Saigon: A Novel Part 46

It was while he was pacing back and forth across the dazzling room, fighting down his growing despair that Lat spoke for the first time. He didn't raise his head or change the att.i.tude of his hunched body and he uttered the words so softly that Joseph wondered at first whether he had imagined hearing them.

"Even if Tuyet Luong was your daughter, why should I help you?"

At the sound of his voice, Joseph rushed to squat at Lat's side. For a long moment he gazed at him, at a loss for words, then he gripped his arm gently. "I was brought here to identify you seven years ago, Lat, don't you remember? I recognized you at once and you recognized me. But because the paths of our lives had crossed long ago I found I couldn't speak. You saved me when my plane crashed, and my OSS medic was able to save the life of Ho Chi Minh - we'd been comrades-in-arms together for a while and it's hard to forget that." Joseph tightened his grip on the scrawny arm of the silent prisoner. "But that's all behind us now. Soon you'll be free, your cause has triumphed. Saigon will be yours within a few hours and I've got no way of forcing you to help me. But, Lat, I'm asking you for the sake of a young girl's life. Trinh's the daughter of my daughter, Tuyet - and she's your flesh and blood too!"

To Joseph's astonishment the eyes of the Vietnamese moistened and looking directly into Joseph's face for the first time, he spoke in a racked voice. "Is what you say really true? Are the forces of the people really on the verge of victory today?"

Joseph nodded anxiously. "Yes, Lat, what I'm telling you is the truth."

The ravaged face of the Vietnamese relaxed suddenly and as he turned away again, his mouth opened wide to reveal toothless gums. He sat like this for a long time before Joseph recognized the expression as a smile, but he said nothing more, and in desperation Joseph grabbed his arm again and shook it. "Lat, who can help me find Trinh? You must tell me now!"

The fixed, half-demented smile did not waver. "Go to 15 Phong Phu, Cholon. There is a Chinese merchant who calls himself w.a.n.g. Say there that you've spoken with Nguoi Hiem Doc Ran - the Serpent Who Strikes Silently. Say that I command him to help you find my great-niece Dang Thi Trinh."

Joseph seized one of Lat's skeletal hands and held it fast in his own for a moment. Then he rose and ran from the cell. Even after Joseph's departure Lat continued sitting motionless on the stool, the features of his skull-like head frozen in the same unchanging grimace of triumph.

9.

The drive to Cholon, although it was only four miles, took Joseph nearly an hour. The evening monsoon storm flooded the streets as he set out, slowing all traffic to a crawl, and the growing number of barbed-wire barricades forced him to halt and turn constantly. The helicopters carrying fleeing Americans Out to the navy armada off the coast were still clattering through the murk overhead, but already the houses and apartments that had belonged to United States personnel were being looted by yelling mobs of Vietnamese. Smashed crockery and furniture thrown from upstairs windows littered the streets through which Joseph drove and he had to swerve frequently to avoid groups of ragged children hauling home stolen refrigerators, was.h.i.+ng machines and air-conditioning units; he saw men running from the broken doors of American apartments with armfuls of whisky and champagne while women staggered under the weight of gauze- wrapped sides of meat that they had obviously s.n.a.t.c.hed from abandoned deep-freeze cabinets. Joseph was driving the battered Pontiac that Naomi had rented to transport her camera crew, and several times he had to turn and reverse quickly when police fired in his direction without warning. Some South Vietnamese soldiers were stripping off their uniforms openly in the streets, tossing their rifles aside and running anonymously through the storm in their underpants in search of a hiding place, and he saw others stopping cars and siphoning gasoline from .their tanks while they held the drivers at gunpoint.

It was dark when Joseph finally located Phong Phu, a narrow unpaved alley that the rain had turned into a sea of mud, and because the strain of the past few days had brought him to the brink of exhaustion he stumbled frequently in the gloom. It took him some time to discover that number 15 was a dingy, two-story villa from which the stucco was peeling, but his knock was answered immediately by a scowling Vietnamese youth who led him wordlessly into a shadowy, candlelit room where the air was heavy with the scent of burning joss sticks. He was left alone there for several minutes before an unsmiling, white-haired Chinese appeared in the doorway. Joseph launched immediately into his story and his listener heard him out impa.s.sively, betraying no sign of surprise that he brought instructions from a commander of the Liberation Front who had been held prisoner in solitary confinement for the past eight years.

"My informant inside the central police station had already advised me of your meeting with the Serpent Who Strikes Silently before your arrival," the Chinese said in an uninterested voice when Joseph had finished. "I've been expecting your visit."

