by Larry Bond
The pastries were at least a day old, if not two or three. The croissants, however, were fresh, still warm from the oven, Mara thought. She’d been in Paris several times, and appreciated a good croissant — flaky and airy, the inside porous enough to soak up jelly.
Little luxuries were like pearls when you were on an assignment, her boss, Peter Lucas, always said. Grab them when you can.
Mara took another croissant, and split it in half with her fingers, dabbing both sides with jelly. The jelly was grape, relatively rare and probably not much in demand before the war, she thought.
It came in a small plastic tub, sealed against germs and bugs, and dust. But ultimately not against war.
Zeus came out from the back, passing the reception desk. He had an easy, confident gait. Though sleepy-eyed, he walked with purpose, the sort of man who swept into a room and took control of it. He was handsome, but without the rugged edge Kerfer displayed. Zeus was clearly headed for the upper ranks.
“You played football in high school,” Mara said as he sat down.
“Are you asking?”
“No.” She sipped her coffee.
“You read some sort of dossier?”
“No. I can just tell.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Quarterback?”
“School record for passing. Broken the next year by a guy who went to Michigan State.” Zeus smiled. The waiter began pouring him a cup of coffee.
“Yeah,” said Mara. “Try the croissants.”
“What’s going on?”
She shook her head slightly. She assumed the hotel was bugged.
“Oh,” said Zeus, catching on. He took a big swallow of coffee.
“I expected more chaos,” said Mara. “And destruction.”
“There’s plenty of both,” said Zeus.
“But there’s also this.” She held the croissant up.
“That good, huh?”
“Try one. Then let’s go for a walk.”
* * *
The coffee was stronger than Zeus was used to, and he had a slight caffeine buzz as they walked outside. A Vietnamese army unit had been assigned to protect the Americans in the hotel. Two trucks sat across the street. A half dozen soldiers milled around nearby. To a man, each had a cigarette in his mouth.
They stared at Zeus and Mara as they came out of the building. They are as curious about the westerners, Zeus thought, as they would be about circus performers come to town.
“You think the hotel is bugged?” Zeus asked as they turned down a side street.
“Hmm,” she said.
It was the barest of syllables, just a sharp hum really, but the tone told him to be quiet. He walked along at her side, chastened, crossing at the corner onto a broader avenue. The sun had not yet risen
“I’ve never been to Hanoi,” said Zeus. “Not in real life. But I’ve played all sorts of war games here. In our simulations — they look a hell of a lot like the real thing.”
“You couldn’t die in one of the simulations if the bricks of the buildings fell apart,” said Mara.
“Or if a bomb hit,” said Zeus.
He meant it as a joke — a quip, something to break the tension. But it fell flat. Mara seemed cross, angry about something. The night before, driving in from Hanoi, she had been much less cynical and snappy.
Well, they were in a war. People were trying to kill them. That didn’t make most people happy.
Mara wasn’t pretty in a conventional way. Not that she was ugly, or even unattractive. She was tall, almost six feet, and maybe a little too much like a tomboy for his taste. Her Vietnamese-style clothes — baggy, draping, in black — didn’t do much for her either.
“Don’t trust the American embassy,” she said, abruptly starting across the street.
“Huh?”
She moved so fast Zeus had trouble keeping up.
“Don’t trust them,” said Mara.
“The ambassador seems nice.”
“Nice is meaningless. And she’s not the problem.”
Mara turned to the right. She seemed to know exactly where she was going. The buildings around them were two- and three-story masonry structures, storefronts and apartment houses, with the occasional office building thrown in. The signs were a colorful mishmash of Vietnamese characters, occasionally punctuated by English and familiar trademarks. There was a Canon sign; across the street on a bank was a logo for HSBC. The words “Out of Order” were written on a piece of cardboard over it, in English and Vietnamese.
“I need to get down to Saigon,” Mara told him. “The airport here is too dangerous to use. It could be overrun at any minute.”
“That’s not true,” said Zeus. ‘“It’s not in any immediate danger.”
“I don’t have time to argue with Langley,” Mara told him, referring to the CIA brass by naming the agency’s headquarters. “And if they’re not going to believe what I tell them, they’re not going to buy anyone else’s arguments. There’s a plane for me in Saigon. I need to get there.”
“I don’t understand,” said Zeus. “Last night, you and the SEALs were going to be evaced from the airport by plane this morning.”
“Yeah. Things change. Especially in Vietnam.”
* * *
Mara walked on, wending her way through central Hanoi’s business district. The soldiers from the hotel were probably following, but she wasn’t able to see them.
Which was good enough. As long as they weren’t in direct sight, they wouldn’t be able to use a shotgun-type mike to pick up the conversation. Not that she’d seen one.
Maybe she was being too paranoid. Unless one of them was bugged…
Shit.
“Stop!” Mara said, turning to him. “Take of your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“Where’d you get them?”
“I brought them with me.”
He stood on one foot in the middle of the sidewalk and removed his right shoe. Mara took it, examining the sole, and then the interior.
“You looking for a bomb?” he asked.
