Hillerman, Tony (24 page)

“I remember flying up the river that day you took me to my brother’s mission,” she said. “It was like flying over green wilderness. Everywhere you looked you could see light reflecting off the water. All tangled up with streams and irrigation canals. Like a maze. I’d think you would get lost. Easy enough, maybe, in a helicopter where you can see the sea behind you and the mountains up ahead. But down on the water in a little boat how could anybody tell? Not in the dark.”

“Anybody couldn’t,” Rice said. “I can. I used to live on that goddamn river. Three hitches in the Brown Water Navy. With the Game Warden project.”

Rice looked from Osa to Moon and back, waiting for the question.

“Game Warden?” Moon said.

“The navy called the whole operation Market Garden,” Rice said. “And the river patrol part down here was Game Warden. The idea being to keep the VC from running their sampans up and down the rivers, hauling troops, ammunition, all that. The navy bought a bunch of little fiberglass boats. Shallow draft, hold four or five crewmen, and do maybe twenty-five knots, and we’d run up and down the rivers and the creeks and canals and raise hell with the VC.”

Rice became aware that his pride was showing and stopped. “Shows you how crazy I was,” he added.

“When was that?” Moon asked.

“I started with the project in ‘sixty-seven. Transferred in. Did two hitches in the little PBRs— anybody but the navy would call ’em River Patrol Boats but the navy made ’em Patrol Boats River. Then I shifted over to the
Floyd County,
one of the LSTs they converted as base ships for the boats. We’d anchor way out in the channel and be mother hen for the PBRs. That’s how I got into copters,” Rice said. “They fitted the
Floyd
out with a copter deck and we played mama for the Huey gunships.”

“How’d you learn to fly?”

“Went along as crew,” Rice said. “I was a chief petty officer, a regular navy lifer. You can do pretty much what you want to do after you learn the system. I got friendly with the pilots. Watched how they did it. Took over when the pilot wanted to eat his lunch or take a break. That’s how I met your brother.”

“He hired you out of the navy?”

“I was quitting anyway,” Rice said. “Had in my twenty, and the navy was phasing out to go home. I’d met Ricky when we were transferring our Hueys over to the Vietnam navy and he was doing their maintenance. I told him I didn’t want to go back to the States—nothing for me there, and he said stick around, he could use me. Yager was already part of Ricky’s team by then, and he sort of gave me the finishing touches.” Rice laughed. “Like how to put one down without bouncing it.”

Captain Teele was standing by the mast now, studying the sails through binoculars.

“Okay,” Moon said. “We get in. We get a copter. Now where do we go to get the child?”

“Here’s where we go look,” Rice said. He moved his finger westward from Can Tho, across the Cambodian border, into a range of hills the mapmaker had identified as the Elephant Mountains.

“See this little road here along the coast? Little dot there called Kampot. Stream runs through it and dumps into the Gulf of Siam. Well, we fly five miles up the coast beyond that, then turn right and head due north, right up the ridge. Seventeen miles, you come to a series of clearings. Four of ’em. And in the fourth one, a little village. Ten, maybe twelve buildings, cluster of little terraced rice paddies.”

Rice looked up at Moon. “You got anything to write with?”

“Afraid not,” Moon said. Back in the prison, on the other side of the moat, Rice hadn’t been able to remember how to reach this village. He’d said it was something he’d have to sort of find somehow.

He’d only remembered the name was Vin Ba and it was near the Vietnam border.

“Here,” Osa said, and handed Rice a pen.

Rice made a tiny X on the map. And out in the Gulf wrote
Vin Ba—four clearings in a row.

Osa was looking over his shoulder. “I think that’s not too far from the village where my brother—”

“Right about here,” Rice said. “On this next ridge. There’s a little village down in the valley— maybe a couple of hundred people with some terraced rice paddies. And up on the ridge in the forest there’s a Montagnard settlement where Osa’s brother has his little clinic. Osa will remember it.” He made a second X, folded the map, and handed it to Moon.

Lum Lee was standing beside Teele now, looking through the binoculars. Without them, Moon could now make out five craft, all small, three with sails.

Rice was looking at Moon, expression curious. “What are you thinking about this business?”

Moon shrugged.

“Scared?”

“Yeah. Matter of fact, I am.”

Rice laughed. “But you’ll go on in,” he said. “Ricky told me about you.”

