And then there was Susan, my furry little kitten with the big fangs. The really scary thing was that she was truly in love with me. I seem to attract intelligent women with mental health problems. Or, to look at it another way, the problem might be me. I can usually blame Dickie Johnson for most of my lady problems, but I think, this time, it was my heart.
There was a big town ahead, according to the map, Lai Chau, which unfortunately was not Lao Cai, and not even close.
We had the Montagnard wrappings on so that out on the road, the military wouldn’t spot us for Westerners and pull us over for fun. But as we approached Lai Chau, we took off the scarves, the fur-trimmed leather hats, and goggles, and pulled into a gas station in the middle of the town, which looked like a less prosperous Dien Bien Phu.
Susan used the facility while I pumped gas with a hand crank. Is it slower if you’re pumping liters instead of gallons? Or faster?
Susan returned, sans blue dye on her face and hands, and said, “I’ll pump. You can go use the bucket.”
“I like pumping.”
She smiled and said, “Can I hold your nozzle?”
Totally nuts. But a great lay.
“Are you angry at me?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you trust me?”
“I think we did this.”
“Okay, do you believe that I’m on your side? That I believe as you do that Edward Blake needs to give a public accounting of how William Hines died?”
“Absolutely.” I finished pumping and asked her, “You got any dong?”
She paid the attendant, who was standing near us, looking us over, and checking out the BMW. Why don’t these guys pump the gas? Things will be different here when all the gas stations are American-owned and — operated. That’ll show these bastards who really won the war.
I wanted to drive, so I mounted up. Susan came up beside me and said, “Look at me, Paul.”
I looked at her.
She said, “I could not have killed that man. You have to believe that.”
I looked into her eyes and said, “I do believe that.”
She smiled and said, “You, however, piss me off.”
I smiled, but said, “It’s not a joke.”
“I know. Sorry. I make bad jokes when I’m tense.”
“Jump on.”
She got on the back and put her arms around me.
I started the engine and off we went, up Route 12, which was mostly uphill as the Na Valley rose higher.
Susan was hungry, as usual, and we pulled over and had a picnic lunch beside a foul-smelling rice paddy. Bananas and rice cakes, and a liter of water. The last good protein I’d had was the porcupine last night.
Susan lit a post-prandial cigarette and said, “If you’re wondering why they picked you, one reason was because they wanted a combat veteran. There’s this sort of bond between old soldiers, even if they fought on different sides, and I could see that immediately between you and Mr. Vinh.”
I thought about that and replied, “There’s no bond between me and Colonel Mang.”
“Actually, there is.”
I ignored that and said, “So, I was picked by a computer? Handsome, bilingual in French and Vietnamese, extensive knowledge of the country, loves native food, motorcycle license, and people skills.”
She smiled. “Don’t forget good lay.”
“Right. Tell you what — they miscalculated.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
I let that one go, and we mounted up.
About sixty kilometers and two hours out of Lai Chau, the road forked and there was actually a sign: to the left was the Laotian border, ten kilometers, and to the right was Lao Cai, sixty-seven kilometers. I took the right fork, not wanting to go to Laos on this trip, and definitely not wanting to run into any more border guards or military.
In my rearview mirror, however, I saw a military jeep kicking up dust behind me. I said to Susan, “Soldiers.”
She didn’t look back, but bent over and found the jeep in the mirror. “You can easily outrun them on a rutted dirt road.”
What she meant was that the tire ruts were very bumpy, whereas the crown in the middle was smoother. I twisted the throttle and got the bike up to sixty KPH, and I saw that the cloud of dust behind me was getting farther away.
We kept up that speed for half an hour, and I figured if the jeep was going half our speed, then he was fifteen kilometers behind us.
She said to me, “I told you a motorcycle was better.”
A lot of this trip had been thought out ahead of time, and what seemed to me random or serendipitous had been calculated. I’d made the mistake of underestimating my friends in Washington, who I knew couldn’t be as stupid as they seemed.