"Then you can help me find Dang Thi Trinh?" asked Joseph.

A mirthless smile parted the lips of the Chinese and he shook his head slowly, as though astounded at Joseph's stupidity. "Mr. Sherman, you seem to think that Comrade Trinh is the only cadre from Hanoi who's been infiltrated into Saigon in the past two weeks. I can a.s.sure you we've brought in many thousands of cadres and civilian commandos during that time."

"But you must know where Trinh has been a.s.signed," protested Joseph, his voice tight with tension.

There was a flash of gold teeth in the candlelight as the face of the Chinese relaxed into another pitying smile. "Full lists of individual cadres are kept only by local commanders, Mr. Sherman."

"Can't they be contacted to check?"

The Chinese studied Joseph's anxious face in silence. "The forces of the National Liberation Army and our northern brothers are on the brink of an historic victory, Mr. Sherman, after thirty years of b.l.o.o.d.y struggle. The fate of a single female cadre is of little consequence on a night like this Joseph gazed helplessly at the Chinese. "But Hiem Doc Ran commanded you to trace her for me."

"Hiem Doc Ran can give his command easily - but it can't easily be carried out. And maybe it can't be carried out at all before the battle begins." The Chinese continued to regard Joseph with unblinking eyes, then he nodded. "But I will see what can be done. Wait here please."

He left the room as silently as he had entered and descended a long flight of steps at the rear of the building into a cellar. Opening a soundproofed door leading into a tunnel, he pa.s.sed beneath Phong Phu into a brightly lit underground communications center where half-a-dozen Vietnamese wearing headphones crouched over powerful Russian-made two-way radios, transmitting and receiving a constant stream of messages. The Chinese spoke with the Vietnamese supervising the radio operators for a minute or two, then returned to his own house and mounted the stairs again to the candlelit room where Joseph waited.

"All unit commanders will be contacted, Mr. Sherman," he said quietly. "It will take several hours. There are many more important messages to be transmitted and received. Return to your hotel and wait there - you'll be contacted."

"But if it takes several hours it may be too late!"

"That's the best that can be done." The note of finality in the voice of the Chinese made it clear there was no point in putting further questions, and when the scowling youth reappeared a moment later, Joseph followed him out without protest.

The rain had stopped when Joseph stepped wearily into the muddy lane once more but the noise of rocket and mortar lire was growing louder all around the city. He could see the glow of flames spreading across the sky to the northwest above the airport and the roar of the big evacuation helicopters and their American jet fighter escorts filled the night. As he turned the nose of the Pontiac back towards the Continental, a small Air America helicopter pa.s.sed overhead unseen, carrying the emaciated prisoner from the cellars of the old French Surete headquarters whom he had first met almost exactly fifty years before in the gilded throne room of the Emperor Khai Dinh in the Palace of Perfect Concord. Crouched on the floor of the bucking aircraft, Dao Van Lat's wrists were still manacled and he still wore the same ragged pair of shorts. The hawk-faced security guard who had shown Joseph into the white cell two hours earlier was seated opposite him, dressed now in the anonymous short- sleeved s.h.i.+rt and dark trousers of a Vietnamese civilian, and his lips twisted in a smile as he addressed a second South Vietnamese security man hunched on one of the aircraft's small seats. "I don't think our silent prisoner can believe his good fortune," he said sarcastically. "He can't believe he's really being flown to freedom."

Lat stared out into the rus.h.i.+ng void beyond the open door of the helicopter and said nothing. His eyes were wary and apprehensive and there was no sign of the exultant expression which had lit his ravaged features a few hours before when he learned the war was ending. Shortly after Joseph left the white room, the order to release all three hundred political prisoners in the cells had come through, but Lat's name had not been among them and he had been taken under close guard to another cell adjoining the rear courtyard. The other prisoners were free without him, and when the evacuation helicopter fluttered down into the courtyard half an hour later his head had been covered with a blanket to prevent recognition and he'd been hustled aboard a moment before it took off again.

As the aircraft rose above the rooftops, the hawk-faced guard had smiled sourly at him. "There's no need to worry, comrade," he said in a mocking tone. "The American CIA provided your special accommodation for the past eight years and they've given special instructions about how your imprisonment shall end. Just relax."

The night had grown fully dark by the time the helicopter pa.s.sed over the coast, heading for the brightly lit s.h.i.+ps of the Seventh Fleet, and as they came in sight, the guard prodded Lat's bony shoulder once more and urged him to look out of the open door. "There are the s.h.i.+ps, comrade, that will take us to a new life in America. And there below is the South China Sea - the great, wide, free s.p.a.ces of the sea! That's much better than the terrible white cell where you've lived for eight long years, isn't it? Won't you break your silence now and talk to us tell us what you think of all this?"

