Hillerman, Tony (28 page)

“What we need to know is whether the crew will come back for the boat. It doesn’t sound likely, unless they need it to get across the river.”

Lum Lee nodded. “We need to know that. And we need to know if the boat is in condition to take us out to the mouth of the Mekong. Mr. Nung remembers there was water in the bottom. They are made of fiberglass and it was hit by bullets.”

“Probably could be patched up,” Moon said.

“We also need to understand how to survive three days until it is time to go out and meet the Glory of
the Sea.”

“That’s the problem,” Moon said. “We’re living on borrowed time staying here.”

“I think of Mr. Nung’s village,” Mr. Lee said. “He said he and some friends raised chickens there. Not all the buildings were burned.”

Since he had watched George Rice fly away, Moon had been kidding himself about their prospects, avoiding despair by not thinking about it. Now he felt a sudden rush of hope.

“Let’s go find out,” he said. “Can Mr. Nung travel?”

“Sure,” Nguyen Nung said, grinning a goofy morphine withdrawal grin. “‘Way we go.”

Special to the
New York Times
SAIGON
, South Vietnam, April 28—More than 150 Communist rockets slammed into Tan Son Nhut air base in Saigon today, destroying a C-130 transport plane, killing at least two U.S. Marines and forcing suspension of evacuation flights.

IT HAD SOUNDED SIMPLE ENOUGH. “If it’s pulled up on the south side of the creek, which is where what’s-his-name said they left it, then we can’t possibly miss it,” Moon declared.

But they did miss it. The boat had been run partly up the muddy bank in a snarled tangle of dead mangroves and palms. The trees had been killed many years past by Agent Orange. The fertilizer used to make the defoliant, diluted by monsoon rains and river flooding, had soaked into the soggy earth and fed a fierce undergrowth of deformed and distorted rain-forest brush. Moon and Lum Lee had skirted this almost impenetrable maze and found nothing downstream in the area

Nguyen Nung had described. Rechecking on the way back, Moon had waded hip-deep along the stream bank. He had spotted the stern of the craft just about three seconds before he spotted a leech feeding on his flank.

The leech was less of a shock than the boat. Mr. Lee disposed of the insect by heating it with a match, causing it to withdraw from Moon’s flesh. The boat contained the corpse of one of Nguyen’s former companions. Worse, it was also half full of dirty water. Worse yet, the water seemed to have entered through a multitude of bullet holes.

“Well, shit,” Moon said. “So much for that.”

As he said it, the sound of explosions reached him. Artillery, or perhaps rockets, or perhaps tank fire. But from where? At the creek bank, engulfed in vegetation, the noise of the explosions seemed to be coming from all around them. But it was probably another attack in the battle upriver at Can Tho. Wherever it was, it reminded Moon that when one needs a boat as badly as he needed a boat, a leaky one is better than none. The APC could get him into Cambodia, providing he had a huge amount of good luck. But even though the army called it amphibious and it could splash its way across a canal or a rice paddy, it was going to take something that really floated to get this bunch back out into the South China Sea. And he wanted it ready to go now, before he left, just in case the huge amount of good luck he needed didn’t happen.

He checked. Five of the bullets had punched through the fiberglass hull well above what normally would have been the water line. Three were lower, where they really mattered. Except for one, the holes were neat, round, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter—probably made by a light machine gun or an AK-47 rifle. The exception seemed to be an exit hole, made by a bullet that had struck something hard and deflected through the bottom, leaving a tear longer than Moon’s hand.

Lum Lee stood looking at the holes. He was wet despite his conical hat. His shoulders slumped. He looked gaunt, exhausted, and discouraged.

“Well,” Moon said, “let’s see what else we can see. And what we can do about this.”

Almost immediately he saw that being shot at was nothing new for this particular PBR. In the tradition of river boatmen, a set of large staring eyes had been painted on the bow of the craft to scare away demons. The paint partly obscured round fiberglass patches used to cover a cluster of three earlier bullet holes. Moon pointed them out to Mr. Lee.

Mr. Lee merely raised his eyebrows.

