Little Saigon

Chapter 28

He remembered the way to Palmdale from his journey with Kim to the Lower Mojave Airstrip. She had taken him the long way, so he took the 605 to the Interstate, then bore north, through Los Angeles, holding his speed to seventy. Once past the city he flogged it to eighty plus, letting the old V-8 eat the highway, watching his rearview, feeling the air go dry and hot as he entered the high desert. Palmdale Boulevard crossed Division Street just a few blocks from the freeway. He spotted the Lucky Star Chinese Restaurant and U.S. Gas on the corner. It was ten thirty-nine. Bennett’s van was parked in front of the phone booth. His brother paced outside it. Two Vietnamese men stood and watched.

Frye parked a block short, cut the engine and waited. No sign that Burns’s agents were here. Just the watchers, hands in their coat pockets, still as statues. A thermometer readout from a savings and loan across the street said eighty-six degrees. Hot breeze blew in his car window. The Cyclone’s engine popped and hissed. Frye checked the clip in the .45. Seven shots, and he knew Bennett never kept one in the chamber. He held the thing in his hand, then slid it under the seat. At 10:45, a withered old man shuffled toward the phone booth. The two guards shooed him away. The man turned, shaking his head, and trudged into the darkness. Frye saw Bennett push into the booth, reach up, and take the receiver. He nodded twice, slammed the phone back in place and shoved his way out. His escorts were already in their white pickup truck.

Highway 14 was a ribbon of moonlight winding through the desert. The wind grew stronger, pressing against the Merc, stiffening the steering wheel in Frye’s hands. He stayed four cars behind the truck until there were no longer four cars to stay behind, then dropped back, killed his headlights, and followed. He prayed to his rearview for Burns and the cavalry, but saw nothing behind him except the night and slow truckers, and nothing ahead but a brother delivering a fortune to men who would take it and kill him.

Bennett stopped in Lancaster and waited outside a pay phone at a K-Mart. His escorts parked beside his van, but didn’t get out. Frye watched from the dark recesses of a parking lot across the intersection. At 11:02, Bennett answered the phone, took his instructions and climbed back into the van. Then back onto Highway 14 to Rosamond Boulevard; Frye knew for certain where Bennett was being led.

It was the same route now that Kim had shown him: five miles east down the boulevard, then north on the wide dirt road marked by the sign for the Sidewinder Mine. He dropped far back, let Bennett and the truck make the turn far ahead of him, then cruised past the turnoff — just another desert rat meandering home after a beer or two with the boys.

A half mile down, he turned around, pulled to the side of the road and waited. How long would it take Benny to go a mile north on the dirt road, pass through the gate, and travel the last five hundred yards west, across the arroyo to the airstrip? Five minutes? Less? He rolled down his window and listened. Except for the firm gusting of the wind, the night was silent. On the other side of the highway, the dry lake bed stretched flat and pale. No cars, no aircraft overhead. No FBI, he thought: We’re on our own.

At the rock pile he cut his lights and let the moon guide him down the wide dirt road. He drove past the gate, continued on another hundred yards, and parked. He put the .45 in his belt, left the hood up to indicate distress, then climbed the chain link fence, plopped down on the other side, and headed toward the airway on foot.

The rocks were treacherous, but the moonlight showed him the way. He climbed a gentle hill, crunched down the other side, then followed a long wash toward the terminal. The next rise was high and steep enough to hide behind. He lay on the warm sand and peered over the crest to the airfield. It was just as before, flimsy and beaten and apparently deserted. But now a naked bulb burned at the entrance of the Quonset hangar, and Bennett’s van was parked beside two pickup trucks in front. The terminal was dark. Behind it, just to the side of the dark slouching tower, a helicopter waited. Looks like an old Bell — Frye thought — a company craft for lifting executives above the traffic. As he watched, the hangar door opened and a Vietnamese man stepped into the raw light of the bulb. He slid shut the door, adjusted the strap of his automatic rifle, then lit a cigarette.

The back of the hangar seemed his only option. He ducked back down the embankment and looped out. A sandy gully took him almost all the way around the compound, while the wind puffed, echoed in his ears, shot sand at his ankles. Above him the stars blinked clear and sharp. From behind an outcropping of sandstone, he looked at the back end of the hangar. A dull light emanated from where windows had once been. No guard. The corrugated sliding door had long since fallen from its track and now stood at a tilt, its runners jammed into a low bank of windblown desert sand. No way to approach under cover. He stood, took a deep breath, crept from the rocks, and loped down a long wash that left him crouched behind a yucca plant, fifty yards from the helicopter. Another measured run and he was kneeling beside the chopper cabin, his heart pounding hard, his skin dry and hot, his right hand wrapped around Bennett’s pistol.

