by Ed Marohn
Hoi An, January 13, 2003
I banged on Hieu’s connecting door, calling her. My watch showed five in the morning. My excitement drove me, and I stood, disheveled in my wrinkled golf shirt and cargo shorts, impatiently waiting for Hieu to unlock the door. The door opened, slightly ajar, her nine millimeter visible through the opening.
Hieu finally recognized me and let the door swing open. “What is . . . ?” Her eyes were puffy from sleeping, hair strewn over her face, right hand hanging to her side, the nine-mil pointed down. Refocusing her eyes on me, she waited for an explanation, sleep shorts and top hanging on her loosely, revealing the tops of her attractive breasts.
“I’ve got it!” I said. I walked into her room, pacing back and forth in front of her. “The Yin and Yang is the key, Hieu. Your philosophy held the key to the mystery.” I hugged her and then pulled her sleepy body to the lounge chair and sat her down, delicately, a toy Panda doll. She sat, staring, trying to comprehend. I knew I should not have hugged her by the look she gave me, but I felt too elated to care.
“OK, just listen. The key is Da Nang and Marble Mountain, like you thought. The Yin and Yang of the war: Da Nang is held by the Americans and its South Vietnamese allies; Marble Mountain is held by the VC. The Yin and Yang of opposing forces: one is good, and one is bad, depending on whose side you are on.”
Hieu looked at me, slowly waking up but still eyeing me with bewilderment, as if a deranged stranger stood in her hotel room. Her mind deliberated though, as her intelligent looking black eyes absorbed my actions.
“I looked on the map and think I have the answers. Marble Mountain, say it is the Yin, is twelve kilometers west of Da Nang, the Yang, basically in a straight line. I looked at My Son on the map and plotted twelve kilometers in a straight line to the east, and it intersects a fork of two roads. The map legend shows they are basically minor roads. The key is using My Son, not Giang village, as the center of the search circle, and using twelve kilometers as a radius, not ten.”
Hieu’s eyes lit up. “Are you certain?”
“Not certain, Hieu, but I feel this makes more sense. We’ve been searching from Giang in a ten-kilometer radius and, as a result, barely touching My Son and forgetting about it since it’s a bombed-out sanctuary.”
“John, why not go west twelve kilometers from My Son?”
I paused. For the first time, she had used my first name. Collecting my thoughts again, I said, “I looked at that as well, but our ten-kilometer radius searches from Giang would have intersected the end of such a straight line. Thus, the only area still unsearched by us is the twelve kilometers east of My Son.”
“But that would place the gold closer to Hoi An or Da Nang.”
“Exactly, and I think when Ramsey buried the gold in early January 1973, he planned to move it by sea out of Hoi An harbor within a year, using his authority to access a freighter. Remember, however, the US had signed a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese on January 27, 1973, and the last US troops left in March 1973. Ramsey was stuck and couldn’t risk retrieving the gold while troop withdrawals were happening. Then in October, your Central Committee decided to ignore the Peace Accord of Paris and continue military operations.
“This would have endangered Ramsey trying to come up to Da Nang and then My Son while the VC and NVA were consolidating the region. He had to wait, hoping he could sneak in later, assuming that the South Vietnamese military would stop the NVA and push them back across the DMZ. That never happened, and in April 1975, the US Embassy evacuated as your Northern brethren were on the outskirts of Saigon. Ramsey had no choice but to evacuate as well.”
Hieu nodded again, fully awake now, almost convinced of my theory, but there existed a questioning look. “Why did Quan keep saying southwest of his village, Giang? And,” her police mind kicking in, “was your patient, Reed, more knowledgeable than you assumed?”
“First, Quan—he was only twelve years old then, and he may have become confused about the actual direction he followed. Another idea is that he may be trying to keep the hidden items for himself—he either knows of the gold or thinks that the missing APCs are worth something.”
Hieu seemed to agree. “What about Reed?”
“That’s my fault. I misread the whole session with Reed. He was more depressed than I thought, and I focused on healing him without understanding his past events. And besides he wouldn’t tell the complete truth. He obviously knew where the gold had been hidden. He served with Ramsey, so he must have called Ramsey after he saw him in December. His nightmare of the killings had been triggered by seeing and talking to Ramsey again. This had to overwhelm Reed, and he finally committed suicide. I think the hidden gold became secondary for him at this point.”
