First Blood

5

Rambo held the owl's soft pliant back, clutched a fistful of feathers on the belly, and pulled. They made a dull tearing sound as they came away. He liked the feel of the feathers in his hand. He plucked the carcass bare, cut off the head and the wings and the claws then pressed the point of his knife in at the bottom of the rib cage, drawing the sharp edge of the blade down to between its legs. He spread the flaps of the carcass, reached inside for the warm wet offal, and smoothly steadily drew it out, getting most of the entrails in a bunch on his first try, and scraping the inside with his knife to get the rest. He would have gone to rinse the carcass where the water was dripping from the roof of the mine, but he could not tell if the water had poisons in it, and anyway, rinsing the bird would just be another complication when all he wanted was to get this over, eat and get out. He had already wasted too much energy as it was. He took a long branch that was not in the fire, sharpened it and spitted the point into the owl, extending it over the fire. The bits of feathers and hair that were still on it sparked in the flames. Salt and pepper, he thought. Since the owl was old, it would be solid and tough. The smell of its blood burning was acrid, and the meat would probably taste like that, and he wished he at least had salt and pepper.

So this is what he had fucking come to, he thought. From camping in his sleeping bag in the forest, and eating hamburgers washed with Coke in the dusty grass at the side of a road, to this, a bed of fir boughs in a mine and the carcass of an owl and not even goddamn salt and pepper. Not all that different from camping in the forest, but living then on a minimum had been a kind of luxury, because he wanted to do it. Now, though, he might be forced to live like this for a long while, and it really did seem like a minimum. Soon he might not even have this much, and he would look back on this good night when he slept for a few hours in a mine and cooked this tough old owl. Mexico was not even on his mind anymore. Only his next meal and what tree he would sleep in. A day at a time. A night at a time.

Chest throbbing, he raised his two shirts and looked at his ribs, fascinated by how swollen and inflamed they were. It was like he had a tumor in there or something growing in him, he thought. A few more hours sleep weren't going to cure that. At least he wasn't dizzy anymore. Time to move. He built up the fire to make the bird cook faster. The heat from the fire touched his forehead and the stretch of his nose. Or maybe it was the fever, he thought. He lay back flat on the fir boughs, face turned sweating toward the fire. The mucus in his mouth was dry and sticky, and he wanted to drink from his canteen, but he had already drank too much from it, he needed to save some for later. But whenever he parted his lips, a thin web of sticky mucus clung between them. Finally he sipped and swirled the warm metallic water around in his mouth, collecting the mucus, debating whether he could afford the waste of spitting it out, deciding not and swallowing thickly.

The voice startled him. It echoed indistinctly down the tu

Teasle wanted him all right. He must have a small army down there. But what was the loudspeaker for? Weren't there enough field radios to co-ordinate the groups? Or is this just noise to get on my nerves? he thought. Or to scare me, to let me know how many are coming for me. Maybe it's a trick and he doesn't have any men at all north and east. Maybe he just has enough for south and west. Rambo had heard a loudspeaker used like this by Special Forces in the war. It generally confused the enemy and tempted them to second-guess what Special Forces was about to do. There was a counter-rule: when somebody wants you to second-guess them, that's when you don't try. The best reaction is to go on as if you never heard it.

Now the voice was repeating itself, dimming with the helicopter over the rise. But Rambo didn't care about anything it said. For all he cared, Teasle could bring men into these hills from every side. It wouldn't matter. Where he was going, they would pass right by him.

He glanced east. The sky was gray now over there. Sunup in a while. He eased down on the cold rocks at the entrance to the mine and tested the bird with his finger in case it was too hot to eat. Then he carved off a strip and chewed, and it was just awful. Worse than he had expected. Stiff and dry and sour. He had to force himself to bite into another piece, and he had to chew and chew before he could swallow.

6

Teasle did not sleep at all. An hour before dawn, Trautman lay down on the floor and closed his eyes, but Teasle kept sitting on the bench, his back against the wall, told the radioman to switch the sound from the earphones to the speakers, then listened to the position reports coming in, his eyes seldom leaving the map. The reports soon came in less frequently, and the radioman leaned forward onto the table, head on his arms, and Teasle was alone again.

Every unit was where it should be. In his mind he saw policemen and National Guardsmen strung along the edges of fields and woodlots, stamping out cigarettes, loading their rifles. They were in sections of fifty, and each section had a man with a field radio and at six o'clock the order would go down the line over the radios to move out. Still spread in a wide line, they would sweep across fields and through woods, moving in from the main points of the compass. It would take days to cover this much territory and converge in the middle, but eventually they would have him. If one group came into tangled country that slowed them, its man with the field radio would broadcast to the other groups to ease their pace and wait. That would prevent one group from slowing so much that it fell behind the main line, imperceptively shifting its direction until it was far to one side, searching an area that had already been covered by the others. There could be no gaps in the line except those which had been pla

The air seemed to dampen toward sunup, and he pulled an army blanket over Trautman on the floor, then wrapped one around himself. There was always something left to do, some flaw in any plan: he remembered that from his training in Korea, and Trautman had said it too, and he was going over the search from every angle for something he might have forgotten. Trautman had wanted helicopters to drop patrols on the highest peaks, from where they could spot the kid if he ran ahead of the search line. It had been dangerous lowering the patrols on pulleys in the dark, but they had been lucky and there had been no accidents. Trautman had wanted the helicopters to fly back and forth out there broadcasting fake directions to confuse the kid, and that was being taken care of. Trautman had suspected the kid would make a break south: that was the direction he had used escaping in the war, and there was a good chance he would try that way again, so the southern line was reinforced except for the intentional weak spots that were traps. Teasle's eyes were burning from lack of sleep, but he couldn't sleep, and then when he could not find any part of the plan that he had forgotten to check, he began to think about other things that he did want to forget. He had been putting them out of his mind, but now, his head starting to ache, the ghosts came of their own accord.