The Asian Mantrap

Eighteen

I got to my feet. “Take the satchel, leave the bike,” I advised Willow. With her trailing me, I moved quickly along the alley to the street where I had left Martin and Phan Wan.

The noises of the commotion in front of Phu Thone’s driveway gate seemed to have shifted in our direction. I thrust my head out of the alleyway and looked toward the corner where the buried culvert lay. At first glance, I thought the two figures standing near the open end of drainage tile were Martin and Phan Wan. When they were joined by two others bearing rifles, I knew their hiding place had been found by soldiers.

Shouts went up from the foursome as two bent down and shined flashlight beams into the tunnel.

From across the street where the pipe ended, a rapid drumming of muffled gunshots pierced the night. Martin was blazing away with distracting, covering fire. The upright soldiers dropped out of sight in the weeds of the ditch. At the same time they unloaded repeated volleys of shots into the culvert. The entrapped bullets screamed and whined as they ricochetted through the cylindrical pipe like a swarm of angry wasps.

Phan Wan didn’t appear at the opposite end next to Martin.

The firing stopped abruptly. Martin was down on his knees next to the opening of the spillway. I heard his mournful wail clearly. He reared up again. A single shot from a soldier crossing the street spun him around. He staggered a few steps and dropped to his knees again. Uniformed figures dashed over and huddled around him.

“Good God!” breathed Willow. “Do you suppose—?”

I didn’t have to guess. I pushed Willow back into the alley. Headlights of a vehicle reaching the scene illuminated the clutch of soldiers crowding around Martin. He was dragged to his wobbly feet. His right hand was gripping his left shoulder. Blood trickled through his fingers.

An arriving truck blocked my view for a moment. When it pulled clear of the intersection and stopped, I saw Martin being prodded toward its rear. Without conscious movement on my part, Wilhelmina suddenly was locked in my outstretched hands. Its barrel was lined up to put a bullet between Martin’s eyes as soon as his head became an unobstructed target. I couldn’t miss at this range. I took up the slack in the trigger pull.

What a hell of a way for all this to end, I thought.

So damn close, then this.

I was so intent on finishing off Martin that Willow’s presence beside me went unnoticed until she let out a trembling sob. I was tracking what I could see of Martin’s head, waiting for a clear shot while he was being hoisted into the rear of the truck. I never got one. Soldiers aboard the truck forced him to lay flat on his face. He was shielded from me by the raised tailgate. I lowered my pistol.

Willow leaned heavily against me, blinking back tears. We watched callous soldiers heave the bloody, rag-doll body of Phan Wan into the truck on top of Martin. The driver began honking his horn wildly as he drove away.

Willow had difficulty controlling her emotions. She bore up well, curbing her grief by replacing it with resolution. There’s nothing like a threat to one’s own survival to put aside concern for another’s misfortune. Her rejection of the impact of tragedy bouyed my lagging spirits.

I faced a whole new ball game. There was little chance that I could comply with Hawk’s latest demand. Self-preservation was the key issue of the moment. Discovery was imminent. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire neighborhood would be scoured. Immediate retreat was the only course of action left.

Willow and I faded into the shadows. Then we began the nerve-racking flight back to the spot that offered any degree of protection — the abandoned construction site.

Reaching it was a nightmare — a seemingly endless hide-and-seek journey that left us bone-weary but still keyed up.

Safe once more in the building foreman’s small shack, I motioned for Willow to use the folded tarpaulin for a bed. “You’ve got to get some rest. You’re worn out.” She was. Her eyes showed fatigue to the point of dull, overall pain. “I want you to be especially alert tomorrow.” Now I was lying. If there was going to be a tomorrow, I figured it would be our last.

“What about you, Nick?”

“I’m going to take a hard look at these building plans.”

