Saigon: A Novel Part 43

The dying man nodded, gazing back at him with the one rheumy eye. "You were always different from Chuck and Guy.

More sensitive, I guess . . . mole like your mother. . . You always seemed far away from me." The cold hand twitched weakly in Joseph's grasp. "But you're strong in other ways. You're the only one who's survived. Chuck and Guy are dead.

Joseph saw his chance and leaned closer suddenly. "Has the burden of Chuck's death been hard for you to bear all these years?"

The good eye fell closed, and for a moment the senator's ragged breathing was the only sound in the room. "I tried to save him. ... I did everything I could. The eyelid fluttered and the exposed eye gazed blearily at him. "You know that, Joseph, don't you?"

Joseph gazed back at his father in disbelief; then after a moment he turned his face away towards the uncurtained window. "Chuck had what it takes He was strong. . . so d.a.m.ned strong and determined . . . he had the will to succeed - that's why his death was such a terrible loss. Never forget that, Joseph, will you? I guess he was a little headstrong . . . Like his old father Like his brother Guy. . . But that's not the worst fault a man can have, I don't reckon."

His voice was rambling, rising and falling on each painful breath, and Joseph, feeling the anger in him reach a new peak, let go of his father's hand and stood up. "You're wrong to compare Chuck with Guy," he said in a whisper so fierce that it caused the dying face to turn quickly towards him. "You're more wrong than you've ever known."

The solitary eye regarded Joseph directly for a moment, then seemed to cloud over. "I know . . . I know .. . You don't have to tell me that, Joseph.. . there was never anybody to touch Chuck, was there? n.o.body at all!"

A grimace of pain contorted his face suddenly and his head began rolling back and forth on the pillow. As he watched his father suffering his death agonies, Joseph felt the anger rush out of him like air from a deflated balloon, and the urge to wound was replaced in the same instant by an intense feeling of pity Nathaniel Sherman had misled others lot so long about his role in the death of his favorite son that in the end he might even have come to believe his own lies. Perhaps he'd had to do that to make his grief bearable, thought Joseph, hut either way he remained impregnable behind the walls of his own illusions, as lonely and isolated as he lay dying as he had been all his life in the midst of his own family.

As he stood watching life fade from the stricken body, another thought struck Joseph with sickening force: he was not so different himself from the man he had been at odds with all his life. He had imagined himself wronged and misunderstood as a boy by a blind, insensitive father who had continued to see life simply through the eyes of ancestors who had tamed the raw, wild lands of America by unrelenting physical determination. He had always imagined that his own more sensitive nature was superior, yet he too in his turn had set his own sons and his bi-other Guy against himself; his owrfoo1ish romantic idealism had led him to believe that nothing was impossible if a man responded honestly to the innermost urgings of his soul, if he set his love of truth above all things - hut these beliefs had brought disaster on himself in his own life that had exceeded even the scale of his father's.

Saddened more by these thoughts than by his father's imminent death, Joseph turned his back on the bed suddenly and walked across the room to the window. For a long time he stood looking out over the darkened boxwood lawns towards the river; the night was moonless but light from the uncurtained window on the ground floor cast a faint glow into the garden, and as his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness he fancied he saw someone moving among the trees. But although he stared hard into the shadows, he couldn't be certain the light hadn't played a trick on him.

Standing there, he remembered how only two or three hours before he had stood beside another bed in Georgetown looking down at the face of his only surviving son who was as lost and remote from him now as his dying father, and he s.h.i.+vered involuntarily; dimly he became aware that in the four-poster behind him, the pa.s.sage of air in and out of his father's lungs was becoming more noisy and labored, but something prevented him from turning around. Then a long, harsh, high-pitched scream split the darkness of the garden outside and Joseph recoiled instinctively as a dark shape rose from the blackness of the box- woods and soared upwards, pa.s.sing close across the face of the window. The peac.o.c.k screamed again as it settled on the chimney stack above the room, and its repeated cries rang eerily in the flue that rose from the big fireplace beside the bed. A shower of soot tumbled noisily into the hearth, and Joseph heard clearly the dry rattling sound of the peac.o.c.k spreading the spines of its tail on the chimney top.

A moment later the rhythm of his father's breathing was interrupted suddenly; a long choking cough racked him and his breath gurgled loudly in his throat like water. Joseph rushed to the bedside, fell to his knees and seized the old man's hand again; the desire to utter some final words of consolation welled up in him with such force that tears started to his eyes - but he gazed in vain into the face that was now clenched and contorted in agony. Clearly beyond hearing or seeing, the senator's whole frame was trembling; then abruptly all movement ceased and the spent, white body seemed to sink and melt into the snowy pillows.

Joseph remained motionless on his knees beside the bed for a minute or two, holding the limp lifeless hand; then he rose and walked quietly to the door. On the landing outside he found Tempe waiting with one hand pressed to her mouth.

"What was that awful noise, Joseph?" she asked in a horrified whisper.

"Just one of the peac.o.c.ks flying up to the chimney." He reached out and took her hand, relieved to find it warm to his touch. "There's nothing to worry about - he's gone."

PART EIGHT.

Victory and Defeat.

1972-1975.

