by Bill Yancey
“No,” Roh said. “I have more trips to make. We should have everyone together by nightfall. The password is, ‘Father Chinh?’ Once you say that, someone on the boat will say, ‘He has gone to Mui Ne.’ Any other response means the northerners have found us out.”
Byrnes nodded. He walked as nonchalantly as possible to the far end of the bridge and crossed the street. A captured ARVN armored personnel carrier, sporting the NVA battle flag, traversed the bridge going the opposite direction. The lieutenant sitting in the command seat ignored Byrnes. No one manned the seat behind the .50 caliber machinegun. Other than two pedal cabs in the distance, Byrnes saw no other traffic. He waited until the APC disappeared from sight, checked the area for other pedestrians, and then dropped onto the dirt trail next to the bridge.
Directly underneath the bridge, hidden by land and water vegetation, Byrnes found a large sampan, not dissimilar to the one that had saved his life in the Gulf of Tonkin. Slapping his hand on the side of the boat, he called, “Father Chinh?”
From the stern of the covered section of the sampan a short man with bad acne and dragon tattoos on a bare chest pulled back a curtain. “He has gone to Mui Ne,” he said. “Are you alone?”
“No. there will be three children and Mrs. Hung shortly.”
“Fine. No names. Be quick. Tell the children to be quiet.”
Byrnes had climbed almost to street level when the youngest of the children, a girl approximately six-years-old, met him on the path. He held her hand and walked her to the boat. As the boat rocked gently in the wake of another sampan passing by, Byrnes handed the child to the sailor.
Next he brought the youngest son, followed by Mrs.Hung. The oldest boy arrived last, accompanied by Lt. Roh. “I thought you weren’t coming.” Byrnes said.
“I’m not. Just checking on conditions. You need to stay in the boat, out of sight,” Roh said.
“Mr. Dang really believes he can sneak fifty people out of Saigon on a sampan?”
“This is no ordinary sampan, Con co,” Roh said and smiled. “It has a large, powerful inboard engine. In addition, it has a compass and a radio. It is capable of sea-going operation. To a smuggler, it’s worth its weight in gold. Mr. Dang used it to meet with larger ships offshore. I’ll be back in about two hours. Get some rest. We’ll set sail after dark.”
Byrnes climbed onto the fifty-foot boat. The sailor who had greeted him sat near the tiller, smoking a cigarette, reading an old edition of the Nhan Dan, a North Vietnamese newspaper. He nodded to Byrnes, pointing to the hatchway that led to the covered portion of the boat. Byrnes pulled back the plasticized drape and stepped inside.
In a fairly roomy interior Byrnes found a score of men, women, and children. He estimated the humidity on the river hovered at nearly 90%, and the temperature had climbed to the mid eighties by the early afternoon. The children lay on the deck naked. Adults sweated. They read or slept in silence. In the hold below the compartment Byrnes saw sacks of rice and tins of water. Children lay on the rice bags. One baby nursed at its mother’s breast. Byrnes sat near the entrance. People whose names he could not remember from the night before nodded to him and smiled wearily. Body odor, the smell of raw vegetables, fish, sewage in the canal, and fear hung in the air.
Throughout the day and evening others arrived singly and in pairs. Monsoon rains poured on either side of the bridge intermittently. Byrnes counted fifty-three occupants before Mr. Dang, his wife, Tu and her husband arrived with Roh. Fifty-eight fugitives on the small sampan. All the refugees squeezed into the lower hold. The two crewmen of the sampan covered the hold with boards and laid fishing equipment on top of the boards. In the claustrophobic darkness, parents whispered to their children, trying to comfort them.
As the sun set, Roh and Byrnes joined the men on deck to augment the crew. Jumping into the canal, they helped push the sampan from the reeds under the bridge. The sailors had given them simple cotton pants and sandals to replace their civilian clothing. To the unsophisticated eye, they passed as crew. Using a small outboard motor, the tattooed sailor navigated the channel north and east, toward the Saigon River. The big inboard motor ran at idle, in reserve if needed.
Saigon was dark. Almost no lights shone in the city. Bridges were deserted of pedestrians. Byrnes saw no vehicular traffic anywhere. The curfew of the second night of occupation kept people in their homes, either planning for escapes or accepting their fate, he guessed.
