Nine Days

by Fred Hiatt

  Without thinking—or maybe because in some corner of my mind I’d been thinking about it all day—I darted through the gap before the gate clicked shut, and dropped into the shrubbery.

  Ti-Anna was being escorted up the path, through shadows. I assumed the man next to her was Rat-face.

  I squatted in the humid Hanoi night, surrounded by cicadas even noisier than my ragged breathing. I had no plan. I couldn’t have told you why I had done what I did, or what I thought I was going to do next, except that I didn’t trust Mr. Thieu, and I didn’t want a wall separating me from Ti-Anna.

  I edged forward through an unkempt garden. The driveway opened onto a gravel-covered lot that encircled Thieu’s house like a moat. It wasn’t really a house, though—it looked more like a squat pagoda, with the ground floor lit up and the higher floors in darkness. An old army truck, with a canvas roof, was parked by the door.

  Curtains were pulled across the windows. But as I crept along the edge of the gravel clearing, I noticed an outdoor wooden stairway connecting the porch to a second-floor balcony. I decided to make a run for it.

  Every footstep was like an explosion on the gravel as I sprinted through the light. But I made it across and up the stairs. I listened, and let my breathing slow again. It didn’t seem I’d been noticed.

  They were talking beneath me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, in part because the truck was idling noisily around the corner. Luckily its rumble covered the creaking of the wood floor, too, as I crept along the balcony.

  A door opened easily, into a storeroom that took up the entire second floor—no furniture, as best I could make out in the bit of light that seeped in, just boxes and old file cabinets. From here, the voices were clearer—there was Ti-Anna speaking now, I was sure—but still indistinct. Then I noticed a bit of light, a small hole in the floor. I tiptoed over, lay flat and peered down: nothing. Angled slats made it impossible to see anything but the ceiling fan below. But pressing an ear to the opening I could hear almost as though I were in the room.

  “I don’t believe you,” Ti-Anna was saying angrily.

  “See for yourself,” a man said. It did not sound like Thieu—the voice was deeper, the English less accented. He said something in Vietnamese, and I heard some walking and some rustling. “Here are the photos,” he said.

  Ti-Anna gasped. “My father.”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “And who’s that? The labor leaders?”

  “She still does not get it,” a different voice said. This was Thieu, I was certain—the same higher-pitched, sneering rat voice we had heard at the gate that morning. “Stupid as her father.”

  “There never were any labor leaders,” the other man said, in a more patient voice. “That was how they lured him here. Don’t you see? Those are Chinese agents. Doing their job.”

  There was a pause.

  “Where is he?” I heard Ti-Anna ask. Now she sounded more frightened than angry, as though she didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Not our business,” the man said. “But that car? From China. Probably they drove back across the border and threw him in prison that same day. If they’d wanted to kill him, they would not have had to go to such trouble.” He laughed a bit. “Not to mention expense.”

  Now there was a longer pause. “So … why tell me now?” Ti-Anna asked.

  “We were not supposed to,” the man said. “But I think, why not? Where you are going now”—the blood froze in my veins—“you will not be telling anyone. So what harm in satisfying your curiosity?”

  “You’re going to kill me?” She sounded a lot more composed than I would have.

  “No.” There was a chilly laugh. “What a waste that would be—an attractive young woman like you. These men”—I heard something, and assumed he was thumping the photo—“want you out of the way. ‘A good lesson,’ they say. ‘They will think twice about making trouble again, if they know even the children are not safe.’ But they didn’t tell us how. Now we will give you something to help you sleep. And you will go on a ride. And when you wake up—well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You will have a new life, believe me.”

  The next second all hell seemed to break loose. Something was scraping along the ground, Ti-Anna was screaming, men were yelling in Vietnamese. Then I heard a groan from Ti-Anna. A thump. Quieter talking in Vietnamese. The front door opening.

  The truck, I thought. With its engine rumbling.

  I scrambled to my feet, ran out to the porch and around the corner. Below me two men were shoving Ti-Anna into the truck while a third supervised. She was limp.