“You can’t be thinking—”

“I’m not sure what I think,” I interrupted. “The odds are stacked against one man. Even with two of us, it’s suicide. I’ve just about decided that the smart thing to do is pass it up. Getting caught isn’t the worst part of failing in this case. Getting caught would tip off the North Vietnamese that our government knows where those POW/MIA files are located. Once they know that, the files would disappear again... maybe even be destroyed. I’d say that this is the time to leave well enough alone. Especially with the trouble that’s going to erupt when these hometown monkeys discover they’ve nabbed General Keith Martin, the president’s fair-haired lad. He’s probably been taken off to—” I stopped. There was nothing to be gained by speculating on Martin’s fate.

“You know,” said Willow, showing interest, “I’ll bet we could find out.”

I paid no attention.

“Did you hear me, Nick? I don’t care how tight things are kept in this godforsaken country, they can’t hold the lid on something as exciting as the capture of the mystery killer... especially when he turns out to be a foreigner.”

I heard her that time. “Do you expect to see it on the front page of the morning paper? No way! Not until they’re ready to milk it for every drop of propaganda.”

“You’re not thinking, Nick. Not newspapers. Intelligence. And we’ve got a direct line into it. Right here.” She went to the telephone over which we had conversed with Phan Wan. “The French Embassy. They’ve got a low-grade listening network here that is onto everything. The young man who is acting as liaison between Paris and Washington for us was attentive and talkative with me. I made note of the number, just in case. How about it?”

She deserved another gold star, but I was leery. “The embassy phone is bound to be tapped,” I said.

“I suppose so. So you forget it, or talk in circles and innuendoes to confuse the eavesdroppers. We’re in this so damned deep now, Nick, we haven’t got any way to go but up. How will we know if we don’t try? I’ll be off the line before a trace can be completed.”

“You might as well give it a try.”

Willow made two calls, ten minutes apart. After the first one she was bubbling with elation. “I told you they couldn’t keep it a secret. Maurice already has preliminary frag reports on Phu Thone being killed. He’s sent that on to Washington, so Hawk knows too. And the follow-up that a man and a woman were captured nearby. Bad news travels fast. Maurice was afraid I might have been the girl who was shot to death. And you guessed right, Nick. Martin wasn’t taken to jail or police headquarters. He’s in the custody of the military somewhere. Maurice is going to put apriority call out to the street grapevine. In an hour he’ll know as much as the Premier does.”

The second conversation Willow had with Maurice at the French Embassy was shorter. It contained specifics. Because of his wound, Martin had been taken to an isolated infirmary under control of the army. Maurice’s sources could not pinpoint its location or give an address. Martin would recognize it, however. It was part of an old, fenced-in prison compound where battle-wounded American prisoners were treated so Martin must have been there once. All Maurice could say was that the camp was in the process of being demolished to provide space for post-war construction. Maurice used that bit of news to support his contention that Martin’s identity had been discovered. It was an ironic possibility.

I didn’t hear that observation until later. Willow had to follow me out of the shack in order to tell me all she had heard. The moment she mentioned an abandoned military compound, I guessed the infamous camp infirmary was part of the group of barracks being dismantled in the nearby park.

I walked the ten yards to the base of the bamboo scaffolding surrounding the girder skeleton of the building under construction. I shinnied up to the second tier to get a good view. The sleeping city was bathed in the hush of very early morning. My watch said two o’clock.

I balanced precariously on a breeze-buffeted girder. It provided an excellent panorama of the wartime buildings being razed. Lights were on in one of them. It was situated on an outer row not more than one hundred yards from my perch. A truck similar to the one that had carted Martin away was parked alongside.

My tiredness was forgotten. I slid down the humidity-dampened bamboo poles to the ground.

Willow was waiting for me. “Can you tell if that’s the place?”

“It fits. If he’s there, he’s not well guarded. It looks like a temporary setup until whoever is in charge decides what to do with him. I’ve got to get a closer look.”

I laid out a simple plan. We went over the fence and crossed the street like shadows. Willow trailed me by ten yards. I kept looking back at her. She neither waved nor whistled. Either signal would be a warning.

From a distance I couldn’t see anything revealing through the grimy windows. A dark shape would move within the lighted interior now and again, but I could tell how many occupants there were. The building was an infirmary, all right. The inside walls were white for one thing. A faded caduceus was painted on a plaque nailed next to a closed double door reached by a wooden ramp and loading platform. The truck I’d seen from my lofty perch was parked in front of it.

