toward her, mimicking what Ky Kieu was doing. It was like pulling the back bumper of a cement mixer — the pressure against them was immense.
“What’s wrong with this?” she said.
“Pull!” yelled Ky Kieu.
Mara put her right leg up against the instrument panel, using it as leverage. The wheel barely budged. She pulled her left foot up and put it against the other side, pushing with all her might.
Treetops loomed in the windscreen.
“Hold on!” yelled Kieu, adding a string of curses in Vietnamese.
The bottom of the fuselage slapped into the very top of one of the trees, which clawed at the plane like a cat raking its nails on a bird taking flight. There was a loud clunk behind them. The plane shook.
Then the sky in front of them cleared. They’d gone over the summit of the mountain.
“Now easy, easy,” said Kieu. “We have to level off. Don’t let go. Work with me.”
“I’m working with you.”
“Work with me. Easy. We turn now.”
Mara wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, except not let go. She eased forward as much as she dared, which wasn’t very much. The nose of the Yunshuji-5 began to come down.
My head feels light, Mara thought.
She looked down, thinking maybe she had been shot and was losing blood. Then she realized they must be so high over the mountains that the air they were breathing didn’t have enough oxygen to sustain them.
She reached for the mask. The plane immediately dipped forward.
“What are you doing?” screamed Ky Kieu.
“I need to breathe,” she said. She reached down and fished the mask from her lap, put it on, and opened the valve. Then she reached over to Kieu, who’d left his around his neck. He was exerting so much pressure on the yoke that his blood vessels looked as if they were going to pop.
“Breathe,” she told him, opening the oxygen.
Kieu began hyperventilating into the mask. Finally his brain caught up with his body, and the breathing began to slow down, approaching something close to normal.
“We need to find a place to land,” Mara told him.
“No shit, CIA.”
“I’m not CIA.”
Kieu said something in Vietnamese. Mara ignored him, putting her hands back on the wheel to help steady it. The plane still wanted to pitch forward, though the pressure wasn’t quite as strong as earlier.
“Do you think you can hold it by yourself for a minute?” asked Kieu.
“I’ll try,” she said, putting her feet back up and tightening her grip.
The aircraft lurched when he let go, but she was able to keep it from plunging into a dive. In the meantime, Kieu rose and pulled off his belt. Then he rigged a harness to hold the wheel, strapping it to the seats.
“Let go,” he told her.
“You sure?”
“Let go.”
Mara took her hands off the wheel. Its nose slid down a degree or two, but it remained on course.
“What happened?” Mara asked. She rubbed her arms, which were starting to cramp with fatigue.
“Some of those bullets must have taken out the hydraulic control system.”
“Isn’t there a backup?”
“Yes — brute strength. Just like in the old days.”
The bullets had also presumably chewed up the control surfaces, making even brute strength difficult to apply. Landing safely was now their only goal. Kieu unfolded Mara’s map and examined it.
“There’s a strip near Cham Chu,” he told her. “We’re on almost a direct line. But it’s about a hundred and seventy-five kilometers away. Very long to fly. More than halfway to Hanoi.”
“Can we make it?”
Kieu didn’t answer, but evidently he didn’t think so, as he continued to study the map.
“We look like we’re getting a little closer to the hills,” she said.
He handed her the map, then took the yoke again.
“Help adjust the belt,” he told her.
They slipped the belt slightly higher and, after a little trial and error, had the plane running perfectly level.
“It’s all right,” Kieu told her. “We’ll aim for Cham Chu. When we get close, we’ll decide if we can return all the way to Hanoi.”
“What if we can’t make Cham Chu?”
“Then we’ll look for a road or a field. We don’t need too long a stretch. The farther we go, the easier it will be.”
Mara decided she should call the desk in Bangkok to tell them something was going on. The trick was doing that without blowing her cover.
“I have a friend who’s a pilot in Bangkok,” she told Kieu. “Maybe he knows a place where we could land.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’ll call him just in case. I’m not doing anything else.”
Mara took her sat phone out of her pocket and called the desk. Jesse DeBiase picked up as soon as the connection went through.
“Jess, how are you?”
“Mara I’m fine — how are you?”
“I’m looking for an airfield in northwestern Vietnam.”
“Good God, girl — what have you gotten yourself into now?”
“Still trying to hunt down that scientist I told you about the other day,” she said. “But you wouldn’t believe what happened to us. There were trucks, and I think some sort of tanks, and they fired at us.”
Mara imagined what a real journalist would say in that situation, pretending to be shocked and maybe a little naive. DeBiase caught on, prompting her with questions as if he were simply a concerned friend, while still pumping her for information.
Their conversation didn’t last long. She hadn’t seen all that much.
“They’re over the line then, the Chinese?” asked DeBiase.
“I couldn’t really say.”
“You mean it’s hard for you to talk, right?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“But those were Chinese vehicles firing at you.”
“Probably.”
“I’m going to get someone to look for an airstrip,” he told her. “In the meantime — the NSA detected some radars being turned on near the border.” He read from the agency’s secure text communications system. “ ‘The radar profile is generally used in searches, usually coordinated with PLA air force aircraft.’ You may have company, Mara. I’ll get back to you.”
“Fantastic.”
She pushed the sat phone back into her pocket. One consolation — whatever Fleming knew, it was largely obsolete by now. Connecting with him was no longer important.
“What did your friend say?” asked Kieu.
“He knows someone who knows someone. He’s going to call back.”
“Soon?”
“Pretty soon.”
Kieu nodded. His face looked grimmer than before she had called.
“You want me to take over for you?” she asked.
“No. It’s not too bad.” He hesitated. “The problem is our fuel. We’re losing some out of the tanks. I can’t
