Tuan glanced quickly up into the sky, then focused back on the dangers of the river. He tilted the rudder away from a swiftly moving log and then narrowly dodged the bloated carcass of a dead pig. “Khong co sao,” he answered. Condley could tell that a typhoon would never deter Tuan. Forty dollars was the equivalent of a month’s wages, and the little boatmaster had already planned on how he was going to spend it. “Di Ninh Phuoc di ve Danang, bon muoi do-lah, duoc, duoc.”

“What did he say?” asked Hanson Muir.

“Roughly, he said, ‘So fucking what?’ The rain doesn’t matter. He wants the money. He’s a tough little bastard, I told you that.”

“No, let’s put this in character, Brandon. If you hired him, he’s got to be the toughest little bastard in all of central Viet Nam, right? And by the time we finish this trip he’ll have become a legend.”

“He’s already a legend, just for taking us,” said Condley, secretly enjoying Muir’s unease. “If we finish the trip, they’ll erect a shrine in his honor.”

Muir shrugged, nervously looking at the sky. “I take your point about the storm. Tell him we’ll give him the money anyway. He didn’t even look up at that cloud bank, you know.”

“He was born here. He can smell a typhoon from fifty miles away.” Condley waved the boatmaster on, laughing grimly. He loved the nguoi trungs, as they called the combative, tough people from Viet Nam’s central mountain region. “The fucker’s going to die for forty bucks.”

“I told you, give him the money.”

“Well, then you’ve got to deal with his pride. He’s a nguoi trung, Professor. He’ll never take a handout.” Condley nudged Muir. “Are you sure you want to keep going?”

From the look on his flabby moon of a face, it was clear that Hanson Muir was not sure at all. The boat hit a half-submerged log, jarring them and knocking Muir sideways. The heavyset anthropologist held nervously to the boat railing and pushed his dirty eyeglasses back up his nose. Finally he sighed. “We’re almost there, aren’t we? If we return to Da Nang we’ve got to come back out here and do it all over again.”

“If we keep going and then get back to Da Nang after the typhoon hits, we won’t get out. The plane from Sai Gon won’t even come in there. The entire airport area will be underwater. And if we get stuck in Ninh Phuoc during a typhoon, we might end up staying there till spring. The way the Taiwanese have been strip-logging up in those mountains, the root systems are almost gone. This whole region could become one giant mud slide.”

Muir forced a grin, masking his fear. “I’ve always been tempted to take a Vietnamese wife.”