It was Liang. Blood ran down his nose and a purple welt swelled under his eye. He had been beaten.
“He was one of the sentries,” Yu said disgustedly. “The one who survived. He claims he fell asleep, but I suspect that he deliberately let the bandits pass. Either way he is guilty. The monks would not let me execute him at the monastery so I brought him here.”
“You should not execute him at all.”
“At the very least, he failed in his duty.”
“So did we,” Nicholai said. “We should have been better prepared.”
“He caused the deaths of comrades,” Yu insisted.
“Again, as did we,” Nicholai argued. “Men aren’t perfect.”
“The new man must be,” Yu responded. “Perfect, at least, in his duty.”
Nicholai looked at Liang, who trembled with cold and fear. While we debate philosophy, Nicholai thought. It’s cruel. He tried again. “Perhaps he was performing his duty to Ki.”
“His duty is to the people.”
“He
is
the people, Yu.”
In response, Yu pulled his pistol from its holster and held the barrel to Liang’s head. His hand trembled as the boy cried and begged for his life.
Yu pulled the trigger.
“And that is how you know,” he said, “that you can trust me.”
96
D
IAMOND FOUND HER
in Vientiane, in the square outside the Patousay.
The monument, even with its Laotian spires, reminded him a little of an
arc de triomphe.
Indeed, Solange thought so too.
“It reminds me a little of home,” she said. “In Montpellier we have something similar.”
“What are you doing in Laos?” Diamond asked.
“Looking for work, monsieur,” she answered. “What are
you
doing in Laos?”
“Looking for you.”
“Ah, well.
Your
task, at least, is finished.”
“Yours too, maybe,” Diamond said. He was instantly jealous of Nicholai Hel. The thought that the arrogant bastard had slept with this gorgeous creature was infuriating.
“How so?” she asked.
“We might have something for you,” he said.
“ ‘We’?” she inquired, her tone slightly sarcastic and tantalizing at the same time. “You mean ‘we Americans’?”
“Yes.”
“I usually deal with Monsieur Haverford,” she said.
She pronounced it “Averfor,” which Diamond found stimulating beyond belief. “He’s on another assignment. He sent me. I’m Mr. Gold.”
Her smile was sensuous, ironic, and infuriating. “Really?”
“No.”
They walked out of the park onto Lane Xang.
“What do you have in mind, Monsieur Gold?” she asked.
Diamond told her, then added, “I think you’ll like it. It could be very lucrative, and Saigon is a lot like France, isn’t it?”
“In some aspects, yes.”
“So your answer?”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“What does that mean?”
She trained the full force of her green eyes on him and smiled. “Why not?”
“Good,” Diamond said, his throat tight. “Good. Uhh, do you need a taxi? Where are you staying?”
“At the Manoly,” she answered. “I can walk, thank you.”
“I could walk with you.”
She stopped walking and looked at him. “What are you asking now, Monsieur Gold?”
“I think you know,” Diamond answered, summoning up his nerve with the thought that the woman was, after all, a glorified whore. “I mean, you said you were looking for work.”
She laughed. “But not
that
desperately.”
They quickly made the necessary arrangements for her trip to Saigon and he walked away hating her.
But the whore will serve her purpose, he thought. The file said that Hel had fallen in love with her and intended to return to her. Good — if the son of a bitch is alive, he’ll come find her in Saigon.
And I have connections in Saigon.
Solange made sure that the disgusting American wasn’t following her, and then returned to her hotel and had a mint tea in the quiet of the shady garden.
Saigon, she thought.
Very well, Saigon.
Nicholai had yet to surface and she had to face the probability that he never would. Men die and men disappear, and a woman must take care of herself. The abhorrent “Gold” was right that Saigon was a congenial city, French in many ways.
97
T
HEY REACHED THE RIVER LATE THAT AFTERNOON.
Nicholai had to admit it was something of a shock.
Early in winter, he had expected the Lekang to be at its lowest flow. Still, beyond the long eddy where the waiting rafts were beached on the pebbled shore, the river ran fast, full, and angry.