The only light inside the helicopter was the pale glow from the instrument panel, but it was sufficient or the guard to see Lat turn his hate-filled gaze on him. From his expression it was clear that he understood what his final fate was to be.

"I think you've guessed what's coming, comrade, haven't you?" said the guard softly. "And you've probably guessed why. You may not have given anything away, but our American friends have decided you know too much. Many Vietnamese who've worked secretly for America are being left behind - and because you know who they are, you must be given the freedom of the seas!"

Reaching out suddenly, the guard hauled Lat into a crouching position by the open doorway; grasping the waistband of Lat's ragged shorts, he tore them off. "You won't need such clothing for swimming, will you, comrade?"

Lat's shrunken body, mutilated by his own hand in a frenzy of patriotic fervor forty-five years earlier, teetered on the brink of the black void outside the speeding helicopter, and both guards watched his face intently, waiting for fear to show. But even in the final moments of his life Lat gazed at the darkness ten thousand feet above the ocean with the same blank, stubborn expression of resistance that he had always shown his captors, and when the hawk-faced guard lashed at him with his foot he still did not cry out. For a second or two his hands scrabbled at the door frame, trying instinctively to cling on, then his frail, fleshless body tumbled soundlessly into the black abyss of the night. Turning and twisting slowly like a sycamore leaf in the invisible air currents, he fell without uttering a sound, and the shock of his plunge from ten thousand feet killed him long before the black foaming sea smashed and swallowed his lifeless corpse.

10.

When he opened the door of his room on his return to the Continental Palace, Joseph had expected to find it empty and he was shocked to find her sitting there, pale and disheveled, waiting for him. As soon as she saw him she rose and flung herself into his arms. Outside the din of a new rocket barrage pulverizing Tan Son Nhut filled the night, and through the windows the crimson streaks of rocket trajectories intercrossed with tracers lit the sky like a fireworks display.

"For G.o.d's sake, why did you come back?" gasped Joseph, his arms tightening around her.

"I just couldn't leave without you." Naomi buried her face in his shoulder and her voice became m.u.f.fled. "I couldn't bear to think .of losing you to Saigon, too. If something awful's going to happen, I want to be with you." They clung to one another without speaking, listening to the noise of the war rising to a crescendo outside. "The evacuation was awful," said Naomi, her head still pressed against his chest. "ARVN soldiers started firing at our bus just down the street from here. They ran alongside banging on the windows and screaming for us to take them with us. The Marines guarding us had to fire over their heads." She shuddered at the memory. "At Tan Son Nhut the gate guards opened fire at us. Luckily our driver was American. He just put his foot down and crashed through, but a lot of the Vietnamese drivers turned back. Then we had to wait two hours in one of those old American bunkers, and sh.e.l.ls were raining down around us all the time. The Air America terminal went up in flames, and when the time came for us to make a dash for it, we had to throw away our bags and my crew lost their equipment and all our film. I got halfway to the helicopter ramp then stopped - I knew I couldn't bear to arrive back in London without you. All the Vietnamese buses were turning back at the gate by this time because their own troops were firing at them and I ran out and jumped on one. They're all trying to get into the emba.s.sy now."

Joseph closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "Jesus! Why did it have to end like this?"

Naomi pulled away from him and poured two gla.s.ses of whisky. "It's the way it's always been, I suppose, isn't it? Muddle - well-meaning, well-intentioned muddle." She shrugged hopelessly and sipped her drink. "Hundreds of Vietnamese employees of your agencies have been abandoned all over town. A lot of them have been waiting hours for helicopters or buses that never come. They're just standing there, so trusting, looking up at the sky watching for the helicopters, clutching their children and those pathetic little bag Seeing her shoulders tremble, Joseph went to her and took her in his arms.

