Up Country

by Nelson DeMille

  It was pushing 2 A.M. by the time we got to the hotel, and a guard let us in. There was no one at the front desk, so we couldn’t check for messages, and we walked up the stairs to the third floor.

  We got to my room first, and I opened the door and checked for a fax message. There was none, and we walked to Susan’s room.

  She opened the door, and there was a single sheet of paper on the floor. She went into the bedroom, turned on a lamp, and read the fax. She handed it to me, and I read: Your message received and transmitted to proper authorities. I am very hurt and angry, but it’s your decision. Not mine. I think you’re making a terrible mistake, and if you hadn’t gone to Nha Trang with someone, we could have discussed this. Now, I think it’s too late. It was signed Bill.

  I gave the fax sheet back to her and said, “You didn’t have to show that to me.”

  “He’s such a romantic.” She added, “Notice he didn’t bother to come to Nha Trang.”

  “You’re tough on men. God knows what you’re going to say about me over drinks in the Q-Bar.”

  She looked at me and said, “Anything I have to say about you, I’ll say to you.”

  There was this awkward moment, and I looked around the room, which was much like my own. I noticed the snow globe on her night table and a few things hung in the open alcove. I said, “Did they give you any soap or shampoo?”

  “No. But I brought my own. I should have told you.”

  “I’ll buy some tomorrow.”

  “You can have half my soap bar now.”

  That wasn’t what I had in mind when I brought up the soap problem, and we both knew it. I said, “That’s okay. Well . . .”

  She gave me a big hug and buried her face on my chest. She said, “Maybe before I leave. I have to think about it. Is that all right?”

  “Sure.”

  We kissed, and for a moment, I thought she already thought about it, but she broke away and said, “Okay . . . good night. Breakfast? Ten?”

  “Fine.” I don’t like lingering good-byes, so I turned and left.

  Back in my room, I took off my shirt and peeled off my wet pants and threw them on one of the beds.

  I pulled a chair out to the balcony and sat with my feet on the wrought iron railing. I looked up at the starlit sky and yawned.

  I could hear music from the beach and voices carried on the night breeze, and the surf hitting the sand. I listened for a knock on my door, but there was no knock.

  My mind drifted back to May 1968, when I was here in Nha Trang, with only one worry in the world—staying alive. Like a lot of middle-aged men who have been to war, there were times when I felt that war had a stark and honest simplicity to it, an almost transcendental quality that focused the mind and the body as nothing else had done before, or would do again.

  And yet, for all the adrenaline rushes, and the out-of-body experiences, and the incandescent flashes of truth and light, war, like a drug, took its toll on the body, the mind, and the soul. There was a point of diminishing returns, and a price to pay for spitting in the eye of Death, and getting away with it.

  I stared at the stars and thought of Cynthia, of Susan, and of Paul Brenner, and of Vietnam, Part Three.

  I got into bed and pulled down the mosquito netting, but I couldn’t sleep, so I played taps in my head: Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well, safely rest, God is nigh . . .

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I got to the veranda at 10 A.M., and Susan was already sitting at a table with a pot of coffee, reading her Economist.

  There were a few other people having breakfast, all Westerners, so I concluded I wasn’t under the eye of the Ministry of Public Security. I kind of wished I was because I had no anti-government activities planned for the day.

  The great minds in Washington had scheduled this as a down week, the week in which Mr. Paul Brenner, Vietnam veteran, established his innocence as a tourist. This was standard tradecraft. Very short trips to faraway places always look suspicious to immigration and customs people. Similarly, visas applied for shortly before a major trip also look suspicious, as Colonel Mang indicated. But it was too late to worry about that.

  I sat and said to Susan, “Good morning.”

  She put down the magazine and said, “Good morning. How did you sleep?”

  “Alone.”

  She smiled and poured me a cup of coffee.

  Susan was wearing khaki slacks, as was I, and a sleeveless navy blue pullover.

  It was a beautiful morning, the temperature was in the mid-seventies, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  The waiter came, and Susan informed me, “They have only two breakfasts—Viet and Western. Pho soup or fried eggs. They don’t know scrambled, so don’t ask.”

  “Eggs.”

  Susan ordered in Vietnamese.

  I asked her, “Did you have hot water?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. There’s an electric hot water tank above the toilet. Didn’t you see it?”

  “I thought it was part of the toilet.”

  “No. There’s a switch you turn on, and it heats about twenty gallons of water. Takes awhile. They turn off the electric to the tanks at 10 A.M.”

  “I didn’t have any soap anyway.”

  “We’ll go to the market later and get a few things.”

  I asked her, “Do you think that when Bill contacted the consulate, he mentioned to them that you’d come along to Nha Trang?”

  She lit a cigarette and replied, “I thought about that. On the one hand, he should have told them, if he’s serious about being useful to the consulate. On the other hand, they all know he and I are—were—dating, so maybe he’s embarrassed to tell them I took off with you.”

  I nodded.

  She asked, “Do you think you’d be in trouble with your firm if they discovered we’d made this trip together?”

  I replied, “They would not be happy, but what are they going to do about it? Send me to Vietnam?”

