Tucker's Last Stand (29 page)

In a few moments the door was open, he had brought in his little goodies, and sat down in the armchair Lao Dai once told him was all that she had salvaged from her father's household because, the day before his arrest by the French, fearing the confiscation of his property, he had asked a neighbor to accept in safekeeping a few articles he especially treasured, the armchair among them.

He did not have long to wait. Whether she was using her lovely hands to carry school papers, or using them to tidy the little bun of her splendid hair, or to knead more and more joy into his adoring body, they were a captivating part of Lao Dai. She dropped her package of papers and flew into his arms.

“It works! It works!” Tucker made her dance around the room with him. Then stopped: “And now you will see, dear Lao Dai, a gradual contraction of all that killing and terror in the countryside, because the flow from the North will soon be down to a trickle, and then perhaps they will sue for peace!”

He felt her sudden stiffening.

“No no no, you must not be afraid. This will take us in the
opposite
direction of a general war.”

Lao Dai took the bottle from him, opened it, brought out two glasses and plates and knives while Tucker told her how lovely she looked, caught by surprise at midafternoon, and how he had hoped to be able to telephone her from “the field” to give her some warning of his arrival, but that in fact he had arrived back just about as expected.

When they were seated, Lao Dai told him how pleased she was that he had got on so well with his work. “And it is especially good news that you think the war will be shortened. But how is that so?”

Tucker said that it is generally a myth that a country is prepared to fight to the last man—“doesn't matter what the cause is. I mean, look at the French. There were lots of live Frenchmen left in June 1940. And it was their own country they were fighting for, not like when they fought here, which was just a colony.”

“But the North Vietnamese think of South Vietnam, don't they, as their own country?”

“Well sure. And the North Koreans consider South Korea as a part of their own country. My point is that the North Vietnamese have got to reach a point where they figure: It isn't worth it. Now I have to confess, a couple of weeks ago I was wondering whether they would ever reach that point, but my little doohickeys performed so well, I think I can see the thing differently now, and maybe closing out the possibility of the war going on and on and on until—”

“Until the United States tires of it?”

Tucker was drawn up short. “Well, that could happen, sure. But the U.S. has had just over a thousand casualties, which is something a country ten times as big as North Vietnam can put up with.”

“How will your invention work? Or is it so secret you can't tell me?”

Tucker poured another glass and looked at Lao Dai. Did it matter? No, actually.

“Let me think a minute,” he said to her.

She smiled. “I'll go to the kitchen and be back in a minute or two.”

What was the purpose of this whole enterprise? Tucker asked himself. It was to deter the North Vietnamese. If they became convinced that they would not prevail, then they would stop trying, wouldn't they? Wouldn't
we
? Wouldn't
anybody
? Wasn't there in fact a pretty good argument for calling in the representative of the International Control Commission, explaining to him the technology the Americans had prepared to seal up the Trail, with instructions to report it all to Ho Chi Minh, and maybe he would realize, then, that his great big Trail operation wasn't going to work?

Tucker was inflamed by the idea. And
anyway
, he continued feeding his enthusiasm, it would be just a matter of days, once Igloo was in operation, before the gooks got hold of one of his Spikebuoys. Granted they were designed to explode when the battery inside reached a certain level of weakness, but using five, ten, twenty thousand of his Uggies over a period of time made the probability of their getting one that hadn't exploded, even though the battery was down, or spotting one whose battery was still strong, inevitable. Then the Uggie would be sent to Hanoi and examined there or, more likely, at the weapons lab at Podolsk, just south of Moscow. So, they would find out what the Uggie did. So? How could they keep the U.S.—or Charlie, for that matter—from using them?

He sensed that he was moved also by other motives than merely pleasing Lao Dai and satisfying her curiosity. After a hiatus of almost twenty years he was suddenly
proud
of what he had accomplished. He had been praised during recent weeks for his ingenuity; some had actually used the word genius. Praised by professionals in the physics and weaponry community, by military men and their associates, the likes of Rufus and Blackford. He wished now the praise of someone he truly loved and wanted to make happy. Somebody who leveled with
him
, like when she volunteered that her late husband had gone off to fight with the North.