"The emba.s.sy's like a madhouse. I went there first looking for you. It took me a quarter of an hour to fight my way in. Somebody told me the White House and Kissinger are screaming for the amba.s.sador to wind up the evacuation by midnight. But there are a thousand Vietnamese at least inside the compound and more keep slipping over the walls all the time. The Marines are herding them into groups of sixty and jamming them into the helicopters as fast as they get back from the s.h.i.+ps. G.o.d only knows how many they'll have to leave behind Her voice broke then, and Joseph held her in silence while they finished their drinks. Outside, the red glow of incendiary fires was lighting the horizon in an arc that he spread right around the city's northern perimeter from east to west. The Communists were at that moment overrunning Bien Hoa and Long Binh where resistance had finally collapsed, and long columns of their tanks and trucks were beginning to head down Highway One towards the capital. It was just after ten o'clock and the North Vietnamese field commander of the Ho Chi Minh offensive, General Van Tien Dung, was studying the flow of reports with his staff officers in a dugout at Ben Cat thirty miles north of the Continental Palace Hotel. Within two hours he would issue his final order of the war to the fifteen attacking divisions and send them thundering in for the kill.

"Have you had no news of Trinh at all?" asked Naomi when she had recovered her composure.

"I've done everything I can. I hope to get a message here telling me where she is. I just have to wait." Joseph's face was haggard with strain but he tried to smile as he put his hands on her shoulders. "You'd better wait for me inside the emba.s.sy. I'll take you there now.

A light knock at the door made him turn and he wrenched it open to find one of the Continental's white-jacketed floor waiters grinning apologetically. "Excuse me, Mr. Sherman, but there's a Vietnamese downstairs looking for an American Joseph rushed past him into the hail before he could finish and ran down the nearest staircase. When he reached the front lobby, however, it was empty, and he halted in bafflement. A moment later the little waiter who had followed him down, panted up behind him.

"No, no, Mr. Sherman, outside." He waved frantically towards the front doors and Joseph ran to the entrance.

On the pavement a large Vietnamese family stood waiting, clutching bags and cases. The mother held a small baby and three other small children clung around her legs. An older boy and girl approached with their father, a thin, anxious-looking man wearing a sweat-stained s.h.i.+rt and baggy trousers. The father immediately seized Joseph's arm, jabbering hysterically in broken English, and Joseph stared at him and the anonymous faces of his family in bewilderment.

"You must help us, please ... Please help us. For fifteen years I've worked for your country! The Communists will kill us all Joseph turned to find the little waiter standing behind him on the steps. "You were mistaken," he told him in a desperate voice. "I don't know them."

The waiter shook his head violently. "No mistake, Mr. Sherman. They tell me they looking for an American - any American."

The mother had seized Joseph's other arm and she began pleading with him too while the children stared up at him, round- eyed with fright. He tried to free himself but they clung to his clothes with desperate hands.

"I'm sorry, I can't help you," gasped Joseph. "You must try the emba.s.sy." he put his hand into his pocket, intending without thinking to give them some dollars. Then he checked himself and began trying to back away into the door of the hotel. The man let go of him suddenly and his expression changed in an instant from pleading to one of contempt.

"We've tried to get into your emba.s.sy -- it's impossible. We waited twelve hours to be collected - but the buses never came His head jerked suddenly and a stream of spittle stained Joseph's jacket.

The mother began weeping bitterly, and with one last hate- filled glance over his shoulder, the man shepherded the forlorn little group away from the hotel. Joseph stood watching them, and when Naomi came tip beside him to take his arm, she found him trembling and unable to speak. They stood in the doorway until the family finally disappeared from view around the corner of Lam Son Square. "We'd better get you to the emba.s.sy now," said Joseph thickly, without looking at her.

Before they left Joseph called the little waiter to him and thrust two one-hundred-dollar bills into his hand. "Go to my room now and wait there until I come back," he said, speaking slowly and emphatically. "Don't leave it even if a bomb falls on the hotel. Take down carefully any telephone message which comes for me."

The waiter stared in amazement at the banknotes, then nodded quickly and rushed towards the stairs. As they hurried across the cathedral square a hill in the rocket attack on Tan Son Nhut brought an eerie quiet to the city and the shouts of the crowd milling outside the United States Emba.s.sy reached them long before they arrived there. In the sky above the flat-roofed Chancery they could see the shadowy bulk of a Cobra helicopter guns.h.i.+p hovering like a basking shark, its machine guns that could fire six thousand rounds a minute trained constantly on the surrounding rooftops and the seething mob below. Occasionally an F-5 jet of the U.S. Navy or Air Force roared overhead, but otherwise Saigon seemed suddenly to be holding its breath in fearful antic.i.p.ation of the war's end.