Richard Nixon won the presidential election of November 1968 largely on the strength of his campaign pledge to "end the war and win the peace" in Vietnam. This promise seemed highly attractive to an American nation that had been deeply shocked by the scale of the Tet Offensive the previous February; the Communist offensive, because it exploded the myth that the war was being won, left President Johnson's Vietnam policies in ruins and contributed directly to his decision not to run again for the presidency, but during the four years of his first term, President Nixon used his ambiguous campaign pledge to spread and escalate the war against Communism in Indochina. He ordered brief invasions of Cambodia and Laos, bombed those two countries over a longer period, resumed the bombing of North Vietnam halted by President Johnson, and eventually mined the approaches to the harbor of Haiphong in an attempt to stop seaborne supplies from the Soviet Union reaching North Vietnam. To pacify public opinion while intensifying the war in these new directions, he scaled down the country's direct involvement by gradually withdrawing American ground troops from Vietnam and arming, supplying and training a greatly expanded South Vietnamese army - a policy he called "Vietnamization." Contrived to satisfy both "doves" and "hawks" alike, this policy gradually cooled the pa.s.sions of the most fervent antiwar protesters - those students who feared they would be drafted to Vietnam if the war continued until their deferments expired. In March 1969, some 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, but this peak figure was reduced by stages until only 27,000 "advisers" remained at the end of 1972. The policy of "Vietnamization" expanded President Thieu's army to a strength of more than a million men and increased the flood of American money and war materials into Saigon, but this did nothing to solve the chronic political and social problems that made South Vietnam so vulnerable to a Communist takeover; the new enlarged army was seen by the largely peasant population as a bigger and better force for terror and oppression, and the increased flow of aid led to greater corruption among the country's military rulers. The invasions of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971 by mixed American and South Vietnamese forces were designed to strike at Communist bases and supply routes, but neither met with much success; the large-scale bombing of these two countries bordering Vietnam also had tragic results, killing unknown numbers of their peasants, turning millions into refugees and ultimately hastening their fall to Communism in 1975. Although President Nixon succeeded in extracting American ground forces from the conflict step by step, 20,000 American fighting men were killed in Vietnam while he was commander in chief, and in the first two years of his presidency he dropped more bombs on Indochina than the United States had dropped in Europe and the Pacific in World War II. By May 1972 some three thousand tons of bombs were falling each day on Indochina at a daily cost of $20 million - but still the war dragged on. By then the remaining American troops fought only with great reluctance; drug-taking became rife in the ranks, and officers were frequently attacked by enlisted men with fragmentation grenades. The soldiers' att.i.tudes were conditioned by the growing mood of disenchantment with the war at home which had been heightened dramatically by two separate events - the revelation in November 1969 that three hundred Vietnamese civilians had been ma.s.sacred eighteen months earlier by American troops at the village of My Lai, and the publication in the summer of 1971 of leaked secret doc.u.ments which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were a detailed government study of American involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1968, and they revealed most dramatically the extent of President Kennedy's intervention in the plot to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, and the dubious background to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, it became clear, had been prepared in advance of the North Vietnamese attacks of August 1964 to give President Johnson a free hand to make war in Vietnam without a formal war declaration. Above all, the Pentagon Papers were a staggering catalogue of how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had deliberately deceived the American people over Vietnam and they turned public attention increasingly to the long-drawn-out peace talks which had begun in Paris in May 1968. Elaborate and infinitely complex, the negotiations, which were to last five years, were often used by both sides for propaganda purposes, but they always centered around one issue: who should govern in Saigon. What began as talks between American and North Vietnamese diplomats were expanded later to include representatives of President Thieu's government and the National Liberation Front but something akin to a permanent stalemate was quickly reached; Hanoi and the Liberation Front demanded as their price for peace a complete American withdrawal and representation for the Front in a coalition government in South Vietnam, but President Thieu refused to countenance the idea of a coalition. As the talking continued inconclusively in Paris, the war went on, and in the spring of 1972, General Vo Nguyen Giap pushed three of North Vietnam's best divisions into South Vietnam supported by tanks and artillery. In response to this new offensive, President Nixon ordered giant American B-52 bombers to attack the regions around Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time since 1968 and he also seeded the Gulf of Tongking with mines to blockade Haiphong Harbor. The Communist thrust into South Vietnam lost momentum as a result and eventually the renewed American bombing and the mining of Haiphong forced the Communist leaders.h.i.+p in Hanoi to modify their peace demands. In early October 1972 they dropped their insistence that the National Liberation Front be included immediately in a coalition government in Saigon; instead, in return for a cease-fire and an American withdrawal, they proposed that the government of President Thieu should continue temporarily in office while a joint "Council of National Reconciliation" discussed the problems of cooperation in the South. With the American presidential election due in November, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser. Dr. Henry Kissinger, were anxious to clinch an early agreement but President Thieu denounced the new proposals as a 'disguised coalition" and refused to cooperate. Despite this setback, a partial bombing halt was observed by the United States in response and Dr. Kissinger ringingly declared that peace was "at hand" during a dramatic press conference in Was.h.i.+ngton on October 26. Two weeks later, on a wave of peace optimism, President Nixon was reelected for a second term by a landslide majority, but when the talks in Paris were resumed shortly after the election, they foundered again without any clear explanation being given as to what was holding up an agreement. President Nixon's critics promptly accused him of exploiting the peace talks for his own electoral advantage, and when the delegates began rea.s.sembling once more at the beginning of December in the anonymous villas in the suburbs of Paris where they had met over the years, there was an unprecedented mood of tension and expectation among the journalists waiting in the wintry streets outside. Their thoughts, like those of the delegates, were turned to peace, and with Christmas approaching, few of them antic.i.p.ated the b.l.o.o.d.y act of wholesale destruction that would be carried out before American forces finally bowed out of Vietnam.

