The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  I didn’t share with him what I’d learned about Colonel Tan Sang’s possible involvement in the murder of Mr. Wonderful. I figured that would only get him needlessly agitated.

  Down the hall, Stoneburner was already plenty agitated by the time the soldiers standing guard outside his room let me in to see him. He paced the floor like a man condemned to death row, wiping the constant sweat from his forehead and ranting about our current president.

  “You know what the problem with America is today?” he asked.

  I might have offered any number of theories if only to lighten the mood, from too many bacon cheeseburgers to the detriments of major league baseball’s designated hitter rule, but I doubted that making light of his predicament would’ve done him much good.

  “What’s that, Captain?”

  “Nobody’s afraid of us anymore,” he said, shaking a finger at me. “I guarantee you, had Ronald Reagan been in the White House, he’d have deployed a carrier battle group by now. He would’ve issued ultimatums that these people would’ve by-God known he was serious about, and Cohen and I would be home right now. Instead, I’m getting hauled off to prison and none of you incompetent dipshits seem to be able to do a goddamned thing about it!”

  The Buddha believed that being angry is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it to somebody else; the person who ultimately gets burned is the angry one. Stoneburner didn’t want to hear that, though. Enraged, he punched the wall, then immediately groaned in pain and clutched his hand. I told him he needed to calm down. He told me rather loudly to perform an anatomically impossible act on myself.

  Alarmed by the commotion, the soldiers out in the hall stormed in, ready for action, shouting all at once in Vietnamese and apparently demanding to know what the noise was all about. I pantomimed how Stoneburner had accidentally tripped on a shoe and fallen into the wall, trying to steady himself. I’ll admit it was a pretty lame excuse.

  “His hand, he needs a doctor,” I told them.

  “I don’t need a goddamned doctor,” Stoneburner said. “What I need is you to get the hell out of here and don’t come back.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Captain. I came here to help, not make things worse.”

  “Just get out.”

  Calling Buzz, to fill him in on Jimmy Luc, he of the severed ear, was next on my list of things to do. Back in my room, I had just stashed my valuables in the plastic bag behind the toilet tank when the door opened wide. In came Mr. Postcards and Horse Face.

  Behind them was Colonel Tan Sang. He was pointing a 9-millimeter pistol at my chest.

  SEVENTEEN

  I’d been hauled off more than once by the police on other continents, so I was already generally familiar with the indignities one could expect while being paraded under escort through a hotel lobby, this one crowded with members of an Australian tour group who looked to be checking in.

  “What the hell, mate?” said a paunchy man with a florid face as Horse Face and Mr. Postcards herded me toward the exit.

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “No talking,” Tan Sang said, his pistol leveled at the small of my back.

  The two desk clerks on duty and their manager, Dan, didn’t seem surprised to see me being led away with my wrists zip-tied behind my back. Nor did Mai Choi, whose bed I’d shared the night before.

  She was standing with her suitcase outside the hotel in stiletto heels and a tight-fitting skirt suit that might have been mauve in color had I known what color mauve was. Tan Sang’s gleaming black Lexus SUV was idling at the curb. She gave him a fleeting glance as he strode past her, toward the car. He pretended not to notice her at all. Mai was impossible not to notice. Their purposeful lack of eye contact convinced me that they were more than passingly acquainted.

  “Heading out?”

  Mai regarded me icily. “I’m waiting for a cab to the airport.”

  “Why not bum a ride with us? I’m sure your comrade, the colonel, would be only too happy to give you a lift.”

  She smirked. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about, love.”

  I wanted to ask Mai what she’d hoped to gain by having seduced me. Before I could, though, Horse Face shoved me into the backseat next to Mr. Postcards. Tan Sang got in on the front passenger side. Horse Face, whose breath reeked of bad fish, threw a coarse, burlap sack over my head, and climbed in on my right. Off we went.

