the war.
“I’m going with you,” Diamond said.
He hated battles, but this was his best chance to kill Nicholai Hel.
159
HAVERFORD LOOKED at De Lhandes in the hospital bed.
“Who did this to you?” he asked.
“One of yours,” De Lhandes murmured through the painkilling drugs. “That’s why I asked to see you. I’m hoping you’re better than that.”
He told Haverford about giving up “Michel” and Solange’s whereabouts, then fell back into unconsciousness.
Haverford left the hospital in a cold white rage.
He went back to his office, checked out a service.45, and went hunting for Diamond.
160
THEY MADE IT safely up the river, navigating without running lights past naval patrols, hiding in channels, mangrove swamps, and stands of bamboo. Then they took a tiny tributary, little more than a stream, north through the swamp until they came out on the Dengnai River south of Saigon. Safely crossing the stream, they landed near a small village, where the people helped them transfer the cargo to a canvas-covered truck.
“What’s the name of this place?” Nicholai asked.
“Binh Xuyen.” Bay Vien chuckled. “We’re pretty safe here.”
They took some tea and rice with pickled vegetables, then got into the truck and drove the roadway inland, then left the truck and the main road and set off on foot. Daylight found them carrying the crates along dikes built above the rice paddies, steaming now in the cloying humidity that came just before the monsoon season.
Nicholai and Solange, dressed unconvincingly in the black shirt and trousers and conical hats of Vietnamese farmers, walked in the center of the small column – just enough Binh Xuyen to carry the load, a handful of armed guards, with Bay Vien in the lead. It was treacherous country, flat and open, observable by French aerial surveillance, vulnerable to the watchtowers and blockhouses that punctuated the landscape.
It was too risky, so they decided to abandon the dikes for the low rice paddies. Trudging through sometimes waist-high water was exhausting, progress was excruciatingly slow, and they had to stop and flatten themselves in the water every time they heard an airplane engine.
At this pace, Nicholai thought, they would never make it to the rendezvous with the Viet Minh. Solange, although stoic and uncomplaining, was clearly played out. Her calves and ankles were cut from blade grass, and her eyes showed a dunning fatigue.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Splendid,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed a stroll in the country.”
She pushed ahead of him.
Just before midday, Bay walked back to them.
“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We have to stop for the day.”
Nicholai agreed, but asked, “Where?”
“There’s a
Nicholai knew exactly what that meant – if the people of the tiny hamlet betrayed them, the Binh Xuyen would come back and kill them all. It saddened him but he understood. Collective responsibility was an Asian tradition.
When they made it to the
Solange fell asleep, but Nicholai lay awake, listening to the sound of airplanes circling above them. The tension in the village was palpable, especially when in the late afternoon he heard whispers that a Foreign Legion patrol was just a half kilometer away.
The village collectively held its breath.
Nicholai laid his hand on the warm metal of the machine pistol and waited. He wasn’t going to be captured – he had seen all he wanted of the interrogation room and the cell. If they took him, they would take him as a corpse.
Then he decided that was selfish. If it looks as if we’re going to be discovered, I will hand her the Ivanov bankbooks, then hold a gun on her and let them think we took her as a hostage. Then I will find a way to kill myself on the way to the prison. That resolved, Nicholai watched through the bottom slats as a Legion officer stood on the edge of the village and questioned its elder.
The man shrugged his shoulders and waved his finger in an arc, indicating that the foreigners could be anywhere, in any one of the dozens of villages nestled among the rice paddies. The young lieutenant looked at him skeptically.
Nicholai noticed that his finger had tightened on the trigger.
The lieutenant stared at the old man for a second, the old man stared back, and then the lieutenant ordered his men to move on. Nicholai lay back and looked at Solange sleeping. He drifted off himself, and when he woke up it was dusk. A few minutes later Bay came in, followed by a woman with bowls of rice and steamed fish. Solange woke up and they ate, then got ready to resume the march.
They walked the dikes now, shielded by the neat rows of mulberry trees. Staying in tight formation, they literally walked in each other’s footsteps and made reasonably good time until the moon rose and lit them. Then they stretched apart and moved by twos and threes, the scouts going ahead and whistling signals that it was safe for the next group to move.
The local militias were out, walking the dikes themselves, going from village to village. Several times, its patrols came within eyesight, and Nicholai’s party flattened themselves to the ground and belly-crawled, if they moved at all.
It was a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the moonlight, a match of stealth and wits. To Nicholai’s surprise, Solange was very good at it – she moved with a quicksilver grace and silence, and he laughed at himself when he remembered that she was not only Solange but the Cobra.
She is more experienced at this, he thought, than I am.
The night seemed to go forever, but they made about ten miles before the sky started to turn to the stony gray of predawn and they came to a long line of mulberries a half mile from a small hamlet.
Bay signaled them to lie and wait.
A few minutes later, Nicholai heard the single sharp whistle to come ahead and he quick-stepped in a slouch along the dike until he reached the relative safety of the tree line. There was a small clearing among the trees and there he saw Xue Xin.
161
“IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU again,” Nicholai said.
“And you,” Xue Xin answered.
He looked so different now, in the light khaki jacket of a Viet Minh officer with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“You knew we’d meet again,” said Nicholai.
