Darwin's Blade

17 “Q is for Quagmire”

I never told Barbara about Dalat, thought Dar as he poured the drinks and rounded up the spaghetti-making equipment. As close as we were, I never talked about any of it. Not to her. Not to Larry. Never to anyone.

Things are different now, he argued with himself. A Russian sniper tried to kill you the other day.

All right. Dar clinked glasses with Syd and they drank good Scotch while he began preparing the meal in a mutual silence filled with the turmoil of too much thought.

Dalat was and is a highland Vietnamese city located at the foot of Lang Biang Mountain, some fifty miles from the coast. In 1962 President Kennedy and the United States government showed its solidarity with whatever South Vietnamese regime was in power at the time—Dar could not recall the strongman’s name—by transferring plutonium and other radioactive materials to the South Vietnamese and helping to set up a working nuclear reactor at Dalat. The reactor was used to produce radioisotopes for research and medical purposes, but more important, it was a status symbol for the South Vietnamese and a gesture of America’s cooperation and friendship.

Cut to March of 1975. Nixon and Kissinger had successfully “Vietnamized” the war. The soldiers who had been equipped to take the place of the six hundred thousand American grunts, Marines, Air Force personnel, and others who had been withdrawn were in full retreat. The Viet Cong and the regular North Vietnamese Army were busy overrunning and occupying every former American base, stronghold, and Vietnamese city. Saigon was ten days away from being overrun, and the situation at the American embassy—where only a token force of U.S. Marine guards were left—was, to put it in the Marine argot of the day, pure clusterfuck. A huge naval armada stood offshore, ready and waiting to haul away the last of the fleeing diplomats, dependents, and Marine guards.

In the middle of all the confusion—burning files, fleeing families, abandoned equipment, thousands of Vietnamese “helpers” petitioning to be flown out—two South Vietnamese technicians showed up at the U.S. embassy and diffidently reminded the Americans that the Dalat reactor was still up and running, and that weapons-grade plutonium was stored there. The ambassador and the top-ranking military man were finally briefed about this in the midst of all the confusion, and they immediately ordered the Vietnamese technicians to return to Dalat posthaste and to scram the reactor—perform an emergency shutdown procedure. They were ordered to then bring all of the vital radioactive material, especially the plutonium, to Saigon, where it would be flown out to the waiting armada.

The Vietnamese technicians allowed that they would very much like to do that, but respectfully reminded the general and the ambassador that Dalat was in the process of being overrun by both Viet Cong and NVA units, that all of the roads and railroad lines to Saigon and the coast had been interdicted by the enemy, and that all scheduled flights in and out of Dalat’s tiny airport had been canceled because of the proximity of NVA soldiers. All of the other reactor personnel had fled, and the reactor itself was at that moment humming along unmanned. The two technicians described how they had flown out—through heavy small-arms fire—in a light plane belonging to the younger technician’s brother, who just happened to be a captain in the South Vietnamese Air Force and who had dropped them at Saigon, landing in rough field along the chaos of the National Road and then had immediately taken off to fly on toward Thailand alone, and while the two technicians would be most happy to go back to Dalat to help their dear American friends, they were actually quite low level technicians who had no idea how to scram a reactor, and besides, having risked their lives to bring word of the Dalat reactor dilemma, perhaps they’d already earned their trip to the United States and a new life.

“Do we have any nuclear eggheads around?” asked the ambassador. “Any sailor or anyone who happens to know how to shut down a reactor and handle plutonium?”

As it turned out, they did. On board a nuclear aircraft carrier standing offshore were two American members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency: one Wally Henderson and a John Halloran. Neither of them was military; both of the men were affable, easygoing academics, and neither had ever heard of Dalat or even of the existence of a South Vietnamese reactor. They happened to be off the coast of Vietnam because several of the warships in the evacuation armada were carrying scores of nuclear weapons, others were chugging along in harm’s way via their nuclear-reactor power plants, and the Defense Department had thought it prudent amidst all the confusion to have someone around—someone above the level of technician or Navy-trained nuclear engineer—who knew how the weapons and shipboard reactors actually worked. Just in case.

Wally Henderson and John Halloran were promptly helicoptered in to the scurrying anthill that was Saigon, briefed, and flown into Dalat with twelve Marines. The briefing—to both the scientists and the Marines—was fairly simple: shut down the reactor, don’t let it explode or whatever reactors do when they’re being shelled by the enemy, rescue as much of the radioactive isotope material as you can, retrieve the approximately eighty grams of plutonium at the reactor, and fly back to Saigon. If the airfield is overrun, try walking the fifty miles through jungle to the coast where they could radio for pickup. At all costs, bring the plutonium along.

