"Be quiet!" the captain whispered, putting a restraining hand on the soldier's arm, listening. Truscoe held his breath and struggled to keep absolutely still. Captain Carter was a legendary jungle fighter, with the scars and medals to prove it. If he thought there was something dangerous, creeping closer in the darkness. Truscoe suppressed an involuntary shudder.
"It's all right," the captain said, this time in a normal speaking tone. "Something big out there, buffalo or deer. But it's downwind and it took off as soon as it caught our smell. You can smoke if you want to."
The soldier hesitated, not sure how to answer. Finally, he said, "Sir, aren't we supposed… I mean someone could see the flame?"
"We're not hiding, Private Truscoe. William — do they call you Billy?"
"Why, yes sir."
"We picked this spot, Billy, because none of the locals normally come this way at night. Light up. The smoke will let all the wildlife know that we're here and they'll keep their distance. They are a lot more afraid of us than you are of them. Not only that, but our informant can find us by the smell too. One whiff and he'll know that it's not the local leaf. That trail over here leads to the village and he'll probably come that way."
Billy looked but could see neither trail nor opening in the jungle wall where the officer pointed. But if the captain said so, it had to be true. He clutched his M16 rifle tightly and looked around at the buzzing, clattering darkness.
"It's not so much the critters out there, sir. I've done plenty of hunting in Alabama and I know this gun can stop anything around. Except maybe another gun. I mean, this geek, sir, the one that's coming. Isn't he kind of a traitor? You know, if he finks on his own people how can we know he won't do the same to us?"
Carter's voice was patient and gave no indication how much he loathed the word geek.
"The man's an informant, not a traitor, and he is more eager than we are for this deal to go through. He was originally a refugee from a village in the south, one that was wiped out by that earthquake some years back. You have to understand that these people are very provincial and he'll be a 'foreigner' in this village — as long as he lives. His wife is dead, he has nothing to stay here for. When we approached him for information he jumped at the chance. We'll pay him enough so that he won't ever have to work again. He'll retire to a village close to the one where he was raised. It's a good deal."
Billy was emboldened by the darkness and the presence of the solitary officer. "Still, seems sort of raw for the people he lived with. Selling them out."
"No one is being sold out." The captain was much more positive now. "What we are doing for them is for their own good. They may not see it that way now, but it is. It is the long-term results that count."
The captain sounded a little peeved. Billy shifted uneasily and did not answer. He should have remembered you don't talk to officers like they were real people or something.
"Stand up, here he comes," Carter said.
Billy had the feeling that maybe the captain could have outhunted him even in his own stand of woods back in Alabama. He neither saw nor heard a thing. Only when the short, turbaned figure appeared at their sides did he know that the informant had arrived.
"Tuan?" the man whispered, and Carter spoke to him quietly in his own tongue. It was so much geek talk to Billy: they had had lectures on the language, but he had never bothered to listen. When they stepped out into the flood of moonlight he saw that the man was a typical geek, too. Scrawny and little and old. There was more cloth in the turban than in his loincloth. All of his possessions, the accumulation of a lifetime, were rolled in a straw mat that he carried in one hand. He sounded very frightened.
"Let's get back to the truck," Captain Carter ordered. "He won't talk here. Too afraid the villagers will find him."
He's got cause to worry, Billy thought, following the disproportionate pair back down the road. The captain was half bent over as he talked to the little man.
Once the truck had coughed to life and the driver was tooling her back to camp, the informant relaxed. He talked steadily in a high, birdlike voice, and the captain put a sheet of paper on his map case and sketched in the details of the village and the surrounding area. Billy nodded, bored, with his rifle between his legs, looking forward to some chow and hitting the sack. There was an all-night cook in the MP mess who would fry up steak and eggs for you if you were on late duty. The voice twittered on and the map grew.
