Li struggled against her bonds. Frye saw her aiming at Thach a frightening, untethered wrath. “I did it for the same reasons I told you a thousand times in the last days. Because the Communists kill the spirit. Because they turn men like Lam into men like you. Think back to the days at the plantation and An Cat, to the young soldier you were. What made your eyes clear then, and your heart strong? What gave you your courage? The promise of freedom! Is there still a Vietnam where that can happen? All you are is a state machine now—soldiers take away the poetry of peasants before the ink is dry and see if the verses help the government.”
Thach looked at Bennett, then Li. “I am very tempted to shoot you both now. But that was not my intention.”
“Then take your victories and money, and let us go,” said Bennett.
Thach returned to his desk and set down the papers. “I now arrest you both in the name of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The charges are inciting treason, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and murder. You will return with me, through Mexico and Cuba, to be tried with the rest of your resistance force. You will confirm to us the identity of Nathan.”
Bennett hurled himself off the chair, but the guard slammed him again with the butt of his weapon. Bennett covered up, hands raised. The guard lifted his gun for another jab, but stopped, shook his head with scorn, then backed off. Frye held him in the sight of his .45.
Bennett lowered his hands. “You’re crazy, Thach. You can’t try us. Your own government will shoot you and send us back here in a week.”
“Maybe. But we have arranged for you to be apprehended in the jungle near Ben Cat. You will be identified by your own people. You will sign confessions, of course. At a time that Hanoi is releasing American soldiers, news of your capture will soon be lost. You will see how quickly the U.S. Government washes its hands of you, as they do of their CIA pilots in Nicaragua. That is their choice. You have made war on us, Lieutenant and Li, ever since the war ended. You have tried to assassinate me. While we try to handle the problem of Kampuchea, you send arms against us. While we try to feed our people, you destroy bridges and waterworks. While we try to build a peace, you bring death. My government may indeed execute me someday, Lieutenant, but my campaign will be complete. I will have ended the war. They can do with you what they believe is right. You must have known that you would someday have to answer for yourselves.”
“No. Not Li.”
“You think you were her salvation, Lieutenant. But you cannot save her now. She goes back with us, to the same fate.”
Frye kept the sight of the .45 on the guard beside Bennett, centered on the man’s chest. Three men, he thought, and Thach. Automatic weapons. Even if I’m lucky, I can only get two. It’s a mismatch. I could kill the light. I could kill the chopper. What happened to Burns?
He watched Bennett, balancing himself uneasily on his fists. “Let Li stay. I’ll go with you, sign what you want. What good can you get from her that you can’t get from me alone? I did what I did to you because I made a mistake. It was a war, Lam. See if you can do any better now. Take me. Your vengeance for my betrayal. My legs for your face. Fucking hang me in Hanoi if that’s what you want. I’m not going to beg. Just let her go.”
“I won’t stay here without you, Benny.”
“You sure as hell will.”
Thach appeared to ponder. He gazed up toward the light bulb. His distended chest was heaving. Frye saw that the two guards were standing closer together now, that he could take them both in two shots. He steadied his aim on the man nearest Bennett. Thach stepped in front of him.
Maybe, Frye thought, I should take Thach first.
“I will offer you a solution,” Thach said. “You identify Nathan to me now, with satisfactory particulars, and I will let Li go. You, Lieutenant, will still return with me.”
Li writhed against her ropes. “No, Benny!”
Bennett stood as if frozen. Frye could almost see the gears turning inside his head. Bennett looked at Li, then Thach. The colonel’s body was turned to Frye now, a full target, standing still.
“Choose, Lieutenant. Nathan for Li. Li for Nathan.”
Li tried to break from her guard, but he held her fast by the arm. “They can kill me, Benny, but not what we have done. Don’t say a word. Don’t kill what we have accomplished.”
Thach stepped forward. “You will tell when we go back and probably die in the process. Identify him now. Save your wife from the firing squad. Who do you love more, Bennett? Your wife, or the hopeless ideas she promotes? Choose.”
