Tucker's Last Stand (35 page)

He spotted his bag, picked it up, shoved the stub into the hands of the guard at the gate, and went out in the relentless sun to hail a cab.

He spotted Blackford walking toward him. He caught just the words, “Tuck, come on …”

A uniformed man with a rifle shoved Blackford to one side, hard. Another bore down on Tucker from the right, another from the left, a third behind him. “Major Montana, you are under arrest. Extend your hands behind your back.”

Montana felt the steel press of the pistol on the small of his back.

He complied. A van drove up. The back door opened. The officer in charge, a South Vietnamese who wore a colonel's insignia, gave orders in Vietnamese to the driver. Twenty minutes later the van stopped. Tucker could hear gates being opened. He looked through the barred window at the back of the van and saw soldiers closing the gates. The van stopped. Tucker was led out and registered at the desk. Then to a bare wall where his two escorts left him, the officer in charge having said in English, “Stand still. Photograph.” Tucker's eyes closed when the flash bulb popped. The guards were back. He was led to a cell guarded by a massive door. Inside there was a bench, and light only from a narrow slit, eight feet up. After he was unshackled, the guards left him, slamming the door shut.

Tucker Montana looked up at the narrow light, lay down on the bench and wept, and prayed for strength.

When the van came to the prison gates, Blackford told Alphonse to slow the Citroen in which they were trailing the military van.

“No point in getting any closer,” he said wearily, bitterly. “They were one step ahead of us.”

“We tried, Mr. Oakes. Wasn't anything more we could do. Didn't know they were also on the trail.”

Blackford cursed himself. Hadn't Rufus
told
him that Tucker—and Lao Dai—would be tailed? There was nothing to be done at this point. Later.

Meanwhile, he had to be in Danang for the final, critical Tracer test. From there he would contact Rufus in Washington.

He didn't know that Rufus had been reached at the airport in Honolulu by the Director. Over the telephone he had been told to return immediately to Saigon. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had called the Director a half hour earlier to report that South Vietnam Intelligence had picked up the chief architect of Operation Igloo and was holding him, incommunicado, in Kham Chi Hoa prison.

37

November 7, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

Colonel Yen Chi, the head of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Intelligence, was not himself able to understand the complexities detailed in the photographs that had been seized from the North Vietnamese colonel at the airport. That the plans had been done by Americans was obvious: all the writing—the specifications, the footnotes, the text—was in English. That it was information given to the enemy by Major Montana, while not yet absolutely established, seemed all but certain. Captain Minh-Lao Hoang had traveled on the Savannakhet flight with him, and had tracked him to the Lao-tse. At the inn he was in the company, continuously, of a Vietnamese who traveled under the name of Choi. A careful check on all incoming flights ended with the tailing, by one of Captain Minh-Lao's associates, of two men, one of them an Asiatic, the second a Russian, also to the Lao-tse Inn.… Silver had crossed hands and got from the dispatcher the information that the chartered airplane in which they came had flown in from Hanoi.

At the inn, close observation revealed that the two new arrivals, together with Major Montana and a fourth man, had spent hours together, on Tuesday and again Wednesday, in the fourth man's suite. Instructions had been given to the driver, who stayed by the Peugeot day and night. He was followed, on the second day, into Savannakhet. There he went to a little stationery store stocked with foreign newspapers and supplies specially purchased for American personnel at Nakhon Phanom. At that store the driver purchased several large pads of what appeared to be sketching paper. These had been taken to the inn.

Captain Minh-Lao and his three men, conferring on Wednesday night and ascertaining from the dispatcher that orders had gone out to have the chartered plane ready for takeoff at ten the next morning, concluded that the man at whose suite the meetings had taken place was probably the senior member of the North Vietnamese delegation and that the sketching paper would almost certainly yield important material.