“OK, I believe this. But Ramsey cannot take the gold out of Hoi An or Da Nang now. There is too much exposure at the harbors.”
“Exactly.” I pulled out an old Vietnam War map that Hieu had gotten for me. “We talked about this before. See where the old Ho Chi Minh trail starts in former North Vietnam, moves into Laos with arms branching into South Vietnam as well as Cambodia? Near the old DMZ and Khe Sanh and then west of Da Nang, there are multi-trails crossing from Laos. There is a main branch of the Ho Chi Minh trail that crosses the border from Laos toward Da Nang, merging into the minor roads that start at the Laotian border.” We both looked at the map as my finger traced the route from the fork in the minor road east of My Son back to Laos in a westerly trace.
“This confirms the ideas that we proposed earlier with input from Hung—he’s coming overland from Laos!” Hieu said. She stood and retrieved her jeans draped over the desk chair and struggled to pull them on over her sleep shorts.
“Hieu, slow down! Let’s freshen up, have breakfast, and get to Giang as scheduled. Then when the troops are searching, you and I will go to My Son and drive overland on a straight easterly course for twelve kilometers. I think we’ll find it.”
She paused. “But we must hurry before Ramsey arrives!”
“Look, he can’t move in daylight because if he is coming by land, he is bringing heavy vehicles and would be spotted or stopped by police. He has to cross the Laos border away from official border crossings. I also calculated that he will need heavy-duty four-wheel drive vehicles, like the Hummer H1 Alpha, as well as trailers to carry all twenty-five thousand pounds of gold.”
“I do not understand.”
“Each Hummer H1 Alpha has a payload carrying capacity of 3,087 pounds. Four Hummers, therefore, would allow twelve thousand pounds, or half of the gold supposedly hidden. By using four trailers, Ramsey can move the rest of the gold, giving a safety level in case a Hummer breaks down.”
My assumptions made sense, but were they accurate? Had I assumed too much of what Ramsey and Loan would do?
“After retrieving the gold, they drive on the minor roads going west, avoiding Dai Lanh and Giang. They will drive through Cha Vanh and then into Laos, connecting to the old Ho Chi Minh trail, and then go further south to Attapu, located on the national road, a good, solid highway. Ramsey enters the national road there and drives west to Pakxe and the airport. A large transport aircraft takes them out of country,” Hieu said. Then taking a deep breath, she raised her head from looking at the map; her uplifted eyes sought agreement.
I stared at her, amazed at her quick mind, and said, “Yes! We played with that scenario after our interrogation of Hung, which he indicated as the best plan. Also, remember, the CIA assumed Ramsey would arrive in Vietnam about January 27 to coincide with Tet.”
My Son, January 13, 2003
By ten o’clock, Hieu and I arrived at My Son in the Mercedes SUV, backtracking on the road from Giang. The soldiers and police continued to search the other sectors around Giang. On the drive to My Son, Hieu sat in the back, grilling Quan. She sent chills up my back as she interrogated with a staccato of Vietnamese, pinging Quan with a steady beat, penetrat
ing him, wearing him down, hoping to extract the truth. Hieu finally briefed me from the back seat, with Quan sitting in abject terror, compressed in the corner to her left. Quan admitted to seeing a young American soldier with another American, but that was all he knew. His misdirection of having us focus to the southwest of Giang instead of My Son was, he argued, a mistake on his part. Hieu seemed uncertain about his explanation. We agreed to let him rest and to question him again later.
Hieu pulled rank on the My Son sanctuary gate guard and admission agent, allowing us to position our SUV as close as possible to the center of the My Son temple ruins. I pointed the vehicle due east. Hieu now sat up front using her hand-held compass. I set the trip odometer to zero, nodded to Hieu, and started driving. The key would be to maintain a straight line, and I worried that we would have to go around ruins, throwing off our direction and odometer readings. To my surprise, the due east direction headed straight and true between ruins instead of through them, which would be knowledge that Ramsey could have used when he sought a place to bury the gold. I began to feel confident that we had solved the mystery.
