Tucker's Last Stand (17 page)

Ho brought in Bui Tin, who had become something of a confidant, and asked his advice on how best to use the talents of his old schoolmate. Bui Tin answered immediately: intelligence work in the South, he said. Le Duc Sy generates the right kind of attention. No woman can turn him away, and men are instantly taken by his charm. He is handsome, laughs easily, can imitate any pompous ass. There is always the risk, Bui Tin admitted, of Sy's doing something reckless. But then—Bui Tin smiled at Ho Chi Minh—“you are hardly equipped, Bac Ho”—he had instructions to call him Uncle Ho—“to criticize those who are bold. First you challenge the French Empire, now you challenge the American superpower. There are those who would judge you to be a reckless man.” Ho Chi Minh with a small smile gave orders to an adjutant to train and send Le Duc Sy to Saigon as an agent. The chief of intelligence would design an appropriate cover for him in Saigon and assign him appropriate duties.

The chief of intelligence (he was the nephew of army chief General Giap) was hungry for well-qualified agents. He had been observing for over one year the increased military preparations in the South, actively subsidized by President Kennedy and now by President Johnson, all hustle and bustle centered in Saigon. And Danang, although admittedly the center of commercial fishing in South Vietnam, had become in effect an American naval base. In short order, young Le Duc Sy was affiliated as a salesman for the Perkins Company, a worldwide distributor of British marine engines ranging from 50 to 1500 horsepower. In Saigon, commercial headquarters of the fishing industry, Le Duc Sy would make contacts, pressing the advantages of the British engines over those of German and U.S. competitors. And he would travel frequently to Danang, there to do business with individual clients and entrepreneurs—fishing captains and large and small fleet owners. He was encouraged by his superiors to advertise his wares directly to U.S. purchasing agents who, if they were not getting exactly what they wanted from the United States, had deep pockets to purchase foreign-made goods that suited their purposes, as these famous engines almost always did.

Within ninety days, Le Duc Sy had gained access to almost everybody in Saigon and Danang who was concerned with the sea. And in less than one half that time, Le Duc Sy had penetrated the gestating plans of an operation called 34-A. He observed with impatience the quiet transformation of the little fleet of boats. His fury when first he discovered the deception was very nearly uncontained. Le Duc Sy's ears had picked up a careless remark, overheard at a bar, made by a fishing captain who spoke obliquely about his “new mission.” This led the agent to make a fresh, inquisitive visit to Danang. Within a few days he spotted the same captain he had seen in Saigon and followed him stealthily to his fishing boat. Thereafter he watched. When one day it left the line of wharves where the boats were docked, he was behind it, moving carefully in a 34-tender he used to demonstrate one of the smaller Perkins engines. He kept the boat in sight. Instead of leaving the harbor to enter the Gulf, it darted to the left, into the area that housed U.S. naval units from the Seventh Fleet. He berthed at a discreet distance and walked up a hill from which, with his binoculars, he could soon see the radar installation being done on the fishing boat. Further inquiries made plain the nature of the “new mission” of such boats. His rage flamed. His first inclination was to set fire to the whole fleet of fake fishing boats. But he restrained himself, for once. The resources of the United States were extravagant. The Americans would simply build more boats. He knew the purpose of the altered fleet: to discover just how the Great Ho, with Soviet aid, was preparing to protect the coastline from any attack by the U.S. Navy and Marines. Torching the little armada would mean one less effective intelligence agent studying the work being done, and reporting it diligently to Hanoi.

He distracted himself by wooing and easily winning the betrothal of the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen—and at the same time, he was prepared to aver after his first night with her, the most satisfying sexual partner he had ever engaged. With this woman, he said in a letter to Bui Tin, he must settle for nothing less than marriage. He described her graces and beauty, giving a leisurely and genial account of her background and making no effort to conceal that she was an experienced woman of the world, given her profession; indeed, Le Duc Sy had written without any trace of resentment, she had had a considerable number of experiences of an intimate nature with both Vietnamese and American men, but had not on that account been coarsened in any way. And anyway, this was all in the past. Their future as man and wife would bring on a total change in her habits, and significant differences in his own.

