The new arrival grinned malevolently, locking his gun on to the Englishman. ‘Well now, there’s a face from the past,’ said Carl Hoyt.
14
‘There is the road,’ Natalia said excitedly, pointing through the trees ahead.
‘About bloody time,’ Chase grumbled. Their trek had taken longer than expected, partly because of the need to watch out for more landmines, but mostly because of the one he was already carrying. Even though he was now fairly confident that the explosive inside the rusted casing had decomposed to harmlessness, there was still just enough doubt in his mind to encourage him to handle it very carefully.
They emerged into bright daylight. The road was nothing more than a muddy track, but tyre ruts told Chase that it was reasonably well used. Nobody had driven along it so far today, though; branches dislodged by the previous night’s storm were scattered all over, and none had been crushed into the wet soil. The search for the fugitives might not have reached this far — yet.
He was still wary, though. ‘Keep to the grass along the side,’ he warned Natalia. ‘So you don’t leave a trail.’
The young woman took heed and stopped at the roadside. She looked in each direction. ‘The village is… that way,’ she announced, pointing to the left.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. Both roads out of it go up hills.’
The pair set off down the slope. Before long, they encountered the first signs of a settlement: scattered garbage in the undergrowth. ‘That’s civilisation for you,’ Chase said with a wry smile.
To his surprise, Natalia became defensive. ‘They do the best they can,’ she said. ‘They have so little — no money, and the land here is not good for farming. They cannot afford to take their trash to be recycled.’
He remembered a comment his late grandfather had once made — ‘You’re never too poor to pick up after yourself’ — but decided she wouldn’t appreciate the piece of Yorkshire wisdom. Instead, he asked, ‘How many people live here?’
‘About eighty. It is only small.’
‘And you stayed here for, what, four days? Wouldn’t have thought it’d take that long to give everyone a jab.’
‘A jab? Oh, a vaccination. No, we treated everyone who needed one on the first day. But we were doing other things also. Actually, that was the reason I came to Vietnam, not just to give out medicine.’
‘Yeah?’ Chase was about to ask more when he saw movement ahead. Someone was walking up the road. ‘Get down,’ he growled, sidestepping into the concealment of the undergrowth.
Natalia laughed. ‘It is okay — I know him!’ She waved, calling out in Vietnamese.
‘No, the guys looking for us might— Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Seeing the man waving back, Natalia ran to meet him. Chase carefully put down the mine and raised the rifle, senses on alert for any signs of danger.
There were none. Natalia spoke to the man, who appeared delighted to see her, then waved for the Englishman to join them. Still annoyed, he collected the Bouncing Betty once more and followed her. ‘All right, who’s this?’
The man’s happy expression quickly became one of trepidation when he saw the mud-splattered, gun-toting Westerner advancing on him with a landmine in one hand. Natalia hurriedly gave him what Chase guessed was an assurance that he wasn’t a threat. The villager — he seemed quite elderly, though given his hardscrabble lifestyle it was possible he was only in his late forties — didn’t seem completely mollified, but his face at least now displayed more curiosity than fear.
She kept talking. The man reacted in surprise to something she said, an intense exchange following, then he gestured for them to follow. ‘He says to come with him to the village,’ Natalia told Chase. ‘They will help us.’
‘Ask him if anybody’s been there today asking about us,’ he said. She did so, getting a shake of the head in reply. ‘That’s something, then.’
It only took another five minutes before they entered Ly Quang itself. The settlement was not impressive, just a small cluster of shacks near a riverbank. Most of the structures were wood and thatch, though some were partially built of corrugated metal. The storm had inflicted damage, people patching up holes in the roofs of several houses.
Chase was more interested in something else: telephone poles, running along the road heading north out of the village. The line ended by one of the largest buildings, a single cable leading down to it. ‘I need to use the phone,’ he said.
Their arrival had already attracted attention. Everyone seemed genuinely pleased to see Natalia, even if their reactions to her travelling companion were more uncertain. Chase made a point of shouldering the AK across his back out of easy reach, though he kept hold of the mine — which encouraged the villagers to keep their distance. After sharing greetings with everyone, the German had a brief discussion with one of the men, then turned to Chase in disappointment. ‘He says the telephone is not working. The storm took down the line — it could be days before it is repaired.’
‘Arse chives,’ he muttered, looking down at the Bouncing Betty. ‘They won’t be able to call anyone to deal with this either. What do they normally do with mines if they find ’em?’
Another rapid conversation. She smiled at the Englishman. ‘They usually go to a safe distance and throw stones at them until they explode. They think you are crazy for carrying one all this way.’
‘Christ, you try to do a good deed… So what do I do with this?’
‘There is a place by the river where you can leave it,’ she told him after getting an answer. ‘They will make sure nobody goes near it.’ A young man, beaming broadly despite missing several teeth, stepped forward. ‘Thanh will take you. You can leave the gun there too.’
Chase was less happy about that, but nevertheless went with the smiling youth to deposit the weapons amongst some rocks, taking the detonator from his backpack and leaving it beside the mine. By the time he returned, the reunion had moved into one of the houses. A middle-aged woman signalled for him and his guide to come inside.
‘You weren’t kidding about having friends here,’ he said on entering. Natalia sat on a rug, older villagers looking on with amusement as several laughing children clung to her. One boy had a crude prosthetic leg below the knee. The young German had replaced her filthy medical gown with a donated wraparound skirt and a faded T-shirt bearing the logo of some Vietnamese product he didn’t recognise, as well as a pair of sandals.
‘I wanted to work with children,’ she replied, grinning. Then the smile faded. ‘And when I heard what had happened here, that made me want to help them even more.’
‘What did happen?’
Natalia spoke to two of the women, gesturing towards Chase. They regarded him with suspicion, but a plea eventually drew reluctant nods. ‘I told them you are English, not American,’ she said. ‘The people here, they… they try to forgive for the war, but it is hard.’
‘Is it something to do with the landmines?’ he asked.
A deep sadness crossed her face. ‘Worse than that.’ She spoke to each of the children, managing to pluck them off her one by one before standing. ‘I will show you.’ One of the women rose as well. ‘But I have to warn you, it is…’ She paused, searching for the correct word. ‘Upsetting.’
Unsure what to expect, Chase followed them out of the little house to the building where the telephone line terminated. The Vietnamese woman opened the screen door and called out, getting a reply from someone inside.