by Larry Bond
“Train tracks, twenty meters,” said Ric Kerfer. The SEAL lieutenant was sitting in the passenger seat, next to the driver, a Vietnamese man whom Mara had bribed to drive the vehicle. She figured that having a Vietnamese driver would help her cover story if they were stopped. She’d told him not to speak if that happened, and from the looks of his shaking hands, that wouldn’t be a problem.
“Di thắng,” Mara told the driver. “Go straight over the tracks.”
The driver slowed and inched over the crossing as if afraid a train might materialize out of the darkness.
“Phải,” said Mara. “Right. Here.”
He found the narrow trail parallel to the tracks and started down it. The car, a two-year-old Toyota, bounced violently.
“Stop here,” Mara told him after they’d gone about thirty meters. She opened the door. Kerfer opened his.
“No, you stay,” she told the SEAL lieutenant.
“What the fuck would I do that for?”
“How about so the car’s here when I get back.”
“Slant-eyes ain’t gonna steal it.”
“You’re so damn charming,” Mara said, closing her door. “Stay with the car.”
She slipped her hand behind her back and pulled her Beretta pistol from her belt.
There was just enough glow to see the track to her right. After thirty meters, she spotted a signal box. She stopped and looked around carefully. Then she resumed walking, glancing left and right and continuing to watch everything around her. After she’d gone another thirty meters, she stopped and dropped to her haunches, listening.
Every so often in the distance she could hear automatic weapons being fired, undoubtedly by nervous soldiers on guard duty. The real war was still some miles to the west. Hanoi was safe enough for now, except for the missiles and bombs.
And spies, which she expected China would have here by the dozens.
Satisfied that no one was nearby, Mara crossed the tracks and walked back in the direction she had come. She stopped when she was roughly parallel to the signal box, then walked into the weeds.
There was supposed to be a footlocker with supplies here. She didn’t see it.
Mara moved forward slowly. There were many possibilities about why it might not be here, and she tried not to think of them. She also fought off her inclination to start composing a Plan B. There was no sense devoting her energy to it yet; better to make sure first that it was needed.
Besides, she was already on Plan Z, not B. She’d have to start the alphabet over.
Her foot kicked something. She stopped, bent to it slowly.
It was a bottle.
Mara straightened, walked again. There was no box here, nothing but weeds and a few stones.
Mara retraced her steps to the bottle and knelt down, patting with her hands in the weeds until she found it. It was a Coke bottle, an old-fashioned, hourglass-shaped Coke bottle.
And there were no other bottles in the area, or along the tracks now that she thought about it. Trash like that wouldn’t be unusual in America, where railroad tracks were often used as open-air trash bins, but in Southeast Asia, northern Vietnam especially, trash was a valuable commodity. An intact bottle had dozens of potential uses.
Including, perhaps, a signal that the box was buried below.
She poked the dirt with her fingers. The ground in front of her was hard, but the weeds to her right came up easily.
They’d been removed, then replaced.
Her fingers scraped the top of the footlocker within a few seconds, but it took her nearly ten minutes to clear enough of the dirt away so she could lift the box from the ground. She stopped several times, listening, still afraid that this might be a trap.
As she reached for the latch, she hesitated again, worried that it might be booby-trapped. It had been left by a contact sent by the CIA station at the American embassy — a station she knew had been penetrated by Vietnamese spies. It was because of that breach that she had been sent to Vietnam in the first place; then the war had begun, and her mission morphed from routine to interesting.
Interesting.
Would someone who wanted to kill her go to the trouble of burying the box? He’d have just left it out where it would easily be found.
But burying it would make her drop her guard. Burying it might lull her into complacency. Burying it would be exactly the sort of precision, the exact attention to detail, to expect from a smart enemy.
There was no way really to know. Mara took her folding knife from her pocket and opened it, teasing the latch. She started to run the point around the edge — but what was the point?
Because she mustn’t drop her guard, ever. She’d learned that lesson many times, long before Vietnam.
Mara worked the knife around the box, opposite the latch. When she reached the first hinge, she pushed it in, levering it up.
The hinge snapped. She froze for a moment, then lowered her ear to listen.
“Shit, you gonna kiss it next?”
Mara dove over the box, pistol raised. She just barely kept herself from firing at the voice behind her.
She would have hit the driver, not Kerfer, who was standing behind him, MP-5 in the poor man’s ribs.
“Calm the fuck down,” said Kerfer.
“You’re lucky you aren’t dead,” said Mara, getting up for her knife.
“Jesus H. Christ — you really think one of your own people booby-trapped it?” said the SEAL.
Mara ignored him. She snapped off the second hinge.
“Stand back,” she said, first in English, then in Vietnamese. “Just in case.”
Kerfer snickered, but he pulled the driver back a few steps with him. Mara slid the top to the left, then to the right, then finally pushed it open.
There were old clothes on top. She took her small LED penlight and shone it around the interior of the box. Two AK-47s, ammunition, a satellite radio, two cell phones, which most likely would be worthless, and maps. A backpack.