The hangar was thirty yards away. He crawled across, beneath the sightline of the windows, and brought himself to rest against the old building. The wind eddied, throwing dust and sand at the metal. A branch scratched at the siding. He moved to a window and stood. In the dark foreground he could make out the shape of an old prop plane, then the outlines of crates and boxes. But past them was a cone of light cast from overhead, widening down from the high ceiling. Dust wavered in the beam, which rocked gently in a draft. The light spread to a circle on the floor and Bennett sat on a chair in the middle of it. A guard stood behind him with a machine gun, the two suitcases of money at his feet. Bennett said something in Vietnamese, and the guard snapped something back. As Frye looked at Bennett stranded in the light, alone in a chair in the middle of this great nowhere, he felt a rage course through him. I’m too far away, he thought. Too far to hear, too far to shoot, too far to do anything but watch. Do they really have Li here, or did they just drag Benny all this way to take his money and bury him in the desert? His heart was thumping so loud he wondered if the guard could hear it.

He crawled back to the defunct sliding door and squeezed into the hangar beside the old plane. The cement floor was dusty but quiet. He moved slowly under the wing of the aircraft, then dodged behind a stack of old ammo boxes. Outside, the wind slapped against the walls. Frye watched the guard look in his direction, then turn back to Bennett, Fifty feet away, he guessed: I could take him out with one shot. You didn’t even get paper on the first one. It’s the first one you want true... usually that’s all you get.

Shapes were moving just outside the light. Frye saw the guard stand at attention. Then the echo of footsteps slowly approaching Bennett, and a tapping sound. A young Vietnamese man dressed in green fatigues stepped into the light, looked at Bennett, then eased back into the shadows, Bennett looked up. Frye could see the stunned disbelief on his brother’s face as he squinted into the darkness. Two more steps, slow steps, punctuated by the tapping sound again. The profile of a man formed. With one last step he entered the light, a stooped figure leaning on an ebony cane, a face twisted beyond recognition. He wore dark glasses. Thach and Bennett stared at each other for a long, long moment.

Frye’s body went bone-cold. He couldn’t take his eyes off Thach’s molten face — the way the cheeks and nose and mouth fused together, as if welded by some skilless artisan using the last scraps of creation. Thach wore an army shirt and pants, a black belt and boots, an officer’s holster, a batch of medals on his bulky, misshapen chest. He continued to stare down at Bennett, who stared back. Frye did too. The .45 seemed impossibly heavy and useless. Then Thach lifted a hand from his cane, just slightly, and motioned to someone behind him. Li stepped into the light, wrists bound tightly, ankles linked by a foot of rope, guided by a soldier with one hand on her arm and the other on his rifle. She wore the black pajamas of a Vietnamese peasant. Bennett started off his chair, but the guard stepped forward and drove him back with his gun butt. The man with Li cinched her close to him. Thach looked at the suitcases of money, then back to Bennett. When he spoke, his voice sounded artificially induced. “Your wife and I have had many long discussions these last days. I expected to find a strong woman in Li Frye, and I was correct. I had hoped to show her the truth of history, and of nature, but she is too far lost to your lies to ever see the truth. You were thorough, Lieutenant. Our attempts to re-educate her have not been a success.”

Li stood motionless. Again Bennett tried to go to her, and again the guard jammed him back with his weapon.

Thach turned to the darkness and waved again. The guard that Frye had seen outside now pulled a small table and chair to the edge of the light. Thach maneuvered himself behind it and sat down. “We have some formalities to complete before our transaction can be made.” The guard placed a sheaf of papers on the table. Thach removed his dark shades, removed a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, wrapped the cables carefully over what remained of his ears, and read. “On July second, nineteen-seventy-two, you ordered South Vietnamese Army sergeant Huong Lam interrogated as a traitor, then executed?”

Bennett sat forward, still looking at Li as if she were the only person left on earth. As she gazed back at him, Frye tried to identify the strange expression on her face. She looked exhausted, almost resigned, but still with hope. What had Thach done to her?

“Lieutenant Frye, please answer.”

Bennett gave his name, rank and serial number.

Thach shuffled the papers, then looked at him. “I must tell you, Lieutenant, that the war is over. You lost. The sooner you give me answers, the sooner we will finish.”