This was a totally desolate stretch of road, called, according to the map, 4D, which obviously meant desolate. It was getting cold and dark. I took Susan’s hand and looked at her watch. It was about 7 P.M. The sun sinks fast in these latitudes, as I found out in ’68, and you can get caught in the dark by surprise.
Route 4D was starting to climb into high mountains, and I could see towering peaks to our front. To make matters worse, a ground fog was developing. We were not going to make it to Lao Cai.
Once again, I started looking around for a place to pull over where we could spend the night. I could actually see my breath, and I guessed the temperature was close to freezing.
Just as I was about to pull over on a small patch of ground near a mountain stream, I saw a sign that said Sa Pa, and in English, Scenic Beauty. Good Hotels. I stopped and stared at the sign. Maybe it was a backpacker joke. I said, “Is that for real?”
Susan informed me, “There’s a hill station town up here called Sa Pa. Old French summer resort. Someone in my Hanoi office went there. Let’s see the map.”
I took out the map, and we both looked at it in the fading light. Sure enough, there was a little dot called Sa Pa, but no indication on the map that this was anything other than another two-chicken town. The map elevation showed 1,800 meters, which explained why I could see my breath and not feel my nose. I said, “It’s another thirty kilometers or so from Sa Pa to Lao Cai. We’ll stop in Sa Pa.”
I accelerated up the sharply rising road. The fog was thick now, but I left my headlight off and stayed in the middle of the dirt road.
Within fifteen minutes, we could see the glow of lights, and a few minutes later, we were in Sa Pa.
It was a pleasant little place, and in the dark, I could imagine I was in a French alpine village.
We drove around awhile, and the town was dead in the winter. There were lots of small hotels and guest houses in Sa Pa, and every one of them would report our check-in to the Immigration Police.
I saw few people on the streets, and most of them were Montagnards. I spotted a Viet on a motor scooter ahead of me, and I said to Susan, “Ask that guy what’s the best hotel in town.” I accelerated and came up beside him. Susan spoke to him, and he gave her directions. She said to me, “Make a U-turn.”
I made a U-turn on the quiet street, and Susan directed me to a road that climbed above the town.
At the very end of the road, like a mirage, was a huge, modern hotel called the Victoria Sa Pa.
We gave the bike to a doorman, took our backpacks, and entered the big, luxurious lobby.
She said to me, “Nothing but the best for my hero. Use your American Express. I think I’m not being reimbursed anymore.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
There was a lounge off the lobby, and I took Susan’s arm and led her into this modern lounge with a panoramic view of the misty mountains. We put our backpacks down and sat at a cocktail table. A waitress took our orders for two beers. I looked around and saw about a dozen Westerners in the big place, so we didn’t stand out, which was why I wanted the best place in town.
Susan said to me, “I have the feeling we’re not checking in here.”
“No, we’re not.” I added, “By no
w, Colonel Mang may know we stayed at the Dien Bien Phu Motel, so he knows we’re in northwest Vietnam. He’d like to know exactly where, but I’m not sure what he’d do with that information. In any case, I don’t want him or the local goons joining us for cocktails. So we’ll push on.”
She replied, “I agree we shouldn’t check into a hotel or guest house, but maybe we should find a place to sleep in town, like a church, or that park we saw. Lao Cai is about two hours of dangerous driving through the mountain fog. If a military jeep came up behind us, we wouldn’t hear him over the motorcycle, and we might not be able to outrun him. If he came toward us on a narrow mountain road, we’d have to turn around, and we might not be able to outrun him.” She looked at me and said, “And you threw away my gun.”
“I thought you had two more.”
She smiled.
I said, “Well, I have an infantryman’s solution to escape and evasion at night. We walk.”
She didn’t reply.
The beers came, and Susan raised her glass to me. “To the worst three days I’ve ever spent in Vietnam, with the best man I’ve ever spent them with.”
We touched glasses. I said, “You wanted a little adventure.”
