34

November 2, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam–Savannakhet, Laos

Tucker left just after 4 A.M. During their last half hour together Blackford decided what he would do. He could keep his word, of course—it was much easier to do than Tucker expected, given that Rufus and South Vietnamese intelligence knew about Lao Dai. He could bring in ARVN Intelligence or for that matter U.S. Intelligence, bring them into the picture in the sense of advising them that, just possibly, Major Tucker Montana would not be going back to Savannakhet. But if he did that, Tucker would be on a kind of CIA–Judge Advocate General–Pentagon assembly line and any hope of dealing creatively with the Montana problem would be gone. As Tucker talked, of this and that—of his childhood, of Fr. Enrique, of Los Alamos—Blackford decided that the key was Alphonse Juilland. As far as Alphonse was concerned, Blackford Oakes, and only Blackford Oakes, was his superior. He could instruct Alphonse to do anything, and he would do it. And Alphonse, with his knowledge of Vietnamese, could travel anywhere more inconspicuously than any American, and if Alphonse was ignorant of intelligence practice, as he insisted he was, he was not in the least ignorant of ways to get by in Indochina—whom to bribe, how, with how much, how to get information not readily available.

Five minutes after Tucker left, he had Alphonse on the telephone.

He instructed him to be on the 6 A.M. flight to Saigon, to call the duty officer and arrange to have a naval officer sit in at Oakes’s office in Danang. He should be instructed to tell anyone who called in for Mr. Oakes that he was out of the office but would be back “in the afternoon,” and could the naval officer take a message for Mr. Oakes? He should call the technician from Aberdeen and tell him to proceed without Oakes on the scanner tests. He gave Juilland the address of the safe house: “I will expect to see you at about seven-thirty.” He hung up the phone. Tucker: That poor, wretched, complicated, endearing man. He hoped Rufus would not call in. His own calendar called on him to be in Danang. Perhaps he could still catch the 10 A.M. flight. He hoped desperately that Tucker would telephone him with his decision early. If not, Tucker might call him in Danang, perhaps even leave a message with the naval aide. That message: Either Tucker Montana would be returning to duty in Nakhom Phanom, or—?

That, three hours later he explained to Alphonse, was his responsibility: to follow Major Montana and to find out when Major Montana goes if he does go to Savannakhet, and from there to Nakhom Phanom. “I know you never laid eyes on him when he was giving us help with the Tonkin raid, but you talked over the telephone. Probably you would recognize his voice. What I don’t have is a picture of him, which would be useful right now. But he doesn’t look like many other people. He’s as tall as Gregory Peck—you know the American movie star? Good. And in fact he looks a lot like Gregory Peck, and his hair is exactly like Peck’s. He is almost always traveling with a large, I mean, a very large”—Blackford spread out his hands—“briefcase, brown, with a lot of old airplane stickers on it. You have to spot him if he goes to the airport—when he goes to the airport. Whatever flight he goes on, I want you on it. Even if it’s a flight to Savannakhet. If he lands there and goes on to his office or to his apartment, call me and come on back. If he goes anywhere else, I want to know where. Here,” he was glad he had picked up the Danang payroll from Rufus yesterday, “is all the money you could possibly need. Share some of it with the reservations and ticket people at the airport. Don’t let them tell you there’s not another seat on any plane Montana gets into.”

Nine o’clock, no word from Tucker. No word at nine-thirty. He initiated the call, but Tucker’s number didn’t answer, and he was not going to call Lao Dai, though he had filed away her number. Too late to get the ten o’clock to Danang. He would wait until ten, then rush out for the eleven o’clock flight. He called and switched his reservations. Ten o’clock, no call. Blackford hurried to the street and got a taxi.

When two hours later he walked into his own office he greeted the sleepy lieutenant (jg) on duty, who had been aroused by Juilland at five that morning. “Messages?”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant looked down on the desk and read out the message he had taken. “A Mr. Montana. He said to tell you he was taking a couple of days off to hunt boar with an old friend in Laos. He’ll give you a buzz when he gets back to his office in—” the lieutenant stumbled over the pronunciation of Nakhon Phanom. “All right, sir?”

Blackford thanked him and dismissed him. No call from Rufus, he noted. And no call from Juilland.