The roar of water running shallowly over rock was impressive, even intimidating, but there was no time for trepidation. Nicholai worried that Ki might take another shot here where they would be pinned down without cover on the narrow strip of beach. He was glad to see that Yu had posted two of his “true believers” to cover the trail.
“We need to get loaded,” he said to Yu.
Yu shouted some orders and his soldiers helped the porters carry the crates onto the rafts, where the boatmen lashed them down. The head boatman, a squat middle-aged Tibetan with a cigarette in his mouth, approached Nicholai.
“Are you Guibert?” he asked in American-accented English that Nicholai knew too well from his years in his cell, listening to the American guards converse in what passed for their native tongue.
“That’s me.”
“I lost two men just getting down here.”
“They’ll be reborn well.”
The boatman shrugged his indifference at the concept of reincarnation. This life was plenty to deal with at the moment. “I’m Tasser.”
He didn’t offer his hand.
“Michel Guibert.”
“I know that. Did you bring the money?”
“Yes.”
“Give.”
“Half now,” Nicholai said, “half when we get to Luang Prabang.”
Tasser scoffed and looked at the roaring river. “Give me the whole megillah now. In case we don’t make it to Luang.”
“It’s your job to see that we do make it,” Nicholai said. He counted out half the money and handed a wad of bills to Tasser. “By the way, where did you learn your English?”
Tasser pressed the fingers of his right hand together and made a swooping arc. “American flyboys. They’d crash their crates into the mountains and I’d get what was left of them down. War had gone a couple of more years, I’d be sitting pretty.”
“Could we speak in Chinese instead?”
“I don’t pollute my mouth with that foreign tongue,” Tasser said in Chinese. He switched back to English. “You got any decent smokes?”
“Gauloises.”
“Frenchie shit? No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I will,” Tasser said. “So what’s in the crates?”
“None of your business.”
Tasser laughed, then crumpled up one of the bills and tossed it into the water. “You gotta grease the river gods,” he explained. But one of his men scrambled downstream, retrieved the bill, and brought it back to Tasser.
Nicholai raised an eyebrow.
“They’re gods,” Tasser said. “What are they gonna do with cash?”
Nicholai walked away and found Yu nervously peering back up the trail. He took out a cigarette and handed it to the colonel.
“Back at the monastery,” Yu said, “you didn’t fight like a man motivated just by profit.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do not fool yourself,” Yu said. “You believe in a cause, even if you don’t yet know what it is.”
“I believe in my own freedom.”
“Individual freedom is bourgeois illusion,” Yu answered. “You should give it up.”
“I won’t, if you don’t mind.”
“Just get the weapons to their destination,” Yu said.
“You have my word.”
They shook hands.
Nicholai walked back to the rafts. “Let’s get going!” he yelled, and the boatmen pushed off.
The river quickly swept them away.
The river slowed and flattened.
For a distance that Nicholai judged to be a couple of miles, the water ran fast but evenly, and he had a chance to peruse the rafts and their crews.
The rafts were about fifteen feet wide and made of buoyant logs tightly lashed together, although with enough give to allow some flexibility. They had hardly any draft and seemed to roll easily over the shallows. Long oars were laid on the sides, although the crew didn’t need them in this current. A canopy had been stretched over poles at the aft, with a charcoal stove just in front. The crates were stacked in the middle of the raft and tightly lashed to boltholes that had been drilled in the sides.
The crewmen, four to each raft, were all Tibetan, with squat bodies, full faces, and skins darkened by the sun. They sat cross-legged at the sides, near the oars, and enjoyed the respite given by this relatively benign stretch of river.
“I never pictured Tibet as having much of a river trade,” Nicholai said to Tasser.
“You got that right.”
“How did you learn to do this?”
