In his one room hooch, Alexander undressed and fell down on his bed. He lit a cigarette, smoked it down, lit another one, and smiled, staring at the ceiling.
“Ant, come here, I want you to play dominoes with your mother.”
“No! Why? I never win.” Anthony had just come home from his first year at West Point. It was June 1962.
“Well, I know,” said Alexander, “but I’m going to watch you two play. You play your mother, and I will watch her and figure out how she cheats.”
“Don’t listen to your father. I don’t cheat at dominoes, Ant,” Tatiana said. “I use all of my vital powers. That’s different.”
“Just draw the tiles, Tania.”
“Yes, just draw the tiles, Mom.”
There were twenty-eight domino tiles. Seven went to Anthony, seven to Tatiana. Fourteen remained in the draw pile.
Alexander watched her. She sat impassively, putting her tiles down, drawing new ones, humming, looking at her son, at her husband. Soon all the tiles were gone except what remained in Anthony’s hand, and in Tatiana’s. Five to seven minutes each game. Each one won by her.
“Have you figured it out yet, Dad?”
“Not yet, son. Keep playing.”
Alexander stopped watching the tiles. He didn’t watch what went on the table, he didn’t watch what was drawn, nor what was put down, not even who won or lost. He was intently studying only Tatiana’s cool, unflappable face and her bright, clear eyes.
They played again and again and again.
Anthony complained. “Dad, we played thirteen games, all of which I lost. Can we stop?”
“Of course you lost, son,” Alexander said slowly. “Yes, you can stop.”
Thus released, Anthony fled the kitchen, Alexander lit a cigarette, and Tatiana calmly collected the tiles and stacked them back in the box.
She raised her eyes at him. His mouth widened in a grin. “Tatiana Metanova,” he said, “for twenty years, I have lived with you, I have slept in your bed, I have fathered your children.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned across to her. “Tania!” he said exaltedly. “I almost can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure it out. But—you count the tiles!”
“What?”
“You count the f*cking tiles!”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said blankly.
“When the draw pile is gone, you know what’s in Ant’s hand! You keep track, you know what tiles are left! At the end of the game, you know your opponent’s move before they can breathe on a domino!”
“Shura—”
He grabbed her, brought her on top of his lap, kissed her. “Oh, you’re good. You are very good.”
“Really, Alexander,” Tatiana said calmly. “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He laughed, so joyously. Letting go of her, he went to the cabinet and pulled out a deck of cards. Rummaging around, he found two more decks. “Guess where you and I are going next month for our twentieth wedding anniversary, my little domino counter,” he said, sitting at the table and shuffling the three decks of cards, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Um—the Grand Canyon?”
“Viva Las Vegas, baby.”
And here in Kontum, in the midst of chaos and misery, not knowing if his son was alive or even saveable, Alexander, usually reminded so painfully of his own humanity, this time was reminded blissfully of it, as only humans can be—finding one strand of comfort amid a covering quilt of anguish.
A package came by express delivery for Alexander. He was surprised; he’d been in the country barely two weeks; who would be sending him a package already, and why? When he got to the post barracks, he saw a long and heavy box. It was from home. Elkins and Mercer were even more surprised as they tried to lift it.
“Some care package,” said Mercer. “What’s in here, bricks?”
They had to open it on the ground, in the dust, in front of the mail room. It was too heavy to carry. Inside Alexander found a very long letter from Tatiana that began, “O husband, father of small boys, one of your sons has lost his mind.” And inside the box were sixteen punji sticks, each five feet long, carved out of round planed wood, notched at the tip, and sharpened like needles on both ends, for easier insertion into the ground, and greater penetration. The letter taped to them, in block handwriting said, “Dear Dad, You are going to need these. Insert diagonally into ground at 45° angle. Also Mama says watch out for bears. Your son, Harry.”
“Your kid made these for you?” Mercer said incredulously.
“Can you believe it?”
“And your wife shipped them express mail?” said Elkins. “That I can’t believe. She must have had to mortgage your house to do it. I don’t know who’s crazier, the son for making them or the wife for shipping them.”
“How old’s the boy?” Mercer asked.
“Ten on New Year’s Day.” Harry was born on the first day of the new decade.
Mercer and Elkins whistled and stared into the box. “Ten. Well, that’s something. These are nearly perfect,” said Elkins.
“They are perfect! What the f*ck do you mean nearly?”
Tatiasha, my wife,
I got cookies from you and Janie, anxious medical advice from Gordon Pasha (tell him you gave me a gallon of silver nitrate), some sharp sticks from Harry (nearly cried). I’m saddling up, I’m good to go. From you I got a letter that I could tell you wrote very late at night. It was filled with the sorts of things a wife of twenty-seven years should not write to her far-away and desperate husband, though this husband was glad and grateful to read and re-read them.
Tom Richter saw the care package you sent with the preacher cookies and said, “Wow, man. You must still be doing something right.”
I leveled a long look at him and said, “It’s good to know nothing’s changed in the army in twenty years.”
Imagine what he might have said had he been privy to the fervent sentiments in your letter.
No, I have not eaten any poison berries, or poison mushrooms, or poison anything. The U.S. Army feeds its men. Have you seen a C-ration? Franks and beans, beefsteak, crackers, fruit, cheese, peanut butter, coffee, cocoa, sacks of sugar(!). It’s enough to make a Soviet blockade girl cry. We’re going out on a little scoping mission early tomorrow morning. I’ll call when I come back. I tried to call you today, but the phone lines were jammed. It’s unbelievable. No wonder Ant only called once a year. I would’ve liked to hear your voice though: you know, one word from you before battle, that sort of thing…
Preacher cookies, by the way, BIG success among war-weary soldiers.
Say hi to the kids. Stop teaching Janie back flip dives.
Do you remember what you’re supposed to do now? Kiss the palm of your hand and press it against your heart.
Alexander
P.S. I’m getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It’s six and you’re not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you’re tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you’re running after him. You’re wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.
I love you, babe.
Deadfall in Kum Kau
Two days later, barely at dawn, all saddled up, Alexander, Tom Richter, Charlie Mercer, Dan Elkins, Ha Si, Tojo, and a six man Bannha Montagnard team, one of whom was a medic, twelve Special Forces soldiers in all, flew out in a Chinook with a large red cross on its nose, three hundred miles north into the Laotian jungle.
They were escorted by two Cobra gunships from Kontum. They had to refuel once. They brought long dehydrated rations, regular C-rations, heat tabs, water, plasma, and arms for a hundred men.
The insertion point was barely a meter inside the Laotian border, seven kilometers west from the mapped-out location of Kum Kau. The hook flew high through the mountain pass, because just last week a Huey slick was flying too low above a valley and was fired at by an RPG-7. It went down; the pilot, the co-pilot, the gunner, and two of the Indians were killed. So this time Richter ordered the chopper to fly above cloud cover to escape detection and not take any short cuts through valleys.
They were inserted without incident in Laos, and then set off to walk through the jungle in the north central highlands, a thousand meters above sea level, deep in the high plateau of enemy territory. On the chopper, they had drunk coffee, smoked, talked bullshit, cut up, joked, but here in the woods, everyone became somber and silent, not speaking, weapons raised, trying not to disturb the fern. Richter made Ha Si walking point, Mercer slack man, Alexander third, and Elkins fourth. Tojo, the Bannha who was nearly seven foot tall, was the drag man at tail—he, apparently, was always at drag because he was like a stone wall. In front of Tojo was Richter, constantly and quietly on his radio, and in front of Richter walked six more Bannhas.
The trail they laid was just noticeable enough for them to make their way back. It was an early December morning, dry and a little cool. The jungle was tall and verdantly dense. After hovering over the men in a holding pattern until they disappeared, the chopper flew thirty kilometers south to the SOG base that was the standby reaction center for the mission. Six Cobras waited there and a medic slick—just in case. The pilot told Richter not to get into trouble for an hour. After refueling, he was ordered to wait for further instructions.