At Savannakhet, on the Thai border and the nearest commercial airport to Nakhon Phanom, Tucker descended with his old labeled briefcase in hand and waited in the baggage room for his suitcase. He looked carefully about the large tin-roofed shelter, lit up by neon bulbs around which the flies and the mosquitoes buzzed. He was familiar with the two ancient men who acted as porters, and with the woman at the dispatch desk. Only three other passengers waited for luggage. They had been seated several rows ahead of him on the DC-3. Two of them had sat together talking in Chinese. The third, a younger man, perhaps in his thirties, was absorbed by a crossword puzzle and by a photograph album which he opened three times on the flight. Tucker could see pictures of a young woman and a baby, the baby only a few months old, photographed in every conceivable pose including seated on the potty. The young man closed the album with palpable reluctance.

Tucker’s bag came down the slide. He picked it up and went out toward the roadway. He shook his head kindly at the toothless stick of a man who beckoned him toward his taxi. Seconds later a modern Peugeot sedan, dusty, stopped beside him. The driver said in French, “We have been sent by Madame Lao Dai.”

The passenger door was opened by the man in back, and Tucker got in. The driver meanwhile took Tucker’s suitcase to put in the trunk. He reached also for Tucker’s briefcase, but Tucker declined to relinquish it. The doors now closed, the car started up. The man at his side, wearing a deep blue shirt open at the collar, and cotton pants, leaned over, his hand extended. “I am Bui Tin.”

“Tucker Montana.”

During the thirty-five-minute drive to the Thai inn whose telephone number Tucker had taken the pains to memorize, and which he had called that morning, by way of establishing its bona fides as a functioning inn, Bui Tin spoke without pausing. (Tucker had asked for an imaginary Mr. Chung Leh, the operator had taken a moment or two, evidently looking through her records, and come back: “Sorry, sir, there is no Mr. Chung Leh staying at the Lao-tse Inn.”) Colonel Bui Tin talked about the history of this easternmost part of Thailand, about the many military skirmishes that had taken place here against the Japanese during the war, about the prospects for that year’s rice crop.

Tucker hardly listened, thinking back always to the tearful Lao Dai, so shaken by the events of yesterday, so insistent, finally, that at the very least Tucker, whom she loved above all mortal beings, living and dead, should meet with her cousin by marriage, Colonel Bui Tin, who was in charge of developing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “You would be meeting in neutral territory, my darling Tucker. What can happen there? And what is wrong with meeting and hearing the viewpoint of my cousin? You are two very important historical people. His job is to construct the Trail, your job is to make the Trail useless. It is what might happen if you succeed that worries me most, so much so that I can think of very little else, just of more Bien Hoas, oh darling.”

She fell into his arms, exhausted by their three-hour exchange. She did not try to entice him to her bed. She was too afraid, she said, too obsessed with her thoughts and fears. It was then that he had said, his mind a blur, “All right. I’ll see him.”

Lao Dai’s eyes brightened. “You will!”

Lao Dai said she must immediately make the right contact. She would need to go to the public telephone. She would be back in perhaps fifteen minutes.

She was back in forty minutes, glowing with pleasure and affection. Could he leave the following day on the noon flight to Savannakhet, “where you fly to anyway”? Leave word that he is on a hunting trip with friends? If he could catch that flight, her cousin would be there to pick him up. Tucker told her he was already booked on that flight. Now I must go. He kissed her, and went to the bar to telephone Blackford at Danang.

During the six and a half hours of discussions that began at six in the evening and were uninterrupted by the simple meal brought in at eight, Colonel Bui Tin made not a single unfriendly reference to the United States. Quite the contrary, he paid the United States full tribute for the war of liberation against the Japanese, with maybe the exception (Bui Tin bowed his head) of the atomic bomb, about which he had serious moral misgivings.

But the United States simply did not understand the motives of the North Vietnamese. Granted, they were—the North Vietnamese and the American people—attached to different political philosophies. It would after all be unnatural if that were not the case, given the different history of the two peoples, would it not? The Vietnamese were a proud race, plagued by strangers from abroad and neighbors from the Indochinese peninsula for centuries. Their experience was different from that of the Pilgrims who settled in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But one thing that was critical to this discussion, which Major Montana had to accept as a constant, was the North Vietnamese determination.