“If the navy is like the army, it put stuff in this boat to fix its problems,” Moon said. It had. In a compartment beside the engine they found a flare gun, pliers, two hammers, assorted other tools, wires, bolts, a box full of first aid kits with the morphine missing, and a plastic box marked
REPAIR KIT, HULL
.

The body of the VNN sailor was small, light, and already stiff with rigor mortis. Moon moved it from the boat and laid it out of sight among the mangrove roots. He jammed cloth from the dead man’s shirt into the subsurface holes, bailed out the boat, and shifted enough of its heavier contents so that he could tilt the damaged section out of the water.

Then he went to work with the epoxy glue and fiberglass patching.

The sun was just setting below the breaking clouds when Moon and Mr. Lee reached the place they’d left the APC, parked out of sight in a bamboo thicket well off the road.

“You found it?” Osa said. She was standing in the hatch, slender, dark hair pulled back into some sort of bun, looking neat and tidy as if protected from the terrible humidity by some sort of invisible screen with which nature guards its few classy women from the troubles that beset usual folks.

“We did,” Moon said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Now let’s see if Nguyen Nung can show us how to find his picnicking place.”

It was no more than two or three miles away, but getting there involved turning the APC off the relatively compact surface of the road, down into the roadside ditch, and then across a series of soggy rice paddies. The U.S. Army specifications for the APC declared it to be amphibious. If Moon remembered what he’d read about it in the maintenance manual, this particular model had been designed specifically with Vietnamese marsh country and the canals of lowland Europe in mind. Therefore it should float a bit better than the one his battalion used in training. But Moon had never quite brought himself to believe it. It was just too much heavy metal, too many tons. Not that they had any choice. if it sank, it sank.

The APC tilted down the slope, skidding and slipping, nosed into the. ditch with a great splash of mud and dirty water, and then rose majestically up the other bank and into the paddy. Its treads made a slithering sound in the mud, but it moved steadily, slowed when Moon eased off on the gas, sped when he asked it to, turned with remarkably little sliding. A damn good piece of equipment, Moon thought, even if the army did design it.

Nguyen Nung was standing on the gunner’s pedestal behind the driver’s seat, his head out the hatch where the .50-caliber machine gun was mounted. He shouted something Moon couldn’t understand, laughed, and started singing. To Moon, that seemed a good omen. But maybe it was a Vietnamese dirge.

Nung’s father, fortunately, had built his house near the canal that fed the rice paddies here and away from the little village beside the creek. The village had been incinerated, perhaps by a napalm strike, perhaps by VC or ARVN forces who suspected it of harboring supporters of the other side. The elder Mr. Nung had surrounded his house with an earthen dike, and it sat behind this wall amid a cluster of outbuildings like a low-rent castle of bamboo and palm logs in an ocean of mud. Nung untied the gate, an affair of wired-together bamboo poles. He waved them in and closed it behind them. They were greeted by a clamor of excited ducks and chickens penned in a shed behind the house, and by a trio of tethered pigs. Osa and Mr. Lee climbed out of the APC. Moon stood in the driver’s hatch, sweating profusely under the slanting, watery sun, and assessed the situation. It was better than he’d expected.

The dike must have been built to hold back the Mekong at its full end-of-monsoon flood, with a stack of sandbags ready to replace the gate when the water rose. Moon could barely see over the wall, and it would make the APC invisible from the road. The roof of the house had been partly burned away. if a napalm bomber had done it he must have arrived on a wet day. Moon guessed the napalm tank had landed short, detonating in the paddy with only the last of it slashing over the dike to hit the roof. A section of palm fronds and their supports had burned out, but the fire hadn’t been hot enough to do more than scorch the bamboo walls. The floor— raised on the inevitable stilts—still looked solid.

Moon found himself feeling optimistic again. Osa, Lum Lee, and Nung could stay here until he got back. Or, if he didn’t get back, until time to meet the “shure boot” from the
Glory
of
the Sea.
With perfect luck no one would notice them in the bloody confusion of the war’s finale. With fair luck anyone who found them would be friendly. Even with bad luck—being found by desperate ARVN deserters or vengeful Vietcong—their prospects were at least as good as his.

Osa was waving to him from the floor. “One room is dry,” she said. “And most of another one.”

Time to get moving. Moon picked up his Langenscheidt map of Southeast Asia and climbed down into the mud.

