by Larry Bond
“Hey, Lieutenant, look at this,” said Private Ai Gua, holding up a satellite phone. “It was in a pocket.”
Jing Yo walked over and took the phone. They had found three the night before; all had already been crushed.
“Why did we miss this?” he asked.
“We didn’t miss it,” said Sergeant Wu, answering before Ai Gua could open his mouth. Jing Yo turned to him. Wu’s cigarette had been replaced by a smug look Jing Yo associated with most veteran commando non-coms, who generally felt superior to any officer they served under. “The donkeys searched the tents.”
“We should have searched them ourselves,” said Jing Yo.
Wu scowled. It was obvious what he was thinking: they couldn’t be everywhere, or do everything that needed to be done.
Jing Yo turned on the phone. Like the others, it required a PIN. He tried a punching a few buttons in sequence — 0-0-0-0, 1-2-3-4, 9-8-7-6 — before getting a message saying he was locked out for too many failed ID attempts. Disgusted, he held the phone in his hands and snapped it in two.
Ai Gua whistled. Wu tried to hide his surprise with a frown.
The phone was small and well constructed, but snapping it in two was merely a matter of leverage, a parlor trick as far as Jing Yo was concerned. Any of the novices who had trained with the monks could have done the same in their sixth month there.
“Make sure the clothes are checked carefully,” Jing Yo said. “If there are any more phones, they must be destroyed before being buried. Anything with an identity must be burned.”
Jing Yo walked to the pile himself and began sorting through the things patiently, holding each piece for a moment as he considered what it told him before putting it aside.
Trousers — a fat, short man. Thick fabric — a man of reasonable means. Frayed at the heel — a man who held on to comfortable clothing, possibly out of frugality, but more likely out of habit.
“Are you looking for a new wardrobe?” asked Sergeant Wu behind him.
“If you want to know a man, start with his tailor, then go to his laundress,” said Jing Yo.
It was a maxim one of his teachers had taught him, but Wu thought it was a joke and laughed. Jing Yo continued sorting through the pile. Each item varied from the others as its owners had varied in life, and yet they told a single story: Westerners, men of learning, trying to understand something in a country foreign to them.
It was regrettable that they had had to die. But at least their deaths had been swift.
The clothes told more. The scientists were well off, able to afford sturdy wear. They were also relatively well fed, thicker around the waist than even the older officers in the army.
So what the premier said in his speeches was true — the West was hoarding the planet’s food, depriving China and the rest of the world of its share. Jing Yo regretted the deaths a little less.
“Something wrong, Lieutenant?” asked Private Ai Gua.
“Maybe he saw a ghost,” said Sergeant Wu, laughing.
Neither private joined in. Both men, Jing Yo knew, were deeply superstitious.
“The Westerners are enjoying the fruit of our labors,” he told them. “They do not have to struggle as we do for food. This war will restore balance and equity. Bury everything well.”
12
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
The huts had dried meat and some stores of vegetables, but the only food Josh trusted was the potatoes. He considered cooking them, but dismissed the idea as too dangerous. They tasted horrible raw, but he ate them anyway, devouring them as he walked up a path that started at the field above the hamlet and cut north, paralleling the road at the valley’s base. Going north made the most sense, he reasoned, because there would be soldiers at the border with China who would be able to help him. The border was only a few miles away, a day or at most two of walking.
The winding trail moved in and out of the jungle, cutting back against the slope as it went. Josh thought he would find a vantage at the top where he could look out over the surrounding countryside and get his bearings, but he was disappointed; the hill was dwarfed by its neighbors on all sides except the east, and there the trees were too narrow to support him as he climbed. After a few minutes, he couldn’t even see down to the village, let alone the road below.
Josh found another path heading east at the top of the hill. As he began down it, a large animal darted to the left, running through the trees into a small meadow about twenty yards from the path. He followed, thinking the animal was part of a grazing flock, maybe a small oxen or goat. Josh stepped warily, slipping among the trees as he got close to the field. There were three animals, about the size of deer though fatter, and with straight horns like goats might have — saolas, or Vu Quang oxen, native to northern Vietnam.
They looked at him warily, certainly aware that he was there, but apparently not afraid of him. When at last he rose and took a step from the woods, they darted away.
Back on the trail, Josh began thinking of the others on the expedition. He hadn’t known any of them for very long, but now they seemed like close friends. He thought of Ross, and Millie, the girl who was helping Dr. Renaldo. Fleming, the Belgian with the loud laugh. Phillip, a Chinese-American who preferred Scotch to beer and had taught him several Chinese curse words during a long night at a bar while trying to prove his point.
Dr. Renaldo himself, slightly cantankerous, especially in the morning before his third coffee — he always had four — yet generous to a fault.
All dead.
Grief rose in his chest, a physical thing, pain that eroded his bones and pricked at the underside of his skin.
How can I go on without them?
It was his parents he thought of, not the other scientists. He was a child again, afraid without his mother and father, alone.
No time for grief. Time for action. Move.
The pain was so intense Josh had to stop for a moment. He forced himself to move again, stopped, felt tears streaming down his cheeks.
