by Larry Bond
“That is my condition,” said Greene. “When it’s done, I will personally give the order to fire.”
11
Northwestern Vietnam
The logging trail followed a seemingly endless series of switchbacks before arriving at a wide, hard-packed dirt road. The road wound through an area of fields, now temporarily fallow, which had been cleared from the jungle only recently. Within a mile, the view opened up, revealing an emerald green valley stretching for miles in the distance. It was a beautiful sight, so pretty Mara felt as if she were walking into a postcard.
The road was made of soft dirt. Mara glanced down and realized little bits of bright yellow clay were clinging to her boots as she walked. Even M left light impressions in the road.
“We need to get off the road,” she told the others, erasing the tracks as best she could before joining them on the shoulder.
After they’d walked for ten minutes, the village came into view. The tin-roofed buildings glinted in the distance, six of them clustered close to the road at the center of the fields. These were large pole barns, open at the bottoms, used by the community to hold crops, machinery, and tools. The houses sat off to the side, on a small rise beyond a circular orchard of orange trees.
Lucas had told her it was unoccupied, but Mara wasn’t about to trust his surveillance. She angled for a wide streambed that ran in a semicircle around the village. Used to irrigate the fields, during the rainy season it was a wide and deep body of water, more a river than a stream. Now, though, the water flowed lazily across the rocks, no deeper than a few inches. Beds of silt were covered with green weeds.
They walked up one of the irrigation ditches toward the field closest to the houses, then crossed into a grove of small orange trees.
Except for a headache, Mara had recovered from the blast. She tried not to think about Jimmy Choi and his people, whom she’d last seen firing at the Chinese from across the road. There was nothing she could do for them now.
The house near the orange grove was small, with a very high-pitched roof. Mara stopped twenty yards away. “Give me your rifle,” she told Josh.
“Why?”
“I want to check out the house.”
“I’ll do it.”
“You’re a scientist. Give me the gun.”
“I can handle a gun.”
“Stop being so damn defensive,” she told him. “Crap, you’d think I was castrating you.”
Josh scowled, then held the rifle out. There were five bullets in the magazine.
“You have an extra mag?” she asked.
He shook his head. His lips were pursed—he was mad, but she didn’t have time to play psychologist.
Mara made sure the weapon was selected for single fire, then slipped through the trees and trotted to the back of the house. There was a curtain at the window: she couldn’t see inside.
She smashed the window with the rifle butt, ducking down quickly in case someone was hiding inside and fired at her. When nothing happened, she cleared the glass, then cautiously poked the rifle barrel past the curtain and peeked in.
The room was empty. Mara hoisted herself inside, gingerly avoiding the shards of glass still in the window.
The house had been abandoned sometime during the night, quickly, but not in a panic. The beds were undone, but otherwise the place was neat. Its owners had taken many of their possessions with them, but there was some rice in a storage closet in the kitchen. There was no running water in the hut; the only jugs were empty, but Josh found a pump near the orange grove and filled it up.
“I say we boil this if possible,” suggested Josh. “The septics smell.”
The oven was an old gas stove, modified to use bottled gas. The fire flared when Mara lit the stove. M leapt from the floor and ran out of the hut screaming.
Mara tried adjusting the fire while Josh went after the girl. The knob on the stove was broken; the flame had to be adjusted by the handle on the tank, which itself was very loose and slipped after a few seconds if it wasn’t held.
Mara managed to get the water and rice simmering without burning down the house. Josh came back, carrying M in his arms.
“She ran all the way back to the ditch. I wasn’t sure I was going to find her,” he said, setting her down. “I’m going to go check the other huts. I’ll be back.”
“Good idea.”
He reached over to take the rifle. Mara grabbed it.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Leave me the gun.”
“Why? You afraid?”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t let go.
Fear wasn’t the reason she wanted the gun. She was the professional, the one trained to use it.
But maybe there was some fear there as well.
He looked like he was going to say something, but didn’t, turning to leave instead.
“Thank you for saving me,” she told him.
“Yeah. We’re even.”
Not quite, thought Mara, though the ledger wasn’t nearly as unbalanced as before.
A tirade poured through Josh’s head as he stalked to the nearest hut. He hadn’t expected the CIA officer who’d come for him to be a nice guy, exactly, but neither had he thought he’d be a complete jerkoff.
Guy.
Maybe that was part of the problem. Mara had a chip on her shoulder because she was a woman.
And she was a spook. What kind of person became a CIA agent? Doing renditions and all that crap? Water torture. She probably pulled that shit herself.
Maybe rescuing him was her punishment.
The way he saw it, she had screwed up. The rescue had been botched big-time.
That wasn’t exactly fair; the Chinese had been closing in, and really, it was her people who’d taken the brunt of it. They were probably dead. If not for them, Josh would probably by lying in the back of one of the Chinese trucks right now, zipped up in a body bag.
