Whistleblower and Never Say Die (20 page)

She rose to her feet and groped around in the darkness for her scattered clothes. “Here’s a little advice, Guy,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t ever give up on your son. Take it from a kid who’s been left behind. Daddies are a precious commodity.”

“I know,” he said softly. He paused, then said, “You’ll never get over it, will you? Your father walking out.”

She shook out her wet blouse. “There are some things a kid can’t ever forget.”

“Or forgive.”

Outside, the rain had softened to a whisper. In the thatching above, insects rustled. “Do you think I should forgive him?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I could forgive him for hurting
me.
But not for hurting my mother. Not when I remember what she went through just to—” Her voice died in midsentence.

They both heard it at the same time: the footsteps slapping through the mud outside.

Guy rolled off the pallet and sprang to his feet beside her. Shoes scraped over the threshold, and the shadow of a man filled the doorway.

The intruder held up a lantern. The flood of light caught them in freeze-frame: Willy, clutching the blouse to her naked breasts; Guy, poised in a fighter’s crouch. The stranger, his face hidden in the shadow of a drab green poncho, slowly lowered the lantern and set it on the table. “I am sorry for the delay,” he said. “The road is very bad tonight.” He tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle down beside the lantern. “At ease, Mr. Barnard. If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now.” He paused and added, “Both of you.”

“Who the hell are you?” Guy asked.

Water droplets splattered onto the floor as the man shoved back the hood of his poncho. His hair was blond, almost white in the lantern light. He had pale eyes set in a moonlike face. “Dr. Gunnel Andersen,” he said, nodding by way of introduction. “Nora sent word you were coming.” Raindrops flew as he shook out the poncho and hung it up to dry. Then he sat down at the table. “Please, feel free to put on your clothes.”

“How did Nora reach you?” Guy asked, pulling on his trousers.

“We keep a shortwave radio for medical emergencies. Not all frequencies are monitored by the government.”

“Are you with the Swedish mission?”

“No, I work for the U.N.” Andersen’s impassive gaze wandered to Willy, who was self-consciously struggling into her damp clothes. “We provide medical care in the villages. Humanitarian aid. Malaria, typhoid, it’s all here. Probably always will be.” He began to unwrap the bundle he’d set on the table. “I assume you have not eaten. This isn’t much but it’s the best I could do. It’s been a bad year for crops, and protein is scarce.” Inside the bundle was a bamboo box filled with cold rice, pickled vegetables and microscopic flecks of pork congealed in gravy.

Guy at once sat down. “After bananas and coconuts, this looks like a feast to me.”

Dr. Andersen glanced at Willy, who was still lingering in the corner, watching suspiciously. “Are you not hungry, Miss Maitland?”

“I’m starved.”

“Then why don’t you eat?”

“First I want to know who you are.”

“I have told you my name.”

“Your name doesn’t mean a thing to me. What’s your connection to Nora? To my father?”

Dr. Andersen’s eyes were as transparent as water. “You’ve waited twenty years for an answer. You can surely wait a few minutes longer.”

Guy said, “Willy, you need to eat. Come, sit down.”

Hunger finally pulled her to the table. Dr. Andersen had
brought no utensils. Willy and Guy used their fingers to scoop up the rice. All the time she was eating, she felt the Swede’s eyes watching her.

“I see you do not trust me,” he said.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

He nodded and smiled. “Then you have learned, in a few shorts days, what took me months to learn.”

“Mistrust?”

“Doubt. Fear.” He looked around the hut, at the shadows dancing on the walls. “What I call the creeping uneasiness. A sense that things are not right in this place. That, just under the surface, lies some…secret, something…terrible.”

The lantern light flickered, almost died. He glanced up as the rain pounded the roof. A puff of wind swept through the doorway, dank with the smells of the jungle.

“You sense it, too,” he said.

“All I know is, there’ve been too many coincidences,” said Guy. “Too many tidy little acts of fate. As though paths have been laid out for us and we’re just following the trail.”

Andersen nodded. “We all have roads laid out for us. We usually choose the path of least resistance. It’s when we wander off that path that things become dangerous.” He smiled. “You know, at this very minute, I could be sitting in my house in Stockholm, sipping coffee, growing fat on cakes and cookies. But I chose to stay here.”

