Dzung carried the baby in his arms as he and his family followed the driver down the alleyway for several blocks, where the van was parked on a wider road. He sat in the front seat of the van, across from the driver. His wife, Tu, and the children sat in the two back rows of seats, amazed at their first automobile ride and the feel of air-conditioning on their skin. The baby was placed in its rear compartment just behind the third row of seats.

The driver announced that he was taking them to a small village just outside Bien Hoa, where the baby would be buried in Tu’s family cemetery. A representative of the People’s Committee would be present at the burial. Tu’s entire family had been notified and were waiting at the burial ground for their arrival. Courtesy, said the driver again, of the new government policy that favored the reunification of families after death.

The traffic was very heavy. They listened to sad music on the cassette player just above the radio. Manh was nowhere to be seen, but to Dzung his presence was as real as the music, as permeating as the cool air that washed over them from the vents inside the van. And from that moment forward Dzung knew the deal was sealed. He could never again question the uses to which he would be put. He had made the offer, and Manh’s superiors had accepted it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Exmouth, Australia

From Perth they flew eight hundred miles due north, over vast, empty deserts and ledges of dust-covered, craggy mountains. The sea was always just to the west, cobalt blue, as endless and as empty as the sky. Below them, a stringlike, hopeless road paralleled the coastline, connecting occasional little towns that appeared to be more like frontier outposts than modern living centers. Herds of wild horses vectored this way and that like schools of fish as the twin-engine aircraft passed over them, and then a throng of donkeys, and after that a valley full of ostriches and mobs of jackrabbits, thousands of them seeming to pile on top of one another as they scrambled away from the sudden noise. Halfway to Exmouth, Condley was certain he saw the silhouettes of camels loping ghostlike through the shadowed, powdery ridges. It was the wildest and most eerily empty terrain he had ever seen.

Finally they reached the northwest corner of the continent, where a peninsula jutted out for another twenty miles into the first beginnings of the Indian Ocean. Above the sea the aircraft bounced like a kite from a sudden burst of wind, then dove quickly, finding a narrow strip of runway among the dust-filled weeds of the peninsula, where it barked and skittered to a halt.

“Exmouth,” said the fleshy-faced, balding pilot, consciously checking his watch as he called to them from his seat. “I guess three hours will do it before we turn around?”