Nicholai used the pause to belly-crawl across that side of the pavilion to a bench on the perpendicular side. It would be better, he thought, if the bandits formed a tactic to deal with a situation that had already changed.
Go is a fluid game.
It was quiet for a moment longer and then a spray of bullets hit the stone bench that Nicholai had vacated. Yu pressed himself flat on the stones and survived the blast, but the bullets kept him down as a group of a dozen or more bandits sprang out of the bamboo and rushed the crates.
Nicholai, on the flank of the attack, easily picked the lead bandit off with his first shot but missed the second one and had to fire again. He dropped the next man, but the bandits in the bamboo adjusted quickly and turned their guns on him. Nicholai flattened out and the bullets passed over him.
Then he pushed himself up on his hands and the balls of his feet, took a deep breath, and vaulted over the bench.
Lit only by muzzle flashes, the scene before him played like cinema in a bad old theater with a creaky projector. Nicholai saw flickers of the melee at the crates — a bayonet thrust, a pistol fired at close range, a wounded man’s mouth agape. He plunged in, firing his rifle until the clip was empty. Then he used it like an ancient Chinese weapon — a sharp blade on one end, a blunt object on the other. He swung and thrust, ducked and dodged, beyond thought in the realm of instinct that came from constant training.
But the bandits were simply too many. The most skillful Go player will lose his few isolated white stones against a tide of black ones.
It was inevitable.
Die with honor.
Hai, Kishikawa-sama.
The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa floated in front of his eyes as he recalled his walk, so long ago, with the general. Kishikawa had focused on the beautiful blossoms to prepare himself for his death.
Then through the flashes of light Nicholai saw a row of brown-robed monks, bamboo staffs in their hands, advance onto the pavilion.
The fight became a whirling blur of bamboo, a tai-fung, but the rain pellets were wood striking flesh and bone, and then it was over, like a sudden squall. The surviving bandits fled back into the forest.
Without the precious cargo.
But six soldiers and one monk lay dead, and others were wounded.
Nicholai squatted beside the body of one of the bandits. Yu held up a lantern and they examined the dead man’s face. It took a moment, but then Nicholai recognized him … the orderly who had served lunch for Colonel Ki.
You have been careless and stupid, Nicholai told himself. “Michel Guibert” did not see the obvious ploy. Whereas Nicholai Hel would have. He resolved to retain a piece of his authentic self regardless of any situational guise.
The monks mopped up blood under lantern light.
Nicholai found the abbot, bowed deeply, and apologized for fouling the monastery with violence.
“You did not,” the abbot responded. “They did.”
“Still, I was the cause of it.”
“And so I will ask that you leave at first light and never return.”
Nicholai bowed again. “May I risk a possibly impertinent question?” When the abbot nodded, Nicholai asked, “I thought that you were pacifists. Why —”
“Buddhists are pacifists,” the abbot answered. “We are Daoists. We eschew violence except when necessary. But it is the mission of our order to offer hospitality. So we were forced to choose between two competing values — our desire not to harm our fellow creatures and our vow of sanctuary to our guests. In this case, we chose the latter.”
“You fight well.”
“When one chooses to fight,” the abbot replied, “it is one’s responsibility to fight well.”
Nicholai found Yu in his chamber, angrily stuffing his small gear into his haversack.
“They were your own men,” Nicholai said.
“I know that.”
His face already showed a loss of innocence. Nicholai felt some sympathy, but it did not prevent him from pressing the necessary question. “How am I supposed to trust you now?”
Yu led him out of the monastery to a wide spot on the trail, where a soldier was bound around the chest to the trunk of a tree.
It was Liang. Blood ran down his nose and a purple welt swelled under his eye. He had been beaten.
“He was one of the sentries,” Yu said disgustedly. “The one who survived. He claims he fell asleep, but I suspect that he deliberately let the bandits pass. Either way he is guilty. The monks would not let me execute him at the monastery so I brought him here.”
“You should not execute him at all.”
“At the very least, he failed in his duty.”
“So did we,” Nicholai said. “We should have been better prepared.”
“He caused the deaths of comrades,” Yu insisted.
“Again, as did we,” Nicholai argued. “Men aren’t perfect.”
“The new man must be,” Yu responded. “Perfect, at least, in his duty.”
Nicholai looked at Liang, who trembled with cold and fear. While we debate philosophy, Nicholai thought. It’s cruel. He tried again. “Perhaps he was performing his duty to Ki.”
“His duty is to the people.”
“He is the people, Yu.”
In response, Yu pulled his pistol from its holster and held the barrel to Liang’s head. His hand trembled as the boy cried and begged for his life.
Yu pulled the trigger.
“And that is how you know,” he said, “that you can trust me.”
96
DIAMOND FOUND HER in Vientiane, in the square outside the Patousay.
The monument, even with its Laotian spires, reminded him a little of an arc de triomphe. Indeed, Solange thought so too.
“It reminds me a little of home,” she said. “In Montpellier we have something similar.”
“What are you doing in Laos?” Diamond asked.
