THE train didn’t stop again for two days. More Vietnamese died, and were stacked at the far end of the car. Teddy could hardly smell them over the stink of the rest of the locked-in POWs. All that time the train climbed. It got colder, until breath crackled and urine froze on the steel floor. He slept spoon-fashion with Pritchard, who talked less and less as time went on.
But the day finally came when the train jolted to a halt again, and they were rifle-butted out into a blinding daylight.
To Camp 576.
His first impression was of a teeming of gray lice festering a desolate landscape of gravel and sand. Vertical walls of pinkish crumbling rock surrounded an immense bowl amid gray hills. The eroding walls looked natural, but were still fearsome barriers. A dull explosion reverberated as the guards herded the prisoners down a barbed-wire lane from the rail spur down into the depression. A trooper with a Kalashnikov watched each fifty yards.
On a second look down, Teddy changed his mind. This gigantic hole in the earth had been scooped out by human effort. The thin wind was chilly, the sky russet with the same shade of fine dust he’d seen in eastern Afghanistan. Beyond the pinkish outcrops rocky hills undulated toward the horizon. Past them, in the far distance, rose jagged, uneven intaglios of mountain, deep-cut ravine-shadows intercutting black with indigo and rose-petal.
As the prisoners were mustered into lines and counted, he wondered dully where exactly they were. Somewhere in far northwestern China was as close as he could come.
“Gankai! Gankai!” He knew what that meant now. “Hurry up!” But he couldn’t hurry. He had to drag the ruined foot behind him, with it bent to the side opposite where the tendons had been torn from the bone. Walking on the butt end of his tibia, each step was a stabbing agony. He didn’t want to be beaten again. They got enthusiastic with those rifle butts. But he was going to be tail-end Charlie in any line.
Not a good place to end up. Not if he wanted to survive.
Did he?
“Give us an arm, mate,” Magpie Pritchard said, beside him. Another explosion thumped the air. It didn’t sound far off, but it was strangely subdued. Neither artillery nor mortar. The Australian pulled Teddy’s arm over his shoulders, but it didn’t work. He towered above the Vietnamese, above the Chinese guards. “You stand out like a fucking lighthouse, Maggie,” Teddy told him.
“Chenmo, chenmo!” the guards shouted. He knew that, too—it meant “shut up.” Whoa, getting fluent, Obie. Another in your long list of fucked-up accomplishments.
The day progressed. They were herded into a corral and made to squat in the blowing grit, hands behind their heads. The guards strolled among them, slugging anybody who relaxed the posture. One by one, the POWs passed down a disassembly line of what he assumed were convict trusties. Many had flatter faces and darker complexions than the guards. Tibetans? They shaved his head, then made him throw all his clothes onto a fire. He was hosed down with icy water, then issued a thin gray cotton uniform. The pants hems came only to his shins. A Chinese character was stenciled on the back. No sign of underwear or socks, which wasn’t going to be good if it got colder. Teddy kept pointing to his foot, but no one seemed to care. He was issued faded, torn blue canvas shoes with white rubber soles, like a geezer would wear in Palm Beach. And a pair of brand-new, beautifully sewn goatskin gloves with decorative red beads sewn on the back. They looked like high-end gardening gloves. He stood in line for a ladle of the same thin white corn mush they’d gotten on the train.
The guards pushed him down to a squat on the ground in front of a desk. The official, on a wooden chair, tried Teddy in Chinese, then in what must have been Vietnamese, because the other POWs in line giggled. The official reddened. He called over another man, maybe his supervisor. This latter fished a booklet from a pocket and leafed through it. Frowned down at Teddy, and said, enunciating very carefully, “You … American?”
“Yes. American. Prisoner of war.”
“American criminal of war.”
Teddy spoke slowly and loudly. “Prisoner of war. I need medical treatment. Geneva Convention.”
The guy consulted his booklet. Looked pissed off. Finally he said, “Here at Camp Five Seven Six, work. What can do?”
“Not much. Not with this.” Teddy lifted his leg; the official glanced at the dangling appendage. “POWs are entitled to medical attention.”
“You bing hao?”
“Excuse me?”
