The Reckoning (14 page)

Finally, Duncan said, “I'm sorry it's come to this, Molly. I'm trying to think of a middle way. But nothing's coming to me. It seems we have to choose between the bones and the city, and I know where I stand. And we know where John stands. But there are three of us.”

He looked to Molly for the deciding vote, and she made a face. “What can I say?” She was genuinely at a loss. Kleat had all but persuaded her, and yet the city needed her. “You both have strong arguments.” She was about to ask if there was really no compromise to be made, but Kleat spoke up.

“No need to fret over it,” he said. He clapped the magazine into the grip and chambered a round. He looked at his pistol, then at them.

“Are you threatening us?” Molly asked.

“Please,” he said. “It's just that sometimes we get carried away with this democracy thing. And we shouldn't.”

According to her watch next morning, she rose at 9
A.M.
the previous morning. It was darker than nine, though.
Six,
she thought, and hurried from her tent.

Gray rags of fog drifted in the mist, as if the morning could not make up its mind which way to blind her. She had her bearings, though. In less than five minutes she found Samnang's bright orange fire and the men all gathered.

She feared that Kleat and Duncan were battling for the brothers' loyalties, the one to stay, the other to leave. But as she quickly learned, the brothers had their own loyalties to attend to. They wanted more money.

“Otherwise, they're leaving without us,” Duncan said. He was good-natured about it. “It makes sense. Why stick around? They scored a few thousand dollars' worth of pots, and as far as they're concerned, the city belongs to them. They're bringing some friends back with them.”

“What about leaving
with
us?” Molly asked.

“More money.”

“Pirates,” Kleat fumed.

“We knew that coming in,” said Duncan.

“They'd strand us?” Molly looked around. Vin kept his eyes on the ground. The other two brothers held their chins high and their rifles prominent.

The mist was churning. The forest breathed.

Samnang brought her a coffee. “Sugar?” he asked.

“No, Samnang.” It was all spoiled. They needed food to stay. Blankets. A generator to recharge her batteries. Umbrellas. More malaria pills. A toothbrush. They needed solitude.

“This is your doing,” Kleat said to Duncan.

“It does me no good,” Duncan said. “They've got us.”

“How much?” said Molly.

“Another five hundred for the ride out. Five thousand to stay through tomorrow. They're not stupid. They keep talking about the typhoon and the river.”

“I only have two hundred,” Molly said.

“I'm out,” said Duncan. What had they been thinking, supplies for six months?

“The statues,” said Kleat.

“What?”

“Show them on your camera. The terra-cotta warriors.”

“No,” said Duncan. “Don't.”

Samnang squatted by the fire and blew on it with pursed lips. He had breath like kerosene. The fire leaped.

“They're worth hundreds of thousands,” Kleat said. “Tell them you'll show them the location. They'll deal.”

“We can walk out of here on foot,” Duncan said. The mist was drawing away. Trees appeared around them.

“Show them,” Kleat told Molly.

She noticed Samnang watching her through the fire. Was there a right and a wrong to this? She was scared. They were in the middle of nowhere. “No,” she decided.

Kleat turned to the brothers. “Statues,” he said in English. He pointed up at the city. “Understand? Big money. Statues.” They frowned at him.

Tails of fog flickered off through the branches. The truck stood over there, and the Land Cruiser. Molly glanced up. Her mouth fell open.

There seemed no way they could have missed such a thing yesterday.

Eyes fixed to the canopy that was their false sky, she backed away from it.

“Molly?” said Duncan. Then he saw it, too, hidden in plain sight. Kleat swore with surprise. The brothers crouched and raised their rifles.

The rusting hulk of a vehicle hung in a spur of limbs, like a Lost Dutchman, beached in the air. One long metal tread had broken and dangled from its belly. She lifted her camera and, on the flank, in plain view, a faint insignia still showed: a black horse rearing.

The revelation—the relic of the Blackhorse patrol—unplugged them from their wrangling. You could not call what followed a peace. They did not reconcile so much as disengage. It was spontaneous. No one willed it. They simply forgot one another, at least for a time.

They drifted apart, staring up at the trapped war machine, struggling to make sense of it. Sixty feet up, the vehicle looked stranded by some mythical flood, but it was the forest that had lifted it.

“Impossible,” Kleat said. “That's eleven tons or more.”

Yet there it hung in the crook of massive branches. The helmet and cartridges had fallen from it. No one had bothered to look up. Who would have thought such a thing could happen?

