The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  Carl Underwood emerged from the house and hurriedly piled into the SUV. Tan Sang shut the door of the house and joined him in the backseat. The gunmen then jumped into the front seats. How none of them saw me, I’ll never know. Maybe it was the Pulfrich effect, whatever that is.

  I watched the SUV drive away and didn’t move a muscle until I could no longer hear its engine. Inside the house, meanwhile, I could hear crying and whimpering. I got up, hugged the wall, and found a window covered by a metal security grate. There were no curtains or blinds, affording me a view inside. It was one I won’t soon forget:

  I was looking into a bedroom that had been stripped of furniture. Through the security bars, in the light of a single, flickering candle, I counted nine Asian women sitting on the concrete floor. Shabbily dressed, like peasants, they were barefoot and chained together by their ankles.

  A window about three meters to my left revealed a second bedroom with eight more women inside, similarly restrained. One of them was crying inconsolably. A guard with a pistol in his belt appeared in the doorway and yelled at her threateningly. The woman sitting on the floor beside her clasped a hand over the woman’s mouth, muffling her sobs.

  I already ducked under the windowsill to avoid being seen.

  Linh, the girl who’d worked for the late Jimmy Luc, had confided to me that her boss was involved in the business of buying and selling women. Jimmy and Colonel Tan Sang were acquainted—a photo of the two of them hung in Jimmy’s shop. Clearly, Tan Sang was deep into human trafficking as well, a modern day slave trader. Why Carl Underwood was palling around with such a monster, I couldn’t say, but I intended to find out.

  V

  Hammer, my Asian wanna-be Tupac, was leaning against his motorbike and talking on his phone, waiting. That he’d stayed surprised me.

  “Where you been, dawg?” he said, hanging up on whoever he was talking to. “I be trippin’ out here all by myself, man, you know what I’m sayin’? All the lights went off. I was freaked, yo.”

  I nodded to his phone. “Does that thing come with a camera?”

  “Yeah. Good one, too.”

  “Mind if I borrow it?”

  “More like ‘rent,’ you mean. A brutha’s gotta make a living, y’know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Okay, how much?”

  Hammer tapped a forefinger to his lips. “One hundred thousand dong,” he said, like I might balk at the price.

  Less than five bucks. Such a deal. “Fair enough. Put it on my tab. You’ll get your money when we get back to my hotel.”

  He showed me how to take pictures with his phone. The procedure seemed pretty straightforward. I told him I’d be back soon and began walking back to the house where the women were being held, passing a sign that indicated the name of the street: Cao Bac Son.

  The entire block and the area immediately surrounding it remained blacked out thanks to my electrical handiwork. A girl of about twelve stood outside the apartment building where I’d disabled the lines, playing with a flashlight, shining the beam all over, including at me. I did my best silly Wolfman imitation— teeth bared, growling, hands raised like claws—trying to get her to smile, but I frightened her instead and she fled inside. So much for my endearing way with children.

  I wanted to take a quick series of photographs documenting the abuses. But when I got to the window, raised up, and tapped the shutter release button, the flash went off. Nobody was more startled than me. The women inside spotted me and began pleading loudly. I didn’t have to speak their language to know they were begging for their lives. Unarmed as I was, there wasn’t much I could do immediately to save them. I took off before the guard with the pistol showed up.

  V

  Back at the Yellow Flower, I had to persuade the two desk clerks working the night shift that I was still a guest of the hotel. Their records indicated otherwise, that I’d checked out of the hotel earlier in the day. My clothes had been gathered up, they said, and placed in a storage room for safekeeping.

  “If I checked out, why would I leave all my stuff?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” The gold name tag pinned to his white dress shirt identified him as Lap. He had red cheeks and licked his lips frequently.

  After much conversation and a call to Dan, the hotel manager, who was at home but who fortunately remembered me, Lap issued me a new passkey to my old room, which fortunately had not been rebooked in my absence. My wallet, phone and passport were still where I’d left them in the bag behind the toilet tank.