1.

Joseph Sherman turned up the collar of his overcoat against the chill December wind blowing along the Avenue de General Leclerc in Gif-sur-Yvette and stamped his feet to warm them. With thirty other journalists and photographers of many different nationalities, he was awaiting the arrival of Henry Kissinger, and as he stood there, shoulders hunched against the cold, he reflected that the setting for the final confrontation between the United States and its Vietnamese enemies was as surprising and bizarre as everything else had been during the baffling war that had spanned an entire decade. The whitewashed artist's cottage with its orange-tiled roof and green shutters, outside which the journalists had gathered, was an anonymous little dwelling standing behind stucco walls on the edge of the sleepy suburban town fifteen miles from the center of Paris; its address was io8 Avenue de General Leclerc and it had first been chosen as a venue for peace talks late in 1969 when Dr. Kissinger and Hanoi's chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, began holding secret meetings away from the public gaze focused on the formal peace negotiations taking place in the grandiose French government conference chamber on the Avenue Kleber. Originally owned by a left-wing French artist, Fernand Leger, the cottage had been bequeathed on his death to the French Communist Party which Ho Chi Minh had helped to found in the 192os. Most prominent Vietnamese Communists of the older generation had cut their revolutionary teeth in Paris in the 'twenties and 'thirties and bonds of friends.h.i.+p developed then with French Communists still held in the 197os; so the party had willingly loaned the painter's cottage to Hanoi as a diplomatic hideaway, and during the closing months of 1972, it had become the most frequently used of three North Vietnamese houses in and around Paris.

From conversations with acquaintances in the State Department, Joseph knew that framed cubist abstracts by Fernand Leger still hung on the walls of the long main room where a rectangular green baize table had been set up, and the American delegation always found little bottles of French mineral water and gla.s.ses set out in front of their half-dozen chairs whenever they arrived. In the days when the venue was still secret, Kissinger had often stepped across the threshold breathless after a 100 m.p.h. dash through suburban Paris to throw off pursuing reporters, but since its location was now known, he had become accustomed to arriving more grandly in a white rented Mercedes, flanked by French police motorcycle outriders.

At that same green baize table on October 8, Kissinger had listened with barely suppressed excitement as Le Duc Tho abruptly reversed four long years of stubborn intransigence and told him that his government was ready at last to agree to a cessation of hostilities. Hanoi would release its American prisoners, he had said, in return for an undertaking that President Nixon would withdraw all remaining U.S. troops and allow South Vietnam to work out its own political future. This amounted to a virtual acceptance of earlier American proposals, and the absence of the habitual Communist demand for the National Liberation Front to be admitted into a coalition government in Saigon had electrified the Americans present. They realized that the North Vietnamese had their eyes fixed firmly on the date for the American presidential election, then one month away, and obviously expected to be able to pressure President Nixon into settling quickly so as to gain maximum advantage at the polls - but otherwise the sincerity of the Hanoi delegates seemed beyond doubt.

Two nerve-wracking months, however, had pa.s.sed since that day. President Nixon had been reelected, but President Thieu had refused to give his approval to the deal, and when the negotiations resumed in mid-November, according to Joseph's informants, the Americans had found that the Communists had returned inexplicably to their old stubborn uncooperative ways. The American delegation had tried to persuade the Communists to meet some of President Thieu's objections but had made no headway at all, and Joseph was told that there had been no alternative but to break off the talks. Since the resumption on December 4, the new session had dragged on for ten days, and in their contacts with the journalists since then, the baffled American negotiators had admitted that they were becoming increasingly frustrated by the rude and sometimes contemptuous time-wasting tactics of the Communists.

The journalists had erected their own scaffold in the street opposite the cottage so that they could see over the wall into the garden around it, and occasionally in breaks between the talks they had caught glimpses of Kissinger or Le Duc Tho strolling and chatting with aides beneath the bare trees. Atmospheric pictures had been taken of them with telephoto lenses, but the windows of the cottage had always remained draped with frilled net curtains which successfully concealed those inside from the journalists' gaze covering the talks in this way was a frustrating a.s.signment, but because hopes for a settlement were high, Joseph, like the others, had stuck doggedly to the task for the past ten days.

Flurries of sleet were beginning to dance in the cold wind on that afternoon of December 13 when the Kissinger entourage finally drove up the avenue and swung into the cottage garden past solid steel gates that were immediately slammed shut behind their cars. A dumpy figure in a white raincoat and heavy-rimmed spectacles, Henry Kissinger strode stern-faced to the front door of the cottage without acknowledging the appeals from the journalists on their scaffold to stop and pose for a photograph. Joseph, like all the other correspondents, was watching intently to see if the austere, white-haired figure of Le Duc Tho would appear to greet Kissinger at the door, and because his attention was fully absorbed, he didn't notice the curtains at an upper window s.h.i.+ft briefly. In the event, Le Duc Tho made no appearance, and a buzz of disappointed comment rose from all round the viewing platform as gloomy predictions were exchanged about the early announcement of a cease-fire.