Of the twelve Marines, four were snipers. Dar Minor, nineteen years old, a precocious college graduate with a degree in physics—which no one in the military or at the embassy knew of or cared about at the time of his assignment to Dalat—was one of those snipers. When they landed in Dalat in an ancient commercial DC-3, made all the less flyable by a lead-lined storage facility quickly jury-rigged to hold the radioactive materials, eight of the Marines, including the commanding officer—a lieutenant—stayed behind to guard the airfield from the North Vietnamese while Dar and three others accompanied Wally and John to the reactor. It was just after 0700 hours and the morning mists were burning off.

The reactor was abandoned, the elite ARVN guards had fled, and the guard gates and main doors were literally standing open. But the enemy had not yet arrived. To young Dar Minor, the facility reminded him of the mock-up of Fort Knox he had seen in the movie Goldfinger when he was eight years old: A huge, heavily reinforced and domed concrete structure on a low hill, the Dalat reactor was surrounded by almost a kilometer and a half of grassy slope in all directions. There were three rows of barbed-wire perimeter fences, one within the other at hundred-meter intervals, and the four Marines had the presence of mind to lock the gates of each as they drove their Jeep and the two excited scientists to the main reactor building. In three directions lay thick jungle, in the fourth the open road to Dalat. The reactor commanded the high ground for that open kilometer and a half. To a sniper—even to an untested sniper like nineteen-year-old Dar—it was obviously the ultimate killing zone.

Although unblooded, Dar was the leader of his two-man team. Snipers had been formally a part of the Marine Corps only since 1968, when divisional orders had recognized their importance in the war and approved the organization and formation of sniper platoons within each regiment’s headquarters company, as well as in the headquarters and service company of each reconnaissance battalion. Formally, the sniper platoon consisted of three squads of five two-man teams and a squad leader for each team, plus a senior NCO, and an armorer and an officer, bringing total platoon strength to one officer and thirty-five enlisted men. Formally, the reconnaissance battalion had a slightly different configuration adding up to a total strength of one officer and thirty enlisted men In reality, Marine snipers operated—as they had throughout this war, Korea, and two World Wars—in teams of two, both of them marksmen but the team leader literally calling the shots, with his number two acting as spotter.

During the Dalat mission, Dar was leader of Team Two, and as the team leader, he carried a 7.62-millimeter Remington 700 bolt-action sporting rifle, modified and renamed the M40 by the Marines, while his spotter was armed with an accurized M-14. The earlier Marine spotters in Vietnam-era sniper teams had been issued standard M-16s for rapid fire, but the Marines had discovered the hard way that the M-16s lacked the necessary long-range accuracy and had reverted to the accurized M-14s.

For this mission, the two sniper teams had literally brought more weapons and ammunition than they could carry. Dar had assumed that with the war over, the U.S. was leaving tens of billions of dollars of equipment behind; what would a few more weapons on this mission matter? The second Jeep was filled with four extra M40 Sniper Rifles, two extra M-14s, one extra M40 barrel for each team, and crates of ammunition. Each of the four Marines carried his own set of binoculars and personal short-range radio, while the two teams shared a large PRC-45 radio for calling in artillery or air strikes. In addition to the binoculars, each spotter carried a twenty-power scout telescope. To add to their observation power, the second Jeep hauled in two heavy NODs—Night Observation Devices—and four smaller AN/PVS2 Starlight scopes mounted on the two extra accurized M-14s. One of the large NODs was mounted on a tripod, but the other was mounted on the pièce de résistance of their arsenal, a.50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun specially modified to function as a single-shot sniper weapon. Also included for the M2 was a massive Unertl telescopic sight for daylight use.

Dar’s spotter was a twenty-two-year-old black fellow corporal from Alabama named Ned. Ned had actually outscored Dar—very slightly—on marksmanship proficiency—but Dar had come out of his 205 hours of formal sniper instruction, 62 hours of marksmanship practice, 53 hours of field training, and 85 hours of tactical field exercises with the higher total score. The real top shot of the two squads was Sergeant Carlos, an old man—thirty-two years old—the only one of the four Marines who had seen combat. Carlos’s spotter was another nineteen-year-old named Chuck, from Palo Alto.

