She spun on her heel and left the room, leaving them open-mouthed. As if it was the fault of MACV that Quan had been taken. Nothing to do with the abysmal failure of ARVN security. Abrams remained calm. “You heard what the lady said. They’re taking care of it themselves, so we can stand down. For now.”

  “Who was that?” Cruz asked.

  “Who? Mister, that was the wife of Nguyen Huy Quan,” Abrams replied, “As you can see, she’s one determined lady. If she wants her husband back, she won’t give up until he arrives back in Saigon. She happens to be a real pain in the ass. Don’t repeat that, but a man can’t help admiring her. She acquired a pilot's license and qualified to fly jets. I understand she even managed to wangle herself into flying several combat missions with the Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam.”

  “Did she get any kills?”

  He gave Cruz a look. “I suggest you ask her, but I doubt she’ll give you the time of day.”

  He strode away, and Heller spent the rest of the night and most of the next day kicking his heels around Tan Son Nhut. Cruz didn’t know if they were required to hold themselves ready to move at short notice, and he told them to stay close. Just in case. In the early evening, a taxi stopped outside the main gate and delivered a large wooden box. The sentries checked it for explosives before opening it. When they looked inside, they found a neatly folded white flag, stained with blood. Beneath the flag, they found the hacked-up pieces of what had been a human being. The only way to recognize him was through the stainless-steel ID tags that lay among the grisly contents.

  The negotiations had failed. Heller noticed several high-ranking officers heading for the main admin building, presumably to talk with the General about their next move. If there was a next move, but it didn’t seem likely. Quan was gone for good, disappeared into the badlands of North Vietnam, with no way to find him. At least, that’s the way it seemed. Until Monaghan’s clerk, sifting through routine messages received during the past seven days came across a report sent by the pilot of an F-4 Phantom, Major Mo Taylor. He rushed into Monaghan’s office and almost collided with Creighton Abrams, who was just leaving. He didn’t look happy.

  “What is it, soldier?”

  “Uh, General, it’s an anomaly our fly boys spotted in North Vietnam. A heavy concentration of anti-aircraft missile batteries in a remote region without any reason for them to be there. Unless…”

  “Unless they’re hiding something,” Abrams nodded, “Show me what you have.” He held out his hand and took the message. “I see. This gives the location of the missile batteries, but no indication of what’s down there. Without eyes on the ground, I’m not sure how this could help us.”

  Monaghan snapped, “Corporal, you’re wasting the General’s time. Go back to your post.”

  “But, Sir, we know the Communists are holding high-ranking prisoners in a secret location. What if it’s this place?”

  Abrams was about to leave the office, but he stopped. Thought for several moments, and his expression changed, his lips compressed into hard lines.

  “He has a point, Monaghan. It’s a possible explanation, and we need to check it out. I want you to go over everything you have on that region, and I want it on my desk within one hour.”

  The Intelligence Officer pursed his lips. “General, it’s a long shot. We could be wasting our time.”

  “Do you have anything better to do with your time, Colonel?” He didn’t wait for a reply, “One hour, not a second more. The Communists are hiding something in that area, and I want to know what it is.”

  One and a half hours later, Monaghan reported with the information he’d been asked to collect. His breath smelled of strong mints, but if Abrams noticed, he didn’t comment. Other aircrews had reported trucks traveling toward that location, carrying what analysts were convinced were rolls of barbed wire and prefabricated concrete posts. The kind of barbed wire and concrete posts that could be used to build a prison.

  He took his time reading through the sheaf of documents, and when he’d finished, he looked at Monaghan.

  “Do you know what this tells me, Colonel? They’ve constructed a prison camp in that location, and they’re keeping it a big secret. They could be holding high-ranking prisoners in that place, especially those unaccounted for and presumed dead. MIAs. We have several hundred men who’ve gone missing over the past few years. Some captured during the fighting in the South and aircrews shot down over the North. We’ve speculated about their whereabouts for a long time, and this could give us the answer. A secret camp not too far from Haiphong, protected by a heavy concentration of anti-aircraft batteries, augmented by the formidable Haiphong air defenses. You know what I’m saying, Colonel?”