Bennett was still staring at Li. “Yes, I ordered Huong Lam interrogated and killed.”

“Huong was a man you had worked with for nearly a year, a man you had come to suspect was a traitor to the American war effort?”

Bennett nodded.

Li was looking at Thach now, as if paralyzed by the face and the disembodied voice.

“On the night you took this woman, she came to you with a pack on her back. Huong Lam had given it to her. What was in it?”

Bennett looked at Li.

“Answer, Lieutenant.”

“He gave Li a bomb. He strapped it to her back and told her to take it to me. He said we should open it together.”

Li looked at Bennett expectantly.

Thach wrote something down. “Tell her, Lieutenant Frye, what your men found in the pack given to Li by Huong Lam.”

Bennett started off his chair again but the guard lifted his gun butt. Bennett ducked, covering up with his elbows. Frye saw the guard’s disdainful frown, the disappointment that he’d already beaten the fight out of his plaything. His brother sank back into the seat. Frye’s grip tightened on the automatic.

Bennett looked at Li. “She knows. It was a bomb, a frag grenade made from three dead mortar rounds.”

Thach rose slowly from the table and tapped his way to Bennett. He stooped, bringing his face close, and removed his glasses. Bennett sat, frozen by Thach as a mouse is frozen by a rattlesnake. Then, slowly, Bennett leaned forward. Their faces almost touched. Bennett’s hand rose slowly, as if to touch Thach’s cheek, but hovered there, unable to complete the motion. Bennett spoke in a whisper. “No.”

Thach’s face twisted into something like a smile. He stood straight. “What is wrong, Lieutenant? You look like a man who is seeing ghosts.”

“Lam.”

“Bennett.”

“Lam... you fell, you—”

“I was thrown. Let us not distort the truth as we have distorted each other. I am still thrown from your Huey a thousand times a night.”

“Lam,” whispered Bennett.

“Lam died in the sky as he fell to earth. He died in the trees that tore his face. He died in the mud where he lay while the rats ate him. He died in the tunnel where they did not set his wounds because he could never live. You killed him.”

Thach brought up a hand, looped something off his neck, and tossed it toward Bennett. It landed on the floor and Frye knew in an instant what it was: the silver wave necklace he’d made and sent to Benny all those years ago.

Bennett breathed deeply, his eyes moving from Thach to Li, then back to Thach again.

Li stood still, staring at Thach as the colonel approached her. Frye could see the tears glistening on her cheeks.

“Lam,” she said. “Lam.”

Thach took her face in his hand and turned it to Bennett. “Tell us, Bennett, what you found in the pack that I prepared for you two to open together.”

Thach yanked Li up close to Bennett, still clenching her face in his hand. “This must come from you. I’ve waited many years for the chance to hear you say that one word. Li would not believe me. Tell her now, what I packed for you to open together. Tell me what I was tortured for, what I was thrown from the gunship for.”

“Champagne,” said Bennett quietly. “Three bottles of French champagne.”

Thach released her. She didn’t move.

“And what else?” asked Thach.

“A note that said, ‘Friend, you have won.’”

Li looked at Bennett imploringly. She seemed to diminish into the pajamas. “Benny... no. It was a bomb.”

Bennett’s voice was low. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know, until after. It wasn’t until my men tried to defuse it that I knew what had really gone down. I was drinking in the officers’ club that night. I was drinking because a friend betrayed me. Then the ordnance team came in and tossed the pack onto the bar. They were laughing. I just stared at those bottles and realized what I’d done. I thought you had betrayed us, Lam. And I thought you tried to kill me for taking Li away. Go back, Lam. Go back to that night and ask yourself what you would have done.”

Bennett wiped his face, then steadied himself in the chair. He looked up at Thach. “When I saw the champagne, I went to Tony and tore apart his hootch. He had code books, maps. He was our traitor, all along. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve prayed for your soul, and prayed I could bring you back. Jesus Christ, my prayers were answered.”

Thach looked at each of them. Frye saw a strange amusement in his face. “Ah, Tony. I suspected him. I wondered if he were an idiot. I nearly shot him once, simply on instinct. Months later, when I found out what valuable work he had done for us, I was glad I didn’t. I’m sure you Americans did a good enough job of that, Lieutenant.”

Thach balanced himself on his cane and peered for a moment up into the light. Frye beheld his ruined face, then his brother’s. When Thach turned again to Bennett, his eyes were fierce. “What made you believe I would betray you? I fought for you. I nearly died, many times, for you. I brought Kieu Li to you. I led your men against my own people. What made you believe that I would not give up a woman to you?”

