“Splendid,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed a stroll in the country.”
She pushed ahead of him.
Just before midday, Bay walked back to them.
“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We have to stop for the day.”
Nicholai agreed, but asked, “Where?”
“There’s a bled just a kilometer or so from here,” Bay answered. “The villagers owe their allegiance to me.”
Nicholai knew exactly what that meant – if the people of the tiny hamlet betrayed them, the Binh Xuyen would come back and kill them all. It saddened him but he understood. Collective responsibility was an Asian tradition.
When they made it to the bled, Nicholai and Solange lay on the floor of a dark hut and tried to get a little sleep. There wasn’t much time to rest – they would move out again as soon as it was dark and hope to make some progress before the moon rose.
Solange fell asleep, but Nicholai lay awake, listening to the sound of airplanes circling above them. The tension in the village was palpable, especially when in the late afternoon he heard whispers that a Foreign Legion patrol was just a half kilometer away.
The village collectively held its breath.
Nicholai laid his hand on the warm metal of the machine pistol and waited. He wasn’t going to be captured – he had seen all he wanted of the interrogation room and the cell. If they took him, they would take him as a corpse.
Then he decided that was selfish. If it looks as if we’re going to be discovered, I will hand her the Ivanov bankbooks, then hold a gun on her and let them think we took her as a hostage. Then I will find a way to kill myself on the way to the prison. That resolved, Nicholai watched through the bottom slats as a Legion officer stood on the edge of the village and questioned its elder.
The man shrugged his shoulders and waved his finger in an arc, indicating that the foreigners could be anywhere, in any one of the dozens of villages nestled among the rice paddies. The young lieutenant looked at him skeptically.
Nicholai noticed that his finger had tightened on the trigger.
The lieutenant stared at the old man for a second, the old man stared back, and then the lieutenant ordered his men to move on. Nicholai lay back and looked at Solange sleeping. He drifted off himself, and when he woke up it was dusk. A few minutes later Bay came in, followed by a woman with bowls of rice and steamed fish. Solange woke up and they ate, then got ready to resume the march.
They walked the dikes now, shielded by the neat rows of mulberry trees. Staying in tight formation, they literally walked in each other’s footsteps and made reasonably good time until the moon rose and lit them. Then they stretched apart and moved by twos and threes, the scouts going ahead and whistling signals that it was safe for the next group to move.
The local militias were out, walking the dikes themselves, going from village to village. Several times, its patrols came within eyesight, and Nicholai’s party flattened themselves to the ground and belly-crawled, if they moved at all.
It was a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the moonlight, a match of stealth and wits. To Nicholai’s surprise, Solange was very good at it – she moved with a quicksilver grace and silence, and he laughed at himself when he remembered that she was not only Solange but the Cobra.
She is more experienced at this, he thought, than I am.
The night seemed to go forever, but they made about ten miles before the sky started to turn to the stony gray of predawn and they came to a long line of mulberries a half mile from a small hamlet.
Bay signaled them to lie and wait.
A few minutes later, Nicholai heard the single sharp whistle to come ahead and he quick-stepped in a slouch along the dike until he reached the relative safety of the tree line. There was a small clearing among the trees and there he saw Xue Xin.
161
“IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU again,” Nicholai said.
“And you,” Xue Xin answered.
He looked so different now, in the light khaki jacket of a Viet Minh officer with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“You knew we’d meet again,” said Nicholai.
“I always knew it,” Xue Xin said. “I knew your true nature.”
More than I did, Nicholai thought.
His name wasn’t Xue Xin, of course, but Ai Quoc.
Nicholai saw it clearly now.
Quoc had controlled the operation and had counted on Nicholai to honor his deal with Colonel Yu.
“I knew,” Quoc continued, “that you would realize the truth and see things for what they are.”
“And now I want a life,” Nicholai said.
Quoc looked past him to see Solange and smiled. “We will do our best to get you out. It might require some patience on your part.”
“I have become the personification of patience.”
“Why do I have my doubts?”
“It must be your monklike wisdom,” Nicholai answered. “All that clipping of vines and deep breathing.”
The sky was turning a coral pink.
Quoc said, “We should be going.”
Nicholai walked up to Bay Vien. “Where are you going now?”
“Back to Saigon,” Bay answered, “to curse your name to the heavens for stealing my weapons and getting away with it.”
“Will they believe you?”
“Yes, or they’ll pretend to,” Bay said, “for a while longer, anyway. Then…”
He left it unfinished. It was obvious – no one knew the future, no man could say what his karma held in store for him.
“Goodbye,” Nicholai said. “I hope we see each other again in better times.”
“We will,” Bay answered.
Bay gathered his men and headed out.
“We need to go,” Quoc said. His soldiers, thirty-odd veterans, started to heft the crates on bamboo poles and were already walking north.
Quoc began to limp after them.
The airplane came out of the east.
162
WING GUNS BLAZING, strafing the tree line, it came in low and out of the sun.
Three Viet Minh went down like toy soldiers knocked off a shelf.
The shells splintered trees, spraying shards of wood like shrapnel.
Nicholai tackled Solange and lay on top of her. The ground shook under them from the vibrations of the low-flying plane.
“Go now!” Quoc yelled as the plane rose to come around for another strafing run.
Nicholai got to his feet and pulled Solange up behind him and, hand in hand, they ran for the next rice paddy, racing to get over the exposed dike before the plane completed its turn. Its wings shone in the rising sun as it banked, came back, and dove, a hawk on the hunt.
They made it over the dike, but two more Viet Minh behind them weren’t as lucky and were picked off easily. Nicholai and Solange slid down the slope into the muck of the rice paddy and plunged under the surface.
Holding her hand as he held his breath, Nicholai tried to listen for the now muted popping of the guns and the sound of the plane’s engines as it climbed again. When he heard a higher-pitched whine he pushed up, and together he and Solange sloshed across the rice paddy.
Looking around, Nicholai saw that Quoc had survived the last attack and was waving them toward a copse of trees on the far side of the paddy. Ahead of them, the men carrying one of the crates made it over the top of the dike and disappeared from sight. Another Viet Minh lay down on his back on the dike and started to fire his machine gun up at the plane, which was now coming in behind them.
Solange jerked him down, and again they held their breath and felt the rounds zip into the water around them. When they came back up, the plane was climbing in front of them. It waggled its wings and kept flying away, apparently out of ammunition or low on fuel.
Nicholai and Solange made it across the paddy, over the dike, and into the copse of trees, where the Viet Minh were regrouping. Wounded porters fell out as other men took their place. Loads were shifted, weapons exchanged. A soldier who was apparently a medic gave rudimentary aid with the scant supplies at hand. Other men were beyond help, and lay dead or dying.