“I also wanted a hot shower and a soft bed tonight. Not to mention a good dinner.”
“You wouldn’t get any of that in jail.” I looked at her and said, “We’ve come too far to make a mistake now.”
“I know. You’re the expert on getting out of here with only hours left before the flight leaves.”
“Did it twice.”
Susan called the cocktail waitress over and in French made her understand we wanted something to eat.
Susan smiled at me and said, “Maybe we’ll come back here in the summer.”
“Send me a postcard.”
She sipped her beer thoughtfully, then said, “They’ll have a fax machine here.” She looked around at the dozen or so people in the lounge. “We can ask one of these Westerners to send a fax for us. Just to say we’ve made it this far.”
I replied, “If we don’t make it all the way to Hanoi with a mission report, they won’t care how far we got.”
“Well… we should at least tell them that we met TVV, and he’s given us some souvenirs.”
“Susan, the less they know in Saigon, Washington, and the American embassy in Hanoi, the better. I don’t owe them anything after the bullshit they — and you — have been feeding me for two weeks.”
The waitress brought a bowl of peanuts and two plates of satay on skewers, covered with what smelled like peanut butter sauce.
“What is this meat?” I asked.
“Don’t obsess on the meat. You have a long walk ahead of you.” Susan stood. “I saw some tourist brochures in the lobby. I’ll be right back.”
I sat there with my beer and mystery meat. Jealous men don’t like their women out of their sight. I’m not a jealous man, but I’ve learned that I shouldn’t let Susan out of my sight.
She returned a few minutes later with a few brochures in her hand, sat, and scanned one of them. She said, “Okay, here’s a little map of Sa Pa, and I see the road to Lao Cai. You want to hear about the road?”
“Sure.”
“All right… surrounding us are the Hoang Lien Mountains, which the French called the Tonkinese Alps… the area is home to an abundance of wildlife, including mountain goats and monkeys—”
“I hate monkeys.”
“It’s very cold in the winter. If we’re hiking, and I guess we are, there are no mountain huts or shelters, and we’ll need rain gear and a heating stove—”
“Susan, it’s only thirty-five kilometers. I can do that in my underwear. Do we have to go through any villages?”
“I don’t think so… doesn’t say… but there are Red Zao tribesmen in the mountains, and it says here they’re very shy and don’t like visitors.”
“Good.”
“Okay… twelve kilometers from Sa Pa is the Dinh Deo Pass, the highest mountain pass in Vietnam at 2,500 meters. On this side of the pass, the weather is cold, wet and foggy. After we cross the pass, it will often be sunny.”
“Even at night?”
“Paul, shut up. Okay… there are strong winds over the pass, but only a few hundred meters down, the weather starts to get warmer. Sa Pa is the coldest place in Vietnam, and Lao Cai is the warmest. That’s good… the Dinh Deo Pass is the dividing line between two large weather systems.”
“Can I speak?”
“No. About ten kilometers out of Sa Pa is the Silver Waterfall where we can ditch the motorcycle.”
“It says that in the brochure?”
She looked up from the brochure and said to me, “They told me in Saigon that this guy Paul Brenner had a reputation of being a difficult-to-work-with wiseass. They didn’t know the half of it.”
I informed her, “They told me in Washington you were a businessper-son who was doing a favor for Uncle. They didn’t tell me one percent of it.”
“You lucked out.”
I said, “Let’s get out of here before we have company.”
We paid the bill, walked outside, tipped the doorman, and got the motorcycle.
Susan said, “It’s cold out here.”
“It’s sunny on the other side of the pass.”
We put on our gloves, leather hats, and Montagnard scarves, mounted up and drove off. We went back into the town, and Susan directed me to the road leading north to Lao Cai.
The dark, foggy road climbed higher into the mountains. The road was paved, but the visibility was so bad I had to keep the speed down to between ten and fifteen KPH.