As he watched the journalists conversing from his place beside the window in one of the upstairs rooms, Tran Van Kim suddenly snapped his fingers at an aide standing behind him and called for a pair of binoculars. Kim wore the same kind of dark, high-necked tunic as Le Duc Tho, his manner towards the junior members of the North Vietnamese delegation was similarly distant and formal, and when his aide returned with the binoculars, he took them from him impatiently. He adjusted the lenses with care until the group of journalists on the scaffold came sharply into focus, then he stared hard at one of the faces.

"Fetch a list of the correspondents covering the talks," he said quietly to his aide at last without turning round. "Check particularly to see if there is an American named 'Sherman' among them. And hurry!"

The aide hastened from the room and returned a few minutes later bearing a sheaf of papers. "Yes, Comrade Kim," he said breathlessly, "there is a 'Joseph Sherman' among the listed Americans." He held out a telephoto close-up of Joseph taken by one of the delegation's intelligence operatives, and Kim eagerly took it from him. As Kim studied the picture, the aide began reading dutifully from Joseph's dossier.

"Professor of Asian studies at Cornell University, 1954 to 1967; senior adviser to the U.S. Joint Public Affairs Office in Saigon for three months, January to March 1968; thereafter resigned and wrote a book ent.i.tled The American Betrayal criticizing United States policy in Vietnam.

"Yes, yes," broke in Kim testily, "the book's well known. But what's he doing now?"

The aide consulted his list again. "Because of the fame his book has brought him, Joseph Sherman, who is married to a British television journalist and lives in London, has currently been commissioned by The Times of London to write a series of special a.n.a.lytical articles on the peace negotiations and the war. So far two have been published." The aide handed over two press clippings attached to another sheet of paper. "At present he's staying at the Intercontinental Hotel at the corner of Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione alongside the Tuileries Gardens. His room number is 4567."

Kim read carefully through the clippings, still standing by the window, then he sat down at a desk and pulled a blank sheet of paper towards him. With a ball-point pen that he took from a breast pocket of his tunic, he wrote in French in his own hand: "I have spotted you outside among the journalists. I will meet you at 7.30 AM. tomorrow inside the gate of the Tuileries at the foot of Rue de Castiglione. Perhaps you would be interested to hear some news of your daughter, Tuyet - and the inside story of the deceitful intrigues which Kissinger and the American negotiators are pursuing inside this house- Tran Van Kim."

Kim sealed the note in an envelope and handed it to the aide. "Call one of our journalists on his car radio and ask him to come to the back of the house immediately. Give him this letter to deliver to Sherman. Tell him I shall be watching from the window."

When the leather-jacketed French Communist reporter, who was a stranger to Joseph, handed him the envelope on the scaffold, Tran Van Kim was able to see the frown of puzzlement that crossed the American's face. He watched him read the note but when Joseph raised his eyes to stare in surprise towards the cottage, Kim was careful to stand well back behind the net curtains so that he couldn't be seen. From the room below, the drone of Henry Kissinger's voice was clearly audible, speaking English with guttural German inflections; it rose and fell in blunt, irritated cadences as the National Security Adviser told an expressionless Le Duc Tho that because the North Vietnamese delegation was obviously now stalling and resorting to trickery for some ulterior motive, the United States was not prepared to continue the discussions and the negotiations were therefore suspended.

2.

Tran Van Kim waved an arm vaguely towards the hosts of stone warriors, G.o.ddesses and orators last becoming visible on the columned walls of the Palais du Louvre in the growing light. "The French, Monsieur Sherman, are a cla.s.sic example of a people too clever for their own good," he said contemptuously as he walked beside Joseph through the light powdering of snow that covered the Tuileries Gardens. "I hope the same will not turn out to be true of the Americans." He flashed a brittle smile at Joseph, then quickly turned his head away again. "The French, you see, have never been able to contain the exuberance of their own conceit. Is it surprising that the poor people of Paris, confronted daily with these overlarge, over-decorated palaces, should have risen up in anger to cut off the heads of those insufferably arrogant aristocrats who built them? The very existence of such overpowering buildings in their midst was an intolerable provocation. But then the French have always lacked a sense of proportion - that's why they unfailingly exaggerate their own worth."

Joseph dug his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets but didn't reply. The sky was still heavy with snow and the sculpted figures on the ma.s.sive baroque facades of the Louvre stood out like sentinels in the suffused glow of the dawn. From the Rue de Rivoli and the quays along the Seine the noise of the early morning traffic was only a distant hum, like the buzzing of flies dying with the onset of winter.

