The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [276]
Drought season for anarchists.
Martinez moved along for a few hundred yards through the tall grass, keeping well within the shadow of the cliffs. As he advanced, he awakened slowly, flexing his arms and pinching the back of his neck. He had been partially asleep while he had talked to Croft, or at least nothing that was said had any significance to him. He had understood the directions, the mission, he had known that Croft was telling him to do something and instinctively he obeyed, but he had not thought about the connotations. It had not seemed particularly dangerous or odd to be going out by himself at night into country he had never seen before.
Now of course as his mind cleared it was becoming apparent to him. Damn fool thing? he wondered, and then dismissed it. If Croft had told him it was necessary, then obviously it was. His senses became alerted, his nerve ends poised. He moved forward with an effortless silent motion, placing his heel first on the ground, and then bringing his toes down gently, his body weaving through the grass to diminish the rustling. A man twenty yards away could not have been certain that anyone was approaching. And yet with this he did not go slowly; through experience, his feet seemed to paw the ground, avoiding stones or twigs, settling confidently, noiselessly. He was functioning more like an animal now than a man.
He was frightened, but effectively so; he had no panic, and it left him intensely aware of everything he could see or feel. On the ship, in the assault boat that landed on Anopopei, a dozen times since, he had been close to hysteria, worth nothing at all, but that variety of fear had nothing to do with this. If he had had to endure one more artillery shelling he might have collapsed; his terror always expanded in a situation where he could do nothing to affect it, but now he was by himself, doing the thing he could perform better than any man he knew, and it supported him. All the successful reassuring connotations of other scouting missions he had made in the past year were stored beneath the surface of his thoughts.
Martinez best man in recon, he said to himself with pride. Croft had told him this once, and he had never forgotten it.
In twenty minutes he had reached the rock shelf where they had been ambushed. He squatted in the woods behind it and examined the ledge for several minutes before advancing again. And then behind the ledge he watched the field and the grove where the Japanese had fired at them. In the moonlight the field was a wan silver and the grove an impenetrable black-green far deeper than the blanched transparent shadows that surrounded it. Behind him and to his right he could feel the huge body of the mountain glowing oddly in the darkness like a vast monument illumined by spotlights.
For perhaps five minutes he peered at the field and the grove, thinking of nothing at all, his eyes and ears the only part of him wholly alive. The tension with which he watched, the taut pressure in his chest was pleasurable, complete in itself, like a man in the first stages of drunkenness when he is content to feel only the symptoms of his intoxication. Martinez was holding his breath but he was unaware of it.
Nothing moved at all. He heard no sounds besides the whispering of the grass. Slowly, almost leisurely, he slipped over the ledge and squatted in the field searching for a shadow in which he might hide. But there was no approach to the grove where he would not have to pass through the moonlight. Martinez debated for an instant, and then sprang to his feet, stood in complete view of the grove for a startling, terrifying second and then dropped to the ground again. No one fired. He would have taken them by surprise. The chances were likely that if there was anyone in the grove they would have been startled enough to fire upon him.
Quietly, he stood up again and loped quickly across half the distance of the field, dropping behind a rock with a twisting sprawling motion. No answer, no fire. He ran another thirty yards, halted behind another rock. The borders of the grove were less than fifty feet away. He listened to his own breathing, watched the moonlight trace an oval of shadow beyond the rock. All his senses told him that there was no one in the grove, but it was too dangerous to trust them. He stood up for a full second, and then dropped down again. If they hadn't fired by now. . . He felt fatalistic about it. There was no way to cross an open field in the moonlight without being seen.