The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  Nguyen spent an hour going back along the route to the path, covering over his tracks as best he could. It wouldn’t fool anyone who was searching for him, but a casual observer would be unlikely to spot where he had driven off the track. He gathered armfuls of ferns and dead wood from the forest floor and spread them across the roof of the van. He’d seen enough helicopters flying overhead to know that there was a risk of being spotted from above, albeit a slim one. He picked up handfuls of damp soil and rubbed them over the sides of the van, and the front and back, transforming the white paintwork into muddy smears, and then took more branches and draped them all around it.

  He looked at his watch. There were hours to go before dusk so he climbed into the driver’s seat and took a portion of rice and another of pork from the take-away carrier bag. He ate slowly, chewing each mouthful thoroughly before swallowing, not tasting or enjoying the food but knowing that it would provide the energy he needed. When he’d finished he settled back in the seat and tried to sleep, saving his strength for the night ahead. In the distance he heard the whup-whup of a single-rotor helicopter, flying low and fast. He slipped into sleep.

  The air was filled with the throbbing of helicopters. It was 1975. Nguyen was with his wife and daughters running through the crowded streets of Saigon, sweating from fear and the heat. The roads were packed tight with panicking faces, young and old, families and individuals, all heading towards the US Embassy and the helicopters. Almost everybody was carrying something, a suitcase, a big wicker bag, a bicycle loaded with clothes or electrical appliances. Children barely big enough to walk were clasping bags to their chests, old women were bent double and gasping for breath as they hurried along with bags attached to both ends of bamboo poles. Nguyen had told his wife to pack one bag for the four of them and he carried it while she held the two children. She was crying as they trotted down the street and the faces of the children were drawn and frightened. Nguyen appeared cold and impassive but inside his mind was racing.

  He and his family had moved into Saigon because it wasn’t safe for them in the country any more. The NVA was walking all over the ARVN and by February Nguyen heard whispers that a helicopter evacuation of Saigon was being planned. Hue fell on March 24 and less than a week later the NVA overran Da Nang and the South Vietnamese were struggling to hold a defensive line north of Saigon. The Defence Attaché Office put together a list of seven thousand or so people it reckoned should be evacuated as the ARVN fought a last-ditch battle at Xuan Loc, just thirty miles east of Saigon. The noise of exploding rockets kept Nguyen’s children awake at night. Nguyen went to see his commanding officer and was told that if Saigon fell he would be evacuated along with the American forces.

  On April 28 he was told to prepare for evacuation the following day. The NVA attacked Tan Son Nhut airfield on the northern edge of Saigon, preventing commercial aircraft from flying out with evacuees. The plan now was for helicopters to ferry the US forces and their supporters out to ships waiting offshore. Nguyen, along with thousands of other Vietnamese who had served the US forces, was told to wait at home where he would be picked up by a specially marked bus. They waited, but the buses never arrived. Nguyen phoned the US embassy every fifteen minutes but was always given the same answer. Wait. He heard helicopters flying in the direction of the embassy and he waited. He heard the rumble of guns at Bien Hoa and still he waited. When he heard the crackle of small-arms fire he grabbed his wife and children and ran into the street. It was almost 9.30 p.m. and the streetlights were on.