He sent this letter, as was his practice, to a name and address in Singapore, whence it was redirected to Hanoi. Bui Tin was sufficiently intrigued by it to cross the hall to the office of the chief of intelligence. There he asked Colonel Giap to check in the copious files of that department for possible information on this singular woman.

Giap proceeded to do so; no request by Bui Tin was denied in Hanoi. The following day he called Bui Tin back to his office to advise him that the woman, under another name, “Lao Dai,” was a covert agent doing duty in his own department. On being told by Bui Tin that she had plans to marry another of his agents, one Le Duc Sy, Colonel Giap expressed his astonished disapproval in unmistakable language. He would instantly communicate to Le Duc Sy, by mail through the usual channels, that under
no circumstances
was Sy to marry someone so useful to the cause of Vietnam independence. That letter arrived three days after the discreet private wedding had taken place (Lao Dai had wished it so, inviting only two or three friends) and on reading it, Le Duc Sy discerned silently, sadly, that his wife and he were engaged in identical activities, she using different methods, lures, and techniques.

That night, after a wonderfully satisfying meal and a bottle of rare French white burgundy, he took unhurried delights with his bride. In due course he disengaged slowly and, his body illuminated by a shaft of light that streamed through the window from the half moon, walked to the bathroom, while Lao Dai observed briefly the perfect torso of her thirty-five-year-old husband who might have been an eighteen-year-old boy. She lay back on her pillow, deeply satisfied by her overwhelming experience, so different from those others so trivial by contrast, with all those other men, in all those other bedrooms. She was beginning to dream when suddenly the voice caused her to shoot up in bed.

“Do you know that the man who just finished fucking you is a spy?”

It was unmistakably the voice of Colonel Giap
.

“
Are you aware that he is the foreign agent of another country
?”

She thrust the sheet in front of her.
What was this nightmare
? What was Colonel Giap doing in Saigon? What was he doing in
her bedroom
? Where was Le Duc Sy? What had happened to him!

“
Have you told your lover the nature of your mission in Saigon? Have you told him that you too are an agent of a foreign power
?”

She could stand it no longer. Lao Dai screamed.

The overhead light flashed on. In front of her stood Le Duc Sy, the mimic, whose talent she had not known. He began to roar with laughter. He was still naked—except that in his hand he held what appeared to be an envelope.

Le Duc Sy turned off the light. “It will be more fun,” he said in his own low, musical voice, “to read you this letter in the light of the moon.” He moved her tenderly to one side. His left hand fondling in feather touch her breasts as he did so, he read from the letter in his right hand: firm orders from Colonel Giap
not to marry Lao Dai
. She was too valuable to the independence movement.

“That,” Colonel Giap had written, “is an order.”

Le Duc Sy dropped the letter on the floor and let his right hand travel down the body of his fellow agent. He whispered, “My sweet little spy. Let us explore our secrets together.”

Five days later he was ordered back to Hanoi.

At first, Le Duc Sy considered simply defying the order. Obviously he did not welcome a separation, however brief, from Lao Dai. But then he reflected on the possibility that he might be ordered to another theater, effecting an even longer separation, but only until Lao Dai could settle her affairs (in a manner of speaking) in Saigon and join him. Perhaps he should cooperate with Hanoi, and they could then live together, faithful to their common anticolonialist cause. Apprehensive, she wondered whether he might be punished. Le Duc Sy scoffed at this. “After all, the letter arrived three days after we were married. And when we
were
married, you didn't know I was taking orders from Hanoi, and I didn't know you were taking orders from Hanoi. So—” He shrugged his shoulders. It was not in his nature to fear punishment. He had never been afraid of punishment by his headmaster, his father, the Japanese army, or his superior officers.

He decided to go. He informed the division manager at Perkins that he would need to visit an ailing sister in Singapore but would return quickly.

