent of fish and rice. His job is to get evidence they can take back to Washington, evidence that the Red Chinese are making themselves at home in North Viet Nam so they can hopscotch all over Indochina, redistributing land here, slaughtering intellectuals there. Scotty, Kelly knows, is skeptical. Luckily, it's not any of Kelly's personal business. His job here is to make sure Johnny makes landfall just southeast of Hue, and then that he and Scotty make it back to the Paracels by sunset. And that is all.
Of course, if they happen on a Chinese installation when they hit the shore, backtracking is going to be a challenging proposition. And for Scotty's sake, he hopes they don't, even if the ten-year-old boy still lingering in his brain would love to test himself in hand-to-hand against the Chinese Army.
***
Scotty
Now comes the fun part. Soggy, sweating, fighting mosquitoes already, and it's barely oh eight hundred. There's never been any question that he'll be the one to hunker down and crank up the radio. Kelly will be the one watching Chung's back during the half-hour or so hike to get to Chung's contact.
He's double-checked Chung's gear and then it's time to see them both away - he plays it like an anxious mother on her boys' first day at school, makes Kelly promise not to pull any pigtails. The joke is a handy shield against the feeling of doom that's been dogging him since Manila. He's not been in the field long enough to know whether to trust this kind of feeling; might be plain old fear.
He should be feeling better; he's well-hidden, the night is gone, and now it's only a matter of time. He's not, though. Worst of all, he knows why the Department didn't just assign a couple of Asian guys to meet Chung in Da Nang and then smuggle him through to covert agents on the other side. Kelly volunteered for the assignment, and Scotty helped put together a plan that made it possible. He admires Kelly's loyalty to Chung, but in hindsight, they could've just bought him a drink at the Officers' Club and offered a hearty Bon Voyage. Scotty doesn't feel much more at home in the O-Club than he does in the South China Sea, but the former has the advantage of telephone service, a convenient taxi stand, and about ten thousand fewer miles between him and a good cheese steak sandwich.
***
Kelly
The weird thing is, despite his general lack of interest in working out the political dynamic of this whole mission, he's much less surprised than Johnny Wayne seems to be when John's contact turns out to have flipped on him.
Chung didn't read enough serialized comics as a kid, apparently; the one predictable truth about these adventure stories is that there's at least one more adventure than the heroes anticipated before the end of the episode.
Just now, of course, he's wondering whether he'll get to see how this one ends. It's been clear from jump that he's the expendable player, while these guys - Viet Cong, if not Chinese - try to get Chung to talk about what his assignment was, and who else besides poor, dead Tran was on his list of friendlies in North Viet Nam. So, after the initial takedown, Kelly's been hanging around - literally - and waiting for a chance to signal Scotty that things have taken a turn, whereupon Scotty can signal for the cavalry.
They have back-ups and contingency plans, and he's got at least three different means of getting a quiet signal back to his partner. But through the simple expedient of tying his wrists together and then hanging him from a tree limb, they've prevented him from the watch trick, or getting at the transmitter in his shoe ... and of course they've confiscated his radio. In a minute, he's going to have to resort to taunting the thugs who are interrogating Johnny, so as to give his friend a moment to breathe.
Maybe if he yells loud enough, Scotty will hear and come to save them. And then they can all fly away, using the magical umbrella Scotty keeps in his back pocket for just such occasions.
***
Scotty
By noon, he can no longer make himself consider the possibility of an innocent distraction having slowed his partner down. He signals trouble, but knows that backup won't be coming any time soon - no sooner than the scheduled sundown rendezvous. At least the chopper will come all the way to the mainland, ready for trouble.
With tremendous force of will, he's not going to think about all the ways Kelly could be dead right now. Chung either, for that matter. Just the various scenarios in which they are both alive and retrievable. He has precisely one piece of good news: he's not heard anything. No explosions, no heavy artillery, not even automatic rifle fire. Any of those things would've carried from the meetup back to his position.