“You sick one. Half food.” He spoke to the guy at the desk, who nodded and made a note.
“Oh, fuck me,” Teddy mumbled.
“You say what?” The official spat orders at two guards, who came to attention. “Fuck me? You say, fuck me? Guanjao ta!”
The beating this time was prolonged, severe, and by men who didn’t care about leaving marks. When it was over they dragged him to a gravel pile and left him there spread-eagled, like a poster child for Bad Prisoners.
He got some sleep. Not exactly restful, but it was nice to stretch out without someone else’s dick pressed to your asshole.
Only when dark approached did a hand touch him. Help him up.
He pried open swollen eyelids to see Maggie, plus three of the Vietnamese he’d been chained up with on the train. “Come on, mate. They assigned us a doss. Let’s get you under some shelter.”
Their “doss” was a corrugated iron lean-to built against one of the inner walls of the depression. Blackened rocks circled a fire pit. Behind the roof, which formed a six-by-four partially sheltered anteroom, a cave went back about fifteen feet into the rock. The ceiling was just high enough that he could sit upright but couldn’t stand. Dried turds littered the ground between it and the next cave. The hut-caves stretched out of sight around the jut of the bluff. A guard tower loomed at the top. Dried grass and a couple of weary quilted-cotton blankets constituted their bedding. Once again, he slept nestled with Pritchard and the Vietnamese, and was glad of the warmth.
* * *
THE next dawn they were shouted out by a ragged little squint-eyed Chinese carrying a stick. A stakebed truck idled at the bottom of the bluff. Most of the Vietnamese climbed up onto the bed. Teddy was pushed up into a much-abused Toyota pickup. Where the inevitable shackles waited. Pritchard tried to go with him, but the Chinese whacked and shouted him into the big truck, with the Viets.
The pickup drove slowly, rocking and creaking on clapped-out shocks. Glancing sideways as they trundled along a bumpy gravel track, he gradually grasped the layout. The camp proper was built around an open pit mine. The whole operation was much larger than he’d guessed the night before. It had to cover many square miles. He couldn’t tell what they were mining, and didn’t have the vocabulary to ask. An explosion thumped, not far away, but again, oddly muffled. He realized he’d been hearing them all night long, though at longer intervals. They were working a graveyard shift, too. At the far end of the vast depression, the glitter of sheet glass. Buildings? Maybe where the guards lived, where the camp was administered. If there was a road to anything like a town, it would lie in that direction. He glanced up at the sun for his bearings, but got a sharp “Yangjing-lay!” More than one rifle butt had taught him what that meant: “Drop your head, eyes down.”
Eventually they left him at a tower sheathed in the same unrusting corrugated iron as roofed their lean-to. A deafening roar and chatter came from within. A breaker, one of dozens that rose here and there across the floor of the immense pit. The rock came up out of the pits, where most of the prisoners were working, in big diesel dump trucks. From them, it went up a power conveyor to the top of the breaker.
A very old, tottering, rail-thin Chinese with a mask over his mouth and nose shepherded Teddy up steel stairs slick with powdery grit to a platform near the top. There, gigantic steel rollers rotated ceaselessly, shaking the whole building. The din was deafening. Huge driven wheels chewed the ore into progressively smaller pieces as it descended. The air seethed with powdered rock, so thick he could see only eleven or twelve feet in any direction. The old man handed him a rag, and gestured to him to tie it around his face. Pointed to the air, and grasped both hands to his neck in the universal symbol for choking. His hands were withered, scarred, and covered with nodule-like, whitish growths. He patted his own chest. “Lew.”
“Teddy.”
“Ted-ti?”
“Close enough. Ted-ti it is.”
Old Lew closed his fingers around the handle of a push broom leaning in a corner and began acting out what to do. The ore emerged from the mill crushed to a gritty, sparkling powder, the particles like coarse, dirty sea salt. Carried along on a wide rubberized belt, it passed under a bank of electromagnets. Switched on, the magnets sucked up grains of a reddish-brown mineral out of the passing ore. At intervals, a mechanism extended a tray, the current in the magnets was switched off, and the reddish matter dropped into the tray. Teddy’s task was to walk from one side of the breaker to the other with the push broom, brushing away what was left sticking to the magnets after the current cut off. Finally, Lew gathered the filings, or shavings, up with the broom, and ran them along the catch tray into a hole at the end.
