by AD Davies
“Please, not my boat. Take money. Not my—”
I slapped his face into the dust again. Told myself I was only roughing up a lowlife. It wasn’t torture. I was being practical. He robbed people of their holidays, of their wonderful experiences in this beautiful country. Besides, a slap or two was better than a Vietnamese jail.
“On pier four,” he said. “Near end. Between the Gong Lai and Ving Lai. Big boats.”
“Key?”
“Please, sir…”
“Relax. I’m the good guy here. I’m just borrowing it. I’ll bring it back. But I don’t have time to barter.”
He twisted his head to look at what I’d taken from him and he pointed awkwardly at a bunch. “Key.”
I let him stand, told him, “If you are lying, I will find you,” to which he nodded again.
I spun him and wrapped my arm round his neck, locking his blood-flow in place, held it there until he passed out. He’d be unconscious long enough for me to get away.
I returned to the melee of people bustling for tickets and shoved my way back to where the theft occurred. I placed the passport and two hundred dollars on the table in front of a twenty-something girl. She looked understandably startled.
Adam’s Smug Travel Tips #1: Watch out for your stuff. Petty criminals aren’t dumb.
I said, “Be more careful,” and walked away.
I left the other passports and possessions with the food-hut in the hope they’d find their way to some lost property department, but I had no way of tracing the owners of the cash.
I would put it to good use.
Harold’s Tours employed several touts, funneling on-the-day purchasers toward various ticket offices bearing the name, which led me to believe they were well-equipped. I went through the do-you-speak-English routine several times, until I found one tout with whom I could communicate in way not limited to him handing me a flyer and pointing at the kiosk for which he worked.
I said, “I need a GPS unit.”
He still tried to sell me a tour, but I lifted my hat briefly and took off my mask. Showed him a portion of the cash.
“I’m in a hurry.”
He led me to the main kiosk where he and his boss offered a rubber-encased oblong box about twice the size and three times the thickness of an iPhone. The screen took up half its surface, the rest a dial and keypad and the brand name, “Garmin.”
They asked for a thousand.
We went back and forth, and agreed on six hundred, although they retailed at around three. He threw in a pier pass.
Through the security barrier, I jogged down the quayside until I came upon a barge with Gong Lai stenciled on the side and a red dragon painted on the front. The Ving Lai was moored beside it. In the water below, a motorized inflatable bobbed up and down. I climbed down the rope ladder, stepped on board, and sat down immediately as it pitched under my weight. It was actually a small Indigo, a rigid plastic hull with a powerful motor and room for between four and six people, the sort of life-raft you get on the smaller yachts, so I guessed the unconscious man behind the toilet block had stolen this too.
The ignition and steering worked more like a car than the rigmarole of the riverboats, and the Indigo fired up first time. Sleazy Stu’s teachings came back to me, and I checked the fuel gauge—almost full—and noted the two gas cans strapped in the back. Satisfied, I plotted a course to the Goon’s coordinates, donned a pair of sunglasses I found beside the seat, and chugged out from in between the two larger boats.
There, revealed before me, was the whole of Ha Long Bay.
Chapter Forty-Five
A fine mist gave the impression of shrouding the bay, but the sky was blue and clear. Hulking barges made of wood, painted to look like rainbow-colored dragons, dozens of them, maybe hundreds—more than I could count—ploughed through the water, a herd of vessels migrating slowly to their established channels.
I maneuvered the Indigo easily enough, though, thumping off conflicting wake from several junks and other boats. The wind buffeted my face, hat held on by string. Although I truly loved the water, I ate air more times than felt safe even for me, so I slowed to cut around other sailors, waved at a couple of happy tourists as I went. I was already off-course but in less than five minutes I was bearing straight ahead. Dozens of barges remained visible through that illusion of haze, but were far enough away that I gunned the engine and sliced over the calm water, back toward the Garmin’s route, where the limestone islands seemed to go on forever.