A police boat pulled alongside the sampan about an hour after they cast off. The small powerboat flew the NVA battle flag as banners from its bow and stern. An infantry sergeant in dark green khakis stood on the bow of the boat. Two armed soldiers positioned themselves behind him. A third man steered the boat. He wore a white T-shirt and dirty white pants. The nose of the police boat nudged the sampan, which was about twice its size. “Where are you going?” the sergeant asked.
“The East Sea,” the sailor with acne replied. “Tide goes out early this morning. We will be trapped inland unless we leave now.”
“We have orders to inspect all boats,” the sergeant said.
The sailor with the dragon tattoo threw the sergeant a line. “Fine. Come aboard.” After lashing the two boats together, the sergeant stepped across the gap to the sampan. He followed the sailor into the compartment. Obviously not a sailor, the sergeant wobbled while moving about the boat. He saw the fishing equipment covering the deck, but did not ask to see the hold. He had been unaware the sailor had kept his hand on the hilt of the long knife in a leather scabbard on his belt, prepared to end the soldier’s life if necessary.
“Okay,” the sergeant said. “You may continue. Bring us some fresh fish when you return. I have written your boat’s number down, 513. Don’t forget, or there will be trouble.” He jumped across the gap between the boats and, after loosening the line, tossed it into the water. The sailor pulled the rope into the sampan and coiled it on the deck.
“Yes, sir,” the sailor replied. He returned to the tiller and cranked up the outboard. Slowly the boats parted. The police boat made a U-turn and continued west.
Two hours later the sampan puttered into a larger body of water. “Saigon River,” Roh said quietly to Byrnes. “The Dong Hai is north of us. The East Sea is south of us. There are not many channels between here and the ocean. Mr. Dang’s crew knows them all. We have to hope the NVA are not yet aware of them.”
When the sampan cleared the south edge of Saigon, the sailors pushed the fishing gear to one side and opened the hatch to the hold. They allowed the sweating, confined passengers to come up on deck four or five at a time for brief respites of fresh air and to relieve themselves over the side of the boat. The gunnels sat barely two feet over the brown water.
“I’m surprised the police didn’t open the hold,” Mr. Dang said to Roh when he took his turn on deck.
The tattooed sailor laughed. “Boss,” he said. “That was no water policeman. The NVA probably detained all the real river police. He was a land-lubber for sure. A real sailor would have noted how low in the water we sit. He would have known there is a hold filled with something below the compartment.”
“I guess we should be thankful that they replaced the water patrol with their own people,” Dang said. “How much longer until we reach the East Sea?”
“We are taking our time,” the sailor said. “We will reach the Nha Be River shortly. I hope to have us at the East Sea by dawn. Then we can use the big engine. We have more than enough fuel to reach Malaysia. Do you still want to go southeast?”
Dang shook his head. He said, “My informants say the Americans are escorting a vast number of large and small Vietnamese boats to the Philippines. We should go east. With luck we will be picked up by a larger ship.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The muscular throb of the powerful inboard motor woke Byrnes as he dozed on the deck. He rolled over and looked into a fat, red, rising sun, surrounded by pink billowing clouds on the horizon over the open sea. Then he heard the gunfire
from behind the sampan. Dang had returned to the deck, wearing only his underclothes. “Faster!” he yelled. The inboard growled louder.
Tracer rounds hit the water near the bow of the ship. Byrnes turned his head and saw another patrol boat to the south, closing quickly. “Better surrender,” he said.
“Never!” Dang said. The man pulled an M-16 from inside the compartment and began to return fire.
A third patrol boat north of them opened fire on the sampan with a machinegun. Bullets stitched the water, climbing into the boat, feet from Byrnes. He heard screams from the passengers below. Dang tumbled into the water, covered with blood. The tattooed sailor, the second crewman, Roh, and Byrnes stood on deck, hands in the air. The machinegun fell silent.
CHAPTER 40
“So, Mr. Wolfe, you are not familiar with Mr. Fulton?” the court appointed psychiatrist asked Wolfe.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Nichols,” Wolfe said, looking across the desk at the pretty, slight, black woman. A whiff of perfume wafted across the desk and dissipated quickly. “I knew Chief Fulton a long time ago when he was a third-class petty officer in the navy. He worked in disbursing on one of the ships on which I served. The only time I saw him was when payday rolled around and we were headed into port. Otherwise I left my pay in the bank.”