Dar and the others parked the Jeeps out of sight in one of the several empty outbuildings, had a quick look at the eerily empty reactor control room as the two nuclear scientists got to work, and then went up onto the parapets to stand guard for the next forty-eight hours. Carlos was delighted at the reactor’s layout in terms of being a shooting stand. There were two 360-degree, cement-walled balconies around the main reactor building, one at a four-story height and the other just below the dome at sixty feet up. The walls on both balconies were slightly tessellated in the sense that every twenty paces or so, the concrete was raised three feet above the average four-foot wall height. This turned the parapet into a battlement, according to Sergeant Carlos. To make it even more of a battlement, the four Marines quickly humped more than eighty sandbags from the abandoned guard posts below to create shielded shooting stands and revetments.

The reinforced walls of the seven-story containment structure were twelve feet thick; the parapet walls were four feet thick. Although a few low outbuildings were clustered near the base of the reactor building, the parapets were high enough that their field of fire was unobstructed in all directions. Access to the two levels and the main control room was via internal corridors and ladders. There were no windows.

“Shi-iit,” said Sergeant Carlos when they finished their strenuous sandbagging job. “If Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Colonel Travis, and the rest of those crackers had this place and these weapons instead of the shitty old Alamo, my ancestors never would have killed their asses and captured the place.”

It took Wally and John forty-two hours to shut down the reactor, locate and load the various isotopes, and find the marked canister reported to contain eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium. The enemy arrived at the Dalat reactor three hours after the Marines.

An hour after Dar’s arrival, Lieutenant Hale radioed from the airport. The eight Marines there—also outfitted with serious weaponry—were in a firefight with what appeared to be a battalion of VC. Half an hour after that, Lieutenant Hale’s radio man reported that half the Marines were dead—including the lieutenant—and that the remaining Marines were attempting to hold off what appeared to be a full mechanized company of North Vietnamese regulars. The DC-3 had flown out, leaving them behind. Hale’s men had called for dust-off, but gunships and evac choppers were unable to approach the airport terminal because of massive antiaircraft fire from the surrounding tree lines.

For another hour, Dar and the other three Marines on the reactor parapets listened to the distant rattle of small-arms fire: the distinctive bursts from M-16s and M60s, the even more distinctive rattle of Kalashnikov AK-47s, the crump of mortars, and the blast of tank cannon. Sergeant Carlos said that this was the first time in three tours in Vietnam that he had ever heard enemy tank fire.

Then the shooting stopped. The silence was so terrible that Dar was actually relieved when the first Viet Cong appeared in commandeered ARVN Jeeps, a few light armored vehicles, and a line of trucks coming up the main road from Dalat.

“Watch this,” said Sergeant Carlos.

The .50-caliber M2 with a special Unertl scope had been set up on the wide wall between the sandbags. While Chuck and Ned spotted with their twenty-power scopes, Sergeant Carlos opened fire on the VC column at a shooting distance of twenty-two hundred yards—more than a mile away. The first bullet turned the head of the Jeep’s driver into a balloon of red mist. The second bullet—an explosive round—ignited the Jeep’s gas tank and blew the vehicle fifty feet into the air. Carlos’s third shot penetrated the light armor of the vehicle behind the lead Jeep and must have killed the driver, for the armored vehicle veered to the right and splashed into a deep irrigation ditch. The sergeant’s fourth shot blasted through the engine block of the third vehicle in line—a deuce-and-a-half-heavy truck—freezing its engine and stalling the entire convoy. Troops jumped out of the trucks and began running for the jungle on each side.

Sergeant Carlos continued his leisurely shooting while the other three men watched through spotting scopes. Every time Carlos fired, a human being died. Then the trucks were empty, as the Viet Cong moved through the jungle toward them and called for NVA support. For good measure, Sergeant Carlos blew up three more trucks with explosive rounds. The flames and smoke drifted high into the morning air.

“You see, having your pals get picked off from more than a mile away hurts morale,” said Sergeant Carlos. He let the .50-caliber weapon cool while he assigned Dar’s team to the lower parapet and went off to prepare his own bolt-action M40 Sniper Rifle for “close-in” work of eight hundred yards or less.

Dar had always heard that war stories grow in memory and in retelling, but he had never told the story of those forty-eight hours at Dalat. His memory of them had always been as solid and unchanging as a stone in his soul.

The VC scouts had begun to return fire and send out probes from the tree line about twenty minutes after Sergeant Carlos had stopped their first convoy. Carlos and Dar used their 7.62-caliber M40s to kill the VC whenever they came out of the jungle shadows or showed themselves by muzzle flashes.

With the exception of the AK-47 rounds hitting outbuildings or gravel below, and a few reaching and barely chipping the reactor containment building itself, it was very quiet. Dar heard little except for the leisurely bark of the M40s and the softly spoken “Hit…hit…down but still moving…kill…hit” of Ned, his spotter.