That was it.
Son of a bitch.
Mara unfolded the backpack, made sure it was empty. She looked at the clothes — peasant wear, useful in the countryside but out of sync here, and in any event similar to what she already had — a black pair of baggy pants, Vietnamese style, with a longish black shirt.
She took the weapons, made sure the box was empty. Then, following an impulse, she dropped down and examined the hole again, digging deeper and on the sides. But the ground was hard. She worked her light around, making sure there was nothing else.
“We set?” asked Kerfer, standing over her.
Mara didn’t answer. She rose, and tossed him one of the rifles.
“Come on,” she said, heading for the car.
“You expecting something else?” Kerfer asked.
“Money,” she said. “A lot of money. The fucks.”
4
In the air, approaching Hanoi
Jing Yo steadied himself in the door frame of the Harbin A180, watching the gray and black tops of the trees pass by. The Harbin — a Chinese “interpretation” of a Cessna 180 — was flying barely twenty meters off the ground, skimming low to avoid any possibility of being picked up on Vietnamese air defense radar. Every so often the pilot had to pull up to avoid colliding with something in his path. Several times branches of trees had brushed against the belly of the plane, tiger claws scratching the metal, hoping to rip it open and expose the meat inside.
The near misses suited Jing Yo fine. They meant the pilot was doing his job. Stealth was all-important.
“Hanoi is ahead,” said the man.
He was a member of the air commando brigade. Jing Yo knew him slightly; his unit had worked on some exercises with the brigade the year before.
“Third time I’ve been here,” said the pilot when Jing Yo didn’t reply. “Twice last night. Fires get brighter.”
He seemed to mean that as a joke.
“Won’t be much left to burn soon,” added the pilot. “Uh
-oh, watch out!”
The plane tilted abruptly to the right. A yellow cone of light rose just behind them: a searchlight, activated by someone who had either seen a shadow or somehow heard the heavily muffled engine.
The plane began to rock. A stream of red and yellow fire arced into the air above, first behind them, then all around them.
“Hang on,” said the pilot. The bonhomie was gone from his voice; he spoke like a machine, cold and impersonal.
Jing Yo welcomed the change.
The intelligence service had identified his subject: an American scientist named Joshua MacArthur. He was in Hanoi, but not at the embassy — the service had excellent contacts there, and the briefer assured Jing Yo that they would know if he was there. A spy had been designated as a local contact, and important information would be delivered by sat phone if necessary, but for the most part, Jing Yo was on his own.
The plane zigged to the left, then to the right, then turned hard in a bank. It seemed to Jing Yo that they were turning around. He waited by the door, silent, watching the fires in the distance. On an ordinary night before the war, there would have been at least a few lights on below, and many more in the distance, in Hanoi itself. But now it was a black hole in the landscape, marked only by fires and a few searchlights.
More lights flashed on. They worked across the sky, pens crossing out sections they had examined. The pilot ducked around them, trying to fly into the areas where they weren’t.
Fountains of red appeared, fresh gushes in the night. Their glow came from tracer rounds, showing the gunners where their bullets were going. The tracers were loaded every five or six bullets — Jing Yo wasn’t sure; perhaps it was even less. So for every streak he saw, there were several more bullets he couldn’t see. The slugs were large, thick pieces of metal the size of a clenched fist. They would tear through the light aircraft like a knife poking through paper. One hit and the tiny airplane would go down.
“Three minutes,” said the pilot calmly.
“Are we going east?” asked Jing Yo.
“South. Don’t worry. You’ll go out where planned.”
Jing Yo waited. The flak from below had not abated. He took a slow breath, counseling the muscles in his body to relax. They had been battered severely over the past several days; they would be battered again in the next few.
Jing Yo had chosen to carry out the mission by himself. This was partly a practical matter. It seemed to him that it would be easier to slip into the city under the cover of darkness, and with dawn rapidly approaching — it was already almost six — even the few minutes it would have taken to return to his unit’s temporary barracks at the captured Vietnamese; base and have one of his men gather his things could not be spared.
Even with more time, Jing Yo would most likely have chosen to come alone. He trusted most of the men in his squad, and could have found one or two on short notice worthy of such a difficult mission. But he had been trained to act alone, and preferred doing so.
Alone, there was less chance of a random error preventing him from accomplishing his mission. Alone, he could focus on the task at hand, and not worry about an underling’s welfare. For even on a mission such as this, a commander had responsibilities to his people.
The nose of the plane tilted upward. They were getting close.
“The flak trucks are very close to the first position,” said the pilot. “There will be ground patrols there, guarding them, and perhaps they will see you. Would you prefer one of the fallback zones?”
“Which?”
“I can drop you exactly two kilometers south of Bay Mau Lake,” said the pilot. “Will that do?”
“It is fine.”
“The Vietnamese have moved all of their army headquarters south of the city,” said the pilot. He was back to being friendly. “They have bunkers. They’re out there, three kilometers south. They think we don’t know.”