“He’s convinced you want him dead. I’m trying to determine if he is delusional, paranoid, or some other type of mentally ill,” Nichols said. “You understand?”
“Of course,” Wolfe said. “I did shoot him, but only to keep him from stabbing my daughter. He broke into my house and threatened to shoot me. I’m a retired physician, by the way.”
“Sorry. I knew that. Would you prefer I call you Dr. Wolfe?”
Wolfe smiled. He wondered if Dr. Nichols were psychoanalyzing him. “Addison, Addy, or even Doc – that’s what the kids at the elementary school call me – is good. Doctor, rather than Mister, if you want to be extra professional, though.”
Nichols grinned. “Touché, Doc,” she said.
“How seriously did I wound him?” Wolfe asked.
Nichols leafed through Fulton’s medical chart, stopping on a yellow page. She said, “He got a chest tube for about a week. Surgeon took the slug out of his right lung. He has healed. No physical complications are expected.”
“Did Fulton shoot the court reporter? Was she seriously injured?” Wolfe asked.
“They took the bullet out of her thigh. She’s walking with crutches. They did ballistics on the bullet. We’re not positive who shot her, yet. Fulton denies it. The same weapon you used to shoot Fulton was used to wound the reporter, though. I don’t understand why he would have shot the court reporter, if he did. Or who did it, if it wasn’t Fulton. The reporter didn’t see who fired through her sliding glass kitchen door.”
“Have you done a physical work-up on the Chief? Any lab or scans to check him for the other things that might make him hallucinate, like thyroid abnormalities, drug use, brain tumor, or whatever else is pertinent?”
“All negative,” Nichols said, nodding. “His story about the fight and throwing a man overboard is consistent, however. Do you know how true that is?”
“Maurice Noble was a second-class petty officer at the time who is also a retired chief now. He was on the same ship with Fulton and me. He told me Jimmy Byrnes did disappear from the ship during its last deployment. I wasn’t on the ship then. The navy wrote the incident off as a suicide. I met with Jimmy’s sister recently, and an ex-POW. They say Jimmy survived the push or fall from the ship and ended up in South Vietnam as a POW.”
“So there’s a chance he wasn’t thrown overboard, but jumped or fell.” Nichols said.
“At this point I don’t think all the evidence is in,” Wolfe said. “Losing sailors over the side of a ship is a constant worry. That’s why they conduct man overboard drills. As a psychiatrist, you know there is a subset of people who are depressed and attempt suicide. And what better way to remove a witness to a crime or an enemy than to toss him overboard when no one is looking?”
“Man overboard drill?”
“It’s even more common on carriers than other ships. Pilots and planes sometimes go into the ocean,” Wolfe said, nodding.
“Mr. Fulton mentioned trying to yell, ‘Man overboard,’” Nichols said. She stood and pulled off the jacket to her gray pantsuit, revealing a frilly pink blouse. She rounded the desk. Hanging the jacket on a hook on the back of her office door, she walked to a filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. After fingering through the filed psychiatric dictations, she pulled one out and took it to the desk. Sitting, she turned the pages of the chart over the top of the manila folder until she found the passage for which she searched. “We record our sessions,” she said. “This is a typed transcript. Saves me from having to remember every detail. Fulton said, ‘I yelled man overboard. The ship is a noisy place, especially the hangar and flight decks. No one heard me. Then Deke, that’s Deke Jameson, grabbed me by the face. He threatened to throw me overboard, too, unless I shut up. He would have, too. He was a huge man. And angry. Byrnes had made him really furious, by getting him tossed into the brig and costing him his stripes.’ Does that sound possible, Dr. Wolfe? Could Byrnes truly have been beat up and thrown off the ship?”
“I knew Deke Jameson. Obliquely,” Wolfe said. “We weren’t friends. He was a bully, an arrogant SOB. And large. If Fulton is correct about there being a smuggling ring within the Supply Division, and Byrnes had cost them a lot of money by testifying against Deke when he stole some laundry, then yeah. That’s not only possible; I’d say it’s likely. It would not have been easy, though. Jimmy knew some martial arts. I’ve seen him deck guys with a single punch, but only someone who had attacked him first. He was no bully. I expect it would have taken several guys to incapacitate him.”