  “No, Sir, I don’t.”

  “If they’re taking Quan anywhere, it could be he’s already in the North.”

  He scooped up the papers and left to return to his office where he could study them in more detail. Five minutes after he’d settled down to read, the door was abruptly pushed open. He’d given orders he wasn’t to be disturbed, and he looked up in irritation. Changed his angry look to a polite nod.

  “Madame Quan, how can I help you?”

  “I believe you have something, General.”

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. Tan Son Nhut had more leaks than the Japanese World War Two battleship Yamato. “I do.”

  “Tell me what you have.”

  He showed her the location southwest of Haiphong on a map. “We don’t know what’s down there, but there’s a possibility it’s a secret camp for holding VIPs.”

  “You think that’s where they’ve taken Quan?”

  “Like I said, we don’t know for sure. It’s just a possibility.”

  “What do you intend to do about it?”

  Abrams struggled to remain calm. It wasn’t easy, not with this lady. Everything about her demanded a man to give her his complete attention. She was shorter than most Vietnamese, pretty, with a heart-shaped face. She exuded a powerful fragrance of expensive perfume, and her clothes did little to hide her charms. Traditional Vietnamese but styled in the latest French fashion. Power dressing with a plus. Her eyes were piercing, like brittle diamonds drilling into his head, and she held her body just so, in a pose that further accented her heady yet unattainable allure.

  He was looking for a way to placate her. “I’m looking into it.”

  “That’s not good enough. I want action, and I want it now!”

  In desperation, he pressed the intercom button on his desk. “Tell Lieutenant Cruz to get his men together and report here on the double.”

  Several minutes later, a knock came on the door. “Enter!”

  Cruz marched into the office, looking like he hadn’t got much sleep the night before. He was followed by the rest of his Recon Team who waited just inside the door. Cruz’s eyes widened when he saw Madame Quan, but he came to attention and saluted.

  “Lieutenant Cruz reporting, Sir.”

  “At ease, Lieutenant. I called you here because Madame Quan needs our help. Or rather, her husband needs our help. We have identified a possible location where they may be holding him, and I need a squad to go into North Vietnam and check it out.”

  His mouth dropped open in shock. “North Vietnam? Sir, a unit of ARVN Rangers could go in undercover and blend in with the locals so they wouldn’t be noticed. If they find the MIAs, we could put together a mission to go in and get them out.”

  Abrams stared at him, and his stare wasn’t pleasant. “I’m not talking about ARVN Rangers, I’m talking about you, Lieutenant. Men who’ve fought in the North, men who know how to survive in enemy territory.”

  The gung-ho fire in Cruz’s belly seemed to have evaporated. Heller, watching and listening, wondered again about some kind of mental problem. He’d completed a previous tour in Vietnam, and it could’ve got to him like it did to so many other men.

  Cruz was shaking his head. “General, that could be a bad idea.”

  “I don’t agree.” They swung around and looked at Madame Quan, “They tell me you carried out a successful mission to free MIAs from a camp in the North. If you could do it once, it means you have the necessary skills to do it again.”

  Cruz gave a polite cough. “I wasn’t on that mission, Ma’am, so I can’t comment. I believe Master Sergeant Heller was involved, along with these two men.” He indicated McGuigan, who looked her up and down and sneered. Lynch gave his familiar scowl of dislike.

  “Whatever. I need you men to get my husband back.”

  “You need?” Heller said before he could stop himself, “What do you mean, you need? With respect, you’re a civilian. If anybody takes this on, it’ll be a purely military operation.”

  She gave him a look of intense dislike, but before things got worse, the door opened. A junior officer entered and rushed to Abrams.

  “Sir, this just came in. It’s a decoded radio intercept of a transmission between Hanoi and Moscow. I think it’s significant.”