And anyway—his face broke out in a smile. He had solved his own problem!—and anyway, she would not get any of the technical details, which she wouldn't understand, and if she did, wouldn't remember. What he was bound to do was to reassure her: that the war might be coming to an end—thanks in large part to the work of her … lover.

“
Okay! I'm ready
,” he called out.

Lao Dai came in from the kitchen and sat down eagerly.

Tucker went to his briefcase and brought out a sketch of his UGS. “There. That's my little baby. UGS stands for ‘Unattended Ground Sensor.' That means pretty much what you would think it would mean. It is unattended by any soldier. It just sits there, or rather stands there. It is designed to go into the ground—see there, the long, needlelike plunger? Here, in the body of the UGS, is a long-lasting battery. Small, but potent. Up here is the electronic wizardry, if you don't mind my being a wizard for just a minute, that picks up sound, any sound. And that unit broadcasts through the antenna over here the character of the sound to a computer receiver in an airplane overhead. That airplane transmits to where we are”—he didn't give the name of Nakhom Phanom—“and we get the sound, we know where it came from because we spot the transmission on a screen that has in it the location of all the Uggies, and after we classify the sound—the noise of a truck, or conversations between soldiers, or a tank or a motorbike, whatever—we give our instructions to the fighter plane, which whoops down on the target, and bang! Pretty soon, no more targets. Because the bad guys have to go through—through a couple of passes.”

Tucker poured himself another glass, ate a pâté-covered cracker in one gulp, pulled out a cigar case and lit up.

Lao Dai was examining the sketch, admiring the draftsmanship. “It is quite remarkable, dear Tucker. I am very proud of you.”

“Enough details?”

“I'm afraid I would not understand more. But, dear Tucker, would this not simply mean that the gooks, as you call them, would come south in other ways?”

“Well, they'll
try
. But we've got the DMZ pretty well sealed up. And the Navy can do its job on the Gulf, after a while. You know, get more sophisticated about the phonies who creep through. I am not suggesting there isn't a whole lot to be done, just that what Ho was counting on primarily is the Trail. Want to know how many? How many troops they plan to send down here, every month?
Twenty thousand
! And one late estimate raises that to twenty-five thousand. So obviously they have been counting on the Trail primarily. Well, when they get there, ole Igloo White pretty soon will be waiting for them, and there ain't any twenty thousand soldiers going to come down my Trail, Laodai, you bet!”

“But what if the Vietcong just grow and grow? What if—what if Russia says no to your Uggies? What if they bomb your—facility? Then don't we have just one more element of increasing the war?” But she interrupted herself. She was genuinely happy.

“Darling! Before you answer, let's agree whatever I say, or you say, this is a night to celebrate. Now, shall we have another bottle of champagne? One was not enough.” She held up the empty bottle. “Here, let me pay for it”—she got up from the chair.

“Whaddayamean, you pay for it! This is
my
party. Siddown. Where do I go?”

“It is only two blocks. Turn right when you leave the apartment house, walk two full blocks. Then on to the corner, where there is a little wine shop.”

Tucker was already standing. “I'll be right back.” He walked to the door, then spun around and grabbed her by the waist, kissing her ardently. “But that's for later, that's for
after
the champagne!” He went out the apartment door. Lao Dai went to her closet and removed the camera. She took Tucker's notebook to the bathroom and turned on the sun lamp, photographing all thirty-two pages.

When Tucker returned, she was in bed. She smiled at him. “Let's have the champagne,” she said, “
after
, not before.”

