“So, the bad guys don’t have direction finders?” Dallas asked.
“Unlikely,” Dan replied.
They all exchanged glances, trying to decide. Robert broke the silence. “Let’s wait. Let’s get farther away,” he said. “It’s still midmorning, and it won’t be long before the crash site will be swarming with rescue forces and Vietnamese military. Then it would probably be safe to turn it on. I just wish we could transmit a voice message on that thing.”
“We can,” Steve said, holding up the handheld radio. “It’s a new type. If the satellite can hear the beacon, it can hear what you transmit, and it’s got a GPS in it, so it transmits our exact location digitally.”
“What does all that mean?” Britta asked.
“It means,” Dan began, sighing deeply, “that when we turn it on, we can tell the world where we are. We’d just better be ready for the consequences.”
“Wait!” Dallas held up her hand, her eyes up as she cocked her head to listen.
“What?” Robert said in a low voice.
“I hear a helicopter over there, somewhere,” she said, pointing west.
“And the crash site’s behind us, right?” Britta asked.
Robert nodded. “Probably not the same one,” he said. “He’d be searching along this direct pathway if it was.”
“How much longer?” Britta asked.
“What do you mean?” Robert replied.
“I mean, how much longer do you think it’s going to take to get out of here and get to safety?” Britta’s chin was trembling slightly, her emotions cracking through the calm facade she’d been keeping intact. She tried to smooth her hair with her right hand, embarrassed to be shaking. “I, ah, I’m exhausted, thirsty, hungry, scared to death, dirty as a bum, flea-bitten and scratched to shreds, and I just… I just wanted to know if I should be planning on sleeping in this horrible place, too.”
“Not if we’re lucky,” Dan said softly. The sound of his voice triggered tears Britta instantly regretted.
“Oh, Dan! I didn’t mean to cry.” She swatted at the tears, her mouth opening and closing as she tried for control. “I mean, I know you can’t see them, but what you’re going through — what the doctor’s going through — and here, I’m bitching like a little baby. I’m sorry.”
Dan put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a small squeeze, his voice soft in her ear. “Come on, Britta. You’re not made of steel. It’s okay.”
“We are going to make it, aren’t we?” she said. She looked around at the others. “Dammit, we can’t bring them back, but we can get out of here and make sure the world knows what those bastards did.”
“Where, Arlin?” the pilot asked in a disgusted tone. He’d picked nearly a dozen clearings to land in, and Schoen had rejected every one.
“There!” Arlin Schoen said as he pointed into the distance.
“All I see is jungle,” the pilot replied.
“Follow my finger. It’s a wide clearing by that river, with a highway bridge on the other side. If they come this way, they’ll be funneled right into that location.”
The pilot nodded and began planning his approach. They would land, Arlin had decided, camouflage the helicopter with whatever brush they could find, and wait for MacCabe and whoever was with him to come walking out of the jungle.
“And if you’re wrong?” one of the men had asked.
“Then we crank up and fly this bucket back to Da Nang, collect our aircraft, and get the hell out of here.”
The man shook his head. “Always have an answer, don’t you, Arlin?”
CHAPTER 23
Kat Bronsky walked briskly through the door of the aging Air Vietnam jetliner into a wall of fragrant humidity. She followed her fellow passengers through the tropical decay of the airport terminal to the long line that led to customs. Kat stood waiting, holding her passport and FBI credentials, as she recalled Jordan’s words on the satellite phone just before boarding in Hong Kong.
“I’m glad you’re letting me help, Katherine. You don’t want to experience what everyone else does entering Vietnam.”
“That bad?”
“Well, from French colonial officials, the Vietnamese learned bureaucratic arrogance and how to dither endlessly over meaningless details. They polished that knowledge with the dizzying duplicity we taught them during the war. And then they folded in a heavy dose of Marxist intransigence before topping that off with the innate suspicion inherent to an abused culture whose every contact with the West in the past century has been an utter disaster.”
“Meaning?” Kat had asked, worried he might have failed to get her clearance.
“Meaning that for the normal passenger, especially an American, getting through Vietnamese immigration and customs inside a week is a small miracle. For instance, if they run out of ink for their mind-numbing collection of itty-bitty rubber stamps, the country comes to a complete, screeching halt.”
“Jordan, I really have to board now, if I’m going. Am I going?”
“I’m sorry, Kat. Here I am telling colorful stories. Yes. You’re all set.”
“You don’t like the Vietnamese much, do you?”
“Love the people, hate the bureaucracy. You’ll see.”
“That bad?”
“Let me put it this way. If Bethlehem had been in Vietnam, we wouldn’t be wearing crosses. Jesus would have died of old age waiting to clear customs.”
A police officer was waving frantically at the line Kat had joined. She could hear him issuing the same Vietnamese command with increasing urgency as he tried to wave them through a doorway. An Asian couple in the lead had been fumbling for something in a small jump bag. They straightened up suddenly and moved obediently through the door, and Kat and the others followed.
An array of uniformed men stood waiting on the other side, each in a tiny booth arrayed with the predicted rubber stamps. One by one they sucked in the passports and papers proffered by each passenger through a small slit below the window of the booth, examined each in minute detail with intense fervor, followed by a flurry of energetic pounding of rubber stamps before the passport — and the passenger — were allowed passage to the next gauntlet.
Kat was next in line, wondering why no one had singled her out, when a hand clamped down none too gently on her right shoulder and she turned to find several uniformed men regarding her unsmilingly.
“Passport!” one of the men demanded. Kat handed the small blue booklet to him, and he quickly examined it before saying something in Vietnamese to the others. He looked back at Kat and nodded toward a distant door.
“Follow!”
The self-important choreography of the customs and immigration dance had been amusing, but she was relieved when the man led her away from the normal processing arena, through a second, then a third, door, and into a dingy office of decaying off-white tiles and stained laminate floor. He motioned her to a rickety chair next to a metal desk that was undoubtedly left over from American surplus in 1974.
“Sit now.”
“Okay. How long?”
“Sit! Sit sit sit!” he demanded in a flurry of staccato gestures. The officer carefully took off his hat and placed it just so on the desk before seating himself on a swivel chair and grabbing the phone. As Kat prepared to speak again, he angrily gestured for her to be quiet. Two other officers, probably police, had appeared at Kat’s side, their faces deadly serious.