A five-man patrol finishes its reconnaissance in the last dark of a season, lying in wet reed below a river bank that has been cut back, faced with stone and grown over.
Then weather sits on every ridge between them and the man who promised to come back for them — and when he finally gets an hour under the cloud, he reports that their landing ground now has men living on it, cutting the scrub back off both edges and stacking what they cut.
The order is to walk the intelligence out to a friendly gun position far to the east. What follows is the walk: a pale road that holds a boot, a valley denied by a friendly artillery program that cannot be lifted, and a country of bare rock with no water and no shade.
And a formation moving in the same direction they are.
