It was late afternoon when Catesby arrived at Que Son. It was the largest village since An Hoa. He knew that it was safe when he spotted a pair of RF soldiers milling about in the marketplace – who looked even less combat-ready than the previous ones. Catesby dismounted and wheeled the Victor to the river landing, which was a wide expanse of firmly packed sand. He had reached the rendezvous and could see a man on the opposite bank shouting and gesturing. The man wasn’t in black pyjamas, but was wearing blue overalls and beret like a French worker.
The coal-mine barge was a French navy landing craft that had been left behind in 1954. Indeed, the entire village and mine looked as if they too had been transported from France. Catesby had a weird feeling that he had stepped into a time–space hole and been mysteriously transported to Picardie or the Pas-de-Calais. The only things that weren’t like northern France were the Vietnamese workers and the Buddhist temple. Everything else, from the football pitch to the red-tiled workers’ cottages to the concrete electricity poles to the heavy 1930 Renault trucks to the Café de la Paix with its ‘baby-foot’ table, belonged to a different era and a different place.
»»»»
Catesby regretted that he hadn’t brought a change of clothes to dress for dinner. Although le directeur du mine wasn’t wearing evening dress, he did look elegant. Le directeur spoke absolutely fluent French without a trace of Vietnamese accent. He was an ageless man who could have been fifty-five or seventy-five – and he certainly wasn’t self-effacing about his status and achievements. The villa was hung with diplomas and photos of le directeur with famous men. Among those Catesby recognised were André Malraux, the writer, Saint-Exupéry, the aviation pioneer, and Robert Schuman, who’d pretty much founded the Common Market. There were also numerous photos of his daughter in and around their home in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré.
The food was elegant and simple, the wine was complex, but had a supple finesse. It was a dinner for three, but the conversation was entirely between le directeur and Catesby. Huynh sat silent for most of the meal and only spoke when asked questions – a well-behaved young man. Catesby behaved himself too and didn’t make any references – coded or otherwise – to Huynh’s tryst with Miranda on the banks of the Seine.
‘I’m looking forward to examining your splendid motorcycle in the morning. I don’t suppose,’ asked le directeur, ‘that you could take me for a spin?’
Catesby looked at Huynh, who frowned. ‘I would love to,’ said Catesby, ‘but we might have other…’
‘Ah, yes. I remember now that you have other business that needs your attention.’
‘But,’ Catesby lied, ‘when that is finished I promise to give you a ride on the Victor.’
‘Good. I love machines, particularly fast machines. I once piloted my own aeroplane.’
Catesby now realised that the slight figure muffled up in flying gear in the photo with Saint-Exupéry was le directeur.
‘You know,’ said le directeur gesturing to the Saint-Exupéry photo, ‘he loved good wine.’
‘Then I am sure he would have loved this one. It’s superb.’ Catesby held the Burgundy up to a candle flame. ‘Most English think that Bordeaux is the best French wine, but they are wrong.’
Huynh stirred uneasily and made a rare intervention. ‘But I am sure the wines of Monsieur le directeur’s château in Bordeaux would prove that most English are correct.’
Catesby smiled bleakly and realised once again why he wasn’t a Foreign Office diplomat. But le directeur was a natural diplomat and rode to his rescue. ‘No, Huynh, I agree with monsieur. My château is just a hobby. The great estates are in Burgundy, but I like the sea air.’
In any case, the wine made Catesby’s brain spin and accentuated the surreal irony of the situation. He was making stilted conversation at a dinner party with a man who was almost a parody of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie. The other dinner guest was another Parisian of Vietnamese descent, who had recently dressed up as a Greek shepherd to participate in an orgy with an upper-class Englishwoman in a tableau vivant of a Poussin painting. The young Vietnamese had, Catesby assumed, decided to follow the woman to Southeast Asia to fight alongside her as a fellow comrade in a Communist army. And yet surrounding them in le directeur’s dining room were the icons of capitalist wealth refined by a patina of culture and good taste: fine wines, Sèvres porcelain, Louis XV candlesticks and an early Miró painting.