The troops were dressed in jungle camouflage battle fatigues; even their steel helmets and lightweight nylon and canvas boots were camo. Over his tunic, Alexander wore a combat vest stuffed to bursting with 20-round cartridges. The bandolier over his waist was filled with an assortment of 40mm rockets that flew farther than hand-thrown and were most useful for close combat. He had on a demolition bag of miscellaneous rounds for his pistols and extra clips for his rifle. He wore another bag holding three Claymore mines, plus clackers and tripwire. The M-16 was in his arms, with the rocket launcher already affixed below the rifle mount. He had with him his lucky Colt M1911, plus the regulation Ruger .22 with the silencer attached. He carried an SOG recon Bowie knife and an excavating tool that could also be used as a piercing weapon. His ruck was filled with medical kits and food. He had at least 90 pounds of ammo, weapons and supplies on him, and he was 50. In the mountains of Holy Cross he was 25, and carried 60 pounds of gear. That was a physics problem worthy of Tania herself. And he wasn’t even carrying Harry’s heavy punji sticks or extra rounds. The Montagnards were carrying those, plus the awe-inducing 23-pound M-60 machine gun with a tripod, plus their own 90 pounds of gear. Without the Yards, the never-complaining, silent, helpful, mountain people of South Vietnam, who were trained by the SOG to be efficient killing machines and who fought alongside the Americans, search and rescue missions would have scarcely been possible.
It had been twenty-five years since Alexander led the 200-man penal battalion for the Red Army through Russia, through Estonia, through Byelorussia, through Poland and into Germany. Back then they had no food and barely any weapons or ammo—he didn’t know why his gear had weighed as much as 60 pounds. His men had been political prisoners, not Special Forces commandos; his men were not trained; many of them had never held a rifle. And yet somehow they managed to get all the way into Germany.
And before Holy Cross, Alexander defended Leningrad. For two years he defended it on the streets, across the barricades, and across the Pulkovo and Sinyavino Hills, from which the Germans bombed the city. He defended Leningrad on its rivers, and its Ladoga Lake. He drove tanks across the ice, he shot down German planes with surface-to-air missiles. And before that, he fought against Finland in 1940, underfed, under-clothed, undersupplied and freezing, armed barely with a single-bolt rifle, never dreaming that one day he would be walking through the triple-canopy jungle in Vietnam searching for his son while carrying a weapon that could fire 800 rounds a minute, discharging each round at over 3000 feet per second. Yes, the third-gen M-16 was an unbelievable rifle.
But he had liked his Shpagin, too, the Red Army standard-issue for officers. It was a good weapon. And the men under his command, they were good men. His sergeants, even in the penal battalions, were always fighters, always brave. And his friends—Anatoly Marazov, who died in his arms on the Neva ice. Ouspensky. They had been fine lieutenants. Ouspensky protected Alexander’s hide for many years, even as he was betraying him, fiercely protected the man who was his ticket out.
Except for Richter, Alexander didn’t know the men he was going into the heart of the jungle with—and wished he did. He wished he had heard their stories ahead of time, before they reached the mountains of Khammouan. He knew the lives of all of his lieutenants and sergeants in the battalion. Yet he had no doubt about any of the men with him now. Because they were Ant’s men. And he knew his son, and had no doubt about him. Mercer, Ha Si, Elkins—they were Ant’s Telikov, Marazov, Ouspensky.
Alexander was glad he had continued to train at Yuma, that he had kept himself rated to enter active combat at any time. He trained even when he was supposed to be translating military intel documents. He didn’t want to tell Tania this, but he had always quite liked the weapons, and the Americans made weapons like no one else. So he went to Yuma, put on the ear protectors, fitted the silencers over the M-4 machine guns and spent the afternoons at the range, keeping his sharpshooter rating permanently on the whetstone. Then he returned to the married quarters at night, took a scalding shower to wash the traces of gunpowder off his body, and lay down with Tania. He touched her with the hands that not two hours earlier had been loading 40mm grenades into the breech of his rocket launcher and pressing the trigger, and then, satisfied in every way, returned to Scottsdale to be at work by Monday, and spackled and pounded wood, and lifted tile, and drafted at his table, smiling while using the nail gun as if he were born to it, having just fired a sniper rifle in Yuma as if he were born to it. And perhaps it was this, his well-hidden true self, that he couldn’t help communicating to his youngest son, who wanted nothing more than to make his dad happy. Such a good boy.
It was getting warmer. Not much like the tropics here: the air was dry. The twelve-man team crunched through the golden cyprus and bamboo jungle in a single file, practically stepping into the forward man’s boots as they looked out for snakes, for mines, for booby traps, for poison, for punji sticks. Ha Si, who saw everything, cleared the bush, held the relief map, the compass, the watch, keeping an eye out, weapon always pointed. It was as if he had six hands.
“He’s f*cking dynamite,” Alexander said, leaning forward to Mercer.
Mercer nodded. “Rumor is,” he said quietly, “he used to be on their side. That’s why he knows everything, can do anything. But we don’t ask. We’re just glad he’s ours.”
“No kidding,” said Alexander, marveling at Ha Si’s innate sense of direction through these impassable parts. Tania should have had him with her when she was lost in Lake Ilmen. Plus a little razor-sharp Bowie knife, a C-ration, Richter’s command-only VHF radio, and a Zippo lighter with the engraved words, “And the Lord said, let there be soldiers, and the fish rose from the sea,” and she would’ve been all set. Alexander smiled. Somehow she had managed, even without.
They walked for three hours. When they were on the sixth kilometer, Richter radioed in. He had found a tiny clearing at klick six, just enough for a landing zone into the man-high elephant grass, and gave the pilot the coordinates of the clearing, so that if they had to get out in a hurry, they wouldn’t have to hump seven uphill kilometers and four hours through enemy terrain to get extracted. “Make sure the turrets are overloaded with ammo, though,” Richter told the pilot. “Because I don’t want anyone else here but you. The asskick will have to be completely SNAFU before I call in the snakes to North Nam.”
Finally they reached the end of the forest, at the crest of a mountain, and came out onto a long and narrow mesa maybe six hundred feet up over a grassy gorge, at the bottom of which, nested between steep and rising ranges, on the banks of a brown stream, a ville was laid out in the flat, like an enclave. The mountains covered it on all sides, themselves covered in elephant grass and rocks and short pines. A dozen rice paddies were staggered in stair formations cut into the side of the mountain across from the A-team.
“This is Kum Kau?” asked Alexander, looking carefully.
“Yes, according to my specs,” replied Ha Si. “What, too small?”
The village was small, one-sixth the size of their base at Kontum. It was maybe fifty yards on its two longest sides, and twenty to twenty-five yards on the shortest. The thatched huts were built symmetrically—on straight pathways—as if the area were designed by a Parisian architect and sprung all at once, except for the slight arc that followed the curve of the river. It was quiet and no one was out. It looked abandoned.
Alexander watched it for five more seconds before he put down his binoculars. “All my training may have come from a small office in Yuma, Colonel Richter,” he said, “not the ground, like yours, but this below us is no village. It’s a decoy. It’s a f*cking army base.”
Richter was doubtful, picking up his own binoculars. “The NVA build gray hooches to hide in. These look like regular civilian huts.” They were so high up, they could talk without fear of being heard down below. Still, they moved a step away from the slope, hunkered down.
“It’s noon,” Alexander said. “Where is everyone?”
“How the f*ck should I know? Sleeping? Jacking off?”
“That’s what I mean. It’s a village. The rice paddies are overgrown and waiting. Why isn’t anyone out tending the crops like they’re supposed to? Colonel Richter, in a normal village, in the middle of the day, people are out. They plant, they wash, they cook, they take care of their families. Where is everyone?”
Richter looked through the binoculars. “There. There are women. They’re washing in that mud they call a river.”
Alexander looked. “There are forty huts, and all you see is three old women?”
Ha Si—without binoculars—quietly said, “Colonel Richter, six hundred feet below us, at the base of this southern hill, a dozen men in coolies drawn over their faces are lying on the ground, hidden by bamboo.”
Alexander nodded. “The sentry are spaced fifteen meters apart, like they were at Colditz Castle, the highest security POW camp the Germans had. A civilian village, Colonel?”
“On the plus side,” Ha Si said conciliatorily to a grumpy Richter, “the sentry are sleeping.”
Alexander glanced at him. “I thought you didn’t joke, Ha Si?”
Ha Si was straight-faced. “I’m not joking, sir. They are actually sleeping.” The black irises in his narrow black eyes twinkled a little.
Ha Si had excellent command of English, which the other Bannhas did not speak nearly as well, all except for Tojo, who was apparently fluent in English (and Vietnamese and Japanese, being half-Japanese himself). However, he chose not to speak.