Early that afternoon, about a hundred VC broke cover and assaulted the reactor complex. Dar and Carlos first killed the VC snipers who were giving the infantry what cover they could with their less accurate K-44 rifles—actually the old Soviet 7.62-millimeter M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifles used by the Red Army in World War II. When they were finished with the snipers—always another sniper’s number one priority—they shot the sappers carrying their bangalore torpedoes to blow the fences. When the sappers had all fallen, Dar and Sergeant Carlos turned their attention to all of the NVA officers that they could identify. As soon as any man in a green uniform and pith helmet shouted an order or urged the other soldiers on or brandished a pistol rather than the usual AK-47, he was shot. When the thinned assault line came within eight hundred yards, still two hundred yards from the outer fence, Ned and Chuck opened up with rapid fire from their accurized M-14s.

The line broke. The VC ran for the jungle. A few made it.

The NVA regulars showed up a few minutes later. Watching through the spotter scope, Dar was amazed. He had never seen a Russian T-55 tank before, much less been taught how to kill it. The two lead tanks seemed to have the plan to drive straight up the road, smash down the gate, and drive straight into the reactor complex. They did not fire their seventy-two-millimeter cannons. All four of the Marines realized that there would be no mortar or artillery fire coming from the Communists. Evidently, some commander up the line had made the decision that the Dalat reactor must be captured without damage to the containment building. It was a stupid decision, Dar knew, because well-aimed mortar rounds would have killed the four Marines and only chipped and pockmarked the massive concrete walls. Wally and John, working deep in the control room, reported later that they had heard none of the shooting. Luckily for the Marines, the NVA command structure seemed to know even less about nuclear reactors than had the U.S. ambassador.

When the lead tank got within one thousand yards, Sergeant Carlos began firing explosive .50-caliber bullets at the vision slits.

“You have to be shitting me,” yelled Ned over the din. “You can’t kill a fucking tank with a sniper rifle.”

“Those vision slits are bulletproof,” said Sergeant Carlos between shots, “but not shatterproof. It’s hard to drive when you can’t see worth shit.”

It took eight rounds, but eventually the tank just stopped. A minute later, the crew bailed out and began running for the distant tree line. Dar and Sergeant Carlos killed them. The second tank took twelve explosive rounds around and into its vision ports before it veered suddenly to the right and stopped. The crew stayed inside until long after dark. When they ran for the tree line sometime after midnight, Dar killed three of them with his Starlight scope. The third tank turned around and clanked back into the jungle, but not before it let off a cannon round seemingly out of sheer frustration. The round blew a three-foot round hole in the outer perimeter fence and exploded on the grassy slope. The T-55 driver had made the mistake of turning around for maximum speed rather than backing away. One of Sergeant Carlos’s twelve-hundred-meter shots ignited the extra fuel canister on the right side and the tank drove into the jungle with flames leaping from its rear deck.

There were two more serious infantry flanking assaults before sunset. Now the Marine shooting teams were moving from level to level, revetment to revetment, firing in all directions. They had to be careful not to slide and fall on all the spent brass on the parapet concrete floors. The VC reached and blew the outer fence on the last rush before twilight. Thirty men got into the zone between the outer and secondary fences.

“Did the ARVN lay mines?” Chuck asked hopefully.

“Naw,” said Sergeant Carlos. “It’s the only fucking place in fucking South Vietnam with no mines.”

The thirty-man infantry shouted a victory cry, raised the North Vietnamese flag, and ran for the second fence. The four Marines killed them.

It was after midnight when the VC and the NVA began crawling out of the jungle toward the outer wire. In training, Dar had been taught that the new generation of passive image-intensifying devices—night scopes—were the Vietnam-era equivalent of World War II’s Norden bombsight: top-secret technology. In the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the saying had been “Charlie owns the night.” Now the Marines owned the night.

Twenty-five years after Dalat, Dar would see an ad in L.L. Bean or some other outdoor catalog for six-hundred-dollar night-vision goggles and he would have to smile. The priceless, die-before-letting-it-be-captured night-vision miracle had become catalogue item #NP14328, available for next-day delivery via FedEx. In recent years he had actually ordered such a pair of night-vision goggles and found them not only lighter and more effective than his old Starlight scope, but the price was much more reasonable.

Ned used the tripod-mounted Night Observation Device to sight the enemy at distances up to fourteen hundred yards and alert Dar and Chuck for their Starlight scope shots at eight hundred yards or less with the M-14s. Sergeant Carlos used the other NOD mounted on the .50-caliber M2 to cut down enemy soldiers at fifteen hundred yards the instant they moved in the midnight shadows.

Unusual for Vietnam at that time of year, the skies remained clear all that long night. There was no moon, but the stars were very beautiful.