So, it's probably not an army, or even a division. A patrol, or a few agents, is what he must be looking at. And Kelly hasn't signaled trouble by any available means because the bad guys are keeping a very close eye on him. That's all.
***
Kelly
He's gotten their attention, all right. In fact, if it's all the same to Johnny, he'd just as soon resume his supporting role in this whole interrogation business. Because Scotty is going to be a little upset with him, even now - when Kelly's on sick leave, Scotty gets shitty administrative work or gets sent to break codes and translate secret documents. It's almost never interesting or challenging, according to Scotty, and Kelly hates to cause him that kind of boredom.
On the other hand, though, he himself would probably prefer a little code-breaking - if he had the knack for it - to the weeks of physical therapy that are likely to be in his future. Aw. Goddamn fucking ribs again. These fellows just have no imagination at all. Or maybe they're just in a hurry. But as soon as he tried hinting that he might be able to tell them whatever Chung is refusing to say, they started beating on his ribs with their goddamned rifle butts. And then when he didn't have anything to say, they just beat him harder.
When they cut him down, no longer worried that he'll be any trouble, he embarrasses himself by screaming like a girl. Except that he hasn't enough breath left to actually scream, and it puts him in mind of a sound from long ago; it came from that cat he'd had as a boy - Smoky, she was called. He'd taken it upon himself to bury her in the backyard after she'd gotten hit by that car, and it had been years before he could even think of her without heart-crushing guilt. If she could only see him now, he can't help but think, she'd have to admit that he's probably suffered enough to be forgiven.
***
Scotty
It's easy enough to follow the trail. Before twenty minutes have passed he's standing where the disturbed undergrowth reveals that his partner, or Chung, or both of them, put up a serious struggle. And it's entirely too easy to spot the footprints of the men who'd been stuck with the extra weight that a grown man would add when flung over one shoulder. On the bright side, there probably wouldn't be any reason to lug corpses through the jungle.
He carries the rifle at the ready, figuring that's going to be the first thing. He's got three smoke grenades at his belt, a pistol under his left armpit, and a machete strapped to his back. He's hoping that they'll burden him in exactly this same manner on his way back to the pickup point.
In the very next moment, he has to let go of that fantasy, when three quiet blips sound from the radio receiver at his ear at the same time that he can hear shouting in the distance. Maybe he can still lean on the element of surprise.
***
Kelly
From his fetal position at the base of the tree, he's managed to do the watch trick - not that Scotty wouldn't have guessed, by now, that things were going less than smoothly. It's Chung who's now hanging from the tree limb, except they've tied his arms together behind his back, and he's hanging about a foot off the ground from his elbows. In quick succession things have gotten loud: Chung's left shoulder has dislocated with a nauseating popping sound, and John screams surprisingly loud for a guy who's hanging that way from a tree.
The VC, or whoever they are, find this hilarious, and they are laughing and hooting as if they've just played the most marvelous practical joke. And Kelly, who can't take it anymore, and anyway, needs to warn his partner, is bellowing at the top of his lungs - a painful, as well as disappointingly quiet exercise - about his constitutional rights.
He's gotten to his knees and is grabbing at Johnny's knee; somehow he needs to signal John that Scotty is at the perimeter; that last ridiculous birdcall during the thugs' laughter has given him back his spine, maybe, because he's telling Johnny not to worry and that everything is going to be okay now when two things complicate his prediction; first, there's an explosion and the sound of machine gun fire from the direction where he's almost certain Scotty is not, and second, he's pretty sure he's seeing one of the thugs puts a bullet through Johnny's head at the exact same moment that his legs are swept out from under him and he lands on his right side and that is all, as they say, she wrote.
***
Scotty
Kelly's gotten the signal, he knows; the surreal speech about the right to keep and bear arms is meant for him, and it makes him smile for about half a second. He's already got the lay of the land, more or less, and it's not a happy situation but he thinks they can swing it - and he berates himself for the metaphor even as Johnny is gently swaying from the sudden dislocation and it looks like Kelly is struggling to hold him steady and maybe give him the good word.
