The two who had hauled him from the interrogation room were sitting up front. There was something vaguely familiar about the back of the driver’s head; it seemed kind of square for a Vietnamese head, somehow. Ngo had gone to Saigon University after he got out of the Army, and was fairly sophisticated; he assumed the blow to his head had broken something and he was hallucinating. He hoped a subdural hematoma would finish him before the legendary Colonel Vo got him to wherever he was taking him.

The colonel sat beside him, which struck him odd somehow. He made himself turn to look his future tormentor squarely in the eye.

And screamed.

There was no Vo. Instead a man sat beside him wrapped in a black cape, grinning at him from the depths of a cowl. His face was hairless. It was also blue.

“Those assholes swallowed my act hook, line, and sinker. Did you see that, Kim?” He reached forward to grab the driver’s shoulder.

Kim Giau Minh, playing the driver, nodded his head. The cowled man settled back in the rear seat. Ngo caught a glimpse of what seemed millions of tiny lights in his cape. Lights like… stars.

“I’m slick,” he said, rubbing blue hands together, “so slick. I don’t see why Mark doesn’t choose me more. I’m really a lot more useful than the others. Much more versatile. Don’t you agree?”

Ngo nodded, though it made his head ring like a temple bell. The apparent fact of his escape from torture, degradation, betrayal, and death was beginning to penetrate the fog. If the blue man had asked him to confirm that he was Queen Victoria – another celestial personage for the Cao Dai – he would have nodded too.

The blue man looked at him closely. “Say, you wouldn’t have a sister, would you? I don’t get out too often.”

Dawn was graying-out the clouds over distant jungle. The patrol boat prowled between banks covered in grass grown thick and high from the summer monsoon. The crew kept their thumbs on the firing-switches despite the fatigue of a night’s patrol. The half hour before the sun actually popped the horizon was prime time for ambushers.

The boat was a Soviet copy of an old American RAG – River Assault Group – design, made especially for the Border Guards Directorate of the KGB. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan it had been retired from service on Central Asia’s Amu Dar’ya, where it and others of its class had been engaged in trying to prevent arms from being smuggled south cross river to the ’Stan, and dope from coming north. The boats had not been a conspicuous success in either endeavor. But the Vietnamese armed forces were intent on resembling the Americans they had outlasted a decade and a half before as closely as possible, so they just had to have the craft when they hit the market.

The rating drowsing upright in the forward twin 12.7 mount jerked fully awake. “Did you feel that? Did you?” he demanded in a shrill voice, tracking the gun barrels left and right at the mist rising off the river.

The warrant officer in command stuck his head out of the armored cabin. “What’s going on?” he yelled over the engine throb.

“I felt something hit us! Didn’t you feel it?”

“Vang!” yelled the man from the after-machinegun mount. “Yes! I felt it too.”

“It was just a snag, Linh,” the warrant officer said. ’A sunken branch caught on a bar. All kinds of things get in the river in the monsoon. Go back to sleep.”

Thump. The fifty-foot craft rocked perceptibly. The warrant officer lurched, had to grab at the hatchway for support.

“What in the name of all hell’s is going on?”

The impact seemed to have come on the starboard bow. A rating ran from the armor-plated cabin to peer down into the heavy water.

“Look!” he shouted, pointing. “I see something down there. Something gray, going away fast.”

Linh pointed his guns that way. “Shall I shoot? Shall I shoot?”

“If you do, you’ll blow To into tiny pieces, you cretin!” the warrant shouted. “Helm, cut the throttle. We need to find out what’s happening -”

“It’s coming back!” To screamed.

The engine sounds died. The boat slowed perceptibly as it coasted into the current, wallowing from side to side. And suddenly it rocked sharply.

To went headfirst over the rail.

At once he began thrashing, splashing, and screaming. If he could swim, he was keeping the fact well hidden.

“Nguyen, throw him a line. Linh, keep a lookout. If you see anything, shoot it.”

To’s shrieks rose an octave, and he actually came halfway out of the water. “Oh, Buddha, oh, Jesus, it’s got me, help, help, help!”

The warrant officer ran to the side – not as near as To had been. The rating was bobbing hysterically up and down, waving his arms. “Shoot!” the warrant officer yelled, dancing back. Then: “No! Don’t shoot!”

Linh, who was tightening his thumbs on the butterfly trigger, cranked up the barrels of his heavy machine guns in time to chew up the tall weeds on the bank instead of To.

And then To was staggering in the shallows, pushed to relative safety by some unseen force. “AHH! Ahh. Ah?” he said. He scrabbled up the bank on all fours, then sat down and covered his face with his hands.

“Now, shoot!” the warrant officer commanded. Linh dutifully began to rake the murky river just shy of the bank, throwing great brown sheets of water over To. To screamed and ran off into the weeds.

Linh stopped shooting. There was a terrific bang, so loud that the warrant officer thought for a moment a round might have cooked off in the chamber. The little boat rocked back.

When it fell forward again, it just kept going. Slowly but unmistakably.

A rating ran from below-decks. “The hull’s all caved in!” he screamed. “We’re sinking!”

“Ridiculous!” the warrant said. A big air bubble rolled to the surface, right in front of the bow.

A metal ammo box came sliding forward down the deck. The boat was settling heavily by the bows now. The warrant officer slammed his pith helmet on the deck.

“Why couldn’t the filthy Americans-without-money have sold us a boat with a metal hull?”

A shape burst from the water, big and sleek and streamlined and silver-gray. It hung in the air a heartbeat, grinning all over its rostrum at them. Then it fell back into the river with a splash that swamped the deck clear to the gun mount.

Linh turned and fled, screaming, “Sea monster! Sea monster!” The warrant officer grabbed him and started punching him.

“It’s just a dolphin, you coward!”

“Dolphins don’t sink ships,” Linh sobbed.

The beast broke the surface again fifty meters away, streaking off in a racing jump. Cursing, the warrant officer released Linh and jumped to the twin machine guns. The dolphin was moving away incredibly fast, shooting up out of the water at regular intervals.

The warrant officer fired the ammo cans dry. He never came close to hitting the dolphin. It vanished around a bend in the river.

He had to wade through ankle-deep water to abandon ship.

“What’s bothering that damned dog?” the sentry demanded.

His partner had his heels dug in and was holding the leash with both hands in an effort to keep the straining, snarling German shepherd from pulling him off his feet and dragging him out of the white high-noon glare of the floodlights that illuminated the ammo dump’s perimeter.

“I don’t know,” he said between panting breaths. “He’s never acted like this before.”

“Stupid animal. I should put a bullet between his ears. That would calm him down.”

“No! He must sense something. He’s a good dog.” The handler sounded wounded. He’d been through training with the dog; his fellow sentry was just somebody he’d been assigned to walk the wire with tonight. The dog was his buddy.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Here. I’ll let him go. He’ll show you.” He released the animal.