94
T
HE NORMAL ROUTE
of arms shipments from China to Vietnam, Yu explained, was through Lang Son, across the border, and directly into the north of Vietnam, where the Viet Minh had secure sanctuaries in the mountainous jungles.
But they were not going to take that route.
The rocket launchers were needed in the south, not the north.
“That is information that our enemies would pay dearly to obtain,” Yu said.
Indeed it is, Nicholai thought. Since its last disastrous effort in the south, the Viet Minh had confined their activities to the north. But now it appeared that, if armed with the new weaponry, they were planning to launch a new southern front.
The northern Viet Minh were dominated by the Soviets, the southern were more independent or allied with China. A successful southern offensive would shuffle the geopolitical deck in Asia.
Yu was playing a deep game.
Given the fact that the weapons had to go to the southern Viet Minh units, there was only one possible route, down the Lekang River into Laos.
It would be no easy feat, he explained. The Lekang ran through deep gorges with boiling rapids and sharp rocks that could pierce the hulls of boats like eggshells. The river was not easily navigable until south of the town of Luang Prabang, deep into Laos.
Luang Prabang itself would present problems. They would have to switch boats there for the rest of the journey, and the area was rife with spies and French special forces.
And then there was the Binh Xuyen.
“What’s the Binh Xuyen?” Nicholai asked.
“Pirates,” Yu answered.
“Pirates?” Nicholai asked. It seemed a tad anachronistic.
Originally river pirates from the vast Rung Sat marshes south of Saigon, the Binh Xuyen, now opium merchants, virtually controlled that city. Their leader, a former convict named Bay Vien, supported the Viet Minh, but had changed sides and was now a close ally of the puppet emperor Bao Dai and his French masters. As a reward, Bay Vien controlled drugs, gambling, and prostitution in Saigon, and used the resulting vast wealth to acquire modern arms and equipment.
“That’s Saigon,” Nicholai said. “What does Bay Vien have to do with Laos?”
“It’s where the opium comes from,” Yu answered.
The Viet Minh used to buy raw opium in the mountains east of Luang Prabang and sell it to buy weapons, but through bribery, intimidation, and assassinations, the Binh Xuyen had virtually taken control of the Laotian opium trade.
Luang Prabang swarmed with Binh Xuyen. Yu went on, “A Viet Minh agent will meet you there and escort you into Vietnam.”
Nicholai noted the shift to the second-person singular and mentioned it.
“This is why we require your services,” Yu said. “My superiors have decided that they cannot take the risk of my getting captured in French territory.”
He told Nicholai how he would be contacted in Luang Pra-bang and later in Saigon, and then resumed his briefing.
In Laos, the Lekang changed its name to the Mekong as it flowed through Cambodia into the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The delta would be a challenge — not only would they have to evade the patrols of the French army and the Foreign Legion, but they would have to make their way through a network of blockhouses and forts.
Worse still, the Mekong Delta was patrolled by well-armed militias allied to the French occupiers.
“Where do I deliver the weapons?” Nicholai asked.
“We don’t know.”
“That would make it difficult.”
Yu explained, “In Saigon you will be told where to rendezvous with a Viet Minh agent code-named Ai Quoc, to whom we will deliver the weapons. Quoc is one of the most wanted men in the country, in hiding even now. He’s survived a score of assassination attempts and the French have a huge reward on him. You won’t be told his location until the last possible moment.”
Nicholai mentally reviewed the obstacles — the river, the Binh Xuyen, the French, their Vietnamese militias, and then locating the elusive Ai Quoc.
“So basically,” he said, “this is a suicide mission.”
“It does have that aspect,” Yu answered. “If you want to change your mind, now is the time.”
“I don’t.”
“Very well.”
“We have an arrangement, then?” Nicholai asked.
Yu shook his hand.
Nicholai found Xue Xin at his usual task of trimming vines.
“I came to say goodbye,” Nicholai said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure,” Nicholai answered, then decided that he owed a better answer. “To find my
satori
.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then I will keep my eyes open,” Nicholai answered.
“We will meet again,” Xue Xin said. “In this life or another.”
Nicholai felt an emotion welling up inside him, something he had not felt since the death of General Kishikawa. “I cannot tell you how much you have meant to me.”
