The Reckoning (16 page)

It was high noon, as best as she could tell inside the green bell jar of the canopy, when the expedition split into three teams. Kleat still seethed over the loss of his gun, but the Heng brothers treated Molly like a champion.

“Rambo,” they said, still awed that a woman could hit like a man. For her reward, they paired her with Samnang and allowed her to keep her camera. Duncan was sent with the middle brother, So. Kleat went up the stairs watched over by Doc and Vin.

Doc made clear that their first priority was to locate the terra-cotta guardians at the back gate. But if they happened to find American bones along the way, that was fine, too. There was no more strike talk. For now, the issue of leaving was moot, and a few extra dollars paled beside the prospect of priceless relics.

Carrying burlap sacks and Molly's emptied-out mule bag, and even bunches of little blue plastic bags like the kind in a deli, the searchers climbed toward the city. Molly and Samnang were quickly left behind. They had the most freedom, she realized. The brothers expected little or nothing from an old man with one leg.

Every so often, she sat down “to enjoy the view” or “rest my knees.”

Samnang was not fooled. “You're a dangerous woman,” he teased her. “You make us believe we're stronger than we are.”

“I'm serious,” she said. “Climbing that tree wiped me out.”

“Yes, and I have two good legs,” he said, smiling.

From halfway up the stairs, their camp looked borrowed from the forest. The green hut was already surrounded by the tiptoe of grass. Their fire lay banked under gray ashes.

They heard Kleat arguing, high above them. One of the brothers, probably Doc, snapped back at him. The argument died away.

“Have I done the wrong thing?” she wondered out loud. Samnang knew what she meant. By disarming Kleat, she had made them defenseless. They were at the mercy of the brothers and the typhoon and fate now.

“You took the fangs from a serpent, and left him alive. It is up to him now, what he does with his poison. As for the others, their hearts are still uncertain.”

“The brothers treat you badly.”

“They blame me for their miseries,” Samnang said. “That is natural. I survived, you see. Their parents did not. They have poison in them, too. We must wait for them to decide what they will do with it.”

It was the closest he'd ever come to discussing the Pol Pot years with her. Molly waited for him to volunteer more, but Samnang added nothing. She could have asked him, but told herself it didn't matter who he had been, only who he had become, this gentle old pilgrim.

They reached the top of the stairs and found that the others were long gone. They started in among the ruins, strolling slowly, and it reminded her of their mornings, before the dawn, at the crash site. She thought of the pilot, and then of the Blackhorse soldiers.

“They could have gone anywhere,” she said.

Samnang glanced at the ground. “Mr. O'Brian went this way with the middle boy,” he said. “Mr. Kleat went through there with the other children.” Children, he called them.

“The missing soldiers, I meant. Thirty years have passed.”

“We have a saying, ‘Don't despair on the winding river,' ” Samnang said. “Patience. They will reveal themselves to us.”

They went straight, following a once orderly avenue between the spires and temples and palaces. The tiles were split apart by roots and subterranean forces. The forest blocked their view. Rounding the flanks of monstrous banyan trees, they saw more trees, more buildings. Eliminate the trees, restore the order, and the city would still have been as complicated as a perfume. The canals and side streets and winding avenue formed a puzzle. If the architects had not designed it as a labyrinth, the city had accumulated a labyrinth within it. As they worked deeper into the ruins, Samnang began braiding grass into knots and bending saplings into
O
s to mark their path. That made her feel less stupid. She was not the only one feeling overwhelmed in here.

It was a kingdom of eyes, the enormous heads beholding their trespass. Molly tried to imagine the Blackhorse soldiers drifting through the ruins with her same hushed wonder, their rifles at the ready. There were a thousand hiding places in here, and she realized that the soldiers would not have left their bones in plain view. They were jungle fighters. They would have squirreled themselves away into the most unknowable spots, burying themselves wherever the enemy might overlook them. What chance did an untrained civilian have of finding them a generation later?

They came to a quadrangle in the center of the city. She and Samnang decided it had to be the center. Four avenues met here at a broad square, or park, mobbed with grass and trees.

In the middle of it all, dominating the city, stood a tower. It was a strange hybrid of a structure, both round and square. It had a dozen angular sides and as many levels, though they were really only one level ascending in a single, steady, candy-cane spiral. A staircase corkscrewed around the exterior, and doorways led off that. The tower rose into the trees. Parrots sailed back and forth to its upper doors.

Like in the canyon she and Duncan had found yesterday, its walls were carved with bas-relief. The tower was a giant storybook. Samnang recognized some of the images, here and there pausing to press his palms together and bend his head. He explained what he could, the scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and the stages—like the Stations of the Cross—of the Buddha's enlightenment.

“This goes back to the beginning of my people,” he said. “But so much of it escapes me. The kings, the alphabet, the battles, I should know them. I'm Khmer. I do know them. Here.” He touched his heart. “But not here.” His head. “This comes from before the Angkor, long before.”

