It was the only such trap they did see, for night was coming fast now and Ryderbeit was finally forced to flick on the headlamp, its pencil-beam swinging giddily round the candle-like tree trunks. Giant trees that rose into dim-veined patterns like the roof of a Norman cathedral, the roar of the engine sounding like the toneless dirge of an organ, speed now meaningless, the invisible enemy as suddenly remote yet immediate as God to a small congregation.
Only once, on a bend where Ryderbeit leaned out almost parallel with the road, and Murray found himself leaning the other way, did he catch a sudden glimpse of the speedometer. The needle was hovering just above the 200 km/h mark. The machine had been spotlessly clean when they left, he remembered: probably not even run in. It seemed incredible that Ryderbeit had not done this run before. But as a pilot he would have studied the large-scale ordnance maps and would have memorised every turn, every twist of the road. He had worked to a careful time-schedule too: to catch the evening traffic into Biên Hòa, without attracting undue attention, then breaking through the out-of-town curfew into darkness.
They were coming into a town, a miserable clutch of hovels that was well on what the maps showed as the red line. Ryderbeit did not slacken his pace, although the road did. It suddenly swung round in a steep turn and seemed to stop. Shadows darted about among the huts. The Honda lurched, shrieked over on the edge of its tyres with a spray of sparks drifting up from the heel of Ryderbeit’s boot as he crouched forward, shoulders level with the handlebars.
Murray only saw the roadblock as they were going through it. A ramshackle barricade of crates and sharpened bamboo staves arranged in a double row, overlapping with a narrow gap between the two. Ryderbeit took the gap like the finest professional rider, the machine swinging over, first one way, then the other, with a great squeal of rubber even above the roar of the engine. Small men in black with guns whipped past the corner of Murray’s eye. The bat swerved through, its front wheel almost leaving the ground as it leapt back up on to the broken camber of the disused French road, heading into the Highlands a few minutes later.
They were out of the rainforest now and a last twilight remained across the hillscape ahead. Sound, blotted out by the total noise of the machine, had become irrelevant. In this sense the huge country before him seemed very quiet indeed. No Phantoms dived out of the sky: no rolling burst of orange napalm, followed by the slow sticky black smoke; no mushrooms of mortar smoke, smouldering fields, little whirring ‘choppers’ like dragonflies blinking death. Ahead, Route Nationale Dix-Sept wound like a ribbon of tinfoil up into folds of furry jungle, looping down again between long neat rows of rubber trees, broken by stretches of undergrowth — wild roots writhing on to the road, cracking the tarmac into a series of sharp, agonising bumps. Then miles of more trees, interrupted by the occasional shell of a house — derelict mansions that had once belonged to the French rubber barons, rising now at the end of overgrown drives like great hotels boarded up in the offseason.
Insects whirled in the headlamp, growing sticky on Murray’s brow, beginning to gum up his eyelids. Birds and bats swept low across their path, leaping away into the shadows as they slowed into a bend. And now, with the coming of total darkness, they entered on the final fifty-kilometre burst up the road to An Loc. The road here was broad and straight and curiously unravaged, even by nature. The roots of undergrowth were gone, and the tarmac borders were cut sharp and firm with a faded yellow line on either side. A ghost road into the ghost town of An Lộc, once a bustling market-centre at the foot of the Southern Highlands, now a damp sprawl of rusting sheds, barracks and fortified towers, the remaining inhabitants living in little huts built from unrolled beer and Coca Cola cans — the excremental rubble of an industrial society left strewn about this remote and gentle province.
Ryderbeit swung up on to a smaller, scrappier road — almost a dirt track where the dust flayed their faces raw. Murray glimpsed the time on his wrist. These last thirty miles had passed in just over eleven minutes. He had no chance to ask Ryderbeit their next destination — the mysterious place called Dong San, somewhere on the borders with Cambodia — although, from its position close to An Lộc, he guessed it to be near one of the infiltration routes, part of what is known as the Sihanouk Trail.
Ahead, across the line of hills, the sky was now lit by dull flashes, soundless against the roar of the Honda, but too regular under the clear sky to be even a freak electrical storm. Either 155-howitzers, zapping everything that moved at a range of eight miles, or the B 52’s doing the same with their saturation sticks of H.E., from the same distance, only vertically.
An hour ago Murray would have felt a kind of resigned anger at this grotesque spectacular — although it was not every journalist in Vietnam, let alone the war protesters back