  Abrams took the message and quickly read through it while they waited. When he’d finished, his gaze swept around the room.

  “This changes everything. It details an arrangement between North Vietnam and the Soviet Union to exchange POWs listed as missing for increased arms shipments. Right now, a Russian merchant ship loaded with weaponry is on its way to Haiphong to unload and take an unspecified number of prisoners on board. The vessel will return to Vladivostok and unload the prisoners for onward transport to Moscow and their final destination.” He paused, “They’re taking them to the Serbsky Institute. I guess some of you may’ve heard of it?”

  A couple of heads nodded, but most indicated a negative. For their benefit, he described the forensic psychiatry research ‘hospital’ outside Moscow. “It sounds innocuous, but it isn’t. It specializes in torture, using a combination of powerful drugs and enhanced mental deprivation to force a man to give up everything he knows. When they’re done with them, their brains are empty husks.”

  “What could they hope to gain?”

  He looked at Cruz. “It’s a sure bet some of the downed flyers will have advanced knowledge of our weapons systems, electronic countermeasures, and radars. They could learn enough to change the balance of the air war over North Vietnam. Some officers would have knowledge of our future plans and strategies. Dammit, if they get them to Russia, what those men face is beyond the imagination of any civilized man.”

  The room was silent, men figuring out what would happen if those captives arrived in the so-called ‘psychiatric hospital’ and the Russians pumped them full of mind-bending drugs. Every man in that room knew when they put them on that ship, and it sailed outside Vietnamese territorial waters, they were gone forever. This was about more than Quan, a lot more. It was about defenseless Americans who’d vanished in action. Men who were untraceable. Until now. Maybe.

  Madame Quan broke the silence. She shouted that if they needed a reason to mount a rescue mission, now they had it. She insisted she had to get her husband back, and said if they didn’t do something, she’d go into the North and get him back herself. Not one man doubted she was serious, if not practical. The briefing ended, and the men drifted away with nothing resolved. Officers mumbled stuff about the need to gather hard intelligence and that’d take time. Cruz made it clear he had further reservations about operating in the North, described the dangers, and the probability that the men who went would be going to their deaths. Heller didn’t agree. Everything pointed to the need to check out that location outside Haiphong. If they were holding American prisoners in a secure camp and planning to pass them on to the Soviets, they had to do everything possible to get them back. Everything.

  As they were leaving, Quan’s wife, Vien, was still protesting, insisting she’d do what it took to get him back. Said she’d do whatever it took. Abrams did his best to calm her down and failed. She stormed out, muttering a long string of threats. Abrams sighed and prompted Cruz to visit the Intelligence Officer, Monaghan, and check out everything he had. It was past midday, and they went to the canteen for coffee and food. Heller downed a third mug of Java and strolled outside for some fresh air and peace. He tried to clear his mind, but it wasn’t going to happen. The last person he wanted to see strode toward him. Madame Quan. He tried to walk away, but it was too late.

  “Sergeant Heller!” she called to him, “Come with me. I want to speak with you in private.” The briefing room was empty. They went inside and she closed the door and stared at him.

  “Will you go into the North and get those men out? Get my husband out?”

  “Ma’am, it’s not my decision. I’m a soldier, so I do what they tell me.”

  Her intense gaze bored into him. “Are you scared?”

  He shrugged. “What sensible soldier isn’t?”

  “Sergeant Heller, I need your help to get him back. You’ve been there before and brought prisoners out. You’re the only man I can trust to succeed.”

  “With respect, mounting a rescue mission is a military decision. You’re not military.”

  Her gaze didn’t falter. “You must do this. The life of my husband could depend on it. As could the lives of those other men in that camp outside Haiphong.”

  “If the camp is there.”

  “It’s there. I just know it is. A small unit could go in undercover, find the camp, and get them out before the Communists know they’re there. What could go wrong?”

  “Just about everything.”