“And has life become dangerous?” asked Willy.

“It’s not my life I worry about now. It was a risk bringing you here. But Nora felt the time was right.”

“Then it was her decision?”

He nodded. “She thought it might be your last chance for a reunion.”

Willy froze, staring at him. “Did you—did you say
reunion?”

Dr. Andersen met her gaze. Slowly, he nodded.

She tried to speak but found her voice was gone. The significance of that one word reduced her to numb silence.

Her father was alive.

It was Guy who finally spoke. “Where is he?”

“A village northwest of here.”

“A prisoner?”

“No, no. A guest. A friend.”

“He’s not being held against his will?”

“Not since the war.” Andersen looked at Willy, who had not yet found her voice. “It may be hard for you to accept, Miss Maitland, but there
are
Americans who find happiness in this country.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. All these years he’s been alive…he could have come home….”

“Many men didn’t return.”

“He had the choice!”

“He also had his reasons.”

“Reasons? He had every reason to come home!”

Her anguished cry seemed to hang in the room. For a moment neither man spoke. Then Andersen rose to his feet. “Your father must speak for himself…” he said, and he started for the door.

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“There are arrangements that have to be made. A time, a place—”

“When will I see him?”

The doctor hesitated. “That depends.”

“On what?”

He looked back from the doorway. “On whether your father wants to see
you.”

Long after Andersen had left, Willy stood in the doorway, staring out at the curtain of rain.

“Why
wouldn’t
he want to see me?” she cried into the darkness.

Quietly Guy came to stand behind her. His arms came around her shoulders, pulled her into the tight circle of his embrace.

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Willy, stop.”

She turned and pressed her face into his chest. “Do you think it was so terrible?” she sobbed. “Being my father?”

“Of course not.”

“It must have been. I must have made him miserable.”

“You were just a kid, Willy! You can’t blame yourself! Sometimes men…change. Sometimes they need—”

“Why?”
she cried.

“Hey, not all men walk out. Some of us, we hang around, for better or for worse.”

Gently, he led her back to the sleeping pallet. Beneath the silvery mosquito net, she let him hold her, an embrace not of passion, but of comfort. The arms of a friend. It felt right, the way their making love earlier that evening had felt right. But she couldn’t help wondering, even as she lay in his arms, when this, too, would change, when
he
would change.

It hurt beyond all measure, the thought that he, too, would someday leave her, that this was but a momentary
mingling of limbs and warmth and souls. It was hurt she expected, but one she’d never, ever be ready for.

Outside, the leaves clattered in the downpour.

It rained all night.

At dawn the jeep appeared.

“I take only the woman,” insisted the Vietnamese driver, planting himself in Guy’s path. The man gestured toward the hut. “You stay, GI.”

“She’s not going without me,” said Guy.

“They tell me only the woman.”

“Then she’s not going.”

The two men faced each other, challenge mirrored in their eyes. The driver shrugged and turned for the jeep. “Then I don’t take anybody.”

“Guy, please,” said Willy. “Just wait here for me. I’ll be okay.”

“I don’t like it.”

She glanced at the driver, who’d already climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. “I don’t have a choice,” she said, and she stepped into the jeep.

The driver released the brake and spun the jeep around. As they rolled away, Willy glanced back and saw Guy standing alone among the trees. She thought he called out something—her name, perhaps—but then the jungle swallowed him from view.

She turned her attention to the road—or what served as a road. In truth, it was scarcely more than a muddy track through the forest. Branches slashed the windshield; water flew from the leaves and splattered their faces.

“How far is it?” she asked. The driver didn’t answer.
“Where are we going?” she asked. Again, no answer. She sat back and waited to see what would happen next.

A few miles into the forest the mud track petered out, and they halted before a solid wall of jungle. The driver cut the engine. A few rays of sunlight shone dimly through the canopy of leaves. Only the cry of a single bird sliced through the silence.

The driver climbed out and walked around to the rear. Willy watched as he rooted around under a camouflage tarp covering the backseat. Then she saw the blade slide out from beneath the tarp. He was holding a machete.

He turned to face her. For a few heartbeats they stared at each other, gazes meeting over the gleam of razor-sharp steel. Then she saw amusement flash in his eyes.

“We walk now,” he said.