“Christ, Lam, you’d been with the Viet Cong once. Our intelligence was leaking worse every week, and I knew you loved her. I saw the look in your eyes when you watched us. If you could have been me that night, you would have figured it exactly the way I did. What in hell else would I think, when you strap a heavy pack on her and tell her to open it with me? Why else would you be packing up to head north when I found you?”

“You were afraid of me?”

“You’re goddamned right I was.”

Thach seemed to consider this. He finally turned to Li. “But, you. I gave you a path to follow, a channel for your passion. I let you see what was happening to our country. I treated you with respect. I protected you. I came to you in the marketplace of An Cat and walked you home at night. I loved you, and you saw it, too. Why did you ever believe I could betray you?”

Li looked down. “Because, Lam, you were fierce, more fierce than anyone I knew. When I told you that I was going to an American soldier, it wasn’t hatred I saw, it was something quieter, something far worse. Your look connected with... with a part of what I was feeling. And your voice, when you tied that thing to my back. Not for a moment did I imagine that you would let me go to Bennett.”

Frye watched as Li stood, wrists and ankles bound. She looked at Thach and held his gaze. “Deep in my heart, I didn’t want you to let me go. Deep in my heart, I felt that what I was doing was wrong. I loved you as I could never love an American. I told you that a hundred times! But didn’t you feel how impossible it all was? That was the war, Lam. There were only two sides. Some part of me wanted to stay with you, but parts of people can’t stay behind. And there was no room in my heart for that doubt, just as there was no room in yours for what I was doing. I was terrified, but I was happy that you would want to kill me. I... needed to believe it.”

“Why?”

Li breathed deeply. “Because it made me free of you.”

Thach looked at her. “You were always so simple, Kieu Li. You still are.” He drew close to her again, bringing his face close to hers. “The truth is, that when I saw the love pass between you two, it sickened me. It still does.”

Frye saw the slickness on the colonel’s face, the blotches of sweat that had soaked through his shirt. Thach’s breath was coming faster now. Frye saw one of the guards glance at the other. Then Thach reached out with his cane and poked Bennett’s chest. “In these last days, I have told Li the truth many times. But she would rather believe you. You have occupied her, Lieutenant, like your army occupied my country. You have kept her a child. I have helped reeducate thousands, and none has been so completely... shaped as Li. You should have much pride in her. And much shame.”

Li struggled against her rope, glaring at Thach. “I’ve listened to my own heart since I was seventeen years old, Lam. You have only listened to others. You are the child, not I. You surrendered in your fight for freedom because you saw yourself as a man betrayed. What of our countrymen, Lam? What of those who fought on against the greater terrors that the Communists unleashed?”

“Such words mean nothing to a man falling through space to his death.”

Frye watched now as Colonel Thach hobbled back to his table and sat down. His breath was fast, exhaled from his twisted nose with a labored hiss. For a moment he seemed lost in his papers. “I have always wanted to bring these truths into the open. Those days are still very clear in my memory. In a sense, they matter little. What are intentions and beliefs? What are reasons and motives? They are things we attach later to our actions. Only the action matters. All else is convenient falsehood.”

Bennett shifted in his chair. “How did you live through it, Lam?”

Thach looked at him. “The mam grove was high. The water was deep because of monsoon. The fall was broken first by leaves, then branches, then the swamp. The Communists took me into the tunnel to die, but I lived. The darkness became my ally. When I woke and saw my new face, I knew that Lam had died. I hated that face. I knew I would stay in the tunnels so no one would see it. So I would never see it. And with a crippled leg I could still crawl, no slower than anyone else. All I knew for certain was that you had betrayed my trust the same way I knew your country would betray mine. My faith in America was my faith in you, Bennett.” Thach stopped and shook his head. “You are right, I was more foolish even than you, Lieu Li. And almost as innocent.”

“So you turned.”

Thach smiled again. Frye could see a grim pride showing in his eyes. “Communism. Democracy. We both know by now that they are only words. They are two fat old women, fighting over a bowl of rice. I turned to my race, Lieutenant, to my people. I turned to my mirror and asked how this had happened. I turned to myself.”

“How did you do it? How did you get to this country?”

“With much planning and waiting. With help from many comrades in your country. When I first heard the songs on your Secret Radio, I was almost certain it was Li. I found later that this ‘Voice of Freedom’ was married to an American. My suspicions were correct. Much planning, Lieutenant, much waiting.”

