It was a bottle.
Mara straightened, walked again. There was no box here, nothing but weeds and a few stones.
Mara retraced her steps to the bottle and knelt down, patting with her hands in the weeds until she found it. It was a Coke bottle, an old-fashioned, hourglass-shaped Coke bottle.
And there were no other bottles in the area, or along the tracks now that she thought about it. Trash like that wouldn’t be unusual in America, where railroad tracks were often used as open-air trash bins, but in Southeast Asia, northern Vietnam especially, trash was a valuable commodity. An intact bottle had dozens of potential uses.
Including, perhaps, a signal that the box was buried below.
She poked the dirt with her fingers. The ground in front of her was hard, but the weeds to her right came up easily.
They’d been removed, then replaced.
Her fingers scraped the top of the footlocker within a few seconds, but it took her nearly ten minutes to clear enough of the dirt away so she could lift the box from the ground. She stopped several times, listening, still afraid that this might be a trap.
As she reached for the latch, she hesitated again, worried that it might be booby-trapped. It had been left by a contact sent by the CIA station at the American embassy — a station she knew had been penetrated by Vietnamese spies. It was because of that breach that she had been sent to Vietnam in the first place; then the war had begun, and her mission morphed from routine to
Would someone who wanted to kill her go to the trouble of burying the box? He’d have just left it out where it would easily be found.
But burying it would make her drop her guard. Burying it might lull her into complacency. Burying it would be exactly the sort of precision, the exact attention to detail, to expect from a smart enemy.
There was no way really to know. Mara took her folding knife from her pocket and opened it, teasing the latch. She started to run the point around the edge — but what was the point?
Because she mustn’t drop her guard, ever. She’d learned that lesson many times, long before Vietnam.
Mara worked the knife around the box, opposite the latch. When she reached the first hinge, she pushed it in, levering it up.
The hinge snapped. She froze for a moment, then lowered her ear to listen.
“Shit, you gonna kiss it next?”
Mara dove over the box, pistol raised. She just barely kept herself from firing at the voice behind her.
She would have hit the driver, not Kerfer, who was standing behind him, MP-5 in the poor man’s ribs.
“Calm the fuck down,” said Kerfer.
“You’re lucky you aren’t dead,” said Mara, getting up for her knife.
“Jesus H. Christ — you really think one of your own people booby-trapped it?” said the SEAL.
Mara ignored him. She snapped off the second hinge.
“Stand back,” she said, first in English, then in Vietnamese. “Just in case.”
Kerfer snickered, but he pulled the driver back a few steps with him. Mara slid the top to the left, then to the right, then finally pushed it open.
There were old clothes on top. She took her small LED penlight and shone it around the interior of the box. Two AK-47s, ammunition, a satellite radio, two cell phones, which most likely would be worthless, and maps. A backpack.
That was it.
Mara unfolded the backpack, made sure it was empty. She looked at the clothes — peasant wear, useful in the countryside but out of sync here, and in any event similar to what she already had — a black pair of baggy pants, Vietnamese style, with a longish black shirt.
She took the weapons, made sure the box was empty. Then, following an impulse, she dropped down and examined the hole again, digging deeper and on the sides. But the ground was hard. She worked her light around, making sure there was nothing else.
“We set?” asked Kerfer, standing over her.
Mara didn’t answer. She rose, and tossed him one of the rifles.
“Come on,” she said, heading for the car.
“You expecting something else?” Kerfer asked.
“Money,” she said. “A lot of money. The fucks.”
4
The near misses suited Jing Yo fine. They meant the pilot was doing his job. Stealth was all-important.
“Hanoi is ahead,” said the man.
He was a member of the air commando brigade. Jing Yo knew him slightly; his unit had worked on some exercises with the brigade the year before.
“Third time I’ve been here,” said the pilot when Jing Yo didn’t reply. “Twice last night. Fires get brighter.”
He seemed to mean that as a joke.
“Won’t be much left to burn soon,” added the pilot. “Uh-oh, watch out!”
The plane tilted abruptly to the right. A yellow cone of light rose just behind them: a searchlight, activated by someone who had either seen a shadow or somehow heard the heavily muffled engine.
The plane began to rock. A stream of red and yellow fire arced into the air above, first behind them, then all around them.
“Hang on,” said the pilot. The bonhomie was gone from his voice; he spoke like a machine, cold and impersonal.
Jing Yo welcomed the change.
The intelligence service had identified his subject: an American scientist named Joshua MacArthur. He was in Hanoi, but not at the embassy — the service had excellent contacts there, and the briefer assured Jing Yo that they would know if he was there. A spy had been designated as a local contact, and important information would be delivered by sat phone if necessary, but for the most part, Jing Yo was on his own.
The plane zigged to the left, then to the right, then turned hard in a bank. It seemed to Jing Yo that they were turning around. He waited by the door, silent, watching the fires in the distance. On an ordinary night before the war, there would have been at least a few lights on below, and many more in the distance, in Hanoi itself. But now it was a black hole in the landscape, marked only by fires and a few searchlights.
More lights flashed on. They worked across the sky, pens crossing out sections they had examined. The pilot ducked around them, trying to fly into the areas where they weren’t.
Fountains of red appeared, fresh gushes in the night. Their glow came from tracer rounds, showing the gunners where their bullets were going. The tracers were loaded every five or six bullets — Jing Yo wasn’t sure; perhaps it was even less. So for every streak he saw, there were several more bullets he couldn’t see. The slugs were large, thick pieces of metal the size of a clenched fist. They would tear through the light aircraft like a knife poking through paper. One hit and the tiny airplane would go down.
“Three minutes,” said the pilot calmly.