Thach balanced on his cane and looked down at Bennett. His face was pale, shining with sweat. Frye could hear the soft hiss of his breathing. He shook his head, motioned in Frye’s direction, and stepped toward his table. “B’o chúng vào trực thǎnga,” he said.
“Let her go!” screamed Bennett. “Lam, let her go!” Thach lifted his cane toward the helicopter and the men began to move.
Bennett charged toward Thach, but the guard stepped forward again and drove his gun butt into Bennett’s chest. Frye was amazed at the speed with which Bennett’s hands locked around the gun and yanked it away. The guard’s head jerked back as the blast echoed through the hangar. When Li’s guard leveled his automatic, Frye shot him in the chest, rocking him back as his gun clattered to the floor. Frye saw the bright muzzle flash of the third guard’s weapon, heard the rounds sucking past his head, felt the wooden splinters of the boxes spraying into his face as the rounds split them apart. Li drove at him, head lowered. Frye dove to the ground, rolled into the open, and fired off two rounds as fast as he could. The off-balance soldier spun and landed face down. Bennett sat in the cone of light, his weapon raised toward Thach. The colonel stood just on the edge of darkness, resting on his cane, his pistol drawn and aimed down at Bennett. Later, Frye would realize that some acknowledgement took place between them there, some admission that this was the only true end to which it all could come. Then a quick, vicious volley, each one firing orange comets into the other while Frye tried to sight around Li. Thach’s cane flew. Bennett shuddered with each impact. But they both kept firing and punching holes in each other while ropes of blood lurched and wobbled into the light and Li screamed and Frye wondered how they could stay alive enough to kill each other anymore. Then, just as he had a clear shot, it was over, and the terrible quiet descended. The colonel lay on his back. Li was hovering over Bennett. Frye stood amidst the haze of gun-smoke, confronted by a silence more complete than he had ever known, a stillness into which everything was sucked, inhaled, consumed. The air was heavy with the particulate stink of powder. The lamp beam swung gently as the smoke rose into the light. Outside, the wind gusted.
Still be with us, brother. Please.
As Frye came close he could hear his brother’s little gasps, quick and shallow as if taken at high altitude. He untied Li’s wrists and ankles. Bennett was on his back. Thach lay fallen in the shadows.
Bennett looked up. The peace in his eyes bore no relation to the rapid lifting and falling of his chest. Li knelt beside him. Bennett blinked, moved his eyes slowly from his brother to his wife, blinked again. That was all.
Li placed a hand on either side of his face and lowered her head to his chest.
Frye knelt there a long while, shivering cold in the hot night air. He still had Bennett’s .45 in his hand. He picked up the silver wave necklace he’d given to Bennett, that Bennett had given to Lam, that Thach had given back, passed from one hand to the other like a gift of death, Li had begun to keen—a high, faint moan that seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once.
He finally stood, moving as in a dream, stuffing the .45 into his belt. Li was wailing louder now. She turned to him, then looked at the weapon that lay beside her, her eyes a pit of desperation so deep and complete and understandable that he wondered if she would ever really see out of them again. He lifted her gently from the floor. “Come with me.”
She looked at him, then back to the gun. He guided her toward
the hangar door, then off across the desert toward his car.
It was the longest walk of his life.
They drove the dirt road back, following the tracks of Bennett’s van. The wind howled, driving sand against the Mercury, easing him to the right. Fifty yards from the hangar, Frye heard the engine of the helicopter groan faintly to life against the wind.
The rotors began to move, and its lights shot into the darkness. As Frye swung his car toward it, he could see Thach hunched awkwardly in the cockpit, working the controls. Frye slid to a stop in the sand, tumbled out, and pulled the automatic from his belt. He drew down and fired, the gun barrel swaying with the wind. A swirling cloud of sand engulfed the chopper, then dispersed. Frye fired again. The rotors spun and the lights shone off into the darkness, but now the cockpit was empty. He pushed Li behind the car and told her to stay.