The diversion was planned. Two pounds of explosive were lodged at night, far enough away from the main airport shed to avoid ruining it, but close enough to make a noise deafening to everyone inside the shed. A battery-powered remote detonator was emplaced so that Captain Minh-Lao could set off the explosion with his tiny transmitter, carried in his pocket inside a cigar case. Minh-Lao was slightly puzzled to see only the Russian and the North Vietnamese enter the airport, without their companion, pausing at the counter to fill out their manifests. For a moment he considered detonating the bomb and grabbing one of
their
suitcases. But he peered out the entrance and saw his target sitting in the car, its engine running. So: They were boarding their flight in relays.

He dallied at the newsstand. Moments later, his mark walked into the building and, leaning over the counter, began to fill out the form. Minh-Lao pressed the switch on the transmitter, dove down on his belly behind his target and, while everyone else was prostrate, lifted himself on his knees and slid the target's briefcase into his empty suitcase, just large enough for the briefcase, a few crossword puzzles, and a family album.

Colonel Yen was disappointed that he had not got hold of the sketch pads. “Obviously the two gentlemen from North Vietnam who boarded the plane ahead of your target had those sketches in their own briefcases. So that what we are left with is—this.” He pointed at the photographs. “Dr. Fwang-tse from Special Forces will be here any minute. He will surely be able to give us the meaning of the photographs.”

Dr. Fwang-tse was there for several hours. He was a trained physicist of some ingenuity, but the transcription was slow because there were many words on the photographed material that were unfamiliar to him, so that they had had to bring in a South Vietnamese student, just returned from M.I.T., to help.

It was almost eight o'clock at night before Colonel Yen was told that Dr. Fwang-tse was ready with his report.

“What you have here,” said Dr. Fwang-tse, lowering the intensity of the light he had trained on the photographs, “is a complicated but comprehensive plan based on something the Americans are calling a ‘Spikebuoy,' defined as an ‘Unattended Ground Sensor.' It is, in simple terms, a noise detector. It is designed to pick up any noise, no matter how faint; to transmit that sound, through its own frequency, to a recorder, probably airborne, which in turn feeds it into a computer which in turn records and analyzes what was heard. Its purpose, I would guess, is very clear: to use on the Trail in order to detect enemy transit.”

That was enough—all that Colonel Yen needed.

But he was a cautious man and he decided, after consulting with his two most trusted aides, to spend the evening considering alternatives, of which there were several.

He called the U.S. embassy.

The ambassador was at dinner. Should he be interrupted?

Colonel Yen was relieved that he had not needed to speak directly to General Taylor. “No. But be good enough to pass along this message to him, that Colonel Yen Chi will need to see him most urgently at ten
A.M.
I shall be at his office.”

“Should I write down your telephone, Colonel?”

“The ambassador will not be able to reach me. But you can confirm the authenticity of this call by telephoning ARVN Headquarters. Ask for Intelligence. My office will know about the ten o'clock meeting.”

“Very well, Colonel.”

And now … Should he report immediately to General Khanh? After all, however shaky his hold on the government, he was still the actual head of the Republic of South Vietnam.

No. He would wait. He could always say he had spent the time reconfirming the contents of the photographic material.

The time had come, he told his aides, to visit the prisoner.

Major Tucker Montana, the handcuffs back on, his beard a day old, was brought into the meeting room.

Colonel Yen gave orders to the guards. They removed the shackles and receded to the corners of the room. Colonel Yen now spoke in English.

“
You
may sit down.”

Tucker did so.

“Why did you give secrets to the enemy?”

“What secrets?”

Colonel Yen got up from behind the desk and, the photographs in hand, walked around and thrust them under Tucker's chin.

Tucker Montana was visibly amazed.

“Where did you get these?”

“From the briefcase of a gentleman with whom you spent almost three days, who a few minutes later departed, with two companions, on a chartered plane to Hanoi.”

Tucker's mind was racing.
How had Bui Tin got hold of the photographs of the Spikebuoy development
? He had not traveled with the portfolio from which these photographs had obviously been taken. And then … then he remembered clearly that when he had first mentioned the word “Spikebuoy,” Bui Tin had said he knew nothing about a Spikebuoy. Yet in his briefcase all along, Tucker now knew, was a duplicate of his own top-secret Spikebuoy folder. Granted, there were copies of that folder floating about, but every one of them was numbered, and except for copies used every day at Nakhon Phanom and at Aberdeen, there was only his one set, locked in the big vault at the Caravelle.

