Hillerman, Tony (30 page)

Nguyen Nung’s foot tapped him on the shoulder.

Moon looked around and up. Nguyen stood on the pedestal seat under the machine gun mount, his upper body out the hatch, visible to Moon only from his bandaged rib cage downward. His right

hand came down, giving the old-as-the-Romans combat signal for be quiet and take cover.

Moon cut the engine.

“What?”

Nguyen was leaning down through the hatch, looking frightened and saying something Moon couldn’t understand.

“Nguyen says he sees light coming up behind us.” Mr. Lee said. “It is moving the same direction we are going. He thinks several vehicles.”

Tanks, Moon thought. ARVN Sheridans or NVA Russian models. One would be about as bad as the other.

The driver’s compartment of the APC was not designed for either comfort or visibility. Peering through the dirty bulletproof glass of the viewing slots directly in front of his face, he could see a rice paddy lit vaguely by misty moonlight. Through the slot to the left he could see a line of bamboo and brush along a feeder canal. Fifty yards to his right he could see the raised embankment of the road he’d decided to abandon
in
fear of mines. He saw no lights. But of course they would be blackout lights—small beams aimed down lust ahead of the tracks.

Moon pushed himself up out of the driver’s seat, tapped Nguyen on the leg, motioned him down, squeezed past the engine compartment, and stepped up on the machine gunner’s pedestal.

Out of the smell of diesel oil, burned cordite, and old fish into a faint fresh breeze moving in from the southwest. if Moon’s directions were right, it came from the Gulf of Siam. Relatively fresh, but Moon’s sensitive nostrils still detected an acrid hint of fungus, the good smell of sandalwood, and a hint of decayed flesh and tropical flowers. From where he stood now, with his body protruding from the APC’s steel roof, he could see a light. Two lights. Three. Four. And these weren’t blackout lights. They were bright. The headlights of trucks, he guessed. They were moving slowly down the road toward them.

Moon dropped from the pedestal.

“Where are those—”

He didn’t finish the question. Mr. Lee was already handing him the case that held the vehicle’s night vision binoculars.

A jeep led the procession up the road, followed by three U.S. Army trucks. The jeep was flying a flag from its radio mast. It looked like a Vietcong flag. Moon scanned the landscape ahead, looking for cover and finding it. He dropped down into the driver’s seat, restarted the engine, shouted “Hang on!” and raced the APC across the paddy.

The vehicle crashed through the brush into the little canal that fed Mekong water into the field.

Moon shifted into neutral, cut the ignition, climbed up into the machine gunner’s hatch, and checked the situation. The APC might be visible from the road now, but only if you knew where to look and what you were looking for. Could he get it out? He had little doubt of that. Army ordnance had produced some notable lemons (the Sheridan tanks in his outfit being an example), but this APC wasn’t one of them. He studied the little convoy through the night glasses, close enough now to make out four men in the lead jeep. The jeep was made in America, but the driver and his passengers wore the black peasant’s garb of the Vietcong. The trucks following seemed to be loaded with men. Probably a VC unit in captured trucks heading up to join the attack on Can Tho.

Now that the noise of the APC’s diesel was gone he could clearly hear the engines. And over that the night sounds. The sky was mostly clear now. The moon was almost overhead, but still a lopsided disk and not the bright white rock that lit the landscape of the Rocky Mountain high country. It would be midmorning in Durance now. But what day was it? He’d lost track of that. Debbie would be at work or, if it was a weekend, off somewhere with J.D. or one of the other men who chased her. How about Shirley’s dog? How about J.D.’s engine? How about Rooney being fired? For that matter, how about being fired himself? None of it seemed important. He shifted to another question. What was going on with Osa van Winjgaarden? Her brother dead and let’s go home; then her brother alive and requiring her attention.

Moon heard a single distant explosion. It echoed and died away. He heard gecko lizards making their obscene-sounding mating calls, frogs, the song of insects. And then another sort of song. The men on the passing trucks were singing. He bent down into the APC. Lum Lee was standing just below him. Osa and Nguyen Nung sat on a side bench, looking at him.

“You hear that?” Moon asked.

“I think I hear someone singing,” Mr. Lee said. “Four truckloads of Vietcong,” Moon said.