  A man forcibly held against his will can deduce one of two things when a bag is pulled over his noggin, preventing him from seeing. One is that he’s being taken to a location his captors wish to remain secret; the bag is both a tool of intimidation and an implicit assurance that he’ll eventually be released, unable to tell anyone where he’s been. The other reason you bag a man’s head is to keep him subdued and in the dark until you can take him somewhere remote and put a bullet behind his ear. That Tan Sang was going to kill me made no sense. Several people had witnessed my arrest—the desk clerks, the hotel manager, the Australian tourists checking in. He knew that if I went missing, my government would come looking. Call me dumb, but I wasn’t especially worried. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve been.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what am I being arrested for?”

  “Public disturbance and assault,” Tan Sang said, “and espionage.”

  “Covering all the bases, sounds to me.”

  “Silence.”

  Not to speak badly of my captors’ tactics, techniques, or procedures, but there were enough gaps in the weave of the burlap bag they’d put over my head that if I turned a certain way, I could make out some details along our route—sort of like looking through a pinhole. The Lexus wended along a series of side streets before crossing over Red River on the Long Bien Bridge, heading northeast, away from the Old Quarter. We passed a Mercedes dealership, two karaoke bars with neon signs out front, and what appeared to have been a brick tenement building recently torn down. Scavengers picked through the debris like ants on a dirt pile, looking for anything salvageable to sell.

  A series of turns down narrow residential streets took us to a dead end outside a small house with old tires and the hulks of dead motorbikes strewn about its walled front courtyard. I was hustled inside where hands pushed me down hard onto an unpadded, straight-backed chair. The bag over my head was removed, but not the restraints binding my wrists.

  Slumped opposite me, chained to a chair in the middle of the kitchen where we were sitting, was my interpreter, Phu Dung. He was barely conscious. His right eye had been blacked. His nose and lower lip were swollen. His orange mesh muscle shirt was wet with the blood from various scrapes and gashes on his face. Somebody’d worked him over pretty good. I had a fair idea who.

  “Is there something you’d like to tell your colleague?” Tan Sang asked me.

  I wanted to hurt him for doing what he’d done to Phu Dung. I wanted to make him scream, beg for mercy, watch his eyes bulge as I slowly crushed his windpipe in my fingers, but I knew that reality, at that moment, trumped fantasy. To acknowledge a connection might well spell the former MiG pilot’s death warrant, and mine.

  “I’ve never seen this guy in my life.”

  “It is pointless to lie. We know he is working with you. We know he works for the CIA.” Tan Sang nodded to Horse Face who wedged his thumb under Phu Dung’s chin and held his head up so I could take a better look. “Perhaps you recognize him now.”

  Phu Dung’s eyes came into focus if only for a few seconds and he gave me a faint, almost imperceptible nod, as if to tell me he understood what I had to do.

  “I’d remember that face anywhere,” I said, “and I don’t.”

  He mumbled something. Whatever it was so enraged Tan Sang that the colonel drew his pistol and jammed the barrel into Phu Dung’s right ear, screaming at him in Vietnamese. Phu Dung’s lips curled ever-so-subtly in a smile, knowing he’d gotten the colonel’s goat. Then, slowly, with the gun still in his ear, he turned his head, looked up at his torment
er, and spit in the bastard’s face.

  Stunned at first by this act of defiance, Tan Sang conveyed his fury in a primal yowl and raised his arm to pistol-whip him.

  “Enough!”

  Tan Sang stopped in midswing and looked over at me. “You will tell me the truth, all of it,” he said, “or I will beat him to death.”

  Winning at poker isn’t always the result of holding a good hand. Sometimes it’s a matter of bluffing and playing poor cards well. The same goes for air combat. As a fighter pilot, you’re taught that keeping your opponent in front of you at all times literally is a matter of life and death. The “three-nine line,” it’s called—the span from the three o’clock position of your right wingtip to the nine o’clock position of your left. I had to find some way of reversing the field, getting Tan Sang off my tail and me onto his. Even if that meant bluffing.

  “You’re not going to lay another hand on him,” I said, “because if you do, there won’t be enough pieces left of you to stuff in a garbage bag.”

  “You are threatening me?” He scoffed at the audacity of the notion.