  She smiled. “Sounds like something you guys said when you were here.”

  “Every day.”

  “Well . . . I’m sorry if this winds up causing you a problem.”

  “No problem.” As long as Karl didn’t rat me out to Cynthia. But he wouldn’t do that—unless it served a purpose for him.

  The eggs came. Susan said to me, “I was thinking about what I told you about Sam, and why I’m here and all that. I didn’t want you to think that a man was the cause of me being here.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “I mean, he was not the cause of me being here. I made that decision. He was the catalyst.”

  “Got it.”

  “I needed to prove something to myself, not to Sam. Now I think I’m the person I want to be, and I’m ready to find the right person to be with.”

  “Good.”

  “Tell me what you think. Be honest.”

  “Okay. I think you got it right last night when you were drunk. I also think that you came to Vietnam with the intention of staying only as long as it took for you to make Sam interested in you again. If he’d come here to get you, you’d have gone back with him long before you proved anything to yourself. But it was important for you that he come and see that you could make it on your own. So, bottom line, this was all for a guy. But I think you’re beyond that now.”

  She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if she was annoyed, embarrassed, or stunned by my blinding insights. Finally, she said, “That’s about it. You’re a pretty sharp guy.”

  “I do this for a living. Not advice to the lovelorn, but I analyze bullshit all day. I don’t have a lot of patience for bullshit, or self-justification. Everybody knows what they did and why they did it. You either keep it to yourself, or you tell it like it is.”

  She nodded. “I knew I could trust you to tell me what you thought.”

  “The question remains, What are you going to do next? If you stay here, stay for the right reaso
ns. Same if you go home. My concern for you, Ms. Weber, is the same concern I had for the guys I knew who couldn’t leave here.”

  “How about guys who stay in the army all their lives?”

  “You mean me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “Point made. So maybe I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “They said it was important. They said they needed me. And I was bored.”

  “What’s so important?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what—when I’m out of here, we’ll meet someday for a drink in New York, Washington, or Massachusetts, and I’ll tell you what I discovered.”

  She replied, “Make it Washington. You owe me a tour of the city. But first, make sure you get out of here.”

  “Did it twice already.”

  “Good. Ready to go?”

  “First, tell me how you knew I was working for the army.”

  “Oh . . . I guess someone told me. I guess it was Bill.”

  “He had no need to know that.”

  “Then I guess it was someone in the consulate. What difference does it make?”

  I didn’t reply.

  She looked at me and said, “Actually, I wasn’t asked by Bill to do a favor for the consulate. They asked me directly. The CIA guy there. He gave me a very sketchy briefing. Mostly your bio. Nothing about the mission. I don’t know anything about that. Only a few details about you.” She added, “The CIA guy said you were army Criminal Investigation Division, and this was about a criminal matter, not a spy thing.”

  “Who’s the CIA guy?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” She smiled and said, “He gave me your photo, and I took the job right there on the spot.”

  I asked her, “When did this take place?”

  “Oh . . . about four days before you got here.”

  The first time they sent me here, they at least gave me sixty days’ notice, a thirty-day leave, and recommended I make out a will.

  I stood. “Is breakfast included?”

  “If they don’t include soap, why would they include breakfast?”

  “Good observation.” I called over the waiter and paid for breakfast, which came to two bucks.

  We walked out to the beach road where about two dozen cyclo drivers were parked. They descended on us, and Susan picked two drivers, one of whom had an arm missing. We got in the cyclos, and Susan said, “Cho Dam.”

  Her guy had the missing arm, and I said to Susan, “Ask him if he’s a veteran.”

  She asked him, and he seemed first surprised at her Vietnamese, then surprised that anyone cared if he was a veteran. She said to me, “He says he is.”

  As we rode up the beach road, Susan conversed with her driver, and I knew she was telling him that I was a veteran.

  As our cyclos came side by side, she said, “He was a soldier here in Nha Trang, and he was captured when the Communists took the city. His entire regiment was imprisoned in the soccer stadium here, without food or water for many days. He had a wound on his arm that turned gangrenous.” She paused. “His comrades removed his arm without anesthesia.”

  I looked at the driver, and our eyes met.

  Susan continued, “He was so sick that he wasn’t sent to a re-education camp, so he was able to stay in Nha Trang with his family, and he recovered.”

  I guess that’s the Viet equivalent of a story with a happy ending. Maybe I should stop taking cyclos, or at least stop asking these wraiths about their war service. I said to Susan, “Tell him I was proud to serve alongside the Army of South Vietnam.”

  Susan relayed this to the guy, and he took his one hand off the handle bar and snapped a quick salute.

  My driver was listening to all this, and he began talking to Susan.

  Susan listened and translated, “He says he was a sailor at Cam Ranh Bay and had the chance to escape by boat as the Communists approached, but he left his ship to make his way back to his village outside Nha Trang. He was captured along the way by North Vietnamese troops and spent four years in a re-education camp.”

  I said to Susan, “Tell him . . . America still remembers its South Vietnamese allies,” which was total bullshit, but sounded good.