“How long did Kim work for you?”

“Four years. She has family in Vietnam. She was easy to use. The false intelligence she sent you from Vietnam was very effective. Look how easily you were fooled. I knew the people in Little Saigon would believe I was here. But you Americans would never believe it. I used your arrogance as a weapon against you. I used the tunnels under Saigon Plaza because they are my element. Kim supplied the words.”

“And the Dark Men?”

Thach stood slowly. “They asked no questions and wanted little money. They are frightened children.”

“Why did you bring us here? Why the airstrip?”

“With Xuan gone and your network crippled, it was a secure place. Nothing is so safe as an enemy camp with no enemy left. Before coming here, we held Li in Los Angeles. We have sympathetic friends there.”

“You won, Colonel. You’ve slaughtered the resistance, haven’t you?”

Thach shook his head. “I have one hundred and twelve people from your network. They will be tried for treason. Only one remains, and you are going to reveal his identity to us. We know he is highly placed in Hanoi, and we must move with caution. One of his code names is Nathan, is it not, Lieutenant? Nathan, who guides you to our positions, describes our strength, misinforms our leaders. Nathan, for your country’s first spy? Yes, I can see already that I am correct.”

Thach’s breathing seemed to accelerate again. Frye watched the sweat run down his face. “Look at all I have accomplished. I have destroyed the resistance and the Voice of Freedom, I have removed the irritating Tuy Xuan. I have shown the people of Little Saigon how small and helpless they are. And I have you, Lieutenant.”

Bennett bowed his head. A moment later he looked to the suitcases, then to Thach. “I brought your money. Take it, and let us go.”

“Your money is a filthy thing, Lieutenant. I demanded it to satisfy my allies in this campaign. I have no need for it myself.”

“Then we’re finished.”

Thach picked up the pen and papers from his desk and brought them to Bennett. “Almost. What we discussed earlier is written here. Also, a statement that you are responsible for organizing a Secret Army in Vietnam. That your government financed it. A list of the accomplishments of the army is included. The bridges they have destroyed, the factories they have sabotaged, the men and women they have assassinated. You will find the information to be accurate. Read it. Sign it.”

“What for?”

“For me, Lieutenant. And to satisfy my superiors. I cannot tell you how rewarding it has been to see you confess. It is something I will want to have with me forever. Even I am tired of hatred. I am almost finished. I kept you from Li for all these days so you would know what it is like to have your love taken away, so you could know how Huong felt. And also, to give me time to convince Li that she should come home with me, confess her betrayals, and work again for the good of her people. At this I may have failed. I knew it would be difficult. But I do have another plan for her, and for you, Lieutenant.”

“Never,” Li spat out. “Never.”

“I’m not going to sign that thing.”

Thach seemed to know all along that Bennett would refuse, but for a moment, Frye thought he saw something like confusion on the colonel’s face. “Why? After all that happened, why did you continue to make war?”

Bennett looked at Thach. “For the people I knew who fought and died for something they believed in. For Li. For myself. For Huong Lam, what do you think of that?”

“And you, Li? For fifteen years you have continued to fight. Your Secret Army has brought death and destruction to the new republic. You fly from rich America to the jungles to deliver codes and instructions. I have photographs of you bearing arms over the mountains of Thailand into Kampuchea. I have watched your progress across our maps in the basement of the defense ministry, marching through the jungle with your pathetic little army. I have imagined the way you must hold the M-sixteen in your thin, beautiful arms. I have hours of tape on which you sing, then plead with my countrymen to join you. Why?”

Li struggled against her bonds. Frye saw her aiming at Thach a frightening, untethered wrath. “I did it for the same reasons I told you a thousand times in the last days. Because the Communists kill the spirit. Because they turn men like Lam into men like you. Think back to the days at the plantation and An Cat, to the young soldier you were. What made your eyes clear then, and your heart strong? What gave you your courage? The promise of freedom! Is there still a Vietnam where that can happen? All you are is a state machine now — soldiers take away the poetry of peasants before the ink is dry and see if the verses help the government.”

Thach looked at Bennett, then Li. “I am very tempted to shoot you both now. But that was not my intention.”

“Then take your victories and money, and let us go,” said Bennett.

Thach returned to his desk and set down the papers. “I now arrest you both in the name of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The charges are inciting treason, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and murder. You will return with me, through Mexico and Cuba, to be tried with the rest of your resistance force. You will confirm to us the identity of Nathan.”