He handed Teddy the broom and looked expectant. “Ni mingbai ma, Ted-ti?”
“Shid-eh,” Teddy said. He took the broom and brushed a few grains off the magnets, then pushed them into the hole.
The old man beamed as if he’d just graduated med school. “Tway. Ting hao! Ting hao!”
“Ting hao,” Teddy said, bowing. “Manwei bowgow.”
The old guy grabbed his gut, bent over, guffawing so hard Teddy was afraid he was going to choke. “Manwei bowgow! Bu, bu. Wo bushi yigi huwei.”
* * *
HE ran the broom all that morning as the rollers rumbled like Niagara and the metal siding around him reverberated with distant booms. Until, at noon by the sun, a whistle blew, echoing from bluff to bluff down the length of the immense pit.
The breaker shut down, first the diesels that ran the conveyors chugging down the scale, then the rollers and the gearing that drove them rumbling to a halt.
A bell clanged. Dozens of workers streamed out from nooks and machinery onto the ladders. Teddy followed, but slowly, supporting his weight on a handrail. At the bottom of the breaker, in the open air, a wooden table held two tureens. One was the white mush, the other a doubtful-smelling vegetable soup. The powder-fog was dissipating, blown away by a thin wind. He shivered. Even at noon, the breeze was cold outside the tower. Four husky Chinese immediately plumped down, pulling up empty wooden cable-spools as seats. They planted their elbows as old Lew dealt metal bowls from a rolling chest that also held wrenches, screwdrivers, saws. There were only five bowls. Teddy tried to sit down too, but they elbowed him back, chortling. At last Lew said something and they grudgingly let him dip a bowl, but Lew stopped him and poured half of it back. “Bu, bu. Bing hao,” he said. “Ni pàng, ni bìng bù xuyào tài duo de shíwù.” He pointed halfway down the bowl. The husky guys guffawed and slapped their thighs, grinning at him.
Fuck this. He wasn’t going to survive on two mouthfuls of corn mush and rotten veggies. His mouth was bleeding again. No way to clean his teeth since Yongxing. He was going to lose them soon. But he let the thugs push him away, folded himself into a corner, and slurped his mush with his fingers. Eat everything they give you, they’d said at SERE. Yeah, but even there he’d lost ten pounds. His legs were starting to look wasted. His hands were numb most of the time. Too many hours in steel cuffs.
Teddy looked over at old Lew, whose hands dangled too, all but useless. When he grinned, just one blackened tooth showed. The guy wasn’t actually that old. He might even be Teddy’s age.
“Ted-ti,” said Lew, grasping his shoulder and turning him toward the rest of the breaker gang. They frowned over their bowls. “May-guo sheebing,” he added. Two or three registered, but most just blinked, then went back to eating.
When the whistle droned again everyone got up and headed for the ladders. Still ravenously hungry, Teddy followed, though more slowly, dragging his foot.
* * *
OVER the next weeks, it got colder. Now and then, back in the hills, at night, the howling of wolves echoed eerily as the searchlights swung this way and that. Also, two other Americans arrived at Chu Shan, which Teddy learned was another name for Camp 576. Or maybe that was the name of the town whose lights he could see in the distance. Both were airmen, shot down over the Taiwan Strait. Teddy managed to get across to his production brigade leader, the squint-eyed guy with the stick, that they wanted to hut together. That made seven in the cave: Oberg; Pritchard; the three Vietnamese, Trinh, Vu, and Phung; and the airmen, Fierros and Shepard. Now it was cramped, but it wasn’t important where you crawled to sleep, or where you worked.
What mattered was more basic.
Little lizards darted down occasionally from what might be greener pastures for them, at the top of the cliff. They were wary, but a thrown rock could stun them long enough to be picked up and have their heads bitten off. He sucked the juices before cramming them into his mouth and chewing them whole, skin and all. The salty crunch reminded him of Fritos.
