Tucker's Last Stand Read online

  “Well, like, er, ‘Dear Bobby: I’ve always known you have a great capacity to give everything to your country. But I think your country needs you right here at home, and I would not want to miss your advice and counsel here in Washington.’—Something like that.”

  The President looked down.

  “Think there’s enough piss in that?”

  “I would think so. He’ll see it.”

  “I want him to feel it, not jes’ see it.… Waal, go ahead. Draft your letter for me. I’ll want it in the morning. An’ I’ll want to meet here, nine o’clock. McNamara, Bundy—both Bundys—Rusk an’ Rostow. Tell them we’ll discuss that paper came in from the CIA boys on the Trail.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  6

  January 15, 1964

  Hanoi, North Vietnam

  Bui Tin was only thirty-eight but he was entirely relaxed in the presence of the maximum leader, President Ho Chi Minh. In part this ease of manner was owing to, first, his background. Bui Tin was the oldest son of an aristocratic family in Hué, the second-largest city in South Vietnam. The Bui clan had for generations lived well, very well, off their great tract of farmland. They had to pay taxes to the French, but Bui Tin’s father was never apparently concerned about this: what he had always feared, he told his son in the late 1930s when Bui Tin was a teenager in the French-run Haute École, was the Japanese; and of course the Japanese had come and for four frightening years, beginning soon after the military strike against Singapore a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, life at Hué had been very hard. The father and mother had been moved to a peasants’ cottage that sat on their own property, quickly confiscated in the name of the Japanese emperor. Tin had been permitted to continue to attend his school, run now by a harsh Japanese academic who doubled the work of the students and tripled the discipline. When Tin reached seventeen, he would be conscripted and used for the imperial purposes of the Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Japanese. His fluent French and schoolboy knowledge of English and Japanese suggested a clerical career, which never eventuated because a few months after his seventeenth birthday the Japanese surrendered. The fate of Hiroshima at the hands of something called la bombe atomique was the cause of much celebration in Hué, and by Christmas of 1945 the harshly aged father had begun the reconstitution of his properties and was again reporting to the very same French deputy who had escaped the scene just in time, and was lately sent back to Hué as overlord of what was to be, in turn, the reconstitution of the French Empire.

  It had been a source of great dismay when, on Christmas Day, young Bui Tin announced to his father that he intended to go north to join the forces of Ho Chi Minh, consecrated to ending French colonialism in Indochina. He was eighteen years old when he first presented himself to Ho Chi Minh.

  Tin knew, as indeed everyone in Vietnam knew and, increasingly, the whole world knew, that Ho Chi Minh was a man of commanding presence. He was the supreme ascetic, and dozens of interviewers went to him to behold the man who had undertaken to outwit, militarily and psychologically, the mighty French. Asked about his genius in mobilizing an effective army from peasants who had needed to break from their long docility first to the French, then to the Japanese, Ho had merely given his benign smile and answered that he had learned the principle of the class struggle from his reading of Marx and Lenin, but that all other impulses were the result of his immersion in poetry. Poetry, he had announced (“Ho closed his eyes when he spoke these words,” the French reporter had written in Le Monde), was his daily bread, and nothing was more beautiful than the alignment of poetry and the class struggle designed to eliminate the base instincts of man, corrupted under the bourgeois order. His pointed features and wispy beard, Tin thought when first he was presented to him, might have been modeled by a great artist molding the face of a Spartan poet pained by the sounds of war, warmed by the peals of beauty that rang out of men’s verbal inventions. But Tin had no reason to doubt that Ho was also a highly organized commander in chief—and Ho did not hesitate in deciding what to do with his latest volunteer.

  Ho told Tin to go out to the field where his partisans were engaging the French, to learn guerrilla warfare. Tin was stationed in Saigon, close to French headquarters, and before long Ho Chi Minh grew to rely on the young, resourceful patrician to undertake intricate assignments. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the division of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh made it known, quite simply, that the war against colonialism would continue; that the so-called government of South Vietnam was in fact an ad hoc aggregation of lackeys of foreign imperialists, primarily American this time around; and that the struggle for the people’s communism would go on until accomplished. Bui Tin never gave Ho reason to doubt that he would stay with him until that struggle had ended and all of Indochina was liberated.

