There were no bombs that night. They’d be raining down in force soon enough during Operation Linebacker II, which made a mess of the northern capital and killed a lot of people. We all remarked later how limited the imaginations were of the men who came up with the name. Surely they couldn’t have run out of sports references. But Jane and her team left the next morning without my message to Hollywood. I had her autograph and I cherished it until one day when I had the flu and thought it was a tissue. It was the nearest I’d been to a movie star. She’d smiled at me.

So, as there’d been no romance in the royal suite and I still had a tank of adrenaline, I put all my energy into my next interview with Henry. I seem to recall there was me, Civilai, General Xuan, the child interpreter Hung Lan and a CIA liaison person who was supervising the orderly release of his pilots. I can’t remember his name. Two guards escorted Henry to the canteen. Something in the way he walked told me he was confident this was to be his release day. We sat him down and he smiled only at the CIA guy, who didn’t smile back. As I was technically the lead attorney, I spoke to the prisoner in Lao, and Xuan translated into Vietnamese, which Mr. CIA seemed to understand. It was messy but it worked.

“Henry,” I said. “I’ve been learning a lot about you.”

He looked confused.

“I was able to trace the records back to the day you crashed,” I continued.

“June 1966 flying an F-100,” said Henry, smiling.

“They never did find your plane,” I said.

“Lot of jungle out there,” he said. “It may never be found.”

“Perhaps because we’re looking in the wrong place,” I said.

“Once my instruments short-circuited there was no way of being sure where I was,” he said. “Like I say, there’s a lot of unoccupied land out there.”

“Lot of river too,” I said.

He looked at me for the first time.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

“It means that a North Vietnamese radar unit plotted your course that day and had you a hundred kilometers off your designated route on the west of Bolikhamxai. You were over the Mekong when the blip disappeared.”

Henry looked at the men in front of him and realized for the first time that this was not a handover committee.

“What is this?” he said.

“Your plane wreckage was not found in the jungles of Bolikhamxai because you put it down in the river a hundred kilometers west.”

“Bullshit,” said Henry.

“It’s undoubtedly still there,” I said. “But we’ll have to wait for the war to end before we go scavenging. You parachuted, not into hostile Laos, but, as you planned, into Thailand.”