From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [461]
Once, over on the Highway as he moved east he saw one patrol car with blue headlights rolling slowly west in the opposite direction. It excited him strangely. He stopped for a minute to watch it. He had been very careful when he crossed Waialae the first time. He had waited a long time and made very sure there was nothing on the Highway. Those blue headlights were supposed to be invisible from the air and maybe they were. But on the ground you could see them a mile away.
He was just as careful when he came up to the second crossing, near the end of the golf course. He was coming down from higher ground with no obstructions and he could see almost half a mile each way and there was not a blue light anywhere. So he did not stop. He just started on across. If there had been a patrol car with its light on anywhere within a mile he could have seen it easily.
What he could not have seen easily, if at all, was a patrol car with its lights off. But he was not expecting to see any patrol cars with their lights off. So he did not look for any.
It was sitting about thirty yards to the west of him in the middle of the Highway.
As he came up onto the shoulder and stepped out on to the asphalt it turned its lights on, the two blue headlights and one spot that was a much lighter blue, almost white. He saw it then. He was caught square in the center of the beam. If he had crossed a hundred yards back or fifty yards further on, it might not have heard him, even though he was not trying to move quietly.
His first instinct was to run but he choked it off. It wouldnt have done any good anyway. He was almost in the middle of the Highway, with flat open ground on both sides of it. Besides, there was still always the chance he might talk them out of it, before he had to make the break.
“Halt!” a voice erupted at him nervously.
But he was already halted. It made him think of the night Warden had halted him, that time at Hickam Field, and he wanted to laugh wildly. Oh, the bastards, the bastards, the smart smug bastards. Sitting there with their lights off. Just when it was all going so good. They would have to pull a smart one like that.
The patrol car, it was a jeep, pulled up slowly and cautiously to within ten yards of him. There were four scared MPs in it; he could see their blue faces and the blue light reflecting from the white letters of their brassards. They all had helmets on. The one beside the driver was standing up staring at him over a Thompson gun above the windshield; he could see the bulge of the Cutts Comp on the muzzle.
“Who goes there?”
“A friend,” he said.
The two in the back, who doubtless considered the answer to be a stock reply to a stock question, were climbing out over the side reluctantly slowly. They were covering him with pistols.
“Advance, friend, and be recognized,” said the bigger one squeakily. Then he cleared his throat.
And he, Prewitt that is, the unrecognized friend, came toward them slowly. Thinking how now, for a split minute out of the time run, by a happenstance of smartness on their part and dumbness on his, they held it all in their hands. A thing that had started almost a year ago, with Chief Bugler Houston, and led up through Dynamite Holmes and the boxing into The Treatment and Ike Galovitch and from there to the Stockade and Jack Malloy and the late Fatso Judson, and a lot of other things both before and after, to finally here, where, for this split minute that was the current point of time in the line of time which was not a line but an infinite series of points, four strangers held it all in their hands without even knowing it.
“Halt!” the bigger one said again.