Shortly after sunrise of the second day, six brand-new T-72 tanks and six T-55s began clanking purposefully toward the Dalat reactor. Infantry moved close behind them, and NVA snipers maintained covering fire from the tree line.

“I didn’t know the fucking North Vietnamese had that many tanks in their whole fucking army,” commented Sergeant Carlos, punctuating the soft words with a spit of his chewing tobacco.

Deep in the bowels of the building, Wally and John had slept an hour each. While one slept, the other had driven radioactive materials around on a forklift. None of the four Marines had slept at all.

Sergeant Carlos watched the tanks approaching the outer wire. He had been busy since predawn, talking on the PRC-45—their so-called Prick 45 command radio. Just before the circle of tanks reached the outer wire, a flight of five fast movers—F-4 Phantoms in this case—roared in at two hundred feet and dropped their ordnance, high-explosive shaped charges. Dar watched with fatigue-tinged disbelief as the turret of the lead T-72 blew three hundred feet straight into the air, higher than the F-4s had flown, the tank gunner’s charred legs clearly visible dangling and kicking from the tumbling turret.

Several of the tanks survived the air assault and churned around in confusion, some running over their own infantry in the smoke and flame. Thirty seconds later, a follow-up strike mission of three Navy A-4D Skyhawks flying off the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk laid down napalm on three sides of the reactor complex. The resulting smoke and flame made it very difficult for Dar and the others to kill the fleeing survivors, but there were few survivors.

The second twenty-four hours were far less clear in Dar’s memory, though even more indelible.

Something happened to time; that was the only explanation for it. Time was distorted, stretched completely out of shape—almost to infinity or eternity was his impression—yet folded back on itself with moments and hours and events overlapping and coexisting. It was as if Dar had dropped below the event horizon of one of the black holes he would study in his doctorate work in the years to come.

There were several more all-out infantry assaults on the morning of that second day. During one of them, the Navy air strikes were delayed by half an hour and several hundred NVA regulars—no VC in black pajamas here, but well-fed, uniformed, superbly well armed crack troops, the pride of General Giap of the North—reached the inner fence. In a normal situation, Dar and the others would have called in artillery fire missions from fire bases nearby, but all of the American artillery had packed up and left the country, and all of the ARVN artillery in the province had been overrun. The only thing that saved their little Alamo was the fact that Giap obviously wanted to take the reactor intact.

Dar remembered that it was during one of those attacks on the morning of the second day that the barrel of his original M40 melted and he had to switch to the backup sniper rifle. Ned was killed by NVA countersniper fire just before that last morning attack—or perhaps just after. Dar could not remember with certainty. But he did remember the sequence of deaths. Ned was shot in the eye while using the twenty-power scope around midday. Sergeant Carlos was hit in the chest and throat sometime during the evening’s fusillade, and died just as the sun set red and full behind Lang Biang mountain. Chuck was killed by a volley of bullets just seconds before they were to board the Sea Stallion.

During the last night—Wally and John still working and loading and using waldoes, remote handlers, deep in the building—Chuck and Dar talked about Plan B. Plan B was walking the fifty miles to the coast. Both Marines knew it was now impossible. It was not just that there were now at least two battalions of NVA mechanized infantry and perhaps three companies of VC in the jungle on all sides of them. Marines could deal with that. But with Ned and Sergeant Carlos dead, Dar and Chuck could never make it to the coast carrying the two bodies, while helping the scientists with their hundreds of pounds of radioactive isotopes and plutonium and what all. And Marines did not leave their dead behind.

Dar had always thought this policy the height of obscenity—trading more human lives for dead bodies—but he also knew that he was not going to be the one to break the tradition and leave Carlos and Ned for the enemy.

When the last attack of the day came and the last air strike was called in, it was napalm again, dropped from four F-4 fast movers. Some of the ordnance burned the outbuildings, the Jeeps, and the base of the containment building itself. Dar would never forget the smell of frying human flesh, nor his shame at the fact that in his hunger, the smell made him salivate. He had not eaten in twenty hours. The screams seemed to come from just a few feet away instead of fifty yards away. Dar clearly remembered cowering on the parapet floor, covering his scoped sniper’s rifle with his body as if protecting a child from harm, as flames rose two hundred feet high all around the reactor building and the air became too hot to inhale.

Chuck and Dar spent the second night moving from position to position, using the Starlight scopes on the M-14s and the NOD on the .50-caliber to spot and shoot the scores of sappers and troops crawling from all directions.

“Did you ever see Beau Geste?” Dar had called to Chuck during a lull in the shooting.