“That, too, is consistent with Chief Fulton’s account,” Nichols said. “Byrnes survived the fall and was later a POW?”
“Yes,” Wolfe said.
“Can we get him to verify this chain of events? It would go a long way toward having Fulton declared mentally incompetent. I think his break with reality might have been the result of years of dealing with the guilt of not being able to save Byrnes. He’s certain Byrnes died.”
Wolfe shook his head. He said, “Jimmy didn’t die from the fall from the ship, or drown. But he can’t testify. The air force pilot who spent time with him as a POW says he was killed in a USAF bombing raid.”
The psychiatrist wrote herself a brief note and placed it in Chief Fulton’s chart. After a minute of staring at the note, while Wolfe wondered if the interview were over, she said, “Do you know anything about the men Fulton claims Byrnes killed? Obviously that’s not possible if the man died in Vietnam, right?”
“You mean the members of Jameson’s gang, the guys who were stealing from Supply?” Wolfe asked.
“Yes. The men in Fulton’s scrapbook. Why would he feel they were murdered?”
Wolfe thought for a minute. He said, “I think you could probably explain that better than Chief Fulton or I can, Dr. Nichols. I suppose the responsibility the Chief felt for Byrnes’s assumed death might make him wish they had died at Byrnes’s hand. That would mean Byrnes wasn’t really dead. Or, maybe Fulton killed them himself, or arranged their deaths?”
Nichols pulled her upper lip under her lower lip, contemplating as she jotted notes. She said, “You know, at one point he claimed you were trying to kill him. And you may have killed those other men.”
“I did shoot him,” Wolfe said. “Until three weeks ago, I had no idea that Jimmy was dead or that they had tried to kill him. Otherwise, I might have done precisely that.”
“Okay,” Nichols said. She lay the dictation on her desk. “I believe that’s all I have for you now. Would you mind coming back if I need more information?”
“Not at all, if I’m available,” Wolfe said. “Sometime this summer I will be attending Mrs. Byrnes’s funeral. The date isn’t set yet, and that can take a whi
le at Arlington National Cemetery.”
“Okay, thanks, Doc,” Nichols said. “Looks like I’ll send a deputy to Chief Fulton’s home, to see if there are any receipts for plane trips on the dates of these men’s deaths.” She stood and shook Wolfe’s hand. “Thanks for coming in.”
“My pleasure, Dr. Nichols.”
CHAPTER 41
Wolfe sat in a folding chair in the large living room of the brick colonial house in Alexandria. All the furniture that had been in the room on his last visit had been removed and replaced with Mrs. Byrnes’s casket, several stands of flowers, and an altar draped in white paper. Tammy Kimura told Wolfe the altar was a Shinto shrine and the paper was meant to ward off evil spirits.
After all the visitors had viewed Mrs. Byrnes’s body, a Buddhist priest conducted the wake ceremony. Kimura and her sister had dressed the dead woman in a white kimono, her wooden geta sandals, and white socks with the gap between the first and second toes. They had placed six coins, pictures of family members including Jimmy and his father, and a package of her favorite chocolate candy in the coffin.
The casket sat obliquely in the corner with Mrs. Byrnes’s head pointed toward the back window and feet toward the side window. “She was specific about having her head point north for the wake,” Kimura said to Wolfe. “The coins are for her to pay to cross the Sanzu River, the Buddhist equivalent to the Greek mythological River Styx.”
Wolfe sat through the Buddhist ceremony, understanding none of what the priest said in Japanese. The smell of incense and flowers drove him outside after the ceremony. Many of the guests stood on the broad lawn. Almost all the men, except Wolfe, wore black suits with white shirts and black ties. Wolfe’s only suit was a dark navy blue.
“I’m so glad you could come to the wake on short notice, Addison,” Kimura said as she approached him with a shorter Asian man in tow. “Buddhists prefer the wake to be held on the 3rd, 7th, 49th, or 100th day after death. Not knowing when the funeral will be scheduled, we chose the seventh day.”
