She turned her head toward him in the darkness and opened her eyes. “I know I will.”
“What hurts?”
“My head.”
“Can you move your arms? Careful,” he added quickly. “The army trucks are coming up the highway.”
As soon as Hyuen Bo demonstrated she had not broken any bones, Jing Yo gently removed her from his lap, laying her softly on the ground. He told her not to move.
“I want to see the trucks, what they are,” he whispered. Then he crawled away, moving carefully to a point a dozen meters away where he could see the road.
There were tanks as well as trucks. They made an easily discernible sound, their treads grinding against the smooth pavement of the highway. They were T-55s, and even if Jing Yo hadn’t been familiar with the whine of their engines from his time in Malaysia, he would have easily recognized them by their silhouettes and long gun barrels.
The crews were driving with their hatches open, anxious to escape the stifling interior. Jing Yo counted twenty-two before the line was broken by a pair of low-slung command vehicles. The sharp angles at the front indicated they were probably BTR-40s, very old trucks that were still used for various purposes by the Vietnamese.
A second group of tanks followed, this one bigger than the first, with the tanks taking two files rather than one. Most of these were T-55s as well, but there were bigger tanks mixed in, T-59 main battle tanks. Jing Yo counted thirty-two.
Supply vehicles followed, then towed artillery. Jing Yo concluded that he was looking at elements from three or four different units, perhaps tank battalions stripped from their normal infantry division and rushed north to reinforce whatever was trying to bog down the advance at the reservoir the soldiers had mentioned earlier. He thought of using his phone to warn of the advance, but realized that would be foolish. For one thing, the Chinese air force would undoubtedly be watching, either by satellite or by UAV. For another, his mission required complete secrecy, and every use of the phone threatened that.
Jing Yo crawled back to Hyuen Bo. She had pulled herself upright, and sat with her knees curled against her chest.
“Is the scooter okay?” she asked.
“We’ll check it in a minute. There may be other trucks coming,” said Jing Yo. “There are always stragglers.”
“In every army?”
“It’s universal.”
He knelt next to her, wanting to inspect her head for cuts. She misinterpreted his intentions and turned to kiss him. He tried to pull back but her lips pressed into his, and he yielded to her insistence. She unfolded her arms and they moved into an embrace. Worried that they might be seen above the weeds, Jing Yo leaned to his right, bringing her down gently to the ground with him.
They stayed like that for nearly a half hour. There were several stragglers, all troop trucks.
Finally, Jing Yo renewed his resolve and pushed himself back up to his knees. Hyuen Bo clung to him.
“We have to check the scooter,” he told her. “We can’t stay here.”
The bike started right up. He didn’t realize the front wheel was badly bent until he tried to drive it out of the quarry. The scooter bucked violently, its wheel wobbling.
They worked together to fix it. Hyuen Bo found a pair of large rocks, and helped anchor the bike in place while Jing Yo used his feet as levers, returning the hub to round.
Or almost round. The scooter pulled to the right once they were on the highway. But it was far better than walking, and even at forty miles an hour, Jing Yo found he could hold it steady with relatively little pressure.
They drove for roughly another hour, still on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Nearing Thai Hoa, Jing Yo got off to use local roads. He ran into a pair of roadblocks almost immediately. At the first, a bored Vietnamese sergeant barely looked at their papers before waving them away. The soldiers manning the second, however, told them that the curfew was being strictly enforced. They threatened to put them in jail until Hyuen Bo began to sob. They relented, but insisted the pair find a place to stay until dawn, warning that other patrols would be stricter, and that sooner or later they would be arrested.
Jing Yo was wondering whether to take this advice to heart when he heard a high-pitched whistle in the distance.
He reached his hand to his chest where Hyuen Bo’s were, grasping them and squeezing. In the next moment, there was a low crash, the sound thunder makes when lightning splits trees ten or twelve miles away.
White light flashed in the distance ahead. The flashes looked like signals sent from a ship in the distance, whiteness streaming through shutters opening and closing.
The sound of the explosions followed.
And then, finally, air-raid sirens began to sound. Antiaircraft weapons began spewing streams of tracers into the air. The ground shook with a dozen different vibrations, and the air popped with rounds as they were expelled. Searchlights began to sweep the clouds. Jing Yo heard jets in the distance.
He angled back toward the highway. It took several minutes to find it. Just before he did, he heard the whistle of bombs falling toward him.
Or thought he did. Jing Yo reasoned later that if he had truly heard the bombs, he would have been blown up by their explosions. And he was not blown up, merely covered with dust and severely rattled. The ground heaved violently and he nearly went over, but with all of the other sounds and chaos, it was impossible to say if the concussions were nearby or not.
Hyuen Bo tightened her hold on his chest.
“Hang on,” he said, squeezing the throttle. “We must get as far south as we can while the attack continues.”
19
The air strikes began with a fury of explosions, half a dozen cruise missiles striking ahead of the airplanes. At first, the Chinese seemed to be aiming at a Vietnamese division headquarters, which was located along the Ho Chi Minh Highway south of the city. But within minutes, unguided bombs were falling in a broad semicircle that took in the residential areas of the city. Some missiles in a third wave even fell on nonmilitary targets, striking the buildings on the eastern side of the highway and flattening the business area beneath a tremendous red and black mushroom cloud.
“Caught a gasoline tank,” said Kerfer. “The Chinese aren’t pulling many punches.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to,” said Mara.
“You know them well?”
“I fought against their commandos in Malaysia. They’re bastards.”
Kerfer remained silent. Maybe, she thought, that was his way of apologizing for having underestimated her.
Probably not. He wasn’t the sort that apologized for anything, not even subtly.
“Now’s the best time to drive,” said Kerfer as the planes flew off. “Everybody’ll be hunkered down.”
“They’ll be nervous, too.”
“They’re always nervous.”
Mara watched for a few more seconds. Fires burned in the distance, the fingers of a man buried alive groping from the grave.
“I wish to hell you hadn’t shot up that train car,” Mara told Kerfer.
