by Larry Bond
“The lieutenant has the other car,” said Squeaky. “Go! Go!”
Mara stepped on the gas pedal. Tires squealing, they drove up the wrong side of the highway for about five hundred yards before coming to an intersection. Mara turned, bumping over the railroad tracks, and speeding onto the road heading eastward, finally on the right side.
“I think I have to throw up,” said Josh.
“Go for it,” said Mara. “We’re not stopping.”
* * *
Mara didn’t stop until she’d gone nearly five miles. Fortunately, the roads were clear of almost all traffic, the only exceptions being a few old farm trucks.
Even better, Josh managed to keep his stomach under control.
They stayed on back roads, moving through the outskirts of towns clustered along the highways. The terrain was mostly partitioned into paddies and fields, completely given over to agriculture.
Kerfer was behind her. He’d grabbed a pickup; two of his men were in the back, no doubt looking for someone else to shoot.
Mara was furious with him, so angry that she was having a hard time keeping the car on the road.
“You okay back there?” she asked Josh.
He moaned an answer.
“Better stop soon,” suggested Squeaky.
Mara spotted a small dirt road on the left that led to an abandoned, ramshackle building. She braked and cranked the wheel hard to make the turn, skidding in the dirt. She pulled up in front of the building and hopped out, her gun in her hand.
Kerfer pulled in behind her.
“Why the hell did you do that?” she screamed at him.
“What do you think he was going to do when he found your gun in the handbag?” Kerfer said.
“I was bribing him,” said Mara. “That was his way of asking for more money. If it came to that, I would have told him we were armed because of the war. He wouldn’t have said anything. Except to ask for more money.”
“Right. You think twenty bucks gets you a get-out-of-jail-free card? You can’t corrupt everyone. You probably pissed him off by offering him the bribe.”
“His unit is probably following us.”
“It’ll take them a while to catch up,” said Kerfer. “They probably don’t even know what happened yet. The train sound covered the shots.”
“You’re a jackass, Lieutenant. You just killed seven of our allies.”
“If they’re allies, why the hell do we have to sneak out of their country?”
Mara stomped back to the car. Josh was bent over near the building. Squeaky and Little Joe were standing between him and the car, looking at her. She got behind the wheel. Squeaky got in the front, immediately pushing back the seat to try and get more legroom.
“Where we going?” he asked.
“South,” said Mara.
Josh, pale, got in the car. Little Joe pushed in beside him.
“It was a do-or-die thing,” said Squeaky. “Just a reaction. It’s how we’re trained.”
“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do,” said Mara. “But sometimes you have to take a risk.”
“The lieutenant lost some people in an extraction out of Afghanistan a year ago,” said the SEAL. “We were trying to get them out as civilians. Those were the orders. Taliban came up, disguised as policemen…”
Squeaky’s voice trailed off.
“This isn’t Afghanistan,” said Mara.
* * *
They drove with the windows down. Gradually, the fresh air helped clear Josh’s head.
At first, what had happened in the train car seemed far away, further than anything that had happened while he was near China, behind the advancing line of the Chinese. But gradually it came into sharper focus.
“How ya feeling?” asked Little Joe.
“A little better.”
“You looked like you were sleeping for a while.”
“Yeah, I guess I was.”
“You puked?”
“Only slime came out.” Josh wiped his mouth on his sleeve, the taste lingering in his mouth. “Why did the Vietnamese shoot at us?” he asked.
“‘They didn’t. We didn’t give them a chance.”
“Don’t they understand we’re on their side?” Josh asked.
“We’re not on anybody’s side but our own,” Little Joe told him.
“No, that’s not true. We have to — the whole world has to deal with this.”
“Dream on.”
* * *
Phai had arranged for Mara to get two vehicles in a small town southeast of Phú Xuyên. Besides the vehicles, Phai had arranged for some other supplies, including gas cans and water.
Mara debated whether it was worth the risk to cut back east. They needed cars or trucks, and holding on to these seemed far too risky. But going back in the direction of the army would be an even bigger risk.
Saigon — or Ho Chi Minh City, as it was officially but only occasionally called — lay over seven hundred miles away as the crow flew, and they weren’t crows. The twisted route and the Vietnamese highway system made the trip from Hanoi a twenty-hour marathon — if everything was with you. She’d calculated that it would take them close to two full days of driving.
Mara kept driving due south, following a checkerboard pattern of secondary roads through the farmland, staying as far away from settled areas as possible. After they’d gone about a half hour, she noticed Kerfer flashing his lights.
She pulled over to the side of the road.
“Gas is getting toward empty,” said the SEAL lieutenant.
As she started back for the car, she heard a pair of aircraft approaching. They were jets, low, very low.
Kerfer leapt out of the truck. “Out, get out!” he yelled. “Off the road.”
Josh and the others were already getting out, taking cover in the ditch at the side of the shoulder. The jets were over and gone before Mara reached them.
“J-12s,” said Stevens. “Brand-new. Chinese stealth jets.”
“That was a big bomb they were carrying,” said Josh.
