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Hanoi
The war juxtaposed life and death, jabbing each against each: a baby carriage next to the bomb crater, a shiny white Mercedes abandoned without a scratch next to the hull of the mobile antiaircraft gun. Nightmare vied with banality: the severed leg of a policeman rotted in the gutter, half covered by a girlie magazine, blood-speckled pages fluttering in the evening breeze.
Just hours before, downtown Hanoi had been hit by four dozen bombs and missiles launched from a wave of Chinese aircraft. The daytime attack had pockmarked the already battered city, starting fires and destroying several buildings. The fires burned largely unabated. The relief forces were drained, and much of their equipment was exhausted as well. A number of fire trucks and ambulances had been damaged by the bombings; a few sat crushed by debris from the buildings they had tried to save. Others sat abandoned where they had run out of fuel. Fire trucks and ambulances still operating no longer used their sirens, as if they were too weak even to sound an alarm.
The center of town had been hit hard. The former French-dot-com bank, once a landmark, was now a burned-out hulk. A residential high-rise not far away had lost about a third of its tower; in the dimming light the jagged edges of bricks looked like an arm rising from the earth, about to rake its claws on the city.
And yet, despite the destruction, the city continued to struggle on, its breath labored yet real. Elements of the bizarre mixed with the defiant and practical. In the same street where citizens had cowered in basements and behind whatever thin shelter they could find an hour before, a parade of black Korean limousines now delivered elegant matrons and twenty-something fashionistas to the Ambasario Hotel for an annual benefit for Hanoi orphans. The women wore brilliantly colored dresses, their hot pink and fuchsia silks a militant stance against the Chinese onslaught.
Zeus Murphy stopped on the street to let a pair of women pass. The soldier felt like a misplaced voyeur, an uninvited guest at a private carnival. He was certainly an outsider—a U.S. Army major dropped into the middle of an exotic land—though he was also more of a participant in the war than any of the dozens of people walking past him in the street.
Zeus watched the women pick up the skirts of their dresses and step over the dried splatters of blood as they walked across the concrete apron to the hotel’s front door. A path had been swept clear for them; a small pile of glass lay a few feet from Zeus’s boots, the fragments glittering with the hint of light from the hotel’s interior.
Most of the women were ex-pats, the spouses and, in a few cases, daughters of men working in Hanoi or nearby. Zeus wondered if they had come out in defiance or to seek some sort of solidarity in misery. There was no longer a reliable route of escape for civilians from the city or the country. Air transport was close to impossible; commercial flights had ended the day before, not only out of Hanoi but also Saigon much farther south. (Saigon was what everyone except foreigners called Ho Chi Minh City.) Even the American embassy had difficulty arranging for helicopters, although it had two flights scheduled for later that day.
The highways south and the sea ports were still open, though how long that would last was anyone’s guess.
Realizing he was late, Zeus started forward, only to bump into a woman who’d been trying to squeeze past him on the pavement. The woman jerked her head around and put up her hands. He reached to grab her, thinking she was going to fall.
She staggered back, regaining her balance. The look on her face was one of dread, as if she had been touched by a ghoul.
Zeus put up his hands, motioning that he meant no harm.
“It’s OK,” he told her in English. He searched for the Vietnamese words for sorry amid his scant vocabulary.
“Xin loi,” he told her. “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”
She took another step, then turned and walked quickly toward the hotel, her pace just under a trot.
Zeus waited until she reached the door before starting again. He, too, was going to the hotel, though not for the show. He had to meet someone in the bar.
Two women dressed in plain gray pantsuits, neither much younger than fifty, stood at the doorway to the lobby. They had AK-47s in their hands. Zeus nodded as he approached. His white face made it clear that he was a foreigner—and not Chinese—and that was all the pass he needed to get in.
At the very start of the war, the Vietnamese had posted soldiers at the large hotels used by foreigners, more as a gesture of reassurance than security. The soldiers had long since been shifted to more important tasks. Some of the hotels had replaced them with their own security forces, though in most cases these men, too, had left, answering the call for citizens to report to local defense units, a kind of home guard that was organized around different residential areas in the city. Though trained in name only, some of these units had been transported farther north and west, to supplement regular army units facing the Chinese.
The units included women as well as men of all ages. Posters emblazoned with slogans like COURAGE and FIGHT ON were just now appearing on the walls of the city; the state television channel had broadcast interviews with women who had fought in the home guard during the last conflict with China. Some were now close to eighty; all said they were ready to fight again.
Zeus lowered his head as he passed a foreign camera crew standing at the end of the hallway. They had obviously come to record the charity event, but were being harangued by a hotel manager, who kept waving his hands in front of the cameraman’s face. The journalist looked exasperated; he clearly had no idea why the man was objecting.
The hallway was dimly lit, with three of every four lightbulbs removed. People clustered along the sides. Many cupped cigarettes in their hands. Smoke hung heavy in the passage, adding to the shadows. It looked like a scene from a 1930s noir film: gangsters hiding at the far end of the hall, an undercover detective weaving through the unfamiliar darkness toward his fate.
Even in the mixed crowd of Westerners and Asians, Zeus looked out of place. His civilian jeans and casual collared T-shirt did little to disguise his military bearing. People glanced in his direction and made way.
The etched-glass door to the bar was blocked by a crowd of people on the other side. He pushed against it gently, gradually increasing pressure when they failed to move.
“Excuse me,” he said, in gruff English, pushing a little harder. He eased up and then jerked his hand so that the door banged against the bodies. Finally they got the message and began to part.
*   *   *
The opening door caught the eye of Ric Kerfer, who was sitting at the bar across the room, angled so he could see the doors without seeming to pay too much attention to them. His eyes sorted through the crowd, waiting to see if whoever was coming through was worth his interest.
Kerfer wasn’t surprised that the bar was packed—bars were always popular when the world was going to hell—but it was interesting that there were so many foreigners still left in Hanoi. When he’d left the week...