Winter Soldier. Marisa Carroll

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СКАЧАТЬ for less than an hour, instead of half the day.

      The sun was setting when the rain stopped. The air had cooled ever so slightly. Leah produced apples and oranges, peanut butter and cheese crackers and bottled water from her backpack. They shared their makeshift meal with the guards, who spoke English far better than Adam spoke Vietnamese. As darkness fell, a little battery-powered lantern materialized from yet another pocket of Leah’s backpack. It fought the darkness to a standstill in a small circle around them.

      As the hours slowly passed, he’d kept her talking about her work, about growing up an army brat and about her family. He’d learned her parents were retired, her father after thirty years in the military, her mother after a career as a teacher. One brother was a U.S. Navy SEAL, one a navy chaplain, the third an army Green Beret.

      And in return he had given up a few details of his own life during the dark minutes before midnight—broken home, one brother, who lived in California, he saw only now and then. Both parents dead. They’d lived hard and died young, he’d told her. She hadn’t asked for more details and he hadn’t offered them. He told her about the judge who’d given him the choice of joining the U.S. Marine Corps, or going to jail for a joyride that had resulted in a totaled car. He’d taken advantage of college courses the Corps offered, found he was a good student and went on to medical school. And then the unrelenting grind of a neurosurgical internship and residency, followed by one marriage, one son, one divorce and all the nightmares he could handle. This last he hadn’t spoken aloud.

      Than Son Nhut he’d faced and survived. This morning it was Saigon. The city had fallen to the victorious enemy only one day after his helicopter had lifted off the airfield. He wondered if Leah’s company might be as potent a talisman against the past today as it had been yesterday.

      He walked the few feet down the hallway to her room and pushed open the louvered door. Her accommodations were identical to his—high ceiling, white walls, sheer curtains at the French doors. The place had once been a villa that belonged to a South Vietnamese general, B.J. had told him. Now it was a hotel, a joint venture between the Vietnamese and an Australian firm. They were trying hard, but they hadn’t gotten it quite right yet. The rooms were clean, the toilets worked, and there was hot water, but no soap and only one towel in the communal bathroom. The electricity was eccentric, as Leah had said. To turn on the ceiling fan, he’d had to hook two bare wires together, and there was no such thing as room service.

      Leah must have heard him enter the room. “There’s whitener in those little packets,” she called from the balcony.

      “No, thanks. Black is fine.” He couldn’t help himself to her coffee and then just leave, walk back into his room and stare at the walls, so he made himself move through the doors onto the balcony to stand beside her.

      Saigon was up with the sun. The dusty, tree-lined street below was crowded with bicycles, motor scooters and cyclos, the bicycle-rickshaws that served as taxicabs and couriers everywhere in Vietnam. There were also a few cars and buses, but completely absent were marked lanes and traffic signals, at least none that anyone was obeying. Traffic moved in both directions on both sides of the street. It was every man for himself.

      Leash was leaning over the railing watching what went on below. She was wearing a flowered cotton skirt that ended just above her ankles and a shortsleeved pink blouse that complemented her creamy skin. Her mink-brown hair was pulled back into a French braid so complicated he wondered how she could accomplish it on her own. There was nothing even vaguely military about her appearance. Today she was all woman.

      “How does anyone manage to cross the street safely?” she asked.

      “Like that,” Adam pointed with his coffee mug. A man with two young children in tow waded, undaunted, into the traffic. Miraculously, bicycles, cyclos, motor scooters, even a bus, swerved to miss him and the children.

      Leah let out her breath in a whoosh. “They made it,” she said, turning to Adam with amazement on her face. “You just start walking. Show no fear. It’s like my dad said it would be.”

      “Your dad was here?”

      “In ‘65 and ’68,” she said.

      “He was in the country during the Tet offensive?”

      She nodded. “That’s where he got his Purple Heart. He wants to come back, but Mom says no more. She’s never going anywhere that requires a passport again. We moved eleven times in fifteen years. I’m sorry. I told you all this last night, didn’t I.”

      “I enjoyed it,” he said. She blinked. He’d spoken too tersely. He was out of the habit of making small talk with a woman.

      “I’m going to do some sight-seeing right after breakfast. Dad wants pictures of the embassy and Chinatown, and I want to tour the presidential palace. They’ve kept it exactly as it was the day the North Vietnamese marched into the city. Want to come along?”

      “No.” Again, too terse. “I mean, I...I hadn’t thought about it.”

      She rested her hip against the stone railing and looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug. “Of course, you were here before. You said so last night.” She turned her head, her gaze moving in the direction of the abandoned American Embassy. “It’s so different—not what I expected at all. My impressions were shaped by those videos of the last days—pictures of tanks and soldiers with guns, mobs of terrified people fighting to get out. But this... It’s as if the war never happened.”

      “For most of these people it didn’t,” he said. “Vietnam is a young country. Half the people here were born after the war. They don’t want to look back. They want to move forward.” Good advice. Too damned bad he couldn’t follow it himself.

      B.J. appeared on Adam’s balcony. “Hey, buddy, there you are. You left your door unlocked, did you know that?” He waved a greeting. “Good morning, Leah.”

      “Good morning, B.J.”

      “Leah has coffee.” Adam moved to the edge of the balcony and surveyed his friend across the few feet separating them. B.J. was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian-print shirt in shades of pink and orange. His red baseball cap was emblazoned with the Marine Corps emblem in gold.

      “So does the hotel restaurant, old buddy. Café filtre and baguettes. Delicious.”

      Leah laughed and held out her mug. “You mean I dragged a coffeemaker all the way from Kentucky for nothing?”

      “Nope. I’m only saying they’ve got great coffee in the hotel. Hospital coffee is the same the world over—not fit to drink. I doubt it’s any different at Dalat. You’ll get plenty of use out of it there.”

      “Any word on when we’ll be moving out?”

      B.J. poked at a piece of crumbling balcony railing with the toe of his shoe. “That’s what I came to tell you. The trucks pulled up at the airport about an hour ago. If there’s any sight-seeing you want to do, I suggest you do it this morning. We’ll be leaving here before noon. Don’t want to get stranded overnight somewhere along the highway. Luckily the day starts early here. Most of the shops are open by seven, the museums, too. Some of the others have already left the hotel. If you apply yourself, you should be able to see a little of the city and at least hit the antique shops on Dong Khoi Street.”

      “An excellent plan, B.J. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

      “Why don’t you СКАЧАТЬ