by Larry Bond
He was on his way to check the other when he heard a truck approaching.
Josh reached the woods just as the vehicle came into the clearing near the two older huts. It was a troop truck. Men in uniform jumped out, but at first he wasn’t sure whether they were Vietnamese or Chinese. He listened as someone barked orders.
Chinese.
Realizing that they would probably fan out into the nearby jungle after searching the huts, Josh began slipping deeper in the woods. Two soldiers trotted toward the path; Josh quietly circled in the opposite direction, only to find himself hemmed in by the road.
A field lined with young fruit trees sat on the other side of the road. Josh paralleled the road, moving away from the village downhill, hoping he could find a point where he could easily get across without being seen. He’d gone only a few yards when a big truck began laboring up the other side of the hill. Moving back, he crouched down and waited for it to pass.
It was a tractor cab pulling a low-rider trailer. On the trailer sat two large bulldozers. The truck stopped in the middle of the road, and the two men in the cab got out and began lowering the ramps at the rear of the trailer. Another truck appeared behind it, also with two dozers. A third truck brought a large excavator. A minute or so later, a pair of gray vans pulled into the field and disgorged the operators; within ten minutes a crew was at work leveling the field. They worked methodically, knocking the trees down, pushing them aside, and running over and over the field.
Josh watched with fascination, absorbed in curiosity though not forgetting that he was in danger. He could hear other trucks arriving farther up the road. Soon a chain saw started up, then two more; within a few minutes the saws were so many and so loud that he could have shouted and he wouldn’t have been heard.
The Chinese were building a base.
The realization satisfied his curiosity, and he turned to leave. As he did, he saw a pair of eyes framed by some tree fronds nearby.
His heart froze in his chest. His throat grew so thick he couldn’t breathe, let alone swallow.
The eyes moved, and he saw they were part of a small face—the girl he’d seen earlier.
Josh put up his hand but she darted off to the right, moving quickly away.
Worried that she might tell someone about him, he started in her direction. But after a few steps he realized he’d never catch her.
Josh went back along the road, skirting the area where the men were clearing the fields. A fire had been started to burn some of the brush. A pair of soldiers, rifles under their arms, patrolled along the road.
There were wide spaces between the trees, and Josh had little trouble weaving his way south, keeping a good distance from the road. There was a lot of traffic on it; big trucks or tanks kept rolling past every few minutes.
About an hour after leaving the village, Josh sat down to rest on a downed tree trunk. He leaned his head forward, chin supported by his hands and arms, which in turn were propped on his thighs. He stared at the ground, his mind taking a temporary respite.
Something moved just out of his range of sight. It rustled through the brush, moving slowly. It was quiet, somewhat softer than the chain saws and earthmoving equipment two or three kilometers away.
It sounded like an animal, a Vietnamese deer maybe.
Food.
He’d make a fire. That wasn’t a problem: he still had the matches he’d found the other day, and a lighter. There was plenty of wood.
He got up slowly, barely daring to breathe, and brought his rifle up.
Josh waited. His nose began to twitch—he felt a sneeze coming on. He reached his hand up, squeezing the nostrils to stifle it.
His prey was only a few feet away. Josh steadied the gun with his right hand, waiting.
Brown fur appeared, then gray. He pitched the rifle down to aim, letting go of his nose.
Not fur—hair. A person.
A girl.
The girl he’d seen earlier.
She turned and saw him. Shock was in her face, surprise.
Fear.
Then he sneezed.
The girl bolted and ran into the woods at her right.
He’d never seen anything so frightened. That must have been the way he’d looked when the police found him those many years ago. Maybe it was even the way he looked now.
“Hey,” he said in a stage whisper, not daring to talk much louder even though he was a good distance from the road. “It’s okay. Xin chào. Hello. Xin lỗi. Sorry.”
It was the most polite, nonthreatening thing he knew how to say in Vietnamese, though given his extremely limited vocabulary, there wasn’t much of a choice. But the little girl either did not hear him or wasn’t persuaded. She continued to run.
Josh followed her for a short distance, but quickly realized it was hopeless. Even if she didn’t know the jungle here, she would be pretty good at hiding, and was unlikely to make the mistake of dropping her guard again.
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he said softly, hitching his pants and walking again.
~ * ~
8
Northern Vietnam
It turned, out to be ridiculously easy for Mara to find a truck; it even came filled with gasoline.
It did belong to the Vietnamese army, but that could be considered a plus—civilian-style vehicles were more likely to draw attention from the soldiers she was bound to meet on the way.
