Nine Days (13 page)

She answered on the third or fourth ring, sounding sleepy but on top of things as usual.

“Ti-Anna?” she said.

“No, it’s Ethan,” I said as loudly as I dared. “They tried to kidnap Ti-Anna, and they have a truckload of girls, and—and we don’t know what to do. We’re a few hours from Hanoi, next to the ocean, but I don’t know where.”

“You’re about five kilometers north of Haiphong,” Sydney said, and my blood ran cold. I covered the phone and whispered to Ti-Anna, “I told you! She knows where we are!”

Ti-Anna whispered back, “The phone probably has GPS,” and at the same moment, as if she could hear my whisper, Sydney was saying, “Ethan, all our phones have locators. We need it for our work.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Where is Ti-Anna now, Ethan?”

“She’s right next to me,” I said. “I got her out. But all the others are in the truck, and we have no idea when it might drive off again, or how to stop it from going.”

“And where are you, exactly?”

“In a shed. Still in the compound.”

“Okay, listen to me,” Sydney said, sounding all of a sudden very serious. “The single most useful thing you can do right now is not get yourselves killed. Do you understand? Probably they are going to put the girls on a boat and get them out to sea before daylight.

There’s a terrific Haiphong police inspector whom I will call right now. She may be able to get some people there in time.

“If she does, you stay out of their way. And if she doesn’t—you
still
stay out of the way, do you hear what I’m saying? And keep Ti-Anna out of the way. Do you hear me? These guys will not be playing.”

I nodded. That didn’t do Sydney much good, so I said, “Okay. Try to get them here fast.” She clicked off without bothering to answer.

“What?” Ti-Anna said. I told her everything Sydney had said, and then for a while neither of us said anything.

I knew Sydney was right. Even more—I thought that once they noticed an empty hammock, they’d come looking for us, and so I was being unforgivably stupid not to get her out of the compound now.

But … Sydney hadn’t seen those girls, curled up so still and terrified on their hammocks. Maybe she was right, there was nothing we could do. But walking away seemed, somehow, impossible.

We stayed, telling ourselves that we were waiting for the police, but really not knowing what else to do. I realized how exhausted I was. I might even have dozed off. Ti-Anna closed her eyes too.

At some point we were both awake and, in bits and pieces, began to fill each other in. I told Ti-Anna how I had snuck past the gate of the house in Hanoi, and what I had overheard of her conversation, and how I had jumped on top of her truck and stayed on top through the ride here.

“That was really dumb,” she whispered. “You could have been killed.” Then she leaned over and kissed the side of my forehead and said, “Thanks, Ethan.”

We were both quiet for a few minutes and then Ti-Anna whispered, “Do you think all Vietnamese fishing nets are this stinky?”

“You mean, or did we just get lucky?”

She smiled, fleetingly. But soon she was thinking again about what she had learned inside the pagoda. She recounted the part of the conversation I’d missed and described the photos of her father being led away, the painful expression on his face, a mix of astonishment and fury and, most of all, she said, wounded pride.

“He must have known by then that he’d fallen into a trap, and I’m sure he hated himself for it,” she said.

“If he fell into a trap, it was only because he so much wants the right thing for China,” I said. “You have to admire that, not blame him.”

That was when we heard the engine. At first, I thought, They’ve come! The police!

But then I knew what we were hearing. It was no paddy wagon, but the diesel engine of a boat coughing to life.

For a minute, for some strange reason, the
thump-thump-thump
of the engine brought back a fifth-grade trip to the Eastern Shore, when we were studying the Chesapeake Bay. I closed my eyes and could smell the sunscreen my mother had made me put on. I wondered if Ti-Anna had taken the same trip.

“Ethan,” she said.

I opened my eyes. She was standing over me.

“I’ll go see what’s happening,” I whispered.

“I’m coming.”

I shook my head.

“You can’t move fast enough,” I said, pointing to her feet. “I’ll scout it out, and I’ll come right back.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

She helped yank me up, then followed me to the door. The courtyard was unchanged. The same light seeped from the office windows; there was no sign of life in the guardhouse; the truck was a dark, silent bulk.