Alexander suspected that while the village slept during the day the place turned into Las Vegas at night. They would have to wait until night to see if his inductions proved correct. Ha Si certainly thought they would: he didn’t take a step without his weapon in hand. Whatever the status of the village, this was Kum Kau. They had to stay long enough to find out if Moon Lai was here.
They scoped out a good central location, cleared a little bush for monitoring activities, found rocks and nice high grass for cover, broke camp, ate. They couldn’t smoke, which made twelve men crazy, but the Vietnamese smelled nothing as well as Western cigarettes. You couldn’t take a puff without the wafting wind blowing it into the nose of the enemy. Alexander said had he known this he might have reconsidered coming.
Ha Si said, “I thought you didn’t joke, sir.”
“Who is joking?” Alexander had not been this long without a cigarette since Berlin. Nothing to do now. Cigarettes or a search for his son.
It was around noon and too warm. They thoroughly cleaned and inspected their weapons and then sat and tapped on their knees in the coarse yellow grass. The grass was thick, growing to ten feet tall in places, its razor-sharp edges making it almost impossible to penetrate. Richter, who hated to sit still, went himself—the height of foolishness— with three of his Yards to scope out the hill and help clear a swath through the grass down to the village, in case there was trouble and they needed to run back up in a hurry. Of course, if they could run up the trail, the Charlies chasing them could also move up the trail. So Ha Si and Alexander—who could sit still but hated to—planted Harry’s punji sticks into the ground halfway up. Then they quietly moved through the grass down almost to where the sentries were snoring and Claymored the lower portion, stretching the thin tripwires fifty meters across. “The Charlies step on this wire,” whispered Ha Si, crouching not five meters away from the slumbering men, “and for a hundred-meter radius they are eating small steel balls for breakfast.” He almost smiled. “We will stagger the mines uphill, too. If this lower pass does not get them, the one ten meters up will, and then will come the punji sticks, and then we will set up the rest of our Claymores up top.”
“We should really mine the entire perimeter,” Alexander said, looking across the grassy hill and around the village.
“We do not have enough mines.”
“You’re right.” Alexander was getting carried away. “One every hundred meters along the bottom of this hill will be fine. We’ll need five. And then four more, ten meters up. And then three more at the top of the hill, near our trail. We have enough.”
“We will forget where we put them,” said Ha Si.
“Better not.” Alexander winked.
“We do not have enough tripwire.”
“Stretch it as far as you can.”
“Many precautions, no?”
“Yes.”
Ha Si nodded. “Preparing for the worst, Commander?”
“Preparing for the worst, Ha Si.”
It took them two hours of stealth and great care—in case the hill was already booby-trapped—to do it.
After they meticulously marked the location of the tripwire, they cleared a separate, secret path through the elephant grass and, pleased with their work, went back to their encampment, sat down and had a drink. But not a cigarette. Alexander would have given up drink for life to have a cigarette. At least one pair of binoculars remained trained on the ville at all times. It was quiet: only sporadically did some women, young and old, creep out to the thick slow river to wash and quickly return to their huts. None of the women looked like the woman the soldiers were looking for—though two had been maimed: each was missing a leg. The guards below continued to sleep peacefully, with their Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles in their hands and their hats covering their faces from sunlight.
At three in the afternoon, Ha Si said, “Heads up. Major Barrington, take a look. Could this be the one?” And he didn’t even have binoculars!
They looked.
A small white shape emerged from a far hooch on stilts near the river and walked toward them, to the row of huts closest to their side of the mountain. She was wearing a white coolie and a white dress. She was small and thin—was easily overlooked, like a peony. But she was pregnant. Alexander noticed that first—how very pregnant she was. She had a white patch over her right eye.
“Bullseye, baby,” said Elkins.
Bullseye indeed. Alexander could not look away from her belly.
Carrying something, she made her way down the path in front of the sentries, stopped, stood for a few moments as if getting her bearings, and then disappeared inside the last hooch in the row. The U.S. soldiers waited, Alexander nearly not breathing.
She reappeared twenty minutes later, still carrying something, and made her waddling way back. Through the binoculars Alexander could now see her right hand—missing the pinky and ring fingers. To him she looked heavier than when she went in, as if suddenly acquiring gravity that pressed down not on her belly but into her shoulders, sloping her to the ground from which she did not—or could not—lift her eye.
“If we don’t hurry,” said Elkins, “she’s going to have the kid right in front of us.”
Alexander wished he didn’t have to look at her to make such an assessment. He watched her walk across the four rows of huts to the river and rinse the things she had been carrying. A small child of two, maybe three, ran up to her. She helped him in the water, splashed him a little. They sat by each other. They were alone.
Richter, Elkins, Mercer, Ha Si watched her quietly, sitting by Alexander’s side. “I’m sure that’s not her kid,” said Richter, glancing anxiously at Alexander. “It’s probably her sister’s kid. Sister’s dead, now she takes care of him.”
No one spoke then.
Alexander did not speak most of all. He turned away from the village, from the girl, he turned his back, he leaned against the rock, and said, “Richter, man, if I don’t have a f*cking cigarette, I’m going to die.” He closed his eyes.
Alexander didn’t have a cigarette and hours later night fell.
Richter ordered his men into sleep and sentry. Two Yards were on watch, everyone else was sleeping, except Alexander. The camp transformed. Bugles blew faint reveille, lights went on, men appeared, moving in and out of huts, there was motion, activity; there was carrying, organizing, adjusting; even the perimeter guards awoke. They relieved themselves where they stood and some of the women (who now numbered in the dozens) brought them food and ate with them. Alexander watched it all through his green-eye StarLights, the night-vision goggles that magnified light up to 10,000 times, but even without them it was plain to see that in this place, in Kum Kau—night was day, and day was night.
Attaching the silencer and the StarLight to his rifle, Alexander leaned over the rocks in the blackness, aiming the muzzle at the perimeter men. The rifle was steady in his hands.
“What are you going to do?” whispered Richter, who had woken up to change sentry and crawled next to Alexander. “Pick them off one by one?” He leaned against the rocks, rubbing his face.
“If you say so, Colonel Richter,” said Alexander. “I never disobey my commanding officer. One by one, tomorrow, while they sleep. It’ll take me fifteen seconds. No one will even notice.”
At two in the morning, a chopper lifted off from just beyond the village, having been camouflaged in daylight, and thup-thuped away.
“Well, looky at that,” said Elkins, who had also woken up. Richter had ordered the men to rest, but most of them were now stirring, as if they were not supposed to be sleeping either.
“Nice Soviet Kamov helicopter they’ve got there,” Alexander said to Richter. “I didn’t know that friendly, women-run Vietnamese villages had much need of Soviet military aircraft. But then what do I know? I’m only in MI, not on the ground, like you fellas.” He refocused his rifle sight.
Elkins pointed at something else through his green-eye. “Look over there,” he said. “At the back of the camp, there’s nothing but sandbags on that low flat rectangular roof. Missed it during the day. But what do you think they’re keeping under those sandbags?”
Alexander thought of the sandbagged statue of the Bronze Horseman and smiled to himself.
“Same thing we keep under ours in Kontum.” That is, heavy artillery in the ammunition supply points. “What’s interesting about theirs, though,” Alexander said, “is how long the sandbag roof is. In Kontum, ours are maybe fifteen feet. Theirs runs probably forty-five feet across. That’s not a supply point. It’s a supply dump.”
“What the hell is going on with this place?” said Elkins.
The men stayed low, StarLights to their faces. At four in the morning, the Kamov returned. It was Ha Si, who, without any night-vision goggles, crouched next to Alexander and Richter and said in a calm voice, “Do you see what I see?”
“No, what do you see?” Richter exclaimed with impatience. “What can you possibly see? You aren’t even wearing the green-eyes! Go the f*ck to sleep.”
“Yours are obviously malfunctioning, sir,” said Ha Si. “Green-eyes, that is. Because I just saw six uniformed, heavily armed Viet Cong jump off the Kamov.”
Richter stared through his. “Oh, shit,” he said, peeling the StarLight off his face. “We are in so much f*cking trouble.”
Alexander remained unfazed. “Nah,” he said calmly. “I’ve got some HE rockets that in three seconds will blow up that Kamov faster than they can say, what the f*ck. We have at least ten thousand rounds between us, plus the waiting Chinook is loaded up. Say there are two hundred men down there. Ten thousand rounds for two hundred Charlies. What, not enough?”