  It was in 1963 that Ho Chi Minh reasoned that his South Vietnamese partisans would never alone achieve the strength necessary to overthrow the southern republic, backed by the Americans. The only means of supplying Vietcong allies in South Vietnam was through the great Trail of which he would soon become the eponym. Bui Tin, thirty-six years old, small like most of his countrymen, tough, sinewy, innovative, single-minded, had been put in charge of an exploratory group whose job would be to go down the Trail and determine what would be needed to make it a more effective conveyor belt for Northern supplies and personnel sent to benefit Southern allies.

  Tin worked his way down that complex of hot jungle paths and ice-cold mountain streams, the ancient route that passed through the habitations of aboriginal tribes, where tigers and elephants had been hunted down, making way for migrants who brought gold and spice from China to the cities of Southeast Asia. He spent more than five months fighting leeches and mosquitoes and hunger, living mostly from food deposits laid down at stipulated points by the Vietcong cadre. And he had come back to make his report.

  It was, in brief, that the Trail was useless unless a gargantuan effort was made to make it possible for substantial traffic to move down to effect the infiltration of South Vietnam. Bui Tin had informed Ho and his generals that, relying only on partisans in the South, they would need to wait until the end of the century before the Vietcong movement succeeded in overthrowing the South Vietnamese government. The revolutionary action would need to be staffed and supplied from North Vietnam, and in order to do this, it would be necessary, first, to tame the Trail.

  After much consultation and the exploration of alternatives, Ho and General Giap concluded that Tin was correct, and what then began was the Vietnamese equivalent of building the Chinese wall.

  They were meeting, this afternoon, several months after the critical decision had been made to modernize the Trail, in the old French colonial courthouse used by Ho as his headquarters. They needed to confront the implications of two developments. The first, the discovery by the South Vietnamese military of their Grand Plan for the Trail.

  This had happened when, a week earlier, a detachment of North Vietnamese construction workers were ambushed by the enemy. Most of them had got away, fading into the jungle they had come to know so well. But not the chief engineer, and he was carrying in his satchel the blueprints, so to speak, for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Late on the evening of the ambush two of the unit’s military guards had worked their way back to the site. They had had no difficulty in finding their engineer and identifying him, even though his head had been severed from the body. But what they were after—the satchel—was gone. And now Ho Chi Minh and General Giap and Bui Tin were thumbing through other copies of the seventy-two-page document that had been assembled by Colonel Dong Si Nguyen, the large, weatherbeaten architect of the great Trail, who had been named minister in charge of constructing it.

  It was all there, they gloomily conceded. A description of the Soviet and Chinese machinery that the Trail would need to be able to handle, specifications of the necessary width of the Trail, the essential built-in detours to cope with the unbridgeable, with weather contingencies, with bombs. Colonel Nguyen had anticipated in due
course heavy American bombs and intended to be prepared with adequate antiaircraft defenses. There would be underground barracks, workshops, hospitals, storage facilities, fuel depots. He anticipated platoons of drivers, mechanics, radio operators, ordnance experts, traffic managers, doctors, nurses. It was the intention of the architect of this Trail, a full description of which the enemy surely had in hand, to expedite the passage of 20,000 North Vietnamese soldiers per month upon the Trail’s completion. And yes, that detail too, 20,000 North Vietnamese soldiers per month, appeared on the document.

  Ho Chi Minh turned to Frédéric Gruyère, the archaeologist who had defected from the French and served now as principal monitor of the news as it came in from the French press and from his myriad contacts in the French intelligence community. How would President Johnson react on seeing the Trail document?

  Gruyère said that, after all, the Americans had already begun surveying the area, obviously in anticipation of infiltration through a much heavier use of it than at present, but 20,000 troops per month could only sound like an invading army.