A nod was the only reply she could manage. Wordlessly, she climbed out of the jeep and followed him into the jungle.

He moved silently through the trees, the only sound of his passage the whistle and slash of the machete. Vines hung like shrouds from the branches; clouds of mosquitoes swarmed up from stagnant puddles. He moved onward without a second’s pause, melting like a phantom through the brush. Willy, stumbling in the tangle of trees, barely managed to keep the back of his tattered shirt in view.

It didn’t take long for her to give up slapping mosquitoes. She decided it was a lost cause. Let them suck her dry; her blood was up for grabs. She could only concentrate on moving forward, on putting one foot in front of the other. She was sliding through some timeless vacuum where distance was measured by the gaps between trees, the span between footsteps.

By the time they finally halted, she was staggering from exhaustion. Conquered, she sagged against the nearest tree and waited for his next command.

“Here,” he said.

Bewildered, she looked up at him. “But what are you—”

To her astonishment, he turned and trotted off into the jungle.

“Wait!” she cried. “You’re not going to leave me here!”

The man kept moving.

“Please, you have to tell me!” she screamed. He paused and glanced back. “Where am I? What is this place?”

“The same place we find
him,”
was the reply. Then he slipped away, vanishing into the forest.

She whirled around, scanning the jungle, watching, waiting for some savior to appear. She saw no one. The man’s last words echoed in her head.

What is this place?

The same place we find him.

“Who?”
she cried.

In desperation, she stared up at the branches crisscrossing the sky. That’s when she saw it, the monstrous silhouette rising like a shark’s fin among the trees.

It was the tail of a plane.

S
he moved closer. Gradually she discerned, amid the camouflage of trees and undergrowth, the remains of what was once an aircraft. Vines snaked over jagged metal. Fuselage struts reached skyward from the jungle floor, as bare and stark as the bleached ribs of a dead animal. Willy halted, her gaze drawn back to the tail above her in the branches. Years of rust and tropical decay had obscured the markings, but she could still make out the serial number: 5410.

This was Air America flight 5078. Point of origin: Vientiane, Laos. Destination: a shattered treetop in a North Vietnamese jungle.

In the silence of the forest, she bowed her head. A thin shaft of sunlight sliced through the branches and danced at her feet. And all around her the trees soared like the walls of a cathedral. How fitting that this rusted altar to war should come to rest in a place of such untarnished peace.

There were tears in her eyes when she finally forced herself to turn and study the fuselage—what was left of it. Most of the shell had burned or rotted away, leaving only a little flooring and a few crumbling struts. The wings were
missing entirely—probably sheared off on impact. She moved forward to the remnants of the cockpit.

Sunlight sparkled through the shattered windshield. The navigational equipment was gutted; charred wires hung from holes in the instrument panel. Her gaze shifted to the bulkhead, riddled with bullet holes. She ran her fingers across the ravaged metal and then pulled away.

As she took a step back, she heard a voice say, “There isn’t much left of her. But I guess you could say the same of me.”

Willy spun around. And froze.

He came out of the forest, a man in rags, walking toward her. It was the gait she recognized, not the body, which had been worn down to its rawest elements. Nor the face.

Certainly not the face.

He had no ears, no eyebrows. What was left of his hair grew in tortured wisps. He came to within a few yards of her and stopped, as though afraid to move any closer.

They looked at each other, not speaking, perhaps not daring to speak.

“You’re all grown up,” he finally said.

“Yes.” She cleared her throat. “I guess I am.”

“You look good, Willy. Real good. Are you married yet?”

“No.”

“You should be.”

“I’m not.”

A pause. They both looked down, looked back up, strangers groping for common ground.

Softly he asked, “How’s your mother?”

Willy blinked away a new wave of tears. “She’s…dying.” She felt a comfortless sense of retribution at her father’s
shocked silence. “It’s cancer,” she continued. “I wanted her to see a doctor months ago, but you know how she is. Never thinking about herself. Never taking the time to…” Her voice cracked, faded.

“I had no idea,” he whispered.

“How could you? You were dead.” She looked up at the sky and suddenly laughed, an ugly sound in that quiet circle of trees. “It never occurred to you to write to us? One letter from the grave?”

“It only would have made things harder.”

“Harder than
what?
Than it’s already been?”

