Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“There’s not that much to tell,” said Dar. “I was only there for forty-eight hours in 1975. But I went back a few years ago—in 1997. There’s a six-day tour leaving from Ho Chi Minh City that ends up in Dalat. Americans are discouraged from traveling in Vietnam, but it’s not illegal. You can fly from Bangkok for just two hundred seventy dollars on Vietnam Airline, or three hundred twenty on the more comfortable Thai Airway. In Dalat you can stay in a bug-ridden hostel named Hotel Dalat, or a fleabag hotel called the Minh Tam, or in a Vietnamese version of a luxury resort named the Anh Doa. I stayed at the Anh Doa. It even has a pool.”

“I thought you don’t fly as a passenger,” said Syd.

“This was a rare exception,” said Dar. “Anyway, it’s a pretty tour. The tour bus goes along the National Road Number Twenty from Ho Chi Minh City past Bao Loc, Di Linh, and Duc Trong—mostly huge tea and coffee plantations in that area, very green—and then climbs up the Pren Pass onto the south end of the Lang Biang plateau to get to the city of Dalat.”

Syd listened.

“Dalat is famous for its lakes,” continued Dar. “They have names like Xuan Huong, Than Tho, Da Thien, Van Kiep, Me Linh…lovely names and pretty lakes, except for some industrial pollution.”

Syd waited.

“There’s some jungle,” said Dar, “but above the city, it’s mostly pine forests. Even the forests and valleys have magical names—Ai An, which means Passion Forest, and Tinh Yeu, which translates to Love Valley.”

Syd put down her coffee cup. “Thank you for the tour, Dar, but I don’t give a damn about how Dalat looked in 1997. Will you tell me what happened there in 1975? It’s all still classified in the dossiers, but I know that you came out of there with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

“They gave decorations to everyone who was there at the end,” said Dar, sipping his coffee. “It’s what countries and armies do when they’re defeated—they hand out medals.”

Syd waited.

“OK,” said Dar. “To tell you the truth, the Dalat mission is still technically classified—but it’s no longer secret. In January of 1997 a little paper called the Tri-City Herald broke the story and it got reprinted in the back pages of several other papers. I didn’t see it, but the travel agent told me about it when I was booking my tour.”

Syd sipped her coffee.

“Not too much of a story,” repeated Dar. His voice sounded ragged even to himself. Perhaps he was coming down with a cold. “In the last days before the big bugout from Saigon, the South Vietnamese reminded us that we’d built them a reactor at Dalat. There was some radioactive material there—including eighty grams of plutonium—that the U.S. officials didn’t want falling into the hands of the Communists. So they rounded up two heroic scientists named Wally and John and flew them into Dalat to grab the material before the VC and NVA overran the place. The scientists succeeded.”

“And you went with them as a Marine sniper,” said Syd. “And then?”

“And then, really, nothing,” said Dar. “Wally and John did all of the work finding and extracting the stuff they were supposed to find.” He managed a smile. “They knew how to shut down a nuclear reactor and use those remote handlers, but they had to teach themselves how to drive a forklift. Anyway, we took the isotopes and the canister marked plutonium and hightailed it out of there.”

“But there was fighting?” said Syd.

Dar went over to pour more coffee, realized that the pot was empty, and sat down. After a minute he said, “Sure. There always is in a war. Even in a lame-duck war like the one in 1975.”

“And you fired your rifle in anger,” said Syd. It was a question.

“No, actually, I didn’t,” said Dar. “I fired my weapon, but I wasn’t angry at anyone, except maybe at the assholes who had forgotten the damned reactor stuff in the first place. That’s the truth.”

Syd sighed. “Dr. Dar Minor as a Marine sniper…nineteen years old…It just doesn’t fit the person I know…sort of know.”

Dar waited.

“Will you at least tell me why you became a Marine?” asked Syd. “And a sniper of all things?”

“Yes,” said Dar, feeling his heart suddenly thud against his rib cage as he realized he was telling the truth. He would tell her. And in many ways, that was much more personal than the details of Dalat.

He glanced at his watch. “But it’s getting late right now, Investigator. Can we take a rain check on that part of the show-and-tell? I have some work to do before turning in tonight.”

Syd bit her lip and looked around the room—she had closed the curtains and shutters before they’d turned on the first lamp—but now the shadows were as rich as the orange lamp glow. For a wild second Dar thought that she was going to suggest that they spend the night—both of them—here in the cabin. His pulse was still racing.

“All right,” said Syd. “I’ll help you clear the dishes and we’ll hit the road. But you promise that you’ll tell me soon why you became a Marine?”

“I promise,” Dar heard himself say.

They were outside in the dark, heading for their respective vehicles, when Dar said, “The Dalat story has a punch line, sort of. It’s the main reason they kept it all classified, I think. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure,” said Syd.

“Remember I said that the mission was really about retrieving that priceless eighty grams of weapons-grade plutonium?”

“Yes.”

Dar jingled his car keys in his right hand. He was carrying the gun case in his left. “Well, Wally and John found the lead-lined canister marked plutonium,” he said. “We got it out. The Feds, in their wisdom, sent it under guard to the big nuclear facility at Hanford, Idaho, where they carefully stored it along with thousands of other canisters of the stuff.”

“Yes?” prompted Syd.

“Well, four years after my first visit to Dalat, in 1979, someone finally got around to looking at it.”

Syd waited in the pine-scented dark.

“It wasn’t plutonium at all,” said Dar. “We went to all that trouble to retrieve eighty grams of polonium.”

“What’s the difference?” said Syd.

“Plutonium makes atomic and hydrogen bombs work,” said Dar. “Polonium doesn’t do much of anything.”

“How could they—Wally and George or whatever—make that kind of mistake?”

“Wally and John didn’t,” said Dar. “One of the Vietnamese reactor techs must have slapped the wrong symbol on the canister.”

“So what happened to the plutonium?”

“According to another report in the reliable Tri-City Herald on January 19, 1997,” said Dar, “the Republic of Vietnam’s spokesman said, and I quote, ‘The Dalat Nuclear Research Institute is currently preserving the amount of plutonium left behind by the Americans as required by technical necessity.’”

Dar had said this lightly, but Syd’s silence seemed heavy. Finally she said, “You mean the reactor is up and running again?”

“The Russian scientists helped the North Vietnamese get it operational a month after they won the war,” he said.

Dar, the merciless ex-Marine sniper, spent the rest of Friday night and all day Saturday sewing and going through his back issues of Architectural Digest .

Some years ago, when Lawrence was poking around amidst Dar’s shelves, the adjuster had come across several years worth of the white-spined interior design magazines, and said, “Who the hell do these belong to?” Dar had made the mistake of trying to explain why he liked reading such home interior design magazines—how the pictured worlds without humans were so static, so perfect, so… minded …how that frozen-forever-perfection always translated in the prose to a couple, gay or straight, living in a timeless, clutterless, decision-free universe since everything was in its place, every pillow fluffed and creased to perfection. In reality the Architectural Digest edition was usually off the stand less than three months before the director and movie star who had built their perfect palace announced their divorce. The irony of the great gap between the perfectly designed, perfectly photographed homes and the chaos of real life amused Dar. Besides, it made good bed and bathroom reading.