Their number was impossible to count, stretching to a translucent horizon. Conservationists estimated nearly two thousand, so the bay must have been vast. I came to the first of them, and it towered above me, the green reaching into a sky so blue the whole scene looked Photoshopped. Then more of them materialized, giant craggy teeth spaced at odd distances, pointing upwards, sheer from the water.
I rounded those natural monuments into a stretch of open water, and what I saw made me drop off the throttle and cut the engine. The quiet of the ocean descended so quickly it startled me.
The Hoà bình đẹp sailed some distance ahead, as unreal as a toy on a pond. Now I’d come to a halt the sea tossed me around with uncontrolled jerks that threatened to throw me overboard, so I forged ahead slowly.
At first, I thanked God, or Dad, or my mother, or whoever was watching over me, for this slice of luck. But as I kept pace with the yacht, I realized there was no reason to be amazed by the coincidence. They, too, must have been utilizing a GPS. We were both aiming for the same destination, so it would actually have been odd not to cross paths. Now the question was what to do about it. A six-inch blade didn’t make me a pirate.
Judging distance on water is harder than on land. The sameness of it all is what does it. The actual size of the yacht helped, and the abundance of landmarks towering over the waves allowed me a bit of perspective. I estimated they were about two nautical miles away. Yet, even with that knowledge, the yacht appeared to be standing still, so gauging the correct speed was nigh-on impossible. I couldn’t risk becoming an obvious tail, either.
I edged forward in slow increments, but their yacht still didn’t appear to be moving, until it veered left and cut across perpendicular to my route. I let the engine idle and bobbed up and down, allowing the current to shift me left, where one of the smaller limestone mounds lay motionless, its sheer sides rounding off to a green mop of hair-like foliage. The Hoà bình đẹp was definitely heading that way, but that was not the atoll on which we were to make the deal.
Then it stopped dead, and waited for several minutes.
With no clue what I was planning, I sped the Indigo toward them. Kept the pace steady but not flat-out. The islet next to which they had seemingly anchored grew larger.
Something else floated in the water. A long, flat structure on which huts had been built at wide intervals, on which people in conical hats and loose clothing roamed, giving the thing scale. Closer, its wooden frame became apparent.
A solid platform.
As I advanced much closer, I discovered the yacht’s launch moored to a jetty, a sleek motorized boat like a mini version of its parent.
The floating structure was a marketplace. They’d stopped to go bloody shopping.
Three other boats disgorged passengers and, now I was close enough to see faces, I realized the market extended along the islet in a dogleg. Two of the other boats were tourist-packed, while the final one appeared to be another private vessel, smaller than Vuong Dinh’s.
I pulled my hat low and my mask up and guided the Indigo into one of the spaces for smaller craft. A walnut-skinned woman greeted me and called for my line, which she kindly tied off, and I climbed up a couple of feet onto the surprisingly sturdy gangway.
Around fifty or sixty people shared the space, shoulder-to-shoulder, browsing bananas, pineapples, bread, crisps, bottled water for a dollar per liter, dried meat. I shunted through the crowd. Mostly Japanese and Caucasian features, a couple of the Japanese and a few of the vendors wea
ring surgical-style masks like mine. I figured Sarah was on the boat, but if I was going to trim the odds, I should know the lay of the land.
Down in a shallow net in the floor, eels slithered over one another. Four more nets next to them, all containing a different variety of fish, flopping and slapping in the water. A middle-aged Vietnamese lady in an apron pulled out one eel and, on a bloodstained block, thunked off its head with a cleaver and dropped the rest in a bag for a tall man in chef’s whites. The smell wafted up, fresh and full-bodied. I twisted to get away from it, and came face to face with the last person I expected to find here.
Sarah.
She still clutched that orange shopping bag to her chest in that same desperate way. Two men stood either side of her, making no effort to blend in, while the Goon—still in his suit and sunglasses—bartered with a man with no legs over the price of a bag of apples. I feigned interest in the eels, but something must have drawn Sarah’s attention, because she lingered on me, as if studying a painting. Did she remember me from the hotel pier?