Bennett hurled himself off the chair, but the guard slammed him again with the butt of his weapon. Bennett covered up, hands raised. The guard lifted his gun for another jab, but stopped, shook his head with scorn, then backed off. Frye held him in the sight of his .45.

Bennett lowered his hands. “You’re crazy, Thach. You can’t try us. Your own government will shoot you and send us back here in a week.”

“Maybe. But we have arranged for you to be apprehended in the jungle near Ben Cat. You will be identified by your own people. You will sign confessions, of course. At a time that Hanoi is releasing American soldiers, news of your capture will soon be lost. You will see how quickly the U.S. Government washes its hands of you, as they do of their CIA pilots in Nicaragua. That is their choice. You have made war on us, Lieutenant and Li, ever since the war ended. You have tried to assassinate me. While we try to handle the problem of Kampuchea, you send arms against us. While we try to feed our people, you destroy bridges and waterworks. While we try to build a peace, you bring death. My government may indeed execute me someday, Lieutenant, but my campaign will be complete. I will have ended the war. They can do with you what they believe is right. You must have known that you would someday have to answer for yourselves.”

“No. Not Li.”

“You think you were her salvation, Lieutenant. But you cannot save her now. She goes back with us, to the same fate.”

Frye kept the sight of the .45 on the guard beside Bennett, centered on the man’s chest. Three men, he thought, and Thach. Automatic weapons. Even if I’m lucky, I can only get two. It’s a mismatch. I could kill the light. I could kill the chopper. What happened to Burns?

He watched Bennett, balancing himself uneasily on his fists. “Let Li stay. I’ll go with you, sign what you want. What good can you get from her that you can’t get from me alone? I did what I did to you because I made a mistake. It was a war, Lam. See if you can do any better now. Take me. Your vengeance for my betrayal. My legs for your face. Fucking hang me in Hanoi if that’s what you want. I’m not going to beg. Just let her go.”

“I won’t stay here without you, Benny.”

“You sure as hell will.”

Thach appeared to ponder. He gazed up toward the light bulb. His distended chest was heaving. Frye saw that the two guards were standing closer together now, that he could take them both in two shots. He steadied his aim on the man nearest Bennett. Thach stepped in front of him.

Maybe, Frye thought, I should take Thach first.

“I will offer you a solution,” Thach said. “You identify Nathan to me now, with satisfactory particulars, and I will let Li go. You, Lieutenant, will still return with me.”

Li writhed against her ropes. “No, Benny!”

Bennett stood as if frozen. Frye could almost see the gears turning inside his head. Bennett looked at Li, then Thach. The colonel’s body was turned to Frye now, a full target, standing still.

“Choose, Lieutenant. Nathan for Li. Li for Nathan.”

Li tried to break from her guard, but he held her fast by the arm. “They can kill me, Benny, but not what we have done. Don’t say a word. Don’t kill what we have accomplished.”

Thach stepped forward. “You will tell when we go back and probably die in the process. Identify him now. Save your wife from the firing squad. Who do you love more, Bennett? Your wife, or the hopeless ideas she promotes? Choose.”

Thach balanced on his cane and looked down at Bennett. His face was pale, shining with sweat. Frye could hear the soft hiss of his breathing. He shook his head, motioned in Frye’s direction, and stepped toward his table. “B’o chúng vào trực thǎnga,” he said.

“Let her go!” screamed Bennett. “Lam, let her go!” Thach lifted his cane toward the helicopter and the men began to move.

Bennett charged toward Thach, but the guard stepped forward again and drove his gun butt into Bennett’s chest. Frye was amazed at the speed with which Bennett’s hands locked around the gun and yanked it away. The guard’s head jerked back as the blast echoed through the hangar. When Li’s guard leveled his automatic, Frye shot him in the chest, rocking him back as his gun clattered to the floor. Frye saw the bright muzzle flash of the third guard’s weapon, heard the rounds sucking past his head, felt the wooden splinters of the boxes spraying into his face as the rounds split them apart. Li drove at him, head lowered. Frye dove to the ground, rolled into the open, and fired off two rounds as fast as he could. The off-balance soldier spun and landed face down. Bennett sat in the cone of light, his weapon raised toward Thach. The colonel stood just on the edge of darkness, resting on his cane, his pistol drawn and aimed down at Bennett. Later, Frye would realize that some acknowledgement took place between them there, some admission that this was the only true end to which it all could come. Then a quick, vicious volley, each one firing orange comets into the other while Frye tried to sight around Li. Thach’s cane flew. Bennett shuddered with each impact. But they both kept firing and punching holes in each other while ropes of blood lurched and wobbled into the light and Li screamed and Frye wondered how they could stay alive enough to kill each other anymore. Then, just as he had a clear shot, it was over, and the terrible quiet descended. The colonel lay on his back. Li was hovering over Bennett. Frye stood amidst the haze of gun-smoke, confronted by a silence more complete than he had ever known, a stillness into which everything was sucked, inhaled, consumed. The air was heavy with the particulate stink of powder. The lamp beam swung gently as the smoke rose into the light. Outside, the wind gusted.