“It sounds like one of their songs,” Mr. Lee said. “Like their national anthem?”

Mr. Lee laughed. “I think more like ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ It has lots of dirty verses. The song is about chasing out the French, and then chasing out the Japanese, and then chasing out the French again, and now—” Mr. Lee, always polite, didn’t complete the sentence. Instead he said, “We have been listening to their radio transmissions. I think they have captured Can Tho. They say the Tiger is dead.”

That changed Moon’s plans a little. He would tag along behind the convoy. No more worry about mines. The VC would know where they’d laid them.

He ran with lights off about half a mile behind the last truck. Nguyen Nung perched in the machine gun hatch as lookout. In the utterly flat terrain the road followed along this arm of the Mekong, there was no problem keeping the lights in sight. A little after midnight Moon noticed another light, a glow on the horizon visible even through his small, smeared viewing window. Can Tho, or some part of it, was burning. The map showed an airport on the north side of town. Probably its fuel dump was ablaze. Probably that was the explosion they’d heard.

He stopped the APC and spread the proper artillery map over the rice sacks on the floor. They studied it. Nguyen proved to understand maps far better than he understood English. He also knew his home landscape. He corrected their present location, moving Moon’s marker to a point six kilometers farther west of Can Tho. The narrow road of packed earth that intersected their path just ahead led directly to paved Route 80, which skirted the coast toward the town of Ha Tien right on the Cambodian border. There would be a border crossing checkpoint there. They’d avoid Route 80 by using farm roads through the paddies and dodge the border guards the same way.

“Okay,” Moon said. “Let’s everybody relieve themselves who needs to. Men to the right, women to the left. And off we go.”

Nguyen was grinning. “Hunner klicks. No much time.”

The road was drier here. Moon stood with his back against the metal flank of the APC looking through the moonlight at the orange glow of whatever was burning at Can Tho. No explosions now, just the geckos and the frogs and the insects. He was thinking that Nguyen’s hundred kilometers was about right. Sixty miles to the border. There the hills began. Another twenty miles, more or less, to Eleth Vinh’s village. Another ten or twelve into the higher country to the Reverend van Winjgaarden’s mission. The range on the APC he’d worked with at Fort Riley was 120 miles fully loaded, with twelve men, their weapons, spare ammunition, food, water, and gear. This model was the lighter version, made for the swamps. It should do a little better. He’d strapped eight GI cans in the racks the ARVN had added. Forty gallons. Full tank when they left the hangars, but if the gauge was right they’d already burned about
30
percent of that. Enough fuel to get there. There would be some left for getting back. Enough? Probably not.

The glow at Can Tho flared brighter. Perhaps a gasoline tank going up. It died away. Moon thought about what they’d find at the Cambodian border. And across it. Lum Lee said the radio had reported that Pol Pot’s new government was announcing it had executed eight members of the old cabinet. A public decapitation. Someone broadcasting from Bangkok had described the Khmer Rouge sending the capital’s residents out into the country, setting up labor camps for them, killing the stragglers, killing the Chinese, killing those who were not ethnic Khmers. Killing those who had “the soft hands of the capitalistic exploiters of the people.”

Well, maybe they would never reach the border. A dozen things could happen. if nothing bad happened, they should be there about moonset. Then they’d see what they would see.

PHNOM PENH
, Cambodia, April 29 (Agence France-Presse)—The Cambodian government today ordered the immediate deportation of more than 600 foreign refugees being sheltered in the French Embassy. The refugees are being trucked to the Thai border.

THERE HAD BEEN A COUPLE OF HOURS of cautious, tense, uneventful driving. Moon sagged in his seat, fighting off the drowsiness of twenty-four hours without sleep, wondering about how his mother’s operation had gone, working over the problem of Osa’s odd behavior, and considering how to recover his lost job, his mind drifting far from the unreality of the Mekong Delta, far from the tension of running without lights down this rutted dirt road, depending on the moon, with Nguyen Nung perched above him behind the machine gun, giving directions sometimes with a bare foot tapping the proper shoulder, sometimes shouting over the mutter of the diesel.

Moon shook his head violently to drive away sleep and, glancing back, saw that Osa was still sleeping curled on the bench and Lum Lee was studying the map spread across a rice sack on the floor. Then Nguyen yelled a warning and kicked hard at both of Moon’s shoulders.

