They drank iced tea. Rufus gave a general account of the political picture. Not much there, really, that they hadn’t picked up on Voice of America and in Stars & Stripes, though as Rufus spoke of the political picture it was clear that it was freighted with the suspense that attached to coexisting anomalies that couldn’t go on too long without colliding. North Vietnam was technically at peace with South Vietnam. South Vietnam was technically at peace with North Vietnam. The United States was technically at peace with North Vietnam. The Geneva Accords forbade its signatories, including the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, from doing what they were nevertheless blatantly doing. Codicils to the SEATO treaty and to the Geneva Accords pledged the United States to defend a nation being aggressed against. And nothing—nothing decisive—was being done to reify, and then act conclusively on, reality.
“The only thing we are doing that is unambiguously legal,” Rufus sighed, an amused-bitter sigh, “is what you are up to, Tucker. Because what we do in Thailand, at Nakhon Phanom, in order to close down the Trail in Laos, is of no theoretical concern to the North Vietnamese, since Laos is a foreign country, pledged to neutrality.”
Blackford tilted his iced tea glass, swallowed, then said, “As a matter of curiosity, Rufus, what’s legal in respect of North Vietnam isn’t necessarily legal in respect of Thailand and Laos, is it? I mean, we’re operating out of two independent countries—”
“No, it would not necessarily follow. But in this case it does. We have the permission of Thailand to proceed with Operation Igloo White, and under the 1962 Second Geneva Conference Accord, all parties are not only permitted to take steps to ensure Laotian neutrality, they are urged to take such steps.”
“Including bombing Laotian territory?” Blackford pressed the point. “After all, when we bomb the Trail with our Thai planes, we’re bombing a foreign country.”
“We are not now bombing Laotian territory. We are preparing to bomb Laotian territory. Our motives in doing so are to put into effect a neutrality that was guaranteed to Laos, and by Laos. You speak like a lawyer, Blackford.”
“Rufus, considering what I’ve done for you in the last thirteen years, if I were a lawyer I would have to, as a matter of honor, disbar myself.”
“Now wait a minute, Blacky—” Tucker spoke up. “This business of what’s legal and what isn’t legal in these modern situations doesn’t really work, does it? I mean, you’re going to tell me the war I fought in in Korea wasn’t a war because Truman called it a police action one year after swearing in a public ceremony to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution that says only Congress can declare war?”
“Declaring war is out of fashion,” Rufus said. “The atom bomb did that.”
“Yes,” Tucker said, his voice dimmed, the aggressiveness suddenly gone. “Hiroshima changed everything … didn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Rufus said. He was in his contemplative-analytical mode. “What it did change was the appetite to declare war. When a country declares war it is expected to use its maximum resources to win that war. We can’t use the bomb in Vietnam—we all grant that. But the general fear of the bomb extends to a failure to use even the next echelon of modern weaponry. Hanoi and Haiphong would cease to exist if we were to drop half the bombs there that we are prepared to drop, so far as I can see, on the Trail. So? We fight with a third echelon—supplies, training, intelligence: support systems, essentially, while the enemy’s use of its third echelon is decisive.”
“Decisive?” Blackford asked.
Rufus weighed his words even more carefully. “Contingently decisive, I should have said. The NVA are prepared to kill and to torture the entire South Vietnamese clerical class, the whole intellectual, educational, political, and religious infrastructure: that is what the Vietcong are doing right now, in the countryside. How much of that, backed up by conventional North Vietnamese military, will they need to do before winning? They have very nearly succeeded in seizing effective control of the Mekong Delta.”
Rufus’s reference was to the dumpy southern one third of South Vietnam, sometimes called the rice bowl of Asia, which the NVA were reaching not only through exhaustive long marches down the 400-mile Trail, but also by shipping into the southern port of Sihanoukville in Cambodia. “But we must take such comfort as we can, gentlemen, in knowing that we are following the orders of a constitutionally elected government and that we are pursuing objectives which no one could judge dishonorable.”