  Ho nodded. He had always done so ceremoniously. Bui Tin found himself wondering whether he nodded in that way when receiving ultimatums from the French. (Would he nod in that way to someone who ordered him executed? Probably.) But Ho also kept his own counsel. Instead of replying to Gruyère, he asked for his current estimate of the political situation in the United States. Gruyère replied that it had not changed, in respect of Vietnam. There was solid support from both parties for continued aid to the enemy, and President Johnson regularly went on with his stream of public pronouncements to the effect that the United States would stand by its “allies” to “curb Communist expansion.” The party of Republicans would almost surely nominate a senator named Barry Goldwater, a most bellicose man who would look for the least provocation to move in the direction of converting the American military cadre now in South Vietnam into a full fighting force.

  General Giap said that it was his impression that President Johnson would move in the same direction.

  Gruyère said that yes, this was so, but President Johnson—he looked over at Ho, pausing very briefly—was not as decisive as the senator from Arizona, and had many conflicting concerns.

  Once again, Ho bowed his head. “It will be a long war,” he said, his lips parted in a half smile. He turned first to General Giap, then to Colonel Nguyen, then to Colonel Tin, with just the faintest tilt of his head. They rose. Ho Chi Minh had dismissed them.

  Ho told Gruyère to summon Xuan Thuy, who acted as his foreign minister. He was there immediately, coming in from his office next door. Ho asked his foreign minister whether he had told the Canadian member of the International Control Commission that the government of North Vietnam would reply to the American overture on a given date.

  “I didn’t say when we would reply, Excellency. I just listened.” Xuan Thuy looked up at Gruyère and back to Ho. Did the President wish him to repeat what he had been told? In front of Gruyère? Ho blinked an assent.

  “President Johnson made an advance through Canada. If you will stop the war against South Vietnam he promises you a vast program of economic aid to rebuild the entire country, to restore it after all the damage done in the current conflict and in the conflict with the French.”

  Ho looked over at Gruyère. “Is there any public knowledge of this initiative?”

  Gruyère shook his head. “None.”

  Ho turned back to Xuan Thuy. “You will almost certainly be hearing again from the Canadian ambassador. Do not approach him. Wait until he comes again to you. When he comes, which I think will be very soon, he will no doubt tell you that U.S. Intelligence has picked up a document that suggests we are preparing to move as many as 20,000 soldiers per month down the Trail when it is built up.”

  Xuan Thuy nodded. Yes, he said. He knew about the captured document.

  “You are to tell him the document is a forgery. The work of provocateurs in the South. When the Southern patriots take over the country from the colonialist stooges, the forgers will be sought out and specially punished.”

  Xuan Thuy bowed. There was a trace of a smile. He had been ordered to say just the kind of thing he enjoyed saying when negotiating with representatives of the imperialist world.

  7

  June 15, 1964

  Saigon, South Vietnam

  The first part of their mission completed, Blackford Oakes and Tucker Montana were back in sticky, crowded, volatile Saigon. It was late in the afternoon when they checked in at the hotel, going directly to the restaurant, where they ate, drank, and agreed that they looked forward to sleep in air-conditioned quarters before the meeting the next day with Rufus and Colonel Strauss.

  In the late spring of 1964 Saigon seemed to be attacked more heavily by domestic than foreign problems. The assassination of the leader, Diem, had been followed by civil turmoil, with one general or junta replacing another at dizzying speed. A determined war initiated by the North was a strategic concern worth worrying about, but it was hardly the dominating concern of the day to the South Vietnamese: a domestic insurrectionary movement was not gaining ground, the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN, was in the field, doing its business. And Saigon was profiting as the center of geopolitical attention. Security within Saigon was not a problem of any magnitude. Yes, of course there would be spies in Saigon, just as there were spies in Berlin and Singapore and Hong Kong. But nothing to warrant elaborate disciplinary procedures, let alone curfews, let alone curtailment of the kind of life appropriate to besieged cities. The restaurants and hotels and nightclubs and brothels were prospering, and life for many Vietnamese and foreigners could be sweet, if only the Westerners could get used to the heat, and stop worrying about the never-ending anarchy within the government. But surely that too would go away, perhaps under the latest general, who spoke frequently over the radio, though to a halfhearted listenership more intent on workaday concerns, on inflation, schooling, food, lodging, entertainment, than security. Saigon was an informal, loose, open city. If a visitor had arrived there knowing nothing of politics, he might spend months there before discovering that a civil war made possible by foreign aggression was going on.

