Free Up Country by Nelson DeMille Page B

job, Mr. Conway. Sleep well tonight.”
    “Thank you.”
    He put out his hand, but I said, “Hold on. I almost forgot.” I opened my overnight bag and handed Mr. Conway my Danielle Steel book.
    He looked at it curiously, as though there were some special significance or meaning to the book.
    I said, “I don’t want that found at home if I don’t make it back. Understand? Give it to somebody. You don’t have to read it yourself.”
    Mr. Conway looked at me with some concern, then again put out his hand, and we shook. He left without even thanking me for the book.
    I opened the plastic bag left on the table, putting the money, tickets, hotel vouchers, letter, and visa in my breast pocket. I put the malaria pills, antibiotic, and The Lonely Planet Guide in my overnight bag.
    At the bottom of the plastic bag was something wrapped in tissue paper. I unwrapped it and saw it was one of those stupid snow globes. Inside the globe was a model of the Wall, black against the falling snow.
     

     

CHAPTER FOUR

    T he Asiana Air 747 began its descent into Kimpo International Airport, Seoul, Korea. After fifteen hours in the air, I wasn’t sure of the local time, or even what day it was. The sun was about forty-five degrees off the horizon, so it was either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, depending on where east and west were. When you’re circling the globe, none of this matters, anyway, unless you’re the pilot.
    I noticed that the landscape below was covered with snow. I listened to the hydraulic sounds of the aircraft as it made its initial approach.
    The seat next to me was empty, and I hoped I was as lucky on the final leg of the trip.
    Then again, there might not be a final leg if I was turned around in Seoul. Of course, the chances of that happening were near zero, but they always put that in your mind as a happy possibility. I had a similar experience the first two times I was headed to Vietnam. My orders said “Southeast Asia,” instead of the V word, as if I might be headed to Bangkok or Bali. Right.
    It was time to read the letter that had started this whole thing. I took a plain envelope from my pocket, opened it, and drew out several sheets of folded paper. The first sheet was a photocopy of the original envelope, addressed to Tran Quan Lee, followed by an abbreviation, which I supposed was his rank, then a series of numbers and letters that was his North Vietnamese army unit designation.
    The return address was Tran Van Vinh, followed by his rank and Army
unit. In neither address was there a geographical location, of course, because armies move, and the mail follows the soldiers.
    I put the envelope aside and looked at the letter itself. It was a typed, three-page translation, and there was no photocopy of the original letter in Vietnamese, making me again wonder what was missing or altered.
    Regarding the provenance of this letter, I tried to imagine the North Vietnamese army postal system during the war, which must have been as primitive as a nineteenth-century postal system; letters handed from person to person, to couriers, making their way slowly from civilians to their soldiers, or from soldiers to family, or soldiers to soldiers, as in this case, and very often, the recipient, the sender, or both were dead before the letter was delivered.
    In any case, it must have taken months for letters to reach their recipients, if at all. I thought of the three hundred thousand missing North Vietnamese soldiers, and the million known dead, many of them vaporized by thousand-pound bombs from B-52 strikes along the infiltration routes.
    It was a miracle, I realized, that this letter ever got out of the besieged city of Quang Tri, another miracle that the letter found its recipient, Tran Quan Lee in the A Shau Valley, nearly a hundred kilometers away, and a further miracle that the letter was found on Lee’s body by an American soldier. The final miracle, perhaps, was that this American soldier, Victor Ort, survived the