The Reckoning (8 page)

They came to a town, or what was left of it. The moon made a brief appearance, and the destruction leaped out at Molly, the dirt as red as Mars. Here and there lone walls stood scored by thousands of bullet holes, the rest of the houses chopped away. Otherwise the place was a shantytown floating on stilts between the rubble.

“Snuol,” Duncan read from his map.

“What happened here?” Molly asked.

“I'd say the United States Army paid a visit,” Duncan said. He had taken the red and white
kroma
from around his neck and draped it over his head, like blinders almost.

“Birth is death, brother,” Luke said. “Somebody has to feed the machine. This was their turn.”

The destruction fascinated Molly. The war had erected an architecture so grotesque, it verged on beauty. And the people let it stand, that was the strangest thing. They chose to live among the ruins.

“We're getting there now,” said Luke.

“North to Kratie,” Duncan guessed. “From there, it's not so far to Sambor.”

“You know the country?” Luke was amused.

“I came this way years ago,” Duncan said. “I was retracing the footsteps of the great Dutch explorer Van Wusthoff. He was making his way to Vientiane. This was back in 1642. He was the first Westerner to set eyes on the supposed ruins of Sambupura, the capital of a pre-Angkor civilization in the sixth century. Sambor, it's called now. The locals stripped it clean centuries ago. They took away the building stones to make dikes. There are a few foundation stones left in the ground. Some scholars doubt the Sambor stones mark the real Sambupura. They think the stones are just traces of a satellite city, that the capital must have been somewhere else. Skeptics say Sambupura never existed, it's just the local version of Shangri-la.”

“More tricks,” Luke said. “You and your folklore and history.”

Duncan was quiet for a moment. “It's what I do. Temple restorations. My specialty is the pre-Angkor period.”

“Let's say that's so,” said Luke. “What's that change?”

Duncan looked stricken. His little light hovered above the map. Molly didn't know why he let the crazy gypsy get to him.

The road forked ahead. “Tell the boy to go right here,” Luke said.

They exited Highway 7 onto a side road that actually improved. The ripped asphalt of Snuol smoothed into compacted dirt. Duncan's map rustled. “East to Mondulkiri,” he said. “This is an old logging road. The Ho Chi Minh Trail branched all through these parts.”

“History,” Luke said.

Night spilled over the windshield. Molly felt vaguely seasick. Since leaving the dig site at seven that morning, she had been on one road or another for over sixteen hours. She was tired. Her head ached. She was thirsty from the lobster, and her mouth tasted sour. She prayed Kleat had grabbed her toiletries kit when he'd gone to the hotel. She was going to want a toothbrush, a T-shirt, and a tent, in that order.

The moon came and went. Molly found herself nodding off in short bursts.

A hand slapped the top of her seat. Molly started.

“It's coming,” Luke said. “Tell him.”

“We're there?” She peered out the window. “How can you see anything?”

“Are you going to tell him or not?” Luke reached over the front seat and stabbed at Vin's ribs. It hurt, Molly could tell. Vin bared his gold teeth and stepped on the brakes. A swirl of dust enveloped them.

“Did I say stop?” said Luke. “Go off up there.”

“Sit back,” Duncan said to him.

Luke's arm withdrew. The backseat creaked under his weight. Vin gripped the steering wheel, angry at being prodded. At last he flipped on his one good headlight.

There was only the red dirt of the highway and high, green grasses. The grass enclosed them. Slowly Molly made out a dark mass in the distance, the sloping hip of a mountain, or an upward march of trees. In either case, nothing but wilderness.

“We keep going,” said Luke.

“Going where?” said Duncan.

The truck arrived behind them in the moonlight. It approached with the immensity of a shipwreck, its tattered canopy flailing like a torn sail. Bald car tires wired to the prow served as a bumper.

Vin went on sucking his golden front teeth, making up his own mind.

A fingernail tapped at her window. Molly cranked the handle, and her reflection became Kleat. “Lost?” he said.

Samnang's round face appeared behind Kleat, a creased brown melon with white hair.

“There's a road,” said Luke. “It goes through the grass.”

“An invisible road,” scoffed Duncan.

“What are you saying?” Kleat asked.

“Turn around now,” said Duncan, “we can be back in Phnom Penh for breakfast.”

“Turn around?” said Molly.

“Look for yourself, there's nothing out there.” He wiped his hand across the map.

Luke didn't argue. He had switched off, tuned out. It was their decision.

Kleat fumed. “If it was in plain sight, they would have been found already. Sometimes you have to dig a little further, that's all.”

Molly didn't see Samnang slide away. He simply appeared in the light beam, moving up the road, hitching his false leg ahead. One by one they all quit talking.

His shadow reached in front of him, long black lines like puppet strings tied to each limb. He followed the edge of the highway, peering into the overgrown ditch. Fifty yards ahead he stopped and began parting the grasses.

Everyone got out and went up the road, all except Luke. He sat in the car, knowing whatever he knew.

Samnang was working deeper into the tall grasses, feeling along with his one good foot. “A track for oxcarts,” he announced to them. “It hasn't been used for many years.”

The three brothers descended from the highway and joined Samnang, chattering away, eager to continue. They wanted a week of wages, not taxi fare for a night ride. They churned through the grass, trampling it flat and tying bunches at their tops as landmarks.

Abruptly the night detonated around them. A clamor filled the air. It sizzled and crackled like wild voltage, loud, almost tangible.

The suddenness and volume startled Molly. She whirled around, searching for a source, but the noise pressed in from every direction. Cicadas, she realized, thousands of them.

She'd never heard such a massed voice of insects. She registered it as anger, but that was only because it was so alien to her. She stepped back from the grass.