From Singapore he flew to Hanoi. He was met by one of those anonymous-looking but physically fit clerks who worked in the office of Colonel Giap. In the car he was told that he was being driven to the apartment of Colonel Bui Tin, on orders of Colonel Giap. Le Duc Sy experienced a certain relief that whatever administrative action was in store for him, it would be administered by his old friend; or in any event, his friend would leaven the news by informing him in advance of what lay ahead.

Though by nature Bui Tin was solemn and Le Duc Sy buoyant, the two men were linked with that complementarity of spirit that had attracted them to each other at school. Young Bui Tin thoughtful, docile, seemingly reclusive; young Le Duc Sy extravagantly enthusiastic, defiant, exhibitionistic. What was especially strange, but satisfying, was that they had arrived independently at their decision to fight against the French resettlement after the war. Bui Tin would never have revealed to his friends at the Lycée, or to his family, the direction his thoughts were taking. Not until his mind had been finally made up. Le Duc Sy typically did. But the particular daemon that drove him to the movement for national independence, animated by Communist universalism, he did keep buried within him. Moreover he did not trace his decision to any particular resentment of the French. It was more that he was uplifted by the notion of independence from old ties, stirred by the challenge of national unification under the Marxist aegis. Bui Tin once said to him, after a long and vinous meal, that Le Duc Sy's mutinous inclinations were really undifferentiated: He had not got on with the Reverend Mother, nor with the principal at their primary school; he had not got on with either the French headmaster or his Japanese successor; had not, really, got on with his father, with whom he was continually quarreling.

“So it may be, Sy, that your renunciation of the French is more an aspect of your temperament than of any patriotic aversion to imperialist practices.”

Le Duc Sy had countered casually that he was not given to psychological self-examinations of this kind, but that if ever his enthusiasm for the independence movement of Ho Chi Minh had flagged, it was revived with the gradual appearance of Mighty America on the Indochinese scene. “I always enjoy a little icon-smashing, the bigger the better.”

“Ho Chi Minh is an icon,” Bui Tin had said gravely.

“Yes. True. And I confess it—sometimes I feel it would be great sport to pull on his wispy beard.”

Bui Tin put down his wineglass, his eyes widening.

“But—I never have, and I never intend to. I recognize that there has got to be some structure in organizational life. Even though I liked to subvert the designs of the headmaster, I always knew there had to be one. There has to be a supreme leader of our movement. And I have been very faithful to Bac Ho.”

As they began to talk now in Bui Tin's apartment, the sun going down, two bottles of beer on the table, Bui Tin recalled that earlier conversation. “You told me once that you have been very faithful to Ho Chi Minh—”

“Yes,” Le Duc Sy interrupted. “And I have also been very faithful to Colonel Giap.”

“Up until now.”

“What do you mean, up until now? Are you aware that I did not receive his letter until after Lao Dai and I were in fact married?”

“I was not aware of that. But I am aware that as a member of the corps of which you
are
a member, marriage is not permitted except by special permission.”

Le Duc Sy shrugged his shoulders. “That is a silly rule. I have never believed in observing silly rules.”

Bui Tin got up and began to pace the floor. He said nothing for a few minutes. Then he began.

He spoke of the accelerating pace of events on critical fronts. He told Sy of the American mission to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, concerning which much was known in Hanoi inasmuch as one of the two surviving native guides on that mission was an agent.

“Clearly the decision of the Americans is to try to interdict our passage down the Trail. Passage down the Trail is at the heart of the strategy of the Independence Movement. It is
my
responsibility to see to it that the traffic moves. Men, materiel, guns, food—everything needed for what will probably seem to the Americans a very long struggle. The President of the United States,” Bui Tin spoke pensively, “is to some extent an unknown quantity. Ho has said to me that the portrait of Mr. Johnson is not finally fixed in his mind. Only recently, Johnson sued once again for peace. He approached Ho through the Canadian member of the International Control Commission. Giving terms that are entirely unacceptable, of course—independence for South Vietnam. Ho treated this initiative by simply ignoring it. But he did ask Melkowski to check with Moscow for any recent intelligence gathered in Washington, and last Wednesday the good and faithful Soviet Ambassador came in with a very full report.”