“No,” said Richter, just as calmly. “Not nearly.”
“And, we’re on top of the hill.” Alexander—who had spent two months at the bottom of the hill in the forest of Holy Cross, with barely any ammo and certainly no M-60 machine gun with armor-piercing rounds reaching nearly four kilometers—stayed unconcerned.
Elkins and now Mercer lay down close to them.
“Colonel, I’m going to have to agree with Major Barrington,” said Elkins. “I know you’re worried about their RPG-7s, but there are twelve of us here, each with our very own, American-made rocket launchers. Two hundred and fifty 40mm buckshot grenades, plus some high explosives for good measure. I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, Elkins,” said Richter. “You couldn’t smell trouble during a Viet Cong ambush.”
And Ha Si said, “Those men aren’t Charlies, by the way, they’re Vietminh. North Vietnamese Army. The Viet Cong don’t rate Kamov choppers.”
Alexander and Richter watched the village. “You know where they live?” said Richter. “Underground. They live like rats in tunnels, in dark caves. The huts, I will bet you your Las Vegas dollar, are almost all empty. Now those are decoys. Most of their ammo, their men and their women are all hidden beneath the earth.”
“Like they’re living already in the grave,” said Alexander.
Richter was silent a moment. “Well, what do you plan to do, Major Barrington?” he asked. “Fight a war underground with twelve guys?”
“We’re not going to fight a war underground,” said Alexander. “We are going to get the girl.”
“You don’t think Anthony’s here, do you?”
A small shudder was Alexander’s only reply.
“Oh, Major!” said Richter. “He’s been gone nearly half a year. He’s probably been taken to Hanoi, to Hoa Loa.” He paused. “Please, please, for a second, entertain that possibility.”
“I don’t want to entertain that possibility,” said Alexander, “because Hoa Loa is far to walk—at least today. We’ll get the girl. Once we get her, we’ll know where Ant is.”
In the darkness, the green human shapes, like aliens, flapped around, the flapping exaggerated by the green-eyes.
Ha Si was silent. Alexander thought he was heavily silent, like he had something to say and wasn’t saying it. That was good because Alexander didn’t want to hear it. He turned to Elkins instead.
“Elkins,” he said, “the one-eyed Moon Lai, do you think she is a prisoner of the NVA in that camp below? Does she move about like a prisoner down there?”
“No, I don’t think she’s a prisoner, Major,” Elkins said, hanging his head.
“Commander, if she is one of them,” said Ha Si, finally speaking up, “she is not going to tell you a thing. We will get her, but we will not get a word out of her. She will die first.”
They groaned to acknowledge the truth of this. Only Mercer was quiet, because he’d fallen asleep where he sat, and Tojo, because he never said anything, let alone groaned. Alexander said, “I appreciate what Ha Si is saying. I don’t necessarily disagree. But we have to get the girl.” He paused. “She is our best chance of finding Anthony. Don’t you agree, Ha Si?”
Ha Si was quiet. “I think,” he said, “you have decided to get the girl. Therefore, we are going to get the girl.”
Alexander looked intently at the Yard. He wanted, needed Ha Si’s help. The Vietnamese did not disappoint him, saying to Richter, “Sir, the perimeter is guarded zealously only at night.” They had observed the sentries, awake and on high alert. “Perhaps they only expect trouble at night, but I think there are supposed to be guards on duty during the day, but are not. Personally I think they have gotten careless. Which is very good for us. So I think we should go in broad daylight.”
“Don’t f*ck with me, man!” said Richter. “We’re not doing an E&E in daylight!”
“Ha Si is right, though,” said Alexander. “We must.”
“You’re both f*cked up,” said Richter. “Forget it. Our mission was to find and extract one man and escape without being detected. But now our mission parameters have changed since the entire f*cking Vietminh army is headquartered down there.”
The soldiers stood silently.
“We don’t have enough men for this!” Richter hissed. “You all want to be dead?”
“We’re going to have to make do with what we have,” said Alexander, adding, “Colonel.”
“How many f*cking times do I to have to tell you? What you’re proposing will require a hundred men! To go underground? You don’t know what you’re up against. And you have to assume the worst. We will have to req at least two, probably three Snakes.”
“The Cobras will hurt our mission, Colonel.” That was Ha Si, and he spoke low and with respect. “The Cobra is not for clandestine work.”
“Oh, and us, here on the plateau, building fires like fiery placards: if you want us, here we are, come and get us! What do you call that?”
“We build no fires,” Alexander said defensively.
Ha Si stretched out his small hand. “You are right, Colonel. Theirs does seem a large-scale op—like a crucial base of operations between the NVA and VC. The river is probably used to transport their supplies downstream on barges. If they have any prisoners, they will be kept underground in bamboo cages.” He turned to Alexander and said, eyes steady, “They torture them with rats. If your son is here, are you ready for that?” He blinked—less steady.
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Alexander was less steady himself. “We should go in tomorrow. At three. When Moon Lai goes into that hut.”
Ha Si disagreed. “No, three is too late. The sentries have had a long rest, they are up. No. We have to go in no more than an hour after they have gone to sleep. Then they will be groggy, still exhausted, drunk possibly. I have something to help them sleep a little longer.” He took out his blowgun, a simple aluminum tube, smiling lightly. “Muzzle velocity of three hundred meters per second, a little opium dart into their neck. Not bad?”
“At three hundred meters per second,” said Alexander, “that opium is passing through their necks and exiting the other side. You might as well shoot them with my Colt.”
Ha Si smiled. “Your Colt is very loud, sir. Quietly, I shoot into the back of their necks or their shoulder blades. They sleep. But we do not yet have sufficient knowledge to go in. Today we saw the girl at three in the afternoon. But she might pay her first visit early in the morning. We need to stay put one more day, watch for her early, see how the whole camp operates from morning till night. We will know when the best time to go in will be.”
Richter glared at them both. “Are you two quite f*cking done? We are not going anywhere. How many Charlies you think are down there? I guarantee you, a lot more than twelve. No, I’m calling for a Hatchet force to come help us,” he said. “That’s thirty-five more guys. I don’t give a f*ck anymore that we’re in North Nam. We’re going in with more men,” he continued, “we’re blowing the motherf*ckers away and torching their whole f*cking village. By the time anyone will come around to ask any questions, they’ll be ashes, and we’ll be back in Kontum. We’ll say we got lost. The compass broke. We went the wrong way, thought we were in hilly Laos, stumbled on this.”
Alexander put his hand on Richter. “Colonel,” he said steadily, “let’s just wait a day. One day. Your operational in charge of CCC while you’re away knows what’s happening. He’ll get you your Hatchet team in three hours. But first let’s just see if Ant is here.”
“Alexander!”
“Let’s wait.” His intense eyes bore into Richter. “Please.”
Richter grumbled that he was not Japanese and did not like kamikaze missions. That made Tojo speak! He said that he was Japanese and didn’t like them much either. Richter radioed his sleeping pilot down at the SOG base, to ask how much ordnance they had in the Chinook. Turned out plenty. The pilot had listened well. Richter told him to fly to their insert position in Laos first thing tomorrow morning and three of the Bannha would go back and retrieve more ammo.
They fell asleep where they sat and woke up in the dew two hours later as the sun was barely coming up. It was cold in the morning in the mountains, low forties, Alexander figured, wrapping himself in the trench cover. Not much tropical humidity here in the winter months. The ville had quietened down. The men had disappeared and the women appeared. Dozens of young women with their babies and their old mothers came out of the huts and ambled to the foggy basin to wash their clothes and clean their pots in the sediment run-off. Though where were they cooking? Underground? Perhaps the smoke exhaust was emptying out into the fog, undetectable.
After watching this bucolic scene for a while, a defeated Richter and a grim Alexander stared despairingly at each other.
“So, Colonel Richter, are you going to send in a Hatchet force?” Alexander asked. “To torch all the women and children?”
Richter spat on the ground. “The bastards are hiding behind them,” he said impotently. “And this is why we die, and this is why they’re going to win this f*cking war. Because they don’t give a f*ck about their own women, while we’re supposed to.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “More is expected of Rome.”
Richter spat again. There was to be no Hatchet.
