Most of the sparse traffic consisted of logging trucks, a few four-wheel drives, and now and then a motorcycle. I saw no motor scooters or ox carts, and no bicycles or pedestrians; this was, indeed, the road to and from nowhere.
To the left rose the hills and mountains that ran along the Laotian border, and to the right were more hills, and beyond them were the towering peaks of what was called the Tonkinese Alps.
All in all, it was a spectacular road, though now and then the surface deteriorated without warning, and I had to slow down.
The general direction of the road was northwest and uphill. As we got farther west, the few signs of habitation disappeared, except for the smoke from hill tribe settlements, rising out of the forest and into the misty air, the smoke sometimes indistinguishable from the mountain fog.
I drove for two hours, and neither Susan nor I spoke a word. Finally, she said, “Are you going to speak to me?”
I didn’t reply.
“I need to make a pit stop.”
Up ahead, I could see a flat area off to the side where pine trees had been cleared. There was a small culvert in the stream, and I drove over it and stopped among the pine stumps. I shut off the engine.
I sat there for a minute, then dismounted. Susan, too, dismounted, but did not use the facilities. She stretched, lit a cigarette, and put her foot up on a tree stump. She turned to me and said, “Say something, Paul.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Tell me I did a good job.”
“You did a good job.”
“Thank you.” She said, “I couldn’t let them stop us.”
“So you said.”
“Well… if you hadn’t taken a wrong turn, none of that would have happened.”
“Sorry. Shit happens.”
She watched the smoke curl from her cigarette. After a while, she said, “The part that’s true is that I’m madly in love with you.”
“Is that the good news or the bad news?”
She ignored that and said, “And that’s the part they don’t like… if they believe it.”
I said, “I think that’s the part I wouldn’t like either, if I believed it.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Do you need to go behind a bush?”
“No. We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.”
“We do.” She glanced at me and said, “Okay, I do work for the CIA, but I’m also a real civilian employee of American-Asian, so neither of us has any direct government involvement, and they could let us hang if they wanted to. And, no, they really didn’t want you to dump me, they wanted you to trust me, so they told you to dump me. And, yes, I’m supposed to keep an eye on you…” She smiled and said, “I’m your guardian angel.” She continued, “And yes, I was involved with Bill, and yes, he really is the CIA station chief, and they’ll go ballistic if they find out I told you, and no, they didn’t tell me to sleep with you — that was my idea. Made the job easier, but yes, I did fall in love with you… and yes, they really are suspicious of me now because they know or suspect that we’re sexually and romantically involved, and I don’t care.”
She looked at me, then continued, “And no, I don’t know what Tran Van Vinh knows or saw, but yes, I know all about this mission, except for the name of the village, which they didn’t want me carrying around in my head, and at 4 P.M. on Sunday, after you met Mr. Anh, I met with him, and he briefed me about everything I didn’t know except the name of the village, which he could give only to you.” She added, “He says he likes you and trusts you to do the job.” She looked at me and asked, “Did I miss anything?”
“The Pham family.”
She nodded. “Right. That was an arranged meeting in front of the cathedral. This motorcycle was already bought, and you passed your motorcycle driving test on the way to Cu Chi.” She added, “I met Pham Quan Uyen last time I was in Hue. He can be trusted.”
“That’s more than I can say about you.”
She looked upset. “Okay… don’t trust me. But ask me anything you’d like, and I swear I’ll tell you the truth.”
“You swore you were telling me the whole truth back in Saigon, Nha Trang, and Hue. You also swore you didn’t have the gun.”
“I needed the gun. We needed the gun in case something like what happened, happened.”
I said to her, “And you need the gun to blow Tran Van Vinh’s brains out. Correct?”
She didn’t reply.
I asked her, “Why does he need to be killed?”
She replied, “I swear I don’t know. We’re about to find out, though.” She added, “I believe he’s alive.”
“So, you’ve agreed to kill a man without knowing why.”
“You killed people without knowing why.”
“They were trying to kill me.”
She looked at me and said, “How many of them were actually trying to kill you?”
“All of them. Don’t try to turn this back on me, Susan. I may have been a combat soldier, but I was never an assassin.”
“Never?”
I wanted to tell her to go to hell, but then she’d bring up the A Shau Valley, and whatever else I’d been stupid enough to tell her, and I really didn’t want to go there.
She said, “Look, Paul… I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be angry. But this isn’t as cold-blooded and devious as it seems—”
“Fooled me.”
“Let me finish. They told me they picked you because you were good, but also because your boss thinks a lot of you personally. He wanted to resurrect your career, or at least have it end well—”
“Like me being killed? How good is that?”
She continued, “He also thought that if you came back here, it would be good for you, and good for… your relationship with… your girlfriend. So, don’t be so cynical. People care about you.”
“Please. If I’d had lunch, I’d blow it now.”
She moved closer to me and said, “I’d like to think there’s a human element in what we do… I mean, as Americans. We’re not bad people, though we sometimes do bad things. And I think we do them with the hope that we’re doing the bad things for a good reason. In another country, they’d just have sent two assassins to kill this guy, and end of story. But we don’t work that way. We want to be certain that if something has to be done with this man, that’s he’s the guy we’re actually looking for, and that what he knows, if anything, cannot be dealt with in any other way.” She looked at me and said, “I’m not going to walk up to a guy named Tran Van Vinh and blow his brains out.” She added, “We may take him with us to Hanoi.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go now?”
“Not until you tell me that you really believe that I love you. I don’t care about anything else. If you want, we can turn around right here and drive to Hanoi. Tell me what you want to do, or what you want me to do.”
I thought about that and said, “Well, what I really want to do is to push on, find this guy, and find out what the fuck this is all about.” I looked at her and said, “And what I want you to do is to go back to Saigon or to Hanoi or Washington or wherever the hell you came from.”
She stared at me a long time. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out the Colt .45.
I looked at the gun — you always keep your eye on the weapon — and it looked bigger than a Colt .45 in her small hand.
She turned the butt toward me and handed me the gun. I took it. She pulled two extra magazines out of her pocket and put them in my other hand. She pulled her backpack out of a saddlebag and put it on.