The Chinaman (16 page)

He woke with a start two hours later when the landlady knocked on the door. ‘Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr Minh?' she called.

Nguyen thanked her but said no and she went back down the stairs. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The curtains were blowing into the room and the sky was darkening outside. He slid off the bed and turned on the light. There was a lamp on the dressing-table and he put it on the floor, under the window, and pulled out its plug from the mains. He spread a newspaper on the shiny wooden surface and then took the soldering iron, solder, flashbulbs and wire and put them on the newspaper. He plugged in the iron and while he waited for it to heat up he used the Swiss Army knife to cut twelve sections of wire, each about eighteen inches long, and then stripped a short section of plastic from the end of each piece. He soldered a wire to the bottom of each of the flash-bulbs, and another to the side. He used a battery to test one, touching the ends of the wires to the two terminals. It burst into white light and hissed as it melted. He tossed it on to the bed.

In Vietnam they'd had a plentiful supply of blasting caps, but they were hard to get hold of in peacetime. Not that it mattered, because the home-made explosive was sensitive enough to be detonated by a flash-bulb. Nguyen had decided he would make extra sure. He opened two boxes of matches and emptied them on to the newspaper. He stripped off the red heads until he had a pile of several dozen and then he crushed them with the blade of his knife, one at a time. Occasionally one would burst into flames as he worked and he'd use the blade to extinguish the fire. When he'd finished he had a neat pile of red powder. He smeared glue over the bulbs and then rolled them in the powder until they were completely covered. He left them to dry on the newspaper while he prepared the plastic piping. It was the sort used as drainpipes in cheap housing. He'd cut each piece with a hacksaw so that they were about a foot long. He sealed up one end of each pipe with strips of insulation tape and then took them into the bathroom. He put his gloves back on and half filled each pipe with the explosive mixture, then went back for six of the detonators. He held the wires in his left hand as he carefully eased the sticky mixture around the detonators, two for each pipe, and pressed it down. When he'd filled all three he sealed the ends closed with tape with just the wires protruding. They looked childish and inelegant, but Nguyen knew how deadly and effective they were. Properly planted in a road, they could destroy a car and leave a crater more than six feet across. All that was needed to set them off was to pass an electric current through the wires.

He wrapped them in newspaper and put them into the holdall. He placed the tools on top and zipped up the bag. Everything else he put into a black rubbish bag. He tied the top and lifted it, but realised immediately the thin plastic was in danger of tearing, so he slid it inside a second bag, and then a third, before twisting the open ends together and fastening them with tape.

It was almost ten o'clock. He lay down on the bed and looked for a while at the picture of the former American president. He closed his eyes, knowing that his internal alarm clock would wake him at dawn, but sleep eluded him at first. The face of the man who had first committed the US military to suppressing the Communists in the North floated in front of him and brought with it a flood of memories. He tried to push them away but they were persistent and eventually he surrendered to them.

Nguyen's father was a fanatical Communist but also appreciated the value of money and when Nguyen was nine years old he sent him to live with a cousin in Hanoi, almost 250 miles to the north of their village. The cousin ran a small garage in a back street and there Nguyen learnt how to service cars and each week he sent back half of his meagre wages to his father. In the evenings he went to a night school run by a local Catholic priest where he was taught to read and write and to question the Communist views he had picked up from his father.

He turned eleven on the day that Vietnam won its battle for independence and the French pulled out and he was in the street cheering with his friends when Ho Chi Minh returned to Hanoi. There was no peace, not even when the last French soldier left Vietnam. The struggle then became a struggle between North and South. Nguyen was eighteen when the first American soldier died in Vietnam, working in an armaments factory which manufactured grenade launchers. The factory was in a ramshackle hut in a Hanoi suburb containing little more than rows of metal tables, a brick forge with bellows powered by a bicycle and a lathe run by a rusting Citroën engine that had been fixed to a heavy wooden frame. He spent four years in the factory during which time he married Xuan Phoung and she bore him two children, both girls. They were three good years, the work he did seemed distant from the fighting going on in the south and though the hours were long and the work hard they lived in a small flat in a pretty part of Hanoi and there were occasional supplies of fresh vegetables sent up from his father's farm.