When they reached the emba.s.sy, they found that even on the outer edges of the crowd the mood of the Vietnamese was ugly. As they pushed their way towards the rear gate they were jostled and spat on, and Joseph had to put both arms around Naomi at times to ensure that they weren't pulled apart. As they neared the high wall they saw that barbed-wire obstacles had been strung along the top and the younger men in the crowd were scrambling up lamp stanchions, trying to climb over the entanglements. One youth who had become caught fast by the front gate was dangling upside down, bleeding profusely, but other Vietnamese ignored him, stretching frantic hands up towards the Marines, waving letters from their American employers or telegrams from relatives abroad. Whenever persistent climbers reached the top of the wall, the Marines were stamping viciously on their fingers with their heavy boots or using the b.u.t.ts of their M-i6 rifles to send them tumbling back into the street, and each time this happened a new roar of anger rose from the crowd.

A few yards short of the gate an hysterical Vietnamese youth suddenly flourished a long-bladed knife in front of Joseph and seized Naomi by the hair. "Take me with you," he screamed, "or your wife won't get in alive." His eyes were rolling with fear, and Naomi cried out in pain. Gritting his teeth, Joseph jabbed his fist into the youth's face, and to his relief he staggered and fell, dropping the knife. Breathing heavily from the exertion, Joseph pushed Naomi in front of him, and a Marine, who had been watching them approach, leaned down and dragged her up beside him. Clinging precariously to the top of the gate she turned and looked beseechingly at Joseph as he turned back into the crowd. "Please be careful," she shouted, "and for G.o.d's sake hurry back!"

11.

It was just after two o'clock in the morning when Joseph's telephone finally rang and he recognized the voice of the Cholon Chinese the moment he picked up the receiver.

"Comrade Trinh arrived in Saigon seven hours ago," he announced in a neutral voice. "She traveled all the way from Hanoi by truck. She's a member of Infiltration Brigade Nineteen now in place at Bien Hoa Bridge. She's been contacted and told to wait. Nineteen Brigade has concealed itself in a concrete culvert a hundred yards south of the bridge. You'll find her there if you go now." - The line clicked and went dead without any further formality, and Joseph grabbed the little waiter by the arm and rushed him down the stairs. Crouched in the front pa.s.senger seat of the Pontiac, the waiter held on to the dashboard tightly with both hands and every so often he lingered the little wedge of hundred- dollar bills that Joseph had pushed into the breast pocket of his white jacket to persuade him to accompany him. In his Ben Cat headquarters, General Dung, the Communist field commander, had already given the final order to attack Saigon at midnight precisely: "Make deep thrusts! Advance to the predetermined points!" he had told his forces proudly and the artillery batteries brought up from the coast had immediately begun raining 130-millimeter sh.e.l.ls on the Tan Son Nhut headquarters of South Vietnam's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The noise of this continuous artillery barrage became deafening as Joseph guided the Pontiac carefully through the refugees swarming into the northeastern suburbs, but as lie drove he noticed the flame trees in his headlights and remembered that this was the same road out of the city along which his father, Chuck and himself had traveled with Jacques Devraux on that first hunting trip half a century before; now, however, the road was choked with abandoned jeeps and trucks left there by fleeing ARVN troops who had perhaps begun to realize that most of their generals had already fled to the s.h.i.+ps of the U.S. Seventh Fleet anch.o.r.ed off Vung Tau. Because of the panic and confusion the short drive took Joseph more than half an hour, and the hands of his watch showed two forty-five AM. when he extinguished the headlights and swung the car off the road a quarter of a mile short of the Bien Hoa Bridge. As he leaned across and pushed open the pa.s.senger door, the little waiter was still fingering his wad of American bills, possibly agonizing over whether the risk he was about to take was worth it.

"Take off your white jacket - or you'll be visible a mile away," said Joseph sharply. "Put the money in your trouser pocket if you want to take it with you. But hurry." He helped the Vietnamese pull the jacket off his shoulders, then pushed him out into the darkness. "The culvert is about a hundred yards from the bridge! Call her name softly - 'Comrade Dang Thi Trinh' -- and hurry!"

"Dang Thi Trinh - okay." The little waiter repeated the name in a frightened voice then scampered away into the darkness.

Looking through the winds.h.i.+eld, Joseph found he could see beyond the bridge, not more than a mile or two away, a long column of North Vietnamese trucks and tanks advancing confidently with their headlights blazing. As he watched the spearhead move nearer he was seized with a sudden fear; the waiter would simply disappear into the darkness with the money and keep running - back in the direction of Saigon! What a fool he'd been! For ten minutes he sat behind the wheel in an agony of suspense; he was sure that an American revealing himself to a Communist infiltration team so close to the battle zone would be taken captive, but he knew he would have to take the risk and try to find Trinh himself if the waiter didn't reappear. He looked at his wrist.w.a.tch every few moments as the minutes ticked by and he had opened the driver's door and was climbing out of the car to begin creeping towards the culvert when two shadows materialized silently from the darkness beside him.