Then he smells sulphur and he whips himself behind a tree just as hell busts out on the other side of the guerrilla camp. It's not the good guys coming in with a distraction, he knows; probably some rival cell trying to swoop in and grab the American prize but still, it's mighty distracting. He's just about to launch himself into the clearing to take advantage of that distraction, when a stocky soldier in a cobbled-together uniform barks out a command and almost simultaneously puts a pistol to Chung's head and fires. It's so far from what Scotty was expecting that when Kelly falls to a vicious sweep kick it's all he can do not to call out, demanding a do-over.
He tosses a grenade into a high arc, and his arm doesn't fail him - it falls right where he figures the newcomers must be and creates a shower of smoke and debris that he doesn't want to think about, and renews the hostilities between the group that's got his partner and these new guys. There's just one halfwit between Scotty and his partner, and the halfwit is going through Chung's pockets. With his eyes on the battle in front of him, Scotty takes care of the halfwit, then opens up on the tangle of guerrillas in front of him, trying not to pay attention to what he's just seen - his partner trying to keep the looter away from Chung and getting slapped - slapped - for his efforts. He tucks the AK under his right arm and he's grabbing Kelly's wrist with his left hand, hoping his partner will forgive him for the clumsy rescue, when a grenade lands thirty feet away and it's all he can do to make eye contact with Kelly - thanks, sorry, goodbye - he figures it's in both their eyes, and he's down.
***
Kelly
It's bad enough that Chung's blood and brain matter are littering the ground all around him and, to be honest, he's pretty sure he's covered in it - he's not going to let some low-life mercenary rifle through Chung's pockets. But then it turns out he hasn't much to say about it; he can't get his left knee to do anything but lock up disgracefully, and there's almost nothing left of his equilibrium after that last fall.
Then there's a blast just about the time he feels Scotty grabbing the lowlife and tossing him off of Chung's body, and there's a penknife in the guy's neck, and Kelly thinks it must be wrong how good that makes him feel. He has to lean over and retch, now, which is hell on his ribs, but not as bad as it's going to be because Scotty's grabbed his right wrist and seems dead set on pulling him out of here one-handed. If Kelly could get a minute to breathe, of course, that wouldn't be necessary, but he's not about to point that out to his berserker partner and anyway, breathing is not something he excels at, just now.
Except he hears the thud and feels Scotty go rigid and turns just enough to make eye contact and knows things just got a lot worse. And in that moment he's struck with the realization that this is all his fault, his fucking pirate fantasy, and they could be back in Washington right now, having let John take the chance of an overland route which was way too dangerous but Johnny's dead now anyway and now Scotty's going to die, too and Kelly's been ready to die now for a while but watching these two go down in pain and blood and hopelessness feels like the loss of more than two or even three lives, and if he thought he felt bad months ago in Hong Kong when Russ shot Scotty, it turns out that was just a warm-up.
***
Scotty
It's all over but the shouting, apparently. A great deal of that shouting seems to be coming from his left arm, except he knows that arms don't scream. The screaming is just the feeling of agony, he realizes, so that's okay then. The dust is still settling, so he figures he wasn't out for long, and some of the guerrillas are still making noise at each other across the clearing. For a minute, he can't figure out why they haven't swarmed all over him, but the briefest bleary-eyed assessment of his surroundings tells him that they think the Americans are dead. Kelly, already on the ground, hasn't been thrown as far as Scotty, but he's fish-belly white under an obscene amount of blood, which Scotty knows is likely mostly Chung's, but it's still disorienting.
When he's relatively certain that the bad guys are preoccupied with killing each other, or maybe just yelling each other to death, Scotty rolls to his back, tucking his left arm - which wakes up and begins screaming again - into his side. His head hurts, and his neck is telling him to please stop wrenching his head to the right, but he's trying to keep one eye on the slackening battle while he squirms carefully toward Kelly. Gently taking his partner's wrist into his outflung hand, he feels the pulse and even the warmth of life beneath the clammy-cold sheen of shock. Tucking his left hand into his utility belt, he wills himself over onto his knees.