From behind them came the voice of Mr. Lee. “On the radio just a minute ago they were saying that Pol Pot has made a broadcast. They will cleanse Cambodia of oppression and corruption by returning their country to Zero Year. They will go back to the simple, clean ways. No more parasite predators living in the filth of the cities. The cities will be emptied. People will go back to the land.”

“My God,” Osa said. “What will that mean?”

“Maybe it is political rhetoric,” Mr. Lee said. “But we were listening to Radio Jakarta earlier. They said Pol Pot’s army was evacuating Phnom Penh. The soldiers were forcing everybody out of their houses and marching them out into the country.”

Rice was grinning, the sunset red on his face. “We’re just in time,” he said. “Everybody is going to be too busy with their own worries to pay attention to us.”

“Yes,” Mr. Lee said, “maybe so.” And he made a sweeping gesture to take the seven little craft now visible in the dying light. “Just in time. In a few hours we are going in. Everybody else is coming out.”

RED FORCES WITHIN MILE OF SAIGON
AS TANKS AND ARTILLERY CLOSE IN

—
New York Times
,
APRIL
28, 1975

AFTER SUNDOWN THE RAIN HAD begun. It was warm, soft, and steady, with a mild breeze behind it. But now, maybe an hour before dawn, the clouds broke up again. The full monsoon would be here a little later, Mr. Lee told them. In maybe a week. Then the rain would be steady. But tonight the first third of the moon hung high in the west. There were stars overhead, and just in front of them was the white line of beach and above it the black wall of shoreline vegetation.

Osa was huddled near the stern of what Captain Teele called in his odd mixture of English and Dutch his “shure boot.” She was talking to Mr. Lee, who seemed to have perfect sea legs and rarely sat down even when this awkward craft was rolling through the heavy swells out in the blue water. Mr. Suhuannaphum sat beside her— assigned to take the shore boat back to the
Glory of the Sea
but demoted now to the role of passenger. When they neared shore and moved into the brown water flowing out of the Mekong, they entered Rice’s territory. Rice had taken over the navigation.

“Here on in we need to keep it quiet,” Rice told them. “Normally at night you wouldn’t worry much, because the devils come out after dark and these delta farmers like to stay in their hooches with the doors closed. But now things ain’t normal.”

Things weren’t normal, Rice explained, because the Vietnam navy personnel who took over the U.S. Navy patrol boats and their bases were mostly refugees from the north end of the nation.

“They came down here because they hated the Commies, and because they hate the Commies, Saigon figured it could trust them in patrol boats,” Rice said. “You know, not to take the boats and go over to the other side. Anyhow, the point is these guys are mostly Christians, or maybe a different kind of Buddhist, whose demons stay home at night. So they patrol just they way we trained ’em to. Sneak along in the dark, listening. Maybe turn off the engine and just float. Hear an infiltrator, turn on the light, and zap ’em. Taking the night away from the Cong, we called it.”

“But now,” Osa said, “it is so dark I don’t know how you can possibly see where you’re going.”

“You don’t exactly see it,” Rice said. “Actually, you sort of feel it. Do you notice how choppy it is under the boat now? Just
bump-bump-bump?
No more upsy-downsy rolling from the waves coming in. Here that’s being canceled out by the current, the brown water coming out. So when it’s dark, you just keep in the middle of the current best you can.

And if you think you’re lost, you use these night binoculars.”

“But so many different mouths to this river,” Osa said. “I think they called it ‘Nine Dragons.’”

“Two of ’em are silted up and closed. They oughta call it ‘Seven Dragons,’ but with the gooks nine is the lucky number.”

Moon now could see that the trees lining the shore were some sort of palms. Soon their crowns were outlined against the stars, almost overhead. And then they were past the palms. Inland. The air felt different: hotter, heavy with humidity. Moon was sweating. The soft sound of the current now drowned the murmur of the idling engine.

The sky lightened a little with a false dawn. Moon saw that the forest lining the river was no longer palms. And no longer alive. The jungle was leafless, dead. Barren limbs formed a black tracery against the horizon. He pointed that out to Osa.

“Agent Orange,” Osa said. “I think that’s what killed everything.”

“Only We Can Prevent a Forest,” Rice said, spacing the words. “That was the slogan of the C-One-thirty guys who dropped the stuff. They’d zap the jungle so we could see, then we’d come along and zap the Cong.”

