Free A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just

interior as remote as any interior on earth; yet in the villages a revolution was struggling to be born. When the plane touched down at last it rolled past scores of American military aircraft, fighters, helicopters, olive-drab Pipers, burly transports. Soldiers lounged in the shade of the wings. When the Boeing halted in front of the terminal, the Americans erupted with a loud sarcastic cheer; one of the stewardesses took an exaggerated bow. The raucous laughter and conversation reminded Sydney of the atmosphere in a fraternity house the night before graduation; the last carefree hours before the serious business of earning a living.
    The stranger next to him yawned and shifted his body. He had not bothered to cinch his seat belt over his vast stomach for the aircraft's descent. He turned and said, New here?
    Sydney nodded. First time.
    Well, he said. Good luck.
    You too, Sydney said.
    Yup, the stranger said, finishing his drink and tucking the plastic glass into the seat pouch, the plastic cracking with the sound of crumpled paper.
    Been here long?
    Ten months and thirteen days. He looked at his wristwatch. And eight hours and thirty-five minutes, give or take. Six weeks to go.
    You're short, then, Sydney said.
    No, no, the stranger said emphatically. I'm not short. You're not short until you're a week or less. It's bad luck to talk about short when you're long. Jesus Christ, don't talk about short. That's asking for it. He scowled at Sydney, then rapped twice on the wooden handle of his valise. Remember that, he added as he moved ponderously up the aisle.
    When Sydney cleared customs at last, Dicky Rostok was nowhere in sight. Tan Son Nhut was quiet at midmorning, pokerfaced Americans arriving on one side of the sawhorse barriers and resigned Vietnamese leaving on the other side. He was startled by the whispering of the Vietnamese, an incomprehensible seven-toned murmur of women; the men were mostly silent. The uniformed officials at passport control handled each Vietnamese travel document as tenderly as a purloined love letter, weighing it in their palms and thumbing each page, looking from the traveler to the photograph and back again, and then once more, sniffing and squinting to make absolutely certain—while on the arriving side of the barrier the scrutiny was routine, almost apologetic, the green passport opened, the visa located, the stamp applied, the passport returned with a blank administrative smile. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese inched forward and the murmur continued to rise and fall in the long lines that reached from the interior of the terminal to the teeming sidewalk outside.
    Sydney stood alone in the vast open-air lobby feeling the heat and the press of humanity, the Americans so large, bull-like shoulders bulging under short-sleeved drip-dry shirts, the Vietnamese dressed up and brittle as birds, shy in the muscular ceremony of arrival and departure; and just then he understood that he fit both categories, arriving in one sense, departing in another. He had only made landfall. His journey had yet to begin, and until it did he would remain as much a part of America as the Boeing he had just left. This airport seemed to be as much American as Vietnamese, the local police standing about with the authority of cocktail waitresses in a gambling casino. He wondered at the identity of the Vietnamese travelers, as many women as men, grinning and nervous as they made their way slowly to passport control. They would be traveling to Hong Kong or Bangkok, to shop or to transact business, perhaps to emigrate. In any case they did not seem reluctant to leave.
    The Americans were obvious enough, construction workers and government officials, crew-cut soldiers in mufti. He recognized someone from the State Department, a deputy assistant something or other who had conducted one of the endless briefings, and a woman who worked for one of the think tanks, Hudson or RAND. He remembered her from a conference at NYU. Mr.