The truck, along with two others, was sitting at a curb near an intersection a mile from Mara’s Hanoi hotel. The building next to the curb was on fire.
It was far from the only one. City officials, after some confusion, were shepherding their limited resources to protect the government areas. It was likely that the soldiers who had parked the trucks here had done so thinking they’d be safe, but the shifting winds had been spreading the fires throughout the morning and early afternoon.
Mara pulled her motorcycle over, hopped into the truck, and pressed the starter. The engine cranked to life.
She didn’t want to give up the motorcycle, so she pulled forward a few feet, then got back out and wheeled the bike around to the back. Jumping up on the tailgate of the truck to lower it, she saw that she had an audience—two young teenage boys were standing across the street, watching her.
“Help me,” she told them in Vietnamese. She motioned to the bike, then switched to French. “I need to get the truck—we have to take the truck from the flames. Do you understand? Fire.”
The young men looked at each other. Neither one moved to help her—but they didn’t try to stop her either, which was her real concern. Mara jumped back down and grabbed the bike. It was heavier than she’d thought. She could barely get it off the ground; there was no way she could lift it high enough to get into the truck.
She put it back down, took a breath, then decided to try again. As she strained, the two teenagers came over and helped.
“Can you drive?” she asked them, switching to English. “The trucks— we have to get them down the road to the police.”
The teens shook their head. She repeated it in Vietnamese.
“Di thắng. Go straight,” she told them, pretending she thought they had understood. Mara slammed the tailgate shut, then waved at them to take the other trucks. “We’re going to the police. I can talk to you there.”
Mara didn’t bother looking back as she got in. Most likely, she thought, she hadn’t fooled them. But the soldiers would be looking for their truck soon anyway.
She ran her hand through her hair as she drove through Hanoi, pushing it back on her head. She really needed a uniform, but it didn’t appear that the truck’s rightful owners had left one.
A few minutes later she came to a roadblock. Several bicyclists were stopped while soldiers went through their papers.
There was no place to turn around. Mara considered jumping and running, then noticed a church steeple and got an idea.
Rolling down the window, she climbed halfway out the cab and leaned on the horn
.
“I need to get to the bridge!” she shouted, first in English, then in French, and finally in Vietnamese. “We have to get soldiers to the hospital! Men are dying.”
The bicyclists turned and stared. The two soldiers looked over at her as if she were crazy.
Which was not the worst assessment they could make.
“We need to move. The bridge!” she repeated.
One of the soldiers strutted over. Mara began explaining that she was a nun—she reached beneath her shirt and pulled out her cross, holding it up as evidence.
The majority of Vietnamese, especially those in the north, were not Catholics, but the Catholic orders had a long history of charity and relief work, and nuns were generally viewed favorably. Elsewhere, Mara might not have looked very nunnish, but the paucity of Westerners in the region helped her cover story.
Her cross was small, but her manner was emphatic, and after a few minutes of being harangued, the soldier decided to pass the buck to his companion. He pointed at the other soldier and told her to talk to him.
Mara, naturally, completely misinterpreted this as an okay to proceed—and made sure the other soldier did as well, smiling and waving at him as she drove past.
“Sister Jean, pray for my soul,” said Mara, offering up both prayer and apology to one of her old teachers as she escaped down the street.
The cover of an aid worker was too good to pass up, and Mara quickly set about shoring up the image. Soon after reaching Route 32— there were soldiers along the highway, but they weren’t stopping military vehicles—Mara spotted a complex built around a Buddhist monastery. She explained to the monks that she was bringing emergency supplies to Son Tay, a city on the Red River to the west. She offered to take the monks with her, and for a moment worried that one of the kindly brothers might actually take her up on the offer. But the monks were already tending to a number of people left wounded and homeless from the attacks, and instead they offered her some bandages, blankets, and bed-sheets.
Her next stop was in a town about five miles away. Parking the truck, she found a small shop and bought several pairs of men’s clothes and a cap for her hair. She also got two peasant-style dresses, and a basket for lunch. She had just gotten the basket filled and climbed back in the cab when the satellite phone buzzed.
“Hey, Bangkok, how we doing?” she asked, holding the phone against her ear with her shoulder as she put the truck in gear.
“How are you doing, Mara?”
“DeBiase! They have you back on the communications desk, Million Dollar Man?”
“I requested it specifically so I could talk to you,” DeBiase told her. “Where are you exactly?”
“You’re not tracking me?”
“You have to transmit for thirty seconds,” he told her. “But yes, we are. It was mostly a figure of speech, like hello.”
“Hello. I’m near Hoa Binh,” she told him. “I want to stay south of the Red River for a few miles. I think there are more troops on that side of the river.”