He said wearily, “I can tell you one thing, Colonel Yen.
I
did not give those photographs to—to the man you took them from.”

Colonel Yen sighed. “Ah then, so you are going to be one of those.”

“One of those what?”

“One of those who proclaim their innocence, even when there is overwhelming evidence of guilt.”

“I'm just telling you: I
did not
give those photographs to the North Vietnamese.”

“Ah then. You
knew
he was a North Vietnamese?”

Tucker said nothing.

“What were you talking to the Vietnamese about, him and his two friends, including the Russian, for two days and two nights?”

“About how to end the war.” Why not be truthful? he thought. When possible.

Colonel Yen yearned to submit his prisoner to physical pressure. The two guards had been especially selected: they were well trained in the arts of persuasion. He thought about it.

No. He had better not mangle the prisoner before his meeting with the ambassador the next morning. And with General Khanh. He drew slowly on his cigarette. Then said sharply, “We will continue this tomorrow.” He spoke to the guards in Vietnamese.

Tucker said, “Colonel, would you pay a fellow officer the respect of putting a reading light in my cell? And could I see a newspaper? And maybe you have a book or two in English here?”

Colonel Yen lifted the telephone and spoke to the chief warder. Tucker didn't understand it all, but got a few words. “No lights for prisoner.”

He looked up at Colonel Yen and spat on the floor.

38

November 8, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

At 2:30 the next afternoon Blackford, somber, intent, was on the lead patrol boat in the Gulf, on the final test run with the metal scanner. To be tested was a second South Vietnamese patrol boat in which the U.S. technician had carefully stored, in shipboard compartments variously shielded with silver oxide paper, wet blankets, and other materials designed to deflect inquisitive beams on the prowl for metals, several kinds of weapons. The question was: Might the North Vietnamese, once they became aware of the Tracer, easily package their contraband in such a way as to escape detection at sea? The American technician was most anxious to be done with this, the concluding test, and to get back to Washington with his notebooks. When the mate called Blackford to the radio, he waited impatiently by the screen of his device. To the technician's surprise, the
Mai Tai
suddenly turned, not toward the patrol boat its mission was to scan, but back toward Danang. At full speed.

He rushed up to the noisy cockpit. “What goes on?” he asked Blackford.

“I've been called back. Emergency.”

“But—but we could have done our test in just over an hour!”

“You can go back and make the test.”

“That will take us another two hours round trip!”

“So, Lieutenant, what do you want me to do? Radio back to cancel the emergency?”

Rufus's voice was tense. Could Blackford make the four o'clock scheduled flight to Saigon? If not, Rufus would arrange for an Air America transport.

“No, I can make it. If I miss, I'll call from the airport and tell you. Do I need to bring anything special with me?”

Rufus paused. “Bring your gear.”

Blackford supposed he was being sent to America. Perhaps with Tucker? If so, would Tucker wear handcuffs? If only he knew exactly what Tucker had done, closeted at that inn with the North Vietnamese.

He called Juilland. “Alphonse. Meet me with the car at BOQ. You'll be running me to the airport.”

He emptied the contents of his chest of drawers into a large bag and, into another, his reading and writing materials. In less than fifteen minutes he was in the car, in less than two hours at Rufus's safe house.

The door latch responded instantly to his knock. He left his baggage on the landing and rushed upstairs. Flinging open the door, he collapsed, sweating, in the armchair. “What's up, Rufus?”

Rufus told him about Tucker.

And Blackford told Rufus about Tucker. When he was through he said simply, “Since you already knew about Lao Dai, it was easy for me to promise not to tell you about her until he made his plans. You should know, Rufus, that my plan was to pick him up at the airport and get him the hell back to Washington. I don't know what he did at that inn with the gooks.”