“Crazy Brits,” Tasser answered. “They’re always going up or down something. Up mountains, down rivers. As long as it’s crazy and dangerous. Before the war, a bunch of wiseguys from Oxford wanted to be the first to go down the Lekang. They needed a ‘river sherpa.’ I was a kid, needed the moola, and thought, ‘What the hell.’ ”
“Did they make it down?”
“Most of ’em.”
“All the way to Luang Prabang?”
“I dunno,” Tasser said.
“What do you mean?” Nicholai asked.
Tasser looked at him and smiled. “I’ve never been down this stretch of the river.”
Nicholai felt the water quicken beneath him and looked downriver, where a cloud of mist suddenly appeared.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Tasser took a map from his pocket and spread it out. Nicholai looked over his shoulder and the map appeared to be more of a picture, a cartoon, really, of the river, with drawings of tall peaks and midstream boulders. Tasser considered for a moment, and then hollered over the increasing rush of water, “That would be the Dragon’s Throat!”
“The Dragon’s Tail?”
“The Dragon’s
Throat
!” Tasser shouted, pointing at his Adam’s apple. He looked at the “map” again and asked, “What the hell does ‘Level 5’ mean, ya think?”
A few seconds later, he answered his own question.
“Holy shit!”
The first fall was only twenty feet but it crashed onto a broad shelf of rock that would certainly smash the rafts to pieces.
Nicholai felt the bow pitch forward, grabbed on to a line, and held on. There was nothing else to do.
Then they went over the edge.
They landed with a heavy impact and Nicholai was sure that he would feel the raft break up beneath him; the logs bounced and rolled but held together and the current swept them over the rock into a chute where the water was whirling in a violent circle just upstream of a second waterfall.
“Get to the oars!” Tasser yelled, and his men abandoned the relative safety of the line and scampered to man the oars.
Nicholai could see why. The circular current was pulling the raft sideways, and if it went into the falls broadside it would surely capsize as it went over. They had to right it so it entered the next fall bow first.
But the raft was spinning like a leaf in the wind.
“Where are the lifejackets?” Nicholai hollered to Tasser.
“The what?” Tasser hollered back.
The current spat them out, but sideways — the starboard side facing the waterfall — and Nicholai saw a large backcurrent, a small wall of water coming toward them.
“Look out!” he yelled.
The backcurrent lifted the raft and pitched one of the aft oarsmen off the starboard side. Nicholai, one hand on the line, crawled back and tried to pull him out of the water, but Tasser yelled, “The oar! Get the oar, goddamnit!”
Nicholai grabbed the oar just before it slipped into the water.
The crewman was pulled back into the circular current and Nicholai saw him try to stay above water as the current spun him around and around like some malevolent funhouse ride.
“Pull!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai sat down and pulled on the oar, straining every muscle and sinew to try to pull the raft around. They were almost straight when the bow went over the edge. This fall was not as high. They landed in a deep pool and the raft bobbed once before it was pulled into the next chute of water.
The flume raced to a narrow fall between two towers of rock. The raft scraped the edge of the rock to the left, bounced off, and then slid over the low fall onto a shallow stretch that rushed over rocks that banged against the bottom.
Downriver he saw a large column of what looked like smoke.
It wasn’t smoke, though. Nicholai knew that could only be mist from a large volume of water crashing over a very high waterfall.
“Pull to the side!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai looked to his right, where Tasser was pointing toward a long eddy. But the current was pulling them away, and they had little time or space to make it over into the eddy, and the crews were already exhausted.
He lifted his oar from the water as the crew on the port side pulled. When the raft was pointed starboard, both sides would row as hard as they could, for their lives. He took a few deep gulps of air and then, at Tasser’s order, started to stroke.
It was only a small bump, but it was enough. Nicholai had pulled himself up on the end of his stroke, and the bump hit before he could settle back down and lifted him up and off the side of the raft.
The first thing he felt was the shock of the cold water as he went under. He pulled himself to the surface, then felt the mental shock of knowing that he was in the river and inexorably headed for the waterfall.