“That’s a fuel tank under the belly,” said Stevens. “Gives them more distance. Except that it’s a bad sign — means they’re not scared of Vietnamese radar anymore. Probably blew it all up in the first hour of the war.”
“Hey, pilot wannabe,” said Kerfer, “you figure they’re doing recce?”
“Probably testing defenses,” said Stevens. “Or just trying to see what the Vietnamese got left. They’ll be using UAVs for reconnaissance.”
“Kerfer, you take the car,” said Mara. “And the girl. Josh and I will get the gas. Just us two.”
“No way. You need protection,” said Kerfer.
“Protection?”
“Don’t be foolish.”
“One person with us in the cab,” she said, realizing he was right. “It looks too suspicious in the back.”
“The hell with suspicious. These people are at war, spook girl. You think they’re really putting a lot of thought into anything but saving their own asses?”
Mara was insistent. She told Kerfer to follow her; when they came to a gas station, she would go in; he should drive on and wait a short distance away.
“You ain’t gonna run out on me, right?” said Kerfer, finally agreeing.
“I’m tempted,” she said.
* * *
The pumps at the gas station looked like the ones back home, more or less, with bright fluorescents and an illuminated sign announcing petro. A silver-haired man dressed in a white shirt and black pants came out of the cement-block building beyond the pumps. He walked with a limp that tilted him almost sideways, dragging his right foot across the crumbling macadam.
Mara and Squeaky both got out, leaving Josh alone in the truck.
The contrast between the calm if rundown station and what had happened in the railroad car — not to mention the past few days — was stark. The station belonged to a world that had never known war, and didn’t have much use for the rest of the worl
d, either. A cluster of buildings sat just beyond it, spilling off the roadside into the farmland beyond. They were small, mostly made of block like the gas station, with shed roofs of metal in various stages of rust and disintegration. The ones closer to the road were stores as well as houses, and Josh could see people sitting or squatting on the stoops in front of them. A boy of about eight stared at the truck intently, perhaps thinking of what he would do if he had such a thing.
Mara spoke to the gas station owner as he filled the truck’s tank. She seemed to be doing most of the talking, though every so often the man would turn and say a few words, gesturing with great intensity. Their conversation continued for several minutes after the truck was full. Then the man and Mara walked into the building. They emerged a few minutes later with a pair of five-gallon gas cans. These, too, were filled, and placed in the back of the truck.
“I’m going to have Kerfer come back and fill up,” Mara said when she got back in the truck. “The old man says he’s the only place around that has gas.”
“Maybe he’s just saying that to drum up business,” said Squeaky.
“No, I don’t think so. He hasn’t gotten any deliveries for the past week, and I doubt anyone else has, either. Once the war started, the gas the Chinese didn’t blow up was probably confiscated by the army.”
Kerfer and the others were waiting about a half mile down the road. Mara insisted that she would be the one to go back, since Kerfer didn’t know much Vietnamese. They left Josh and the SEALs and went back. Josh sat in the front seat, staring through the windshield, his mind jumbled. The lower part of his stomach and groin felt as if they were on fire. Heat poured from his forehead. But whatever disease or sickness he’d picked up was only part of what was bothering him. His brain felt scrambled, unable and unwilling to process what was going on around him. There were too many jumbled contrasts, too much death and contradiction.
Mạ, drowsy, leaned against him, once more sucking her thumb.
She was sleeping. Gazing at her, Josh realized she didn’t have her doll. She’d lost it somewhere in the train car.
Damn.
Outside the truck, the SEALs plopped down in the shade, watching the road and waiting. One of the men — Silvestri, an Italian-American who claimed to be the only “wop” who lived in Texas — realized that he had bits of blood on his shirt from the railcar, and pulled it off, stripping to his undershirt. The others began joking, making cracks about his physique, then about the blood, then about the ghosts that would be clinging to Silvestri’s shirt.
The jokes were mild by SEAL standards, but Josh was appalled.
“How can you guys joke?” he said. He repeated the question several times, talking more to himself, though his voice was just loud enough for Squeaky to hear.
“What’s up, Josh?” Squeaky asked, coming over to the truck.
“You guys are joking.”
“Just blowing off some steam.”
“The officer’s head burst open like it was a tomato,” said Josh.
“Yeah.” Squeaky smiled awkwardly. “That’s what happens.”
“It sucks.”
“Would you rather it’d been you?” asked Mancho. His voice was sharp and defensive.
“No,” said Josh.
“I know what he means,” said Little Joe. “You’re that close to something like that — it gets to you.”
“Everything gets to you,” said Mancho. “Because you’re a wimp.”
“I’m worse than a wimp,” said Little Joe. “I’m a little girly wimp.” He laughed.
“You okay?” Squeaky asked Josh.
Josh nodded.
Squeaky reached in. “Man, you’re burnin’ up. You got a fever. You know that?”
“I guess.”
“You want some aspirin?”
“I took some.”
“Baby sleepin’?”
“Yeah.”
“If you’re sick, you think you oughta be that close?”
“I carried her through the jungle a couple of days,” said Josh. “If she’s going to catch it, she’d have it by now.”