  “Yuck it up all you want, Colonel. You won’t find it quite so funny when that Predator up there launches a Hellfire missile and blows your ass away.”

  Tan Sang blinked like he still didn’t understand.

  “There’s a CIA drone orbiting this location as we speak. You know those two old men you have locked up in that hotel? Before I was sent over here to tend to their psychological needs, the State Department microchipped me, so they could know my precise location at all times. If they don’t hear from me at regular intervals, their instructions are to immediately notify the Joint Special Operations Command and the agency’s Special Activities Division. And those guys, as anybody who watches television news knows, are only too happy to fire missiles and vaporize anybody who looks like they’re even sneezing funny.”

  I laid it on thicker than I probably should have, letting slip how the intelligence community had perfected technology that allowed third-generation guided munitions to sniff out and destroy targeted individuals like him using facial recognition software.

  “What I’m saying, Colonel, is that big bug in the sky already has you in its sights. All I have to do is fail to call in when I’m supposed to, and you’re as good as dead.”

  Was I making it up on the fly? Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back? The amazing part, though, was that Tan Sang appeared to actually be buying it—at least to the extent that he ordered Mr. Postcards to go outside, to see if I was telling the truth about the drone.

  “You’re wasting your time, Colonel. The Predator flies too high to be seen or heard.”

  “How would a clinical psychologist know such things?”

  I smiled. “Let’s just say I’m well read.”

  The way he ran the palm of his hand across his mouth let me know he was spooked. His attention was now fully turned toward me and not Phu Dung. I smiled inside. Advantage Logan.

  “Why did you attack my men?” the colonel demanded.

  “I didn’t. They attacked me. I was only defending myself.”

  “You are a spy.” Tan Sang pointed to Phu Dong. “He is a spy. We have all the evidence we need.”

  “What evidence would that be?”

  “Photographs.”

  The images, Tan Sang said, provided incontrovertible proof linking Phu Dung and me to certain “nefarious individuals.” He wouldn’t reveal who those individuals were or the nature of their alleged nefariousness. When I told him I had a right to see the photos, he kicked my chair over with me in it.

  “This is not America.” He sneered. “Here you have no rights. Here you are nothing. Do you understand? Nothing.”

  “You’ve got nothing on me, Colonel,” I said, lying there on that greasy linoleum floor with my hands bound behind me, “and you know it.”

  Mr. Postcards returned from outside. I couldn’t tell what he was saying but it was clear by his gestures that scanning the skies had detected no drones.

  “Like I was saying, they’re too high to spot. So here’s how it’s gonna go down: either you cut me loose and I walk out of here in the next five minutes so I can check in with Washington and take care of those two old men like your government authorized me to, or you better start finding yourself a good bomb shelter.”

  “There is no drone,” he said. “You are lying.”

  “Okay, I’m lying. Or not. Believe whatever you want, Colonel. Only you better believe it quickly, because my deadline’s about to pass, which means your clock’s about to expire.”

  After about ten seconds of pacing back and forth and giving me the evil eye, Tan Sang reached into his pocket, flicked open a folding knife, and walked behind me. The blade looked to be about four inches in length. I couldn’t tell if it was a Buck, but based on Carl Underwood’s description, the knife was not dissimilar in design or size to the one that had been used to kill Mr. Wonderful. For a couple of anxious seconds, I thought Tan Sang was going to stab me in the back with it. Instead he stooped over and cut the plastic zip tie binding my wrists.

  “If I you choose to remain in Hanoi, and I find out tomorrow morning that you are still here,” he said, collapsing the knife and returning it to his right front trouser pocket, “you will not be as fortunate as you are today.”

  I got to my feet and nodded toward Phu Dung. “He comes with me.”

  “Why should he matter to you? You have never seen him before, remember?”

  “He either comes with me, or I’ll have no choice but to report you to the appropriate authorities.”

  Tan Sang translated for Mr. Postcards and Horse Face what I’d said. The two thugs laughed.

  “I am the appropriate authority,” he said with no trace of humor.

