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.