While most people’s short-term memories filter out incidents of zero importance, those with an eidetic memory would instantly recall a stranger out of place. I held her eyes. Lowered my facemask and smiled. She took a deep breath and her mouth turned up slightly at the edges. I hoped she understood.
The Goon opened another negotiation. Sarah resumed that neutral look, although her fingers kneaded the carrier bag. It contained very little.
I stayed two stalls behind. Through the comings and goings, Sarah looked at me again. I concentrated on examining an octopus that an elderly lady presented to me in a plastic water-filled pot. Its legs whipped around and I nearly dropped it. The chef took it from me and he gestured for the lady to bag it.
I shifted to an empty stall, where two giggly British girls chatted about some guy the blond one met in Hanoi and how she hoped to hook up again in Ho Chi Minh City.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Would either of you have a pen I could borrow?”
The brunette forced a smile as she took me in. Taped-up fingers, Vietnamese clothes, conical hat. I did look pretty ridiculous as soon as you realized I was a northern British bloke. With a quick glance to her friend, who nodded, she fished in her bum-bag and gave me a sparkly pen.
“Any paper?” I asked.
“No, sorry.” She shrugged at her friend.
The friend shrugged too. “It’s all on the boat.”
I had to get to Sarah somehow. See if she could break away whilst on board the yacht. When their guard was down, she could jump overboard and I’d pick her up and be gone before they realized she was missing. She just needed to know I’d be there, waiting.
But there were no stationers on the market. I scanned around again and found what I needed. A pineapple. A price tag tied around the stalk, a cardboard strip, displayed “$5” in black pen. I paid the five dollars without haggling and took the price tag and handed the world’s most expensive pineapple to the blonde girl.
She said, “Umm, thanks?”
I wrote on the strip, “When the boat leaves, I will follow. Jump when you can.” I signed it “A friend,” which I hoped she believed. Now all I had to do was get it to her.
I handed back the pen and said, “I’ll buy you an octopus if you slip this to that girl over there. The men can’t know.”
“Oh, pu-lease,” said the brunette. “What are we, schoolgirls?”
The blonde said, “Yeah, we’re twenty, not fifteen.”
“A bit of advice, mister. Girls don’t like it when guys play games. Especially older guys hitting on young girls. If she likes you, you’ll know.”
Their love lesson complete, the two uber-wise girls returned my pineapple and sashayed off.
I picked up a second pineapple, and spent time bartering this one. It confused the woman, since I hadn’t quibbled before, but we went through the routine as the group came back along the gangway. Having pounded her down to four dollars, I backed away and dropped both fruit into the group’s path.
One of the guards kicked one accidentally. When he bent down to pick it up, I knelt to collect the other. As I did so, I slipped the label into Sarah’s carrier bag. She caught the operation but no one else did.
So only I could hear, she said, “It’s a trap.”
I stood back up with my five-dollar pineapple and the shorter of the two guards returned my four-dollar one, and they all moved on, my disguise clearly more effective than I’d realized.
Some trap.
So it had been a trick to lure me here. Or maybe simply an attempt at counter-surveillance. The Goon kept looking out to sea, perhaps checking for an out-of-place boat waiting for the yacht to resume its journey. He hadn’t expected me to come ashore.
Sarah pointed to some bottled soft drinks, but no one wanted to stop. She pulled away and was about to cause a scene when the Goon acquiesced and bought the drink for her. As he passed her the bottle, he tried to smile. He seemed genuinely disappointed as she rearranged her bag to accommodate the energy drink.
Once the Goon stepped away again she used the cover of movement to read my note. When finished, she let it drop into the water between boards and tried to find me again through the mass of shoppers. Five stalls away, examining another octopus, I gave a thumbs-up, and Sarah nodded minutely.
The vendor, however, thought the thumbs-up was for her, so I ended up paying ten dollars for a live octopus in a bag of seawater.