I jogged up to it, avoiding stubs of concrete pilings which marked the footings of adjacent buildings now removed. The last ten feet were covered by a headlong dive. My roll carried me under the vehicle. I belly-crawled under the rear axle and stood up just beyond the tailgate. I pulled myself up into the back of the truck. I was on my hands and knees. One hand rested in a thick, glutinous substance. I held it up so what little light there was could fall on it. The smear was tacky to the touch and a dull reddish color. That’s all I needed to know that this truck had been used to carry away the wounded Martin and the blood-dripping body of Phan Wan.

A door slammed close by. Voices — two of them — came toward the truck. I dropped flat on the bed of the truck, facing the tailgate. Wilhelmina was in my hand, the safety off.

The two men got into the cab from opposite sides. The driver cranked up the engine. Headlights came on, reflecting off the building’s sides. I’d surely be seen if I jumped out and ran.

The truck was moving, backing up. I looked over the tailgate and directly into the window of the infirmary. It was one large room with no partitions. I could see most of the interior. At the far end, two Vietnamese army officers were engaged in conversation. They stood near the only inside wall. A solid wood partition jutted out from the far side of the building to a point halfway into the main room. The fourth side of the corner alcove was open with what looked like cement-reinforcing mesh bolted to thick studs. Behind the thick wire lattice sat Keith Martin, strapped to a heavy wooden chair. Powerful, blinding lights inside the cage were focused on his face. The preliminary interrogation had begun.

The truck drew away. My glimpse into the building was brief, but enough to tell me that freeing Martin would be no easy matter. I had seen three armed enlisted men in addition to the officers in charge.

At the first opportunity before the truck picked up too much speed, I bailed out. I struck the ground, lost my footing and somersaulted. I got up, massaging one elbow.

Willow answered my low-pitched whistle with one of her own. We huddled together in the darkness beside a pile of rubble. “I saw him. He looks all right. They’ve got him penned up in a cell that needs more than a can opener to break open. Two officers and at least three soldiers are guarding him. We could clean out the troops, but we’d need something like a burning bar or three pounds of plastique to open up that corner room.”

“Any sign of Bu Chen?”

“No.” It took a moment for me to see her point. “No, I’m sure no connection between Bu Chen and Martin has been made. Until someone learns that Bu Chen was picked up only a short distance from where Martin was captured, he’ll probably be held for borrowing a bicycle. That rascal just might sweet talk his way out of the fix he’s in.”

“I wish he were here,” lamented Willow. “He could round up what we need to pry Martin loose... something like a Sherman tank.”

“That’s it!” I beamed. “We’ve got it. Not a tank, but the next best thing.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her up. “Come on! We’re going to get ourselves a battle wagon.”

Willow held the penlight while I hot-wired the ignition. The big diesel powering the bulldozer caught and roared. We surged forward, cleated tracks biting into the ground. The lurching machine was tested in the first fifteen yards. At that point it flattened a twenty foot span of the construction site fence.

Twenty yards from the end of the infirmary building, I brought the mechanical beast to a halt. I set the blade and lined it up with the corner of the building. I showed Willow how to get it in motion and told her to watch for my signal.

I ran forward and around to the far side of the building. Willow responded to the turned-on beam of my flashlight. The bulldozer started forward — straight on target.

I raced half the length of the building and jumped up onto the loading platform. I listened. The sound of the bulldozer was plain. It would become attention-getting louder in moments. After the count of five, I eased open on the door in front of me enough for one eye to see inside. One of the officers, catercornered from my position, was peering out of a window. The second officer joined him, looking over his shoulder.

The three enlisted men, posted about the large, open room, began to fidget. The approaching rumble drew their undivided attention. The sharp edge of the bulldozer blade was no more than ten yards from the building corner now.

One enlisted man made a dash for the window next to the one the two officers were using. The other two soldiers raced over to gaze out as well.

I stepped into the room armed with Pierre. I rolled the tiny gas bomb mid-way between the two clusters of bewildered observers. Then I jumped back as the air became asphyxiating.