“Other shoe,” she insisted, holding out her hand.
He gave it to her. Then she demanded his shirt.
“You gonna ask for my pants, too?”
“You can check that yourself,” said Mara, running her fingers across the seams. The CIA had bugs that were so small they could be sewn into the facing of a shirt, or placed along the side of a buttonhole. But the Vietnamese didn’t possess such technology, or at least no one in the agency thought they did.
Which, Mara knew, wasn’t the same thing as their not having it.
It wasn’t just paranoia she was feeling. She was angry, mad at the agency, furious with Langley and the idiots there who ran things. She wasn’t even too happy with Peter Lucas. She needed to talk to him, but despite trying, she couldn’t get through. She’d been with the Company long enough to guess the reason: Lucas, temporarily heading the agency’s Southeast Asia operation, had been called back to the States to give a command performance for the White House.
Idiots.
And then there was the problem of the ten thousand dollars missing from the drop. Which, at best, indicated that the station was employing thieves.
“So do I get to check your clothes now?” Zeus asked.
“Very funny,” said Mara, handing him back the shirt. “Did the Vietnamese give you anything?”
“Indigestion.”
“In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not in a very good mood, Major.”
“Really? You were just about bowling me over with your jokes.”
“Walk,” she said, starting again.
“So your plans were changed,” said Zeus, falling into stride. “Which is what has you in such a good mood.”
“The airport was closed. As if nobody could fucking foresee that.”
“Go out by ship.”
“Apparently the Chinese have set up a blockade and we’re not going near enough to the coast to test it,” said
Mara.
The SEALs had come from a submarine farther offshore, which had rendezvoused with a helicopter. The submarine had gone northward near the Chinese coast immediately after the SEALs left and was not available to even try for a pickup.
“You sound a little bitter,” said Zeus.
“I am.”
Mara realized she was almost running. She slowed her pace, trying to calm herself. There was no sense being angry; plans changed all the time.
“Too much coffee,” she told Zeus.
“Didn’t get much sleep, huh?”
A jet rocketed overhead. Zeus stopped and spun in the direction of the sound, braced for a bomb. Mara felt comforted somehow, his tension proof that her jangling nerves were normal, were deserved.
“Probably a reconnaissance flight,” said Zeus.
“In any event, the upshot is, I need to get south,” said Mara.
“I can talk to General Trung,” said Zeus. “I’m sure we can get an escort.”
“I don’t want an escort. I don’t want anything that will draw attention to us. More than the obvious,” said Mara. As foreigners, they would stand out no matter what.
“You don’t trust the Vietnamese?”
“No,” said Mara.
“Not even Trung?”
Mara had been told by Langley to treat the Vietnamese army as if the general staff had been penetrated by the Chinese — which to Mara meant that it had been. She wasn’t supposed to tell Zeus that, since it could possibly jeopardize whatever means the agency was using to gather its own intelligence from the Chinese. But she wanted him to put two and two together, for his own safety.
“I wouldn’t trust anyone,” said Mara. “The Chinese have a huge spy network here. A very efficient one.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, I’m supposed to get south quietly,” added Mara. “The Vietnamese don’t know about Josh. They know very little about the UN mission that he was on.”
A mission that had been penetrated by the CIA, a fact that also had to stay secret, though it did not involve Josh. The spy had been killed in the Chinese massacre.
“I need to know what roads south are open,” said Mara. “That’s number one.”
“They’re all open,” said Zeus. “South of the reservoir.”
“Will they be open twelve hours from now?”
“Hard to say. It depends on what the Chinese do next. If I were them, I would be swinging eastward to hit Hanoi,” said Zeus. “And I’d be coming in from the sea. But if I were them, I would have had a different strategy to begin with.”
“I may need to find out what’s going on,” said Mara. “I need to be able to talk to you.”
“Call me.”
“Good idea.”
“You’re being sarcastic?”
Mara turned at the corner and picked up her pace again, walking to a building in the middle of the block whose door was painted bright green. She stopped, looked around, then walked to a set of steps leading downward just beyond the main door. Zeus followed.
She knocked. The door was opened by a short, gray-haired Vietnamese woman, who looked at her expectantly.
“Four,” said Mara in Vietnamese.
The woman told her that the price was one hundred dollars apiece.
“One million dong for all,” said Mara.
“Dollars.”
“I’ve always paid in dong.”
Mara had never bought a phone here, or anywhere else in Vietnam for that matter. But it was a plausible lie. Mara knew she wasn’t going to pay in dong, but she had to try and get the price down as far as possible to preserve her small supply of American money.
“Phone always in dollar,” said the woman, switching to English.
“You won’t be able to change them,” said Mara, sticking to Vietnamese.
“Changing them is my problem,” said the woman, back in Vietnamese. She offered Mara ninety a phone. Mara told her that was unacceptable, waited for a moment, then turned to go.
“I know that trick,” said the woman.
Mara ignored her. She had reached the sidewalk when the woman offered the phones for fifty apiece.
“Too much,” said Mara.
“Mister, buy for your wife,” said the woman, appealing to Zeus in English.