“True.”
Squeaky went back to the others, joking by the side of the truck again.
Josh went back to staring out the windshield.
* * *
Mara and Kerfer returned a few minutes later. Mara and Squeaky got in the truck, leaving Josh between them.
“We should be able to get pretty close to Saigon with the gas we have,” she told him as they turned onto the road. “I don’t know what the conditions are going to be. We haven’t seen any panic yet, but it may be different in the south.”
“Yeah.”
“The Chinese army is moving down the western valleys,” Mara continued. “They were stopped at the Hoa Binh Lake area, but once they get past that, they have a clear shot at Ninh Binh. That’s the next concentration of troops we have to get around. We should start seeing them in about an hour. The people here haven’t seen much of the war yet.”
Mara stopped talking and turned to Josh. Her face was close, only inches away. “Are you all right?” she asked him.
“I’m here,” he answered.
“Your stomach?”
“It hurts when I pee.”
“And you have a fever.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll have help for you soon,” she said, a worried look on her face. “Hang in there.”
“I’m here.”
14
Hanoi
After leaving the tailor shop, Jing Yo went back toward the Hai Ba Trung district in the city’s business area, aiming to check the two hotels the intelligence reports had recommended.
Jing Yo had left his weapons at Hyuen Bo’s house. He was worried that explaining even a pistol might be difficult, and until he located his target and had a plan, the risk did not make sense. Besides, if circumstances were right, Jing Yo could easily kill him with his hands and feet.
Lenin Park had been turned into an antiaircraft site. Tanks and a throng of soldiers blocked off access. Beyond them, Jing Yo could see trucks with antiaircraft cannon mounted on their backs.
He walked in the direction of the river for a few blocks, then headed north. His first stop was the Hilton Hanoi Opera, an overwhelming building of grand design, mirroring the city’s opera house next door.
The men at the door were wearing pistols conspicuously strapped to their hips. One stopped Jing Yo as he started inside.
“Are you a guest?” the man asked.
“I’m to meet someone here,” he said.
“Who?”
Jing Yo considered his answer.
“An American,” he said finally.
“Who?” demanded the guard.
“Joshua MacArthur,” said Jing Yo, deciding there was no sense in not naming his subject. “He works for the UN.”
“Wait here,” said the guard.
Jing Yo folded his arms and took a step back from the door. The two other doormen were frowning at him. Neither could have stopped him from going in if he’d wanted, but it seemed pointless.
The doorman returned quickly.
“There is no MacArthur here,” he said.
“I am not sure whether he is a guest,” said Jing Yo. “He told me to meet him in the lobby.”
“You can’t come in unless you are a guest,” replied the doorman.
“You could call him,” said one of the other men. “Call him on your cell phone.”
“Are the phones working now?” Jing Yo asked. He looked at the man.
“Sometimes.”
Jing Yo could see that the man was lying. He had made the suggestion in an effort to seem helpful — to seem like a nice person. The man wanted people to like him. He had acted on that emotion, without thinking of the implications. Now he was trapped in the lie.
A weak emotion — the need to be liked.
To be loved. Was that why he had gone to Hyuen Bo?
He had succumbed to his own weakness, Jing
Yo thought.
“I will have to think of another way to contact him,” Jing Yo told them. “Thank you.”
* * *
The Sofitel Metropole was another executive-class hotel, featuring the best French restaurant in the city. No guards barred the way here; the doormen, if armed, were as discreet as the others had been obvious. The lobby was packed with foreigners. Jing Yo moved through them, picking up pieces of conversations.
It seemed all the people were Europeans. A lot were French.
One of them mistook him for a waiter, and asked that he fetch him a brandy. He realized his mistake as Jing Yo stared at him.
“Excusez moi,” said the man in French.
“Ca ne fait rein,” answered Jing Yo, somewhat haltingly trying to say it didn’t matter. His French was not particularly good.
“Ca va,” answered the man. “Do you speak English? I don’t speak Vietnamese.”
“Some English,” said Jing Yo. It was of course a lie; like most Chinese students, he had studied English from the time he was a small boy; and then he’d continued his education in the army.
“This war — a — ” The Frenchman struggled for the right word. “A disaster.”
“Yes.”
“Are you a guest?”
“I am looking for a friend,” said Jing Yo. “I am worried for him. He’s an American.”
The Frenchman offered to buy him a drink. Jing Yo went with him to the bar, though when the man offered, all he would take was water.
There were not many Americans in Hanoi, according to the Frenchman. The best place to look, he added as he sipped his brandy, was the Hilton.
“Yes,” said Jing Yo. “But he is not there.”
The Frenchman rattled off a list of other hotels. He seemed to need to talk. His fluency in English grew as he drank a second brandy, though his accent thickened. Jing Yo had to listen hard to understand the words.
“There are a lot of people at Hotel Nikko,” said the man. “Mostly Asian, though. The airport is closed. There’s a train south to the coast, but everyone says it is foolish to take it — it’s sure to be bombed.”
“So are you going to stay here then?” Jing Yo asked.