While the women worked, the guards on the perimeter had already fallen asleep in the growing bamboo. At eight in the morning, the small dark woman, all in white with a white patch over her eye came out from her hut looking fresh from sleep. Alexander’s binocular gaze was zeroed in on her like the crosshairs of his rifle sight. Her belly protruding, she sashayed along the length of the huts, past the sleeping guards, carrying what he now saw were clean white gauze bandages, and disappeared into the farthest hooch. He waited. Twenty minutes later, she reappeared, holding unclean bandages in her hands.
Alexander’s binoculars slipped for a moment at the sight of those unclean bandages.
When she was back by the stream, Moon Lai helped an old woman to the outhouse latrine. Perhaps it was her mother, since she touched the old woman gently, and the old woman rubbed Moon Lai’s belly. Afterward, she carried two babies to a tub of water. The small boy was by her side again. The only activity on the base was near the murky soup of a river. The day got much warmer.
Alexander turned to Richter. “First of all,” he said, “I can’t think straight until I get a smoke. Second,” he continued, “scientific evidence may still be deficient in deducing the workings of that girl’s cross purposes, but our second empirical observation has told us a little bit more about her.” He paused for the inhale of his invisible cigarette. “The first thing Moon Lai does when she wakes up in the morning—before mothers, before babies, before washing herself—is disappear into that hut. And comes out twenty minutes later with filthy rags.”
“It’s probably not your son, Major Barrington,” said Elkins by way of comfort. “One-eyed, eight-fingered NVA whores are very fickle. It could be another injured john.”
“Elkins, for f*ck’s sake!” said Richter. “Is this the time for jokes?”
“I wasn’t joking, sir,” Elkins said feebly.
But Alexander couldn’t help it. He was tormented by the sight of the pregnant young woman. His judgment was failing him. In her actions, in her movements, in her posture, in the sweet expression on her face, no matter how hard to see, to decipher through the distance and the distorting magnifying lenses—she reminded him of Tatiana. A half-blind, mutilated Vietnamese Tatiana. Where was Anthony? Was Alexander wrong about everything? He was weary and troubled—and in the throes of grim nicotine withdrawal. He didn’t know what to think. What would Tania think?
Miserably he watched the camp all morning and then said to Richter that either they had to go in to get Moon Lai now and not a second later or he needed to go have a cigarette now and not a second later. Richter was amused, mockingly inquiring what in the world did Alexander do in the past, when he was, say, in prison and was denied cigarettes for weeks at a time as punishment. Alexander, who was not amused in the least, unmockingly replied that unless Richter wanted to string him up by his ankles and hang him naked and upside down for eight hours, he would let him have a cigarette. Richter solemnly considered both options, but finally gave Alexander and Elkins permission to walk two kilometers into the woods. Elkins, rifle in front, could barely keep up. Deep in the jungle, Alexander sank onto his haunches in the wild bush and gratefully smoked down three cigarettes before he uttered a word. He found it only mildly ironic that he had gone nearly four years without a woman, yet could last barely twenty-four hours without nicotine.
“What’s up, Ant’s father?” said Elkins, smoking happily, and not nearly as desperately. “Worried about the snatch?”
Alexander shook his head. “I am, but that’s not it.” He dragged his smoke out because he couldn’t drag his words out.
“What? You can’t believe your son and my best friend fell for someone like her?”
Another cigarette. “That’s a little more along what I’m thinking.”
“Major Barrington,” said Elkins, patting him comrade-like on the arm. “I’m assuming you don’t know this, but to say you’ve fallen for a young Asian beauty, even a crippled beauty, is redundant. The Asian girls are too heady for the white man. We have no weapons against them. That Anthony fell in love with that girl is now becoming quickly secondary to our main problem. What we want to know is—did he fall for the Mata Hari? Did she lure him here, her new husband, a soon-to-be-father, and then betray him?”
Alexander smoked. “Elkins,” he said, “that is what I’m thinking. But what I don’t understand is how he could have continued with her beyond the DMZ.”
Elkins shook his head. “You’re not seeing things anymore. It’s okay. You don’t have to.” He paused. “You forget how you scolded me for not seeing that we were ambushed by her eighteen months ago in Hué. I had no idea what you were talking about. Well, now I do. If she was part of that ambush, and he was blind to it then, even before he fell for her, he would’ve easily come with her quite far north after he had.”
Alexander nodded. That’s what he thought, too. But this far? What confounded him was the observable change in Mata Hari’s movements as she walked to that hut and then crawled back. Alexander couldn’t reconcile what he had observed of her as contrasted with the things he suspected of her. He sat on the ground, thinking and smoking, and didn’t tell Elkins any of his worst fears about Anthony’s fate at the hands of the NVA.
Alexander smoked eight cigarettes before he staggered back, much slower on the return, and collapsed next to Mercer, feeling woozy and addled, but a little better having smoked, and better still, sitting next to Anthony’s friends, as if by being near them he was a little closer to his son. Exchanging a look with Elkins, Mercer cleared his throat.
“What, Sergeant?” Alexander said. “Don’t be shy. Say anything. We’re in this together.”
Diffidently, Mercer said, “I just wanted to say, sir, Ant was full of stories about you at war. How you escaped from Colditz. I think the entire SOG ground studies group in all three command controls knows your Colditz escape story.”
Smiling a little, Alexander nodded, allowing himself to be pleased with his boy.
“Tell me, sir, is it true?” said Mercer, his breath bated, “did you really scale down ninety feet of wall and cliff in sixty seconds in the dark?”
Alexander laughed lightly. “No, I think the last forty-five feet we scaled after the sixty seconds were up.”
“But no one escapes from Colditz, that’s what we heard.”
“Well, no, some escape. They’re just all caught later.” Alexander paused. “Like I was caught.” He lowered his head, feeling a singe of himself sitting on the frozen February ground with Tatiana’s dead brother in his arms, waiting for the German guards to come and catch him. His mouth twisted as he looked away from Mercer. Not all of it was just stories.
“But what about the Gulag camp? Didn’t you get yourself and your wife to Berlin with a Soviet army following you?”
“I did,” said Alexander, “and you know what, gentlemen? The Soviets themselves may have a hard time letting go of that last one, which could be the reason we’re all here. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He moved away to sit next to Ha Si who mercifully didn’t ask him any questions.
Alexander spent a long time cleaning and inspecting his weapons.
The day ticked slowly by.
They had to decide right away, did they go in first thing the next morning? Ha Si wanted to wait another day. Richter growled, Alexander growled. But the ungrowling Ha Si maintained that unless they had an indication from Moon Lai of a punctual morning pattern, they were dooming themselves to failure, and with odds already so long, Ha Si thought they should do everything to make them a little shorter. Richter and Alexander grudgingly agreed, and so they waited out the rest of the tortuous day and another awake and active Martian night, during which the Vietnamese men came and went as if at a Saturday bazaar in New York City, a bazaar with Soviet-made helicopters coming and going, dropping off armies and supplies.
It settled down finally, and then promptly at eight in the morning, Moon Lai emerged from her hut and started to her destination. Ha Si, not even looking at her anymore but only at his watch, said he was satisfied. Alexander said, “What, now that you know she is as punctual as a German, you feel better?” He smiled.
“I do not understand what you are talking about, Major Barrington,” Ha Si said seriously. “I do not know any Germans. But yes. I feel better. Tomorrow morning, we go in when the guards are asleep. I will help them sleep. They will remain knocked out half the day.”
“Let me shoot them, Ha Si,” said Alexander, lifting his rifle. “They’ll be knocked out a little longer than that.”
“As you wish, sir.” Ha Si smiled. “The girl goes inside the hut, we go in behind her. A word of warning—we are probably going to have to go down into the tunnels. Down there better not to shoot, better to use the knives, but if we shoot, we shoot only with our silenced Rugers. The sound of a charge going off is like an explosion.”
Richter refused to let Alexander go with Ha Si to capture Moon Lai. “That’s an order. That’s final. No. We have nine other guys who can go. You’re not going. One of the Yards will go. They’re still like death.”
Alexander was barely listening to Richter, as he was getting his ammunition ready. “Colonel,” he said, “I’m also still like death.”
“You haven’t stopped pacing for five days!” exclaimed Richter. “You can’t sit for five minutes without a cigarette. I said no.”
“And yet,” said Alexander, “I managed to survive six days with six men in one foxhole. And months in the woods. And in a cell in isolation for eight months. I’ll be fine.”
“That was twenty years ago! And in the meantime, sneaking up and scaring your mouse of a wife half to death on Halloween does not count as honing your recon moves.”
“Anthony told you that?” said Alexander, disgusted.