They see what they call the liberation of the South as a sublime and holy goal, and every last one of them—of us—would die to see it accomplished. To that end, Bui Tin whispered, President Ho had wrested very significant concessions from the governments of the Chinese and the Russian people. Peking and Moscow were not only helping the North Vietnamese in their war of liberation right then as the two gentlemen were speaking, in the most civilized way, but were prepared to go much further—I dare not be too specific about this, Bui Tin said—much, much further, if necessary, to accomplish our goal, which they too hold to be sacred. They are prepared to go right to—the brink.

And who knows, when nations in a nuclear age go to the brink, is it ever certain that they can just—stop? Bui Tin asked a philosophical question: Was there ever a war entered into willingly, which one combatant retrospectively would have engaged in if he had known its outcome? Imagine General Tojo authorizing the attack on Pearl Harbor if he could have known that five years later he would be swinging from a gibbet! Imagine Adolf Hitler marching into Russia if he had had a preview of his last days in the bunker! Imagine what prophetic knowledge would have done to quiet the enthusiasm in Athens for the last stage of the Peloponnesian War! What Carthaginian would willingly have provoked Rome if he could have seen the wasteland that was left of the great city its citizens had inhabited and taken such pride in?

In this respect, Colonel Bui Tin and Major Tucker Montana were as one, were they not? Neither wished to contribute to the destruction of their two countries. And what North Vietnam wished was so modest historically, so modest geographically: the end of the false division between North and South.

“Yes, sure. But we don’t see that and we’re preparing to knock the shit out of your supply line along the Trail, Colonel.”

Bui Tin smiled. “We know that you have in your hands the technology to prolong the struggle, to cause many more casualties, in the North and in the South—what a little preview Bien Hoa was of the horrors that lie ahead. And if American troops come there will be many casualties, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, but the end will always be the same.”

“But wait a minute, Colonel. If we stop you at the Trail, how’re you going to keep going?”

Bui Tin told him that they would simply find other means. There was no way the Americans could stop the passage of the spirit of liberation from crossing rivers and mountains, oceans and rice paddies, seizing the heart of the people.

“You mean seizing the heart of the people by shooting them and torturing them. Come on, Colonel.”

Bui Tin explained that he was as much appalled by the practice of warfare as the major, even though the two were professional soldiers. Bui Tin explained that he had been brought up in a Catholic school in Hué, and knew both by education and by experience how precious human life was. But what matters is the objective. He didn’t know, granted, whether, if he, Bui Tin, had the authority to drop an atom bomb, he would exercise that authority by going ahead and dropping it on Saigon. But short of an atom bomb, guerrilla warfare, by whatever it was called—look at Algeria!—had always been the same, throughout recorded time. There wasn’t any way to keep people from using force and violence to advance objectives they thought themselves spiritually committed to.…

At about eleven, Colonel Bui Tin asked whether Major Montana would join him in a glass of cognac. His father, he said, had been a devoted cognac drinker, back in the Hué days, and even as a young man he had been infected with the habit, and liked every now and then to refresh his recollection of the French—miracle.

After so long a talk and all those questions and debate, Tucker was delighted at the idea. He reached into his briefcase and brought out a package of cigars, offering one to Colonel Bui Tin, who declined with a smile. “I used to. But they are too scarce now. I have put them away until—until Liberation Day.”

Cognac in hand, Tucker asked a pointed question. “What would it mean if the Trail were clear to you?”

“Just this: The end of the war after maybe one year, instead of five, six years. That, and much more: Avoiding any possibility of a nuclear war.”

Tucker emptied his glass, and put it out absentmindedly to accept a refill. They talked another hour, and Tucker announced he would turn in. They shook hands.

In his bed he tried to sleep, gave it up. He had to think. He thought first about Lao Dai. There could be no mistaking the love she felt for him. That was a given. He thought then of the sacrifices she had been prepared to make. He found himself admiring, in a professional way, what she had done. Who was he, who had machine-gunned forty-one Huks, to criticize her deceptions? And then the points she made, and those Bui Tin had made, paraded by his mind. And, there was no way to avoid it, he felt the same seizure he had felt a week or two after his flight on the Enola Gay after he had seen the pictures—hundreds of pictures, clinically reviewed by his colleagues: the pictures of the aftermath of total war.