The mood was broken by the rumble of artillery, which was not very distant. The candles flickered and the shadows swayed. Le directeur ignored it and rang a porcelain bell. An elderly Vietnamese woman in a formal high-collared áo dài appeared. For the first time, le directeur spoke Vietnamese. Until then, Catesby hadn’t been certain that he even knew the language. The woman disappeared and a moment later there was a whiff of alcohol mingled with the scent of something rich and sweet burning. The woman returned bearing some crème brûlée.
‘Would you like brandy and coffee with…’ Le directeur’s words were lost in a deep thunder roar of artillery impacting. The windows were open and the sky above the palm trees flashed white.
‘Yes, please.’ Catesby shouted to make himself heard above the bombardment. He reckoned it was big stuff, maybe eight-inch, and was probably landing six or seven hundred yards away. Catesby assumed the shells were targeted at the ridge line, which rose up sharply behind the coal mine. He remembered from Bucksport the Sailor’s map briefing that a spur of the Ho Chi Minh … no, the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route, ran along that ridge line. In any case, he wasn’t going to say anything about the artillery. Mentioning the shelling, or anything about the war, was obviously a breach of etiquette at le directeur’s dinner table.
Le directeur served the brandy and the coffee himself. He then attacked his crème brûlée with such ravenous delight that it seemed it was the dish he had been waiting for all evening. Le directeur’s eyes were so full of bliss that Catesby thought about offering him his own crème brûlée as well.
Le directeur shook his head, as if he had read Catesby’s thought. ‘You must forgive me. As I get older, and I can’t see how much older one can be, I love sweet things more and more, but I must control myself.’
There was now a racket of small arms fire from across the river. Catesby remembered an RF outpost on the edge of Que Son village near where they crossed the river. He guessed that the post was now being attacked. The rattle of small arms was joined by heavy machine guns and the thump of RPG rockets. Catesby was seated at right angles to a window facing across the river. Out of the corner of his eye he could see red and green tracer flying in opposite directions and occasionally ricocheting off rocks towards le directeur’s villa. It was difficult to maintain the etiquette and not watch the battle. Catesby sipped the VSOP brandy and finished his crème brûlée.
Meanwhile, le directeur stifled a yawn and rubbed his eyes. He looked at Catesby: ‘Have you read Proust?’
Catesby quoted the opening of Remembrance of Things Past. The lines where the narrator recalls that when he was young, he ‘used to go to bed at an early hour’.
Le directeur looked slightly abashed, as if realising Catesby was more than a rosbif prole on a fast motorbike. ‘How apt,’ said le directeur. ‘But how ironic. Now that I am old I need to go to bed early – but when I was young I wanted to stay up forever. The world was a new fresh place to discover. In any case, you must excuse me. I will leave you and Huynh with the brandy and coffee.’
Catesby watched le directeur pad into the shadows. He was sure that the real reason for the old man’s early night was to leave him alone with Huynh so they could plan their next move. Le directeur was obviously a man who never said anything directly – the ultimate diplomat. Catesby glanced at Huynh, whose face was a blank, then poured more coffee. It was going to be a long night.
It was obvious that what Nhung and Bucksport the Sailor had said about the coal mine was true. The mine and its village were neutral squares, Vietnam’s Switzerland. They were immune fr
om the war that swirled around them because both sides wanted the mine left intact as an economic resource when the war finally ended. The coal mine had its own uniformed and armed gendarmerie, but they never took sides.
The battle continued to rage on the other side of the river. At last, Catesby was free to look out at it. After a few more minutes, the green tracer began to dominate. Then the red tracer disappeared altogether. There were a few more rocket thumps and a gradual diminuendo of rifle fire. Then an eerie silence, but not a real silence at all for the night was now pierced by the moans and cries of the wounded and dying. And the sound of a boat being paddled across the river. Catesby poured himself a brandy.
‘I believe,’ said Huynh, ‘that you have met…’ He said the name of the female French journalist who had given Catesby a lift to Cu Chi.
‘Yes, she spoke very fondly of you. You were, I believe, a student at the Sorbonne.’