"See the angel with the outstretched wings and the clarion," said Kim, pointing to a cornice silhouetted on the south wing. "That is what the French are best at - blowing their own trumpet." He smirked at his own wit and glanced at Joseph. "You've seen the same ostentation on the front of the old Opera House in Saigon - and on the old palaces of the French governors. Their boastful architecture and their overbearing manner in Vietnam had the same effects on my countrymen as these palaces had on the poor people of France - they made us both revolutionaries." The Vietnamese closed his eyes as he walked and sucked the cold air deep into his lungs. "But just the same it's good to be back in Paris after all these years. We shouldn't forget that it was their arrogance and their desire- to show off before a humble people that led the French colons to bring our best minds here to be educated - and that here we first studied the teachings of Marx and Lenin." He sighed again as he walked. "But despite our differences we still had some things in common. The French and the Vietnamese are both unsentimental people." He glanced quickly at Joseph once more. "Unlike the Americans, of course."

"Talking of being unsentimental, will you take the opportunity to visit your brother, Tam, while you're here?" asked Joseph suddenly. "I'm sure you know he's just arrived to join the Saigon delegation. I talked to him yesterday - it must be over thirty years since you last met." Joseph watched Kim's still deceptively youthful face, but it remained expressionless, and he didn't reply. Although in his late fifties, there was no trace of gray in his dark hair, and his round, almost cherubic, features still bore a strong resemblance to his brother's. "If you do want to talk to Tam, lie's taken an apartment at number 3 Avenue Leopold II in the Sixteenth Arroridiss.e.m.e.nt," added Joseph, still watching him carefully. "He once told me that despite the differences between - you, he'd never be able to forget that you are his brother."

Kim turned away to gaze across the gardens, and Joseph was unable to see his face. For a while they walked in silence, then Kim shook his head dismissively. "I didn't come to Paris [or family reasons, Monsieur Sherman. Nor, as you might imagine, did I come to discuss philosophy and history. I asked you to meet me because I wanted to tell you the real reasons behind the breakdown of the negotiations at Gif-sur-Yvette."

Joseph eyed him suspiciously. "Why tell me?"

"Because you're well known as an authoritative critic of your government - and you're writing now for an influential Western newspaper outside America. If you tell the truth in tomorrow's edition of The Times, perhaps the evil plans of your president will be thwarted."

"What 'evil plans' exactly are you talking about?"

Kim took a deep breath arid turned to look at the American as they walked. "Soon no doubt your president or Dr. Kissinger will tell the world that we're responsible for breaking off the talks - but the truth is exactly the opposite! We proposed cease-fire terms in early October that amounted to acceptance of an earlier American outline. Kissinger was delighted to agree. Only when the Thieu regime in Saigon was consulted did Kissinger and your president begin to go back on that agreement. It's well known that Thieu would oppose any agreement at all on principle, since his dictators.h.i.+p will be undermined by the slightest change. But now he's raised no less than sixty-nine objections to our draft proposal - and your president, instead of forcing him to accept the terms already agreed with us, is asking us now to reconsider all sixty-nine points. Nixon and Kissinger seem to fear above all else a public row with their puppet Thieu." He stopped talking, and his eyes glittered angrily. "Now we've just heard through Soviet intelligence sources in Was.h.i.+ngton that Nixon is preparing to send a ma.s.sive fleet of bombers against our cities during the Christmas period to force us to accept these new changes - that's the truth behind the breakdown of the talks."

Joseph reflected on Kim's words in silence for a moment. "When did you arrive in Paris, Kim?"

"Only yesterday."

Joseph's expression grew thoughtful. "I wonder if you're telling the truth? Couldn't it be that you and the rest of the Politburo in Hanoi have suddenly realized too late that Le Duc Tho may have been overplaying your hand - and you want to try to use roe or someone like me to get you off the hook?" Kim shook his head vigorously but Joseph ignored him. "I'm too long in the tooth not to recognize a deliberate leak when I hear one, Kim. I know you've always believed you'd be able to crack the Thieu regime wide open one day if you pressed hard enough - but if you're getting cold feet now on the idea, I'm not the one to help you. A critic of my government I may be - but I'm no Communist-stooge!"

They walked on through the snow in silence, then a calculating expression flitted across the face of the Vietnamese. "Is it of no interest to you then, Monsieur Sherman, if Hanoi is bombed?"

Joseph stopped suddenly in his tracks and looked hard into Kim's face. "What the h.e.l.l do you mean by that?"

Kim gazed steadily back at him. "Your daughter, Tuyet, and her children have lived in Hanoi for the past four years - or had you forgotten?"

Little flurries of powdery snow blew between the two men as they stared at one another; then Joseph took a quick step towards the Vietnamese. "'Unsentimental' is the right word for you, Kim," he breathed, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. "You're so d.a.m.ned 'unsentimental' that common human decency seems to mean nothing to you. Do you think I imagine you had nothing to do with what happened to my son Mark? You and the rest of the Politburo must have sifted through the names of all the U.S. pilots you ever captured to see if there wasn't some political capital to be made out of them. You're nothing if not thorough."

Joseph was shaking with anger, but the Vietnamese remained unruffled. "My comrades and I don't have time to concern ourselves with minor details, Monsieur Sherman. We have many complicated duties to perform."

"I've got 'complicated duties' to. perform too," said Joseph grimly. "And they don't include writing disguised propaganda on behalf of the Lao Dong - even under the threat of blackmail." He glared angrily at Kim, then turned abruptly on his heel and stalked away into the thickening snow.