“Looking for work, monsieur,” she answered. “What are you doing in Laos?”
“Looking for you.”
“Ah, well. Your task, at least, is finished.”
“Yours too, maybe,” Diamond said. He was instantly jealous of Nicholai Hel. The thought that the arrogant bastard had slept with this gorgeous creature was infuriating.
“How so?” she asked.
“We might have something for you,” he said.
“ ‘We’?” she inquired, her tone slightly sarcastic and tantalizing at the same time. “You mean ‘we Americans’?”
“Yes.”
“I usually deal with Monsieur Haverford,” she said.
She pronounced it “Averfor,” which Diamond found stimulating beyond belief. “He’s on another assignment. He sent me. I’m Mr. Gold.”
Her smile was sensuous, ironic, and infuriating. “Really?”
“No.”
They walked out of the park onto Lane Xang.
“What do you have in mind, Monsieur Gold?” she asked.
Diamond told her, then added, “I think you’ll like it. It could be very lucrative, and Saigon is a lot like France, isn’t it?”
“In some aspects, yes.”
“So your answer?”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“What does that mean?”
She trained the full force of her green eyes on him and smiled. “Why not?”
“Good,” Diamond said, his throat tight. “Good. Uhh, do you need a taxi? Where are you staying?”
“At the Manoly,” she answered. “I can walk, thank you.”
“I could walk with you.”
She stopped walking and looked at him. “What are you asking now, Monsieur Gold?”
“I think you know,” Diamond answered, summoning up his nerve with the thought that the woman was, after all, a glorified whore. “I mean, you said you were looking for work.”
She laughed. “But not that desperately.”
They quickly made the necessary arrangements for her trip to Saigon and he walked away hating her.
But the whore will serve her purpose, he thought. The file said that Hel had fallen in love with her and intended to return to her. Good — if the son of a bitch is alive, he’ll come find her in Saigon.
And I have connections in Saigon.
Solange made sure that the disgusting American wasn’t following her, and then returned to her hotel and had a mint tea in the quiet of the shady garden.
Saigon, she thought.
Very well, Saigon.
Nicholai had yet to surface and she had to face the probability that he never would. Men die and men disappear, and a woman must take care of herself. The abhorrent “Gold” was right that Saigon was a congenial city, French in many ways.
97
THEY REACHED THE RIVER LATE THAT AFTERNOON.
Nicholai had to admit it was something of a shock.
Early in winter, he had expected the Lekang to be at its lowest flow. Still, beyond the long eddy where the waiting rafts were beached on the pebbled shore, the river ran fast, full, and angry.
The roar of water running shallowly over rock was impressive, even intimidating, but there was no time for trepidation. Nicholai worried that Ki might take another shot here where they would be pinned down without cover on the narrow strip of beach. He was glad to see that Yu had posted two of his “true believers” to cover the trail.
“We need to get loaded,” he said to Yu.
Yu shouted some orders and his soldiers helped the porters carry the crates onto the rafts, where the boatmen lashed them down. The head boatman, a squat middle-aged Tibetan with a cigarette in his mouth, approached Nicholai.
“Are you Guibert?” he asked in American-accented English that Nicholai knew too well from his years in his cell, listening to the American guards converse in what passed for their native tongue.
“That’s me.”
“I lost two men just getting down here.”
“They’ll be reborn well.”
The boatman shrugged his indifference at the concept of reincarnation. This life was plenty to deal with at the moment. “I’m Tasser.”
He didn’t offer his hand.
“Michel Guibert.”
“I know that. Did you bring the money?”
“Yes.”
“Give.”
“Half now,” Nicholai said, “half when we get to Luang Prabang.”
Tasser scoffed and looked at the roaring river. “Give me the whole megillah now. In case we don’t make it to Luang.”
“It’s your job to see that we do make it,” Nicholai said. He counted out half the money and handed a wad of bills to Tasser. “By the way, where did you learn your English?”
Tasser pressed the fingers of his right hand together and made a swooping arc. “American flyboys. They’d crash their crates into the mountains and I’d get what was left of them down. War had gone a couple of more years, I’d be sitting pretty.”
“Could we speak in Chinese instead?”
“I don’t pollute my mouth with that foreign tongue,” Tasser said in Chinese. He switched back to English. “You got any decent smokes?”
“Gauloises.”
“Frenchie shit? No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I will,” Tasser said. “So what’s in the crates?”
“None of your business.”
Tasser laughed, then crumpled up one of the bills and tossed it into the water. “You gotta grease the river gods,” he explained. But one of his men scrambled downstream, retrieved the bill, and brought it back to Tasser.
Nicholai raised an eyebrow.
“They’re gods,” Tasser said. “What are they gonna do with cash?”
Nicholai walked away and found Yu nervously peering back up the trail. He took out a cigarette and handed it to the colonel.
“Back at the monastery,” Yu said, “you didn’t fight like a man motivated just by profit.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do not fool yourself,” Yu said. “You believe in a cause, even if you don’t yet know what it is.”
“I believe in my own freedom.”
“Individual freedom is bourgeois illusion,” Yu answered. “You should give it up.”