I got halfway to the rear end of the building before an explosion sounded. Windows shattered and the side walls buckled and puffed out. Spurts of gray smoke spewed out of empty window casings. The whole building shifted on its concrete footings. The bulldozer had reached its goal.

I reached the corner just as the structure was being sheared away. I saw a figure leave the operator’s cab. Willow hit the ground, lighting with the grace of a ballet dancer. The mechanical giant thundered on.

As soon as it cleared the caved-in corner of the building, I scrambled over splintered, broken boards and twisted reinforcing mesh to reach Martin. His chair had toppled over. He was covered with dust. He was stunned but unhurt. He responded to his name while I set him upright and took off the binding straps. He let me guide him out through the torn-away corner to where Willow was waiting. The bulldozer was waddling on like a monstrous bug, clawing blindly on to a mindless destination.

By lifting Martin out of the proverbial frying pan, I had plunged all three of us into the fire. It wouldn’t take long to reconstruct what had happened. The prisoner had been rescued. The search for him and his accomplices would be immediate, intense, and widespread. There was no place to go. The smashed down fence protecting the construction site was like an arrow pointing to the foreman’s shack.

Willow seemed unconcerned. She drew Martin along, heading directly for our former haven. “There’s no point in going back there,” I objected.

“Trust me, Nick,” Willow replied. “First we’ve got to retrieve what we’ve left there and hang onto it. We’re going to be fine. There’s a trick I remember from Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s early movies. He was a master stuntman, you know.”

“We’re going to need more than some old-fashioned gymnastics backed by the right camera angle,” I protested.

“It will work because it plays on the basic character of humans. Man is a ground-oriented being. Most of their world exists at eye level or below. We’re going to use that trait to keep us secure.”

When Willow explained in detail, I went along. Her idea was wild, but better than any I had. In fact, it was the only out that gave us any chance at all.

I didn’t realize how hairy it would be, and afterward I wondered if I could have done it in daylight. For when daylight came, Willow, Martin and I were sixty feet in the air, invisible from the ground, and unreachable by any reasonable means.

We lay stretched out on the uppermost girders of the five story building skeleton. The flimsy bamboo scaffolding which would eventually surround and reach all levels of the structure had been erected only as far as the third floor when active work ceased. That left a terrifying gap of twenty unaccessible feet which could be spanned only by a bird, a cherry picker, a helicopter in flight, or a nerveless, determined acrobat with the skill of Willow. With expertise and sheer guts, she went hand-over-hand up the slimmest of ropes to the very top. Then working fearlessly on unsure, windy footing, she rigged a lift system that took Martin and me up the final treacherous height. Because of Willow, we had accomplished the impossible.

There was not much of the night left. Dawn came early. The morning was long. Search activities started at first light. The effort appeared to be erratic, over-manned, and disorganized. By noon the hubbub below had died down and shifted elsewhere. By noon our torture started. The air was humid, the sun unbearably warm. Our dark clothing captured both heat and moisture. We were miserable — hungry and thirsty — and suffering from deep fatigue. A pelting afternoon thunderstorm brought some relief, but with it came high winds. We hung onto our narrow supports like seamen clinging to a ship’s rigging in a heavy squall. We rode out of the storm and welcomed twilight that came soon after.

We waited until full darkness before descending. Then we went only as far as the uppermost platform. Willow left us after a short rest and returned shortly with water from the spigot near the foreman’s shed. Everything was quiet, she said while gulping down dried rations to revive her strength.

Refreshed and in slightly better spirits, I laid out the whole dismal situation to Martin. He listened and allowed Willow to examine his wound. The frown that grew on her face told me she didn’t like what she saw. The bullet had made an in-and-out wound, but it was not a clean one. Willow sprinkled on a powdered antibiotic then applied a field dressing over the inflamed area. Martin endured the mild discomfort without a sound. He was a man of steel.

Martin listened intently. He grasped our predicament, emphatically endorsed the idea of filching the MIA lists, accepted the attendant dangers offhandedly, and grew impatient to get on with the attempt.

Two hours later, it began.