30

October 2, 1964

Gulf of Tonkin

Colonel Yen Chi, the head of South Vietnamese Intelligence, complained once more through channels to the Pentagon that there weren't enough junks in the 34-A operation to interdict efficiently all the guerrillas and weapons coming down the coast. While it was true, he said, that thousands upon thousands of personal searches had been made since the operation began, as recently as a week ago an ARVN unit had come upon a cache of enemy weapons not far from Hué, the northern-most South Vietnamese stronghold. The guards were apprehended and after some persuasion divulged that the most recent addition to the cache had come in only the day before. The question was, How had the smugglers got through the 34-A screen? Colonel Yen reminded the Pentagon that stopping a North Vietnamese junk at sea, boarding it and searching it thoroughly was an operation that required as much as two hours. “We do not have enough ships to stop every boat that comes down the coast and to give two hours' time to it.”

What Colonel Yen wanted the Pentagon to come up with was some kind of a long-range metal detector or something that could be trained on a passing junk, something sophisticated enough to let pass without wasting time vessels that were not carrying weapons cargo, leaving ARVN patrol boats to concentrate on suspicious or manifestly contraband vessels. And the question was: Could such a device be developed? Or would it be unable to distinguish between the necessary paraphernalia of the professional fisherman, some of which was of iron and steel, and those of guerrilla fighters?

A prototype developed by the CIA's Technical Services Division had arrived, and Blackford and Alphonse Juilland and a technician from Maryland would now try it out. If suitable, it would in due course be mounted and encased in the upper deck section of a 44-foot patrol boat alongside the radar, to which it was similar in size and shape, and more would be made. Rufus did not elect to go out with them into the Gulf. He said, rather more vaguely than usual, Blackford thought, that he had other business to attend to.

The patrol boat, the
Mai Tai
, had an engine that would permit it to speed up to 17 knots. That morning's briefing at the dispatch office had assigned it a sector twenty miles wide, paralleling the coastline for as long as the workday permitted. The
Mai Tai
would go out to sea, then take diagonal courses within the sector, returning at nightfall to Danang. Its job: to scan and stop any non-Vietnamese junk, irrespective of whether it was outside territorial limits; board it; inspect its cargo and personnel; release it if innocently engaged; bring it to Danang if caught smuggling.

These encounters were with increasing frequency leading to combat at sea.
Mai Tai
's sister ship, the week before, had signaled a junk its intention to board and had been met, moments before throwing over the grapnel, with machine-gun fire. The ship had maneuvered quickly and a 40-mm. projected from its hull, to do duty along with a .50-caliber machine gun up forward. The smuggler sank, without survivors; but by then one South Vietnamese naval hand was dead, another wounded.

New orders had gone out: A boat hailed now for boarding received instructions by radio and by megaphone: every member of the crew was to appear on deck, both hands clasped to the ship's lifeline, before the boarding actually began.

When
Mai Tai
came about and began its diagonal course, Blackford could with naked eye count thirty-two ships on the horizon, clear evidence of the need for the metal scanner to do its work. He stood by the technician, observing the dimly lit yellow screen as the scanner beamed in on their first junk.

“Tell the captain he has to get closer,” the technician called out to Juilland, who relayed the message in Vietnamese.

“Tell him
much
closer, like 100 meters. Ask him how far away are we right now.”

Juilland relayed the two questions, the first to the captain, the second to the radar operator, who answered him:

“Radar says we are at 200 meters.”

“Get closer, and then move parallel with him and go at his speed.”

Alphonse Juilland relayed the orders. The captain ordered the crew to their stations, one standing by the cannon, a second by the .50-caliber gun. By radio he gave orders to the junk, reiterated by the amplified megaphone.

“Call out distance to target,” the technician demanded. Juilland now interpreted … 180 … 150 … 130 … 110 … 90 … 80 … 75.

“All right, hold it there.” The young technician turned to Blackford. “See that grainy stuff? Metal. But it seems to be scattered along the length of the boat. Probably pails, fishhooks, maybe a rifle or two there. Let's board and have a look.”

The fishermen, eight of them, were standing dutifully on the weaving deck, both hands on the lifeline. At 50 meters the technician snapped a Polaroid picture of his screen.