“What?” said the Marine from the higher parapet.

“Never mind,” shouted Dar.

The NVA was laying down smoke by this time—which was smart because even image-intensifying night scopes could not see through smoke—but there was already so much smoke in the air that it worked against the NVA cover-fire snipers as well. Usually, when a trooper got within one hundred yards, either Chuck or Dar would catch a glimpse of greenish movement through the hellish curtains of smoke and white-blob glare of the open flames, and then one of them would kill him with a single shot. When they were shooting from the same side of the building, the two Marines worked efficiently, yelling, “Mine! I’ve got it!” like Little League outfielders calling for a catch.

At 2:00 A.M. of that second night, Wally and John staggered to the parapets to announce that everything was loaded on pallet trucks and they could leave in the Jeeps now. While Dar explained that the plans had changed, the enemy kept up constant harassing fire. Thousands of bullets were striking the parapets. The sandbags were shot to pieces and the sound of bullets striking them was as steady as a heavy rain on a canvas tent roof. The ricochets were the dangerous element. Both Marines were bleeding freely from impacts from flying masonry and spent bullets.

Dar remembered Wally cleaning his glasses—the scientist’s eyes red with fatigue but also wide in shock at Dar’s bloody and battered appearance—and saying, “Has there been shooting while we were working?”

The PRC-45 radio was destroyed shortly after Wally and John finished their work, but Dar had already requested two air strikes at 0400 hours. The original plan called for a slick to slip in to pick up the two Marines, the two bodies, the two scientists, and their half ton of radioactive material. They’d be covered by massive use of napalm and cluster bombs, to be followed by Huey gunships rocketing the tree line all around the perimeter. But the Navy was dubious that an Army Huey could lift that load, and two slicks trying to land close together in all that smoke and fire was courting disaster. Finally the Navy said that they would see if they could free up a much larger search-and-rescue chopper—a Sea Stallion—from its duties ferrying important Vietnamese politicians and their families and luggage and possessions from Saigon to the carrier task force.

The hour of 0400 came and went and there was no air strike, no gunships, no Sea Stallion rescue chopper…Dar felt that there would be no hope for air evacuation after first light, as the NVA had serious antiaircraft guns and shoulder-launched SAMs all around Dalat by now. By 0540 hours, Dar had groggily swapped his remaining M-14 and Starlight scope for his M40 Sniper Rifle with its daylight Redfield scope. He remembered wiping blood off the lens, although whose blood it was, he could not tell. For the first time, as that second Dalat dawn set forth its rosy fingertips—the Homeric phrase kept echoing through his head—Dar felt the approach of katalepsis. He felt himself begin to surrender to both fear and bloodlust; he felt the loss of control he had spent his short life trying to master.

The fast movers roared in at 0645, six Phantom F-4s laying down so much napalm that Dar lost his eyebrows and most of his hair. The gunships came in before the deafening sound of the jets had faded, the Hueys rocketing and mini-gunning the tree lines in all directions. NVA shoulder-launched missiles flew out of the jungle by the score, leaving crisscrossing smoke trails like some elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display. But the gunships came in low and skimmed just a meter or so above the grass and flattened fences, actually passing through the walls of flames before opening fire with their miniguns, risking the massive amount of small-arms fire, rather than keep altitude and be brought down by a missile.

And then the Sea Stallion came in, blowing the smoke into complicated spirals that mesmerized the exhausted-beyond-numbness Darwin Minor. He almost forgot to move, so fascinated was he by the intricate spirals and vortexes of smoke created by the huge rotor blades. Years later, Dar used chaos mathematics to study the fractal variations of that phenomenon.

But of the events at 0645 hours on that second day, he only dimly remembered Chuck pulling him away from the parapet, of carrying Sergeant Carlos’s body to the waiting chopper while Chuck carried Ned’s limp form, and then going back to help the scientists hump the isotopes and other trophies out into the light.

The lead-lined container of 80 grams of priceless weapons’ grade plutonium had absolute priority—just like the contingency moonrocks the Apollo astronauts had grabbed as soon as they came out of their lunar module a few years before—and Chuck lifted it and jogged toward the Sea Stallion while Dar was pulling the last crate of reactor crap out the doorway.