  So, we rode along the nice beach road under an azure sky, the smell of the sea in my nostrils, and the human wreckage of a lost cause propelling us on.

  The street we were on dead-ended at a gated marketplace. We dismounted, and I gave each of the drivers a fiver, which made them very happy. At this rate, I’d be broke by next week, but I’m a sucker for a sad story. Also, I think, I was feeling some survivor’s guilt, which I’d never felt before.

  We wandered through the market, and I got a chunk of mystery soap wrapped in tissue paper, and a bottle of American shampoo, whose brand, I think, they stopped making in ’68. Susan bought me a pair of Ho Chi Minh sandals, made out of tire treads, and I bought Susan a T-shirt that said Nha Trang is the lovely beach—Tell the dears at home.

  Who writes this stuff ?

  Susan also picked up two silk blouses. She said, “This is cheaper than in Saigon. The silkworm farms and factories are in this area. I should come here to shop.”

  “For the factories?”

  She laughed.

  We wandered around the outdoor stalls for about an hour, and Susan picked up a scented candle, a bottle of rice wine, and a cheap vinyl tote to carry the junk. Women love to shop.

  We went to the flower section, and Susan bought branches of Tet blossoms tied with twine. She said, “For your room. Chuc Mung Nam Moi.”

  We took cyclos back to the hotel, checked for messages, but there were none, then went to my room.

  Susan tied the Tet blossoms to the mosquito net frame of my bed. She said, “This will bring you good luck and keep the evil spirits away.”

  “I like evil spirits.”

  She smiled, and we stood there a few seconds, looking at each other.

  She asked me, “Do you want to go to the beach?”

  “Sure.”

  She took my soap and shampoo out of her tote and gave them to me. “I’ll knock on your door when I’m ready.” She hesitated, then left.

  I got into my bathing suit, pulled on a gym shirt, and slipped into my brand-new Ho Chi Minh sandals.

  I put my wallet, passport, visa, vouchers, and airline tickets in a plastic bag, wondering if the desk clerk would hold this stuff, or go to America with it.

  I sat in a chair and watched a gecko crawl up the wall. I ran some stuff through my mind as I watched the gecko and waited for Susan.

  Susan Weber. Probably she was what she said she was: an American expat businesswoman. But there were signs that she had a second job. In a country where our intelligence assets were limited, but our needs were big and getting bigger, it was common practice to recruit friends in the American business or expat community to do a little something for Uncle Sam on the side.

  There were at least three agencies who did this kind of recruiting overseas—State Department Intelligence, Military Intelligence, or the Central Intelligence Agency.

  And then there was American-Asian itself. The whole operation looked legit, but it also had all the bells and whistles of a CIA front.

  The other question was Susan Weber’s fondness for Paul Brenner. You can fake a lot of things in life—women fake orgasms, and men fake whole relationships—but unless I was really losing my ability to read people, Susan was honestly taken with me. It wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened, which was why intelligence agencies instinctively distrusted their human employees and loved their spy satellites.

  In any case, Susan Weber and Paul Brenner were on the brink of a sexual liaison that wasn’t part of the original script and could only lead to disaster.

  There was a knock on the door, and I called out, “It’s open.”

  Susan came in, and I stood.

  She was wearing the Nha Trang T-shirt I bought her—tell the dears at home
—and it came down to her knees. She had on sandals and was carrying her new tote.

  She smiled and said, “Love your sandals.” She took a plastic cup out of her tote, filled with white powder. She said, “This is boric acid. You sprinkle it around your bed and luggage.”

  “Then what? Pray for rain?”

  “It keeps the bugs away. Specifically, cockroaches.”

  I put the cup on my night table and we left the room. On the way down the stairs, I said, “I have all my valuables in this plastic bag. Can I trust these with the front desk?”

  “Sure. I’ll take care of it.”

  We got down to the lobby, and Susan spoke to the desk clerk. The deal was that we had to inventory everything, including Susan’s money and passport as well as my own stuff. As all this was going on, I said to her, “Mind if I snoop through your passport?”

  She hesitated a second, then said, “No. Terrible photo.”

  I looked at her photo, which, of course, was not that terrible, and I noticed that the passport had been issued from the General Passport Office a little over three years before, which was consistent with her arrival here. I looked at her photo and saw that her hair was much shorter then, and there was something very sad and innocent about her expression—but maybe I was just projecting because of what she’d told me. In any case, the woman standing beside me looked a lot more confident and assured than the woman in the passport photo.

  I flipped the pages and saw that she had three entry stamps for the U.S., two for New York and one for Washington. That was not totally consistent with her claim that she’d never been to Washington—but it could have just been an entry point for a connecting flight to somewhere else, like Boston.

  Her Viet visa stamp was different from mine, and was probably a work visa rather than a tourist visa. It had been renewed once, a year ago, and I pictured her at Section C of the Ministry for Public Security, two years into her tour, and giving everyone a hard time.

  She’d also been to Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, and Tokyo, which was either for R&R or business. Nothing tricky there. But the Washington thing stuck out.

  I put the passport back on the counter, and the clerk gave us the handwritten receipt, which we all had to sign, and Susan gave him a dollar.