  Hammer waited for me outside on the street. He’d already uploaded to my phone the photo I’d taken of the women in the house.

  “Thanks for the help, my brutha,” I said, handing over the dong I owed him.

  “Thank you, man.” He stared at the money like it was more than he’d ever seen in his life.

  Shaking hands good-bye was a production. Grip. Pull. Bump shoulders. Tap knuckles. Make your fingers like a starburst. I followed his lead and had no idea what I was doing.

  “Take care of yourself, Hammer.”

  He tucked the cash in his sagging jeans and pimp-strolled back to his motorbike, the way somebody might who’s seen plenty of blacksploitation films but never been outside Vietnam. You couldn’t help but like a kid that innocently impressionable.

  Standing outside the hotel with no surveillance in sight, I forwarded the picture of the women in the house to Buzz. Once upon a time, the old school, analog me would’ve had fits sending the most basic e-mail. Now here I was, downloading and uploading and sideways loading and doing whatever else one does as a participant in the digital age. I smiled to myself.

  Buzz called me back almost immediately.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

  “What the hell is what?”

  “This. The picture I’m looking at that you just sent me. A bunch of women sitting on the floor? Lemme just say, Logan, your photographic skills leave a bit to be desired. What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “Potentially nothing,” I said, “or everything.”

  I started walking, updating Buzz on what I’d learned of Tan Sang and what appeared to be a human trafficking ring, and Carl Underwood Jr.’s potential participation in the operation.

  “You’re saying Underwood’s directly involved?” he asked.

  Across the street from me was a hole-in-the-wall eatery doing a brisk business. Patrons were lined up outside the door, waiting to eat dinner late. Stacked up outside in four wire cages were eight small hairless dogs, listless and forlorn-looking, two dogs to a cage. The culinary reason they were there outside that restaurant was not lost on me. Something sour welled up from deep beneath my sternum and lingered in the back of my throat. I tried not to think about it.

  “What I’m saying is that Underwood was there tonight with Colonel Tan Sang. At a minimum, Underwood has to have direct knowledge. Whether he’s helping run the thing or profiting from it, I couldn’t tell you at this point.”

  “If he is involved, he’s going to Leavenworth—assuming the agency doesn’t save itself the expense and embarrassment and just cap his ass. But what I still don’t understand is what all this has got to do with them holding Cohen and Stoneburner. And, I guarantee you, the president’s people will be asking me the same question.”

  “I don’t have the answer, Buzz. What I need from you right now is to make happen what I’m about to ask for. They’re moving Cohen and Stoneburner tomorrow morning to prison. We’re rapidly approaching the two-minute warning and I’m basically down to one play. This is either gonna work or it’s not.”

  He sighed and exhaled, letting the air out slowly. It sounded like a snake hissing—a sure sign my old battle-buddy-turned-supervisor was losing his patience with me.

  “Well, maybe if you told me what it is,” he said, “I might be able to help you out.”

  “It’s called extortion, Buzz.”

  V

  My ambition was simple: blackmail Tan Sang into releasing the two
Americans by threatening to notify his government and international law enforcement officials of his apparent predilections when it came to abducting and selling peasant women. I planned to show him the picture I’d taken, to persuade him that I had him over the proverbial barrel. I knew that one grainy photograph would likely not be persuasive enough to convince him that setting Cohen and Stoneburner free would be in his best interest. I needed more damning and definitive evidence to throw in his face, something that he couldn’t explain away. That’s where Buzz would hopefully come in handy.

  For years, special operators hunting terrorists have commonly relied on digital imagery from Advance Crystal KH-12 satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. Envision a massive camera orbiting 200 miles above the earth that can look down through clouds to photographically capture with stunning clarity objects as small as six inches across. That’s the KH-12. You might ask, do such satellites have infrared capacity allowing them to see inside buildings, through roofs and walls? If I said that, in fact, they do, I’d be either fibbing or violating the sworn confidentiality agreements I signed years ago before going to work in the intelligence community under threat of imprisonment or execution. Such oaths are like homicide; there are no statutes of limitations. So I’ll just say, “Well, you never know,” and let it go at that.

