We were well hidden in the brush long before the advancing column came into sight. I rested the two sacks of jewels on the ground. A king’s ransom, I thought, and much good they were doing us. They were an extraordinary collection; I had finally let avarice triumph over nonchalance a day earlier and had had a good look at them. Most were cut gems, diamonds and rubies and a preponderance of exceptional emeralds, along with a variety of stones I couldn’t recognize. Many of them had started the trip in gleaming gold settings, but for expedience’ sake the original thieves had pried them free and stowed them away in individual leather pouches. No doubt the gold had long since been melted down and disseminated through the Bangkok black market. It would have been enough to finance the operation for the Pathet Lao, and everything left over was gravy.
There were also some jade carvings, and I knew enough about jade to realize that they were exceptional. So we were toting a fortune, and it did us no more good than paper money or gold, neither of which would have been of any use. I would have traded the lot for a gun or a machete or a flashlight, anything that would have helped us cope with the jungle.
A horned beetle crawled from my foot to my leg. I flicked him away with my forefingers. Tuppence and Dhang crouched in silence on either side of me. The column of North Vietnamese was drawing close now. A trio of jeeps were in the lead, followed by a brace of motorized antiaircraft guns, a convoy of troop carriers, and, in the rear, four lumbering tanks.
And then, from the south, we heard the cheering sound of American air power.
Tuppence glanced at me, eyes wide with alarm, and I nodded. She pursed her lips and whistled soundlessly. Fly away, fellows, I urged them silently. Fly like birds. Don’t be heroes today. Go bomb Hanoi or something. But don’t drop anything around here.
They didn’t listen to me.
Just a few yards from us the North Vietnamese braced themselves for action. The column ground to a halt, and the antiaircraft guns readied themselves for the encounter. The troop carriers peeled back their canvas tops and dozens of foot soldiers spilled out, rifles in hand. They scattered in the brush. We waited for them to stumble upon us, but almost all of them chose the other side of the road, and the ones who came over to our side were concentrated to the north of us.
The planes droned overhead. The tanks – Russian T-34’s, the same sort I had seen in Korea – pointed their massive guns at the sky. Keep going, I urged the planes. Knock out the oil depots in Haiphong. Do anything, but go away.
In perfect formation the U.S. aircraft peeled off and dived for the trail. A pair of jet fighters led the way, flying directly into the stream of flak, peppering the trail with machine-gun shells. Behind them fighter bombers laid their eggs.
It was just what I thought it would be. Napalm.
The jungle burst into flame. “Fall back,” I told Tuppence and Dhang. “Don’t even worry about the soldiers. They couldn’t care less right now. Just get the hell out of the way of that fire.”
We scattered like field mice in a burning barn. More planes passed over the trail, and from the heart of the napalm fire came the report of high-impact shells. Now and then the antiaircraft fire found its mark. One of the fighter-bombers took a blast in its middle and broke in half. A fighter evidently caught some flak in the cockpit, went out of control, and spiraled insanely off to the north, crashing and bursting at once into flame.
But the planes were giving better than they got. Three of the T-34’s were out of action in no time at all, two taking direct hits, the third getting the backlash of the bomb that landed square atop the troop carrier in front of it. The ground troops screamed and died in the fire that raged around them.
We missed most of what happened, running crazily through the brush. We outran the napalm, then sprawled at last in a tangle of vines. And lay there, deafened by the sounds of battle, hearts shaken by the combined effect of exertion and panic, until the last burst of ground fire was still and the last plane flew south.
We had hated the jungle. Slogging through it, through the mud and the snakes and the insects and the treacherous vines, we had personified it and cursed it as an enemy. Now we crept toward the ruined army column and looked upon the alternative to the jungle. Acres of plant growth had been burned out of existence. What had been green was burned black, with little vestigial fires still raging at the perimeter. The air was filled with the scent of burning vegetation and the more pungent stench of roasted flesh. The wounded shrieked in agony or moaned in the throes of death. The dead were mercifully silent.
Those Vietnamese who remained unimpaired were unequal to the task of coping with the situation. We watched them from the sidelines, less afraid now of discovery. I scanned the row of ruined jeeps and antiaircraft guns and troop carriers and tanks.
“That’s it,” I said.
“What?”
“Our passport. They got three of them, but one’s still operable. All we have to do is get into it and roll.”
Tuppence looked at me as though I had gone over the edge. “You rest a minute,” she said. “The fever-”
“No fever. I’m talking about the tank.”
“Huh?”
I pointed. “The T-thirty-four,” I said. “The tank. That’s our out. It doesn’t matter what color you are inside one of those. We’ll all be invisible. We can cut right through North Vietnam and across the demilitarized zone without anyone wondering who we are.”
“How do we get one?”
“Change places with the clowns inside it.”
“Suppose they don’t go for the idea?”
“They’re probably dead,” I said. “They probably got cooked. If they don’t come crawling out in the next few minutes, we can count on it. The napalm generates a hell of a lot of heat. But that last tank never took a direct hit, and the machinery should be all right. Sooner or later it ought to cool off. By that time the rest of the column should be long gone.”
“Have you ever driven one of those things?”
“No.”
“Groovy.”
“I never paddled a dugout, either. Maybe I can figure it out.”
“You really think so?”
“Do you want to walk the rest of the way?”
“No.”
“Then it’s worth a try.”
We waited on the sidelines while the uninjured soldiers and walking wounded rounded up as many of their wounded fellows as they could and made their way back north again. The air attack had been a fairly comprehensive success. What had begun as a motorized column left on foot, with all of their vehicles abandoned. Almost everything had been destroyed, and it was only barely possible that the one undamaged tank was still functional. But it seemed like a good gamble.
Around us the cries of the remaining wounded gradually faded. Some of them metamorphosed statistically from Wounded In Action to Killed In Action, dying quietly on either side of us. Others either passed out or gave up moaning when no one came to aid them. After a while I took a gun from a dead soldier, told the others to wait, and headed across the napalm-scorched clearing to the abandoned tank. From the ground a badly burned soldier called to me. There was nothing I could do for him. I went to the tank, and the metal hatch was still too hot to handle. The hatch was unfastened, which meant either that those inside had not bothered locking it, since after all they were not engaged with ground forces, or that they had escaped from the vehicle, or that they had died while trying to escape. I couldn’t tell without opening the hatch. There was a general stench of burned flesh, but there was no way of knowing whether it came from within the tank or was merely part of the general aroma of roasted humanity that pervaded the entire region.