“I don’t think that boy can keep his mouth shut about anything,” said Richter, staring at Alexander in a peculiar way that made Alexander look away.
Elkins said, “Let him go, Colonel. Mercer, Tojo and I will have his back from the trench. Ha Si will send us a sign if he is in trouble and needs help.”
“What f*cking trench?” Richter said, nearly yelling.
“The trench we’re going to dig as soon as we get permission to dig one, sir.”
Richer gave permission for Elkins and Mercer to go dig a trench directly across from Moon Lai’s hooch, and then took Ha Si aside. Glancing over at Alexander, Richter said, “Promise me you’ll watch his back.” He paused, and added quieter, “the way you watched his son’s back.”
“Will do, Colonel,” said Ha Si. “But hopefully better than I watched over his son. The boy is missing.”
“You see how wired he is?” said Richter. “He’s thinking only of his son. He’s going to get reckless. All right? Take Tojo with you. He can help you.”
Shaking his head, Ha Si said, “Three is too much. And Tojo is a Sumo. He is very good in a fight, but we want no noise. Major Barrington is almost as quiet as I am.” That was the highest compliment Ha Si could pay.
They waited out the rest of the night hidden in the grasses and the rocks. They slept briefly and badly, from anticipation of the morning, and from fear that snakes would come out, smelling food and men. Alexander kept watch with Ha Si and Elkins. Then he went and sat by Richter. Nobody could sleep, even though they had to, even though they had been ordered to. Alexander thought his own freefalling anxiety was enough to keep all of Saigon awake.
“Don’t worry about the men, Alexander,” Richter said. “You worry about nothing but yourself, do you hear me, about nothing but yourself, and you regret nothing. This is Ant’s team. He’s their commander. They will go into the fire for him. The Yards, too.” Richter paused. “Ha Si especially.” When Alexander gave him a quizzical look, Richter nodded. “Ha Si was close to your Anthony. I’m almost surprised Ha Si didn’t know about Moon Lai.” After too long and heavy a pause he added, “This business with Moon Lai is nasty. I feel it.”
“You should worry less, Tom.” Alexander was worrying plenty for the twelve of them.
Richter shrugged. “Can’t help it. What if they have more of our guys? Then what do we do? They’re so well situated here.”
“They’re f*cking idiots,” said Alexander. “What kind of fighter builds his base in a hole in a valley surrounded by high ground, where an attacking force can entrench on top of a hill and with hardly any men grease them one at a time? Tom, you know this better than anyone—you who nearly single-handedly flattened North Korea until there wasn’t a building standing, you who firebombed them into submission—if only we had invaded North Vietnam proper, the war would be long over and we wouldn’t be in this predicament now.”
“Let’s try to find Ant first, all right?”
Alexander smiled, palming and smelling his cigarettes. “All I’m saying is he who controls the highlands controls everything.”
“Don’t forget to radio me every five minutes, Major Control,” said Richter, “give me a heads-up.”
“I don’t even have to call my wife every five minutes,” said Alexander.
“If shit starts flying, you radio me instantly, I won’t care how much noise our chopper makes; it’s coming in, and we evacuate. You have to get up the mountain and just one klick in, to that little clearing. Ten minutes, so we just have to pray we can outrun them.”
“We will outrun them.”
“Thing is, soldier,” said Richter, “you can’t run forward and shoot backward at the same time.”
“Watch me.”
“One klick, Alexander.”
Alexander studied Richter. “Tom, what’s the matter?”
Richter shook his head. “They have some heavy shit down there. The place is lousy with Sappers.” Sappers were NVA demolition commandos. “Vikki is already so upset with me for losing Ant in the first place. I keep telling her I didn’t do it on purpose.” He coughed. “I’ll feel better if we find him. But if things go south, I can only take so much grief.”
“And then a little bit more,” said Alexander.
They sat. Richter asked, “You lived like this for ten years. You miss the mad minute?” He smiled. “Do you keep hearing the far drums beating the long roll? Our Supreme Allied Commander MacArthur heard them all his life.”
“And not just him,” Alexander said, smiling at Richter’s sheepish expression before admitting, “I do miss the good men. Occasionally the idle bullshit. And I don’t mind the weapons.” He nodded sheepishly himself. “But…as for the rest of it, you won’t believe it, but I hate to be wet, hate to be filthy, hate to bleed, hate to lose my guys, and I quite like my wife.”
Richter smiled in assent, was thoughtful. “I liked my wife, too,” he said, pausing. “Still do a little bit.”
Alexander was not looking at Richter.
“I can’t defend myself, Alexander. This here is my life. Once it mattered to Vikki, but now she is very much over me.” He sighed. “It’s funny, but the older I get, the more I wish she weren’t quite as…over me.” He struggled with something. “I’m not explaining well.”
“Don’t need to explain anything, man. Really. Not a thing.”
“God! Whenever I think of her now, the thing I come back to is that first time I saw her, back in 1948. She had come to DC to meet you guys; she was disheveled and harried, running to Tania and Anthony. Her black hair was flying, she was crying, and she was scooping up your boy into the air, suffocating him with her arms and her loud kisses. I think that’s when I fell in love with her—right then and there, watching her love on him.” An anguished cry left Richter’s chest. “She was so…emotional and Italian. Apassionata. I liked that. I needed that.” He broke off for a long while. “We were so strong once, but now it’s just for show,” he said quietly. “I do what I want. She does what she wants.” He hung his head. “Not really a marriage, is it?”
“No,” said Alexander. “Not really.”
“Yes,” Richter whispered, “but I know that when I cross the river, the last breath on my lips won’t be the Corps and it won’t be this.”
Alexander lowered his head in his mute, conflicted compassion.
“Everything good with you and Tania?” Richter asked much later when they were still reluctantly tensely awake.
“Yes, man,” said Alexander, staring below into the black valley with the little green men like Martians, invading earth. “Everything is what it’s always been.”
“That’s good,” Richter said. “That’s very good.”
They fell asleep eventually, against the rocks, next to each other.
Then it was dawn. At seven in the unseasonably warm and cloudless morning, Ha Si and Alexander, armed, helmeted, ready, moved down the hill single file, with Elkins, Mercer and Tojo behind them. Richter and his six Yards had spread out and hid at the top of the hill amid the boulders, setting up their M-60 machine gun on a tripod. Ten 100-round bandoliers lay close, plus two extra barrels when the grease gun started smoking from the heat. Despite all their precautions, the white men couldn’t help it: they were all nervous about a high-stakes mission without the cover of night. On the plus side, the crisp morning was dazzling and visibility was good.
From slightly above, Ha Si shot his opium darts one by one into the backs or shoulders or necks of the sleeping guards. Whoosh—and then he moved through the elephant grass to the next one. Whoosh. Behind him, Alexander went up to the guards and emptied their AK47s, throwing the banana clips to Elkins and Mercer in the trench. He left the weapons with the slumped-over guards because he didn’t know how observant Moon Lai was. They jumped into the trench to hide until she came.
At eight, Moon Lai slowly walked down the path with clean bandages and came to the last hut barely thirty feet away from the troops. Opening the door, she disappeared inside. As soon as she was in, Alexander and Ha Si, silent like tigers, made their way to the hooch. They stood, stood, and then flung open the door and in one movement were through.
Inside was empty—a grassy space, perhaps twelve feet square, and no Moon Lai. Ha Si pointed to the secret trap door in the ground. Had they not known to look for it, they never would have seen it. The huts were decoys, empty of life.
Ha Si pulled the grass hatch open slightly to see which way it hinged. Turned out, it just lay on top like a manhole cover. The ladder faced away from the back wall of the hut and that’s where Alexander and Ha Si planted so that Moon Lai’s back would be to them when she ascended the ladder.
Twenty unbearable mute minutes crawled by. It was damp and fluid and sticky in the hooch, it was stifling and sweaty. Though Alexander listened, there was no noise from below. “Are you a Buddhist, Ha Si? An animist?” he whispered, pulling up and kissing his cross.
“No,” Ha Si replied, kissing his own cross. “I’m a good Catholic boy like you and your son, Major Barrington.”
A slight creaking of the ladder alerted them. They both crouched, got ready, barely breathing. The manhole cover was lifted by a small, crippled hand. She struggled, having a hard time pulling herself and her belly up onto the straw floor. Her back was to them. Alexander smelled the sulfur of medicine, he smelled the salt of blood, he saw the empty opium vials she put on the ground next to the bloodied rags. Whoever she was taking care of was not only hurt but in pain.
