Going After Cacciato Read Online Free PDF

hard into place.
    “Fire it,” he said, “and let’s move.”
    Paul Berlin took a long time opening his pack.
    But he found the flare, unscrewed its lid, laid the firing pin against the metal base, then jammed it in.
    The flare jumped away from him. It went high and fast, rocketing upward and then smoothing out in a long arc that followed the course of the trail, leaving behind a dirty white wake.
    At its apex, with barely a sound, it exploded in a green dazzle over Cacciato’s hill. A fine, brilliant shade of green.
    “Go,” whispered Paul Berlin. It did not seem enough. “Go,” he said, and then he shouted, “Go!”

Two
The Observation Post
    C acciato’s round face became the moon. The valleys and ridges and fast-flowing plains dissolved, and now the moon was just the moon.
    Paul Berlin sat up. A fine idea. He stretched, stood up, leaned against the wall of sandbags, touched his weapon, then gazed out at the strip of beach that wound along the curving Batangan. Things were dark. Behind him, the South China Sea sobbed in against the tower’s thick piles; before him, inland, was the face of Quang Ngai.
    Yes, he thought, a fine idea. Cacciato leading them west through peaceful country, deep country perfumed by lilacs and burning hemp, a boy coaxing them step by step through rich and fertile country toward Paris.
    It was a splendid idea.
    Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination. A trulyawesome notion. Not a dream, an idea. An idea to develop, to tinker with and build and sustain, to draw out as an artist draws out his visions.
    It was not a dream. Nothing mystical or crazy, just an idea. Just a possibility. Feet turning hard like stone, legs stiffening, six and seven and eight thousand miles through unfolding country toward Paris. A truly splendid idea.
    He checked his watch. It was not quite midnight.
    For a time he stood quietly at the tower’s north wall, looking out to where the beach jagged sharply into the sea to form a natural barrier against storms. The night was quiet. On the sand below, coils of barbed wire circled the observation tower in a perimeter that separated it from the rest of the war. The tripflares were out. Things were in their place. Beside him, Harold Murphy’s machine gun was fully loaded and ready, and a dozen signal flares were lined up on the wall, and the radio was working, and the beach was mined, and the tower itself was high and strong and fortified. The sea guarded his rear. The moon gave light. It would be all right, he told himself. He was safe.
    He lighted a cigarette and moved to the west wall.
    Doc and Eddie and Oscar and the others slept peacefully. And the night was peaceful. Time to consider the possibilities.
    Had it ended there on Cacciato’s grassy hill, flares coloring the morning sky? Had it ended in tragedy? Had it ended with a jerking, shaking feeling—noise and confusion? Or had it ended farther along the trail west? Had it ever ended? What, in fact, had become of Cacciato? More precisely—as Doc Peret would insist it be phrased—more precisely, what part was fact and what part was the extension of fact? And how were facts separated from possibilities? What had really happened and what merely might have happened? How did it end?
    The trick, of course, was to think through it carefully. That was Doc’s advice—look for motives, search out the place where fact ended and imagination took over. Ask the important questions. Why had Cacciato left the war? Was it courage or ignorance, orboth? Was it even possible to combine courage and ignorance? How much of what happened, or might have happened, was Cacciato’s doing and how much was the product of the biles?
    That was Doc’s theory.
    “You got an excess of fear biles,” Doc had said one afternoon