Ducking as low as he can, he rubs a couple of knuckles against the side of Kelly's face. "You in there, Duke?" he whispers, but he knows there will be no answer. With one last look over at Chung's body, the ruined head testifying to the fragility of even the bravest and truest specimens of humanity, he clenches a fist into the collar of his partner's jumpsuit at the back of his neck, and begins backing out of the carnage.
***
Kelly
He's come to in some weird situations, but this one - he's never felt pain like this, like his rib cage is made of razor wire now, and whose idea was that? But the badness of replacing his ribs with razor wire just pales immeasurably in comparison with this, what is this? He's being dragged along by the back of the neck, the neck of his jumpsuit, which would be uncomfortable on a good day, and this is not a good day. He hopes maybe this is hell, and he's now experiencing his eternal torment, because even though it's eternal, at least some of it's gone by before he woke up.
Okay, that sounds like Scotty gasping for breath, and so he's clearly not in hell. And they've just ground to a halt, which would be a relief if it didn't sound like Scotty was on the verge of crying back there. He tries to raise a hand, but almost before he can complete the thought he's tensing up and whimpering and a sweaty hand is on his left shoulder.
"Hang on there, Kel. I've gotcha. Just stay still, okay? We gotta stay quiet, and we gotta move, and right now this is the only bus in town. Sorry for the rough ride, man."
"Scotty?" He's never heard that tone in his partner's voice: pain, for sure, but also the edge of frantic desperation. That's not something he can assimilate into his experience of Alexander Scott. He tries again.
"Scotty?" Then realizes that his own voice is so far from what he's used to hearing from himself that the whole thing is probably some drugged-out nightmare. Maybe it's some kind of lab set-up -
"I'm - I'm here, man. Just. Taking a breather. Gonna be okay, Hoby. Let - let me do the work, okay? You've got some busted ribs. Try - `m trying to keep 'em out of your lungs."
"'preciate it. They don't ... don't b'long there. In my lungs, I mean."
There's the barest hint of laughter, so maybe Scotty's understood what he said.
"Got that right, man. Not much longer, now, okay? Just - Just hang on."
The movement begins again. He's swallowing to keep from crying out, but he figures Scotty can tell, and it can't be making his job any easier. Time to shut everything down, then. Just turn it off, and shut it down.
***
Scotty
It's some kind of miracle that he doesn't want to think too hard about. He's gotten Kelly back to the rendezvous point, radio still waiting, and he can't hear anyone moving through the jungle behind them. Following the trail they left in the mud would be only slightly more difficult than tracking a garbage truck on a hot summer morning in Philadelphia, but no one appears to be following. He feels privileged to have benefited from what analysts and historians will call "internecine strife" in this undercover not-quite-war; mostly, though, he'd like to get the hell out.
The other lucky thing is, Kelly's still out. He doesn't know how much of this assignment Kelly will remember, assuming they make it out, but he's going to take it hard, and Scotty's already seen how hard Kelly can take his own perceived failings. He thinks the physical stuff will mend, with time and therapy - at least the knee joint seems no more than badly bruised, and the concussion, if any, isn't too bad. At least, during the horrible moment when Kelly came to on the trail, he seemed generally oriented, and only as miserable as the situation warranted. Scotty doesn't know enough about rib injuries, though - there's a lot of cartilage and other connective tissue involved there, and if those things don't heal properly then Kelly will never play tennis again, let alone work as an agent. So Scotty refuses to consider that as a possible outcome, and tosses the possibility of permanent lung damage on the same scrap heap.
There are echoes of battle still out in the jungle, but it seems to be moving away from their hidey hole here, and maybe that helps to account for the fact that they haven't been tracked down. Yet. He's willing himself to see some orange in the sky, some sign of dusk in the trees, and then he hears his name spoken, quietly.