Dar still retained a perfectly clear image of Chuck being struck by a dozen bullets as the smoke cleared enough for advancing snipers to fire from the inner fence. Dar had frozen in place. Wally and John were in the Sea Stallion, but Dar was outside, less than a hundred yards from the twenty-five or so NVA marksmen who had just cut Chuck to bloody ribbons. As warped as time seemed at that moment, Dar knew that he had no time to grab his rifle or to run for cover. He watched the AK-47 muzzles swing in his direction as if everything had been choreographed in slow motion. Then a Huey gunship seemed to drift over them, also in slow motion, its Gatling gun revolving and firing in a silence only Dar could hear, empty cartridges flying and dropping by the hundreds, by the thousands, dropping away and catching the light from the rising sun. It was a beautiful sight simply from an aesthetic point of view—the sunlight glinting on all that expended brass. Suddenly the entire mass of NVA snipers was enveloped by dust and then tumbled down and back, as if simply slapped away by the invisible backhand of God.

Dar threw Chuck’s body over his shoulder, grabbed the priceless plutonium cylinder, and ran for the Sea Stallion.

To this day, Dar remembered nothing of the flight out to the waiting carrier except for his last glimpse of the Dalat reactor through the swirling smoke. The entire six-story building was cratered by bullets. Dar could not have spread his hand on any part of the wall without encountering more than one pockmark. The sandbags were completely gone—shot to pieces, and the pieces then shot away.

Later, Dar could not remember the landing on the carrier. He vaguely remembered the confusion on board as he was carried to the crowded infirmary. The Navy surgeon asked, “How bad are you hit?”

“Not hit,” Dar had said. “Just cut up from ricochets and concrete chips.”

They had cut off his boots, cut away his filthy, bloody blouse and trousers, and sponged his bloody flesh. “Sorry, son,” the middle-aged surgeon had said. “You’re wrong. You have at least three AK-47 rounds in you.”

Even as they sedated him, Dar was not concerned. He had carried Sergeant Carlos to the chopper. He could not be badly hurt. The AK-47 slugs had probably spent most of their kinetic energy in striking the reactor wall or passing through a half-empty sandbag before striking him. He did not even remember being shot.

When he finally awoke after surgery and four days of unconsciousness, he was told that the huge carrier was now so overloaded with refugees that aircraft on deck—including the gunships and Sea Stallion that had saved them—were being pushed overboard into the sea to make room for more choppers carrying VIPs from Saigon.

Dar slept again. When he next awoke, the city had fallen, and Saigon was now Ho Chi Minh City. The last diplomats and CIA personnel had filed onto the roof of the U.S. embassy and been flown out by slicks while thousands of Vietnamese allies had been held back by the final circles of Marines. Then the Marines were airlifted out under heavy fire.

The carrier task force headed for home. The important South Vietnamese politicians were sleeping in officers’ quarters below, while hundreds of displaced Marines and sailors literally slept on the deck, crowding under the remaining choppers and A-6 Intruders, exhausted men trying to keep out of the rain that now fell constantly.

Dar had agreed to tell Syd about Dalat, but had suggested he make them dinner first.

“That was good pasta,” said Syd when she’d finished.

Dar nodded.

Syd raised her coffee cup in both hands. “Will you tell me about Dalat now? I only know the barest facts.”

“There’s not that much to tell,” said Dar. “I was only there for forty-eight hours in 1975. But I went back a few years ago—in 1997. There’s a six-day tour leaving from Ho Chi Minh City that ends up in Dalat. Americans are discouraged from traveling in Vietnam, but it’s not illegal. You can fly from Bangkok for just two hundred seventy dollars on Vietnam Airline, or three hundred twenty on the more comfortable Thai Airway. In Dalat you can stay in a bug-ridden hostel named Hotel Dalat, or a fleabag hotel called the Minh Tam, or in a Vietnamese version of a luxury resort named the Anh Doa. I stayed at the Anh Doa. It even has a pool.”

“I thought you don’t fly as a passenger,” said Syd.

“This was a rare exception,” said Dar. “Anyway, it’s a pretty tour. The tour bus goes along the National Road Number Twenty from Ho Chi Minh City past Bao Loc, Di Linh, and Duc Trong—mostly huge tea and coffee plantations in that area, very green—and then climbs up the Pren Pass onto the south end of the Lang Biang plateau to get to the city of Dalat.”

Syd listened.

“Dalat is famous for its lakes,” continued Dar. “They have names like Xuan Huong, Than Tho, Da Thien, Van Kiep, Me Linh…lovely names and pretty lakes, except for some industrial pollution.”

Syd waited.

“There’s some jungle,” said Dar, “but above the city, it’s mostly pine forests. Even the forests and valleys have magical names—Ai An, which means Passion Forest, and Tinh Yeu, which translates to Love Valley.”

Syd put down her coffee cup. “Thank you for the tour, Dar, but I don’t give a damn about how Dalat looked in 1997. Will you tell me what happened there in 1975? It’s all still classified in the dossiers, but I know that you came out of there with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

“They gave decorations to everyone who was there at the end,” said Dar, sipping his coffee. “It’s what countries and armies do when they’re defeated—they hand out medals.”