Jing Yo stared into the darkness. If there were bunkers, they were well beyond the flak, where he couldn’t see them.
“Hold on now, we’re turning,” said the pilot. “We’ll either go into a calm spot in the sky, or we’ll be shot down.”
He laughed.
Jing Yo gripped the handle at the side of the door. The plane jerked hard, making the turn. Its nose came up abruptly. Jing Yo felt his stomach fall toward the bottom of his chest.
They flew like that for five seconds, then ten more. The sky cleared.
“Three hundred meters,” said the pilot. “I’m climbing to five.”
Suddenly the sky filled with searchlights. The pilot cursed. Tracers appeared near the door.
“I’m going,” said Jing Yo, leaning toward the door.
“I can’t let you out here. You’ll be killed!”
“You have no choice,” said Jing Yo, stepping into the night.
5
Central Hanoi
As a newly minted second lieutenant, Zeus Murphy had served in Iraq at the height of the second Gulf War. Much of his time had been spent in Baghdad and the surrounding areas, when suicide bombings and random mortar and rocket attacks were still common. The days had been hell, but he’d always managed to sleep easily at night, even when he was staying outside of what later became the protected Green Zone. In fact, he’d slept through at least two mortar attacks on his building, including one that damaged the room next to his.
It was the same way now, in Hanoi. Perhaps it was the exhilaration of having cobbled together a mission to help the SEALs and CIA officer Mara Duncan retrieve the American scientist. Zeus hadn’t had a “real” mission since making major and being promoted out of Special Forces nearly a year before. Or maybe it was just jet lag. In any event, Zeus had fallen asleep as soon as he hit his mattress. None of the Chinese bombs and missiles, let alone the antiaircraft guns stationed across the street, put the slightest dent in his slumber.
The hotel called itself, without ironic intent, Hanoi’s Finest Hotel. The title was impressive in Vietnamese, where the characters were drawn and arranged in a way that could be interpreted as having several lucky meanings. The hotel building itself was somewhat less so. It consisted of three different sections, all built by the French during their occupation. The oldest, taken up by the reception hall and offices, had some slight pretensions toward Architecture, with a capital A. There were columns and plasterwork so elaborate that decades’ worth of white paint couldn’t entirely obliterate them. The draperies and rugs were threadbare but their patterns hinted, if not at opulence, at least at some appreciation of design and color.
But the two additions, which folded out from each other in a train behind the oldest, were utilitarian block houses, with low ceilings and narrow hallways. The rooms were small even by Vietnamese standards: the door hit Zeus’s single bed when it was opened more than halfway.
The hotel had somehow managed to escape damage during the war with America. The Vietnamese considered this a sign of its superiority, making prominent mention of the fact in not one but two placards in the lobby. In fact, most buildings south of the central business areas had not been damaged. As inaccurate as American bombing sometimes was, even the massive B-52 raids that dropped bushels of unguided iron bombs had always been aimed away from obvious civilian areas.
Neither Zeus nor General Harland Perry, his boss, thought the Chinese would take such pains in this war.
Perry had been put up in a guesthouse a mile away. His driver and his security people were staying with him. The rest of his small staff — Zeus, Major Win Christian, and two sergeants with expertise in intelligence and communications — had been put up in the hotel after a brief stay at the U.S. embassy.
Officially, they weren’t in Vietnam. They wore civilian clothes, and in the unlikely case that someone asked what they were doing, had been instructed to give vague replies about being attached to the embassy.
Unofficially, they were there as observers to see what the hell the Chinese were up to, and possibly learn if the Chinese claims that Vietna
m had started the war were true.
Secretly, and in reality, they were there under the direct orders of the president of the United States, to do whatever they could to keep the Chinese from rolling through Vietnam.
“Major?”
Zeus rolled over in the bed.
Jenna was with him — in his dream. He pushed himself against her side, then wrapped his arm around her, his left hand searching for her breast.
“Major Murphy?”
Gradually, Zeus realized there was someone else in the room. A woman.
But not Jenna. And not in his bed.
Damn.
“Zeus?”
“Mmmmmm,” he mumbled.
“Zeus? Are you awake?”
A hand touched him. Big, warm, somewhat soft.
“Zeus?”
“Mmmm.”
“Zeus, I need to talk to you.”
Zeus rolled back over and opened his eyes. Mara Duncan stood next to the bed. The door to his room was open to the hall.
“Mara,” he mumbled.
“Zeus. Come on, wake up.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I picked the lock. Come on. We need to talk.”
“Uh, what about?” he asked.
“Not here. Get dressed. I’ll wait for you in the lobby.”
Just as demanding as Jenna, thought Zeus, though not in a good way.
* * *
Mara waited for Zeus on one of the massive French couches in the lobby, sipping coffee and eating one of the croissants the hotel employees had brought. A Western-style continental breakfast was an old tradition at the hotel, and the manager insisted on keeping it up, even though his staff was greatly reduced.