If I turned right out the shed door and kept to our side of the courtyard, I thought I’d be able to slip between buildings and reach the bay.

I patted my pockets. Phone, passport, lighter.

“You keep this,” I said, handing Ti-Anna the phone. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

And I would have been—I really meant to hold to my promise—if I hadn’t tripped over that canister of gasoline.

I kept to the shadows of the outbuildings along the courtyard. The rain was taking a break, but a sharp, salty wind had picked up, and somewhere I could hear a loose line swinging against a metal pole.

A narrow passageway took me to the harbor. It did not resemble what I remembered of the Eastern Shore. There were docks and boats, but there was also junk everywhere: wooden boards, chipped buoys, rotting fish, crab shells. If a harbor could be a slum, this was a slum.

It wasn’t hard to find where the sound was coming from. Bobbing gently at the end of a wooden dock thirty or forty feet out from the cement seawall was a fishing boat with black smoke belching out the back. It was substantial—plenty of room in the hold for human cargo, I thought. Its running lights were the only sign of life in the harbor.

I started making my way north on the seawall, alongside the low building. I knew I should go back and tell Ti-Anna what I’d seen. There was nothing I could do, except get caught. But I kept thinking about the girls. Would the gangsters carry them to the boat, I wondered, or make them run barefoot?

I’ll just get a better look, I told myself. Maybe if I can read the boat’s name, that will help.

Two windows were lighted on this side of the narrow building too, but since they had no curtains and, judging by how clearly the
voices came through, no glass, I didn’t dare look in. At least three people seemed to be talking, in a language I didn’t recognize—not Vietnamese, I was pretty sure, but not Chinese either.

I dropped below the windows, crawled past and inched along until I could read the name of the ship.
Abella
, it said, with a little Filipino flag. Well, maybe that will be something to go on, I thought. And then I really was about to turn back, when I nearly fell over the fuel can.

I’m not sure how the idea came to me, but I swear all I had in mind was creating a diversion. I thought if I could get something burning, the boat would have to move to a different pier before they could load the girls, and maybe that would give Sydney’s police inspector enough time.

I hefted the canister. It was full. I didn’t know much about marine fuel, or about arson for that matter, but I could tell it held a lot of gallons. I lugged it to where the dock met the cement.

At first I thought I’d pour it all right there, and hope the fire would travel out along the dock. But the wood was damp, and the wind was shifty but mostly coming in from the sea. So I walked out as close to the boat as I dared and then turned the thing over and started shaking fuel on the wood as I walked slowly backward toward land.

Which leads me to my one piece of advice: if you’re ever considering committing arson in the middle of a black and windy night, don’t walk backward. I backed right into a pole, and started to slip on the wet wood and lost control of the canister, which fell onto the dock with a thud. A gray-haired man emerged from the boat’s cockpit.

I flattened myself on the wood, trying to make myself two-dimensional yet again. After a minute the man retreated into his slave ship. I stood back up, lifted the canister and shook out the last drops.

My first few flicks of the lighter accomplished nothing. The wood wouldn’t light. The air was cool by now, but I was beginning to sweat, certain that at any second the men would emerge from the office and find me kneeling there. I thought, maybe arson is harder than it looks in the movies. Maybe I better give up.

But then, slowly, almost lazily, a curlicue of flame sprouted from a wet board. It smoked, it sputtered, it came back to life—and suddenly it began to spread. One board, two boards—and then it was dancing. I took cover on the cement walk, behind a pile of nets.

I must have poured more gas nearer the boat, or it had had longer to soak in, because as the fire made its way outward it grew stronger and higher and brighter. It was almost mesmerizing, the way it hissed and crackled, and even though I knew I should be getting out of there,
right now
, before the men came running, I couldn’t tear myself away.

Within a couple of minutes the fire was roaring. Try carrying your criminal cargo of innocent girls over those boards now, I thought.

