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From time to time I pulled the paddle inside the boat and closed my eyes and rested. I felt completely recovered, and long before dawn I was hungry again. When the sky lightened, we beached the boat, and Dhang and I went out to look for food. I found some fruit that he told me was poisonous, and he brained a few lizards with the butt of his pistol and seemed surprised when Tuppence and I showed little enthusiasm for them. He managed to unearth some edible roots, and I picked some non-poisonous berries. Tuppence and I made do with them. Dhang roasted the lizards and seemed to enjoy them considerably.
Around noon we stopped the boat again, and Dhang and I went exploring. We saw smoke rising off to our right and headed toward it, moving silently through the jungle. We had been a long time without seeing any other human beings. Where there is smoke there is also fire and often food, and living off the jungle can have its limitations.
We crept close to the campsite. Through a break in the undergrowth I saw uniformed men sitting around a campfire, talking and laughing. I listened closely but could not understand what they were saying. Whatever language they were speaking, it was not one I recognized. Dhang couldn’t make it out either.
Some tribal dialect, I decided. I considered making ourselves known to them, then decided against it. If we didn’t have a language in common with them, things could be extremely difficult. In all probability they were Laotian regulars, probably an antiguerrilla force. Dhang was still dressed in the uniform he had do
And then, late in the afternoon, we heard a plane flying overhead. Dhang noticed it first. We heard the engines droning long before we caught sight of the craft and we craned our heads upward for a look at it, and the pilot came down for a look at us.
It was a jet fighter. I couldn’t recognize the model but when it swooped downward, I made out U.S. Air Force insignia on the undersides of the swept-back wings.
“It’s one of ours,” I said, and Tuppence and I began to wave furiously, and the plane continued its downward sweep.
And bullets plowed a furrow in the water beside us.
“Evan! The mother’s shooting at us!”
He missed us completely on that run. He came out of his dive, swung into a graceful turn, and headed our way again, machine guns open. The silly son of a bitch was trying to kill us.
“Overboard,” I shouted. “Swim for shore! Fast!”
We leaped out of the dugout and into the water. Bullets riddled the water around us. I grabbed Tuppence and swam furiously for land. Dhang was off to the right, cutting the water with clean, brisk strokes. The pilot finished his run, made another illegal U-turn, and came back a third time.
We reached the bank, clambered ashore, dove into the cover of an overhang of vines and shrubs. The fighter let us alone and concentrated on the dugout. He made three more strafing runs at it and by now he was getting the hang of it. Bullets tore into the hollow wooden shell. By the end of the third run enough holes had been opened up, and the dugout had filled with water. It didn’t exactly sink – it was, after all, wood – but its days of service were over. It was filled with water to the top. It was useless to us, and so were our guns.
The plane finished its third run, made another pass over the ship with the guns silent, evidently to assess the probable success of the mission. Then the pilot banked smartly, headed skyward, and flew away.
“Now he can go back to his base,” I said bitterly, “and he can paint a dugout canoe on the side of the fuselage. The son of a bitch!”
“Baby, I don’t get it. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe-”
“Evan – the jewels!”
I swam back to the boat. The two leather bags of jewels were where we had left them, happily untouched by the bullets. But the boat was a lost cause entirely. I rescued the two jewel sacks and swam back to shore. A U.S. plane, I thought, disheartened. Just what we needed. With friends like him we didn’t need enemies.
“Why did that mother shoot us up, Evan? And what do we do now?”
The second question was unanswerable. But I had the first one figured out and suddenly I knew where we were.
“Those soldiers we saw around noon were speaking A
“Why?”
“Because we’re in the middle of North Vietnam,” I said.
Chapter 14
Dhang demanded a translation; once I had supplied it, he wanted an explanation. I told him the United States and North Vietnam were fighting, and that there were some guerrillas in South Vietnam called either the Vietcong or the National Liberation Front, depending who you listened to, who were fighting the government of South Vietnam. He asked how you could tell the North Vietnamese from the South Vietnamese, and I told him that you couldn’t, but that it didn’t really matter, because the leading strategists on both sides had evidently concluded that the only possible end to the confusion lay in killing everyone on both sides and everyone on neither side, as quickly as possible.
Then he asked another a
I didn’t answer either of them.
“We could surrender,” Tuppence suggested.
“To whom?”
“To the first people we meet. We’re lost and we don’t even have a goddamned boat. Suppose we just hit on the first cats we find and wave a white flag at them. What then?”
“They would take us to Hanoi and try us.”
“As what?”
“As war criminals. Or they might ship us back to the Pathet Lao. Or, most likely, they’d shoot us on the spot. I don’t think the North Vietnamese Army is too keen on taking prisoners behind their own lines. They haven’t had much experience at it except with captured pilots. With none of us speaking the language, they’d probably decide we weren’t worth the trouble.” I shook my head wearily. “Or else they’d figure out that we were part of an invading force operating in the north. Who knows? We might touch off an international incident. I wouldn’t mind that so much, but I have the feeling we wouldn’t survive the experience.”
“And don’t forget the jewels.”
“I’d love to forget the jewels.”
“You haven’t looked at them yet.”
“I don’t particularly want to look at them. I should have left them in the river. Now we can’t even chance surrendering to some peasants somewhere. They’d kill us for the jewels. You know, I’m not particularly ecstatic about our situation. I wish that goddamned river had led in some other direction.”
“How do we get out of North Vietnam?”
“I’m not all that certain that we do,” I said. “But I guess the only way to do it is by going to South Vietnam. Which, logically enough, is south of North Vietnam.”
“So if we keep going south-”
“We get killed,” I finished for her.
“Oh.”
“But we have to try it. I think we can forget about the river. We could conceivably cut wood for a raft and lash it together with vines, but I’m not sure it would work. And the river seems a little too exposed. If that idiot was willing to waste a few hundred bullets on a dugout canoe, he’d probably drop napalm on a raft.”
“If we don’t use the river, what then?”
“Cut through the jungle,” I said. “There’s something called the Ho Chi Minh Trail – according to the newspapers, it’s what the North Vietnamese soldiers use when they infiltrate into the south. I don’t suppose there are any road signs on it, but if we head over that way, away from the river, we ought to hit some sort of route heading south. We’ll have to travel by night, I’m afraid. We don’t want to meet anyone at all because there’s no one from here to the border we can count on as a friend. The local soldiers will be against us and so will the American planes. When they come over here, they shoot at anything that moves.”