"It's us, Mr. Sherman," whispered the waiter shakily. "Here's Comrade Trinh."

Joseph clapped the waiter ecstatically on the shoulder and bundled him into the back of the Pontiac; then he led the other figure towards the front pa.s.senger seat. She turned to face him as he opened the door for her, and in the red glow from the fires raging beyond the city he saw that her face was strained but composed. She wore the dusty black trousers and tunic of a peasant but her straw hat was pushed back on her shoulders and her hair fell loose about her cheeks. His heart lurched when he saw how she had grown into a young woman of seventeen; she looked back at him wide-eyed, her expression apprehensive and shy, her features combining unmistakably traces of Lan's beauty and Tuyet's proud strength. He resisted a fierce urge to throw his arms around her, and instead said softly in Vietnamese: "Trinh, I'm so happy that I've found you in time."

She looked at him anxiously for a moment, then turned her gaze in the direction of the advancing North Vietnamese tanks. "I'm very glad, too - but we must hurry, mustn't we?"

Joseph smiled and motioned her into the car. "Don't worry. We'll make it all right."

He ran to the driver's door, slipped behind the wheel again and turned quickly in the direction of the city. He had to sound the Pontiac's horn continuously to clear a path through the running crowds, and when the car was under way he lifted his wrist close to his face; the glow of the fires, bright, enough to drive by, was also sufficient to illuminate his watch dial, and he saw that it showed just after three. "There's still time for us to get to my emba.s.sy - and there we'll find a helicopter to fly out of Vietnam."

As he drove he felt a light touch on his arm and turned his head to find Trinh's fingers on his sleeve; she had a wondering look in her eyes and she removed her hand with a little embarra.s.sed smile when she found him looking at her.

Inside the United States Emba.s.sy on Thong Nhut Boulevard at that moment the last American amba.s.sador to Saigon was folding the United States flag and tucking it into a plastic bag to carry with him to the s.h.i.+ps of the Seventh Fleet. His face was gray and crumpled in the aftermath of a debilitating attack of pneumonia, and he watched anxiously as the giant CH-53 helicopters continued to sweep into the emba.s.sy compound to pick up fresh loads of evacuees. Their pilots now were red-eyed with fatigue and the five or six hundred Vietnamese still waiting seemed to sense that the end of the airlift might be approaching. From the rooftop pad smaller CH-47 helicopters were evacuating the last of the thousand or so emba.s.sy staff and their dependents but not many remained by three-fifteen AM., and those still waiting stood around in irresolute little groups on an upper floor inside the Chancery watching with dismay the final defeat and humiliation of their country and its Asian ally.

Naomi Boyce-Lewis waited with them, rarely leaving her place by the windows; she scanned the streets outside constantly, watching for a sign of Joseph, but as her turn to leave drew near, she was ushered firmly into a line drawn up before an internal stairwell. She tried to hang back but the diplomats around her confided that in Was.h.i.+ngton President Ford was becoming increasingly impatient with the amba.s.sador's reluctance to wind up "Operation Frequent Wind." The emba.s.sy's secret communications equipment was being smashed, they told her, and the last direct messages had already been sent to Was.h.i.+ngton. The helicopter radio links with the commanders of the Seventh Fleet were the only surviving channels of contact between Saigon and Was.h.i.+ngton, and orders were expected from the White House at any time, they said, to curtail the airlift as soon as the last U.S. diplomat was airborne. After that there was no certainty that anybody else would get out.

Naomi took a last look Out of the window then reluctantly moved up the stairwell behind the other waiting Americans. When she stepped out onto the Chancery roof it was almost four AM. and the CH-47 that was to take her and twenty-four others to the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the flags.h.i.+p of the evacuation fleet, was just settling onto the pad. Because time was precious it did not cut its rotors, and they continued to spin as Marine guards urged the first group of pa.s.sengers forward into its open hatches. Suddenly Naomi realized that from the top of the six-story building she could see the rivers of North Vietnamese armor flowing down the two main highways towards Saigon with their driving lights s.h.i.+ning, and her heart sank; then in the next instant she lowered her gaze to the street outside the emba.s.sy walls and saw Joseph's Pontiac nosing through the crowd towards the side gate.