Osa was standing in the partly dry room with Nung beside her, grinning and pointing at a charcoal burner and an assortment of cooking gear on the floor around it. The female instinct to make a home, Moon thought. Universal, even in someone who would look—even in a soggy, crumpled shirt— equally at home on Fifth Avenue. But there was no time for that now.

He unfolded the map Rice had marked, spread it on the floor, and squatted beside it.

“Here’s the plan,” Moon said.

It was a simple plan. Moon would take the APC northwest into Cambodia and collect Osa’s brother, his niece, and Mr. Lum Lee’s ancestral bones. That done, he would return to this house. Meanwhile, Osa, Lum Lee, and Nguyen Nung would wait here, keeping out of sight. Upon his return, when the third day was up, they would take Nung’s boat and sail away to the mouth of the Mekong and their rendezvous with the shore boat from the
Glory of the Sea.

“Okay?” Moon asked. “Does everybody agree?”

“No,” Osa said. “It’s crazy. It’s insane.”

Lum Lee looked thoughtful. Nguyen Nung looked curious, waiting for a translation.

“Why insane?” Moon asked. “if you lie low here, there’s a good chance nobody will find you. At least nobody hostile. And if I’m not back by—”

“No,” Osa said. “You stay here. We should all go together.”

She looked frightened, Moon thought. He hadn’t really seen that before. Plenty of chances to be frightened, but she hadn’t let it show.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll go take care of things. Find your brother. I’ll make him come back even if—”

“He’s already dead.”

That stopped Moon, the illogic of it.

“Yesterday you were sure he’d still be alive. Even this morning. Did you hear something on the radio?”

Moon looked from Osa to Lum Lee. He thought

he saw amusement in Mr. Lee’s expression, but that must be wrong.

“We heard that Pol Pot has concentrated his forces at Phnom Penh,” Lee said. “We picked up a broadcast that sounded official from Kampong Cham. The man was ordering all the people of that city to gather out on the highway for something. I think it was some work project, but the signal faded in and out.”

“And from Thailand,” Osa said, “they were broadcasting interviews with refugees who’d gotten across the border. They said—” She shuddered. “It was terrible, what they were saying the Khmer Rouge was doing to people. It was even worse than what I remember from Indonesia when they were killing the Chinese.”

“But that’s not the point,” Moon said. “How about your brother? Was there anything to tell you he’s not still alive?”

“How could he be? He’s exactly the sort of people they were beating to death.”

“But if Pol Pot pulled everybody north to clean out Phnom Penh, then down here in the south end of the country they wouldn’t have had time—”

“No, no,” Osa said. “He is already dead.”

Intuition, Moon thought. That and too much fatigue. Too much stress. No wonder she has given up. It would be much harder on her, not having any control over things. It was more than anyone should have to bear.

“Possibly you’re right,” he said. “But if I can find him, I’ll bring him out.”

Osa said something fiercely emphatic that Moon didn’t understand, probably in Dutch and, judging from her expression, probably an expletive. But before she looked away, he thought she was crying.

“What?” Moon said.

“I said, Why are men so damned stubborn? So unreasonable. Like donkeys. So stupid.”

“Well,” Moon said, a little irked by this, “if you will just remember when you met me in Manila, you will remember my purpose in coming here was to get Ricky’s daughter and bring her home. There’s nothing unreasonable about that.”

“But it’s not possible now. Mr. Rice flew away in the helicopter. Before that it was possible. Now it’s only being stubborn. You just go in and get killed. How does that help anybody?”

“Nguyen can run the boat. Nguyen and Mr. Lee. You don’t need me.”

Silence. Moon had been looking at Lum Lee when he made that statement. He looked back at Osa. Her face was no longer pale. It was flushed.

“I can run that damned boat myself,” she said. “I was just trying to save your stupid life.”

“Oh,” Moon said.

“Go ahead, then,” Osa said. “Go up there among Pol Pot’s savages and let them beat you to death with their bamboo poles.”

“Look,” Moon said.

“My stubborn brother has to die so he can be a martyr. Why do
you
want to die?”

“I just—” Moon began, but Osa had stalked out into the courtyard.

Leaving behind a strained silence.