The Ninth Dragon by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-13T19:56:49+00:00

Chapter Fourteen:

All Things Come

Ho Chi Minh City August 22

Time hung heavy. Sam Borne sat in a wicker café chair in front of a small wicker table on the veranda of the Dong Khoi Hotel, formerly the Continental Palace Hotel. This was about as near as you could come these days in Ho Chi Minh City to sitting in a café watching life parade by. Sam had carefully arranged to be here to pass the time in this early evening hour. He watched the light change in the plaza directly in front of the National Assembly. He had liked the National Assembly much better years earlier when it had been the National Theater. On that first visit years ago, he had seen a fairly well-mounted production of Molière’s Tartuffe in this very theater, but nothing that lighthearted was likely to be staged here again. It wouldn’t do for the Communists to show life as playful; no, now everything had to appear grim.

Grim was exactly how Sam was feeling. It was only a matter of time before he heard back from Bui and whoever controlled him. Bui’s presence the previous evening at his sister Amy’s apartment was no accident. He was sure to be back. In fact, Sam was annoyed that things had developed as slowly as they had. He was certain he had done all the groundwork necessary when he’d fed Bui the story about his being a professor at Harvard. A phone call or two would dispel that fabrication. Bui should have been here already, especially since Sam had specifically told Amy that he’d be on the veranda at the Dong Khoi from seven to eight in the evening.

Out in the plaza some kids kicked a soccer ball around in an impromptu game, their shouts filling the air. Watching them carried Sam back to the days of his own boyhood, when he’d been an urchin, a street fighter, a hustler. He had led a band of roving thieves the same age as the kids playing soccer. In Tokyo, Sam and his band had roamed the downtown streets where the GIs went to get liquored and laid. As the leader, Sam would wait for the right moment, then fling himself into action, spearheading attack after attack that resulted in some drunken GI losing his wallet, his watch and rings, and sometimes a tooth or two. There were even cases where Sam’s victims had to have their jaws wired and then had to eat baby food through a rubber grill in the front of their mouths while their broken jaws healed. Eventually, after so many of these attacks, the American MPs succeeded in running Sam and his gang to ground.

Sam had been marked out immediately and referred to high-ranking intelligence officers who’d quickly discovered that he’d been left in a hand basket on the United States air base at Mount Susshima on the second day of November in 1951. They further learned that his father had been one of the paratroopers with

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