It all changed in 1967 by which time US bombs were regularly falling on Hanoi. Nguyen was drafted into the North Vietnamese Army. There were no arguments, and it didn't matter that he had a young wife and two babies. It would have been earlier if he hadn't been helping the war effort in Hanoi, but now they said his skills were needed down south. After two weeks basic training Nguyen was sent into action as a sapper. Before he left Hanoi he arranged for his family to leave Hanoi and stay at his father's farm. It was a lot closer to the fighting than Hanoi, but he knew that the bombing could only get worse and that in the city there would be no one to take care of them.

Nguyen and his fellow sappers were taken to within twenty miles of Saigon, to an area the Americans called The Iron Triangle, where they spent six months helping to build and equip a network of tunnels that housed hundreds of NVA and Vietcong soldiers. Deep underground were hospitals, training schools, supply stores and munitions factories. For weeks on end he never saw the sunlight. Nguyen was then put to work manufacturing home-made mines from captured US 105-millimetre howitzer shells of which the NVA had an abundant supply. The cash-rich Americans were notoriously careless with their equipment and there were crates upon crates of the shells for Nguyen and his team to work on.

One day when he was supervising a new batch of the mines a VC officer came to watch and began talking to him. The officer had been a mechanic many years before and it turned out that he'd originally worked in a garage in Hanoi not far from where Nguyen learnt his trade. The man complimented Nguyen on his work and after watching for a while longer he went away. The following day Nguyen was called to his commanding officer and told that he was being transferred to a Vietcong guerrilla unit. He'd asked what sort of unit and the officer had shrugged and said that it didn't matter. Nguyen didn't press it because he knew there was no point. He wasn't surprised when he was told that he was ordered to report to the VC officer who'd been watching him earlier. That was when Nguyen had been taught to fight. And to kill.

Nguyen was told that he'd be working in a team of three, setting booby traps on trails used by the American forces. He was given a black uniform to replace his grey NVA fatigues, but he was told he was to keep his AK-47 rifle. And that was that. Nguyen spent almost a year living in fear, creeping out of the tunnels at night, planting mines, setting trip wires and doing everything possible to terrorise the Americans. He became expert at moving silently through the jungle and quickly learned to camouflage himself so effectively that he was almost invisible from a few feet away, even during daylight.

Nguyen himself gave little thought to the politics involved: he was happy to fight for his country and, besides, if he had ever expressed any reservations about what he was doing he would have more than likely been shot in the back of the head. But that all changed one night in the summer of 1968 while he was in temporary attachment to a VC training camp close to Chap Le. The camp was only thirty miles away from Dong Hoi and Nguyen was hoping to be granted leave so that he could visit his family on his father's farm, when word reached him that his father had died. When he officially applied for leave it was refused, with no explanation. He went anyway, borrowing a battered Vespa scooter and driving through the night. When he arrived at the farm he was greeted by his tearful wife and children, and he learnt the full story.

A truckload of Vietcong soldiers had arrived at the farm three days earlier and demanded that they provide them with food and supplies. They helped themselves to rice from the storage sheds and half a dozen chickens. One of them untethered a bleating goat and began pulling it towards the truck. Xuan Phoung had protested that she needed the milk for her children, but one of the soldiers pushed her away and when she tried to take the goat back hit her in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. Nguyen's father went to pick her up and the soldier turned on him, hitting him on the head. The soldiers dragged him to the truck, along with the goat, and drove off. They took him to a nearby hamlet and tied him to a stake and called out all the villagers to watch. They accused him of being a bad Communist and of conspiring against the National Liberation Front and then they slowly disembowelled him as the crowd cheered.