The sound of moaning was now much louder. There were footsteps too and people talking in hushed voices.
‘Yes, I was studying architecture.’
‘But you decided that being here was more important.’
‘It was a difficult choice. I had to accept that Vietnam was my country and not France.’
Catesby decided to be direct. ‘Did Miranda help you make that decision?’
Huynh shifted uneasily. ‘No … well, perhaps in part. Maybe Miranda made me think about things. But maybe I would have come here in any case.’
Catesby suspected that Huynh was besotted with Miranda. That was good news for Catesby, who needed Huynh’s help to find Miranda, but maybe bad news for Huynh. ‘Have you seen Miranda since you came here?’
‘Yes, I have.’
The elderly woman came back into the room to clear the crème brûlée ramekins. She had changed out of her traditional áo dài and was wearing a starchy nurse’s uniform that must have dated from World War One. Catesby remembered that the coal mine had its own infirmary. As the old woman left the dining room, Huynh stood up and said, ‘Excuse me,’ and followed her.
Catesby was left alone for nearly half an hour. He passed the time by drinking brandy to calm his nerves and looking at the bookshelves. There were two signed first editions by Malraux, L’espoir and La Condition Humaine, and one by Saint-Exupéry, Vol de Nuit. All the titles were apt in the situation.
When Huynh came back he was nervous and agitated. His arms were laden with clothes. ‘We need to leave tonight, very soon.’ He put the clothes down on a chair and picked out a pair of black pyjamas. ‘Here, you’ll need to put these on. I hope they fit.’
‘Who won the battle?’
‘We did,’ said Huynh, ‘but at a cost.’
»»»»
There were two people in the narrow boat nearest the landing, but only one of them was alive. There was another boat of the same size waiting further up in the shadow of an overhanging bank. There were three people in this boat, but only one of them was able. The third was heavily sedated. Not so much to ease the pain, but to keep him quiet.
Huynh led Catesby to the boat with the dead body. The corpse was lying flat in the bottom of the boat as if he had had too much rice wine at a Tet celebration and fallen asleep. There was no place to sit. The boat was built to carry cargo so Huynh and Cateby had to squat at either end of the body. Catesby was struck by the smooth, graceful beauty of the boat. The planks had been laid lengthwise and tapered upward to curved double ends. He rubbed his hand along the smooth flawless wood and knew that the fishermen of Suffolk would have been impressed by the craftsmanship.
It was a dark moonless night and the boat with the wounded Viet Cong set off first. The oars were mounted on posts in the stern of the boat and the oarsman rowed standing up and facing forwards. There was a low mist over the river so that only the upper body of the person rowing was visible. The rowing motion had an unearthly grace and the oarsman looked like a ghost dancing on a watery cloud.
The boat with Huynh, Catesby and the dead VC followed close behind. Both boats clung close to the shadows of the bank. For the first half a mile the river ran under sheer granite cliffs and their cover was perfect. The steep banks then gave way to marshes, sandbanks and low river walls with paddy fields beyond. They were in the last basin of the Song Thu Bon before the river twisted into the mountain gorges. The mist drifted away and the boats became exposed and vulnerable. There was no moon, but the stars had begun to glow fiercely.
Catesby remembered that Bucksport had mentioned a Special Forces outpost on a mountain that dominated the river basin. He wondered if they had night-vision devices. Just as that thought flickered through his mind, the champagne cork pop of a mortar shell leaving the tube echoed over the river valley. The Viet Cong boatmen were well drilled. In the few seconds before the illumination round reached the top of its parabolic flight and ignited, camouflage netting woven with river flotsam was stretched over both boats. Even the most beady-eyed observer would only see detritus from the monsoon floods.
There were more illumination flares during the next few minutes and the river valley was bathed in a creepy unnatural phosphorescence that was as bright as day. Catesby began to hate the illumination rounds. He imagined their phosphorescence was refined from the decaying souls of the war dead. He then realised that his hand was resting on the face of the dead Viet Cong. He raised it, sticky with blood.
