“Fucking tell me about it,” he groaned. “Small-cell lung cancer, aged sixty-seven, bham! You know, I’ve tried smoking, I’ve tried not smoking. I’ve tried clean living, and every time I get the same fucking disease. I asked a medic once why that should be, and you know what she said? ‘Hey, stuff just happens.’ I mean, fuck me.”
“So,” I asked carefully, deciding not to elaborate on my own medical career, “why war?”
He eyed me beadily over the rapidly appearing whiteness of the lamb bone. “You done much fighting? You look like you might have been old enough to do a bit of World War Two, no offence to you.”
“I’ve seen a few wars,” I admitted with a shrug, “but I tend to steer clear. Too unpredictable.”
“Fuck, man, that’s the whole fucking point! You’re born knowing everything that’s gonna happen in your lifetime, every fucking bit of it, and you’re like ‘Let’s just watch’? Screw that–let’s get out there, let’s live a little, get surprised! I’ve been shot–” he bristled with pride “–seventy-four times, but only nineteen of those bullets were fatal. I also been blown up by a hand grenade and stood on a mine, and this one time, back when we were fighting the Vietcong, I got stabbed to death with a sharpened bamboo stick, can you fucking believe it? We were clearing this patch of jungle which didn’t even have a fucking name, and the place stank cos the air-force boys, they’d fried the land to the left and the land to the right–funnelling the guerrillas into a killing zone, they called it–and Jesus, we’d done some killing, and I’m feeling on top of the world, I mean like, knowing every second could be my last, it’s this buzz, this amazing buzz. And I don’t even hear him, I don’t even see this guy; he’s just there, coming out of the ground, and I get a shot off which takes out his stomach and he’s gonna bleed to death, but that doesn’t even slow him down–he’s on me, bham, bham! Guy can’t have been more than sixteen years old and I thought, hell yeah, you’re a sight worth seeing.”
He threw the chewed bone out of the door for a three-legged dog to hobble over and gnaw on. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he grinned at me and said, “You Cronus Club boys, you’re all so scared of doing something different. Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out–I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”
“Do you think you’ve ever made a difference to the course of linear events?” I enquired. “Have you, personally, ever affected the outcome of a war?”
“Fuck no!” He chuckled. “We’re just fucking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back–none of it fucking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and and go, ‘Wow, let’s make the decisions we were always gonna have to make anyway.’ I’m no threat to temporal events, partner–I’m just the fire in the stove. And you know the best bit?” He beamed, climbing to his feet, tossing a fistful of bunched-up notes into the corner of the hut, like a master throwing scraps to a pet. “None of it fucking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any fucking difference at all.”
He made to go, then paused in the doorway, grinning, his face half in the shade of the hut, half in the blinding white light of day. “Hey, Harry, you ever get bored of this archaeology shit, or whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line.”
“Good luck to you, Fidel,” I replied.
He grinned and stepped into the light.
Chapter 51
“It’s yes,” I told Vincent. “The answer is yes.”
We sat in the commander’s office of the Pietrok-112 facility, the commander having tactfully vacated the space, and I waited, knees crossed and hands folded, watching Vincent watch me.