“You don’t need to,” Xue Xin said. “I know.”
Nicholai knelt and bowed, touching his forehead to the ground. “Thank you. You are my teacher.”
“And you mine,” Xue Xin said.
Then the monk knelt back down and resumed his work, serene in the knowledge that Nicholai Hel had determined his destiny.
We will meet again, he thought.
95
Y
U HAD LEFT
the crates of weaponry in the care of a local battalion commander.
Colonel Ki’s belly hung out over his belt, an indication that life was good for a commander in the remote hills of Yunnan. He treated Yu and Nicholai to a very good lunch of fish, vegetables, and mounds of rice, served by an orderly who virtually salivated as he presented each dish.
“I’ll take command of a squad of your soldiers,” Yu said to Colonel Ki, “and we’ll need some of the local Puman as porters.”
“To Lang Son?”
“To the river,” Yu answered. “We will take them from there.”
“Perhaps,” Ki said, “you have misunderstood what ‘Lekang’ really means in Chinese.”
“It means Unruly Waters,” Nicholai answered.
“Unruly to say the least,” Ki commented with the expression of mild sympathy that one gives to an acquaintance who has just embarrassingly revealed that he is terminally ill. But there was money to be made. “For a nominal fee, I can provide boats.”
“I have already arranged for the boats.”
Ki inwardly cursed the rivermen who had sold their services without gaining his permission or giving him his cut, and worried how such a transaction could occur without his knowledge. “An escort, then? You are four days’ march from the river, and despite the party’s heroic efforts, there are still bandits in these mountains.”
“Bandits?”
“Bad people,” Ki said, shaking his head. “Very bad people.”
The porters shouldered the heavy crates on bamboo poles down the steep mountain trail, slippery with mud from the recent rains. The short legs and long trunks of these Puman tribesmen gave them an advantage that Nicholai did not possess as each step jarred his already sore knees and ankles. While the climb up from the last valley had been grueling, the descent down into the next was simply painful, and Nicholai thought that the route more than lived up to its sobriquet, “the Dragon’s Tail.”
They’d been on it for three days now, with another day yet to go before they reached the river and the boats.
The soldiers that Yu commandeered went out ahead and along the flanks. Some had Chinese “burp guns” slung over their shoulders, others carried captured American Mi rifles. At each pause in the day, and at their camps for the night, Yu gathered the soldiers and conducted study sessions on Marxist theory and Maoist thought.
Communism, Nicholai thought. It promises to make everyone equally rich and instead makes everyone equally poor.
During a break in the march one day, Nicholai took out a pack of cigarettes, shook out two, and offered one to Yu.
“French,” Yu observed. “They are very good, I think.”
“Take one,” Nicholai said. “You’re allowed the occasional bourgeois indulgence.”
A man needs a whiff of sin now and then, Nicholai thought, or he becomes something not quite a man. Yu took the proffered cigarette with an expression of delicious guilt. Nicholai lit it for him and Yu took a long drag. “It is very good. Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
Yu took two more short, disciplined puffs, carefully snuffed the cigarette out on the ground, put the butt in his shirt pocket, and buttoned it.
Nicholai thought of Solange, and missed her.
“Is there a girl at home?” he asked Yu.
“As a revolutionary,” Yu answered, “I have no time for bourgeois concepts such as romantic love.”
“So there is.”
Yu allowed himself a shy smile. “She is also a revolutionary. But perhaps someday, when the revolution has been established … You?”
“Yes. A French girl.”
“And you think about her.”
“Yes.”
After three years in prison, Nicholai thought he had come to terms with loneliness. Its return to his internal life was a mixed blessing. But, yes, he thought about Solange.
Too often and not often enough.
He took the next painful step down the mountain.
They stopped for the night at a Daoist monastery built on a small knoll along the side of the trail. The view was magnificent, the food somewhat less so, composed as it was of congee with small bits of vegetables and fish. But Nicholai ate ravenously and then stood on the periphery of a rectangular stone pavilion and watched the monks perform their kung-fu
kata
, which he recognized as the classic southern
hung-gar
form of “Tiger and Crane.”