Frye approached the ‘copter’s door from behind, on the passenger’s side. Above him, the blades were slowing. He stood by the door, struck momentarily by the idea that all he wanted to do here was kill this man; it was all that mattered now, all he could think about. Two shots, he thought: I’ve got two left.
He steadied the gun before him, jumped to the door, and aimed through the window. Inside, red lights blipped, instruments gave their bright read-outs, the harness swayed free in the vacant, blood-smeared pilot’s station. Through the open door on the far side, he could see Thach, a hundred feet away already, laboring over a hillock, then disappearing in a cloud of dust and wind.
He ran back to the car and found Li right where he had left her. She looked up at him, a hint of clarity in her eyes now. “I’ll stay here. Good luck, em. He can’t go far.”
This time, he’s mine, Frye thought. He got a flashlight from the trunk of his car, then leaned into the wind after Thach.
He made the hill in a matter of seconds. It overlooked a wide arroyo, pale in the middle, peopled on its flanks by the shapes of yucca that materialized, then faded back into the darkness. Frye saw movement at the rim of the gully, a lurching motion that became fainter the harder he looked at it. He’s shot and bleeding, Frye thought. He’s crippled. I know where he’s going.
Frye plodded into the heavy sand of the wash and followed. He saw Thach twice more—flashes of motion in the dark—and each time, he was a little closer. Where the gully bent north, Frye marched on, using his flashlight. Thach’s blood, dark and heavy as old oil, led up the embankment and out of the channel. Frye scrambled up the loose side of the arroyo and followed the shiny trail to the foot of a steep hill.
The old wooden framework was partially collapsed, sagging around the cavern entrance. Sheets of decayed plywood, used once to block the hole, were torn down and strewn around it. Obscenities were spray-painted on a huge boulder that sat at the mouth. Beneath the words and the graffiti, Frye could make out the words SIDEWINDER MINE—DANGER! NO TRESPASSING.
As he stood and looked into the black hole, he could feel the pressure gathering upon him, the slow squeeze of walls and darkness, the frantic terror of enclosure. Everything of Frye, from his heart to his fingertips, told him no. Everything except that voice deep in the center of himself, the voice that had led him to some of the very worst moments of his life, the voice that would simply never take no as an answer, on principle, on faith. Thach’s blood shone on the stones, glimmering in the beam of the flashlight.
For Benny, he thought. For Li. For me.
He took a deep breath, felt a clammy chill break over his scalp, and ducked inside. Five steps in, and the world went silent. The air was cool, damp, heavy. With the flashlight he could see twenty feet ahead at best, to where the cavern narrowed and turned to the right. The floor was gravel—dark and ferric—that shifted and crunched as he made his way to the turn. His face was cold now, his body beginning to shiver with the sweat that oozed through his clothes. He rounded the corner.
The shaft led down to another bend that went left. The silence deepened; the echoes of the gravel under his feet rose against the walls and seemed to both follow and precede his steps at the same time. He sat, quietly as he could, and pulled off his shoes.
The rocks bit into his feet, but, stepping deliberately and slowly, Frye found he could move with hardly a sound. Or was it just his heart roaring in his ears that drowned the lesser noise, that same pressurized howl he felt when he went under in the waves and the world locked around him like a coffin?
He looked back toward the entrance, but saw only blackness. He was almost to the next turn when he first heard the breathing: fast, shallow, wet. His hands tightened on the gun and flashlight, his back shuddered in a spasm of nerves. At the turn, the sound came louder, nearly synchronized with his own rapid breath. He brought himself to the corner and waited, gun raised, stinking of death and of a fear beyond death, wondering why things get funneled down to such narrow, to such irrevocable moments. It was your choice, he thought. You could be a thousand miles away if you wanted to be, washing your hands, foreseeing reasonable futures, tending curable wounds. The simple awful truth is that somehow, this is where you set out to end up. Sometimes the best thing you can do is the worst thing you can imagine.
