Fields of Fire (49 page)

“Let's get out of here.”

Now Condley knelt next to the remains, beginning to fold them back inside the old poncho. “Roger that. I've seen absolutely no women in Ninh Phuoc that you should spend the winter with.”

THE trip downriver was quick and fun, like falling down the far edge of a roller coaster. The typhoon ended up stalling just off the coast, then turning north in late afternoon and heading inland toward Vinh. Condley made the flight to Sai Gon, leaving a depressed and disconcerted Muir in a leaking, broken-down old hangar at the Da Nang airport, where he was tasked by the American Embassy in Ha Noi to await a military aircraft. The Joint Task Force for Full Accounting had already summoned a cargo plane that would take the remains back to the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii, and Muir, who lived and worked in Hawaii, would accompany it.

“You bastard,” grunted the bulky scientist as he shook Condley's hand to say good-bye. “I deserve at least one night of R and R for all my efforts.”

“Take care of them bones, boy,” joked Condley.

“That's my job.”

“Exactly. You're the scientist. I'm just the tour guide.”

Muir, ever the dramatist, came to a respectful version of attention as he looked over at the wrapped remains. “But let me remind you that these are not mere bones. Lying there inside that poncho is somebody's son, Brandon. Maybe someone's husband and father. Someone who served his country and lost his life in the process. An American hero, at this moment unrewarded for his sacrifice. We will have the honor of rendering him that award.”

“Even if you don't get laid in Sai Gon.”

“I didn't even want to do that. What's wrong? Why are you being so adamantly cynical, Brandon?”

“I don't know,” answered Condley, staring pensively at the poncho that held the pile of bones. “I just keep wondering how he ended up in that village when Hao said there wasn't even a fight that night.”

“Or why his hand is gone.”

“What does that mean?”

“His left hand is off,” said Muir, obviously intrigued. “It appears to have been severed cleanly, as if by a knife. Very strange, on a combat casualty.”

“Maybe some villager souvenired it,” mused Condley. “Or an NVA soldier. You know, like some of our guys used to cut off ears.”

“A gruesome thought.”

“It was a gruesome war.”

“We will have that answer soon enough,” said Muir. “Once we make a positive ID on Specialist Fourth Class Deville we will locate his family, his unit history, and his former comrades. And we will also find out not simply how he ended up in that village, but why they apparently did not go back to find him when he disappeared.”

A shabby little bus took Condley from the hangar to the airport terminal, built during the war by the Americans. Inside, he sipped filtered coffee in the same waiting room in which he had stood thirty years before as he prepared to board the giant Freedom Bird that would take him away from the war zone. The cracked pavement underneath his feet was the same. So was the huge mural on the wall depicting a waterfall somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and even the fake little pond just outside one window, cobbled with molded gravel and underneath a now-unworkable water fountain. All the same—the runway, all twelve thousand feet of it, built by the French in one war and expanded by the Americans in another, the sagging hangars, the crumbling revetments that once had housed scores of American combat aircraft. The mountains rose up like looming shadows to the west, and just beyond them had been the war. Literally thousands of battles had been fought within an easy helicopter ride from where Condley stood.

A French Airbus with a British pilot and a crew of gorgeous Vietnamese flight attendants took him back to Sai Gon. There were not a lot of people on the plane. Condley dozed fitfully at his window seat, exhausted from his journey to Ninh Phuoc and back. At one point he awakened as if from a nightmare, imagining that he had put Specialist Deville's remains in his hanging bag and wondering where the bag had gone. But finally he relaxed, looking out the window and remembering.

There wasn't a whole lot to remember. He hadn't done much with his life other than to live it. The war, first with the Marine Corps up north and then returning with the Agency west of Sai Gon and in Laos, and when it ended not knowing what to do. A year floating past as he traveled aimlessly through Australia, living off the sizable earnings of the war years, which he had never had the opportunity to spend. After that there was no sense going back home, anyway. Home hadn't been home for more than eight years. It had been too long, he had grown too untamable, and he had perfected skills for which there was very little demand in the States. His few short visits confirmed that the good jobs were taken and that the country was on its ass, paralyzed by endless and angry debates. So he had returned to Asia, sometimes with the Agency, at others on his own, pulling security work for American companies as they set up businesses in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. An easy life, devoid of ambition.