Beautiful and doubtless deadly, he thought, although not as efficient as
hoda korosu.
But that was the main distinction between Chinese and Japanese martial arts — the former used many elaborate and circular moves while the latter emphasized one quick, direct, fatal strike.
Nicholai contemplated which was superior and decided that it was the Chinese for beauty, the Japanese for killing.
On the far side of the pavilion, Yu inflicted Communist doctrine on his students. One of the victims, a thick country lad named Liang, stared wistfully off into the bamboo thickets, doubtless wishing that he could find sanctuary there. But Liang was something of a special pet of Yu’s and so good-naturedly sat through the lecture as if genuinely interested. Yu had great, if misplaced, hopes for him.
One more day on the Dragon’s Tail, Nicholai thought. They would reach the river late the next afternoon and load their cargo onto the waiting boats. It would be a nice change to be on the water and off the arduous trail.
He walked back to the chamber that had been assigned to him. It was a small room with a single kang, the classic Chinese raised bed, which was draped with thin mosquito netting. Someone had already come in, lit a lantern, and left a thermos of hot water and an old porcelain cup with which to make tea.
But Nicholai craved rest more than the stimulation of the strong southern green tea, so he stripped off his clothes, climbed into the kang, and stretched out. He closed his eyes and told his mind to allow him five hours of sleep. He wanted to wake up well before dawn to make sure that the caravan got an early start.
Nicholai’s proximity sense woke him before his internal alarm did.
The two men smelled of cheap Chinese tobacco. Their heavy steps made clear that they were bandits and not professional assassins — they tried to walk quietly but were clumsy and obvious. Amateurs assume that to step slowly is to step softly, while professionals know that the opposite is true and are both quick and light.
Willing himself to remain still, Nicholai measured the slow heavy footsteps of the lead bandit as they creaked on the wooden floor. If they were going to use guns they would have done it already, but they apparently didn’t want to make noise and spring the main attack prematurely, before they had eliminated the leadership. So it would be a sword, a knife or an axe, maybe a garrote, but more likely an edged weapon that could slice through the mosquito netting, sparing the extra second to open it.
So there would be time for
hoda korosu.
He edged his hand along the
kang,
felt for the teacup, and slid it beside him under the thin sheet. Silently he crushed the cup in his hand until he felt blood running from his palm, and then pinched the sharp shard of glass between his thumb and forefinger.
Then he waited.
The footsteps stopped and Nicholai felt the bandit pause as he lifted his arm to strike.
Nicholai swung the shard in a horizontal backhand that sliced the bandit’s throat. The knife arm came down in a limp, useless arc and then the bandit, his left arm futilely clutching his throat, pitched forward onto the
kang.
The second bandit made the fatal error of backing up and reaching for the pistol at his belt as Nicholai launched off the
kang,
grabbed the heavy metal thermos, and swung it like a club. The man’s skull fractured with a sickening crack. Nicholai bent over his body, took the pistol, and stepped outside.
Red muzzle flashes tore the black silk fabric of the night.
Yu, clad only in trousers, stood with a pistol in his hand, trying to form the startled men into some kind of order.
Nicholai heard the
zip-zip
of gunfire and felt the little pockets of air concuss as the bullets flew past him. He had experienced bombings, beatings, and hand-to-hand combat, but this was his first firefight and he found it chaotic. The bandits had chosen a good time to strike, the hours of deepest sleep before dawn, and the fight had the surreal quality of a waking dream.
The bullets were real, however, and Nicholai heard the hollow thunk of a round strike the soldier beside him. The boy reached down to the hole in his stomach and looked at Nicholai with an expression of hurt surprise, as if to ask if this were really happening, then howled with pain. Nicholai eased him to the ground as gently as he could. The boy would die and there was nothing he could do.
He could only try to save the cargo.
Nicholai exchanged his pistol for the soldier’s rifle and moved out.
Yu was already rallying the men he had left toward the crates stacked in the monastery’s central pavilion. A few of the sentries guarding the crates had already fled, two others lay slumped dead at their posts, while three crouched behind the boxes and returned the shots that were coming from the bamboo thicket on the far side of the pavilion. But they were under heavy fire and it was obvious that they couldn’t hold out for long.
