Toi was sitting by the window, thumbing through some magazines. Shit, Yong Kyu murmured to himself, why bother. He felt awkward. After all, was he so different from the drunken recruit who threw a beer bottle at that Korean dancer for performing a strip show? Neither Pham Quyen nor Mimi seemed to have chosen their paths of life with any conviction.
But then again, on this night with so many killing games going on outside, was it so wrong to have an uncertain future? True, in the end this land would belong to those who, embracing death and yet warring against it, secure their own survival one step at a time. Just the way he came, so Yong Kyu one day would be slipping off quietly with his duffle bag on his shoulder. To sit and gaze at the back of Hae Jong as she set the table for dinner made him think she had become totally at home here. The evening sun was burning deep red just above her as night shaded the sky out there beyond the Ku Dhe River of Son Tinh.
Major Pham emerged from the bathroom in shorts and a casual shirt. Hae Jong stopped setting the table and pointing through the window with the fork in her hand, yelling, “How beautiful! What are those sparks?”
Pham Quyen turned to Yong Kyu with a questioning look. The two men went out onto the veranda to see. Darkness had descended over Da Nang Bay down below them, and streams of fire were flickering in towards the beach from over the ocean. They were probably from helicopters. They seemed to be tracers from heavy machine guns fired as a formation of gunships went up on a night mission.
21
Once in a while a breeze found its way in through the cracks in the truck’s canvas cover, but the heat remained unforgiving. Fifteen urban guerrillas, operatives of the Third Special District, had broken down into teams of five and were departing for Da Nang. They had marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail along the Atwat Mountains to the border between the Second and Third Districts.
The teams headed into the Third District first had to infiltrate into Long Long, a big village in the Central Highlands from which a rough mountain road ran down to Da Nang. This village on the Thatra River was guarded by a contingent of US Special Forces and was an ARVN reconnaissance outpost. The conditions for infiltration were extremely unfavorable, but once they made it into the confines of the village they could hop on regularly scheduled freight trucks to Da Nang and down the coast on Route 1.
There had been another infiltration route from Atwat into Hue and Da Nang through Bien Hien, but the transfer point had not been securely recovered since a North Vietnam division recently was decimated in the area. With guidance from a local agent they made their way to Nhong Trong and marched through the jungle from there. They had one encounter with an ARVN patrol, but with the guide’s help they hid in the reeds along the Thatra River and waited in silence until the enemy party passed by.
In groups of three they finally arrived at the edge of Long Long where a farmhouse served as a sanctuary. The next afternoon they were escorted to the rendezvous point, a restaurant in the center of the village. Everyone was disguised as a peddler or a traveling peasant. They hid in the attic or the basement air raid shelter of the restaurant until their respective departure times. The freight truck that left the village once a day could only carry five men hidden inside under the cargo of produce. Pham Minh was in the second group to leave. They left at dawn. It was still very dark outside when they got into the truck, bearing loads on their shoulders like ordinary laborers and then burrowed underneath the cargo. Each group’s lead agent sat up front in the cab beside the driver. When they approached a checkpoint he knocked three times on the truck window. Then once they passed a safe distance beyond, he would knock again twice to sound an all-clear.
The road was an unpaved ledge precariously cut into the steep slope running down from the highlands into the jungle valleys and the truck bounced roughly as they cautiously inched their way onward. It had been built for wagons, originally dug out by villagers mobilized by the French colonial government. Pham Minh’s group of five had brought along an empty can so they could relieve their bladders without leaving the truck. For food all they had was lumps of cooked rice wrapped up in banana leaves. By the time they ate it, the rice was salty from the human sweat it had absorbed.
On the road down to the northern side of Da Nang, the truck approached a checkpoint at Kethak near the point where the Kudeh River emptied into Da Nang Bay. From the front they heard the signal of three knocks and instantly the men in back raked the vegetables up over their bodies. The space toward the front of the cargo bed was partitioned with boards so that even if there was an abrupt stop, the fruit and vegetables piled up high in the back would not fall down forward and be damaged. When someone looked into the back of the truck, all they could see was the cargo of produce piled almost to the canvas roof of the truck.
The Kethak checkpoint was manned by an ARVN QC sergeant and local militia. They checked the driver’s pass and glanced at the load. By that time, however, the agent had already handed over a “toll” of one thousand piasters, slipped in with the transit pass. If no toll had been paid, the sergeant in charge of the checkpoint probably would have made a fuss of unloading the entire cargo for inspection, saying he had to search for guerrillas and ammunition before allowing them through.
At the checkpoints on the outskirts of the cities, the inspection was usually more thorough for the outgoing traffic than for the incoming, mainly because the incoming trucks carried agricultural goods that were very scarce. Even when such goods were moving between so-called liberated areas under NLF control and the areas under South Vietnamese jurisdiction, both sides tended to be lenient.
The truck lurched forward again, and soon two knocks on the window were heard. Only then did the men in back pull their heads and shoulders up free of the vegetables, turning their necks to loosen the weight under which they had been buried. The five of them had been born again as brethren now fighting for the National Liberation Front. Apart from his four comrades, Pham Minh had no information about their higher organization, or about the identity of their fellow urban guerrillas, nor did he have any idea how they expected to regain the strength needed to liberate the nation while under the countless enemy guns, cannons, and aircraft in Da Nang.
According to the vague information they had been given, the number of NLF guerrillas active in Da Nang was at least two hundred. There were roughly forty teams, collectively known as the 434th Special Action Group of the Third Special District. In other words, the fifteen members in his training group at Atwat were comparable to a single company unit, and they were acquainted with no superior command above the level of company leader. The political staff of the district committee must have been handling the coordination with other teams on the next level above.
“We’re in Da Nang!” one of the team members shouted after hearing the sound of passing vehicles and peeking out through a parted canvas flap. Pham Minh could also sense they had arrived. The breeze now had the fresh smell of the sea. The truck pulled in past the inter-city bus terminal at the old Le Loi market and slowly parked in the lot for the produce market. The driver and the lead agent lifted the rear flap and pretended to begin unloading the goods. One at a time, the team members crawled out and casually joined in the work of unloading. To the eyes of onlookers, they looked no different from any of the other day laborers hired in the market to move the fruit and vegetables around.
When they were almost finished, they followed the eye signals of the agent to the Chrysanthemum Pub. It was the very place Pham Minh had first visited when he joined the Front. Since the pub was a place always jammed with travelers, nobody thought twice about strange faces, thus it was a textbook example of a good place for arranging a covert rendezvous. They walked in past customers eating nuoc mam noodles and passed inside the rear quarters behind the partition. No sooner had they sat down around a table in one of the rooms than a waiter stood before them. Their lead agent spoke.