Still be with us, brother. Please.

As Frye came close he could hear his brother’s little gasps, quick and shallow as if taken at high altitude. He untied Li’s wrists and ankles. Bennett was on his back. Thach lay fallen in the shadows.

Bennett looked up. The peace in his eyes bore no relation to the rapid lifting and falling of his chest. Li knelt beside him. Bennett blinked, moved his eyes slowly from his brother to his wife, blinked again. That was all.

Li placed a hand on either side of his face and lowered her head to his chest.

Frye knelt there a long while, shivering cold in the hot night air. He still had Bennett’s .45 in his hand. He picked up the silver wave necklace he’d given to Bennett, that Bennett had given to Lam, that Thach had given back, passed from one hand to the other like a gift of death, Li had begun to keen — a high, faint moan that seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once.

He finally stood, moving as in a dream, stuffing the .45 into his belt. Li was wailing louder now. She turned to him, then looked at the weapon that lay beside her, her eyes a pit of desperation so deep and complete and understandable that he wondered if she would ever really see out of them again. He lifted her gently from the floor. “Come with me.”

She looked at him, then back to the gun. He guided her toward the hangar door, then off across the desert toward his car.

It was the longest walk of his life.

They drove the dirt road back, following the tracks of Bennett’s van. The wind howled, driving sand against the Mercury, easing him to the right. Fifty yards from the hangar, Frye heard the engine of the helicopter groan faintly to life against the wind.

The rotors began to move, and its lights shot into the darkness. As Frye swung his car toward it, he could see Thach hunched awkwardly in the cockpit, working the controls. Frye slid to a stop in the sand, tumbled out, and pulled the automatic from his belt. He drew down and fired, the gun barrel swaying with the wind. A swirling cloud of sand engulfed the chopper, then dispersed. Frye fired again. The rotors spun and the lights shone off into the darkness, but now the cockpit was empty. He pushed Li behind the car and told her to stay.

Frye approached the ‘copter’s door from behind, on the passenger’s side. Above him, the blades were slowing. He stood by the door, struck momentarily by the idea that all he wanted to do here was kill this man; it was all that mattered now, all he could think about. Two shots, he thought: I’ve got two left.

He steadied the gun before him, jumped to the door, and aimed through the window. Inside, red lights blipped, instruments gave their bright read-outs, the harness swayed free in the vacant, blood-smeared pilot’s station. Through the open door on the far side, he could see Thach, a hundred feet away already, laboring over a hillock, then disappearing in a cloud of dust and wind.

He ran back to the car and found Li right where he had left her. She looked up at him, a hint of clarity in her eyes now. “I’ll stay here. Good luck, em. He can’t go far.”

This time, he’s mine, Frye thought. He got a flashlight from the trunk of his car, then leaned into the wind after Thach.

He made the hill in a matter of seconds. It overlooked a wide arroyo, pale in the middle, peopled on its flanks by the shapes of yucca that materialized, then faded back into the darkness. Frye saw movement at the rim of the gully, a lurching motion that became fainter the harder he looked at it. He’s shot and bleeding, Frye thought. He’s crippled. I know where he’s going.

Frye plodded into the heavy sand of the wash and followed. He saw Thach twice more — flashes of motion in the dark — and each time, he was a little closer. Where the gully bent north, Frye marched on, using his flashlight. Thach’s blood, dark and heavy as old oil, led up the embankment and out of the channel. Frye scrambled up the loose side of the arroyo and followed the shiny trail to the foot of a steep hill.

The old wooden framework was partially collapsed, sagging around the cavern entrance. Sheets of decayed plywood, used once to block the hole, were torn down and strewn around it. Obscenities were spray-painted on a huge boulder that sat at the mouth. Beneath the words and the graffiti, Frye could make out the words SIDEWINDER MINE — DANGER! NO TRESPASSING.