He stopped at the threshold of the hut, reminding himself that he wasn’t on a scientific expedition. People with guns, and a lot of them, were looking for him. He couldn’t afford to act like a prima donna; the world really didn’t care if a woman got his nose all bent out of joint because she was a jerk. The world cared about what he had seen, and the evidence of it on his little camera.
That was like science, wasn’t it? Science was the pursuit of truth, and truth didn’t care whether you had a cold or whether you were hunting a grant or hoping for some killing when your patent got approved. Truth was the bottom line, and if you let your ego get in the way, then it was lost.
Damn, he was hungry. That was what was in his way now.
The door had no lock. What kind of place was this where you didn’t need a lock?
A poor place.
Josh slipped inside quietly, as if he was afraid of waking someone in the front room. It was empty. Just like the other house, the people who had been here appeared to have taken most of what they had before going; certainly anything that was valuable was gone.
So was the food, if there had been any. There was no rice, and not even a dried leaf in the bins near the basin in what he guessed was the kitchen. The stove was even more primitive than the one in the other house, just a metal box attached to a stovepipe.
The barns would be where the food was.
And maybe a farm truck?
He trotted up the road, convinced that he was going to find something. But the barns had no trucks, and no food. One was used as a furniture workshop; several small chairs and bookcases were in various stages of production. Two of the other buildings were used to store wood. The last had probably held vehicles, but they were gone; the bins for food or maybe seeds were empty. There was a chicken coop at the back, with nothing but feathers and one long-broken egg in the nests. The villagers must have taken the birds with them when they’d fled.
Josh eyed the eggshell hungrily before moving on.
A power line ran from the road up to a shed between the barns; lines went from the
re to the barns, but not the houses. There was also a power generator in the shed, a backup that stank of kerosene. There was an oil lamp next to it, probably meant as an emergency light for someone troubleshooting in the dark. Josh took the lamp with him and went to the north side of the hamlet, where there were three more huts, along with a good-sized toolshed.
He went to the shed first. Besides the plows and a mower, there were a few rusted hand tools. Josh found a machete with a nicked but sharp blade. He took it, then went to see if there was anything of value in the houses. But all three were like the others, stripped of just about anything useful.
He sat down on a bench in the last house, trying to think of where else he might look. It made sense that they would take the vehicles, but all the food, too?
Maybe they hadn’t had all that much.
He kicked at a bed mat, then rolled it back with his foot. The floor of the hut, like the others, was wood.
So was the floor in the toolshed.
Why wasn’t it dirt? The floors in the barn were all dirt.
Josh got up from the bed and left the house. He started back toward the hut where he’d left Mara and M, then altered his course to swing by the toolshed.
The walls looked all of a piece, though, everything together, fifty or more years old, and worn. There was a rug on the floor, a woven bamboo rug, almost brand-new, beneath one of the plows.
Why use a new rug to protect a plow?
Josh pushed the mower and another plow out of the way. The plow holding the rug in place was heavy, close to a hundred pounds, he guessed. That might account for the rug—they needed something to make it easy to push across the floor.
But as Josh pulled it back, the plow blade hung up on the lip of something.
A trapdoor.
Josh pushed the plows and the mower out of the way, then carefully pulled back the rest of the rug to reveal a cutout. It was difficult to get a grip—there were holes where he thought a handle had been, but no handle. He started to use the machete to help pry it open, then realized he was likely to break the blade. A rusted hoe worked much better. He pried up the door and found a set of steps.
The door covered a large cellar storage area stuffed with crates. It was too dark to see much, even with the lamp, but there were dozens and dozens of boxes stacked down there, along with some clothes and tools.
He decided to go back and tell Mara what he had found. The idea of food pushed him to run—he was hungry beyond belief.
He’d taken a few steps across the compound when he heard the sound in the distance:
Helicopters.
Mara was tending to the rice when Josh came running into the hut.
“Choppers!” he yelled. “The Chinese are coming!”
“We have to hide in the jungle,” she said, turning off the stove.
She grabbed the rice pot, using her shirttail as a pot holder. Then she realized that if any soldiers came inside, they’d see the stove was hot and know someone was hiding nearby. She grabbed the water jug, dousing the burner area. The water sizzled off. By the time they got here it would be cold.
“We gotta get out,” Josh told her, grabbing M and leading her outside. “They’re coming. Come on.”
The helicopters were still some distance off, not yet visible in the sky. Mara pulled the door closed behind her, then started after him.
They’d never make it to the jungle. The irrigation ditches were closer, but what then? There were several helicopters; she could tell from the sound. They’d leave one circling the area, looking.
“We have to find a place to hide,” Mara said. “The helicopters are too close.”
Josh’s face went blank, as if he were having trouble processing the information. For a second, Mara thought he had frozen on her.
“This way then,” he said, darting toward the barns. “I know the perfect place.”
12
Northwestern Vietnam
Jing Yo pressed his hands together, folding the tips of his fingers against each other and pulling outward. His biceps tightened; the muscles in his shoulders and neck went taut.