  Nguyen dropped the bag in the street and took one of the girls from his wife, scooping her off her feet and letting her sit with her legs around his neck. She giggled and played with his hair. His wife picked up the other girl. Time was running out. There were fewer helicopters hovering over the embassy. The roads were packed with cars, trucks, bicycles and pedestrians, and everyone seemed to be heading towards the embassy. The crowds were moving faster now, and they had to be careful not to trip over abandoned luggage as they pushed down Thong Nhat Avenue. In the distance they could see the squarish block of whitewashed cement that was the American embassy. More helicopters flew overhead. The crowds were so thick that Nguyen and his family couldn’t get any closer than fifty yards or so to the nine-foot wall that surrounded the embassy. The top of the wall was wreathed in barbed wire and protected by Marines with machine guns. The only way in was through the gate, and that was only opened when refugees could produce the correct paperwork and identifying codeword. Nguyen’s daughters were crying. Midnight passed and with it came an end to the distant thudding explosions at the airport and still the helicopters came and left after picking up the lucky ones from the landing pads on top of the embassy building. Dawn broke and they had made almost no progress, the solid mass of anxious humanity locked solid. Nguyen’s wife almost collapsed from exhaustion but was held up by the pressure of the people around her until he managed to slip his arm around her waist and support her. She looked at him with pleading in her eyes but there was nothing he could do. The papers that guaranteed sanctuary were in his breast pocket but they were useless unless he could get to the embassy gates. It was hopeless. The crowd roared and screamed and Nguyen looked up to see a helicopter lift off from the roof and head out towards the sea where the Seventh Fleet waited. The chopper was alone in the sky and Nguyen realised it was the last one. There were no more guards around the wall, none on the embassy roof. The Americans had gone. Xuan Phoung cried softly. The crowds dispersed quickly, knowing that the T-54 tanks of the North Vietnamese Army would soon arrive. The streets were littered with abandoned ARVN uniforms and equipment.

  Nguyen took his family back to their small flat and helped Xuan Phoung put the exhausted children to bed. He held her tightly and kissed her, and she led him by the hand to their tiny bedroom and he made love to her, urgently and with more passion than he’d shown in a long time. It was the night that Kieu Trinh was conceived.

  Nguyen jerked awake, his face drenched with sweat. It was dark outside and he sat for a while, forcing himself to relax. He filled his mind with images of the Buddhist shrine at his home – his former home, he reminded himself. He climbed over the back of the seats into the rear of the van and placed the three pipe bombs into the rucksack. He also packed the filled water-bottles and the remainder of the take-away food, along with six coils of plastic-coated wire, two clockwork alarm clocks and a few tools that he reckoned he would need. The batteries which he planned to use to detonate the bombs were zipped into the pockets of the camouflage jacket so that there could be no possibility of them accidentally going off. He also packed the binoculars and the map.

  He stripped off all his clothes except for his underpants and socks and then slipped on the camouflage trousers and jacket. He pulled on a pair of thick wool socks and his old, comfortable boots. He rolled up the right leg of his pants and tied the scabbard of one of the throwing knives to his calf. The other knife he tied to one of the straps of the rucksack so that it hung upside down, the handle lowermost where it was accessible in an emergency. He did the same with the big hunting knife.

  When he’d finished his preparations he climbed into the front of the van and left by the driver’s door. He kept his eyes firmly closed while he opened and shut the door because he didn’t want the internal light ruining his night vision. There was no point in locking the door because if the van was discovered it would all be over anyway, but he buried the keys near the roots of a tree he’d be sure to recognise later.

  He covered the door with tree branches and stood for a minute taking a bearing from his compass. There was a thin sliver of moon in the cloudless sky and enough starlight to see by. He headed west through the trees, parallel to the B180. He moved at a brisk pace but even so the constant weaving to and fro to avoid trees meant that it took the best part of two hours to cover three miles and emerge from the forest. He kept going due west for another two and a half miles, travelling across fields, sticking close to hedgerows wherever possible, unt
il he reached the B8. After crossing it he took another bearing from the compass and began walking north-west. He changed direction twice to avoid farms and several times he dropped to the ground when helicopters buzzed overhead. Eventually he reached Hennessy’s farm. Behind the buildings loomed the empty blackness of the hill which he’d climbed the previous day.

  He lay in the sweet-smelling grass for a full thirty minutes before he was satisfied that everyone inside was asleep, then he began to crawl silently towards the farmhouse. He didn’t want to risk crossing the road leading to the farm, even in the near-darkness, so he circled around the stables and the manager’s cottage and behind the barns until he arrived at the outbuildings. He crept up against the stone wall and slowly got to his feet. He moved on tiptoe through the gap between the wall and the barn, placing his feet carefully so that he made no sound.