Kim watched him go for a moment, then pulled a notebook from an inside pocket and wrote in it briefly. He waited until Joseph disappeared from view before making his way slowly to the Rue de Rivoli entrance of the Tuileries once more, and there he flagged down a pa.s.sing taxi. After casting wary glances along the street in both directions, he got in and read to the driver from his notebook the address in the Sixteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt that Joseph had given him. Because the snow was getting heavier, he didn't spot the little radio car driven by the same black-jacketed French journalist who had delivered his message to Joseph at Gif-sur-Yvette. The car had been parked on the north side of the Rue de Rivoli alongside the Intercontinental, and the hard-faced North Vietnamese intelligence agent seated beside the Frenchman nodded once to indicate he should follow the taxi as it pulled away in the direction of the Place de Ia Concorde.

The radio car stayed a careful hundred yards behind the taxi all along the Seine to the Pont d'Iena where both cars crossed the river again. In the Rue La Fontaine beyond the broadcasting rotunda of the Maison de Radio Telefusion Francaise, Kim stopped the taxi and instructed the driver to wait. 'The intelligence agent shadowing him ordered his driver to slow down, and they watched Kim walk around the corner out of sight into Avenue Leopold II. A's the agent's car pulled slowly across the junction, the men inside saw Kim pressing the bell of number 3, the corner apartment, and almost immediately the door was opened by a Vietnamese whose facial resemblance to Kim was striking. The agent took a photograph with his miniature camera as Tran Van Tam seized the hand of the brother he had not seen for thirty-six years and flung his other arm around his neck.

Before Tam drew Kim inside, the agent managed to take a second picture, and after making a note of the address, he ordered the French journalist to turn around and drive the car past again so that he could take a further picture of the whole building.

Inside an apartment on the first floor, the two brothers who had not met since the day of the tennis champions.h.i.+ps in Saigon in 1936 stood looking at each other with tear- br.i.m.m.i.n.g in their eyes. "I may only stay a few minutes," said Kim in a choked whisper. "And there must be absolutely no discussion of politics."

3.

A full moon sailed high above Hanoi on the night of Monday, December 1i8, 1972, casting a ghostly, filtered light onto the city through ragged clouds that drifted lazily cross the sky. Crowds of cyclists and pedestrians were thronging the streets as they had done every evening since late October when the partial bombing halt declared by the United States had once again put the area of the capital and the region seventy miles to the south off limits to American air raiders. The streets consequently were not blacked out and the people in them were relaxed moving without haste or anxiety between their homes and the factories where they worked or the markets where they bought their supplies. In the industrial suburb of Kham Tien, Tuyet Luong and her two children were returning home from a local produce market, carrying vegetables and their meager monthly rice ration. They were heading for a drab, one-bedroom apartment in a twenty year old workers housing project that had been a.s.signed to them with Tuyet's job in a nearby munitions factory on her arrival in Hanoi in the spring of 1968. Since then Tuyet had spent twelve hours at the factory every day, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g percussion caps onto artillery sh.e.l.ls, and at the age of thirty-five her face was prematurely lined and gray with fatigue; her shoulders sagged, too, as she walked, and the shabby black calico trousers and tunic she wore were frayed and threadbare.

Alongside her Trinh, grown tall and gangling at fourteen, and Chuong, her sprightly eleven-year-old son, chattered and chased one another up and down the curb, shrieking and giggling whenever one of them spilled the bag of vegetables they were carrying. Tuyet admonished them from time to time in a tired voice, hut they were able to walk quietly for only a minute or two before their youthful high spirits prompted, some new bout of mischief. The ear-splitting wail of the city's air raid sirens, however, stopped the children dead in their tracks just after eight o'clock. Within moments the streetlights and all the illuminations in the public buildings went out, plunging the capital into darkness. The droves of cyclists immediately began stampeding homewards, and Tuyet called both her children to her and began running towards the underground shelter beneath their own four-story housing block. They looked up into the night sky as they ran, but although the full moon was still bright, they couldn't see or hear anything, because the first wave of the biggest armada of strike aircraft ever a.s.sembled in the history of aerial warfare was streaking towards Hanoi at an alt.i.tude of nearly seven miles, which made it both invisible and inaudible to people on the ground.

All the eight-engined B-52 Stratofortresses in that first wave carried a ma.s.sive load of explosives - forty-two 750-pound bombs stacked like fish roe in their long steel bellies and another twenty-four 500-pounders clamped beneath their broad wings. They were homing on their targets in Hanoi and Haiphong at six hundred miles an hour in packs of three, having been guided nearly three thousand miles across the Pacific from Guam or across the neck of the Indochina peninsula from Thailand, by bombardier navigators imprisoned in tiny windowless cabins on their lower decks. These navigators, who would never catch a glimpse of the country they were attacking, had plotted their courses blindly with maps and instruments and were at that moment preparing to release their bombs with the aid of radar screens and stopwatches. They were proud of their ability to dump their destructive loads to earth with surgical precision, and each formation of three B-52s could on an ideal mission destroy everything within a precise target area almost two miles long by one mile wide. Because the American negotiators had not been able to win their arguments in that little artist's cottage outside Paris five days before, on the night of December i8 the B-52s were being sent for the first time to attack vital installations in the very heart of both Hanoi and Haiphong - docks, s.h.i.+pyards, roads, bridges, missile sites, airstrips, supply dumps, munitions factories and military barracks; targets on their outskirts had been attacked sometimes in the past, but this was the first substantial raid of the war directed against the city centers themselves.