Old Lew apparently lived outside the camp, or in some privileged area of it. He would bring a little can of rice, and sometimes fish or radishes, for his lunch. Teddy spent anguished hours at the top of the breaker, raking magnetized ore and mulling over how and whether to steal the lunch can. The prisoners never saw rice. But if he antagonized Lew, lost this easy job, he’d go to the pits with the others. Or worse.
And those guys weren’t doing so well. It was pick-and-shovel work, with a quota of ten cubic meters a day. Like Teddy at the breaker, the others got mush and soup at lunchtime, and another bowl at knockoff. The toll of heavy labor and lack of nutrients was clear in their wasting arms, their drawn, bony faces. The Viets seemed to be taking it better than Pritchard. The Australian rolled off the truck at the end of the day, crawled to the hut, and lay with his eyes closed. As weeks passed, he began coughing, a nagging hack that brought up gray oysters.
Teddy decided to do something about his foot. He stole two yards of the thin rag they all wore over their faces at the breaker, stuffing it down inside his pants when the last whistle blew. Back at the cave, he rubbed a scrap of wood on a rock until it resembled the sole of a shoe, but with a bent piece sticking up along the back. He strapped his foot up so that it didn’t hang, and the wooden brace gave him ankle support.
With it strapped on tight, very tight, he could limp. Not fast, and it still hurt like a sonofabitch, but it was better.
Each day, he tried to pick up a word. Most of the other prisoners refused to speak to him, but a couple would. One, he suspected, was Christian. He’d drawn something on his palm, hiding it from the others, but Teddy couldn’t make sense of the ideogram.
How was “good,” or used like “okay,” to agree or say you understood.
Tway meant “you did that right,” which they didn’t say to Teddy very often.
Apparently boo yow meant something like “fuck, no” or “get out of my face.”
“No” was bu shi, with a sort of upward singing note on the bu and a dropping note on the shi.
He tried to figure out “thank you” so he could say it to old Lew, but no one seemed to say that around here. Finally he noticed that the husky guys scratched the table with two fingers when they got their mush. He used the gesture, and got rewarded with a squint, then a clap on the shoulder from Chow.
Chow ran Teddy’s level of the breaker. One of the muscular guys who got to sit on the cable spools. A mechanic. He kept the grinding wheels lubed and adjusted. He was always climbing in among the mill gears, even while they were in operation, reaching in here and there as if he didn’t care about losing a hand. He was already down two fingers. What were these guys in for? Either politicals or regular criminals, but he couldn’t figure which. His hutmate Thinh thought they were politicals, that this had been a re-education camp, but admitted he wasn’t sure.
Then one day Chow wasn’t there anymore. Teddy asked Lew where he’d gone. “Na-li shi Chow?”
Lew just looked away.
* * *
AND the days passed.
There was no clock, only the whistle. No news. No calendar, so he didn’t know what day or even what month it was. Just that it kept getting colder, and now and then fine icy crystals drifted down.
It was too dry to really snow. But their piss froze in the plastic buckets, and they shivered all day long. They scavenged anything that would burn: paper, broken shovel handles, dead grass.
One evening Fierros whispered, staring into the dying fire, “We have to get out of here.”
No one said anything for quite some time. Until the pilot added, “It doesn’t matter where. Probably just out there to die. But we’re gonna die in this shithole anyway.”
Teddy slumped against the cave wall, massaging his leg. He’d kept falling down all afternoon. Each time, the unit leader had kicked him back to his feet.
This wasn’t the first time they’d discussed escape. He and Pritchard had talked it over on and off since they’d arrived. Each time, they’d concluded it might be possible to get up the bluffs and over the wire. But what lay outside? Desert, mountain, hostile locals?
“You heard the wolves howling out there,” Pritchard observed. “We leave the wire, mates, what do we do about them?”
Teddy slid closer, until the embers scorched his knees. But his ass was still freezing. “It’s not time yet,” he muttered. “The war’s got to be over someday. It’s got to be.”
“How long do we wait?”
“As long as they’re feeding us, we stay.”
Fierros muttered, “And when they stop?”
Teddy blinked into the dying glow. Took a deep breath, and let it out.
“Then it’ll be time to go.”