Kleat paced beneath like a starving man eyeing an apple, alternately quiet and then stringing out thoughts for anyone to hear. “The first time the Vietnamese saw an APC, they called it a green dragon,” he told anyone who cared to listen. “The army used them for amphibious taxis. M-113s. Armored personnel carriers. The cavalry turned them into gunships on tracks. ACAVs. ‘Tracks,' the troops called them. They were fast and mean. There was usually a crew of five. They'd load them full of ammunition and go hunting in columns.”

He went on about its armament, travel range, and the thickness—or thinness—of its armored skin. “They were death traps if you hit a mine or caught a rocket.” Molly quit listening. She could not get over the power of the trees. Sixty feet, six stories high, in thirty years. Eleven tons.

Duncan, the dedicated scientist, went to one of the terraces and opened his steel briefcase to take notes and sketch on his pad.

The three brothers retired to the staircase in a smudge of cigarette smoke, stricken with superstition or just discussing the possible profit to be made. The market in American bones from the Vietnam era was not something the DOD talked about, Molly had learned, but they paid well for the real thing.

Samnang alone did not seem awestruck. He had unwittingly made their fire under the dead vehicle and now began shifting it to a more suitable place. A few at a time, he carried the logs with their smoldering tips to the base of a broad, flat terrace and blew the flames back to life.

Molly noticed him. His simple act declared acceptance. Everything was changed, and yet nothing. For all their differences, they were staying. He had grasped that fact. They needed a center. The fire was that, an anchor for their camp.

“This is only one of them,” Kleat said. “We're looking for nine men, though. There has to be a second track somewhere.”

The canopy didn't seem to be hiding any more of them. Molly looked up among the ganglia of limbs and vines, and this appeared to be the forest's sole catch.

She stood back and faced it as if facing the Sphinx. That's how it seemed, like a beast in the middle of the desert. A riddle in metal skin. They had come for bones and found a fortress. They had looked in the treetops and found a chariot. What did one have to do with the other? Some hidden hand had sewn them together, but why?

She drew out her camera and telephoto lens and sighted through the long barrel. The ACAV leaped at her. Tipped slightly downward and canting to its right, it hung up there with its machine gun aimed straight at her. She took the shot and stepped to the side, out of the line of fire.

Meandering, angling for the best shots, she ransacked the track with her high-tech spyglass. The details bounded out at her. A ramp at the rear flapped open like a drawbridge. Beside the neatly stenciled
U.S. ARMY
, graffiti vowed maximum savagery. There was another gun shield behind the main turret, but this one lacked a barrel in the slot.

A man was watching her from the roof of the vehicle.

It didn't register in the first instant.

She saw him, but didn't see him.

Her mind rationalized the face as a knot of wood, or a distant statue. His eyes were right on her, and she accepted them as bulbs on a limb, or openings in the leaves.

But then his nostrils moved, nothing else, just the center of his watching face, and she realized he was taking her scent.

“Christ,” she said.

Her hand jerked. The camera moved, but not before she hit the shutter release. In or out of focus, she didn't know. She lifted the camera back to her eye, searching, zooming, not certain she wanted to see him again.

Duncan was at her side in moments.

Gone, he was gone. Her hands were shaking, next to worthless for holding the telephoto steady.

Kleat came over.

“A man,” she said. “I saw him, his face, up there.”

“Bullshit.” But Kleat's gun appeared. He held it in a two-handed grip, half raised.

“See for yourself.” She fiddled with the display. There was the face, or almost a face.

“You got one,” Duncan congratulated her. “Too bad he moved.”

“One what?”

“A gibbon, it looks like. A pileated gibbon. They're all but extinct east of the Mekong. The hill tribes loved them to death. Good meat, I hear.”

Kleat holstered his gun. “A monkey,” he said.

She stared at the lighted image. The focus was ragged. The turret details were perfectly sharp, but the face was a blur, barely there at all. It was charcoal gray and, granted, simian in some measure. But it wasn't quite the face she'd seen.

“Let me see,” said Kleat. She passed him the camera, thinking he wanted to study the image. Instead he brought it to his eye like a marksman.

“You've done it again,” he said after a minute.

“What?”

“First the pilot, now this.” He handed her the camera. “That's a skull.”

She steadied the camera. There the sloped breastplate, a fading white army star, up higher the snout of the machine gun, and the turret—empty now where the face had been. And behind that, all but hidden along the upper shell, she saw the head, tucked within the shadows, unmoving.

Hard and glossy, it rested on a stubby metal pole. It looked freshly plucked from the battlefield. Through her lens, the eyes gazed down. Kleat took the camera.

“The Vietnamese must have found them,” Kleat said. “Or the fucking KR. Those poor guys. There could be more of them inside.” The idea quickened in him. “Someone's got to go up there.”

“That will be a trick,” Duncan said.

“Get one of the boys to do it.”