“Duncan thinks it could be two thousand years old,” she said.

“Yes, Duncan,” Samnang said. “He has made this his
spécialité.
”

“He said it might have been the model for Angkor Wat.”

Samnang looked at her. “Angkor and this place, or the Sistine Chapel or Notre-Dame, they are expressions of an idea. Like the statues of Buddha, or Michelangelo's God with a white beard, magnificent attempts to imagine a face for what has no face.”

“Have you been to the Sistine Chapel?” she asked, hoping he might offer more of his past.

“In another lifetime,” he said.

She dropped it.

The green light kept dimming. Somewhere above their hemisphere of leaves and limbs, storm clouds were eclipsing a sun they could not see. Thunder rolled like a subway train.

There was a crack of rifle fire. One of the search parties had discovered the gate and the terra-cotta statues. The others would join them. “Should we go to them?” she asked.

“Are the statues something you want?”

“No. You saw the head. Those eyes. They're terrible.”

“Then let us not suffer for their desire,” Samnang said. “We can stay here, deaf to the world. Anyway, we will see their treasures in camp tonight.”

They went on circling the base of the tower and came across a name. Carved in deep, square letters among the bas-relief it said
C. K. WATTS
. Underneath was a date: 8/20/70.

Molly looked up at the tower. The logic slid together. “From up there you could see the whole city,” she said to Samnang. “I think that's where they went.”

“Among the birds,” said Samnang. “Certainly.”

She ran her fingers over the incisions. According to the ACAV map, the lost souls of the Eleventh Cavalry had pulled into the fortress on or around June 24. If the graffiti's date was right, the soldiers had languished here, alive, another seven weeks or more.

The idea moved her. They hadn't just burrowed into lairs to fight it out. They'd made their home here, and found time to roam among the ruins. One of them, at least, had passed beside the stories inscribed on this wall.

She looked to see if there was a special context for the name, and it was carved beneath a monstrous warrior, one of Duncan's wrathful deities, with a tiger circling his legs. He wore a necklace of severed heads.

She snapped a picture of the name and the demon slayer. She doubted C. K. Watts ever knew this was a ritual slayer of ignorance. But what irony, an American kid with a gun and a knife, off course and vulnerable, unconsciously appealing for wisdom. More likely he'd been taken with the image's ferocity.

“That makes four of them,” she said. “Him, plus the three dog tags.”

The tower reached into the middle canopy. The stairs stretched up and around, offering access to scores of gaping doorways. There would be a hundred and four of them, she remembered. Maybe she was getting the hang of the place after all.

“I think this will be of interest to Mr. O'Brian and Mr. Kleat,” Samnang said. “They will want to be here.”

She promised to wait at the base of the tower while Samnang went to find the others. He disappeared into a thicket of spires and trees in the direction of the rifle shot.

Her watch read 10
A.M.
yesterday. The second hand crept. She tried to restrain herself. With her macro lens, she stalked a small white gecko with red spots.

But as the everlasting seconds dragged by, she chafed. The stairs lay right here before her. And the brothers might have shanghaied Samnang to carry down their plunder. Even if they released Kleat and Duncan to explore the tower, another hour or two could pass before they arrived. The afternoon was marching on. The tower might go unexplored until tomorrow. And tomorrow was a toss of the dice. It was senseless to wait.

She took the winding staircase slowly.

The tower held answers, she was certain of it. Once it would have commanded a view of the entire city, maybe even of the far plains to the west, a man-made mountain on top of a mountain. Even with the encroaching forest, the tower was still the ultimate high ground. It would have given the soldiers a vertical fortress, with a honeycomb of doorways to watch for their enemies.

The deep, wide steps spiraled in a clockwise direction. When she was a kid, her stepparents had taken her to Washington, D.C., and she still remembered the marble steps eroded by millions of feet passing up and down. Add to that twenty centuries of rainfall and you had these stairs. The inner half of the steps had melted into a single sluice for running water. It forced her to walk along the outer edge where the steps wobbled under her weight, and a slip could be deadly. But she felt only a growing sense of authority.

On her left, always her left, the city unwound its maze, a great crossroads with the tower at its center. She spied more canals and lanes and corridors veining off without landmarks that she could see. Even from this height, satellite pyramids looked identical. The place seemed built to be lost in.

On her right, the doorways yawned like ornate caves. She glimpsed statues and carvings inside, and it was entirely possible the rooms held more Eleventh Cavalry relics and graffiti. Their discovery would have to wait for another day. She wanted to see what lay at the top.

Thunder rolled through the heavens. Vines hung like slow-motion rain. She came to a summit deck, and it held a crowning structure. Molly hesitated outside the entrance, a final door.