As he stood and looked into the black hole, he could feel the pressure gathering upon him, the slow squeeze of walls and darkness, the frantic terror of enclosure. Everything of Frye, from his heart to his fingertips, told him no. Everything except that voice deep in the center of himself, the voice that had led him to some of the very worst moments of his life, the voice that would simply never take no as an answer, on principle, on faith. Thach’s blood shone on the stones, glimmering in the beam of the flashlight.

For Benny, he thought. For Li. For me.

He took a deep breath, felt a clammy chill break over his scalp, and ducked inside. Five steps in, and the world went silent. The air was cool, damp, heavy. With the flashlight he could see twenty feet ahead at best, to where the cavern narrowed and turned to the right. The floor was gravel — dark and ferric — that shifted and crunched as he made his way to the turn. His face was cold now, his body beginning to shiver with the sweat that oozed through his clothes. He rounded the corner.

The shaft led down to another bend that went left. The silence deepened; the echoes of the gravel under his feet rose against the walls and seemed to both follow and precede his steps at the same time. He sat, quietly as he could, and pulled off his shoes.

The rocks bit into his feet, but, stepping deliberately and slowly, Frye found he could move with hardly a sound. Or was it just his heart roaring in his ears that drowned the lesser noise, that same pressurized howl he felt when he went under in the waves and the world locked around him like a coffin?

He looked back toward the entrance, but saw only blackness. He was almost to the next turn when he first heard the breathing: fast, shallow, wet. His hands tightened on the gun and flashlight, his back shuddered in a spasm of nerves. At the turn, the sound came louder, nearly synchronized with his own rapid breath. He brought himself to the corner and waited, gun raised, stinking of death and of a fear beyond death, wondering why things get funneled down to such narrow, to such irrevocable moments. It was your choice, he thought. You could be a thousand miles away if you wanted to be, washing your hands, foreseeing reasonable futures, tending curable wounds. The simple awful truth is that somehow, this is where you set out to end up. Sometimes the best thing you can do is the worst thing you can imagine.

He stepped out, flashlight held up and away from his body, aiming down the short barrel of the .45 at Thach. The man was sprawled against a rock wall, legs out, trunk propped up, head back. The eyes were open in the ruined face. His shirt was torn away. His left hand was jammed up under a thick, protective vest that had slowed the high-velocity bullets, but not stopped them. His right hand lay on his lap, clutching a pistol. Thach blinked, coughed, moved his head slightly.

Finish it, Frye thought. Finish what your brother started twenty years ago. He could feel the darkness moving in around him. His vision blurred. His breathing matched Thach’s, as if both were geared to the same engine.

The colonel coughed again. His voice was faint, drowned. “Who are you?”

“His brother.”

Thach groaned, closed his eyes, then stared up at Frye.

Their breathing was still locked together — meshed, one. Frye couldn’t break the rhythm, then he didn’t want to, as if it were something to hold onto, some stabilizer in a body that without it would disintegrate. “Who are your allies in Little Saigon?”

The colonel shook his head, coughing lightly. His eyes regarded Frye from the twisted, bloody face, but there was something satisfied, almost amused in them.

“Who are they?”

“I won.” Thach stared down at his pistol as across some unpassable distance. His hand began to move. Frye inhaled slowly, deeply, disengaging himself from Thach’s breathing. Then he was falling. Up? Down? A swirl of vertigo and pressure, a disassembly, a melting away. He felt the gun slipping from his hand. He braced himself on the mine wall. The scene before him broke into kaleidoscopic shards that rotated, rearranged themselves, fractured again. And in the center of it all: Thach’s face, a moving hand, a bloody finger slipping inside a trigger guard, a barrel rising slowly toward him as Frye steadied the .45 and blew Thach forever out of this world and into the next.

For a long while, Frye stood there. Slowly, the walls receded. The pounding in his ears began to fade away. His breathing slowed, and his focus started to sharpen again. As he looked down he saw not one man lying before him, but two. He saw Huong Lam, the kid who brought Li to Bennett, the kid who sent three bottles of French champagne to a man he admired too much in war to oppose in love. He looked again and saw Thach, the monster who had cut down Tuy Xuan and Bennett and countless others. And finally, he saw Charles Edison Frye, who, like Lam and Thach and Bennett, had become just another willing drinker of the same endless bloody cup.

He dug the silver wave necklace from his pocket and tossed it onto Thach’s chest.