sometimes with a bare foot tapping the proper shoulder, sometimes shouting over the mutter of the diesel.
Moon shook his head violently to drive away sleep and, glancing back, saw that Osa was still sleeping curled on the bench and Lum Lee was studying the map spread across a rice sack on the floor. Then Nguyen yelled a warning and kicked hard at both of Moon’s shoulders.
Moon slammed the APC into neutral, hit the brakes, flicked on the headlights. Two hundred yards down the road, a group of men were pushing an army truck backward across the narrow road. Some wore steel helmets. ARVN soldiers. Probably one of the fragments left from the Yellow Tiger Battalion. Probably the survivors of a platoon fleeing Can Tho. How should he handle this?
Nguyen was shouting something unintelligible.
“He says rocket launcher,” Mr. Lee said. Then Moon could see it himself. The man holding it was just behind the truck, wearing a helmet. Kneeling now to aim. Moon cut the lights, slammed the APC in reverse, did the push- pull “bugout” maneuver they’d practiced a hundred times at Fort Riley, felt the machine begin its spin. He heard something like a curse from Nguyen, then the sound of bullets ricocheting from the side armor, then the staccato roar of Nguyen’s machine gun.
The APC lurched into the ditch, tilted at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. From behind Moon came the sound of things clanging and crashing as they fell, the slamming, whanging sound of bullets hitting the armor, of sudden bursts from Nguyen’s gun, of the left tread spinning in the mud, the groan of twisting metal plates.
Then the deafening blast of an explosion.
Moon’s nostrils were filled with the smell of smoke, his ears with Nguyen’s scream.
Moon thought, So this is how it ends.
He felt a strange, illogical sense of peace. Behind him Osa was sprawled on the rice sacks. Mr. Lee was invisible. Nguyen’s legs were thrashing. Then he realized that the diesel was roaring, both treads were holding again, the APC rolling down them, tilting back to level, moving. Now the
It had probably been an antipersonnel grenade, designed to kill men but not to penetrate even the thin armor of an APC. They’d decided that after fleeing a mile down the road and turning down an even narrower side road and sitting, with the engine cut, to listen. Moon, who rarely remembered to pray, prayed now not to hear an approaching truck. The truck could easily outrun them on the road. The grenade had merely frightened them and gave Nguyen another shrapnel slash across his shoulder. But if the soldiers had an antitank rocket it would punch right through this thin-skinned little vehicle and turn it into a great blaze of burning diesel fuel.
Which, it occurred to Moon as he sat straining to hear something and hoping not to, was why they were still alive. The truck must be out of fuel. The roadblock was being formed either to snare an operating vehicle or refuel the truck.
Now sounds began to emerge from the eerie silence. No truck, no shots, just the rain-country lizards resuming their lustful shouts, insects taking up their nocturnal songs, and finally the frogs issuing their interrupted mating calls.
Nguyen was sure the blast had been a rocket grenade. He had seen it coming. He had seen them coming before out of the mangrove thickets, out of the half-burned hooches lining the creeks and canals and the Mekong itself. Seen what they would do when they hit the fiberglass hull of a PBR or one of its occupants. That’s why he had screamed. But he was embarrassed by that now, because only a little piece of shrapnel had cut his shoulder.
While Osa added to his collection of bandages, Nguyen gave them his analysis of the action, which seemed, despite his wound, to have left him joyful. They had come upon what was left of a Yellow Tiger infantry platoon on the run from their lost war at Can Tho. They were headed for the coast, Nguyen believed, hoping to steal a boat. Their truck had run out of fuel. They had heard the APC coming and were preparing a roadblock to ambush them. Nguyen emphasized that he was navy, not army. A sailor, not a soldier. He had Mr. Lee translate that distinction twice. Even so, he would not have fired upon those cowardly soldiers had they not shot at him first.
They mapped a detour, following the network of little capillary dirt tracks that kept the delta peasants in touch with the villages. It avoided the roadblock, reduced the risk of running into such problems, and added about twenty kilometers to their journey. Moon pushed himself up from the bench, trying to do the math in his head, converting kilometers to miles and dividing the miles per gallon of diesel fuel burned. He felt dizzy. And pessimistic.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get going.”
Osa caught his arm. “My turn,” she said. “I’ve slept. I’m rested. You’re exhausted.”
“You think you can drive an APC?” Moon’s tone implied he didn’t.
“Why not? Because I’m a woman?”
“Because you don’t know how,” Moon said. “There’s the ignition,” she said, pointing past him at the switch just left of the driver’s seat. “There’s the fuel control. The right post controls the right tread, doesn’t it? The left post the left tread. And there’s the thing to shift the gears.”
“I better drive,” Moon said.
“Why? You’ll go to sleep. We’ll run off the road.”
“Things might happen,” Moon said. To his dismay, he had to stifle a yawn. Being sick on that ship had taken something out of him.
“If something happens you should be up there in the hatch. Nguyen must lie down. He lost blood. I think he is all used up for a while.”
“Mr. Lee can be lookout in the hatch,” Moon said.
“Mr. Lee lost his glasses.”
“Oh,” Moon said, lost for words. The other alternative was to have Osa stand in the machine gun hatch. He rejected that. Someone might shoot her.
“You be in the hatch,” she said. “Away from the engine fumes. The fresh air would be good for you.”
He made sure Osa understood the gearing system, and how to handle the tread control steering if they needed to go into reverse, and how to take directions by a foot tap on a shoulder. Then he climbed onto the pedestal seat, heard the engine start below him, and felt the APC begin to lumber forward.
The moon was lower now but they were driving westward, almost directly toward it, and it made the track they were following a ribbon of light between the dark brush of the ditches alongside. Nguyen had jammed one of the rice sacks between the hatch rim and the machine gun mount, either for padding or protection. Something had torn the sack, allowing rice to dribble out on the APC’s steel roof. But it was soft. Moon rested his arms on it and thought.
First he completed the fuel computation, dividing his estimate of round trip miles remaining by the gallons remaining. He came out short of fuel. Nothing to do about that. He thought about Victoria Mathias. if his mother hadn’t survived the operation, who would arrange the funeral? if she had, who would be there to take care of her? He should know more about her friends. He should have taken more interest in her life. Too late for that now. And if he didn’t make it back, how would she ever know what had happened to him? Would she ever know that he had tried, that he had not simply absconded with her tickets and her eight thousand dollars?
That led him to think about the long odds against getting back to his house in Durance, and about what he’d have to say to get Shakeshaft to rehire him, and about what to do about getting Rooney back on the wagon and reemployed.
He left thinking about Debbie for the last. Nothing had changed in that department. Only that now he knew he didn’t really want to marry her. He would, if that was the only way to save her. But now he hoped for some other salvation-just as in Manila he had longed for something to save him from this hopeless duty.
He remembered the subtle way Osa had pushed him to keep him on the hunt for Ricky’s friends. Ah, Osa! If only things had somehow been different a long time ago. If only he had been the man Ricky’s tall tales made him out to be. And thinking about that, with his nostrils full of the smell of gunny sacking and rice, Malcolm Mathias drifted Off into an exhausted sleep-into a dream dark with sorrow and loss.
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 29 (UPI)-A helicopter shuttle service began evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy today while marine guards kept thousands of desperate Vietnamese from breaking through the gates.
The evacuation began as North Vietnamese tanks and infantry units began fighting their way into the city.