  When he reached the courtyard and its collection of cars he slowly scanned every inch, his eyes wide to pull in as much reflected light as possible. Only when he was sure that no guards had been posted did he turn right and slip along the rough wall towards the farmhouse. He drew level with a large window made up of four dirty panes of glass in a wooden frame and he peered inside. He could see metal barrels stacked on top of each other, thick wooden benches and a collection of farm tools. He eased himself past the window and reached a wooden door with ornate metal hinges. There was an ancient keyhole and two bolts, one high up and one near the ground. He gingerly pushed back the upper bolt and was relieved that it moved silently and smoothly. Though the door was old and battered, it was obviously regularly opened. The second bolt was similarly quiet. He held his breath, seized the metal door handle and turned it slowly. It grated a little but not enough for the sound to carry and then he pushed the door inwards. It hadn’t been locked and it opened with a mild creak. Nguyen slid inside and closed the door behind him.

  The room smelt of dust and decay and there was a bitter chemical taste to the air. Nguyen went over to the barrels. Most of them were full and according to the labels they contained weedkillers of various kinds. He was glad that they weren’t fuel drums because at this stage he wasn’t planning to burn down the house, he simply wanted to prove to Hennessy how serious he was.

  He knelt down on the concrete floor and took off his rucksack. He took out one of the pipe bombs, an alarm clock and two of the shortest coils of wire. The glass had already been removed from the clock leaving the hands exposed. Nguyen fastened one end of one of the coils of the wire to the hour hand of the clock, twisting the wire around three times and then spreading the copper strands out into a fan shape. He did the same with the other piece of wire and the minute hand. He cut the length of wire in half with his knife and bared the cut ends. He took one of the batteries from his pocket and connected the wire from the minute hand to one of its terminals, and the loose piece of wire to the other, before setting the clock to twenty-five minutes to five and checking that it was fully wound. He now had about fifty minutes before the two wires came together. He put the pipe next to the wall under the windows and then connected the two wires protruding from it to the timing circuit by twisting the ends together. When the minute hand had crawled round to meet the hour hand and the two bare wire ends touched they would complete the circuit between the battery and the flash-bulb detonator which would in turn explode the bomb.

  He repacked his rucksack and put it on before he gently rolled four of the full barrels of weedkiller over and ranged them around the bomb in a semicircle which would have the effect of concentrating the blast against the wall where it would do the most damage. The hands of the clock were forty minutes apart when he edged silently through the doorway and bolted the door.

  Nguyen retraced his steps, but he didn’t begin crawling when he left the courtyard, instead he ran around the barns in a low crouch, dropping down only when he came within earshot of the cottage. When past the cottage he rose up again and jogged by the stables. The horses were locked inside and he heard snorts and whinnies but no panic. He reached a point in the field where he could see the entire front of the farmhouse and he dropped down into the grass. He took his binoculars out of the rucksack, put them on the grass in front of him, and looked at his watch. Eight minutes to go.

  He lay listening to the night sounds: the hoot of a hunting owl, the bark of a faraway fox, the whup-whup of army helicopters. In his mind, Nguyen pictured the clock ticking away the seconds, and his concentration was so intense that it was almost as if he could hear the metallic clicks emanating from the storeroom, getting louder and louder until the air resonated with the beat and he was sure it would wake everyone for miles around.

  The blast, when it came, shocked him, even though he was expecting it. From where he was he couldn’t see the explosion but the farmhouse was silhouetted by the flash and a fraction of a second later he felt a trembling vibration along his body and a thundering roar filled the night.

  He clamped the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the farmhouse. Within seconds a light went on in one of the upstairs rooms and a figure appeared at the window. Nguyen recognised the man as being one of those who had searched him at Hennessy’s office. No other lights came on upstairs so Nguyen got to his feet and, keeping low, scurried back along behind the stables. He moved carefully but he was sure that all eyes would be on the shattered outbuilding which was now burning fiercely. He heard the horses neighing in their stalls and the thuds as they kicked out with their hooves. He dropped down and crawled because he realised that someone would probably go in to calm them down. He made his way past the cottage and didn’t stop until he was in the orchard. He crouched behind an apple tree and examined the upstairs rooms of the farmhouse. The door of the cottage burst open and a middle-aged man in a striped dressing-gown came running out, shouting, followed by three bare-chested young men. Nguyen checked them out through the binoculars. They were holding guns.