Back toward the dock, I wandered past the eels and fishery and I sat on the boards next to my boat, tossed my sandals on the deck, and dangled my legs in the water. I used Giang’s knife to cut pieces of pineapple. The sweetness and juice satisfied a thirst I hadn’t noticed until it hit my throat. I tipped the octopus into the sea and it floated there for a second, as if anticipating a trick of some sort, then it flexed its tentacles and shot down into the deep.
The group of four passed the octopus stand.
Nothing to do now but wait. I planned to give them a head start, which shouldn’t be a problem given the speed they’d established so far. When she was ready, she’d jump. I would accelerate and scoop her out of the water. Their yacht was faster in a straight line, but I could zip between the outcrops, disappear, and find my way back to any part of the Vietnamese coastline. I congratulated myself on its simplicity. No going in half-cocked this time. Harry would have been proud.
They reached the eels and the fishery.
Son, you need to plan when you go in, and plan to get out.
With hindsight, I should also have planned for what happened next. I recalled all Caroline told me about her sister. How, when feeling stressed, her personality would regress, fold back in on itself and emerge like a robot, a mind lasering in on solving the problem before her. She would analyze her immediate aim in life, and simply act. Without emotion. Without further thought. Today, she had a savior in sight. Three men around her. Her white knight, her Batman, a mere ten feet away.
A promise of rescue.
All she had to do was get away.
Sarah lunged for the eel vendor’s meat cleaver. Before either guard could react, she swung it and the blade gouged into the short one’s neck. She yanked it out and blood sprayed flat and wide like a hose with the end nipped.
The people around them screamed and scattered, dozens splattered red. One woman crouched by the fish and splashed water on her face to wash out the fluid. The chef dropped all his wares and dived into the sea. Several followed him, some unintentionally as they got caught up.
The only person sprinting toward the mess was me.
Sarah went for the other guard. He grabbed her wrist and she tried to knee him in the groin, but he was ready for it.
The Goon placed his bags on the floor and drew his gun just as I got to him. I shoulder-barged him low in the ribs. Although he felt as solid as a bag of cement, he staggered over the boards and splashed into the water. The second guard let go of Sarah and launched at me. Without breaking stride I punched
him in the throat and landed my heel in his solar plexus. He tumbled backwards and down into the eel enclosure, where he thrashed about and screamed for help.
“Come on!” I grabbed Sarah’s hand and led her to the Indigo.
The Goon surfaced and his hands gripped the platform. No gun that I could see.
I lowered Sarah to the deck, the cleaver and carrier bag still in her hands. The Indigo fired up and I pulled into open water, looking back to see the Goon adjust his wraparound sunglasses as I made off with his prize possession.
“I dropped my drink,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Six
Crashing against mercifully-small waves, the Indigo launched into the air every few seconds. Each time, the craft wobbled as it landed but I didn’t dare ease off. My two-handed grip fused my fingers to the wheel, the little one hurting like hell. Over the wind, the crashing spray, and the engine, I had to yell to be heard.
“Are they following?”
Sarah held her bag between her legs and wrapped both hands around the rail, one of which was covered in blood. Her face was streaked too, her expression completely neutral. After a quick look back, she said, “Yes, they are.”
“How far behind?”
“I don’t know. Who are you, please?”
I eased off the throttle enough to glance back. The yacht faced us, moving, but it was nothing but a white gash in the water, not close enough to shoot at us. I dropped the speed some more, and steered to the left, between two islets two hundred yards apart. The yacht disappeared from view.
“I’m Adam,” I said. “Caroline hired me to find you.”
“Caroline did? That was nice of her.” No sarcastic inflection. Just matter-of-fact.
“I’m sorry I have to ask this right now, but do you have a pen-drive? A USB stick?”
“No,” she said. “I have a few.” She showed me the orange carrier bag, containing a pair of red high-heeled shoes, a mobile phone, a toiletry bag, a couple of matchbooks and six USB memory sticks. Mostly black, but one red one.