Moon slammed the APC into neutral, hit the brakes, flicked on the headlights. Two hundred yards down the road, a group of men were pushing an army truck backward across the narrow road. Some wore steel helmets. ARVN soldiers. Probably one of the fragments left from the Yellow Tiger Battalion. Probably the survivors of a platoon fleeing Can Tho. How should he handle this?

Nguyen was shouting something unintelligible.

“He says rocket launcher,” Mr. Lee said. Then Moon could see it himself. The man holding it was just behind the truck, wearing a helmet. Kneeling now to aim. Moon cut the lights, slammed the APC in reverse, did the push-pull “bugout” maneuver they’d practiced a hundred times at Fort Riley, felt the machine begin its spin. He heard something like a curse from Nguyen, then the sound of bullets ricocheting from the side armor, then the staccato roar of Nguyen’s machine gun.

The APC lurched into the ditch, tilted at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. From behind Moon came the sound of things clanging and crashing as they fell, the slamming, whanging sound of bullets hitting the armor, of sudden bursts from Nguyen’s gun, of the left tread spinning in the mud, the groan of twisting metal plates.

Then the deafening blast of an explosion.

Moon’s nostrils were filled with the smell of smoke, his ears with Nguyen’s scream.

Moon thought, So this is how it ends.

He felt a strange, illogical sense of peace. Behind him Osa was sprawled on the rice sacks. Mr. Lee was invisible. Nguyen’s legs were thrashing. Then he realized that the diesel was roaring, both treads were holding again, the APC rolling down them, tilting back to level, moving. Now the
whang
of bullets hitting steel was coming from the closed rear ramp. Whatever had exploded hadn’t killed them. Not even Nguyen. The blood trickling down the man’s arm and dripping on Moon’s back must be from something relatively minor because Nguyen was still at the gun above, firing efficient short fifty bursts.

It had probably been an antipersonnel grenade, designed to kill men but not to penetrate even the thin armor of an APC. They’d decided that after fleeing a mile down the road and turning down an even narrower side road and sitting, with the engine cut, to listen. Moon, who rarely remembered to pray, prayed now not to hear an approaching truck. The truck could easily outrun them on the road. The grenade had merely frightened them and gave Nguyen another shrapnel slash across his shoulder. But if the soldiers had an antitank rocket it would punch right through this thin-skinned little vehicle and turn it into a great blaze of burning diesel fuel.

Which, it occurred to Moon as he sat straining to hear something and hoping not to, was why they were still alive. The truck must be out of fuel. The roadblock was being formed either to snare an operating vehicle or refuel the truck.

Now sounds began to emerge from the eerie silence. No truck, no shots, just the rain-country lizards resuming their lustful shouts, insects taking up their nocturnal songs, and finally the frogs issuing their interrupted mating calls.

Nguyen was sure the blast had been a rocket grenade. He had seen it coming. He had seen them coming before out of the mangrove thickets, out of the half-burned hooches lining the creeks and canals and the Mekong itself. Seen what they would do when they hit the fiberglass hull of a PBR or one of its occupants. That’s why he had screamed. But he was embarrassed by that now, because only a little piece of shrapnel had cut his shoulder.

While Osa added to his collection of bandages, Nguyen gave them his analysis of the action, which seemed, despite his wound, to have left him joyful. They had come upon what was left of a Yellow Tiger infantry platoon on the run from their lost war at Can Tho. They were headed for the coast, Nguyen believed, hoping to steal a boat. Their truck had run out of fuel. They had heard the APC coming and were preparing a roadblock to ambush them. Nguyen emphasized that he was navy, not army. A sailor, not a soldier. He had Mr. Lee translate that distinction twice. Even so, he would not have fired upon those cowardly soldiers had they not shot at him first.

They mapped a detour, following the network of little capillary dirt tracks that kept the delta peasants in touch with the villages. It avoided the roadblock, reduced the risk of running into such problems, and added about twenty kilometers to their journey. Moon pushed himself up from the bench, trying to do the math in his head, converting kilometers to miles and dividing the miles per gallon of diesel fuel burned. He felt dizzy. And pessimistic.