Alexander and Ha Si waited two more seconds.
She was barely out and still on her haunches when Alexander, not giving her a chance to stand or to see them in the peripheral vision of her eye, sprang on her, knocking her down on the ground, his arm over her arms, his hand over her mouth. Instantly Ha Si pulled the manhole cover closed so no one could hear them from below. Holding her very tightly, Alexander leaned to her ear and whispered, “Where is Anthony?”
The woman went into convulsions in her struggle against him. She tried to scream, to turn her head, he had to hold her so firmly it must have hurt her, but she fought anyway and flailed her legs until Ha Si grabbed hold of them, while Alexander gripped her around her chest with one arm, keeping the other over her mouth. She tried to bite him. He had to snap her jaws shut. Turning her head to him so she could see his grim face, he said, “Stop moving. Stop fighting.” He gave her head a yank. Since he didn’t think she understood him, he jerked her head again to get her to stop her frenzy. A stick-on bandage covered one eye, but her other, seeing eye, very near his face, was black and round with—what was that? Strangely, it didn’t look like fear. Despite the pressure on her neck, she kept trying to bite him, kept shaking her head, kept trying to free herself from him.
“Dâu lá Anthony?” Ha Si said in Vietnamese, while tying her feet together with rope. “Où est Anthony?” he asked in French.
She kept shaking her head in Alexander’s hands. Shaking or trying to free herself?
“Where is Anthony?” Alexander asked in English. “Gde Anthony?” he whispered in Russian. She blinked. She blinked at Russian?
Alexander couldn’t let go of her mouth until he was sure she wouldn’t scream, because if she screamed they’d have to kill her and run, and their op would be finished before it began, and they still would know nothing about Anthony. “Should we take her into the trench?” Alexander asked Ha Si, panting.
She groaned, shaking her head against his hand.
Alexander looked down at her. “She understands me?”
She nodded. Recognition was in her eye. She was looking at him as if she knew him.
“Are you going to scream?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“You speak English?”
She nodded, but he couldn’t trust her. What if she screamed? One of her hands had gotten loose from Alexander, and she reached over and grabbed the dirty bandage lying on the ground and waved it up and down—like a white flag.
After exchanging a look with Alexander, Ha Si pulled out his SOG knife and stuck it into Moon Lai’s neck. “Listen to me,” he said. “He will let go of your mouth, but if you utter one sound above a whisper, the knife is going into your throat, do you understand?”
She nodded. Alexander still held her head in a twist. “Even before he gets to you with his knife,” he said, “I’m going to break your f*cking neck if you raise your voice. Do you understand that?”
She nodded.
“Do you know where Anthony is?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want us to take you into the woods?” said Ha Si. “Two men to take you into the woods and keep you there until you tell us where he is? Because that’s next for you.”
Alexander frowned at Ha Si. Were these kinds of threats really necessary against a pregnant woman? Moon Lai saw his ambivalence. Ha Si, ignoring him, was undeterred. “Stop looking at him. Look at me. Where is Anthony?”
She shrugged again, struggled again. Alexander’s hand remained over her mouth.
“If you don’t tell us,” Ha Si said, “we’ll snatch your mother. And the little boy. Nod if you understand.”
The girl nodded.
“Where is he?” Alexander asked in a milder tone than Ha Si, despite his firm hold on her fragile throat. He applied extra pressure. “Is my son down there?” he asked her. “Is he in the hole?” When she did not reply, Alexander yanked her neck back. She gasped against his palm but did not reply. She was a pregnant woman! This was insane. “Please,” he said to her, moving off her body, no longer straddling her, letting her lie on her side. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want my son. Tell me if he is down below, that’s all I want.” Taking a chance, Alexander let go of her mouth.
She just lay on the ground, panting and limp, not trying to get away, saying nothing, her brown eye moist and knowing, blinking at him. Ha Si backed away a few inches, his knife still trained on her, and Alexander moved away three feet—to get away from her heaving belly. He wished he could close his eyes and not look at her. His instincts were about to fail him, looking at a tiny woman so heavily pregnant, in a physical fight with two armed soldiers. It was too f*cked up. “Please,” he said, “just tell me where he is.”
Moon Lai opened her mouth and spoke softly in halting but very good English. “You know,” she said, “he assured me you would never find him. But I told him you would find a way.”
No closing of eyes now. Eyes were opened wide. “What?” Alexander whispered.
“It won’t do you any good to pretend to be surprised,” she said.
“Who is surprised? He is alive?”
“I do not know,” she said in her spare voice. “He was barely alive when they took him from here.”
Took him from here! Alexander couldn’t speak. He almost cried.
“You are too late. He is near Hanoi now,” she said. “Soon they will take him to a Castro camp near China. And then USSR.”
Groaning, exhaling, Alexander sank into the earth.
She was watching him unblinking. They were all on the ground, Moon Lai near the manhole, half-lying down. Alexander aghast and against the wall, legs spread out, Ha Si close to her, gripping the pointed knife.
“I know where he is. I will take you to him,” she said. “You come with me. He was alive when he left here. But we do not have much time.”
Alexander had lost his power of speech.
“You are a f*cking liar,” said Ha Si. “Whose bandages are you changing twice a day?”
Moon Lai smiled softly. “This is a transit camp. We have other POW here,” she said. “I help them, too, the way I helped him.” Sitting up, she straightened out and brushed the straw off her face.
“Keep your hands in front of you,” Ha Si said, moving closer.
“Okay, okay.” She put them on her belly and cringed as if she were in pain. She was trying to control her breathing.
If Alexander didn’t listen to her words and looked at her mute, she was just a young pregnant girl pleading for compassion from men. Perhaps pregnant with Anthony’s baby. Oh God. If one didn’t look at the patch over her face, you could see how fresh she was, how small and pretty. “How old are you?” he asked numbly.
“Seventeen.”
His heart nearly gave out. He glanced at Ha Si for strength.
Ha Si, emotionless, his eyes brutal, shook his head at Alexander, as if to say, buck up, soldier. “You are not seventeen,” he said. “Maybe a hundred and seventeen. Do not lie to the major. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six,” she said. “Born in 1943. Like his son.”
Alexander was surprised; she looked young like a child. “Are there guards down there?” he asked, frowning at her lies.
“Many. Guarding the POW. But what does it matter? He is not here.”
“Armed guards?”
“Heavily.”
They were quiet.
“You lay in wait for the American patrols in Hué,” Alexander said. “You lay in wait for my son.”
“I was just bait,” she said with a shrug. “Usually we killed them then and there. Not your son. He is some warrior. He is the reason I am half blind.”
“Ah,” said Ha Si, “but in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
“I do not care for your insults about my country,” said Moon Lai without looking at him. She spoke in a gentle, non-inflammatory tone. Her manner was subservient. “It is your country, too, Bannha.” She never once looked at Ha Si. Her eye was trained only on Alexander. “In Hué, Anthony thought he was saving me. He was so noble and decent. Such an easy mark, your son,” she said softly. “The easiest. Just a few days and he was wholly addicted.” Her eye smiled approvingly at Alexander. “But really, I must tell you, you did not teach him very well. He is too trusting. Though, of course, it is probably the only reason he is still alive today. Because I was going to kill him like I kill them all—kill him with opium, with deadly vipers.” She had a lilting voice, sweet. “But he started telling me such interesting stories about his life! I waited to listen. He told me a little at a time, but when we married, he told me everything. I was just a Vietnamese whore he saved, a simple village girl desperately in need of his protection.” Her eye glistened and shined as she spoke of him. “He told me so much, thinking I barely understood. And I sat and listened. He told me about his mother, the Soviet escapee, and about his father, the American who came to the Soviet Union, who had served in the Red Army, who escaped twice, who killed Soviet interrogators and NKVD border troops, who escaped from a maximum security Soviet prison and was now in U.S. military intelligence.” Moon Lai looked as though she were tenderly reminiscing. “He was so thorough, we barely even had to go to your files to confirm his stories.”
“Oh, my God, who are you?” Alexander whispered, his hands shaking.
“I am his wife,” Moon Lai said in her most pleasant voice. “I am his pregnant wife and I was his nurse.”