He began to sweat. He was afraid of that particular sweat. It had hit him at Los Alamos, and again in one of his conversations with Fr. Enrique, after he had left the hospital where he had been given something or other that kept him, those three weeks, only half conscious, trying to drive those pictures out of his mind. And, of course, the jeep episode with Lao Dai …

It was only after he had come to his solemn conclusion that he finally slept, just as the dawn came.

They did not wake him. It was eleven when he suddenly snapped up from a deep, serene sleep. He dressed and went down to the dining room. A waitress was there and he asked for coffee, and for Colonel Bui Tin.

Back in the colonel’s suite, Tucker began.

“Do you know, I think you’re right, Colonel. Now, that doesn’t mean I like your system of government. I hate it. If I lived there I’d do my best to assassinate Ho.” He looked up at Bui Tin. Had he gone too far?

His host smiled, in patient understanding of his guest’s position. He said only, “President Ho is mortal, Major Montana.”

Tucker resumed. “What makes you think I could clear the Trail for you?”

“I don’t think you can, Major. If … reports of what you are doing in Nakhon Phanom are accurate about the technology you are amassing, you will make it very difficult. Especially in the two passes. It is very sad, because obviously you cannot persuade the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon to cancel the project.”

“You kidding? If you think for one minute that your line of thinking would sell in official Washington, you’re crazy. No. They’re not going to stop work on the Trail. But …” Tucker hesitated. His last hesitation. He put down his glass. “What I can do is teach you how to beat our Spikebuoys.”

“Spikebuoys?” Bui Tin feigned ignorance of the contents of Tucker’s thirty-two-page notebook, which he and Vietnamese and Soviet technicians had been studying for two weeks.

“Yuh. They’re the pivotal devices of our Igloo operation, as we call it. They’re designed to send the signals to our computers, which will relay the information to bombers and fighter planes.”

Colonel Tin looked forlorn.

“The thing of it is,” Tucker said, “I could develop a counterweapon. Something that would make the Spikebuoys useless.”

Suddenly Tucker Montana, scientist, was engrossed again, as he had been years before, searching for a trigger mechanism, now beginning the search for a device that might remove a trigger. “It’s a matter of getting at their frequency and displacing it. High-tech dislocators, but doable in the field. Lead scout comes upon the first Spikebuoy, a truck comes in equipped with the right stuff.” Each Spikebuoy has a separate frequency, he thought. “You’d need to envelop the aboveground portion of the Spikebuoy in a copper flyscreen. At the bottom of the flyscreen you’d need a braided copper wire a few feet long, soldered to the screen on one end and soldered to a copper pointed rod at the other end. You got to then stick a carefully shielded antenna, connected to a portable frequency analyzer in there. A technician slams a big sledgehammer on the ground and the Spikebuoy broadcasts an alarm. But it doesn’t go anywhere except into the analyst’s frequency analyzer. Do that along the whole Spikebuoy fence and then load the frequencies into a kind of sequencer. You can destroy the Spikebuoys and then set a series of transmitters to those frequencies. The sequencer will activate the transmitters and provide the same sounds the Spikebuoys would have broadcast if trucks or troops were being heard. Only you’d do this at the other edge of the pass. Aircraft would attack where the Spikebuoys had been—and then your trucks and troops go through fast after the attack is over. There are lots of details. For instance, the truck would need to be heavily protected by wet blankets or canvas over its hood, prevent infrared detection. And over its body too, to protect against radiation of heat by the crew and their electronics. But I guess I’m just telling you all this. It can be done. I know how to do it.”

At last, Tucker thought. The elusive trigger. The huge cloud. The charred figures at table. The blur, the dizziness as he had fought for consciousness. Study the problem, solve the engineering question. Yes … more. But now he was maybe preventing a nuclear war.

Bui Tin drew a deep breath.

“You would be willing to teach us how?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Now. Tomorrow. It’s all here. In my head. No point in postponing it, is there?”

“No point at all, Major.”