Hieu kept staring ahead, tense and excited, her vibes also confident that we were on the right path. She kept pointing out old vehicular trail ruts in the hard ground in front of us, obvious that years ago, even over thirty years ago, someone had steered a dozer this way, cutting a straight swath and allowing other vehicles, such as APCs, to follow. A Rome plow, with its heavy, massive, sharp blade, would have been the ideal choice. Fortunately for us, we were in the upper portion of the Central Highlands, which was more arid than the Delta around Saigon; thus, wild vegetation grew slower, helping us find an old trail possibly made by Ramsey and his conscripted crew.
Five kilometers from the center of My Son, we left the ruins, approaching foliage and trees. Our forward movement stopped, blocked by a huge pile of dirt overgrown with bushes and elephant grass. Hieu stayed with the SUV while I climbed the ten-foot-high mound. On top, I looked due east, facing the jungle. An overgrown road or trail was in front of me in the same direction. The thrill of discovering the path that might lead to the gold, and eventually Ramsey and Loan, fed me energy. Maybe the many gods of Vietnam had rewarded our tenacity. I watched Quan while Hieu confirmed what I had seen standing on the top of the mass of overgrown dirt. When she climbed down, she asked Quan if this was familiar. It certainly matched his original story about coming to the end of vehicle tracks, finding his way blocked by a large pile of dirt and debris. His concurrence seemed genuine, as did his sigh of relief.
After reconnoitering and finding the jungle on either side of the ten-foot high, twenty-foot wide dirt mound too impenetrable for the vehicle, I decided to drive the SUV up and over the dirt obstacle. I hoped to thrust the front end high enough in the air to cause the SUV’s center of gravity to shift, plunging it over the mound without its undercarriage hanging up. Hieu agreed. The three of us buckled up as I backed up about one hundred feet, stopped, and then thrust into drive. I stomped on the gas pedal. The automatic transmission shifted smoothly as the SUV accelerated on the rutted trail, tires digging into the ground, gaining speed. Hieu showed little concern as trees, brush, and bushes flashed by, front tires hitting the slope, gaining traction, pulling the vehicle forward, rear tires pushing the front end up, pointing it to the sky, rising higher. I saw only blue horizon, front tires now spinning with high RPM torque, singing, clawing the air. The front end finally tipped horizontally, slowly dipping back to Earth. Suddenly gaining momentum, the SUV crashed nose first, front bumper skimming the ground, shock absorbers oscillating, stabilizing the front end. The front tires tore into earth, propelling us forward, as we drove away from the mound.
As soon as we cleared the little hill, we stopped to check the Mercedes; there seemed to be no apparent damage. Continuing, we maintained a straight course due east, crunching through bushes and small bamboo tree clusters. We ignored the constant scraping on the sides of the vehicle. Seven kilometers from My Son, we drove on, heavily concealed by the jungle canopy, its foliage surrounding us while we pushed forward on the old track ruts, overgrown with elephant grass, bushes, and occasional small saplings that easily bent under the Mercedes.
The going slowed, but by 1300 hours we had reached twelve kilometers, per the odometer. We stopped the vehicle and stared at a rocky hill structure that spread several hundred feet to our left and right; it rose over fifty feet at the highest point, overgrown with banyan trees! Hieu pulled Quan out and grabbed our AK-47s from the rear. She gave me mine as I waited in front of the scraped and dirty SUV, peering at the huge hill.
“Hieu, let’s see if our theory is correct. If we go to the left, we should see a minor dirt road in the distance running east and west, intersecting another dirt road going south behind this hill.”
We humped through the dense brush and trees, skirting the base of the hill, looking for openings to caves or underground bunkers. Thirty minutes later, wet with perspiration from breaking a trail, I finally came around the left end of the hill and saw the minor road in the distance, over one hundred yards away, with no traffic. The other road forked off to the right, heading south toward us but eventually bending behind our large hill. We continued walking around the prominence, which revealed that it stood bigger than initially thought. Five hundred feet long and six hundred feet wide, it dwarfed us as we looked toward its peak for signs of a cave or diggings. The tall banyan trees added more height and density to the hill, reaching to the sky and offering us some shade from the sweltering sun. By 1600 hours, we had explored the entire perimeter of the hill and stood in front of our SUV, staring at the probable spot where a buried cave might exist.