  * * *

  He was a trusted, low-level Vietnamese civilian employee. Trong Sang had been an ARVN corporal, wounded while on duty, shot in the leg and left with a pronounced limp. Out of sympathy, MACV gave him a job with the domestic staff at Tan Son Nhut. He was one of many, anonymous, just another South Vietnamese face. A man who’d fought and suffered for his country. Except it was a lie. His sympathies lay with Hanoi, not Saigon. He’d been wounded when an ARVN officer discovered him passing intelligence on a planned ARVN operation to the enemy. He tried to arrest him but Sang pulled a gun and they exchanged shots. The officer died. Sang survived with a minor wound and blamed it on the Vietcong, which gave him a perfect cover for his spying activities.

  He’d been in another building when the briefing took place, but now he’d moved on to the next room. Through a tiny hole he’d made in the woodwork, he listened to Vien and Heller talking. Whenever he overheard anything of value to the North, he passed it on, and they paid him a bonus. This was more than good, this was dynamite. An American mission into the North to search for POWs. Incredible! He pictured himself taking delivery of a new Honda motorcycle. He’d been saving for a year, and this could give him enough money to cement the deal.

  When he finished his shift, instead of going home, he visited a poverty-stricken area next to the river on the outskirts of Saigon. An area the police and military rarely visited. He knocked on the door of a squalid house. An eye appeared in the peephole, and the door opened. Nguyen Duc Tho, in overall command of the Saigon Vietcong, stood framed in the doorway. “Sang! You know you shouldn’t come here unless it’s something important.”

  “It’s important.”

  He stood aside and Sang entered. Related what he’d heard, repeated it twice and left with a promise of a cash reward when they’d confirmed the information. Tho wrote the information on a sheet of rice paper and summoned his wife.

  “I want you to take this and pass it to our radio operator outside the city. Tell him it’s for immediate transmission to Hanoi.”

  “Now? I was just…”

  “Now!” he barked. Nguyen Le was eighteen years younger than him, just fifteen-years-old, and like most young girls, he considered she needed firm handling. It was all worth it, he smiled to himself. She was very pretty, the envy of his neighbors, and he found her attractive, useful features in many ways. When she ran into soldiers on the street, they were more interested in her feminine assets than anything she might be carrying on her person. Usually hidden inside her underwear.

  She tucked the message beneath her clothing and cycled through the fetid streets until she reached the outskirts of the city. Passed the message to the radio operator, and immediately turned back for home. Her husband was not a man to cross by arriving back later than expected.

  * * *

  Less than thirty minutes after she handed over the message, the intended recipient in Hanoi was reading it. His name was Commissar General Tran Khiem, a veteran of the People’s Army. Short, square and hard-muscled, with narrow eyes and a scarred face, his reputation for brutality had earned him rapid promotion to his current high rank. Khiem was a man who would stop at nothing to achieve a result, no matter how many lives it cost. Whether those lives were soldiers or civilians, friends or enemies, meant nothing to him.

  By coincidence, he was the man who’d taken the flak for the major prisoner escape from Dien Bien Phu. He’d been lucky to get off with a minor reprimand, although since then, he knew his position hung on a thread. The investigation into what’d gone wrong at Dien Bien Phu was still ongoing, and he was thankful he hadn’t been involved in the less-than-successful attack on the Presidential Palace in Saigon.

  He needed something to safeguard his career, and this information could make all the difference. If he could prevent another American raid on the North to free prisoners, his star could once again be in the ascendant. But the affair needed to be handled properly. He ought to pass on this information now, so the People’s Army could take the necessary measures, but his part would be that of a mere messenger. If he could arrange to ambush the rescue party, kill them, or even capture them for enhanced interrogation, it would serve to underline his reliability and loyalty to the State. He needed a subordinate to assist, a man he could trust.

  A name came into his mind, a man he was confident he could rely on. Captain Hong Ninh, like him a career officer, was always anxious to do whatever it took to gain a promotion and secure his position in the People’s Army. He told his radioman to acknowledge the message and order Captain Ninh to report to him on the double.