“I won’t, if you don’t mind.”
“Just get the weapons to their destination,” Yu said.
“You have my word.”
They shook hands.
Nicholai walked back to the rafts. “Let’s get going!” he yelled, and the boatmen pushed off.
The river quickly swept them away.
The river slowed and flattened.
For a distance that Nicholai judged to be a couple of miles, the water ran fast but evenly, and he had a chance to peruse the rafts and their crews.
The rafts were about fifteen feet wide and made of buoyant logs tightly lashed together, although with enough give to allow some flexibility. They had hardly any draft and seemed to roll easily over the shallows. Long oars were laid on the sides, although the crew didn’t need them in this current. A canopy had been stretched over poles at the aft, with a charcoal stove just in front. The crates were stacked in the middle of the raft and tightly lashed to boltholes that had been drilled in the sides.
The crewmen, four to each raft, were all Tibetan, with squat bodies, full faces, and skins darkened by the sun. They sat cross-legged at the sides, near the oars, and enjoyed the respite given by this relatively benign stretch of river.
“I never pictured Tibet as having much of a river trade,” Nicholai said to Tasser.
“You got that right.”
“How did you learn to do this?”
“Crazy Brits,” Tasser answered. “They’re always going up or down something. Up mountains, down rivers. As long as it’s crazy and dangerous. Before the war, a bunch of wiseguys from Oxford wanted to be the first to go down the Lekang. They needed a ‘river sherpa.’ I was a kid, needed the moola, and thought, ‘What the hell.’ ”
“Did they make it down?”
“Most of ’em.”
“All the way to Luang Prabang?”
“I dunno,” Tasser said.
“What do you mean?” Nicholai asked.
Tasser looked at him and smiled. “I’ve never been down this stretch of the river.”
Nicholai felt the water quicken beneath him and looked downriver, where a cloud of mist suddenly appeared.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Tasser took a map from his pocket and spread it out. Nicholai looked over his shoulder and the map appeared to be more of a picture, a cartoon, really, of the river, with drawings of tall peaks and midstream boulders. Tasser considered for a moment, and then hollered over the increasing rush of water, “That would be the Dragon’s Throat!”
“The Dragon’s Tail?”
“The Dragon’s Throat!” Tasser shouted, pointing at his Adam’s apple. He looked at the “map” again and asked, “What the hell does ‘Level 5’ mean, ya think?”
A few seconds later, he answered his own question.
“Holy shit!”
The first fall was only twenty feet but it crashed onto a broad shelf of rock that would certainly smash the rafts to pieces.
Nicholai felt the bow pitch forward, grabbed on to a line, and held on. There was nothing else to do.
Then they went over the edge.
They landed with a heavy impact and Nicholai was sure that he would feel the raft break up beneath him; the logs bounced and rolled but held together and the current swept them over the rock into a chute where the water was whirling in a violent circle just upstream of a second waterfall.
“Get to the oars!” Tasser yelled, and his men abandoned the relative safety of the line and scampered to man the oars.
Nicholai could see why. The circular current was pulling the raft sideways, and if it went into the falls broadside it would surely capsize as it went over. They had to right it so it entered the next fall bow first.
But the raft was spinning like a leaf in the w
ind.
“Where are the lifejackets?” Nicholai hollered to Tasser.
“The what?” Tasser hollered back.
The current spat them out, but sideways — the starboard side facing the waterfall — and Nicholai saw a large backcurrent, a small wall of water coming toward them.
“Look out!” he yelled.
The backcurrent lifted the raft and pitched one of the aft oarsmen off the starboard side. Nicholai, one hand on the line, crawled back and tried to pull him out of the water, but Tasser yelled, “The oar! Get the oar, goddamnit!”
Nicholai grabbed the oar just before it slipped into the water.
The crewman was pulled back into the circular current and Nicholai saw him try to stay above water as the current spun him around and around like some malevolent funhouse ride.
“Pull!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai sat down and pulled on the oar, straining every muscle and sinew to try to pull the raft around. They were almost straight when the bow went over the edge. This fall was not as high. They landed in a deep pool and the raft bobbed once before it was pulled into the next chute of water.
The flume raced to a narrow fall between two towers of rock. The raft scraped the edge of the rock to the left, bounced off, and then slid over the low fall onto a shallow stretch that rushed over rocks that banged against the bottom.
Downriver he saw a large column of what looked like smoke.
It wasn’t smoke, though. Nicholai knew that could only be mist from a large volume of water crashing over a very high waterfall.
“Pull to the side!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai looked to his right, where Tasser was pointing toward a long eddy. But the current was pulling them away, and they had little time or space to make it over into the eddy, and the crews were already exhausted.
He lifted his oar from the water as the crew on the port side pulled. When the raft was pointed starboard, both sides would row as hard as they could, for their lives. He took a few deep gulps of air and then, at Tasser’s order, started to stroke.
It was only a small bump, but it was enough. Nicholai had pulled himself up on the end of his stroke, and the bump hit before he could settle back down and lifted him up and off the side of the raft.