“How far north can you be by tonight?”
“China if I have to be.”
“Pick a place farther south, and hopefully a little safer.”
“I was thinking of Nam Det, if there aren’t many troops in the way.”
“Hmmm.”
“Are you looking at the satellites? What do they say?”
“The latest satellite says there are no troops there. The Chinese still haven’t come across the border at Lao Cai.”
“Maybe they won’t.”
“Don’t bet on it. Nam Det…You’d have to go up Route 70.”
“I’d planned on it—if there aren’t a lot of checkpoints.”
DeBiase began clicking through information screens on the computer in front of him. Besides satellite data, the U.S. now had Global Hawk UAVs patrolling to provide real-time information on what was going on.
“There are two points I’d steer you around, darling. One is Phan Luong, which the Vietnamese are using as a mustering point for their reserves in Tuyên Quang. The other is farther north, near the Thac Ba Reservoir. That one’s the problem—there are no alternate roads unless you go through Yen Bar.”
“I can do that.”
“I don’t think so—the Chinese are bombing it right now. The analysts seem to think they’ll attack and occupy it tonight.”
Mara tried visualizing Vietnam in her head. The rivers that cut southward were flanked by mountains; her route back to Nam Det was in the shadow of the Con Voi Mountains, between the Chay River and the Hong. The Da River valley, farther to the west—and on the other side of the Hoang Lien Son Mountains—was the main route of the Chinese advance, though no one expected them to stay there very long.
“I think my best bet will be to BS my way past the checkpoint at Tuyên Quang,” she told him. “The question is when.”
She looked at her watch. Assuming she could keep her speed of fifty kilometers an hour—an iffy proposition, admittedly—she’d be at the checkpoint no later than five p.m., just as dusk was falling.
“Can you get past?” asked DeBiase.
“Sure. I’ve gotten by two already. I just tell them I’m a nun.”
“That works?”
“They don’t know me very well.”
Mara asked DeBiase if he could arrange an equipment drop; she needed a backup radio, batteries, and most of all ammunition. DeBiase told her he’d have to work on it. Two hours later, he called back to tell her Lucas had wangled an unmanned aerial vehicle to drop the gear on the field at Nam Det just before dawn.
Assuming she could get there.
“We’ll know in an hour,” Mara told DeBiase. “If that roadblock at Tuyên Quang is still there.”
“It is. The Vietnamese are telling people in some of the villages near the Chinese border to leave and go south. You’ll be running into refugees soon.”
“I’ll try not to hit them.”
“Yeah.”
“That was a joke, Jess. You’re losing your sense of humor.”
“I know.”
~ * ~
Figuring she would be stopped at Tuyên Quang, Mara decided to try and polish her image. She used a needle and thread to sew a makeshift cross out of sheets on the top of the truck, but didn’t have enough left over for the sides. She had only a few boxes of supplies—a pathetic effort if she really was working for a relief group. Mara rearranged a few things, but there was only so much she could do, and when she climbed back into the cab and put the truck in gear, she felt even less confident than before.
A half hour later, Mara saw the first refugees walking along the road. They were a family of four, a mother and father with two children around seven and nine, a boy and a girl. Each carried a big bundle on his or her back. They didn’t look at her as she passed.
Mara thought they were an anomaly—the area had so far missed the fighting—but within a few minutes she saw more people, bunches of them, groups of ten and twelve. Most were on the side of the road, but here and there a group strayed onto the asphalt. Bicyclists were scattered among the walkers, most pedaling slowly and glumly alongside relatives or friends. By the time she’d gone another kilometer, the highway was flooded with people-—old people, middle aged, children, some pulling carts, a few dragging bundles placed on pieces of wood and poles.
Another kilometer farther on and the road was almost impassable.
A few of the refugees stared at her as she drove, slowly, pressing forward against the tide. But most didn’t look at her at all; they looked at nothing but the black tar of the road, oozing up in the late-afternoon heat.
The steady flood of people overwhelmed a small village that straddled the highway They seemed like ants climbing through the remains of a dead animal, moving forward. A few of the inhabitants stood in their doorways, jaws slack, unable to entirely comprehend what was going on.
North of the village, Mara found she could go fastest by straddling the edge of the highway and shoulder. People would
move off the road more easily there, and she managed to get the truck to twenty kilometers an hour for several stretches. But she was constantly slowing down, often hitting the brake as an old person got stubborn in front of her, or a child didn’t pay enough attention. By the time she got close enough to Tuyên Quang to see the checkpoint, the sun had set.