  I realized my ultimatum sounded trite—threatening to send Tan Sang to the vice principal’s office would’ve sounded only slightly less menacing—but I’d run my bluff about as far as it would go. Besides, saving Phu Dung was never my first priority. He might’ve been a fellow combat pilot and decent human being, but he was still a contract operative, and a foreigner to boot. In the world where I come from, that meant he was expendable. He had to have known that and the inherent risks before he took the job.

  My primary mission all along had been to gather intelligence on Mr. Wonderful’s murder and to determine what role, if any, the three former American POWs had played in his slaying. That mission remained largely unaccomplished. Warnings to get out of Dodge aside, I’m not in the habit of quitting any job before it’s done.

  “Okay, Colonel,” I said, “name your price.”

  He stared at me. “. . . Price?”

  “Dong. Dollars. Euros. Whatever. How much would it take for you to release the two Americans and let them come home with me? I’m sure my government would be willing to come to some financial arrangement.”

  I wasn’t sure at all Washington would pony up a penny for Cohen’s release, or Stoneburner’s. More than anything, I asked the question to confirm my suspicions that Tan Sang was as dirty as they come.

  Attempting to bribe a ranking official of the Vietnamese Communist Party, he said with his eyes narrowed and far too much righteous indignation, was grounds for long-term imprisonment.

  “I will pretend you said nothing. Now get out. Before I change my mind.”

  “What makes you so sure it was the Americans who killed the guard?”

  Slowly, deliberately, he said, “We have witnesses.”

  “Witnesses. Right. You mean like that doorman at the Yellow Flower I saw you paying off? You think anything he has to say will hold up in the court of public opinion? He’d testify the moon’s made out of spring rolls if you paid him enough. The rest of the world will see right through your little witch hunt, Colonel, and do you want to know who the real victim will be in all of it? Vietnam. It’ll be your country’s economy that takes it in the shorts if you put any of those old men on trial. How many billions of tourist dollars will be lost?”


  I was trying to goad him and it was working. He was clenching his teeth. Tersely, in Vietnamese, he said something to Postcards who threw the burlap bag back over my head once more. I caught Phu Dung’s eye before he did. He was slumped, chained and motionless, in the chair. I wanted to offer encouragement, to tell him I’d try to figure a way to get him out, but I wasn’t at all certain at that point I could. I gave him a wink. I thought I saw him smile before the burlap obscured my vision.

  V

  Night had descended. My view under the bag, from the backseat of the SUV, was an indistinguishable blur of storefronts, restaurants, and nightclubs. I knew we’d crossed back over the Red River into Hanoi proper because of the rumbling sound the tires made on the bridge. After a couple of minutes of disorienting turns and stops, the right front passenger door opened, Mr. Postcards with his fish breath exited, opened my door, pulled me out, and got back in. I removed the bag from my head as the SUV’s red taillights disappeared into traffic.

  My phone was back in my hotel room along with my money. I had no idea where in Hanoi I was beyond a street in a residential neighborhood that could only be described as dodgy. Rundown tenement buildings six stories high towered on either side of me. The street itself was littered with garbage and reeked of urine. Five young, hard-looking Vietnamese dudes were hanging out on the sidewalk, sitting on little blue plastic stools about twenty meters to my left, swigging bottles of Tiger beer and eyeing me the way lions do a gazelle.

  “ ’Evening, gents.”

  They seemed a bit taken aback that anyone, let alone an obvious foreigner, would deign to address them the way I had, and commiserated in low tones among themselves as if they weren’t sure how to respond. Finally one of them got up and strode over with a decided hip-hop hitch in his stride, gangstastyle. Oversized white T-shirt, jeans sagging, wallet chain dangling, cigarette tucked behind one ear, Los Angeles Kings cap pulled on backwards, the brim comically flat, the sales stickers still on—Hanoi’s version of some African American rap artist he apparently admired and whose mannerisms he was trying hard to emulate. With a distinctly Asian inflection and decidedly inner-city attitude, he said, “What up, my nigga?”