  The two haulers clambered after her and disappeared for a minute. Then they slid back out onto the gravel, said a few words to the third man and walked back inside. The third man rehooked the flap, tugged it to make sure it was fixed and started toward the cab.

  I climbed onto the balcony railing. The truck’s canvas roof was about six feet below me. I knew I could either jump and try to hold on or lose Ti-Anna forever.

  I jumped.

  Chapter 28

  The next—what was it, two hours? three? four?—were the scariest of my life.

  The tarp sagged when I jumped, but didn’t give way. I started snaking toward the back, thinking I could swing inside, grab Ti-Anna and make a run for it. But as I hung my head over the edge, the truck lurched forward.

  It was all I could do not to tumble off. I grabbed the edge of the tarp and managed to wriggle feetfirst, inch by inch, toward the front of the truck as it rumbled down the driveway.

  When it stopped at the gate, I scooted back a couple more feet so I could loop my ankles under a rope that ran side to side near the cab. With my hands I grabbed hold of a parallel rope toward the back. I didn’t dare let go long enough to turn around. As we lurched onto the street, I was backward, spread-eagled, facedown and scared out of my mind.

  Right then, of course, it started to pour.

  For a while I barely opened my eyes. The driver obviously had had a bad day. He braked hard, accelerated harder, ground his gears and careened around every corner. He seemed to aim the truck at every pothole he could find, and Hanoi’s streets gave him plenty of chances. Rivulets of tropical rain gushed down the canvas. The rope was rubbing raw my scrapes from the pier.

  But nothing lasts forever, right? That’s what I kept telling myself. Just hold on. And eventually we had left the center of the city and settled onto a smoother, straighter roadway.

  I opened my eyes, feeling like a fool for not having paid more attention. Now I knew we were heading out of Hanoi, but I had no idea which way.

  Think, I told myself. You need a plan. What is your plan?

  Everything was swirling in my head. Ti-Anna’s limp body as they slung her into the truck. Rat-face’s sneering She still does not get it. The dark concrete apartment blocks marching past me in the night.

  The rain eased and I lifted my head slightly. We were on a two-lane divided road with few lights and little traffic. Every once in a while we’d flash through a commercial strip, where a few men would be squatting on low stools clutching bottles of beer. A store or two would be deserted but garishly lit—once, a store with nothing but vases; another time, nothing but stuffed animals.

  At one intersection four men were playing Ping-Pong, outdoors, with a couple of kerosene lanterns to light their game. I wondered if I was hallucinating.

  In my pockets I had my passport, some dollars, some dong, and the cell phone Sydney had given us. Not that I could get to it: There was no way I could let go of the rope, reach back into my pocket and pull out the phone without getting blown off and flipping end over end down the highway.

  But even if we stopped, and I could get someplace where I could make a call without being overheard, what would I do? Punch number 2 and say, “Sydney, I’m on a truck, Ti-Anna’s been drugged and kidnapped and she’s inside, and, uh, no, I have no idea where. And no, I have no idea who. And as to why—”

  I didn’t w
ant to think about why, about what they might have in mind for Ti-Anna, after some of the stories Sydney had told us. But what would she do with a call like that, anyway? What could she do?

  And there was something else, too, which at first I didn’t want to admit into my brain, but as time went on I couldn’t keep it out. I had to figure out how this had gone so wrong. My first thought was that somehow they had followed us from Hong Kong to Hanoi, figured out where we were headed and gotten to the house before us. Rat-face wasn’t the real Mr. Thieu, who we were supposed to meet, but some agent of the Chinese who’d been waiting to take Ti-Anna away.

  Apartment buildings gave way to what I figured must be factories, hulking dark things behind imposing fences. As one after another whipped past, I had to admit there was another, maybe likelier possibility for what had gone wrong. If the conversation I’d overhead was what I thought it was, and the photos I hadn’t seen were what I thought they were, then Ti-Anna’s father had had the same rude surprise when he came to his meeting. He had been set up—and so had we, and fallen for it as he had.