  I could’ve asked that Buzz file a formal tasking, directing that the NRO fly one of its birds over Hanoi to shoot high-resolution pictures of the house where the women were being kept. We both knew, though, that even on a priority basis, it would take several days to run the request up the chain of command, write computer code to shift the satellite into position, take the pictures, review and enhance them, then have the NRO forward them to Buzz’s Cleveland operation so he could forward them on to me. By then, the women would likely be gone, shipped off to whatever hell they’d been consigned. So, too, would Cohen and Stoneburner. Transferring the two old pilots from the hotel to prison in advance of a murder trial would surely make the news. Once the story got out, the chances of getting them out were sure to decline exponentially as officials in Hanoi, unwilling to bow to US pressure, would surely dig in their heels amid the crush of international media attention.

  We needed to fabricate harder evidence that would convince Tan Sang we had the goods on him, and we needed to do it fast.

  “So, basically, you want me to make crap up,” Buzz said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Essentially.”

  I proposed that Buzz engage the services of a civilian-owned surveillance satellite company, which could respond much faster than Uncle Sugar ever could. There were dozens of such companies in operation—Russian, Chinese, American, it didn’t much matter—whoever could capture aerial shots of the house within hours as opposed to days would do. Civilian satellites generally can’t provide the kind of high-resolution imagery that top-secret government agency birds are capable of, but that didn’t matter, either. All we needed was a few passably recognizable representations of the house as taken from space. The photos could then be doctored to include infrared imagery of Tan Sang and Underwood inside the house. I knew that alone likely wouldn’t be enough to convince Tan Sang we had him by the short hairs, so I told Buzz that I also wanted a time- and date-stamped shot of the colonel’s black Lexus SUV parked in front of the house with the license plate visible.

  “It was directly in front of the front door. There’s only one spot. When you see the house, you’ll see where the car would’ve been parked. All you gotta do is insert the car in the picture.”

  “You got a plate number?”

  “Eight zero dash November Gulf dash six three one three two.”

  Buzz read it back to me to make sure he got it right, then asked me for the address. I gave that to him, too—22 Cao Bac Son. He told me that his agency had recently partnered with a Korean company on another classified project, using satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar that could take three-dimensional pictures through clouds.

  “They work fast and they don’t charge much, either,” Buzz said.

  “How soon can you get me the pictures?”

  “How soon do you need ’em?”

  I checked the time on my phone—it was twenty minutes to midnight.

  “In about eight hours,” I said.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me. Eight hours? There’s no freakin’ way.”

  “Buzz, these are old men. They’re taking them to prison in the morning. I don’t know if either one of them will be able to survive the emotional ordeal of being locked up again that way.”

  “The ‘emotional ordeal?’ Jesus, Logan, you really are starting to sound like a shrink, you know that?”

  “Just get me the photos.”

  He promised to upload the massaged reconnaissance shots to my phone as soon as he got them.

  Back in my room, I didn’t bother checking for bugs. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I slipped into bed, exhausted, and tried with little success not to think about those two old men being held one floor above me, and how their fate all but rested in my hands. I thought about Phu Dung, my interpreter, and whether he was still alive. I hoped he knew somehow that I hadn’t abandoned him, and that my strategy to free Cohen and Stoneburner would also prompt his release, too. Whether that strategy would prove successful was anyone’s guess.

  I stared at the ceiling and remembered how it felt to kiss Savannah, the tingle down my spine, the taste of her lips, the way she smiled when we made love. I missed her. I always would. I got up, too tired to sleep, drank some water, and turned on the television to some Vietnamese language movie set during the war with America. It was a love story between a man and woman, both pith-helmet-wearing Viet Cong soldiers. The guy conveyed a George Clooney-like suave. The gal could’ve passed for Miss Universe. The subplot seemed to involve them deceiving B-52 crews into dropping their bombs harmlessly on a patch of unoccupied jungle, rather than on their comrades. I couldn’t understand the dialogue, but I followed the story line easily. The same could not be said for myriad English language Hollywood movies I’ve had to sit through.