I’ve gone through this already, he told himself. I will survive.
He tried to distract himself by repeating the facts he knew about Vietnam’s weather. He recounted, by rote, the average rainfall, and high and low temperatures of each month. He considered what the consequences of these were, as if he were delivering a lecture or discussing the matter with his doctoral advisers.
* * *
Sometime in late afternoon, with the sun sinking below the hills, Josh heard a helicopter. The sound shoved his thoughts about science away. His first reaction was to hide: he plunged into the jungle beyond the road, taking cover between the trees.
As he crouched against a trunk, he realized that hiding was not the thing to do. On the contrary, whoever was in the helicopter would probably help him, perhaps even fly him to safety. But he stayed back.
His sense of danger increased as the rotor of the chopper pounded heavier and heavier toward him. Finally it appeared, streaking down from the north, a long, dark machine, with a black cockpit and a thick tail. Missiles were stacked beneath the stubby wings, and a large round disk sat atop the rotor. To Josh, the aircraft looked like an American Apache, with a gun hanging beneath its pointed nose. But a star was painted in dull red on the side of the fuselage, faint but still visible to the naked eye.
The chopper skimmed so close to the trees that Josh thought it was going to crash. It thundered past, shaking the ground for more than a minute.
The path looped out of the trees onto a ridge. As he walked along it, Josh could see across to the hills on the other side. He continued a little farther and saw the road below — the same road I was on earlier, he thought, though of course now he was several miles farther north.
He could also see a faint glow in the distance where the road curved into the hills.
A village.
He wanted to run, but the glow was too far away to make that worthwhile. Instead, Josh picked up his pace, moving quickly, trying not to
get too anxious.
His pants began to sag at his waist. He put his hands in the loops and held them as he went.
The path looped back into the jungle. The sun had gone below the ridge, and the ground before him was gray, filled with shadows. Josh kept moving, bending forward a bit and rehearsing his small store of Vietnamese.
The jungle became darker with each step, until finally he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. The winding lane dipped to the left, then climbed so sharply that Josh had to use his hands to help him scramble upward. Finally it leveled out, and the thick jungle canopy gave way to a purple-blue sky. Once again, Josh picked up his pace, moving along the edge of the trail as it skimmed yet another ridge.
A highway came into view down to his left. Nearly straight ahead, about a half mile away, he spotted a double fence topped by barbed wire. Lights played on the fence, cutting through the growing shadows.
It was the Chinese border.
13
Hanoi, Vietnam
Another American arriving at Noi Bai Airport outside Hanoi might have noted the irony of the terminal’s westernization in the decades since the end of the war. But Mara Duncan was too focused on her mission. Clearing customs — she was traveling on a regular passport, in keeping with her journalist cover — she walked through the relatively small terminal to the taxi queue. The cab was a brand-new Indian-made REVA, the recently introduced four-door hatchback model of the Standard, an electric car. It was eerily silent as it pulled away from the airport terminal building; only when they reached the highway and the driver floored it did she hear any noise, a high-pitched flutter that sounded more like an overachieving fan than the motor of a car.
Hanoi had grown over the past several years, but compared to Bangkok it looked like a sleepy Asian backwater, especially on the outskirts, where colonial-era buildings shouldered against plain-box new structures four and five stories high, with the occasional ancient historical building plopped incongruously in the middle. The traffic was not anywhere near as bad as elsewhere in Asia, but it still took nearly an hour on the two-lane highway for the taxi to reach center city, where her hotel was. She’d been booked into a new hotel called the Star; rising on the ashes of several much humbler structures, it boasted fifteen stories and a white stone facade turned turquoise by the evening light. Mara paid the driver and went inside.
They gave her a suite with a king-sized bed and a soaking tub lined with tiny bottles of perfumed oil. The bath looked tempting, but she was on too tight a schedule; there was barely enough time to check the room for bugs before going out.
Sure enough, she found a device embedded in one of the lamps in the sitting room, where it ran off current from the wall. It also appeared to use the electrical circuit to send its signal. While Mara hadn’t encountered the specific device before, she had considerable experience with other members of its family.
The bug didn’t mean that the Vietnamese security apparatus had taken an interest in her specifically, much less that it suspected she was with the CIA. Industrial espionage was a growth industry in Asia, routinely practiced by a number of governments, including several with long historic ties to the U.S. Data was mined and then offered to various customers; while local businesses were generally favored, selling information to overseas competitors was usually more lucrative.
Mara left the bug in place — removing it would only arouse her eavesdroppers’ interest. She changed her clothes and went down to get a cyclo to take her to her appointment.
Cyclos were a kind of bicycle with a cushioned passenger seat at the front. They were popular with tourists, who tended to view them as an exotic touch in a place that was rapidly becoming a lot like the rest of the world. Mara liked them because they made it easier for her to see what was around her — and whether she was being followed or not.
As she stepped toward the curb, the driver looked at her face and gave her clothes a quick glance. Deducing that she was an American, he addressed her in broken English.
“Lady, I take you where you want. Best travel. Where you go?”
“Alfresco,” she told him, naming a well-known tourist restaurant in the center of the city. “You know it?”