“She’s not my wife,” said Zeus.
The words confused the woman.
“One hundred for all the phones,” said Mara in Vietnamese.
The woman made a face. “Your Vietnamese is very good,” she told Mara. “So you must know how poor our country is.”
What Mara knew was that the phones had surely been stolen. Pointing that out would not be helpful at this stage in the negotiations, however.
“One hundred for all of the phones,” Mara repeated.
The woman closed her eyes.
“I will give you three phones for that,” she said finally.
Mara took the deal.
The phones had numbers taped to the back. But those weren’t the numbers they were going to use. Two blocks away, Mara found a wooden crate to sit on. She carefully opened the phones and inserted new SIM cards, in effect changing the brains of the phones. She gave Zeus one and kept the other two.
“I should only have to call you once,” said Mara. “But don’t get rid of the phone until I call and tell you to do so. You realize the Vietnamese listen to all cell phone conversations, right?”
“Uh — ”
“So we have to assume that they’re going to be listening in. Maybe even the Chinese will by then. I’ll give you a number. That will be the highway number. Then I’ll give you a place. I’ll be asking you if the road is clear south of that place. You tell me yes or no. That’s it. Nothing more. Assume they’re listening.”
“What if you have a more complicated question?”
“Then I’ll have to play it by ear,” said Mara.
“This is all the help you want?”
Mara contemplated giving him a copy of the video and stills Josh had shot of the massacre. Washington had ordered her not to transmit the files, since she couldn’t safely encrypt them. It was likely the Chinese would intercept the transmission, and they could break any commercial encryption, just as the CIA could. Once they had the images, they would find a way to alter them, releasing versions before the U.S. did.
But what if she didn’t make it? Murphy could be a backup.
No. Her orders were specific: trust absolutely no one with the files, even Americans. Even Zeus, though he hadn’t been named.
“It’s all the help you can give me,” she said. “Can you find your way back to your hotel?”
He looked around. “I’m honestly not sure.”
“Take a right there, go two blocks, then take a left,” said Mara, pointing. “You’ll be back on the avenue. Keep going and you’ll reach your hotel. If you get stuck, you can always ask the soldiers who are trailing you. They’re a block and a half behind.”
6
Over Hanoi
Stepping into the air was a relief.
Jing Yo pinned his elbows close to his ribs, his legs tucked up. He wanted to wait until the last possible moment to deploy his chute.
The city grew before his eyes, the yellow speckles resolving into spot-lights and guns. He’d parachuted so often that he didn’t even need to glance at the altimeter on his wrist to know when to pull the cord; he could just wait for the twinkles to stop.
He thought of what would happen if he didn’t pull, if he just continued to fall.
Oblivion was everyone’s eventual reward. But it was hubris to try to steal it from fate, to seek it before one’s assigned time. The way was unending; attempt to cheat it on one turn of the wheel and the next would make you pay.
Jing Yo pulled the cord. The chute exploded into the air behind him. He felt the strong tug on his shoulders and at his thighs. He took hold of the toggles and began to steer.
He wanted a black spot to land on. He fought off the blur, steadied his eyes.
The guns were still firing, but they had moved northwest, following the small aircraft that had flown him here.
Jing Yo aimed for what he thought was a field, then realized almost too late that it was the flat roof of a large single-story building at the end of a road. He pitched himself right, and managed to swing the parachute into the small yard behind the building. His rucksack hit the ground a moment before he did, giving him just enough warning.
The next few minutes rushed by. He gathered the parachute. He found a large garbage bin behind the building and placed it inside. He put the jump helmet and goggles there as well. He unpacked the rucksack, unfolding the bicycle he would use to get into the city. He took his pistol and positioned it beneath his belt. He made sure his knife was ready. He considered changing his boots — he’d worn heavy combat wear for the jump — but thought better of it.
Finally, he started to ride.
Only when his foot touched the pedal did he hear the dogs barking. Even then, he thought they were just random sounds, the sort of alarm a nosy pet might make when catching an unfamiliar scent in the field.
Then he heard shouts, and he realized someone was hunting for him.
Jing Yo began pedaling in earnest. The street before him lit up — headlights, coming from behind him. The beams caught the rusted crisscross of a chain-link fence on the right side of the road, then swung back, reflecting off the houses that lined the left.
He glanced over his shoulder. A pickup was following him.
Though a strong cycler, Jing Yo was no match for the truck. It accelerated toward him, pulling alongside.
Two dogs, along with two men, were in the truck bed. The driver rolled down his window.
“You,” shouted the driver. “What are you doing?”
“I have to report for work,” replied Jing Yo, still pumping his legs. There were houses on both sides of the road; if necessary, he could run behind them.
How could he lose the dogs?
“Where do you work?” asked the driver.
Before Jing Yo could answer, one of the men in the rear of truck yelled at him, asking if he had seen a paratrooper.
Jing Yo’s Vietnamese was very good; he had trained for the mission inside the country, working with a tutor for months. But his vocabulary wasn’t encyclopedic, and he didn’t recognize the Vietnamese word for paratrooper.