who started this — it’s the Vietnamese. They’re the real aggressors.”
“Bullshit!” someone called out.
“Yeah — piss off, lady!”
Wray didn’t know which lady was being referred to — the animal rights one or the redhead. Now there was a special news bulletin reporting that there had apparently been some “naval activity” in the South China Sea. Wray grunted in drunken disgust. It was about as helpful as saying there was a weather disturbance somewhere in Texas. The nonspecific nature of this newscast upset Wray much more than it normally would have. He was a perfectionist, and vagueness about anything irritated and at times disturbed him, especially when he’d been drinking heavily. On top of this, there had been the day’s dismal failure of not getting anything out of the Korean, and on top of that, of losing his cool and the unspoken, maniacal encouragement he’d given the JDF man. Which made him, Henry Wray of the CIA, no better than the North Koreans, he told himself. Worse.
He finished his scotch and walked over to a map of southern Japan, surprised there had not yet been any kind of attack on U.S. and Japanese shipping by North Korea. Maybe the Korean had made contact about something else? But not knowing what it was, even what it might be, filled Wray with a despair, despite all his years with the firm, made infinitely worse by the booze — a plunging feeling deep in his gut, his conscience telling him that he had stood far too long at the edge of the abyss, and now it was staring back at him — that he was out of control. He reached inside his jacket, took out the 9mm Beretta automatic, and fingered it like a blind man for a few minutes, as if it was something he’d lost touch with, as if he was reacquainting himself with an old friend. Then he put it atop the TV.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was near dusk when a policeman pulled up to the American visitor by an alley off Duy Tan Street and asked for identification and the special permit to be in Lam Dong province. Though the American lifting of an embargo against trading with Vietnam had meant better relations for several years, old habits died hard among some of the highlanders who, as young men, had fought the Americans in the Vietnam War. The American, Captain Raymond Baker from the U.S. legation in Ho Chi Minh City, was dressed in civilian clothes. He presented his passport with three ten-thousand-dong notes — about three U.S. dollars — sandwiched in the middle. The policeman moved back a few paces into the alley, said nothing, took the money, handed back the passport and began walking eastward down Duy Tan Street. Baker slipped the passport into the waistband money belt he wore and called out to the policeman, “Which way to Lang Bian Mountain? They tell me the views are—”
Baker didn’t know whether this was official policy or simply well-meant advice. In any event he decided he would hire a guide. The policeman had already seen that he was a cultural attache at the U.S. legation and might therefore already suspect him of spying around Dalat, though now with the U.S. and Vietnamese allies against the Chinese, it was difficult for Baker to imagine what military mission the Vietnamese policeman might think he was on. Unless the policeman had guessed that he was up here possibly searching for MIAs. The discovery of an MIA would be highly embarrassing at the moment, not only for the Vietnamese, but for their American allies as well. A hitherto MIA suddenly turning up would prove extraordinarily damaging to the U.S. public’s support for U.S. assistance against the Chinese invasion, rekindling memories of the interrogation and treatment of U.S. POWs during the Vietnam War.
It was too dark now to start out on the twelve-kilometer journey to the five volcanic peaks of Lang Bian Mountain that rose to over six thousand feet above lush countryside, and Baker went instead to the nearest mid- range hotel, booked a room for the night, and asked if he could hire a guide from there to go to his ultimate destination of Lat village near Lang Bian.
“
“Who from?”
“Dalat police.”
Baker wondered why the policeman who had stopped him hadn’t told him about the permit. “How much?” he asked.
“One hundred thousand dong. Ten dollars U.S.”
Baker nodded and started up to his room when the clerk called after him, telling him that he had to leave his passport at the desk for security. Baker brought out an expired but unpunched passport that he kept specifically for such purposes. It wasn’t his first time looking for an MIA. He knew they wouldn’t bother looking at the date, so long as it had a lot of the right-looking stamps.
Tiredly — it was unusually warm for the central highlands— Baker made his way up to the second floor of the People’s Palace and spread out a local tourist map of Dalat on the mattress atop the old, creaky French-colonial style, wrought-iron bedstead. The map was poor in quality and seemed to have no scale, but he did discover that Lat village was in fact not a single entity, but consisted of a half dozen or so hamlets. Which hamlet had the old man on the sampan meant? Perhaps Lat village had been the only description the old man had been given. Most of the villages were inhabited by the Laks, the others by Kohos, Mas, and Chills, and so now he saw more sense in the hotel clerk’s advice about a guide. And given what were bound to be the different dialects of the villagers, he might need more than one guide.
Already his mission to ask about any possible MIAs in the village was becoming complex, and there was no early bus from Dalat to Lat, so he would be obliged to hire a car. He suddenly wished he’d stayed in Ho Chi Minh City. His colleagues at the legation there were probably right — the MIA tip was probably a waste of time and Baker knew he wouldn’t get any encouragement from Washington now that the Americans and Vietnamese were allies against China. A live MIA still being kept as a POW would be embarrassing all around. On the other hand, Washington had enough on its mind with the war that MIA search policy had more or less been forgotten about.
Baker estimated he’d need at least a week to visit the hamlets alone, for though he spoke Vietnamese, he wasn’t familiar with the dialects of the central highlands. He reflected momentarily on the only hard evidence he’d ever unearthed about an MIA — two sets of dog tags and a pile of bones which the U.S. Army forensic lab had determined were human. But he still remembered the phone calls, then the letters, of the two GIs’ parents.
And while more and more the question of MIAs—2,392 of them — from the old Vietnam War was receding and being shunted aside, Baker knew that if a young soldier of about twenty had been taken and was still being held, he would now be in his late forties or early fifties, and that the pain of his loved ones, like that of the parents of any missing child, would still be there.
He unpacked his suitcase, took out a glass jar of boric acid, and like someone marking a tennis court, tapped out a line of the white powder until the rectangle he made about the bed was complete.
Around midnight he thought he heard someone outside his door — or was it someone in one of the next rooms? He sat up and listened. The noise ceased and all he could hear in the background was the faint tinkle of a radio — probably from one of the rice stalls in the street below.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Susan D. Basehart was an American who had tired of having most of her money invested in small-yield blue chip stocks. Diagnosed as having inoperable cancer of the bowels, her life expectancy at most a year, she had decided — along with other American and Asian investors — to gamble most of her money on a new stock in ASAM Industries, a firm sold on the promising research carried out on the feasibility of highspeed maglev: magnetically levitated train travel on commuter routes. With tests of banked speeds up to 250 mph and 1,000 mph on straightways, the commuter run from Penn Station in New York to Union Station in Washington, D.C., averaging 300 mph, would take less time than it took to take a limo from Manhattan to La Guardia. And you could move hundreds