Soon the boat captain was back out on his deck, shouting. Guess you’ll have to swim to shore, I thought, feeling pleased with myself. I heard yells from the building. The fire leapt and started licking the boat itself. And that’s when the world blew up and came to an end.

Or at least, it felt that way. I can’t really say I saw the explosion, and I don’t even remember hearing it. All I can say is I felt a force and a scalding heat and something like an overwhelming redness that was louder and brighter and more terrifying than anything I could have imagined. It sent me flying and knocked me flat on my back. And then everything went dark.

Later, I realized that the boat must have been loaded with enough fuel to ship the girls a long way, so it didn’t take much of a spark to blow it to smithereens. But that wasn’t my first thought as I came back to consciousness.

I wondered what I could be lying on that was so hard and wet. I wondered why everything was so black. Then I opened my eyes. That helped.

Three men were standing in front of the office, arguing and gesturing toward the water. I noticed one of them had his belt buckle undone. I closed my eyes again and wondered why he had forgotten to do up his pants.

I heard a crackling, and realized it was fire, and remembered everything: that I was lying on my back on a wet cement seawall north of Haiphong, and that a fire was crackling because I had lit it, and that if I didn’t want to get thrown into it I had better not let those guys see me.

I started to push up from the ground and— Ohh! Pain shot through my right leg. My head clunked back to the cement.

When the throbbing eased, I tried again, slowly, lifting my head a few inches. The dock was gone: a few charred pilings poked up. What had been the boat was a twisted mess of wood and other odds and ends, still burning, but without much intensity, as if the fire knew it had won and was getting bored.

Out to sea, there was the faintest line of pink in the sky. The men, close enough so that bits of their conversation wafted over me, were arguing.

Closer in my line of vision was a giant wooden spool, the kind that holds cable, and this giant spool happened to be perched on top of my leg. It was helping to hide me from the thugs, if they looked this way, so I thought maybe I should leave it be.

Then another bolt of pain charged through me and I changed my mind.

Summoning all my strength, I managed to shove the thing to the side. To this day I am positive that I screamed with pain and I can’t explain why the thugs didn’t look over. But they didn’t. I lay back down. I think I would have passed out, except that I remembered the boat captain. And while I was wondering what had become of him, I had an even more terrible thought: Where were the girls?

Suddenly a vise was squeezing my chest. It couldn’t be, I told myself. You would have heard them being taken off the truck.

Oh, yes? I answered myself as the vise squeezed harder. How about while you were dozing in the shed? You have no idea whether anyone was still in that truck. You might have—

Ignoring the pain, ignoring the thugs, I forced myself to my feet—or to my foot, since there was no way I could put any weight on the leg that had been pinned. I hopped past the end of the office building toward the courtyard, not even thinking of the men any longer, praying please, please, please, let them not have been on the boat. Please.

As I rounded the corner I could make them out in the early gray
light: the girls. Ti-Anna was helping them out of the truck, one by one, and sending each one silently across the stones to our shed. That was when, I admit, I think I started to cry—out of relief, and gratitude, and then pain and fright and whatever chemicals a broken leg can send squirting through your body.

I had hopped halfway toward the truck before Ti-Anna saw me. She came running over and grabbed my hands. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered back. “I thought all of them might be dead. All I meant to do was burn the dock, so that …”

She was staring at me, not hearing my words.

“What’s happened?” she said. “You’re all clammy. And”—she leaned in again—“that smell!”

“I think it’s just burned hair,” I said. I recognized the odor from chemistry lab. “And I might have broken my leg.”

I leaned on Ti-Anna’s shoulder and we started toward the truck. A group of girls was waiting patiently.

“When I heard the explosion, I thought I better get them off the truck, so they couldn’t just be driven away again,” Ti-Anna said. “At least this might slow things down.”

“Still no police?”

She shook her head.

“Look what I found, way at the back.”

Leaning against the tire was a plastic bag crammed with flip-flops and sandals and slippers. How thoughtful: they’d be ready to begin their slave labor as soon as they got to wherever they were going.