Before he could react, she stood and hugged him. No one had held him in a very long time. His head felt light, blood rushed hot to his skin. He made an awkward, panicked escape.

“I will be gone for a few days. A week at most.”

“But we have the story to cover.”

“Can’t be helped. You’ll be fine.”

Back at the café, he ordered a whiskey. He was meeting with Mr. Bao the next day in Tra Vinh, and had to have his head clear. He would gather maps and stop by the American commissary and pick up Mr. Bao’s new passions: two cartons of Marlboros and four loaves of Wonder Bread.

Linh allowed Mr. Bao to believe that they were having an effect on the American reporting of the war, although the reporters ended up being far more disillusioned by the truth than anything Linh could craft. “You just can’t manage to stick to one side,” Mr. Bao had said after finding him. Ironically, Linh’s intelligence gathering now included Mr. Bao, too, and his new sideline of drug trafficking, using the military for protection. He was making millions. Besides his dabbling in small-time brothels. His corruption made him the ideal partner for Linh-a man always open to compromise.

A week later, the helicopter dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early morning. The change in geography was startling: the sultry flatness of the Mekong, with its inland oceans of rice paddies and white-hot sky, all replaced by the thinner, cooler air of the Central Highlands with its burned gold of elephant grass, olive drab of bamboo and scrub, its ancient menace of mahogany and teak forests.

Inside the military compound, a mission was being patched together to rescue an earlier convoy headed for a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border. According to the last radio dispatches, only a few survivors were holding out.

Helen argued with the head sergeant, Medlock, a hound-faced man, and finally got permission to accompany the rescue. She felt jittery but swallowed the fear, already getting used to having Linh at her shoulder.

“You willing to share some of that?” Helen asked a first lieutenant, Reilly, sitting on an ammunition crate eating a chocolate bar.

“Sure.” He broke off a piece and handed it to her. “Need my energy for this baby.”

Helen nodded and put a piece of soft, melted chocolate on her tongue.

“You and I better keep our hats on.” He pointed to his own hair, the color of red-licked flame. “Our heads are like target practice.” He pulled out a beaten-up bush hat. “This here is my lucky one. Some shaman or something blessed it by pissing on it.”

Helen gave a short laugh. “No kidding?”

“Yeah, but he said whoever wears it won’t get hurt. So far not a scratch.”

“Makes up for having to put it on your head.”

“I got two. ’Case I lose one. You want to wear it?”

“Already have my own.” She touched the bush hat that Olsen had given her, that led to the Captain Tong pictures. She stood up. “Thanks for the chocolate.”

“You find me if you change your mind.”

Medlock gave a shout, and Helen searched for Linh, finding him with a group of Vietnamese paratroopers. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’re on.”

He looked at her and then looked back at the Vietnamese officers. He picked up the film and camera bags and followed her. In the background she could hear snickers from the paratroopers. “We’re not going,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“This convoy will be ambushed.”

“Well, a chance of that. But we’re going.” She couldn’t let on that her stomach was sour, her hands clammy. Shouldn’t she be getting over this by now?

He put the bags down. “This time, no.”

Helen looked back at the paratroopers and then at him. Trucks lined up and loaded with supplies; jeeps filled with machine guns and grenades. A queer, unreal look to everything, and now Linh was spooking her. “Do they know something?” she said, pointing her chin toward the paratroopers.

“Let’s move out,” Sergeant Medlock shouted again.

“Listen to me this one time,” Linh said. He looked her in the face because this was more urgent than his politeness. “Stay behind.”

“I’ll look like a fool,” she said. “ Gary ’s expecting pictures.”

“Be a fool then.” His throat grew tight. “Here you listen to me. Here I know better.”

The sergeant came toward her with a clipboard. “ Adams, you ride in the second jeep.”

She stood for a moment looking at the ground. She hadn’t expected this-not an assistant but a babysitter. Her confidence so fragile that she was afraid if she backed down now, she would always find reasons to.

Medlock sighed. “Look, don’t give me trouble about the lead truck. I need my men on that one.”

Helen kept silent, Linh’s eyes on her. If she let him order her around now, there would be no end to it in the future.

“ Adams? Am I disturbing you?”

“I’m going to have to pass.”

“Hurray, one less problem.” He walked away, already forgetting them. Now that the choice had been made, she took off her bush hat and wiped her forehead, angry that she had given in, angry that she already felt the physical relief from fear. Failure pounded at her. “I doubt you would have kept Darrow from going.”

“I wouldn’t need to. He would know better.”

“What would’ve he known?”

Linh shrugged, tired of the conversation. He could not endure this. He would go back and give Darrow an ultimatum-either he worked for him or no one. Certainly not this woman.

Helen glared. Without a word, she turned and stalked away toward the communications bunker. The rest of the morning she took pictures at the field hospital. Her nerves were badly jangled by the tension of the camp, the sight of the wounded, the thought of what she had avoided. Although they worked side by side, she didn’t speak to Linh once. Her intuition told her she had missed something important, and far from helping her, he had talked her out of it. She planned on ending the arrangement when they returned to Saigon.

But the outgoing flights were loaded with wounded, and they would be forced to spend the night. At sundown, as she was lounging in the communications bunker reading a magazine, the radioman waved Sergeant Medlock in.

“The lead jeep set off a mine. Everyone inside got it.”

Medlock shook his head, his long face even longer, and punched his fist on the table.

The radioman listened again. “Sounds like the rest of the convoy is blocked and ambushed. They want to know how to proceed.”

“Damn it,” the sergeant said. “Give me the phone.” He looked around the bunker at the grim faces, then spotted Helen. “This is classified, sweets.”

Helen left. An hour passed and the sergeant wheeled out from the bunker, short of breath. She approached him.

“The rest of the men caught it. We’ve got two left, hiding in the jungle.”

She said nothing, tried not to think of the faces of the men she had joked with that morning. By nightfall, the radioman had lost contact, and it was concluded the two had not survived. Linh didn’t stay with the Americans but went to sleep with the Vietnamese soldiers.

In the damp, stale air of the bunker, only flashlights were used for light. Sergeant Medlock sat on a crate next to Helen, hesitated, then passed her a flask; she took a deep drink. He asked why she had changed her mind about the convoy.

“I didn’t. My assistant refused to go.”

“Little coward saved your life. Bullheaded orders from headquarters. I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle; worked the stockyards. Let me tell you, no difference. Waste of lives. I don’t want to be giving the orders for it.”

The night stretched long and bitter, her thoughts chasing from fear to self-pity to animal joy at being safe. Around midnight she left the bunker for fresh air and a smoke. She nodded to the perimeter guards and offered them a cigarette. When they hissed to her that it would attract sniper fire, the risk wasn’t enough to keep her from squatting down against the sandbag wall and cupping her hand over the tip until she sucked it down to a stub.