“Rufus, when we get tried by Bertrand Russell in Sweden, I want you for my lawyer.”
“Blackford, if you go to trial in Stockholm, I shall long since have been hanged.”
Tucker found himself suddenly prompted to break his long-standing covenant never to refer to his role in creating the overweening dark cloud of the day, surely a capital crime in the statute books of Lord Russell and his assorted committees calling for unilateral disarmament. But he drew back before the words passed his lips. He said only, “I guess that gang would get us all, if they could.”
“And they’ll need to get us to Stockholm to do so,” Rufus said. Had they been younger men, Rufus would have taken the moment to remind them to be alert at all times to security. But he was talking to men experienced in the trade in which they were engaged. So he asked instead, “How is it going, Blackford?”
Blackford spoke for half an hour about operations in Danang. “If you want a head count on the interdiction process we’re subsidizing, prepared to be impressed. During the first seven months of this year, the South Vietnamese patrol boats we pay for, supervise, and give instructions to have inspected one hundred and forty-nine thousand junks plying nine hundred miles of coast north and south of Danang, mostly north, obviously. We have, by one reckoning, inspected five hundred and seventy thousand North Vietnamese fishermen. That’s a cumulative figure, of course: some of the same persons have been stopped and inspected a half-dozen times. We have amassed an armory of Soviet materiel taken from apparently innocent junks. That part of 34-A—interdiction of subversive materiel and personnel—has become routine, and routinely successful in terms of the quantity of stuff we’re stopping.”
“And of course to the extent that you succeed,” Tucker interrupted, “you increase the pressure on my side of the border.”
Blackford said, “On the second mission, our own disguised fishing boats are bringing in information I’ve been feeding you, Rufus, through channels every few days. There isn’t any doubt about the latest fact: the Soviets are installing a new generation of SAM missiles stretching right down along the coast from Haiphong to Dong Hoi. All we can tell you is where they are, how numerous we think they are, what kind of radar keeps watch over them. And wait for something to give.”
“And wait for something to give,” Tucker said.
“That’s right.” Blackford motioned to him to take over.
“On the western front, we have a hell of a lot of work to do, but the essential thinking is done. The idea of the Spikebuoys has been tested. The product will be 5.5 feet overall. When it’s dropped from the plane, stabilizing fins will direct it as they would a bomb. About 30 inches will bury into the ground, with a diameter of six inches. The upright antenna will be 48 inches with four radiating arms at right angles to one another, each about 18 inches long. It will weigh twenty-five pounds, and the batteries will last as long as forty-five days, but almost certainly thirty days. And we’ve come up with a slightly different design for the acoustic-seismic devices, same family as the Spikebuoys. They’re called ACOUSID, for Acoustic and Seismic Intrusion Detector. They weigh 37 pounds and bury themselves almost the whole of their 48 inches into the ground. The antenna is about the same length. Their microphone is on the top of the buried portion, at the base of the antenna, above ground. We can activate that microphone by remote control from the air. It’ll pick up the sound of a man pissing. I’m working now on a display, a giant wall map—all electrified—inside the installation at Nakhon. It will plot the Trail through the two p
asses. The sensor locations will illuminate on our screen. By the end of the year we ought to know better than the gooks just where their caravans are.” He looked somehow, for the moment, sad. Then he lifted his hand. “Hey, I’m hungry! And thirsty! Let’s avoid the hard part: What Washington will decide to do with all that information we’re prepared to give them.”
Again they separated for dinner. Tucker had become more outspoken about his “friend.” Rufus, ever aware of Blackford’s own penchant for sowing wild oats, always made it possible for Blackford to withdraw, to make his own private dining arrangements. But he was always glad when Blackford said, which most of the time he did, that he would prefer to have dinner with Rufus. They dined this night at the Caravelle, Blackford doing most of the chatting, which was how Rufus liked it. At ten they said good night, Rufus departing for his safe house, Blackford for the officers’ quarters at the airport.