“With me gone, dead, Ann was free to move on,” he said, “to…find someone else. Someone better for her.”

“But she didn’t! She never even tried! All she could think about was
you.”

“I thought she’d forget. I thought she’d get over me.”

“You thought wrong.”

He bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Wilone.”

After a pause, she said, “I’m sorry, too.”

A bird sang in the trees, its sweet notes piercing the silence between them.

She asked, “What happened to you?”

“You mean this?” He gestured vaguely at his face.

“I mean…everything.”

“Everything,” he repeated. Then, laughing, he looked up at the branches. “Where the hell do I start?” He began to walk in a circle, moving among the trees like a lost man. At last he stopped beside the fuselage. Gazing at the jagged remains, he said, “It’s funny. I never lost consciousness. Even when I hit the trees, when everything around me was being ripped apart, I stayed awake all the way down. I
remember thinking, ‘So when do I get to see heaven?’ Or hell, for that matter. Then it all went up in flames. And I thought, ‘There’s my answer. My eternity…’”

He stopped, let out a deep sigh. “They found me a short way from here, stumbling around under the trees. Most of my face was burned away. But I don’t remember feeling much of anything.” He looked down at his scarred hands. “The pain came later. When they tried to clean the burns. When the nerves grew back. I’d scream at them to let me die, but they wouldn’t. I guess I was too valuable.”

“Because you were American?”

“Because I was a pilot. Someone to pump for information, someone to trade. Maybe someone to spread the Party line back home….”

“Did they…hurt you?”

He shook his head. “I guess they figured I’d been hurt enough. It was a quieter sort of persuasion. Endless discussions. Relentless arguments as I recovered. I swore I wasn’t going to let the enemy twist my head around. But I was weak. I was far from home. And they said things—so many things—I couldn’t argue with. And after a while…after a while it made…well, sense. About this country being their house, about us being the burglars in the house. And wouldn’t anyone with burglars in their house fight back?”

He let out a sigh. “I don’t know anymore. It sounds so feeble now, but I just got tired. Tired of arguing. Tired of trying to explain what I was doing in their country. Tired of trying to defend God only knew what. It was easier just to agree with them. And after a while, I actually started to believe it. Believe what they were telling me.” He looked down. “According to some people, that makes me a traitor.”

“To some people. Not to me.”

He was silent.

“Why didn’t you come home?” she asked.

“Look at me, Willy. Who’d want me back?”

“We did.”

“No, you didn’t. Not the man I’d become.” He laughed hollowly. “Everyone would be pointing at me, whispering behind my back, talking about my face. Is that the kind of father you wanted? The kind of husband your mother wanted? Back home, people expect you to have a nose and ears and eyebrows.” He shook his head. “Ann…Ann was so beautiful. I—I couldn’t go back to that.”

“But what do you have here? Look at you, at what you’re wearing, at how skinny you are. You’re starving, wasting away.”

“I eat what the rest of the village eats. It’s enough to live on.” He picked at the rag that served as his shirt. “Clothes, I never much cared about.”

“You gave up a family!”

“I—I found another family, Willy. Here.”

She stared at him, stunned.

“I have a wife. Her name’s Lan. And we have children. A baby girl and two boys…eight and ten. They can speak English, and a little French….” he said helplessly.

“
We
were at home!”

“But I was here. And Lan was here. She saved my life, Willy. She was the one who kept me alive through the infections, the fevers, the endless pain.”

“You said you begged to die.”

“Lan was the one who made me want to live again.”

Willy stared at that man with half a face, the man she’d
once called her father. The lashless eyes looked back at her, unblinking. Awaiting judgment.

She still had a face, a normal life, she thought. What right did she have to condemn him?

She looked away. “So. What do I tell Mom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“She has a right to know.”

“Maybe it would be kinder if she didn’t.”

“Kinder to whom? You or her?”

He looked down at his feet in their dirty slippers. “I suppose I deserve that. Whatever you have to say, I deserve it. But God knows, I wanted to make it up to her. And to you. I sent money—twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. You got it, didn’t you?”

“We never knew who sent it.”

“You weren’t supposed to know. Nora Walker arranged it through a bank in Bangkok. It was everything I had. All that was left of the gold.”

She gave him a bewildered look and saw that his gaze had shifted toward the plane’s fuselage. “You were carrying gold?”