Kelly's looking at him, concerned and more than a little confused.
"You okay, Fred C.?"
Now that Kelly's eyes are open and they aren't bumping ridiculously along the ground, it seems obscene that there's still blood spattered all over the man's face. Scotty offers him a little water, and he takes a swallow or two, not nearly as interested as he should be, but it saves Scotty from having to cut him off.
"I'm fine, Hoby. You're the one beat up like a pinata."
He's pulled a length of bandage from the pack they'd stashed here earlier, and now Scotty wets it and goes about cleaning, as gently as he can, the blood and gore from Kelly's face, and neck, and hands.
"Arm?" Kelly asks, and Scotty knows it was too much to hope that he wouldn't notice the awkwardness of the clean-up job, or the way his left arm was tucked into his flight suit.
"Yeah. Lost a fight with a tree. Gonna have a re-match next year, though. Just wait. That is gonna be one sorry tree, man."
Kelly's voice is breathless. "Should have a sling."
The words are the ones he expects to hear from Kelly Robinson, and even the brevity can be explained by the broken ribs. Scotty can probably explain the lack of any life or heat in the words, the failure to offer any words of disapprobation for the badness of the tree, but he doesn't want to think about that.
"Kelly, you did what you could, man. We all did. Not a lot you can do when the contact flips."
For a second, there's wary interest in Kelly's eyes. "How'd you know?"
"Guessed. I mean, what else could've happened? We planned for it the only way we could, and Chung knew the risks, man. We all did. Not your fault."
"Right."
The word is clipped as if in anger, but the gleam in Kelly's eyes when he turns his head shows Scotty what Kel's really struggling with, and there's not much he can do about it here and now. So he decides to shut up and sit still; it makes his left arm happy, and right now he'll take what he can get. He puts his good hand on Kelly's forehead, just to check for fever, then takes hold of his forearm, eyes forward.
He's still sitting like that twenty minutes later, and Kelly's asleep, or passed out, when light begins to fade. He hears the helicopter, and he knows it's going to be a terrible extraction - hurry hurry hurry -- nowhere to land, minimal light, and Kelly, his ribs in shards, having to ride up in a harness; Scotty tries not to think about how that's going to feel - but there's no alternative.
He's been holding back on giving Kelly morphine, but the arrival of the winged chariot tells him it's time. Kelly may be mildly shocky, still, but his breathing is good (if careful) and the head injuries don't seem dangerous. And anyway, he can't conscience putting his partner through that kind of hell, right on top of what he's already seen today.
"Kel? I think that's our bird. Time to get ready."
There's a slow nod from the man on the ground, and bleak eyes open, focusing on the syrette in Scotty's hand.
"Ah, nectar of Morpheus you have there."
Once again, Scotty hears Kelly's words come out of Kelly's mouth in a stranger's voice.
"We got a special deal on - one per customer. No waiting."
Kelly's eyes narrow.
"You?"
"Naw, I've just got the wing problem. Be okay as long as I don't flap it around. But I can't see any way to get you out of here that won't leave you cursing my name, and possibly my mother as well."
"Never, my man. Your mother is the epitome of ... of motherhood. You sure you're okay?"
For a second, Scotty can convince himself that all will be well.
"In the pink, pal. Now, can I give you this stuff that dreams are made of?"
When Kelly only shrugs, and once more turns his head, the illusion ends. But job one is getting the man out; the rest will have to wait. He slides the needle in carefully, just under the skin of his left forearm, and within minutes, his partner's eyes close and his body relaxes.
"Okay, Hoby. One thing at a time."
He's pushing the filthy hair off of Kelly's forehead when the receiver squawks, and he lifts his eyes to the brilliant sight of an unmarked chopper lowering a lifeline.
end
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Notes: Thanks to Robert Culp, for writing "The Tiger", and to Sarah Enany, for the best beta money could never buy.
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