Because the planes from which they fell could neither be seen nor heard, the explosion of the first stick of bombs petrified Tuyet and her children as they dashed towards their underground shelter. The night sky was lit first by a blinding flash of light which made the moon invisible, then the earth beneath their feet shook and the buildings on either side of the Street trembled. A deafening roar engulfed them, followed by another blinding flash of light which lit the city like day, and it was succeeded in its turn by another flash, then another, until the glare, the explosions and the rumbling of the ground became continuous.

Tuyet, Trinh and Chuong stopped running and clutched fearfully at one another; at first they were not even sure bombs were falling. This was nothing, like the fitful fighter-bomber attacks on the suburbs that had been launched in response to General Giap's Easter offensive in the South. The world seemed to be ending, the earth seemed to be heaving and exploding all around them in a blaze of light, and like all the other inhabitants of Hanoi and Haiphong they were gripped by the starkest terror. Only when the antiaircraft defenses around the capital began to open up and the long dark cylinders of Soviet surface-to-air missiles were seen lancing upwards into the heavens through the white glare of the exploding bombs, did Tuyet and her children realize that there were aircraft flying silently high above their heads; and only then did they recover their nerve sufficiently to run on to the shelter.

The first attack lasted about twenty minutes, and at the end of that time the elemental roar of the explosions ceased abruptly. After letting a few precautionary minutes pa.s.s, Tuyet and her children, along with thousands of others who had crowded Into the underground shelters of Kham Tien, came out silently into the darkened street and gazed upward in horror; a blood-red glow lit the heavens all around the city and thick black smoke drifted across the face of the moon. Muted explosions filled the night as distant fuel depots and ammunition dumps continued to blow up, and each new blast sent fresh columns of fire leaping towards the sky. In every direction they looked fires were burning - in the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes Hanoi had become an inflamed bruise on the dark face of the earth.

Before the shock of the first attack had subsided, however, the sirens sounded again at nine P.M., and Tuyet and her children dashed once more into the underground shelter. Soon the foundations of the city were shaking again as the onslaught was resumed, and this second attack lasted another twenty minutes before another lull ensued; then at ten o'clock, eleven o'clock and midnight the sirens sounded and fresh waves of B-52s arrived overhead to rain their lethal explosives onto new targets. The giant bombers continued to sweep in over the city at hourly intervals throughout the night, laying down their mathematical carpets of destruction, and they continued to attack relentlessly on the hour every hour throughout the night for the next eleven days, with only a short pause on Christmas Day. In the daytime while their crews rested, smaller tactical aircraft, F-4 Phantoms, F-111s and U.S. Navy fighter-bombers from carriers in the Gulf of Tongking, continued the raids so as to give the antiaircraft defenses of the cities no respite, and as the days pa.s.sed the planes systematically pulverized and flattened all their chosen targets.

At the same time, however, the awesome size of the attacking force paradoxically gave new encouragement to the defenders of Hanoi. In the previous seven years only one American B-52 had been lost over Indochina, but because the giant strategic bombers were attacking in such dense formations, fifteen were smashed from the sky by SAM-2 missiles. The bombers carried highly sophisticated, electronic counter devices that could jam the direction-finding radar in the Soviet missiles, but the North Vietnamese countered this by switching off the missiles' guidance systems and firing the SAM-2s blindly into the midst of the B-52 formations armed with proximity fuses. More than sixty American crewmen had to bail out of the stricken aircraft brought down in this way, and half of them survived to join other American prisoners of war in Hao Loa prison - which remained unscathed as the raiders intended in the center of Hanoi.

Although the B-52 crews were proud of their ability to pinpoint their targets, their bombardiers knew well enough that if they punched their bomb-release switches a few seconds too early or too late, their bombs would fall perhaps a few hundred yards outside their target area. Their commanders would later claim that with less than two thousand deaths claimed by the Vietnamese themselves in a city of one million people, the raids were one of history's most accurate aerial campaigns. Hadn't sixty thousand people died in the British bombing of Dresden? Hadn't thirty thousand people died in the German blitz of London? Weren't such figures proof that America had mastered the art of bombing cities while showing consideration for the people in them? But despite these comparisons, at least one Hanoi hospital was. .h.i.t, large swathes of houses were reduced to ruins, and each morning new groups of dazed Vietnamese could be found wandering blankly amidst the rubble of their former homes, weeping for lost relatives.

Among them on the morning after the last of the raids was the slender figure of Dang Thi Trinh. She stood in Kham Tien, outside what had once been the entrance to the underground shelter beneath her housing block, her awkward young body bent with anguish and her tears making pale streaks in the grime and dirt that coated her face. Only one wall of the building remained standing; the other three had collapsed as though punched by a mighty fist, and men, women and children were scrambling over the mountains of debris like automatons picking up pieces of broken furniture and ornaments. Others simply stood staring about them in blank disbelief, and Trinh was numbly watching a rescue team shoveling and manhandling stones from the shaft leading down into the shelter. Faint cries had been heard from beneath the rubble in the early hours of the morning, but they had long since ceased, and she had been waiting there for five or six hours, weeping and hugging herself in her grief.