“I didn’t know it at the time. It was our little rule at Air America: Never ask about the cargo. Just fly the plane. But after she went down, after I crawled out of the wreckage, I saw it. Gold bars scattered all over the ground. It was crazy. There I was, half my damn face burned off, and I remember thinking, “I’m rich. If I live through this, son of a bitch, I’m
rich.”
He laughed, then, at his own lunacy, at the absurdity of a dying man rejoicing among the ashes. “I buried some of the gold, threw some in the bushes. I thought—I guess I thought it would be my ticket out. That if I was captured, I could use it to bargain for my freedom.”

“What happened?”

He looked off at the trees. “They found me. NVA soldiers. And they found most of the gold.” He shrugged. “They kept us both.”

“But not forever. You didn’t have to stay—” She stopped. “Didn’t you
ever
think of us?”

“I never stopped thinking of you. After the war, after all that—that insanity was over, I came back here, dug up what gold they hadn’t found. I asked Nora to get it out to you.” He looked at Willy. “Don’t you see? I never forgot you. I just…” He stopped, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I just couldn’t go back.”

In the trees above, branches rattled in the wind. Leaves drifted down in a soft rain of green.

He turned away. “I suppose you’ll want to go back to Hanoi. I’ll see that someone drives you….”

“Dad?”

He halted, not daring to look at her.

“Your little boys. You—say they understand English?”

He nodded.

She paused. “Then we ought to understand each other, the boys and I,” she said. “I mean, assuming they want to meet me….”

Her father quickly rubbed a hand across his eyes. But when he turned to look at her, she could still see the tears glistening there. He smiled…and held out his hand to her.

She’d been gone too long.

Three hours had passed, and Guy was more than worried. He was scared out of his head. Something wasn’t right. It was that old instinct of his, that sense of doom closing in,
and he was helpless to do anything about it. A dozen different images kept forming in his mind, each one progressively more terrible. Willy screaming. Dying. Or already dead in the jungle. When at last he heard the rumble of the jeep, he was hovering at the edge of panic.

Dr. Andersen was at the wheel. “Good morning, Mr. Barnard!” he called cheerily as Guy stalked over to him.

“Where is she?”

“She is safe.”

“Prove it.”

Andersen threw open the door and gestured for him to get in. “I will take you to her.”

Guy climbed in and slammed the door. “Where are we going?”

“It is a long drive.” Andersen threw the jeep into gear and spun them around onto a dirt track. “Be patient.”

The night’s rainfall had turned the path to muck, and on either side the jungle pressed in, close and strangling. They might have gone for miles or tens of miles; on a road locked in by jungle, distance was impossible to judge. When Andersen finally pulled off to the side, Guy could see no obvious reason for stopping. Only when he’d climbed out and stood among the trees did he notice the tiny footpath leading into the bush. He couldn’t see what lay beyond; the forest hid everything from view.

“From here we walk,” said Andersen, foraging around for a few loose branches.

“Why the camouflage?” asked Guy, watching Andersen drape the branches over the jeep.

“Protection for the village.”

“What are they afraid of?”

Andersen reached under the tarp on the backseat and pulled out an AK-47. Casually, he slung it over his shoulder. “Everything,” he said, and headed off into the jungle.

The footpath led into a shadowy world of hundred-foot trees and tangled vines. Watching Andersen’s back, Guy was struck by the irony of a doctor lugging an automatic rifle. He wondered what enemy he planned to use it on.

The smells of rotting vegetation, of mud simmering in the heat were only too familiar. “The whole damn jungle smells of death,” the GIs used to say. Guy felt his gait change to a silent glide, felt his reflexes kick into overdrive. His five senses were painfully acute; the snap of a branch under Andersen’s boot was as shocking as gunfire.

He heard the sounds of the village before he saw it. Somewhere deep in the forest, children were laughing. And then he heard water rushing and the cry of a baby.

Andersen pushed ahead, and as the last curtain of branches parted, Guy saw, beneath a towering stand of trees, the circle of huts. In the central courtyard, children batted a pebble back and forth with their feet. They froze as Guy and Andersen emerged from the forest. One of the girls called out; instantly, a dozen adults emerged from the huts. In silence they all watched Guy.