On impulse he decided to stroll first down Tu-do Street toward Cho-lon, the festive area adjacent to Saigon. “Saigon’s Bourbon Street,” he had heard it called. He turned back to the Hotel Caravelle and checked his briefcase in one of the steel lockers that had recently been set up near the cloakroom. And he walked out down Tu-do Street, turning left toward Cho-lon.
It wasn’t really like Bourbon Street, he reminded himself. More like Paris or, more accurately, Marseilles. By New Orleans standards, the sound was relatively muted. The lights from the restaurants and bars were yellow and enticing. The prostitutes were easily spotted. Some would see them merely as young women out for a stroll. He paused beside one nightclub, wondering whether to enter it and order a drink. A girl, surely less than twenty years old, dressed in tight yellow cotton only just covering her breast line, with large brown eyes and high pink cheekbones, approached him, Did he have a light? Her English was broken, as also one of her teeth. Blackford replied in French, Sorry, he didn’t smoke.
Would he like a lesson on how to smoke? she asked, cocking her head.
Not really, thanks. It had taken him ten years to give up smoking.
Would he be interested in having a drink with her? Perhaps even treating her to a drink?
Blackford smiled down at her. Poor beautiful wretch, he thought. I don’t drink, he said.
Did he not permit himself to take pleasures of any kind? she wanted to know.
I take pleasure, he said, putting a banknote in her hand, gently, in avoiding vice squads.
She left, with a pert little smile. He entered the club and sat down at the bar. At the opposite end were three Americans and a couple of girls. He ordered a Campari and soda and then lifted from his coat pocket the letter he had first read on checking in at the APO post office at the airport. It was so—well, perhaps not typically Sally: distinctively Sally. It began:
My darling Blacky: Now first hear this from the only English teacher, I should hope, you have ever slept with. When you use the phrase “the good ship,” as you did in your last letter, the next word you use has got to be “Lollipop.” Otherwise you are using a quite humdrum cliché, and we agreed when you were a senior at Yale that you and I would try never to exchange clichés. You do remember?
Now, you have, sometimes, a terribly obscure way of expressing yourself, a difficulty you may have noticed (you should have noticed) that never afflicted my mentor, J. Austen, who had no problem in expressing thoughts, no matter how subtle, with unambiguous lucidity. Just for instance:
“… Elizabeth was called on by her cousin, to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings, which for Charlotte’s sake, she made more favourable than it really was. But her commendation, though costing her some trouble, could by no means satisfy Mr. Collins, and he was very soon obliged to take her Ladyship’s praise into his own hands.” P/Prejudice, Chap 23, last line.
Granted, we would not now tolerate that comma after the word “cousin,” but whereas that can be called progress, it cannot be progress to write as you did, “it truly strains me to say what it is that is on my mind, so much of it confused, all of it, I think, comforting, if you see what I mean.” My comment: I do not see what you mean. I do not see why it is that you cannot tell me what is on your mind. Even if it confuses you, it does not follow that it would confuse me. Why? Because I have trained myself to focus on ambiguities and to sort them out. You speak of marriage at the end of the year and then you speak about burdens from which you cannot free yourself, and then you say that you are certain (only you make it obvious that in fact you are not certain) you can resolve these difficulties, but you then speak as though those difficulties are creatures of others’ makings: from which it is obvious that you are simply trying to say, I would like for us to be married in December but there is no assurance that we can be married in December. So what am I supposed to say?
