Satori

“I always knew it,” Xue Xin said. “I knew your true nature.”

More than I did, Nicholai thought.

His name wasn’t Xue Xin, of course, but Ai Quoc.

Nicholai saw it clearly now.

Quoc had controlled the operation and had counted on Nicholai to honor his deal with Colonel Yu.

“I knew,” Quoc continued, “that you would realize the truth and see things for what they are.”

“And now I want a life,” Nicholai said.

Quoc looked past him to see Solange and smiled. “We will do our best to get you out. It might require some patience on your part.”

“I have become the personification of patience.”

“Why do I have my doubts?”

“It must be your monklike wisdom,” Nicholai answered. “All that clipping of vines and deep breathing.”

The sky was turning a coral pink.

Quoc said, “We should be going.”

Nicholai walked up to Bay Vien. “Where are you going now?”

“Back to Saigon,” Bay answered, “to curse your name to the heavens for stealing my weapons and getting away with it.”

“Will they believe you?”

“Yes, or they’ll pretend to,” Bay said, “for a while longer, anyway. Then…”

He left it unfinished. It was obvious – no one knew the future, no man could say what his karma held in store for him.

“Goodbye,” Nicholai said. “I hope we see each other again in better times.”

“We will,” Bay answered.

Bay gathered his men and headed out.

“We need to go,” Quoc said. His soldiers, thirty-odd veterans, started to heft the crates on bamboo poles and were already walking north.

Quoc began to limp after them.

The airplane came out of the east.

162

WING GUNS BLAZING, strafing the tree line, it came in low and out of the sun.

Three Viet Minh went down like toy soldiers knocked off a shelf.

The shells splintered trees, spraying shards of wood like shrapnel.

Nicholai tackled Solange and lay on top of her. The ground shook under them from the vibrations of the low- flying plane.

“Go now!” Quoc yelled as the plane rose to come around for another strafing run.

Nicholai got to his feet and pulled Solange up behind him and, hand in hand, they ran for the next rice paddy, racing to get over the exposed dike before the plane completed its turn. Its wings shone in the rising sun as it banked, came back, and dove, a hawk on the hunt.

They made it over the dike, but two more Viet Minh behind them weren’t as lucky and were picked off easily. Nicholai and Solange slid down the slope into the muck of the rice paddy and plunged under the surface.

Holding her hand as he held his breath, Nicholai tried to listen for the now muted popping of the guns and the sound of the plane’s engines as it climbed again. When he heard a higher-pitched whine he pushed up, and together he and Solange sloshed across the rice paddy.

Looking around, Nicholai saw that Quoc had survived the last attack and was waving them toward a copse of trees on the far side of the paddy. Ahead of them, the men carrying one of the crates made it over the top of the dike and disappeared from sight. Another Viet Minh lay down on his back on the dike and started to fire his machine gun up at the plane, which was now coming in behind them.

Solange jerked him down, and again they held their breath and felt the rounds zip into the water around them. When they came back up, the plane was climbing in front of them. It waggled its wings and kept flying away, apparently out of ammunition or low on fuel.

Nicholai and Solange made it across the paddy, over the dike, and into the copse of trees, where the Viet Minh were regrouping. Wounded porters fell out as other men took their place. Loads were shifted, weapons exchanged. A soldier who was apparently a medic gave rudimentary aid with the scant supplies at hand. Other men were beyond help, and lay dead or dying.

Nicholai found a rifle and picked it up. Solange draped the sling of a burp gun around her neck. They walked to the far edge of the trees. In front of them stretched a long rectangle of tall sword grass bordered on the right and left by paddy dikes. Beyond the grass rose another stand of trees.

“We’ll be safe once we get there,” Quoc said, pointing to the trees.

“Why is that?” Nicholai asked.

“We disappear.”

Nicholai had no patience for Zen metaphysics. If Quoc, whether he was really a monk or not, thought they were going to meditate themselves into thin air, Nicholai wanted a more mundane plan. The plane had flown off, but the pilot had certainly radioed their position to the patrols that were thick on the ground.

It wouldn’t be long before troops arrived, and they would run out of neither bullets nor fuel. The French troops and native militia that had been crisscrossing the countryside would converge in a neat, organized pattern and surround them. The sheltering trees would become a death trap, unless Quoc had an actual plan for escape.

“Our motherland will swallow us,” Quoc said.

Poetic, Nicholai thought, but hardly practical.

Of course his mind went to a different metaphor, the go-kang, and he saw it all too clearly. Their little pool of black stones would soon stretch into a thin line and progress toward Quoc’s apparently magic trees, there to group into a pool again. The white stones – and there were many more of them – were even now gathering around them.

Go players had a term for such an isolated, surrounded group.

Dead stones.

And, Nicholai recognized, the flat go-kang surface had become an anachronism. The ancients never anticipated modern airpower, which literally added another dimension to the game. They couldn’t have imagined stones floating above the board, delivering death and destruction below.

Nor, he had to admit, was Go a model for battle. The go-kang was serene, quiet, perfect in its organization and form. The modern battlefield was chaotic, noisy, hellish in the anarchy of its blood, carnage, and agony.

Modernity, he thought, has destroyed so much.

He forced his mind back to the reality on the ground. Trap or no, the copse on the far side of the grass was a better position than the one they now occupied, its size created a larger defensive perimeter from which to make a last stand. He made it to be a little less than a half mile away, so it should take only minutes to reach.

But the sword grass would be a painful impediment, although doubtless narrow foot and game trails had been cut through the chest-high blades. The burden of the weapons, especially now that there were fewer porters, would slow them down further.

Perhaps…

No, Quoc would never think of abandoning the weapons, and when Nicholai looked at it honestly, neither would he.

They had come at too high a cost.

The quiet behind told him that the Viet Minh were ready to move out.

He turned and saw that they would leave their dead comrades. Everything useful had been removed from their bodies.

“It comes at a high cost, your freedom,” Nicholai said.