The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [296]
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.
Martinez glided across the rest of the distance separating him from the grove. Once inside the trees, he paused again, flattened himself against a trunk. Nothing was moving. He waited until his eyes became acclimated to the darkness and then he crept forward from tree to tree, separating the brush with his hands in his passage. After fifteen yards he came to a path and stopped, peering to left and right. Then he paced along it to the border of the grove again, halting before a small emplacement, into which he knelt. There had been a machine gun there several days before -- he reasoned this by the fact that the holes for the studs of the tripod were no damper than the surface of the emplacement. Besides, the machine gun had pointed toward the rock ledge; the Japanese would have used it that afternoon in the ambush if it had still been there.
Slowly, cautiously, he examined the periphery of the grove. The Japanese had left, and by the number of empty ration cartons, the size of their latrine trench, he estimated that they must have made up a full platoon. Recon had run into much less than that; it could mean only that most of their platoon had been withdrawn a day or two before, and the men