By three AM. on that last night of the raids, she had become accustomed to the constant roar of the attacks and because at that hour they had seemed to be moving away from the city, she had come out of the shelter with her mother and Chuong to watch the distant flashes of bombs falling on Haiphong. Chuong had squealed with delight when they saw a missile explode in a burst of orange flame high in the darkness and the silhouette of one of the great eight-engined American bombers had begun spiraling downwards in the glare. It seemed to fall for a very long time before it reached the ground several miles away, and they had watched until it exploded with an earthshaking rumble, sending a great new fountain of lire into the air.

A moment later, to their horror, a new "ladder" of bombs had begun falling half a mile away on the other side of the munitions factory where Tuyet worked, and everybody had begun screaming and das.h.i.+ng for the underground shelters again. Trinh had fallen and become separated from her mother and brother in the stampede and she had been hustled into a neighboring shelter by a party cadre who helped her up. Unknown to them, at that moment, forty thousand feet above them, a SAM-2 missile was racing towards an approaching trio of B-52s programmed to finish off the munitions factory. The first one dropped its thirty tons of bombs successfully on target and turned away, but the SAM-2 exploded two or three hundred feet above the second aircraft, rocking it violently at the moment when the navigator was reaching for his bomb-release switch. The B-52 pitched and yawed under the impact of the explosion, and the navigator was flung hard against the bulkhead of his cabin. By the time he'd gathered himself, the second hand of his stopwatch was five seconds past the release point and the little yellow signal light indicating "Bomb Doors Open" was winking furiously on the panel before him. He seized the release switch nevertheless, and one by one the lights beside the radar panel went out, indicating that first the 750-pounders, then the 500-pounders had slipped from the gray body of the plane. Forty seconds later the "Bombs Released" sign lit up in the c.o.c.kpit and the pilot breathed a sigh of relief as he began to turn the nose of the plane back towards Guam.

The thirty tons of bombs that should have demolished the munitions factory, because of the five-second delay, st.i.tched a row of craters across the southern end of the Kham Tien suburb; one of them smashed down three walls of the housing block in which Tuyet lived with her son and daughter and it exploded as it reached the ground floor, blasting a ten-foot crater into the underground shelter where a hundred people were crouching in the darkness. In mid-afternoon, Trinh watched the crumpled bodies of her mother and Chuong being dragged out together; they had been clutching one another when the bomb smashed into their refuge and they were still entwined. Sobbing hysterically, Trinh flung herself on her mother's body and it took several minutes of pleading and cajoling before the rescue workers were able to lift her to her feet and lead her away.

4.

A solemn hush fell over the sumptuously furnished main salon of the old Hotel Majestic on the Avenue Kleber. For several minutes the rustle of high-quality parchment paper and the rattle of winter rain flurries against the windows were the only sounds in the chamber. Silent, deferential American and North Vietnamese protocol aides stood respectfully beside Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who were seated facing each other across the baize covered mahogany conference table, and one by one they turned the sixty or so pages of the bound cease-fire agreements so that their princ.i.p.als could scribble their initials on texts they had negotiated so laboriously over the previous four years. It was a quarter to one on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 23, 1973, and in the formal diplomatic surroundings of the Quai d'Orsay's International Conference Center furnished with gilded mirrors, ta.s.seled drapes and antique silk tapestries, the ten-year war that America had fought through the heat and slime of Vietnam's jungles and paddy fields was coming quietly to an end.

A little group of correspondents, photographers and television news cameramen had been invited into the chamber to observe the ceremony, and their cameras had begun to click and whirr the moment a discreet French protocol official hovering inside the door gave the sign that they might begin to record the scene. Tran Van Kim, who was seated beside Le Duc Tho, glanced up from watching the signing ritual and scanned the faces of the journalists until he caught Joseph Sherman's eye. The two men looked at one another for a moment, then the Vietnamese gave a little formal nod of recognition before turning his attention back to the typewritten agreements.

When the two chief negotiators at last laid aside their pens, their aides closed the bound doc.u.ments and walked around the table with measured steps to exchange their copies. Through their interpreters, Dr. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho made brief, sonorous speeches referring to their mutual desire for peace and the historic nature of the moment; then the meeting broke up so that they could step out into the rainy street to be photographed by the rest of the waiting pressmen. The pavements were drenched, the skies overhead leaden, and the photographers had to use flash for their pictures as the American and the North Vietnamese clasped hands on the pavement's edge, smiling broadly at one another as if they were old friends. In the lobby leading to the street, the delegations and the pressmen milled together as they put on hats and raincoats; in the crush Joseph felt a tug on his sleeve and turned to find Tran Van Kim beside him.

"Perhaps we might meet briefly, Monsieur Sherman, before you leave Paris," said the Vietnamese in a low voice.

Joseph shrugged. "Isn't it a little late for fresh revelations about the secret machinations of the evil American negotiators?'

"I have information for you this time of a purely personal nature."

Kim spoke in a strangely subdued voice, and Joseph's manner softened at once. "Why don't we meet for a drink on the terrace at my hotel this evening? I'm at the Intercontinental."

The Vietnamese shook his head quickly. "I'd rather we met in private. I'll come to your room there at six o'clock." As soon as he'd spoken, Kim moved away, giving the American no opportunity to reply, and he was quickly swallowed up in the crowd.