Murray looked at him and thought: Jacky’s right. The man is crazy. He tried a last query, playing for time: ‘Where did you get this monster anyway? Is it hired?’
‘Bought. By courtesy of Filling-Station — with his pocket money.’
‘A bit extravagant, isn’t it — if you’re only going to be here for twelve more days?’
‘Recklessly extravagant. But we’ve got to get into the habit, haven’t we? Now get aboard and put your arms round me, lover boy, and hold on bloody tight!’ He had pulled on his helmet and goggles and was fastening the scarf across his mouth. Conversation from now on would be impossible. Murray gave up and took off his jacket, folding the newspapers across his chest and pulling the sweater down over them. Then he climbed on the pillion and Ryderbeit kicked at the starter pedal.
The machine started first time, with a powerful snarl as they drifted away from the pavement, straight into the evening rush-hour. Murray closed his eyes. He didn’t open them again until they were at the end of Tu Do Street where they swerved left along the river bank with their ankles almost grazing the ground; zipping past the old mercantile buildings of Saigon; shooting the lights right, again almost on their sides, swinging up on to the wide Tinh Do Bridge where Murray grabbed hard at Ryderbeit’s belly, pressing himself forward against the hunched leather back, biting into the neck of his sweater, his watering eyes stretched half-open with the gritty slip-stream.
They stopped only once — on the outskirts of the city, at a dead railway line where Ryderbeit was forced to pull aside for a convoy of tanks. Murray’s ears were numb, his groin aching; and as they waited for the tanks to pass over the level-crossing, he looked down the line, its tracks eroded by rust like strips of brown sponge, its sleepers long ripped up, the tracks warped, leading nowhere — the severed arteries of a country paralysed by war.
The last tank had clanked and scrabbled its way past them; and suddenly his spine felt as though it were being snapped in two as his hands locked again across Ryderbeit’s stomach and they swept forward, zig-zagging out on to the great highway north-east to the town of Biên Hòa. The orange ball of sun was hanging low under flat clouds; then came the first dusk of the forest trees, the howl of the engine rising, becoming part of his body, part of the spine-jarring, numbing pain, his fingers frozen senseless even through the woollen sleeves of his sweater. Once he began inching his head up over Ryderbeit’s shoulder to glance down at the speedometer; but when he tried opening his eyes they almost rolled up inside his head. The tears stiffened on his cheeks, the corners of his mouth dragged back under the neck of the sweater.
They reached the outskirts of Biên Hòa, twenty-eight miles from the centre of Saigon, in just under twelve minutes. So far the road had been secure. Ryderbeit now swept round the outer perimeter of the vast U.S. airbase there, with its attendant shanty town, and in less than five minutes they were back under the high trees, zooming down what the maps showed as a single green line — green as distinct to black, meaning temporarily secure as against secure. The red line for insecure would come soon.
They passed a couple of jeeps — no more than fleeting brown blobs in the shadow of the trees. Impossible to tell whether they were American or Vietnamese. Ahead, through his tears, Murray could just see the road straight and narrow like one of those roads in northern France, but lined with rainforest instead of poplar trees, passing in the monotonous crescendo of wind and machinery. They were swaying about rather less now, and he tried again to get a glimpse of the speedometer, but Ryderbeit’s helmet was now almost level with the handlebars and covered the clock completely. Murray had the curious sensation that the top of his head no longer existed.
They were coming close to the edge of ‘D’ Zone, and the ‘Iron Triangle’ — the Viet Cong’s deepest, most impregnable stronghold north-west of Saigon, where even the eight-engined B 52’s could make little impact, pattern-bombing with delayed-action 1,000-pounders through the two-hundred-foot trees. They passed another patrol — a confused blue shadow that might have been one or two vehicles — and Murray wondered what kind of report the troops would send when they got back to base. Red motorcycle with black-clad rider, like some bat out of hell, heading straight into the most insecure corner of Vietnam.
The road was becoming eaten away at the edges now, its surface humped and blistered, rotted by rains, gnawed by insects — the remnants of a fine French road which few vehicles had touched for years. They were ten minutes out of Biên Hòa — almost twenty-five miles — but now there was another danger. Murray knew it well, as did anyone who had been any time in Vietnam. The question was whether Ryderbeit knew it.
Even back in the Viet Minh days it had been a favourite trick: to take a strip of highway deep in the jungle and dig it out a metre deep and a metre wide. Any vehicle travelling at a reasonable speed would jam its front wheels, snap its axle and lie prone. Then the ambush. Only Ryderbeit and his Honda were not going at a reasonable speed.
Using the top of his head as a windshield Murray began to examine the tarmac under his feet. Nothing happened