An exhausted Quan acted confused. During our forced march around the hill, I eyed him regularly, feeling that he knew more about our discovery than he had revealed. Hieu must have felt the same and kept checking on Quan as he stood silently drinking from his bottle of water.
Even though we had snacked on power bars before we trooped around the base of the large hill, our energy levels had sunk lower; we drank more water to begin rehydrating as we stood in the forest canopy’s shade. Personally, I had delayed too long on drinking water and started to see little stars flashing in my eyes.
“Hieu, I think we can drive around the hill to the left and cut across the fields to the dirt road. I’d rather do that than go back along the old trail when we leave. The way we came is too slow.”
She agreed, standing there in her sweat-stained blue police tunic drinking water. I admired her endurance, never stopping until I stopped. Still, the heat and the physical exertion had taken a toll on her today; she looked haggard.
I walked over and gave her one of my malaria pills, a routine to which she acquiesced when we arrived in Da Nang. Living in Hanoi, the chance of catching the disease was slim, but now that we were in the brush and jungle, I worried about her since she had no pills; it was a precaution she never even considered, being native to the country. The countryside produced infinite mosquito-breeding areas, a fact that had not changed since my days here during the war. I had taken the daily malaria pill religiously for my entire tour and still had minor chills and fevers during the first year of my return to the States, although the symptoms also stemmed from the parasites and amoebas that had infiltrated my blood. This had such serious implications that the military instructed returnees to avoid donating blood for three years.
I knew Hieu would be as vulnerable to jungle diseases as any nonnative. During the war, the NVA and VC suffered from malaria and other diseases, just as Americans did. Plodding through the forests and jungles of Vietnam spelled danger.
As she swallowed her pill, I hoped that I had not started her too late. The prescription drug required starting the daily doses two days prior to arrival in the infested area, a luxury we had not had. I counted on her slight native immunity to help initially.
“If Ramsey and Loan come from Laos along the dirt road that w
e observed to the left of this hill at night, he can hide his vehicles in this same spot.” I pointed to our parked Mercedes and the trail behind it, which we had driven earlier.
“Yes—if this is the place.” Hieu stared at me. Her sweaty, dirt-covered face peered at me from under the New York Yankees cap.
I turned around and looked at the hill rising in front of us. “Ramsey used a Rome plow to cut through this jungle area, probably followed by the two armored personnel carriers loaded with gold. Is this then the hiding place, and if so, how do we get into it?”
I walked to where the trail stopped by the mound; huge piles of dirt and debris were piled against it, covered with different vegetation and blending with the hill. There were symmetrical rock edges protruding around the placed dirt, forming what looked to be the entrance to a cave.
“This could be the entry point to a cave. I suggest we get a crew here tomorrow and start digging at this spot,” I said.
Hieu now stood by me, looking with full attention to where I pointed. I heard a rustle behind me and turned. We had forgotten about Quan. I thought I saw movement on the trail behind the SUV and I began to chase him, signaling for Hieu to get in the vehicle and follow. She scurried to the SUV as I sprinted, my exhausted body groaning as I ran down the trail. Why the hell did he run?
Even though tired, I surprised myself with my fast pace and sighted Quan some fifty feet ahead of me, struggling to outdistance me. I had sprinted over a hundred feet at a steady pace but now felt my energy waning as I gained on him. Although in good physical shape, I strained for oxygen in the thick humid air that pressed against me. The tightness of my shoulder holster with the pistol and my AK-47 and my backpack, all unnecessary weight for my dash, constricted my chest and breathing. Quan continued to run, but he too suffered from this heat and the oppressive air. We had gone another twenty feet and I had started to grab at him when he stumbled on a long vine crossing the trail and fell, sprawling to the ground, sliding on his face and hands for several feet. I slid to a stop and yanked Quan up with my left hand, holding him by his dirty, sweat-stained shirt collar. He exploded into tears, chanting in Vietnamese, covering his face with his hands.
