Resting his back against the bank, he forced his eyes to focus.
From shoulder level the great width of the open river spread away into the darkness.
She held the launch close to the bank while he climbed through the tangle of roots and scrambled aboard. Moments later they were standing together in the well of the boat, the water streaming from them to form a gleaming puddle on the polished planking.
Running at half throttle before the river’s flow, the launch cut easily through the water, its powerful engine a muffled throb. It had proved easy enough to start, relocking the fuel line and short circuiting the ignition. Summers spent on Cape Cod had provided the little expertise necessary. The fuel tank had been, as he expected, virtually empty. But the twenty gallons of gasoline they had dragged along the river bank would, if all went well, be just enough to carry them first to the open sea and then to a landfall just inside the Thai coastline. If all went well.
‘Two hundred kilometres,’ Nan Luc said, kneeling on the wheel seat beside him. ‘Out at full speed past Phu Quoc Island and then north to the Thai coast opposite Ko Kut. We’re going to make it.’
‘Do many boat people make it from Cahn Roc?’
‘Not sailing straight past the lighthouse,’ she said. ‘But then not many people think of hiring the ex-administrator’s boat for the day.’
He found himself lifted by her confidence. By one of the unpredictable changes in the course of the fever, he was feeling better again, clearer headed. In his nostrils he could smell the open sea, now no more than a mile ahead. The cloud had thickened too, reducing the moon to a faint pink glow in the sky. Before them the river was beginning to widen, the channels of the delta like the fingers of a hand spread flat on the landscape.
The searchlight hit them from out of the darkness of the channel ahead. As Max wrenched his head from the path of the blinding white light he pulled on the throttle and felt the launch surge forward. Blinded from the front, he turned the launch in a tight half circle. Then from the bank somewhere behind them another searchlight flared. Held in the cross-lights they ducked below the gunwhale as they heard the thud of a heavy machine gun and saw the edge of the sprayshield shatter above their heads.
They lay together in the well of the boat as another burst of fire splintered woodwork and ricocheted howling into the night. Then the firing stopped and a voice, high-pitched even through the loud-hailer, called to them in Vietnamese.
‘They are ordering us to cut the engine,’ Nan Luc said. ‘Then to stand up with our hands in the air.’
‘I’ll put the boat towards the bank,’ he said. ‘When I cut the engine, you roll over the side. The launch will cover you as you swim for it.’
‘You’ll come too, Max,’ she said fiercely. ‘This doesn’t have to be the end.’
‘This is not the end,’ he said. ‘Somehow, I’ll be back.’
She held him to her. ‘If ever…’ she said.
The loud-hailer voice rose in pitch. As Max reached up to cut the engine, the launch was already drifting towards the bank. For a moment he held Nan Luc’s hand tightly, then releasing her, he stood up in the full glare of the searchlight, slowly raising his hands above his head.
Behind him he heard a faint splash, like the fall of a flying fish.
It had been raining since first light, a rattling percussion on an overturned oil drum in the courtyard beyond the barred window of his cell. Max sat on the frame bed, his head hanging forward, somewhere between sleep and waking. He was fairly sure that Nan Luc had made it clear away. The soldiers, young boys in their late teens under an older sergeant, had triumphantly hustled their Westerner back to the courthouse at Cahn Roc. They had no more than a few words of English or French, not enough to put questions to their prisoner. And none of them seemed to have considered the possibility that he had not been alone.
As the cell lightened Max had become aware of a sound from across the corridor, less than a man snoring, a deep inhalation and exhalation of breath. For ten minutes or so he had accepted it into the rhythm of his own breathing until, briefly emerging from his nodding half-sleep, he had become aware that the sound had stopped.
Lifting his head with effort, he looked across the corridor into the deep darkness of the windowless cell opposite.
‘You are the young man who was sitting next to Nan Luc in court each day,’ a voice said in French-accented English.
Max got to his feet and stood at the barred door of his cell. ‘Who are you?’ he said, straining his eyes into the darkness.
A white shape approached the bars of the cell opposite. ‘Vo Tran Quatch,’ the voice said. ‘Found not guilty, for what it’s worth.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘In any event I shall be dead by tonight.’ On the floor above they could hear the excited chattering of voices. ‘They’ve realised their mistake,’ Quatch said, his tiny mouth twisted in amusement. ‘They should never have put us together.’
‘What did you mean, you’ll be dead by tonight?’
‘In Vietnam,’ Quatch said, ‘the difference between guilty and not guilty is semantic. That’s to say, something to be ignored by honest men or the state.’
Sandalled feet clattered lightly down the winding stair. ‘Who was the American?’ Max asked him. ‘The American you met in Geneva?’
Three soldiers ran shouting along the corridor. The grille to Quatch’s cell was unlocked and he was dragged out.
‘Stevenson,’ Quatch said, as he was borne away by the guards. ‘Nan Luc’s father, Cy Stevenson…’
Van Khoa’s face was drawn, as pale as his olive skin could become. ‘I have no need to ask you who was with you on the launch,’ he said.
Max sat on the frame bed looking up at him as the last of the rain dripped and pinged against the oil drum in the courtyard. ‘That part of the incident can be considered closed,’ Van Khoa added in a voice little above a whisper.
Max turned towards him. ‘You mean you will not be pursuing what you call that part of the incident?’ he said cautiously.
‘For what purpose?’ Max shrugged. ‘I mentioned it to reassure you, Mr Benning. To reassure you that no one will suffer unnecessarily.’
‘You’re an unusual policeman, Mr Van Khoa.’
Van Khoa smiled wryly. ‘Hear me to the end,’ he said. ‘Somebody made a blunder.’
‘When they put me in a cell opposite Quatch?’
Van Khoa nodded slowly. He walked across the cell and stood at the window, smoothing the arm of his khaki uniform with his mutilated hand. ‘You will be put upon a plane from Saigon this afternoon,’ he said. ‘There will be no further investigation of this incident. You left Vietnam a day after the other journalists because you were too sick to travel. Do you accept my terms?’
‘No further investigation as long as I write exactly the same account of the trial as the other journalists?’
‘Let’s put it in clear, Mr Benning. No action will be taken against Nan Luc unless you publicise anything Vo Tran Quatch might or might not have said to you across this corridor.’
They faced each other.
‘I accept,’ said Max.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In her room Nan Luc made no attempt to light the lamp. For a few moments she stood by the open window looking out over the dark sea. Nothing, she thought, compares with the emptiness of the sound of the tide washing along the shore. Nothing invokes loneliness like the incessant heaving of the black waters. She turned away from the window and sank down on to the sleeping mat, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up before her.