The years had blended into each other, a blur of dark-eyed women, warm turquoise oceans, and the smell of jasmine, smoke, and muck. He grew older, more cynical, less combative but somehow more confrontational. He drank less, ran slower, longed for old friends who wrote him at various post-office boxes and occasionally drifted through Bangkok or Manila and dragged him along on a two- or three-day binge of booze, friendly women, and old memories.

On rainy evenings as the typhoon winds rattled shutters on whatever hotel or house he happened to be occupying with whomever he had ended up with for that night, he might hear his mother in the whistling wind, wishing for him as she bewailed the unredeemable emptiness of his Asian fate. Now and then along the dirt roads and in the yeasty jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines he smelled the rot of dead carcasses and felt he could reach out and touch Hai and Dan and Thanh, Baker and King and McDowell, all friends he would have died for, but who instead were left violated and lifeless along the road that he himself still traveled. And always he would think of Mai, with her full lips and husky, teasing laugh, whom he had really loved and who had died because they hated her for loving him.

It was beery, painless, loveless, and so free he might have been falling through a warm sky, untouched and unencumbered. And then one morning he had stared into a brightly lit mirror and admitted that he had lost his youth. After that there had been questions. Sometimes he wished he had a wife. Sometimes he wondered if he did in fact have children. Sometimes he woke up in a panic, knowing that after all the dreams that once had mattered and the struggles that had in the end simply drained out the wishes and the hopes, after the years of trying to live without owing anybody anything, without playing the whore to any other man, he had finally comprehended that all of it added up to nothing more than a trick.

He'd spent twenty-five years trying to put salt on the tail of a mirage bird, or maybe an unrisen phoenix. Nothing had changed except his age. The whores may have sold out, but at least they had something to show for it.

In the early 1990s the “Bamboo Curtain” that had been imposed by Viet Nam's ruling communists in 1975 began to lift. The season of terror and darkness that followed the war was slowly receding. Foreigners were allowed to visit some areas of the country. And he began to dream of going back. What better place to return to, in a world where everything was lost, anyway? Sai Gon, where he might still take a five-dollar room in one of the flophouses of Pham Ngu Lao Street, float again on a band of raw emotion, no longer drearily certain of where the end might find him, no longer moribund with where the past had taken him.

Then, like some deus ex machina, the American government had delivered all that back to him. They needed a liaison officer to work with the Army's Central Identification Lab as it searched for the remains of those still listed as missing in action during the war. Someone who understood the culture and spoke Vietnamese. Someone who didn't mind lousy pay and frequent travel to the worst areas of the country. He'd jumped at it. So now he spent about half the year in Viet Nam and the other half in Hawaii. He'd even learned to like Hawaii, which had surprised him after spending most of the past thirty years in Asia.

He dozed again. In minutes a flight attendant awakened him, bringing him tea and a sandwich. As he ate, the plane suddenly descended from the high skies and settled toward the wide green paddies and the sluggish, curving rivers, and in one beat of his heart Condley felt that he was home again. Below him were earthly rhythms that had formed his adulthood. Merely seeing them brought him again into their cadences. In the last moments before the plane touched onto the runway at Tan Son Nhat, he looked out at abandoned military towers, the long rows of curved concrete parapets that had once housed dozens of American warplanes, the ruins of an old military hospital, the streams of thin brown people on motorbikes and bicycles, past and present mixing into a yeasty dynamism that jumped up at him from every face and tree.

Yes, he liked Hawaii, but he felt more at home in Sai Gon. He did not know why. He only knew that it was true. Sai Gon, Condley remembered from an old and happy song that spoke of the city's beauty and its carefree ways. Dep lam.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

FIELDS OF FIRE

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Gypsy Boy Music, Inc.: Specified words from the song “Until It's Time for You to Go,” by Buffy Sainte-Marie. ©Copyright 1965, 1973 by Gypsy Boy Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

From the song “These Eyes,” by Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman. ©Copyright 1969 by Cirrus Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Cedarwood Publishing Co.: Specified lines from “Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town),” by Mel Tillis. ©Copyright 1966 by Cedarwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Tuna Fish Music Co.: Specified lines from the song “And When I Die,” by Laura Nyro. ©Copyright 1969 by Tuna Fish Music Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Jondora Music: Specified lines from the song “Bad Moon Rising,” by John Fogerty. ©Copyright 1969 by Jondora Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

ResWot Tunes, Inc.: Specified lines from the song “Behind Blue Eyes,” by Peter Townshend. ©Copyright 1971 by ResWot Tunes, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1978 by James Webb.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-21182.

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eISBN: 978-0-307-48477-2

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