The smell of the sea was gone now. Moon’s nostrils picked up the aroma of flowers, of decayed vegetation, of rancid mud, the perfume of sandalwood and smoke. Sweat ran down from his eyebrows into the corners of his eyes.

Rice throttled down the engine. “Better be quiet now,” he said. “This one we’re in they call Cu’a Cung Loi, I think it is. Probably means ninth mouth, or something like that. Anyway, it’s the mouth furthest from Saigon. Full of Vietcong before we got ’em—”

Mr. Suhuannaphum was whispering something.

“Something’s coming,” Osa said in a low, low voice. “Can you hear It?”

Moon heard it. The sound of someone crying. A child’s wail. A tinny rattling. Hushed voices. The creak of wood on wood. The steady thumping of a heavy engine.

Rice cut the motor.

It was off somewhere to their right. Coming toward them but farther out in the channel.

“There,” Osa whispered, pointing.

A dark shape, looming above the water. And then it came out of the shadows into the moon path: a sampan, Moon guessed. It had a high round bow and a roof from which the light reflected. Probably tin, Moon thought. It moved steadily past them, loaded with whispers, with someone sobbing and someone scolding, the sounds of sorrow and despair. And then they could see only its stern, quickly disappearing again into the shadows of the mangrove trees.

“Well,” Rice said, “I wish them luck.” He restarted the motor.

“Refugees from that dreadful war,” Osa said. “Probably no place to go. They must be frightened.”

“Scared to death,” Rice said. “Ghosts are out in the dark at night. They call ’em
kwei,
the Hungry Ones. They’re the spirits of folks who die without any children to take care of their bones. They get out of the underworld after dark and go around causing bad luck, making people sick.”

“And us,” Osa said. “I think you should also wish us to be lucky.”

“I think we’re already being lucky,” Moon said.

About dawn they saw a flare arc into the sky, across the river and maybe a mile to the east. Two more flares rose and died away, and then there was the sudden sound of a machine gun. Moon reached out his hand, touched Osa’s arm, and she rewarded him with a strained smile. But the gunfire lasted only a few seconds. It aroused frogs and night birds and provoked challenging calls from the same sort of lizards he’d heard on Palawan Island. That, too, quickly died away.

Silence then. Only the purr of the motor, the hiss of the hull sliding through the brown water, the small clatter when Mr. Suhuannaphum shifted his feet. Moon noticed the night was fading fast. He could make out the shape of mangrove trunks, see the pattern of the current on the water surface, discern flotsam moving with the stream. Beside the bank ahead, a man-made shape loomed. It seemed to be a platform raised above the riverbank on stilts with an odd shape built on it.

Rice noticed him staring at it.

“Used to be a house,” Rice said. “The VC used it, and we flushed them out and burned it.”

The sky was reddening now in the east. A rooster crowed somewhere nearby, exuberant. And awoke another rooster. A dog barked. Something bulky was floating past, a hundred yards out in the current. Cloth. A human body too far out in the river to determine gender. And beyond it something else that looked like a floating bundle. Another body? Too far away to be sure. He glanced at Osa. She was looking inland. So was Rice.

“There’s a few rice paddies back there behind the mangroves,” Rice said. “Eight or nine hooches, best I remember. The ARVN boys thought they might be Vietcong, but then they thought everybody might be Vietcong. It’s the way they stayed alive.”

“Do you think the army will still be here?” Osa said. “They must know they’ve lost the war.”

“I don’t know,” Rice said. “They had this Yellow Tiger Battalion stationed here. Part of an airborne regiment. If they were normal ARVN, I think they’d just shoot some civilians and steal their clothes and pretend to be just plain folks. But these Tigers were tough cookies. Had a colonel named Ngo Diem. Supposed to be mean as a snake.” He chuckled. “Even the marines liked ’em, and the marines didn’t like nobody.”

From far across the river came another sound. It sounded to Moon like a truck engine starting.

“We got to stick close to the bank now,” Rice said. “Around that bend behind that bunch of palms there’s an old LST anchored. LST,” he repeated. “Landing Ship Tank. The U.S.S.
Pott County.
They anchored it out there and used it as a base for our river patrol boats. Then in ‘seventy-three they turned it over to the Vietnam navy.”