  The truck slowed, grinding its gears, and came to a stop. I pushed up, saw we were at a kind of toll gate and flopped back down, pressing myself into the tarp to become as two-dimensional as possible. I heard snatches of conversation, and then the driver lurched forward again. Still mad about something, I thought.

  But if it was all a set-up, what did that mean? Was the original email to Ti-Anna’s father the beginning of the plot, or had someone hijacked it along the way? Was it Horace? Or Radio Man?

  And if Radio Man had intentionally sent Ti-Anna’s father into a trap, and then Ti-Anna, too, what did that say about Sydney? After all, he’d sent us to her. All that business of her wanting to come with us, and worrying about us, and all the rest—had that been an act, part of this whole gruesome show?

  The phone in my pocket began to feel more like an alien force than a means to rescue. If anyone was going to save Ti-Anna, it was going to have to be me.

  As we drove on through the dark, with my hands bleeding and my feet numb, that began to seem like a bigger and bigger if. What could I possibly do? I wasn’t sure I could even lift her out of the truck.

  And if I did—then what? Carry her? Where? I had no idea where I was. It was hopeless.

  Then I pictured, for the hundredth time, Ti-Anna’s drugged body, bouncing on the floor of this army truck. Or maybe she was waking up now, in the dark, no idea where she was, or where I was, or what had happened or was going to happen.

  I was furious at all of them—Horace, Radio Man, Sydney, Rat-face. I wasn’t going to let them do this to her. One way or another, I wasn’t going to let this happen.

  I heard a cawing overhead, and realized it wasn’t a crow but a seagull, and then I recognized something else: a salt tang in the air.

  There, I thought, there’s one good thing: now I know which direction we’ve been traveling: east. East out of Hanoi, toward the ocean—toward the Gulf of Tonkin.

  I lifted my head to look for waves, or beach, or something. All I saw was darkness.

  Day Six: Friday

  Haiphong–Hanoi

  Chapter 29

  I was beginning to think I’d been wrong when I’d told myself that nothing can last forever. This truck was going to drive on and on through the rain and the dark, never stopping—only I wasn’t going to be able to hold on forever. My hands would give way, my feet would unhook, I’d tumble onto a wet Vietnamese highway, and the truck—and Ti-Anna—would disappear into the night.

  But then—could it be?—we weren’t going quite as fast.

  I lifted my head again. The road had narrowed, and looked deserted. The buildings were smaller, houses or shacks or little warehouses, I couldn’t tell. There were no streetlights, and I could barely see beyond the pavement. I thought maybe I heard waves, but then I thought maybe I was imagining it.

  Then, miracle of miracles, we really were slowing. Third gear, second gear, turn. Stop.

  With the engine idling, the driver called out, got no response, called again. A voice responded, and the truck eased off the road and onto a graveled parking area, rolling another twenty yards or so before falling blessedly silent. It was an amazing relief not to have air rushing past.

  It was also terrifying: suddenly I felt totally exposed. I held my breath and willed myself to be invisible.

  The cab door opened and then slammed shut. There was some scraping on the gravel—rubbing out a cigarette butt?—and then a few steps and a knock on a door. A door opening, another hurried conversation, a door slamming shut. And then—quiet.

  A light drizzle was tapping the roof of the cab, and now I was sure I could hear the rhythmic lapping of waves not far away. And that was it. No voices, no cars. Nothing.

  Slowly, slowly, I uncurled my fingers from the rope and rolled stiffly onto my side.

  We were parked in front of a low, long building, with ten or twelve windows facing our way. Two windows were lit, and enough light leaked out through grimy curtains to show that we were in a compound, framed by sheds and shacks and a couple of other low buildings like the one that had swallowed the driver.

  An odd assortment of boats and vehicles and equipment was scattered around the lot: a truck like the one beneath me, a few motorcycles, a three-wheeled bicycle rickshaw, an old fishing boat listing to one side and ropes and crates and other junk I couldn’t make out in the gloom.