The desperate Vietnamese were swarming frenziedly around the slow-moving car, imagining somehow that it might be their last chance of salvation, and Naomi stepped aside to let other diplomats board the helicopter ahead of her. Her hand Hew to her mouth when she saw a dozen or more youths scramble onto the Pontiac's roof, hoping to spring from there over the gate when it got near enough. Others smashed at its windows, and gradually the dense throng halted the car. In their anger they began rocking it and Naomi let out a little cry when it toppled slowly onto its side. Men and boys attacked it with their feet, shattering its winds.h.i.+eld and side windows, and it was then that Naomi saw for the first time the terrified face of Trinh as she struggled to force open the pa.s.senger door that was suddenly above her head.

Inside the car, the screams of the crowd were deafening; Joseph, who had fallen awkwardly when the car went over, was fighting to free his legs from the controls and trying to calm Trinh at the same time. As she began trying to climb out of the car he seized her arm, motioning for her to wait, and pulled his pa.s.sport from inside his jacket. "If we become separated, show this to the soldiers on the top of the wall and they'll let you in," he yelled, thrusting it into her hand.

She nodded frantically and clambered out of the wrecked car clutching the pa.s.sport. The crowd had begun to surge wildly back arid forth and almost at once she was carried away from him along the foot of the wall. A volley of shots rang out from among the crowd, directed at the helicopter that had just landed on top of the Chancery, and this was greeted with hysterical cheers; then the heavier bark of a machine gun firing from a roof on the other side of Thong Nhut suddenly broke in on the clamor and half-a- dozen men and women crumpled to the ground, As Joseph pulled himself from the Pontiac screams of "Viet Cong! Viet Cong!" rose all around him and there was a concerted rush at the walls. The American Marines standing shoulder to shoulder on the parapet, wearing flak jackets and steel helmets, stamped on the climbers' hands with their heavy combat boots and brandished their bayonets, and again the crowd fell back screaming abuse. The Cobra guns.h.i.+p that had been hovering overhead suddenly dropped like a hawk and the roar of its multi-barreled weapons blotted out everything else for several seconds while it fired at the Communist machine gun nest on the rooftop opposite.

In the thick of the crowd Joseph craned his neck in desperation, trying to spot Trinh, but he couldn't see her. Then he heard a distant voice shrieking his name, and he looked up to see Naomi gesticulating frantically from the Chancery roof. She was pointing along the wall, and following her directions, he saw Trinh scrambling up a lightpole with two of three other youths. He shouldered his way through the crowd and began climbing the same lattice-iron stanchion; halfway up, he found himself gasping for breath and lie stopped. As lie rested he saw a Marine guard appear above him, and the soldier clubbed savagely at the two Vietnamese youths ahead of Trinh with his M-16 to clear the way for Joseph. They fell backwards with a yell, sweeping Trinh to the ground, and she rose sobbing and holding her arms beseechingly towards Joseph.

"Ong ngoai! Ong ngoai!" she screamed, reverting in her despair to "Grandpapa," the childish term of endearment she had first used for him seven years before in the sampan on the River of Perfumes, "Vui long giup toi! - Please help me!"

The Marine was calling repeatedly for Joseph to climb up alone but he ignored him and leaned back into the crowd, stretching out his arms towards Trinh. She tried to grab his hand, but the fear-crazed mob surged wildly around her and she was swept away. The Cobra guns.h.i.+p which had failed to silence the Viet Cong machine gun had begun dropping flares to expose its position, and by their ghostly light Joseph saw her struggling to her feet again. Feeling his strength ebbing he decided not to venture back into the melee; instead he yelled her name repeatedly and waved her in his direction. When she saw him she began fighting her way towards the light stanchion once more, but before she reached it a dark blob flew in an arc above the heads of the 'crowd. The flash of the grenade exploding blinded Joseph for a few seconds and when his vision cleared he saw Trinh lying still among the ma.s.s of bodies crumpled on the pavement.

From the top of the Chancery, Naomi couldn't see what had happened outside the compound, but from the hunched, rigid position of Joseph's body as he clung to the lightpole she sensed that something was wrong. At that moment a yelling Marine grabbed her by the shoulders and hustled her towards the open door of the helicopter that was waiting to leave. She tried to struggle and shouted for him to release her but her words were torn away in the noise of the helicopter's fast-spinning rotor blades. In the end he lifted her bodily into the aircraft alongside the other pa.s.sengers and slammed the door. As the helicopter shuddered into the air she saw Joseph release his hold on the lightpole and slip back into the crowd, and she buried her face in her hands.