  Somewhere around 0115, I fell asleep. At 0427, I was awakened by frantic screaming. I walked out on the balcony in my boxers and observed people on the street running; the action appeared to be taking place around the corner on the east side of the hotel below where the two former POWs were bedded down. Something told me the commotion had something to do with them.

  I threw on my jeans, shoes, and shirt, and quickly made my way out of the hotel. What I found on the pavement when I turned the corner made my mouth go dry and my rage boil over. Desperate to avoid going back to a Vietnamese prison, Captain Virgil Stoneburner, USAF Retired, had tied sheets and towels together, knotted one end to his balcony railing, then attempted to rappel six stories down to freedom. That was before a knot slipped and he fell.

  TWENTY

  Spectators stood around him three deep, the ones in back craning and clamoring for a better view of the gore, all seemingly jabbering at once.

  I pushed through the crowd and knelt beside Stoneburner. He was on his stomach, still breathing but barely. His right leg was bent up and under his chest at an impossible angle. Blood pooled on the sidewalk around his head. Pressing two fingers against the side of his neck, I found a pulse, but it was weak. A couple of Vietnamese men, one with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, tried to roll him over on his back, thinking that might help, and I nearly took their heads off.

  “Don’t touch him, you understand?”

  They backed off. The sirens of approaching emergency vehicles pierced the night.

  “Hang in there, Captain. Help’s coming.” I knelt down, in his face, so he could see me. “Just stay with me. You’re okay, you’re going to be fine.”

  It was a lie, of course, one of those things people tend to say to calm the fatally injured or mortally wounded. Whether my words had any effect is difficult to say. Stoneburner’s eyes were focused somewhere far beyon
d me. Then they lost focus completely. Some people insist that when a person passes on to whatever exists beyond this life, one can feel their presence transitioning to the hereafter. Not me. I’ve watched more than my share of individuals, the good and the evil, surrender the ghost up close and personal. Not once did I ever register that sort of holy, body-leaving-the-soul moment. Virgil Stoneburner was alive one minute, then he wasn’t. That’s just how it goes.

  I picked up the top sheet that he’d fallen with and covered him with it just as two of the soldiers who’d been guarding him on the sixth floor came running. They yelled at everybody to move back, jabbing the barrels of their weapons at those who didn’t respond fast enough. One of the soldiers tried to shove me out of the way, thrusting the butt of his AK at me. Without really thinking, I side-stepped the jab the way a bullfighter might, reached back, and twisted the assault rifle from his hands, then flung it into the street as spectators scattered, many screaming in fright. As he stood there, stunned, his partner came rushing toward me, yelling and raising his own rifle to a firing position. I pivoted right as if to run, then abruptly turned into him, catching him in the throat with my left hand. He staggered back, gagging. I snatched the weapon away from him before he dropped it and pointed angrily to Stoneburner’s body.

  “You’re responsible for this. If you morons hadn’t fallen asleep or whatever the hell it was you were doing up there, he’d still be alive.”

  That was only half true. The other half was that Stoneburner’s death was on my hands as well. Had I been more resourceful, smarter, I might’ve gotten him out and he’d still be alive, back in Florida by now with his wife. Guilt washed over me like a cold rain.

  Two Hanoi police cars, subcompact Toyotas with sirens blaring and bubblegum lights flashing blue and red, showed up. Four cops jumped out with their pistols drawn, all yelling at me to drop the assault rifle. I did, and raised my hands. One of them wore a snarl on his face that reminded me of one of the Angry Birds on my phone. He walked up and slugged me in the gut. The blow stung but not badly. I’d been hit harder in football practice.