On the apron, they turned right and wheeled a wide slow semicircle through the hot jet wash until they were lined up with the Starlifter’s ramp. They slow-marched forward, up the exact centre of the ramp, feeling carefully with their feet for the metal ribs bolted there to help them, and on into the belly of the plane. The pilot was waiting for them. She was a US Air Force captain, trim in a tropical-issue flight suit. Her crew was standing at attention with her, a copilot, a flight engineer, a navigator, a radio operator. Opposite them were the loadmaster and his crew, silent in green fatigues. They stood face-to-face in two still lines, and the honour guard filed slowly between them, all the way up to the forward loading bay. There they bent their knees and gently lowered the casket on to a shelf built along the fuselage wall. Four of the men stood back, heads bowed. The forward man and the rear man worked together to slide the casket into place. The loadmaster stepped forward and secured it with rubber straps. Then he stepped back and joined the honour guard and held a long silent salute.
It took an hour to load all seven caskets. The people inside the hangar stood silent throughout, and then they followed the seventh casket on to the apron. They matched their walk to the honour guard’s slow pace,
and waited at the bottom of the Starlifter’s ramp in the hot noisy damp of the evening. The honour guard came out, duty done. The tall silver-haired American saluted them and shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and nodded to the American woman. No words were exchanged. He shouldered his garment bag and ran lightly up the ramp into the plane. A slow powerful motor whirred and the ramp closed shut behind him. The engines ran up to speed and the giant plane came off its brakes and started to taxi. It wheeled a wide cumbersome left and disappeared behind the hangar. Its noise grew faint. Then it grew loud again in the distance and the watchers saw it come back along the runway, engines screaming, accelerating hard, lifting off. It yawed right, climbing fast, turning, dipping a wing, and then it was gone, just a triangle of winking lights tiny in the distance and a vague smudge of black kerosene smoke tracing its curved path into the night air.
The honour guard dispersed in the sudden silence and the American woman shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and walked back to her car. The three Vietnamese officers walked in a different direction, back to theirs. It was a Japanese sedan, repainted a dull military green. The woman drove, and the two men sat in the back. It was a short trip to the centre of Hanoi. The woman parked in a chain-link compound behind a low concrete building painted the colour of sand. The men got out without a word and went inside through an unmarked door. The woman locked the car and walked around the building to a different entrance. She went inside and up a short flight of stairs to her office. There was a bound ledger open on her desk. She recorded the safe despatch of the cargo in
neat handwriting and closed the ledger. She carried it to a filing cabinet near her office door. She locked it inside, and glanced through the door, up and down the corridor. Then she returned to her desk and picked up her telephone and dialled a number eleven thousand miles away in New York.
Marilyn got Sheryl woken up and Chester brought round into some sort of consciousness before the thickset man came into the bathroom with the coffee. It was in mugs, and he was holding them two in one hand and one in the other, unsure of where to leave them. He paused and stepped to the sink and lined them up on the narrow granite ledge under the mirror. Then he turned without speaking and walked back out. Pulled the door closed after him, firmly, but without slamming it.
Marilyn handed out the mugs one at a time, because she was trembling and pretty sure she was going to spill them if she tried them two at a time. She squatted down and gave the first one to Sheryl, and helped her take the first sip. Then she went back for Chester’s. He took it from her blankly and looked at it like he didn’t know what it was. She took the third for herself and stood against the sink and drank it down, thirstily. It was good. The cream and the sugar tasted like energy.