“They'll never go,” Duncan said. “Especially with a dead man up there.”

“Bargain with them.”

“Don't force this, John. I keep telling you, part of them still lives in the tenth century, with curses and evil eyes and flying spirits. The locals give their babies charms to protect them. They stack firewood against the door to keep out the dead. You wouldn't believe some of the stories.”

Kleat wheeled around and walked quickly to the brothers. For a moment, Molly didn't miss her camera. Then she realized his game.

“He's showing them the statues,” she told Duncan.

They hurried after Kleat, but the damage was done. They were holding her camera and smearing the display with their fingertips. They were excited.

“What have you done?” said Duncan.

“I just gave you and me the world,” Kleat said. “Now talk to them. Get whatever you want out of it, all the supplies in the world, just as long as you get us into that track.”

“Forget it.”

“Sam, get over here,” Kleat said. “You tell them. The place is huge. They could search for days and never find these statues. And they don't have days. The typhoon's coming. We know where the statues are. I need someone to run a rope up to that vehicle. That's for starters. They're businessmen. Let's do business.”

Samnang relayed the message. Doc, the eldest brother with the full
sak
—the suns and flames and lines and dots from his toes to his throat—glanced up at the ACAV and said, “
Te.”
No way.

“Come on,” Kleat said in English. He pointed at the camera display. “You want these? We'll show you where they are. One of you street heroes, come on. All you have to do is climb up. Tell them, they don't even have to go inside. All we need is a rope to it. We'll take it from there.”

Doc said something. Samnang said, “They want your gun.”

“My gun?”

“They are saying that. The statues and your Glock.”

“Why? We're already outgunned, three to one.”

Outgunned?
thought Molly.

“What does it matter?” said Duncan. “If the bones are there, you get what you want.”

“And if they're not? Tell them no statues until we get inside the track,” Kleat said. “Tell them.”

“They understand,” said Samnang.

Doc spoke. Vin handed the camera to them. Duncan and Samnang exchanged a wary look.

“Here's your camera. They're requesting to look at your gun. An exchange.”

“The hell.” Kleat's voice flattened out. A vein appeared on his scalp.

Molly took her camera.

“They want me to hand it to them?”

“Just do it,” Duncan said.

“You know what they're doing,” said Kleat.

“Not necessarily, John. Keep calm.”

“They're pirates.”

“Don't raise your voice, John.”

He was going to pull his gun on them, Molly realized with sudden alarm. They were baiting him to do it. They were waiting for him. Their yellow eyes stared off into the distance. They toked their cigarettes like Marlboro men. But their fingers had shifted on their rifles. They were getting the weight of their weapons, the arc of their descent, the timing, the targets. The signs were all there.

She could almost picture herself lying among the dead.

“I'll go,” she said suddenly.

Her voice startled them.

Kleat narrowed his eyes, suspicious of everyone now. “Up there?”

“You don't understand.” She smiled large and stepped between the men. “I'm good at this. It's one of the hats I wear. I hang off rocks for a living. Mountain photography. Calendars and magazines. I'm not the greatest climber in the world, but I can manage a tree.”

“No,” said Duncan.

She smiled at him. “Baby steps,” she said.

She took over, chattering brightly, getting them distracted. Samnang began relaying her decision to the brothers. Vin's eyes grew big. She reached for him and brought him down into their midst, rifle and all, disarming them one at a time.

“I'll need a rope,” she said. “Do you have a rope?”

Samnang droned on softly. Vin nodded his head and started for the truck.

“And you,” she said to Kleat. “Give me your gun.”

Kleat backed away from her. “Now you?”

“I'm not going up there without some protection. Who knows what's living in there?”

“Forget it.”

“You want me to fix a rope? That's my price. A loaner.”

“I'll watch your back.”

She held out her hand. “Right now.” She added quietly, “You son of a bitch.”

Samnang halted his translating.

She could see Kleat's gears turning. He could refuse her. But she was his only hope, and he knew it. They were locked on to his every move, and his one chance at keeping his gun was to give it away. She would take it out of the brothers' reach as well as his…for the time being. He handed her his Glock.

“Is the safety on?” she asked, looking at both sides of the gun.

“It's a Glock,” he said.

“That's what everyone keeps saying.”

“It's all internal,” he said. “Don't worry about it.”

She tucked the gun into the back of her waist, out of sight, out of mind.

The brothers' hands relaxed on their rifles, just as she'd hoped. “Keep this for me,” she said to Duncan, and gave him her camera.

He laid one hand on top of hers, and she was shaking. His touch steadied her. He took the camera. “You want me to get a picture of you?” he asked.

That was a first. None of her subjects had ever bothered to ask if she wanted a record of herself.