  Leaving the hotel restaurant, Blackford depressed the elevator button, sleepily staring at the floor indicator. Montana said he thought he would take a walk before turning in. “Maybe just say a quick hello to a girl I met last time I was in town, nice little thing, pretty, and very, very hospitable.”

  “You just said a half hour ago you couldn’t wait to go to bed.”

  “Didn’t say whose bed.”

  Blackford smiled. “I understand a lot of nice women in Saigon are good at quick hellos. Even at protracted hellos.… By the way, Tucker”—he addressed Major Montana for the first time by his Christian name—“you did me a favor on the field today. Thanks.”

  Montana waved his hand dismissively. “It was your expedition, but I was in charge of getting you in and out; couldn’t very well bring you back dead.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Bad, the copilot. At least he was unmarried, I found out.”

  “Yes,” Blackford said.

  The elevator door opened. Blackford gave his companion a lazy mini-salute, went into the elevator and on reaching his bedroom made a quick decision: He would go instantly to sleep rather than fight the fatigue; set the alarm for six and then work on his notes. Shortly, he was bouncing about lazily and happily in the green pastures of heavy slumber when the little tinkle began. His light and carefree gamboling was infinitely pleasurable—he found that he could jump about as though there were hardly such a thing as gravity, bounding from this little oasis of trees and flowers to that one a half mile away, as fleetfootedly as a ballerina and with the powers of Superman.

  What was that little tinkling bell? It was beginning to annoy him. He ignored it in exchange for leaping over to explore another green corner in the vast garden.… And then suddenly the fairyland disappeared, evaporated. He woke up. It was the telephon
e.

  The telephone.

  He looked at his watch. It was not quite midnight. He reached out for the receiver, brought it down to pillow level and said, “Yes?”

  “Are you Mr. Greyburn?”

  Mr. Greyburn! Sally! “Yes.” He jolted up to a sitting position. In a few seconds she was there, loud and clear, only the slightest background feel of over-come-in-please button-pushing somewhere along the line, perhaps a short-wave radio operator in the picture.

  “Darling, were you asleep?”

  “No. No, not at all, darling.” The connection was perfect.

  “You are an unaccomplished liar. I don’t know how you succeed, given your line of work. You evidently forget that I have heard you speak when you wake up and I am seven inches away, not seven thousand miles away. I know that sound.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Blackford said. “And I don’t like it when you keep yourself seven inches away. I find that extremely snotty. How do you say snotty in Spanish?”

  “Er … desinclinado.”

  “I don’t believe you. You are an unaccomplished fake. An academic sciolist.”

  “Oh? You’re talking to a Ph.D. It is I—not you—who lectures in Spanish at the University of Mexico on Jane Austen; who, by the way, got on very well in her novels without having to use the word snot—”

  “I bet she didn’t get very far without using the word ‘disinclined,’ because my guess is that desinclinado translates to ‘disinclined’ in English.”

  “Oh Blacky, I do miss you.”

  “I miss you, love. How is the little monster?”

  “He had his second birthday yesterday: He is two months old. He is quite beautiful. Just like his father.…” There was the moment’s silence. Blackford quickly broke in.

  “Have any trouble getting through to me?”

  “Yes, actually. I put in the call two hours ago thinking that was a pretty safe time to find you still awake. And then when I got through to the operator and asked for ‘Mr. Greyburn’ she said there wasn’t anybody there with that name, and of course I remembered, and had to go to your telegram to get the right room number. You are back from the bush, as you put it?”