  I sat all the way up and rubbed my feet. Beyond those two windows the compound looked deserted, but I knew at least one other person was out there. I had to hope he—the guy in the gatehouse—had fallen back asleep.

  I looked at my watch, which I had never adjusted. Back home it was three in the afternoon. Here it was eleven hours ahead. Two in the morning. Still plenty of darkness to come. Another good thing, I told myself.

  Gingerly, I turned myself around, like a dog looking for the right position for a nap, and crawled toward the front of the truck. My muscles creaked and complained but they did what I told them to do. I figured eventually even my feet would feel normal.

  I slid onto the roof of the cab and swung down, my feet finding the driver’s open window and then the narrow running board and, finally, the ground.

  I peered inside the cab, not knowing what I was looking for. It’s not like you’re going to find a map with an X drawn over our final destination, I told myself. There were no keys, either, just a crumpled cigarette pack and a lighter.

  I grabbed the lighter and tiptoed toward the back of the truck. No one came running at me from the office building, or from the gatehouse.

  I heard an odd snuffling inside the truck. Please, let her be okay, I thought. I unhooked and lifted the flap. In the darkness I could make out nothing, so I flicked the lighter and—I couldn’t help it—let out a gasp.

  Chapter 30

  I’d been imagining Ti-Anna lying in empty darkness, maybe tossed on a few empty sacks. What I saw was the opposite of emptiness. Three rows of rope hammocks ran the length of the truck. Each row was triple-decked, one hammock on top of another on top of another. And in every hammock a girl, curled up to fit the tiny space.

  In my shock I let the lighter close. I took a deep breath, hoisted myself into the truck and, with my hand shaking, flicked it on again. The flap closed behind me.

  I had to turn sideways to slide between the rows. Some of the girls stared at me, in a vacant way. Some didn’t bother. Some had blindfolds on. Some had tape over their mouths. None of them made a sound. There was a sour smell to the air.

  I sidled up one narrow aisle, holding the lighter over one stack of hammocks after another. The girls were just that, most of them—girls; kids, really, though there were a few young women too. All were barefoot. A few had bruised faces or black eyes. None of them was Ti-Anna.

  She’s got to be here, I told myself. I saw them put her in. I would have seen them take her out. I sidled back toward the flap and pushed up the other row, flicking the lighter more and m
ore impatiently until—there she was, in a hammock near the front, in the middle of a stack: one girl above her, one below.

  I held the lighter close to her face. Her eyes were closed, but she looked unhurt, and she was breathing. Okay, I told myself. She’s alive. Another good thing.

  I shook her lightly and whispered her name. Her eyes flickered open. I moved the lighter nearer my face, so she could see me. For the longest time she stared almost uncomprehendingly, as if she were swimming up from somewhere deep, deep underwater. Then she reached out and touched my chest.

  “You’re soaking,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I whispered. I was so happy I wanted to squeeze her in my arms. She’s okay, I thought. That’s all that matters. We’ll get out of this somehow. “It’s the rainy season here in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Where are we?” she said. She lifted her head and moaned, fell back down and asked again, more insistently. “Where are we? What is going on?”

  “You were drugged,” I said. “Do you remember going to Thieu’s house? They injected you with something, and put you in this truck, and drove you toward the seashore. We’ve got to get you out of here. Fast.”

  Some of the other girls were watching us now, still without emotion, without curiosity, or maybe they were too scared to show either. Ti-Anna didn’t seem to notice them. She closed her eyes again, and I closed the lighter; I didn’t want to use it up. I couldn’t see my hand six inches in front of my face.

  I perched on the side of Ti-Anna’s hammock, without putting my weight on it, and felt for her shoulder.

  Then I heard her voice in the darkness.

  “I do remember,” she said. “They showed me pictures of my father. Ethan, he’s alive! We have to— Ow! My head is pounding.”

  She had tried to sit up again, too fast. But this time she kept coming, more slowly, holding on to my arm and swinging her legs onto the ground.