He had been in bad situations before, while exploring narrow passages in caves during his happy years with friends in Japan. Then, the chambers had closed in and seemed to offer no way out. Or he’d been trapped by underground streams, the water hissing below him in the pitch black, and he’d enjoyed the danger, so now he forced his mind to dismiss the terror and focus on survival.
The first thing to do was get turned around, so he struggled successfully to get feet-first into the current. He didn’t know what waited at the bottom of the fall, but it was certainly better to encounter it with his feet instead of his head, smashing his legs, perhaps, instead of his neck or skull. He knew that he was dead anyway if the fall landed shallowly on rock, but honor demanded that he do his best.
Then he pressed his arms tightly to his sides and closed his legs to create as compact a vessel of himself as he could, so his limbs wouldn’t create levers that might tip him sideways and roll him, akimbo, over the falls.
He held his neck and head up out of the water until the last possible moment, then took a deep breath (his last? he wondered) and went over the edge.
The fall was long and violent, the water battering him to try to knock him out of his posture, but he held firm, waiting for the “landing” that would shatter his body, maim him, or offer the next challenge.
Then he felt the stillness of a pool and realized that he’d survived the fall.
He looked back up and realized that he’d plunged at least forty feet. Treading water to catch his breath, he looked downstream and saw, on the right edge, both rafts pulled up on the shore.
They were in bad shape.
The canopy of the first raft was stoved in, and several oars were broken. The second raft looked little better, its bow jagged like a broken tooth. But both had made it through the Dragon’s Throat and, miraculously, the crates sat in the middle like cows lying down in the face of bad weather.
One of the crew standing on the edge saw him and started to point and yell as Nicholai, exhausted, swam for the shore, where he just lay on the rough stones, unable to move.
“Thought you were a goner,” Tasser said, standing over him.
“So did I.”
“Glad you made it.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, you have the rest of my dough.”
On that sentimental note, he pulled Nicholai to his feet.
They spent the next three days resting, repairing the damaged rafts and oars, and perusing the rough map of the next stretch of the river.
“This so-called map is useless,” Nicholai said.
So Tasser and Nicholai walked downstream, climbed a steep cliff on the right bank, and confirmed their worst fear: an enormous fall, higher than the one that nearly killed them, loomed just downstream.
“We can’t run that,” Nicholai said.
“Nope.”
They would have to go around it. With only nine men, a portage would be long and arduous, but they had no choice. So they went back and began the long task of disassembling the rafts and hewing poles with which to heft the crates. This took two more days — making an unplanned delay of five days — so dwindling supplies became a concern. With no villages in the wilderness of the Lekang River gorges in which to buy food, they would have to cut rations, a serious problem with the increase in labor that the portage would extract.
But no one complained about these hardships, when weighed against the terror of another run down worse rapids. The men worked steadily, and in two days they were ready to set out.
For three days they worked in relay teams, hefting, pulling, dragging, and pushing the rafts’ logs up the slope beside the massive waterfall, then lowering them down using ropes wrapped around trees as counterweights. Then, while two of the crewmen reassembled the rafts, the other six men carried the heavy crates with their lethal cargo over the same route.
To the extent that one can enjoy grueling physical labor, Nicholai did so. The battle against the physics of hauling heavy material up and down a mountain and the struggle against the limitations of his own body and spirit seemed simple and clean as opposed to the more underhanded conflicts of his mission.
No deception was involved in this, just the direct application of muscle and sweat, determination and brains. Nicholai found it to be a cleansing process — even the sharp edge of hunger that came on the second day seemed only to sharpen his senses and purge the malaise that he only now realized had set in after leaving Solange.
And the Tibetan crewmen were a marvel of cheerfulness and stamina. Having begun their working lives as sherpas, lugging heavy baggage on the slopes of the Himalayas, they were not daunted by this task and seemed to find the complexities of maneuvering the loads to be a pleasant intellectual as well as physical challenge. They loved to solve the problems of weight and counterweight using complicated arrangements of ropes and knots that fascinated Nicholai.