Summary
In Saigon, an Alabama-born man named Gerald Ives drives with Sand into the city from the airport. The white man doesn’t like the idea of taking orders from a Black man, but he knows not to cross Clarke. He confirms Sand’s and Clarke’s hotel reservations and gives Sand a .45 gun and fake passports and cash.
In his hotel room, Sand meets with Philip Braun, who has been ordered by Clarke to set up a deal with Tolstoy to deliver guns and ammunition to lure him out. Braun explains that he told Tolstoy the rest of the munitions are in Paris, which is where Tolstoy sells his heroin in bulk. Sand asks for the name and address of Coleman Near, Braun’s contact in France. Sand memorizes the address, insisting on “no paper.”
Meanwhile, Braun meets with Long Minh Sat, a Vietnamese war criminal and one of Tolstoy’s most ruthless accomplices, infamous for cutting the throat of a fourteen-year-old girl. Braun lies, arranging a meeting between Sat and “Johnson,” a Black American who wants to set up a heroin-selling network of his own. The scene cuts to Braun calling Sand in his hotel to confirm that Sat is coming to his room to make the $100,000 deal. Sand senses from Braun’s voice that he is in trouble. Sand gathers his weapons and slips out to the other room rented down the hall under another name.
Meanwhile, Braun hangs up a phone in front of Tolstoy, who heard from Sat that this supposed Johnson is Black. Braun claims innocence, saying he was just making a deal, but Tolstoy doesn’t believe him. Sat cuts Braun’s throat with a bayonet. Tolstoy orders Sat to go kill Sand personally, warning him that this one man is different than others he has dealt with.
When Sat arrives at Sand’s hotel room with two Vietnamese men, Sand is watching from the cracked door of his second hotel suite. Sand fires a silent, steel-tipped arrow at one of the men, dispatching another with a kick. When Sat starts firing his gun, Sand retreats to the hall and waits for Sat to exit, knowing he has only one escape route.
Sat crawls out of the room like a rat only to have Sand fire an arrow into his shoulder, which drives the gun loose from his hand. Sand steps from the shadows and asks about Tolstoy. Sat struggles to say he is at his villa, and likely leaving tomorrow for Paris. Sat tries to attack Sand from the ground by asking for help, attempting to get him close enough that he can strike Sand with his bayonet. Sand steps to the side and blows the top of Sat’s head off with his .45.
James Devlin Winters, an Irish Republican Army terrorist, is in Paris to kidnap Mary, Clarke’s 23-year-old daughter. Winters disagrees with Tolstoy’s plan to bring her to America to kill her in nine days; he wants to find her and kill her right away. He is impatient to get his revenge on America by destroying a town. One year ago, he and his wife Kathleen had come to New York to buy guns needed back in Ireland. The crooked cops who set up the deal came with guns drawn to their hotel room, hoping to get the money from Winters, knowing he couldn’t lodge a complaint against them. The aggressive cops killed Kathleen, and Winters calmly killed the two cops.
In Saigon, Tolstoy speaks with the two injured Vietnamese men who escaped Sand’s hotel. Knowing Sand is on his way there, Tolstoy asks Richard and Joseph, two Korean contract killers, to deal with Sand. Tolstoy also makes Richard and Joseph use their martial arts skills to kill the injured Vietnamese men using punches and kicks.
Sand phones Ives and explains that his life is in danger because Braun might have given Tolstoy Ives’s name. Sand gives him instructions. Ives does as told, then leaves for the airport, giving Sand his driver, a Vietnamese man named Luc. In the back of Luc’s cab, Sand puts his hands behind his head and thinks about the beautiful sixteen-year-old Toki, and how he’d sensed her romantic interest in him. Sand remembers a day he met with her in the city while he was on an errand for the samurai. She gave him the gift of an inexpensive but attractive wristwatch, which he wears now. He regrets not having told her then how he felt—and continues to feel—about her.
Sand arrives at the villa. There are three roads leading to the building. He gets Luc to stop there so he can proceed on foot, but not before tearing four hundred-dollar bills in half and telling Luc he’ll get the rest when Sand is done. Luc reclines in the back seat to wait, thinking about how strange this Black man is.
Analysis
The theme of deception enters the narrative with Sand’s arrival in Saigon. Per Clarke’s instructions, Gerald Ives, Clarke’s contact in Vietnam, has made hotel reservations for Sand under assumed names and provided him with fake passports. Using these simple tools of deception, Sand can carry out his clandestine mission of bringing down Tolstoy and his men. He relies on Braun, another of Clarke’s contacts, to arrange a meeting with Tolstoy’s men under the guise of wanting to start his own heroin-selling network.
While it may seem as though the terrorists have seen through Sand’s plan, Sand’s greater deception involves them knowing he is trying to trick them. Once they’ve confirmed that Sand is with them in Saigon, they will send people to kill him, and Sand will have the opportunity to eliminate some of the most ruthless members of Tolstoy’s criminal network. The man they send is a Vietnamese war criminal, who brings two accomplices. Sand’s deception is simple but effective: Watching the men enter from the door of the second hotel room he has rented, Sand launches his attack from behind, easily getting the better of the unsuspecting assassins.
The theme of violence arises with the brutal fighting between Long Minh Sat and Sand, their battle ending with Sand coldly blowing the top of Sat’s head clean off. Olden continues building on the themes of violence and revenge with a chapter opening from a new character’s point of view: that of James Devlin Winters, an IRA terrorist. Recruited by Tolstoy to kidnap Mary Clarke, Winters’s hatred for the US is fueled by the memory of his wife being harassed and killed by corrupt American cops one year prior. Like Sand and Tolstoy, Winters draws on this personal suffering as motivation for exacting his revenge.
Olden injects further violence into the story with the present-day scene in which Tolstoy harnesses the martial arts skills of the Korean contract killers Joseph and Richard to finish off the Vietnamese men who escaped Sand’s hotel to warn Tolstoy. Even though these men have done Tolstoy a favor by informing him of the fact that Sat revealed Tolstoy’s hideout to be Sat’s villa, Tolstoy displays a boundless appetite for cruelty, rewarding the Vietnamese men’s loyalty with a pointless betrayal.
As Sand sets out in Luc’s taxi to infiltrate Tolstoy’s villa hideout, Olden flashes back to provide crucial details about Sand’s relationship to Toki. Beyond being Master Konuma’s daughter, Toki is Sand’s love interest. Although any romance between them was implicitly forbidden by the samurai code Sand lived by, a relationship developed organically while both were away from the samurai houses in Tokyo. Sand wears the wristwatch she once gave him—a reminder whenever he checks the time that he missed his opportunity to tell her he loved her. With this delayed revelation, Olden increases the stakes for Sand.