When Joseph reached Trinh's side she was lying quite still, with her eyes closed, but there was no sign of injury on her face or body. With the growing pandemonium of the Communist bombardment filling his ears, he knelt to pick her up and, summoning his fading strength, he staggered back to the foot of the wall. The explosion of the grenade had scattered the crowd and he signaled to a Marine sergeant on top of the gate to take Trinh from him. The sergeant leaned down and hauled her over the gate with one arm before pa.s.sing her to one of his waiting men inside; then he climbed down to help Joseph scramble over.

Trinh was still unconscious when Joseph took her from the Marine and carried her unsteadily across the darkened emba.s.sy compound to the landing zone on the lawn. He persuaded the colonel supervising the evacuation to let them board the last Sikorsky Sea Stallion, and he squeezed in among the seventy or so frightened Vietnamese who were already crowded inside. He had to crouch on the floor, cradling Trinh's head against his chest, and as the helicopter rose and pulled slowly away from the glare of the emba.s.sy area, she opened her eyes and gazed around at the sea of faces in terror.

"Don't worry, Trinh," he said, speaking close to her ear. "You're safe - everything's going to be all right."

End.

Postscript.

While researching the background to this novel I received invaluable guidance from history scholars in Paris, London, Was.h.i.+ngton arid at Harvard University; a number of journalists and writers with a deep knowledge-of Vietnam also kindly shared their perceptions of the past with me. In Paris, my early enthusiasms were nourished by French historian Philippe Devillers and foreign correspondent Edith Lenart, who has covered Indochina with distinction for many years. In London Dr. Ralph B. Smith, Reader in the History of Southeast Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, steered me towards scores of stimulating sources, including the once-secret Surete Generale files now accessible in the French Ministry of Colonies. In Was.h.i.+ngton, author William R. Corson, a splendid friend and a man of perhaps unrivaled military and intelligence experience in Southeast Asia, was an unfailing inspiration and helpmate; Professor Allan W. Cameron of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a specialist in the diplomatic history of Indochina, gave endless hours of his time to discussing Vietnam with me; Frank Snepp, author of Decent Interval, the inside story of Saigon's final fall, provided many fresh insights; Douglas Pike, who has written several authoritative works on the Viet Cong, helped me generously and Bruce Martin, research facilities officer at the Library of Congress, constantly rendered a.s.sistance far beyond the call of duty.

In libraries and archives in Paris, London and Was.h.i.+ngton over a three-year period I consulted several hundred books and thousands of doc.u.ments relating to Vietnam; all contributed something to my efforts to re-create the Vietnam of decades past but among them a few books stood out as beacons of enlightenment. The Three Kingdoms of Indo-China by Harold J. Coolidge, Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1933, provided fascinating glimpses of what big game hunting was like in Cochin China and Annam in colonial times; Little China by Alan Houghton Brodrick, published in 1942, and East of Siam by American travel writer Harry A. Franck (1939) were indispensable guides to Vietnamese and colonial customs in the early years of this century. Ngo Vinh Long in his work Before the Revolution; The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French doc.u.mented as n.o.body else has done the privations suffered by some of his countrymen on the rubber plantations and in the World War II famine, and Virginia Thompson's wide-ranging survey French Indo-China (i937) brought the rigors and problems of life in the French colonial territories sharply into focus for me. Among the several biographies of 1-b Chi Minh, Charles Fenn's, published in 1973, stood out because of its author's personal contacts with the enigmatic Vietnamese leader during World War II. Little has been written about Britain's brief but crucial involvement in Indochina in 1945 and George Rosie's brave little paperback, The British in Vietnam is so far the sole published guide to those controversial events. Jules Roy's The Battle of Dien Bien Phu and Bernard Fall's h.e.l.l in a Very Small Place were compelling reading for anyone wis.h.i.+ng to reconstruct authentically the climactic battle of the French Indochina war. Of the books written during the 1960S David Halberstam's The Making of a Quagmire and Malcolm W. Browne's The New Face of War proved invaluable guides to Saigon and South Vietnam in that period and Don Oberdorfer's Tet! was an essential companion for understanding fully the historic Communist offensive of 1968.

At a practical level my warmest thanks are also due to my research a.s.sistant in Was.h.i.+ngton, Sally Weston, to my typist Jean Johnson who tirelessly worked and reworked successive drafts of the novel in both London and Was.h.i.+ngton and ultimately to my tenacious editor in Boston, William D. Phillips. In acknowledging my debt of grat.i.tude to those specialists who have aided me, I don't, however, mean to suggest that they necessarily approve in every case of the manner in which I have portrayed the events of the past Fifty years. In the end the novelist's viewpoint remains, uniquely, his own.