Shadows of War

12

Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

The huts had dried meat and some stores of vegetables, but the only food Josh trusted was the potatoes. He considered cooking them, but dismissed the idea as too dangerous. They tasted horrible raw, but he ate them anyway, devouring them as he walked up a path that started at the field above the hamlet and cut north, paralleling the road at the valley’s base. Going north made the most sense, he reasoned, because there would be soldiers at the border with China who would be able to help him. The border was only a few miles away, a day or at most two of walking.

The winding trail moved in and out of the jungle, cutting back against the slope as it went. Josh thought he would find a vantage at the top where he could look out over the surrounding countryside and get his bearings, but he was disappointed; the hill was dwarfed by its neighbors on all sides except the east, and there the trees were too narrow to support him as he climbed. After a few minutes, he couldn’t even see down to the village, let alone the road below.

Josh found another path heading east at the top of the hill. As he began down it, a large animal darted to the left, running through the trees into a small meadow about twenty yards from the path. He followed, thinking the animal was part of a grazing flock, maybe a small oxen or goat. Josh stepped warily, slipping among the trees as he got close to the field. There were three animals, about the size of deer though fatter, and with straight horns like goats might have — saolas, or Vu Quang oxen, native to northern Vietnam.

They looked at him warily, certainly aware that he was there, but apparently not afraid of him. When at last he rose and took a step from the woods, they darted away.

Back on the trail, Josh began thinking of the others on the expedition. He hadn’t known any of them for very long, but now they seemed like close friends. He thought of Ross, and Millie, the girl who was helping Dr. Renaldo. Fleming, the Belgian with the loud laugh. Phillip, a Chinese-American who preferred Scotch to beer and had taught him several Chinese curse words during a long night at a bar while trying to prove his point.

Dr. Renaldo himself, slightly cantankerous, especially in the morning before his third coffee — he always had four — yet generous to a fault.

All dead.

Grief rose in his chest, a physical thing, pain that eroded his bones and pricked at the underside of his skin.

How can I go on without them?

It was his parents he thought of, not the other scientists. He was a child again, afraid without his mother and father, alone.

No time for grief. Time for action. Move.

The pain was so intense Josh had to stop for a moment. He forced himself to move again, stopped, felt tears streaming down his cheeks.

I’ve gone through this already, he told himself. I will survive.

He tried to distract himself by repeating the facts he knew about Vietnam’s weather. He recounted, by rote, the average rainfall, and high and low temperatures of each month. He considered what the consequences of these were, as if he were delivering a lecture or discussing the matter with his doctoral advisers.

* * *

Sometime in late afternoon, with the sun sinking below the hills, Josh heard a helicopter. The sound shoved his thoughts about science away. His first reaction was to hide: he plunged into the jungle beyond the road, taking cover between the trees.

As he crouched against a trunk, he realized that hiding was not the thing to do. On the contrary, whoever was in the helicopter would probably help him, perhaps even fly him to safety. But he stayed back.

His sense of danger increased as the rotor of the chopper pounded heavier and heavier toward him. Finally it appeared, streaking down from the north, a long, dark machine, with a black cockpit and a thick tail. Missiles were stacked beneath the stubby wings, and a large round disk sat atop the rotor. To Josh, the aircraft looked like an American Apache, with a gun hanging beneath its pointed nose. But a star was painted in dull red on the side of the fuselage, faint but still visible to the naked eye.

The chopper skimmed so close to the trees that Josh thought it was going to crash. It thundered past, shaking the ground for more than a minute.

The path looped out of the trees onto a ridge. As he walked along it, Josh could see across to the hills on the other side. He continued a little farther and saw the road below — the same road I was on earlier, he thought, though of course now he was several miles farther north.

He could also see a faint glow in the distance where the road curved into the hills.

A village.

He wanted to run, but the glow was too far away to make that worthwhile. Instead, Josh picked up his pace, moving quickly, trying not to get too anxious.

His pants began to sag at his waist. He put his hands in the loops and held them as he went.

The path looped back into the jungle. The sun had gone below the ridge, and the ground before him was gray, filled with shadows. Josh kept moving, bending forward a bit and rehearsing his small store of Vietnamese.

The jungle became darker with each step, until finally he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. The winding lane dipped to the left, then climbed so sharply that Josh had to use his hands to help him scramble upward. Finally it leveled out, and the thick jungle canopy gave way to a purple-blue sky. Once again, Josh picked up his pace, moving along the edge of the trail as it skimmed yet another ridge.

A highway came into view down to his left. Nearly straight ahead, about a half mile away, he spotted a double fence topped by barbed wire. Lights played on the fence, cutting through the growing shadows.

It was the Chinese border.

13

Hanoi, Vietnam

Another American arriving at Noi Bai Airport outside Hanoi might have noted the irony of the terminal’s westernization in the decades since the end of the war. But Mara Duncan was too focused on her mission. Clearing customs — she was traveling on a regular passport, in keeping with her journalist cover — she walked through the relatively small terminal to the taxi queue. The cab was a brand-new Indian-made REVA, the recently introduced four-door hatchback model of the Standard, an electric car. It was eerily silent as it pulled away from the airport terminal building; only when they reached the highway and the driver floored it did she hear any noise, a high-pitched flutter that sounded more like an overachieving fan than the motor of a car.

Hanoi had grown over the past several years, but compared to Bangkok it looked like a sleepy Asian backwater, especially on the outskirts, where colonial-era buildings shouldered against plain-box new structures four and five stories high, with the occasional ancient historical building plopped incongruously in the middle. The traffic was not anywhere near as bad as elsewhere in Asia, but it still took nearly an hour on the two-lane highway for the taxi to reach center city, where her hotel was. She’d been booked into a new hotel called the Star; rising on the ashes of several much humbler structures, it boasted fifteen stories and a white stone facade turned turquoise by the evening light. Mara paid the driver and went inside.

They gave her a suite with a king-sized bed and a soaking tub lined with tiny bottles of perfumed oil. The bath looked tempting, but she was on too tight a schedule; there was barely enough time to check the room for bugs before going out.

Sure enough, she found a device embedded in one of the lamps in the sitting room, where it ran off current from the wall. It also appeared to use the electrical circuit to send its signal. While Mara hadn’t encountered the specific device before, she had considerable experience with other members of its family.