Syd waited.

“OK,” said Dar. “To tell you the truth, the Dalat mission is still technically classified—but it’s no longer secret. In January of 1997 a little paper called the Tri-City Herald broke the story and it got reprinted in the back pages of several other papers. I didn’t see it, but the travel agent told me about it when I was booking my tour.”

Syd sipped her coffee.

“Not too much of a story,” repeated Dar. His voice sounded ragged even to himself. Perhaps he was coming down with a cold. “In the last days before the big bugout from Saigon, the South Vietnamese reminded us that we’d built them a reactor at Dalat. There was some radioactive material there—including eighty grams of plutonium—that the U.S. officials didn’t want falling into the hands of the Communists. So they rounded up two heroic scientists named Wally and John and flew them into Dalat to grab the material before the VC and NVA overran the place. The scientists succeeded.”

“And you went with them as a Marine sniper,” said Syd. “And then?”

“And then, really, nothing,” said Dar. “Wally and John did all of the work finding and extracting the stuff they were supposed to find.” He managed a smile. “They knew how to shut down a nuclear reactor and use those remote handlers, but they had to teach themselves how to drive a forklift. Anyway, we took the isotopes and the canister marked plutonium and hightailed it out of there.”

“But there was fighting?” said Syd.

Dar went over to pour more coffee, realized that the pot was empty, and sat down. After a minute he said, “Sure. There always is in a war. Even in a lame-duck war like the one in 1975.”

“And you fired your rifle in anger,” said Syd. It was a question.

“No, actually, I didn’t,” said Dar. “I fired my weapon, but I wasn’t angry at anyone, except maybe at the assholes who had forgotten the damned reactor stuff in the first place. That’s the truth.”

Syd sighed. “Dr. Dar Minor as a Marine sniper…nineteen years old…It just doesn’t fit the person I know…sort of know.”

Dar waited.

“Will you at least tell me why you became a Marine?” asked Syd. “And a sniper of all things?”

“Yes,” said Dar, feeling his heart suddenly thud against his rib cage as he realized he was telling the truth. He would tell her. And in many ways, that was much more personal than the details of Dalat.

He glanced at his watch. “But it’s getting late right now, Investigator. Can we take a rain check on that part of the show-and-tell? I have some work to do before turning in tonight.”

Syd bit her lip and looked around the room—she had closed the curtains and shutters before they’d turned on the first lamp—but now the shadows were as rich as the orange lamp glow. For a wild second Dar thought that she was going to suggest that they spend the night—both of them—here in the cabin. His pulse was still racing.

“All right,” said Syd. “I’ll help you clear the dishes and we’ll hit the road. But you promise that you’ll tell me soon why you became a Marine?”

“I promise,” Dar heard himself say.

They were outside in the dark, heading for their respective vehicles, when Dar said, “The Dalat story has a punch line, sort of. It’s the main reason they kept it all classified, I think. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure,” said Syd.

“Remember I said that the mission was really about retrieving that priceless eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium?”

“Yes.”

Dar jingled his car keys in his right hand. He was carrying the gun case in his left. “Well, Wally and John found the lead-lined canister marked plutonium,” he said. “We got it out. The Feds, in their wisdom, sent it under guard to the big nuclear facility at Hanford, Idaho, where they carefully stored it along with thousands of other canisters of the stuff.”

“Yes?” prompted Syd.

“Well, four years after my first visit to Dalat, in 1979, someone finally got around to looking at it.”

Syd waited in the pine-scented dark.

“It wasn’t plutonium at all,” said Dar. “We went to all that trouble to retrieve eighty grams of polonium.”

“What’s the difference?” said Syd.

“Plutonium makes atomic and hydrogen bombs work,” said Dar. “Polonium doesn’t do much of anything.”

“How could they—Wally and George or whatever—make that kind of mistake?”

“Wally and John didn’t,” said Dar. “One of the Vietnamese reactor techs must have slapped the wrong symbol on the canister.”

“So what happened to the plutonium?”

“According to another report in the reliable Tri-City Herald on January 19, 1997,” said Dar, “the Republic of Vietnam’s spokesman said, and I quote, ‘The Dalat Nuclear Research Institute is currently preserving the amount of plutonium left behind by the Americans as required by technical necessity.’”

Dar had said this lightly, but Syd’s silence seemed heavy. Finally she said, “You mean the reactor is up and running again?”

“The Russian scientists helped the North Vietnamese get it operational a month after they won the war,” he said.