The old man was still dying as Xuan Phoung arrived on foot at the village, and she cut him down and cradled his head in her lap. The VC had left by then and one of the braver villagers helped bury him. No funeral, because that would antagonise the Vietcong and there would be more killings.

Xuan Phoung took Nguyen to the unmarked grave and stood with him in silence as tears ran down his cheeks. He made his mind up then, as he stood by the wet soil, and later that night he took his wife and two children, precariously balanced on the scooter as they headed south. As they got closer to the area controlled by the South Vietnamese forces he took them into the jungle, travelling by night and hiding from all patrols, US, NVA and VC, until he reached a South Vietnamese camp near Hue, on the banks of the Perfume River.

There he gave himself up to the ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, and applied to join Chieu Hoi, the ‘Appeal to Return' programme. He'd read about Chieu Hoi in the jungle after a low-flying helicopter had thrown out handfuls of propaganda leaflets. The VCs kept them and used them for lighting fires and as toilet paper.

His wife and children were resettled in a safe village south of Saigon while Nguyen was sent to a rehabilitation camp. He wasn't there long. He'd never had any great love for Communism and the ARVN realised how useful Nguyen would be. When he crossed over he hadn't thought that he'd be fighting for the South, he'd had some vague hope that they'd simply allow him to go back to what he enjoyed doing, working in a garage somewhere and spending the nights with his wife and daughters. He was wrong. The ARVN didn't threaten to put a bullet in his head, but they didn't have to. The South was infiltrated with VC soldiers and agents and if Nguyen and his family weren't kept in a safe village they'd be killed within weeks. Their survival depended on the goodwill of the Government of South Vietnam. And the price exacted for that goodwill was for Nguyen to serve them in the best way he could.

Once he'd satisfied them that he wasn't a VC agent he was sent to the Recondo School, run by the 5th Special Forces Group at one end of Nha Trang airfield, near Saigon. The Recondo School was where the US army trained the men who made up the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols – or Lurps to the men who served in them. The Lurps operated in six-man teams deep in enemy territory as the eyes and ears of the army, and often as its assassins.

It soon became obvious to the instructors that there was nothing Nguyen could learn from them. Within two days he was teaching them about VC booby traps and camouflage techniques and then the top brass got to hear about his talents and inside a month he found himself seconded to a Lurp unit on the edge of the Iron Triangle.

Time and time again, Nguyen was sent into enemy territory, along the same trails that he'd travelled when he was a VC. He knew many of the hiding places and the supply dumps and the secret trails, and he had a sixth sense for spotting the VC trip-wires and traps.

Nguyen was allowed regular visits to his wife and daughters, and as he drew regular US army pay, life was good fighting for the Americans, until it became obvious that the NVA were going to overrun the South. Nguyen began to worry about what would happen if the Americans pulled out, but he was always assured that he would be taken care of and that his family would be given sanctuary in the United States. He'd believed them.

Nguyen tossed fitfully on the bed, sweat beading on his forehead. His breath came in ragged gasps as he relived in his mind what had happened to his wife and his three daughters, how they'd died and how he'd been powerless to help.

Mary Hennessy was sitting alone in the lounge watching television when the doorbell rang. She got to her feet and smoothed down her dress before going into the hall, but Murphy had got to the front door ahead of her. There were four suitcases by the door, mainly clothes that she wanted to take with her to the farm. Liam had said they were only going for the weekend, but she could see that he was holding something back, and realised that he'd been badly shocked by the two bombing attempts and that they'd probably end up staying on the farm until it had been sorted out.

It was ten o'clock already, but Liam had said he was waiting to see someone before they left and it was a desire to see who the mysterious visitor was rather than a sense of politeness that had taken her to the hall. He was hidden by the door, all she could see was a sleeved arm shaking hands with Murphy, but then she heard his spoken greeting and she gasped, her hand flying involuntarily up to her mouth. The door opened wider and he stepped inside. Morrison was holding a blue holdall in his left hand and he bent down to put it on the floor by her suitcases and it was only as he straightened up that he saw her. He smiled and his eyes widened.