“Restaurant. Very nice.”
“How much?”
“Ten U.S. dollar.”
“You think I’m rich?”
“Five dollar.”
“Two hundred dong,” she said, naming a price that worked out to about fifty cents at the current exchange rate. They went back and forth for a while more before settling on five hundred dong.
It was a little lower than the going rate, but the driver didn’t seem offended by her hard if good-natured bargaining.
“Good, good, very good,” he clucked, putting his foot to the pedal and nudging the cyclo gently toward her as she turned to sit.
After Bangkok, Hanoi’s seventy-degree evening seemed cool, even to Mara, who’d been raised in Wisconsin winters. She curled her arms around her chest, keeping warm while she glanced around the street the way she imagined a journalist would: perpetually curious, fascinated by everything. A cluster of Western travelers caught her eye — two families, one with a pair of small children, the other with a young teenager. The little kids were cute, even with the fatigue showing on their faces.
Mara felt a pang of jealousy, and for just a moment wanted to push her life along, move ahead in her career to the time when contemplating a family was not impossible.
The idea evaporated as the cyclo turned the corner, sliding into a knot of traffic. She came back to the present, focusing on the task at hand.
She got out of the cyclo a few yards from the front of the restaurant. After a few steps toward Alfresco she stopped, turning as if she had forgotten something, though really she was checking to see if she’d been followed.
It didn’t seem as if she had. Even so, Mara moved back into the shadows near the building, surveying the people around her — almost exclusively tourists. None seemed to notice her, or make too much of a deal out of not noticing her. She made a U-turn and walked to the end of the block, then turned the corner before doubling back. She saw an empty cab and trotted toward it, flagging it down.
“Old City,” she told the driver, getting in. “Okay?”
“Okay, lady.”
The restaurant where she was to meet the scientist was in the Old Quarter, the center of the city. Called Massalli, it had been open for several years and served Mediterranean cuisine. One of its best features was its wine list; knowing the Belgian was something of a connoisseur, Mara made sure to get the list after she was shown to the table.
She took a travel guide for Angkor Wat — the ancient capital of Cambodia — from her purse and laid it on the table, angling it so a passerby could easily spot it from across the room. The guide was unusual, but not so out of place that it would call too much attention to her; the scientist would look for it as an initial recognition symbol. Mara, of course, had studied his picture and would know who he was when he asked if she was going there.
She glanced at her watch. She’d aimed to be there a half hour early; she’d made it with five minutes to spare. She ordered a bottle of water, and began thumbing through the book, pausing every so often to scan the crowd.
An hour later, she was still waiting. None of the dozen or so diners, all Westerners, looked remotely like the scientist.
Mara ordered some dinner, then took out her cell phone and called the hotel where the scientist was supposed to be staying. He hadn’t checked in.
That didn’t necessarily mean anything bad. He was coming a considerable distance from the northwestern jungles, and might not consider a meeting with a CIA officer his top priority. But she didn’t like it. Deciding the restaurant might be a little too crowded for a detailed discussion, she left her napkin on the chair and got up, walking to the hall where the restroom was. Spotting a door to the side alley, she went over and stepped outside. Except for some neatly stacked wooden boxes and sever
al steel garbage cans, the alley was empty. Mara tried to ignore the smell as she dialed his sat phone from hers.
She got his voice mail service.
“Missed you for dinner,” she said cheerfully, not giving her name. “Hope to see you for cocktails.”
Back inside, Mara ate slowly, then nursed a Saigon beer. Two and a half hours after she was to have met the scientist, she paid her bill and went to the bar. It was a small, narrow room between the dining area and the entrance, and very crowded. Everyone, even the bartender, was a foreigner. Mara ordered a beer and stood near the door, considering what to do next.
Was the scientist in trouble? Had the Vietnamese or even the Chinese figured out he was in the agency’s employ? Or was he just being a scientist, with many other things on his mind?
Maybe he’d gotten cold feet. Maybe he’d decided meeting with her was too dangerous.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
The bartender came over and leaned over the counter, smiling. Two Australians wanted to buy her a drink. Mara let them. One was cute — about her age, tall, with a soccer player’s slim body. He had a two- or three-day beard that softened the hard lines of his chin. His friend, shorter, rounder, did most of the talking. They were techies, installing some sort of machine in a factory at the outskirts of town. Lonely, obviously, and a bit drunk. She flirted with them while waiting to see if Fleming might show up after all.
Mara managed to sip her beer so slowly she still had half a glass when the bartender signaled last call an hour later.
“We can continue this party down the street,” suggested the shorter Aussie.
Mara glanced at his friend, who smiled shyly.
“Be fun,” he said.
“I don’t think so. Thanks though,” she said. “Too much work in the morning.”
She touched his hand, then walked out with them, let them hail her a cab. A small part of her wondered if they were spies as well, but she’d already dismissed the possibility; something about the way they held themselves told her they were civilians. It had nothing to do with the short man’s talkativeness, or the taller man’s shyness. They lacked the coiled, just barely contained intensity that a covert agent or spy needed to survive.