Yu started across the pavilion for the pile of crates but Nicholai held him back. It was brave but useless to join the three soldiers in their isolated post. We would just become additional targets, Nicholai thought, a few more sacrificed stones in a soon-to-be eliminated position on the board. Better to create a new position and give the bandits something new to think about.
So Nicholai squatted behind a stone bench set at the edge of the pavilion. He waited until he saw a muzzle flash come from the bamboo and fired at it, then heard a man scream in pain. Yu did the same with the same result.
The shooting from the bamboo stopped as the bandits considered how to handle the new situation.
Nicholai used the pause to belly-crawl across that side of the pavilion to a bench on the perpendicular side. It would be better, he thought, if the bandits formed a tactic to deal with a situation that had already changed.
Go is a fluid game.
It was quiet for a moment longer and then a spray of bullets hit the stone bench that Nicholai had vacated. Yu pressed himself flat on the stones and survived the blast, but the bullets kept him down as a group of a dozen or more bandits sprang out of the bamboo and rushed the crates.
Nicholai, on the flank of the attack, easily picked the lead bandit off with his first shot but missed the second one and had to fire again. He dropped the next man, but the bandits in the bamboo adjusted quickly and turned their guns on him. Nicholai flattened out and the bullets passed over him.
Then he pushed himself up on his hands and the balls of his feet, took a deep breath, and vaulted over the bench.
Lit only by muzzle flashes, the scene before him played like cinema in a bad old theater with a creaky projector. Nicholai saw flickers of the melee at the crates — a bayonet thrust, a pistol fired at close range, a wounded man’s mouth agape. He plunged in, firing his rifle until the clip was empty. Then he used it like an ancient Chinese weapon — a sharp blade on one end, a blunt object on the other. He swung and thrust, ducked and dodged, beyond thought in the realm of instinct that came from constant training.
But the bandits were simply too many. The most skillful Go player will lose his few isolated white stones against a tide of black ones.
It was inevitable.
Die with honor.
Hai,
Kishikawa-sama.
The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa floated in front of his eyes as he recalled his walk, so long ago, with the general. Kishikawa had focused on the beautiful blossoms to prepare himself for his death.
Then through the flashes of light Nicholai saw a row of brown-robed monks, bamboo staffs in their hands, advance onto the pavilion.
The fight became a whirling blur of bamboo, a
tai-fung,
but the rain pellets were wood striking flesh and bone, and then it was over, like a sudden squall. The surviving bandits fled back into the forest.
Without the precious cargo.
But six soldiers and one monk lay dead, and others were wounded.
Nicholai squatted beside the body of one of the bandits. Yu held up a lantern and they examined the dead man’s face. It took a moment, but then Nicholai recognized him … the orderly who had served lunch for Colonel Ki.
You have been careless and stupid, Nicholai told himself. “Michel Guibert” did not see the obvious ploy. Whereas Nicholai Hel would have. He resolved to retain a piece of his authentic self regardless of any situational guise.
The monks mopped up blood under lantern light.
Nicholai found the abbot, bowed deeply, and apologized for fouling the monastery with violence.
“You did not,” the abbot responded. “They did.”
“Still, I was the cause of it.”
“And so I will ask that you leave at first light and never return.”
Nicholai bowed again. “May I risk a possibly impertinent question?” When the abbot nodded, Nicholai asked, “I thought that you were pacifists. Why —”
“Buddhists are pacifists,” the abbot answered. “We are Daoists. We eschew violence except when necessary. But it is the mission of our order to offer hospitality. So we were forced to choose between two competing values — our desire not to harm our fellow creatures and our vow of sanctuary to our guests. In this case, we chose the latter.”
“You fight well.”
“When one chooses to fight,” the abbot replied, “it is one’s responsibility to fight well.”
Nicholai found Yu in his chamber, angrily stuffing his small gear into his haversack.
“They were your own men,” Nicholai said.
“I know that.”
His face already showed a loss of innocence. Nicholai felt some sympathy, but it did not prevent him from pressing the necessary question. “How am I supposed to trust you now?”
Yu led him out of the monastery to a wide spot on the trail, where a soldier was bound around the chest to the trunk of a tree.