Oh darling, do you even love me—chastely? I doubt it. It is not one of the disciplines, chastity, in which you are proficient. Who should know this better than I?… But this is not a subject you will want to discuss with me. Know then this, that I shan’t, as I once did, marry another man. Not because I regret that I did; Tony was as special in his own way as you, and our son promises, at two months, to be—how should I put it?—as priceless, as unique, as his father and his stepfather-elect combined. There now. My news?…”
He did not reread the brief account of doings at the Casa Serena. He was interested in doings in a house he might find himself inhabiting one day, but when quotidian experiences were recounted, inevitably his mind turned to his own day-to-day life, on a scene where spectacular historical developments were taking place—which, he had begun to sense, would eventually engulf the entire country in whose capital he was now sitting, drinking a Campari and soda by himself.
He looked up, taking in the general atmosphere at La Tambourine. Over there he saw Tucker Montana seated at a small table with a single candle between him and one of the loveliest women Blackford had ever seen in Asia. Should he?
The decision was taken from him. Tucker stood up and motioned to him. Blackford walked over, drink in hand. “Blacky! You old rake, sitting in this disreputable little place, all by yourself! Please meet Lao Dai.” She lowered her head, in diminished oriental manner, the little sign of deference muted by experience with Western informality. Blackford extended his hand. Tucker brought over a chair and signaled to the waiter for another Campari and soda. “That is what you are drinking, isn’t it? I think I recognize it. I had a great-aunt who used to order that shellac.” Blackford sat down, and Lao Dai gave him, now, a radiant smile.
19
August 1, 1964
Dong Hoi, North Vietnam
Le Duc Sy’s rage was uncontrolled, and on the evening of August 1 he spit it out.
His vehicle was the squadron leader of the NVA Dong Hoi patrol boat fleet, Captain Thanh-Lang. He found him, as he hoped he would, at the bar near the dock, a favorite of the naval officers. He would approach him with some care, and for that reason paused at the bar to chat with the talkative French owner, who had been permitted to stay on in Dong Hoi because during the war with the French he had been cooperative. The Frenchman had been so not out of any special sympathy for the Vietnamese, but because he thought it of primary importance to save his restaurant and its wine cellar. He liked to tell his customers that in Paris, during the occupation, the restaurants—the “best restaurants”—never missed a meal. “It is bad enough to be occupied and to be at war, but to be occupied or to be at war and to be without a place safely to relax with your friends and have a little spirits or beer—that is too much, do you not agree?” He asked that question of everyone, but Le Duc Sy didn’t mind hearing it again. He agreed fully, he said, instructing the barman to pour him another glass of wine.
The Frenchman was still talking when suddenly Le Duc Sy wheeled on him: “Can I use your back room for a few minutes? It is quite important.” The Frenchman readily agreed. It was then that Sy went over to Captain Thanh-Lang and asked that he join him for a private conversation back there. He looked down to se
e what Thanh-Lang was drinking, and asked for a bottle of Tiger beer to be brought in.
“Of course, M. Sy,” the Frenchman said, obliging as always. “And I shall see that you are not disturbed. On the desk is a buzzer. If I hear it ring, I will understand that you and the young officer”—he pointed approvingly at Captain Thanh-Lang—“are ready for a little more refreshment.”
The door closed. Le Duc Sy came right to the point. “On the patrol with you this afternoon I kept checking the radar. It confirmed that you were at all times just inside the three-mile limit.”
“Of course, Sy, I am very particular about that. Orders.”
“As you know, those orders often flow through me.”
“I know that you are a special representative of Colonel Giap.”
“Well, this afternoon when I was not looking at your radar I had my binoculars fixed in the direction of the southern fleet.” Sy poured himself another drink. “Perhaps you do not know, Captain Thanh-Lang, that I am more familiar than perhaps any of our comrades with the enemy fleet based in Danang. Familiar with the so-called fishing fleet, and familiar with the American warships that come to Danang for fuel and for repairs.”
“I did not know you had spent time in Danang.”
“Well, I did. And let me tell you what. This afternoon I saw it. And it was not observing the three-mile limit. There could not have been more than one and one-half miles between us.”
“You saw what, Le Duc Sy? I heard you shout, and I even started to go to see what was wrong, but you waved me away, remember? What did you see?”
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