Alexander was grateful he was sitting. Once he had given all of himself away, the same reckless way, to a small, soft, very young Soviet factory girl, whom he had barely known, sitting on a bench under the summer elms in the Italian Gardens in Leningrad. Pale and trembling, watching this girl, he asked, “How did you get him to come with you all the way here?” He was looking for something from her, a small tremulous clue to one thing and one thing only: Where was Anthony?
Moon Lai shrugged. “He came peacefully. When he got suspicious, a few miles south of the DMZ, I helped him go to sleep, and when he woke up, he was here. It was not even a fight.”
Alexander was mute, struck dumb by the vision of his son, waking up to find himself here.
Moon Lai continued in a murmur. “But once here, Anthony suddenly needed so much persuasion to keep on talking! Which is when all our trouble with him began. Because when he did talk, he told us the most damnable lies about the American military positions. He sent us on crazy missions that ended in large losses for us; we kept walking right into ambushes and booby traps. And he kept trying to kill our guards, succeeding three times, twice while he was still shackled! He became very dangerous. We had no choice but to incapacitate him and then to transfer him.”
Incapacitate him? mouthed Alexander.
“Every other word out of your mouth,” said Ha Si, “is a f*cking lie. He is down there right now.”
“No, he is not,” Moon Lai said without argument. “But there are fifty guards there with the prisoners. You two want to take them on in the dark tunnels by yourselves? Please—go right ahead.”
“Fifty guards?” said Ha Si. “How many prisoners do you have down there?”
Not answering, Moon Lai said to Alexander, “Tell your Bannha to take his weapon from me, Commander. I am your daughter-in-law. This child could be your grandchild. The knife comes off my neck right now.”
After a frayed moment Alexander motioned to Ha Si who, with supreme reluctance, moved himself and his weapon away and behind Moon Lai.
“Is it…Anthony’s child?” Alexander asked haltingly.
Her one eye stared right back at his two, all three brown-hued, a telescoping triangle playing for keeps, all unblinking and unflinching. “Commander, what are you asking me? You came to Vietnam, abandoned your family, put your own life in mortal danger, all to see your son again. I am about to help you do that, if you will be reasonable, and you are sitting here asking me about”—she pointed to her large belly—“this? What does it matter?”
Now Alexander flinched and blinked. “What does it matter?” He exhaled. “It matters a great, big, f*cking deal. Don’t evade me, don’t defraud me. Can you say one f*cking thing without dissembling? It’s a simple question. Yes or no. Is it his child?”
She bowed her head as if she were praying. “Alexander Barrington,” said Moon Lai, lifting her steady gaze to him, “what do you believe in? Do you, of all people, not know that your new country is at war with your old country? You are in the middle of a very hot war; shouldn’t you, of all people, care about this most? Who cares about babies? What do you think is going on around here? Do you know that your country is also at war with my country? We are fighting for the very soul of Vietnam! Vietnam will be one. One Communist Republic of Vietnam. Nothing you Americans—or the stooges you call your South Vietnamese allies—can do to change that. We will not rest until you go. Southeast Asia: Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, they are not your business. They are our business. Instead you come here and pretend to fight.” She laughed easily. “You call this fighting? We call it losing.”
“We are not losing,” said Alexander. “We have not lost one single f*cking engagement against you since this damn war began.”
“You are losing regardless. Do you know why? Because you’re wasting your time dumping bombs from safe air, going on recon missions like this one, and f*cking whores.”
“Like you?”
“But you know who is fighting?” she went on. “We are. The Soviets train us, and teach us, and educate us, and arm us. They teach us your language, Commander—Russian, English, and the language of war—which is the only language you understand. We fight with their old weapons and the new weapons you leave behind. We fight without boots and without helmets and without C-rations. You burn us with napalm? We bandage ourselves and keep going. You kill our crops with Agent Blue? We eat grass and keep going. We do not care about your bombs and your chemicals. We do not care if we die. Because we are fighting for our life, for our very existence—the way the Red Army once fought Hitler. Victory was the only option. That is the way Americans fought in World War Two, and for the first few months in Korea. But here in Vietnam, what you are doing is pretending to fight. That is why you will never win, despite having the most disciplined, best trained, best equipped force in the world. Because you are unwilling to sacrifice even fifty thousand of your men to defeat communism in Indochina, while we will sacrifice our men to the last one to defeat you. We will sacrifice millions of our men, tens of millions, not a lousy fifty thousand! No price is too high to pay, no sacrifice is large enough. We believe in this war, and you do not. You yourself do not believe in it, your country does not believe in it, your jodies at home do not believe in it. Your politicians and your journalists certainly do not believe in it.” Moon Lai smiled warmly. “In fact, they do so much of our vital work for us, destabilizing the will of our American enemy. And once you leave, the South Vietnamese, despite all your training, will not last a week.”
She spoke so softly; her voice was melodious; it never rose above a purr; words fluttered like butterflies off her tongue. She smiled! But these were the words she was saying. A poem, of all things, came back to Alexander. When she spoke what a tender voice she used…John Dryden, how had it gone?…Like flakes of feathered snow, it melted as it left her mouth. But her words were incongruous. Alexander wanted to say, I don’t understand a word you’re saying; speak English.
But he understood.
He was imprisoned by her voice and her large belly. She looked like Tania when she was eight months pregnant, when she could not get off the couch or the bed without Alexander’s help, when she could not turn over without rocking and rolling, when he walked around after her with his hands constantly out, in case she tripped or slipped or wavered.
Alexander wavered. In response to what he had just heard, the only thing he uttered was, “The South Vietnamese also believe in their war, no?”
“No. They are weak, and they are led by the nose by you. Vietnam will be one despite them, and despite the mercenaries you send here to help them.”
“My son is not a f*cking mercenary.”
“Your son was not, no,” Moon Lai said, motionless and calm. “He was one among half a million men.” She paused and blinked. “But do you know what? He did not believe in this war either. Oh, he thought he did. Until he met me, he thought he did. And when he married me, he still thought he did. But he never even asked me if I was South Vietnamese! He married me instantly when I told him I was having a baby, and he never even asked if it was his.”
Alexander, his fists clenched, compassion for her draining out of him, said, “Yes. Because he believed in you.”
Moon Lai shook her head. “Only superficially. When he opened his eyes here in Kum Kau and saw where he was and pleaded for me, the interrogator brought me to him, pregnant and roped up and told him to speak. Anthony spoke all right, but do you know what he said?” She took a breath. “‘I don’t give a f*ck what you do to her,’ said your son. ‘And that baby isn’t mine. They say that a wife is only for one man. But sometimes she is for two men, and sometimes for three. And my wife f*cked every American soldier from here to Saigon, lying on her back trying to ambush them with her p-ssy like she ambushed me. She may as well have had razor blades in it. Kill her in front of me. I don’t care.’” Moon Lai smirked casually even as a tremble passed her face. “Needless to say, of course, they did not kill me. But my point to you is made. He did not believe in me.”
“Believe in you? What the f*ck are you talking about, believe in you?” said Alexander, gratified that at that terrible moment Anthony finally saw the truth—Anthony, who once thought all the world was good. “My son finally learned he had found something lower than a two-dollar whore,” said Alexander, “and he wanted you to know it.”
“Yes, that is right,” she said. “So love was not completely blind, was it?” Moon Lai composed her mouth. “You should be grateful to us, because it was here in Kum Kau that your son finally found out what he himself believed in. It was not the war against communism, and it certainly was not me. Until he found out what he believed in, we could not make any progress with him. Nothing we could say could convince him to confide in us. We threatened him with a transfer to the Castro camp. We brought in our best interrogators, we used our strongest methods—”
Alexander flinched and flinched again.
“—Nothing was making an impression on him. He cursed us in English, Russian, Spanish—even our own. He told us to kill him. We kept him in water, we deprived him of water. We beat him, we starved him, we burned him. We kept him with rats, we did…other things to him. And then I would come and minister to him.” Her voice was soothing. “I ministered so thoroughly to him. I was his only friend, and his wife, and he was chained and naked and had no way out. He had to let me touch him. What punishment that must have been for him, what torture.” Her hands were tensing slightly, lying less languidly on her stomach. “You are recoiling, Commander, why?” Moon Lai relaxed her hands. “Finally we figured out a way. Pretending to give up, we said to him that we have kept him hidden long enough. He was no longer of any use to us. We were going to notify his government that he was still alive and an NVA prisoner. Maybe they would negotiate for Anthony Barrington.”