seem to isolate the problem. Each one must be leaking a little.”
Mara raised herself in the seat and began looking at the ground for a road. But the thick jungle made it hard to see.
The sat phone buzzed. Mara was so intent on looking for a place to land that it took her a few seconds to grab it from her pocket.
“There’s a town called Nam Det,” said DeBiase. “Can you find it?”
“Maybe.”
“You want to stay away from Lao Cai,” he added as she looked. “It’s right on the border. We think it will be one of the Chinese’s first targets.”
Mara unfolded the map and found Nam Det, a small dot in Lao Cai Province, twenty-five or thirty kilometers from the border and off the main roads.
“On the south side of the village, there’s a long field. We’ve uh, been familiar with it in the past,” DeBiase told her. “Relatively recently.”
“Okay.”
“The French used it right after World War II,” he added. “Some OSO people took off from there in 1946 on a mission, I’m guessing to China. They used a DC-3. Whatever you’re in should be able to land there.”
He was telling her that so she could share it with the pilot if he had any doubts. OSO was the Office of Special Operations, the interim agency between OSS and CIA.
“I’m looking at a sat photo,” said DeBiase. “There are rice paddies all around it. It stands out. There’s a little hamlet next to it; Nam Det is to the north, a kilometer maybe.”
“We’ll try to stay out of the rice.”
“We have another alert from the NSA. There are Chinese MiGs in the air. Our Air Force intel center confirms it. This is the whole shooting match here, Mara. The Chinese are going into that country.”
“Great.”
“Thought you’d want to know. You want me to stay on the line?”
“We can handle it from here, thanks.”
Kieu turned to her as she put her phone back into her pocket.
“So?”
“My friend says there’s an old field at Nam Det.”
“Nam Det? Where is that?”
She showed him.
“Your friend is sure?”
“His friend was very sure. And he brought an image up on Google Earth. He says a DC-3 could land there.”
“DC-3s haven’t flown for fifty years,” said Kieu. “What is he? Another spy?”
“I’m not a spy.”
“A drug smuggler?”
Mara gripped the handhold on the cockpit’s windshield pillar, peering down at the ground. According to the map they were a little under fifty kilometers away — maybe twenty minutes.
“Help me with the yoke a minute,” said Kieu. “We have to adjust our course to make that airfield.”
Mara put both hands back on the yoke. The aircraft didn’t seem to be fighting them quite as fiercely as it had before. Kieu tipped the wings very gently, steering the plane toward a beeline for the field. When he got on the proper heading, he reset the belt and told Mara she could take a break.
“If you see anything that looks like it might be big enough to land on, straight enough, let me know,” he told her.
“Sure.”
“From here, it would look like about two fingers long,” added Kieu. “Maybe a little less.”
Nothing below looked two fingers long, let alone the occasional squiggles of red and black roads that peered through the jungle canopy. A large portion of western and northern Vietnam had been clear-cut over the past ten years, but from here the terrain looked as thick and jungle-bound as ever.
Kieu’s hair, neck, and shirt were soaked with sweat. His cheeks looked as if they’d been sucked inward, and his forehead had furrowed to the point that it looked like a stairway to his scalp. He seemed to have lost about ten pounds and aged ten years in the past half hour. If the flight continues too much longer, Mara thought, he’ll shrivel into an old man.
“How’s the fuel look?” she asked, leaning over toward his side of the dash.
Kieu nodded back in her direction, indicating that the fuel panel was on the right side of the instrument array. She saw round dials with arrows pointing to the left, though with the symbols written in what looked like Chinese she had no idea what she was looking at.
“I’m sure we’ll make it,” she said.
Kieu mumbled something in Vietnamese. She didn’t quite catch the words, but it didn’t sound like “you bet.”
“We can do it,” Mara told him. “Think positive. Cut back on your speed to save gas.”
“The problem is the leak, not the speed,” he said. He reached over and flicked a silver switch on the panel. “We’re leaking at a constant rate. I have to up the speed. That’s our only hope.”
“Go ahead.”
“The engine is already flat out.”
“Don’t give up on me, Ky.”
He looked at her, utter despair in his face.
“We’re going to do it,” she told him. “Tell me how I can help.”
Mara studied him, hoping for some inspiration that might tell her how to buck up his morale — no matter how dire their situation might be, it would be that much worse if he didn’t believe he could deal with it.
“Get the map and let’s check our distance,” he told her. “I’m going to take it lower.”
It wasn’t the most optimistic statement in the world, but it was a start. Mara picked up the map and found Nam Det again.
“Show me,” said Kieu.
She did.
“Twenty-five kilometers,” he declared. “Almost there.”
“See?”
He nodded.
Suddenly, they pitched downward. A black cloud passed over the cockpit as Kieu grabbed the yoke.
Mara, recoiling in her seat, caught sight of a dagger-shaped blur crossing past the windscreen.
One of the Chinese MiGs had found them.
3
“Take the next truck, and follow me,” Jing Yo yelled to Wu. The rest of the commandos split themselves into two groups, climbing into the back of the trucks, where they jammed in with a platoon’s worth of regular troops.
The truck bucked as Jing Yo threw it into gear. He pulled forward, then made a U-turn, driving past the column of trucks that had stopped behind the Shaanqi.
The change in direction was too much for the unit commander, Captain Wi Lai, who had been sitting in the