That suddenly the noise stopped.

The silence had a slight sucking vacuum to it. Molly felt pulled by it. “What was that?” she said.

The men had frozen. They were staring at the grass on all sides of them.

Then Kleat waved at the night. “Bugs. Nothing.”

The clouds opened to the moon, and the distant mountain revealed itself as a pile of low hills crowned with dense forest.

“Okay?” Kleat said. “It's there. The man said it was there. There it is.”

Molly gazed up at the mountain.

“An oxcart path,” Duncan said, dismissing it. “A mountain.”

Kleat was having none of it. He grabbed a handful of grass and gave a fierce yank. It was a foolish gesture. The roots were deep and this was saw grass, with firm, sharp blades. His fist slid up and came away empty. Kleat snapped his teeth in pain and opened his cut palm. When he shook his hand, drops of his blood spattered into the dust like petite explosions.

 

They followed the oxcart path. The convoy climbed through grass growing higher than the doors. The grass stroked the windows like fingers of seaweed. Behind them, the truck's headlights swam through an ocean of brilliant green lines.

Their pell-mell highway dash slowed to a crawl. The path was rutted and winding and hard to see, but it rose gently. The shovels and jerry cans piled in the rear quit clattering. They merely rustled at the curves. Molly could practically feel the grass slithering along the undercarriage.

She relaxed, grateful for the quiet and the sinuous path. With each looping turn, the moon shifted in the sky. It seemed to have grown to twice its normal size, as if they were rising off the planet.

“We're farther north than I thought,” said Duncan. “We're reaching into the Annamite range. The mountains run all the way to China. It's wild country. The lowlanders stay clear of it. The hill tribes live up here pretty much the way they have for ten thousand years, taking animals, throwing down a little corn between the trees.”

“History,” whispered Luke.

At three-thirty they crested a ridgetop and stopped. Ahead stood all that remained of a bridge, a single stone pillar rising from the wide riverbed. Beyond that, higher up, a tall forest took over the grassland.

“Now where?” said Duncan.

They got out, except for Luke, who once again left them to their own conclusions. Molly faced back the way they had come, expecting their path to be flattened by the tires. But the grass had folded shut behind them. They would have to hunt their way down just as carefully.

To her surprise, the logging road lay far below them. Winding back and forth, they'd ascended hundreds of vertical feet. From this height, you could see moonlit paddy fields far to the west, and curious rows of ponds. They were not ponds, she realized, but bomb craters.

Kleat paced along the riverbed rim like a trapped tiger. “We're close,” he said. “It's right there in front of us.”

“It's just a forest,” said Duncan.

“It's cover,” said Kleat. “It makes sense. We're looking for the remains of an armored cavalry unit.”

“How do you know that?” asked Molly.

“Who do you think the Blackhorse Regiment was? The Eleventh Armored Cavalry. They were famous, George Patton's men. ‘Find the bastards and pile on,' his orders. Nine men, Luke said. That would have been enough to crew two tanks or armored personnel carriers. That's what we're looking for. Anything that large, left in the open, would have been spotted by plane or satellite years ago. I don't know how these guys got lost. But those trees are where they went.”

“Not across that bridge, they didn't,” Duncan said.

“Why not? Bombs were falling like rain all through this area. Our pilot was returning from a run along this very borderland. Sometime after the Blackhorse soldiers crossed over, the bridge must have caught a bomb. That would explain why they never got out.”

“Except the bridge is too primitive,” Duncan said. “See these stones? It was a cantilever design. That dates it to a thousand years ago, or earlier. A bridge like that couldn't have taken the weight of a tank. And look at how the building stones have been shoved down-river over time. Some of them are huge. No, this fell to pieces centuries ago.”

“The closer we get, the less you care,” Kleat said. “Or are you afraid of something?”

Molly stood away from them. The night air was a joy to breathe. She actually felt cold in her sundress.

“Even if they got across thirty years ago, it doesn't mean we should follow them,” Duncan said. “Look at the width of that riverbed. It carries some major water. Once the rains begin, we'll never be able to cross back. We'd be stuck over there for the next six months. And that, not a bombed bridge, would explain why they were never seen again.”

“I don't see any rain.”

“It's coming.”

“June 23, 1970,” Kleat said to him. “That's the day they went missing. They were part of the Cambodian incursion. Nixon sent them. That's what Kent State was all about.”

“I remember.”

“Somehow these nine soldiers got separated from the main body. Maybe night was coming on. The enemy was out there. They couldn't stay in the open.”

“And you think they drove this far north? We're halfway to Laos.”

“Maybe they were going for the high ground. Maybe they saw the trees. Maybe they were being pursued.”

Molly left them arguing. The night, the dark morning, was too fine to spoil. Venus stood bright. The constellations beckoned. For a month, swamped by haze on the plains, she had missed the stars. Down there, in another couple of hours, the dawn people would be plundering the site, dodging through the mist. Up here, she felt free. She clutched her arms across her chest and meandered along the broad rim.

At first she didn't notice the strange ribbing under her shoes. It rose out of the ground only gradually. At last the notches threatened to trip her. She bent to run her fingers across the imprints and they were as hard as ceramic.

“Duncan,” she called. “Kleat.”

They were arguing. She called louder.

“What?” said Kleat.

She showed them the marks on the ground.

Kleat had a six-battery bludgeon of a flashlight. He shined it on the rows of corrugated imprints, each the same fourteen or fifteen inches wide, leading off like dinosaur footprints. The track marks ran a hundred yards before sinking back into the earth. The clay had captured the passage of vehicles. The sun had baked it and made it impervious to three decades of weather.