About forty-five minutes out of Sa Pa, I could hear the crashing of a waterfall ahead, and a minute later we saw the falls cascading from a high mountain off to our left front. There was a drop-off on the side of the road, and I dismounted. I couldn’t see down through the fog, so I picked up a big rock and threw it. A few seconds later, I heard it strike another rock, then another, until the echoes died away. I said to Susan, “Well, as the brochure said, this is where we ditch the bike.”
We left the engine running, and we both pushed the BMW Paris-Dakar off the edge of the road. About two seconds later, we heard it hit, then hit again and again, until we couldn’t hear it any longer. I said, “Good motorcycle. I think I’ll buy one.”
We continued on foot, up the steeply rising road. It was bitter cold, and the north wind was blowing in our faces.
It took us almost an hour to cover the two or three kilometers to the Dinh Deo Pass. As we approached the crest of the pass, the wind began to howl, and we leaned into it and trudged on in silence.
At the top of the pass, the wind was so strong we had to stop and take a break on the leeward side of a boulder. We sat there and caught our breath.
Susan spent a few minutes getting her cigarette lit in the wind. She said, “I need to stop smoking. I’m winded.”
“It should be better on the downslope. Are you okay?”
“Yeah… just need a break.”
“You want my jacket?”
“No. This is a tropical country.”
I looked at her in the dim light, and our eyes met. I said, “I like you.”
She smiled. “I like you, too. We could have a hell of a life together.”
“We could.”
She put out her cigarette, and we both started to stand, then she froze and said, “Get down!”
We both dropped to the ground and lay flat.
I heard the engine of a vehicle over the noise of the wind, and I could see yellow lights refracted in the fog. We lay there, and the lights got brighter as the vehicle approached from the direction we’d come from. I caught a glimpse of a big military truck as it passed.
We lay there for a full minute, then Susan said, “Do you think he’s looking for us?”
“I have no idea, but if he is, he’s looking for two people on a motorcycle.”
I let another minute pass. Then we stood, came around the bo
ulder, and walked on into the wind. I pushed the scarf down to my neck and raised the flaps on my leather hat so I could hear better. Now and then, I looked over my shoulder for lights. The chance of anyone in a vehicle spotting us on foot before we heard or saw them was slim. But we needed to keep alert.
We crossed the crest of the pass, and the wind picked up, but it was downhill now, and we made good time.
About five hundred meters from the top of the pass, the wind became a breeze, and I could actually feel the air get warmer.
Five minutes later, I saw yellow fog lights coming at us and heard the sound of the engine, carried toward us on the wind.
There was a drop-off to our left, and to our right was a narrow stream between the road and the wall of the mountain. We hesitated half a second, then fell into the ice cold stream.
The vehicle approached slowly, and the engine got louder and the yellow lights got brighter.
We lay there, motionless.
Finally, the vehicle passed, but I didn’t get a glimpse of it.
I gave it thirty seconds, then got up on one knee and looked south. I could see the lights climbing up toward the pass. I stood. “Okay. Let’s move.”
Susan stood, we got back on the road and continued on. We were soaked and cold, but as long as we were moving, we wouldn’t freeze to death.
There was not a single sign of habitation along the route, not even a Montagnard house. If the Viets and hill people thought Dien Bien Phu was cold, they definitely wouldn’t live up here.
Two hours after we crossed the pass, the fog lifted, and the air was warmer. We were almost dried off, and I removed my gloves, scarves, and leather hat and put them in my backpack. Susan kept hers on.
Within half an hour, we could see the lights of a town down in what appeared to be a deep valley that I guessed was the Red River Valley, though I couldn’t actually see the river.
We stopped and sat on a rock. Susan took out one of the tourist brochures, which was soggy, and read the brochure by the flame of her lighter. She said, “That must be Lao Cai, and on the northwest side of the river is China. It says Lao Cai was destroyed during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, but the border is open again, if we want to visit the People’s Republic of China.”
Up Country pb-2 Page 67