The illumination rounds ceased when a thick mist rolled in over the river valley. The camouflage netting was rolled back and stowed and the boats set off again. Catesby washed his hand in the river. The problem now was not concealment, but navigation. Visibility was down to less than five yards, but the boatmen appeared to recognise every foot of the riverbank. The rowers pushed with renewed vigour. There were soon disembodied voices from a riverbank that was lost in the mist. They had made it.
The village was called Phu Gia. It was base to a company of Viet Cong guerrillas, but it was also a staging post for supplying the 2nd NVA division in the mountains to the west. North Vietnamese purchasing agents went into the Que Son valley to buy rice at twice the going market price in South Vietnam. It was dangerous for the farmers to do this for they risked retribution at the hands of a CIA Phoenix team, but high profits and high risks go hand in hand. Catesby remembered the old Marxist saying: ‘The capitalist will sell you the rope that you use to hang him.’
Catesby helped carry the dead man to a hut in the village where he was laid on a hard earth floor. His name was Quoc and he was a native of the village. A woman threw herself on Quoc and started keening in a wail that pierced Catesby to the quick. He was suddenly back in Limousin in 1944, and he had never wanted to go there again. A minute later a young man, Quoc’s brother, arrived and started crying. Catesby left them to their grief.
Outside the hut a debate was raging about what to do with the wounded man. Huynh tugged at Catesby’s sleeve and said, ‘We have to be going.’
Catesby gestured towards the wounded soldier. ‘But what about him?’
‘He’s too ill. They are going to take him to a field hospital in Tien Phuoc, not far from here, where he will recuperate – or die.’ On cue, a cart pulled by a water buffalo arrived. ‘Come on,’ said Huynh, ‘we must hurry or it will be too late.’
The next part of the journey was by river again, but only a short distance to the gorge where mountains blanked the now clear sky on either side. The boatman took them to a landing where there were other boats and a lot of activity. It was the crossing point on the river where the rice from Que Son made its final journey to the 2nd Division base areas in the mountains along the Laotian border. The portering was mostly done by men carrying bulging rice nets on their shoulders, but there were also heavily laden bicycles. Here, at least, the logistics were labour intensive. And, as far as was possible in the starlight, Catesby could see why. The land leading to the river crossing had been completely ‘craterised’. There was literally nowhere that wasn’t part of a bomb crater. The craters overlapped with each other like
grotesque Olympic rings. Catesby watched a dark line of porters stumbling across the moonscape.
‘At one time,’ said Huynh, ‘there was a village here. A very pretty village. The B-52s came one night and there were no survivors.’
Come with me, my dearest, to visit green Truong Son. We will travel the road of history as it changes day by day. Sing with me, my love, the song of Truong Son, the road of the future…
Catesby didn’t know what the words meant until Huynh translated them. They had first appeared on a poster pinned to a tree alongside the trail.
‘Is it a poem or a song?’
‘It is both,’ said Huynh.
Catesby was surprised by the number of posters along the trail, but most of them were pointing the other way to greet the soldiers coming south. His favourite showed women fighters firing AK-47s at American soldiers. The caption read: ‘The Southern Female Guerrillas are Truly Gutsy.’ Catesby suggested that ‘fearless’ or ‘courageous’ might be a better translation than ‘gutsy’, but Huynh disagreed because it was more ‘visceral’. They had begun to speak English at Huynh’s insistence. Catesby wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was because Huynh thought the NVA officers would find it more difficult to eavesdrop on English than French. Or, more likely, Huynh wanted to practise his English so that he could talk more easily to Miranda.
The trails improved as they got closer to the border with Laos and they started to meet powered vehicles. The first was a Chinese-built motor-tricycle that was grossly overloaded with .122 rockets and tins of Russian mackerel. And a day later there was a three-wheel Chinese truck carrying a howitzer. If Catesby ever got back to London he knew he would be expected to give an intelligence report on what he had seen. But he would refuse to do so unless he had a cast-iron guarantee that it would not be shared with the Americans. It was going to be a delicate situation. But the gist of any report would be that the bombing wasn’t working. The North Vietnamese logistics network was too large, too hidden and too dispersed.
The Whitehall Mandarin Page 31