He stepped out, flashlight held up and away from his body, aiming down the short barrel of the .45 at Thach. The man was sprawled against a rock wall, legs out, trunk propped up, head back. The eyes were open in the ruined face. His shirt was torn away. His left hand was jammed up under a thick, protective vest that had slowed the high-velocity bullets, but not stopped them. His right hand lay on his lap, clutching a pistol. Thach blinked, coughed, moved his head slightly.
Finish it, Frye thought. Finish what your brother started twenty years ago. He could feel the darkness moving in around him. His vision blurred. His breathing matched Thach’s, as if both were geared to the same engine.
The colonel coughed again. His voice was faint, drowned. “Who are you?”
“His brother.”
Thach groaned, closed his eyes, then stared up at Frye.
Their breathing was still locked together—meshed, one. Frye couldn’t break the rhythm, then he didn’t want to, as if it were something to hold onto, some stabilizer in a body that without it would disintegrate. “Who are your allies in Little Saigon?”
The colonel shook his head, coughing lightly. His eyes regarded Frye from the twisted, bloody face, but there was something satisfied, almost amused in them.
“Who are they?”
“I won.” Thach stared down at his pistol as across some unpassable distance. His hand began to move. Frye inhaled slowly, deeply, disengaging himself from Thach’s breathing. Then he was falling. Up? Down? A swirl of vertigo and pressure, a disassembly, a melting away. He felt the gun slipping from his hand. He braced himself on the mine wall. The scene before him broke into kaleidoscopic shards that rotated, rearranged themselves, fractured again. And in the center of it all: Thach’s face, a moving hand, a bloody finger slipping inside a trigger guard, a barrel rising slowly toward him as Frye steadied the .45 and blew Thach forever out of this world and into the next.
For a long while, Frye stood there. Slowly, the walls receded. The pounding in his ears began to fade away. His breathing slowed, and his focus started to sharpen again. As he looked down he saw not one man lying before him, but two. He saw Huong Lam, the kid who brought Li to Bennett, the kid who sent three bottles of French champagne to a man he admired too much in war to oppose in love. He looked again and saw Thach, the monster who had cut down Tuy Xuan and Bennett and countless others. And finally, he saw Charles Edison Frye, who, like Lam and Thach and Bennett, had become just another willing drinker of the same endless bloody cup.
He dug the silver wave necklace from his pocket and tossed it onto Thach’s chest.
CHAPTER 29
FRYE ISLAND. HYLA WEPT AND EDISON stormed. Frye could look neither of them in the face. The family doctor, a stout Swede named Nordstrom, filled everyone but Frye with sedatives. Edison called Lansdale and bellowed nonsense. Frye called Minh
, Wiggins, and the Newport Beach surf report. To the first two he gave the location of the slaughter. He almost called Cristobel.
Li, still wearing her peasant pajamas, walked into the den and shut the door. Frye could see her through the glass of the French doors, first spitting her tranquilizers into a wastebasket, then taking up the telephone, her face downcast. She made eight calls. Then she motioned Frye in, and they sat next to each other on the sofa. Her eyes were dull as sun-baked glass. She took his hand. “Xuan, too,” she said. “And Nguyen Hy. And even Eddie Vo.”
Frye listened, removed again from himself while Li talked, the names of the dead slamming into him like speeding trucks. Her hands were cold and tight.
“What I wish to do is die,” she said. “But I can’t do that. There is a debt to the living. The first thing one learns in war is that sometimes death is a luxury.”
“Who are Thach’s allies here?”
“He said nothing about them.”
“He had help.”
Li breathed deeply and sat back. “Communist agents, buried deep in the life of Little Saigon. I don’t know who they are. They have been very careful over the years.”
“What about Dien?”
“I suspected him for a long time. It is possible. But it’s possible too that he is simply a profiteer, an aging thief.”
“Someone is going to come for that ransom money.”
“You should leave it here.”
“Then they’ll come here to get it, I don’t want those people in my mother’s house.”
“That much cash is like a magnet. You will attract them.”
Frye realized fully that the suitcases in the trunk of his car were a portable curse, a beacon for the killers who had helped Thach plan his mission. It’s their payment, he thought: Thach didn’t do it for profit, not even for two million bucks.
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