Tucker's Last Stand (32 page)

Blackford breathed deeply. Tucker did not go on. After a moment Blackford spoke.

“How did you find out?”

“I went to her apartment after the meeting this afternoon. I had told her I wouldn't be there until ten, that I had to have dinner with you and Rufus. I didn't know you had another engagement. I reached the landing—she's on the fourth floor—just when her door opened, and a young guy, Vietnamese, left, carrying a briefcase. Didn't see me clearly, was in a hurry. I kept walking, as though going on up to the fifth floor, let him get to the staircase and start down. I turned around and followed him.

“I swear I don't know what made me do it, but when he was out on the street and had walked maybe a block, block and a half—street was empty—I ran up. Grabbed him. I asked who he was. He said in French he was a schoolteacher. I said let me see your briefcase. With his left hand he handed me the case, with his right hand he went for a pistol in his pocket. He didn't have a chance: I smashed his face in, plenty of time, pistol fell on the pavement. I dragged him and the case into a side alley. He was out. The case was locked. I found the key in his pocket. I opened it. There were two rolls of film in it, undeveloped. And four packets of U.S. bills, $1,000 stamped on each packet. Then … then in the document compartment two folders. The first folder had a receipt for one thousand dollars. Signed: Lao Dai, dated yesterday, November 1. And in the other packet, black-and-white pictures …”

Blackford waited. Tucker turned, again, to one side. There was an audible catch in his throat. Blackford said nothing.

“Pictures of me … having sex with Lao Dai.”

Blackford permitted himself to whistle. But he said only, “What did you do?”

“You guessed it, I went back to the apartment house. Knocked on the door, she answered. I locked it behind me, walked over to the table, opened the briefcase, spread out the stuff, told her she hadn't asked for enough money, here was three thousand dollars more, and I tossed her the money.”

“And?”

“I don't feel I can go through it all, Black. But that was at about seven o'clock. And I left her half an hour ago, went to a bar and called you. I guess I can just put it together and say: I forgave her.”

Blackford spoke cautiously. “Why?”

“Because she convinced me. She convinced me she's trying to avoid a world war, convinced me that she loves me, that she will do anything I want, including turn herself in if I ask her to; that the North Vietnamese are going to win, no matter what, and the sooner they do, the less lives it's going to cost. That she had no idea there was a trick camera in the bedroom, she'd give them hell over that; that the money was to pay several subordinates on her payroll. And convinced me that Ho Chi Minh is very sick, is on the way out, and the younger people coming in aren't the old Stalin types, but independents who have nothing but contempt for the old ways, and that the new Vietnam will be just a socialist state, like Sweden—” He stopped talking suddenly. “You think I'm crazy?”

“No, Tucker. I don't think you're crazy. But I think you've got to be real careful. I mean, let's take Lao Dai. Maybe she's on the level with you … but then maybe she isn't. If she isn't, she might try to ambush you, get you kidnapped—you'd be a pretty hot property up at Hanoi, you know.”

“That's right, Black. Either she's telling me what she really believes, or she isn't telling me what she really believes. I got to decide, right? Well, I have decided. I have decided she is telling me the truth. So the question is: What do I do?”

“You mean, what do you do—other than tell me what's happened?”

Tucker nodded. “Besides that?”

“Well, you won't be surprised, Tucker, if I tell you you owe it to—to all of us to go back to Savannakhet and finish up on Igloo.”

“I figured you'd say that.”

“Will you?” Blackford spoke slowly.

“I haven't one hundred percent decided. Will you agree to keep secret on Lao Dai until I decide?”

“I have to—for now. For you.”

“Black, can I ask you for another favor?”

“Sure.”

“Can we talk for a while about something else? Anything else?” Tucker reached for the bottle of beer. Blackford gave his answer by reaching for the second bottle.

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.