  A light had gone on in the window on the right-hand side of the building, the end nearest the outbuildings, and there were lights in the two rooms on the left. As Nguyen watched, a woman came to the window and opened it. She was middle-aged and dark-haired. A light came on downstairs and then the door opened and two figures appeared. One of them was the man he’d seen at the far side of the building, the other was Hennessy. They ran towards the flames. A young woman ran out of the cottage and the middle-aged man shouted something at her. She changed direction and headed for the stables.

  From the farmhouse four more men emerged, none of whom Nguyen had seen before. One of them was carrying a fire extinguisher and the rest had shotguns at the ready. The flames were flickering out of a jagged hole in the wall where the door and window had been. Most of the roof tiles had been blown off and were scattered around the courtyard and on the cars. The fire extinguisher spluttered into life and the man played foam around the hole. The girl ran out of the stables carrying another fire extinguisher and she gave it to the man in the dressing-gown. He joined in the fire-fighting. The woman shouted down and Hennessy waved at her and yelled something back. Probably his wife, thought Nguyen. One of the men went back into the farmhouse and reappeared with another fire extinguisher and before long the three columns of foam had the blaze under control. Nguyen decided he had seen enough. He crawled on his belly, away from the farm and into the darkness. There was a wedge-shaped copse of trees about a mile away that he’d earlier identified as a suitable place to lie up during the day and which would allow him to keep the farm under observation.

  Murphy and Hennessy stepped gingerly over the broken brickwork and peered into the smoking wreckage of the outhouse. Steel barrels had been torn apart in the explosion and they were careful not to tread on any of the twisted shards. The blast had shredded the tough, wooden benches and chunks of wood were scattered around misshapen tools, what was left of them.

  A slate from the shattered roof crashed down on to the floor and Murphy pulled Hennessy back. ‘Careful, Liam,’ he said. ‘We’d better wait until daylight before we go
messing in there.’

  Hennessy nodded and followed Murphy back out into the courtyard.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what in heaven’s name is going on?’ said Joe Ryan, standing with an empty extinguisher in his hand, his dressing-gown flapping around his legs. Ryan had been the manager of Hennessy’s farm for more than twenty years. He’d been a little surprised when Hennessy and Mary had arrived with McMahon, Murphy and seven men from Belfast who were now standing around the courtyard carrying various weapons that obviously weren’t for shooting rabbits, but Hennessy hadn’t offered an explanation and Ryan hadn’t asked for one.

  Hennessy went over to his manager and put a reassuring arm around his shoulder. ‘My fault, Joe, I should have told you earlier. But I had no idea he’d follow me here.’ As they walked to the kitchen door of the farmhouse he explained about The Chinaman.

  Mary was waiting for them in the kitchen in a green silk dressing-gown and slippers. She’d made a huge pot of coffee and had placed a bottle of Irish whiskey and a dozen glasses on the table for the men. She poured a generous measure into one of the glasses and gave it to her husband. She told Murphy to fill the rest of the glasses for the men who were filing in behind him. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked Hennessy, touching his shoulder as she spoke, her concern obvious and genuine.

  ‘I’m fine, right enough,’ he said.

  ‘Another warning?’ she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not.

  ‘He wasn’t trying to kill anyone, if that’s what you mean, Mary,’ he said, and took a mouthful of the smooth whiskey.

  He turned to Murphy. ‘Get Kavanagh down here straightaway,’ he said. ‘Tell him there’s no point in looking for The Chinaman in Belfast. And tell him to bring a dozen or so of his men here. Including Willie O’Hara.’ Murphy grunted and went out to use the phone in the hall.