About ten minutes later, I noticed in my rearview mirror the headlights of a car, and as it got closer, I saw that it was a small open jeep. I said, “We have company.”
Susan looked out the back window and said, “It could be a police jeep. I think there’re two people in it.”
I floored the Nissan.
The road was straight and flat as it passed through the rice paddies, and I eased the Nissan to the center of the road where I hoped the blacktop was better. The vehicle behind me was keeping up, but not gaining.
Mr. Cam was looking in his sideview mirror, but said nothing.
I asked Susan, “Do the police have radios?”
She said, “Sometimes.”
Mr. Cam said something to Susan, and she said to me, “Mr. Cam believes there’s a police car behind us, and he suggests we pull over.”
I replied, “If it was a police car, he’d have his lights and siren on.”
She said to me, “They don’t have lights and sirens here.”
“I know. Just being funny.”
“This isn’t funny. Can we outrun them?”
“I’m trying.”
I was maxed out at 160 KPH, and I knew if I hit a major pothole at this speed, I’d have a blowout, or I’d lose control, or both. The police knew the same would happen to them, but they seemed uncommonly dedicated to the chase, and I figured they had more in mind than a two-dollar ticket. In fact, if Mr. Thuc had set us up, the cops had also figured out by now that Mr. Cam wasn’t driving.
The Nissan held the speed, but this was a total crap shoot regarding who was going to hit the first big pothole.
There was a big truck in front of me, and I came up behind it like it was standing still. I swung onto the oncoming lane and saw another truck coming head-on. I passed the truck, then at about two seconds before I would have collided with the oncoming one I swung back into the right lane. A minute later, I saw the headlights of the jeep behind me, and he’d lost some ground.
Mr. Cam was getting increasingly agitated, and he kept trying to reason with Susan, who kept telling him, “Im lang,” which I recalled meant be quiet or shut up.
The vehicle behind us was about a hundred meters away, and maybe a little closer than last time I looked. I asked Susan, “Do the cops carry rifles or just pistols?”
“Both.”
“Do they shoot at speeding cars?”
“Why don’t we assume that they do?”
“Let’s assume they want to rob the stagecoach, and they don’t want everything incinerated in a ball of fire.”
“Sounds right.”
I said to Susan, “Get ready to toss that thing in your tote. We don’t want to face a firing squad.”
She said, “I’ve got it in my hand. Tell me when.”
“How about now? Before I flip this car, and they find it on us.”
She didn’t reply.
“Susan?”
“Let’s wait.”
“Okay, we’ll wait.”
I tried to remember the map, and if I recalled correctly, there was another small town a few minutes ahead. If there was another cop in the area, that’s where he’d be.
Mr. Cam was quiet, the way people are when they have accepted their fate. In fact, I thought I saw his lips moving in prayer. I didn’t expect him to do anything stupid at this speed, like grab the wheel or try to jump out, but I said to Susan, “Tell Mr. Cam that I’ll stop at the next town and let him out.”
She told him, and he seemed to buy this. Why, I don’t know, but he bought it.
Meanwhile, I was hitting potholes, and we were all bouncing wildly.
Up ahead was a small car, stopped right in the middle of the road. I could see a woman in my headlights waving for assistance. This, I figured, was the ambush where we’d be relieved of what the cops hadn’t gotten in fines. But the law hadn’t caught me yet, and Mr. Cam was not behind the wheel. He said, however, in rehearsed English, “I stop. Car need help. I stop.”
“You’re not driving. I no stop.”
I swung into the oncoming lane where I could better judge the distance to the drainage ditch on my left, and shot past the lady in distress and her car.
I tried to divide my attention between the road outside my windshield, and the headlights behind me. I saw the lights swing around the stopped car in the road, and the jeep almost veered off into the ditch, but then it got back on the road.
Susan was watching out the back window.
I said to her, “Sorry about this.”
“Don’t worry about it. Drive.”
“Right. That guy’s not a bad driver.”
She asked me, “Do you know how to blind a Vietnamese driver?”
“No. How?”
“Put a windshield in front of his face.”
I smiled.
What wasn’t so funny is what happened next. I heard what sounded like a muffled backfire, and it took me about half a second to recognize the hollow popping sound of an AK-47. My blood froze for a moment. I took a deep breath and said, “Did you hear that?”
She replied, “I saw the muzzle flash.”
I had my foot all the way down to the floor, plus some, but the Nissan was maxed. I said, “Okay, ditch the gun. We’re going to stop.”
“No! Keep going. It’s too late to stop now.”
I kept going and again I heard a gunshot. But was he firing at us? Or just trying to get our attention? In any case, if his four-wheel drive was bouncing as badly as mine, the guy with the rifle couldn’t get a good shot at this distance, which was about two hundred meters now. I swung the Nissan into the oncoming lane so that the shooter would have to stand and fire over his windshield, but the police jeep also swung into the oncoming lane behind us. So, I swung back into the right lane.
I heard another shot, but this time, his bullet was a tracer round, and I saw the green streak off to my right and high. My God. I hadn’t seen a green tracer round since 1972, and it made my heart stop for a second. We used red, they used green, and I started seeing these green and red streaks in front of my eyes.
I brought myself back from that nightmare to this one.
Mr. Cam was sobbing now, which was fine, except he started beating his fists on the dashboard. Next it would be my head. I recognized the little signs of hysteria. I let go of the wheel with my right hand, and gave him a backhand slap across the face. This seemed to work, and he put his face in his hands and wept.
I had this crazy idea that all of this had been a misunderstanding and a coincidence — the police car just wanted to check our registration, the car in the middle of the road really was broken down, and Mr. Cam was pure of heart. Boy, wouldn’t he have a story to tell around the Tet dinner table?
We’d whizzed through a few small villages that straddled Highway One, and I saw within the villages people on bicycles and kids on the road. This was dangerous, and so were the potholes and the guys shooting at us. It all came down to luck — one of us was going to make a fatal mistake.
I threw my map and guidebook back to Susan and said, “Can you tell how far the next town is?”
She used her lighter to see the page and said, “I see a place called Van Gia. Is that the one?”
“Yeah. That’s it. How far?”
“I don’t know. Where are we now?”
“We’re about thirty kilometers from Ninh Hoa.”
“Well… then Van Gia is right here.”
And sure enough, I could see the lights of a town ahead.
Susan said, “You can’t go through that town at this speed, Paul. There will be trucks, cars, and people on the road.”
“I know.” I needed to do something fast.
A truck was right in front of us now, and his brake lights were going on and off as he slowed down for the town. I swung out into the oncoming lane, passed him, and got back into my lane. I slammed on my brakes and discovered they were not antilock. The Nissan fishtailed, and I fought to keep it under control. The truck was right on my tail now, and I killed my lights. I kept about five meters in front of the truck, hidden from the police car.