Balance is all. A man who is balanced stands at the center of the ever-changing swirl. A man balanced is unchanged by chaos. He does not know catastrophe. He is the eye of the storm.
“We’re landing, Lieutenant,” said Wu, standing over him as the helicopter touched down. “We are at the village.”
Jing Yo got up from the bench. They had already searched an abandoned hamlet farther north, the Hmong settlement Colonel Sun had directed him to. As soon as he saw that it was empty, he had reboarded the helicopter and directed the bulk of his force here—back south of the creek, contrary to the colonel’s orders. It was a gamble, but he thought it justified by the circumstances.
Or at least by his gut sense.
The settlement was a small farming commune, with cottages on either side of a central barn area. Jing Yo sent half of the regular army troops to watch the perimeter, then split the remainder in half, sending one group to search the huts at the north and tasking one group on the huts at the south. He and his commandos went to the barns.
“You seem tired,” said Sergeant Wu as they walked toward the first building.
“Just thinking.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
Jing Yo smiled, thinking it was a joke. Wu was serious.
“If you worry too much about losing men, you can’t do your job,” he said.
Jing Yo nodded.
“They were good, those people,” said Wu.
“Very.”
“Mercenaries. Working for the Americans, I would bet. Or Americans themselves. They’re a mongrel race. You can never tell where they come from.”
The man Jing Yo had wounded was probably back at the medical unit at the forward helicopter base by now. Jing Yo would talk to him eventually. Hopefully after they had apprehended the scientist.
The barn was empty. The commandos moved inside quickly, silently, securing it, then moving on.
“The peasants here make furniture,” said Wu dismissively, surveying the interior. “Cheap furniture for Americans, I bet.”
Jing Yo walked around the interior perimeter, rechecking the areas his men had already looked at. There were no hiding places; it was a plain, simple building without interior walls or a loft.
The next building was a twin of the first, except that it contained piles of rough wood rather than furniture.
If the scientist wasn’t here, then most likely the colonel was right, Jing Yo realized as he surveyed the second barn. He was likely to be cowering in the jungle somewhere, hiding like a scared rabbit.
Overestimating an enemy could be nearly as bad as underestimating him. Because he was an American, Jing Yo was preconditioned to see him as almost a superman, when in reality he was no different from anyone else.
Jing Yo returned to the door. Stepping outside, he caught the scent of burning wood on the wind. He thought for a moment that the village wasn’t abandoned after all, that someone was making dinner. Then he turned and saw that one of the cottages had been set on fire.
They’ve found someone and are smoking him out, he thought.
“This way, quickly,” he called to the others, who were just about to go into one of the smaller buildings nearby.
As they ran across the compound, Jing Yo signaled to them to spread out. Then he noticed that the soldiers nearby weren’t watching the building, but searching the others.
A soldier lit a bundle of dried weeds and held it to the roof of the nearby cottage.
“What are you doing?” Jing Yo shouted. He ran over and grabbed the man’s arm as he tried to light another part of the roof.
“Orders, Lieutenant.”
“What orders?”
“The captain’s.”
“No more fires,” said Jing Yo.
The unit captain was surprised when Jing Yo confronted him. “My invasion orders said I was to fire any building that wasn’t useful,”
he said. “So that’s what we’re doing. What’s the problem?”
“Where did those orders come from?”
“Division.”
“I don’t want the house burned,” said Jing Yo. “Don’t burn any more.”
“The order came from division,” said the captain. “That means the general, and your colonel, who’s his chief of staff. If you want to ask them to rescind it, that’s okay with me. But the general has a reputation, and I don’t want to cross him. I’m sure you’re on better terms, being a commando as well.”
Jing Yo knew he could get the order rescinded, but it would take talking to Sun. If he did that, inevitably he would have to say where he was. The colonel would not like the fact that he had disobeyed his orders on where to search.
What difference did it make if the buildings were burned? The people had already run away.
“My people will finish searching the houses,” said Jing Yo. “You take the barns. You can burn them after you’ve searched—but only when you’re certain there’s no one inside.”
“I’m not a barbarian,” said the captain, rounding up his men.
“We’re next!” hissed Josh, running over from the door where he’d been watching the troops search the barn buildings. He dodged the two plows Mara had placed near the opening and ducked onto the steps next to her, sliding the rug over the top of the trapdoor.
“Get down,” she told him. “One, two, three.”
On three, Mara ducked down next to him, closing the door over the space. At the same time, she pulled hard on the rope she had in her hand, dragging the mower over the trapdoor. She had tied a very loose knot, trusting that it would come free as she yanked. The idea was that the mower would roll over the space, making it easy to overlook, just as they had originally.
Except the rope didn’t untie. As Mara flattened herself on the stairs, it got hung up beneath the panel, keeping the door open a crack and practically drawing an arrow toward where they were.
“Jesus.”
Mara put her shoulder against the top of the door and pulled. The mower had rolled over the door, and was just heavy enough to make it impossible to move the rope.