The statue of a female lay in rubble to one side. Her twin, a half-naked Amazon with breasts as round as bowling balls, guarded the other side of the entrance with a stone sword, its point resting between her feet. Standing head and shoulders above Molly, the sentinel was voluptuous and beautiful, a change from the bestial glare of the warrior statues. She passed on the photo for now. It needed Duncan or Samnang for human scale. Not Kleat. When it came time to write the account, she didn't want to have to explain him.

From this height, the faces carved on distant spires seemed to be lowering their eyes before the tower. She peered down from the edge for the others. She could hear their voices in the forest; they were speaking her name. But the plaza was empty. Her gain, she reckoned. For a few minutes more, the tower room belonged to her.

She stepped across the stone doorsill, and the room was richly lighted inside. The roof had a rectangular opening so large she thought it must have been built as an observatory. There were no sun or stars to see now, only the green jacket of the canopy. Leaves formed a thick, moldering carpet from one wall to the other. It smelled, not unpleasantly, like a compost pile.

Buddhas lined the far wall, or what was left of them. Side by side, each sat tucked within his own niche. She counted them: thirteen. The skylight had been built to illuminate them. At one time, the display must have been awesome.

The centuries had not been kind, however. The far end of the statue wall had collapsed into rubble. The faces were chewed down to raw stone. At least their lower bodies had been spared the ravages of time. Their long, elegant fingers twisted in ritual shapes, like gang members' hand signals. She imagined princes and monks meditating here, issuing prayers up through the aperture, to the heavens. Long ago, this must have been a transit station to the sacred.

After a minute, she pulled her eyes from the Buddhas, and remnants of the Eleventh Cavalry lay all around her in the shadows to the sides and rear. She turned in place, discovering a tangle of green web gear with worn grommets, and a rotting boot, and a snaking length of unspent machine-gun bullets. Mounds and heaps of things lined the wall. The soldiers—some of them, anyway—had retreated to this room.

She treated it like a crime scene, touching nothing, documenting everything with her camera, memorizing the line of her motions. She planted her feet as meticulously as a tai chi artist.

Using her telephoto, she reached across the leaves to a heap of emptied metal ammunition boxes with hinged lids. Two lay on their sides, one stood upright, half filled with old water. A black-and-white dragonfly hovered there, and that was a photo.

She found—but did not touch—a toothbrush with the bristles mashed wide from overuse. Some boy's mother had taught him well. Dental hygiene right up to cause of death.

Stacked boxes had rotted and collapsed, avalanching their contents out from the walls. There was a flashlight with a red lens, like something out of
Dick Tracy.
A flak jacket was propped up and empty. A broken M-16 rifle lay to one side. A tendril had grown up the barrel and out through the jammed chamber. A small white flower hung like a shell in mid-ejection.

It was as if the soldiers had shed themselves here.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, the room became more defined. The Buddhas had been defaced, not by the elements, but by gunfire. The collapsed section had been dynamited or hit by a rocket.

Bullets—hundreds of them—scarred the statue wall in long, slashing bursts. She tried to piece together their desperate firefight. Had the enemy dropped down through the roof? Or had they come running through the door and sprayed the Americans crouching beneath the Buddhas?

The place should have been heaped with bones. But there were none that she could see. Had they been scattered by animals, or had the victors carted them out and pitched them off the tower? Had she passed bits and pieces of them on her ascent without knowing it? Part of her didn't want to find them. She fastened on the idea of them rising up through the hole in the roof, body and spirit, rescued on their Judgment Day.

She passed over the hands twice before recognizing them.

There were two of them beneath a scorch mark in one corner, the bones gloved in dried black skin.

She pulled the image closer with her telephoto, not willing to cross over to them. To the side, were those more bones? Sticks, she saw, charred firewood. A cremation? But the pyre was too small. This was no bigger than Samnang's cool fire.

The hands had mummified over the years. Or been smoked by the fire. Someone had lopped them off at the wrists.

It came to her.

Cannibalism.

Trapped, battered by fear, out of food, they must have taken to eating their comrades.

A laugh—a yap—cracked through the room. It fell upon her, Luke's animal laugh. But it wasn't Luke up there. Molly looked, and there were three of them this time, like the one she'd seen in the ACAV turret. While she prowled through the room, the gibbons had stolen up and perched along the skylight rim. They had black masks and gray arms. Her pulse slowed. She took a picture of them, just to regain control.

“Hey,” she said. “Just looking.”

One leaned forward. He opened his mouth. He bared his teeth. Were they going to attack? But his eyes stayed fixed on hers, and he seemed to be trying out her language. That made her more afraid than the bared teeth.

They were studying her, and she was alone.

Careful not to turn her back to them, Molly began retreating from the center of the room. Something gave a muffled crunch beneath the carpet of leaves. Nut shells within the mast? She moved her foot and whatever it was shifted under there. Bones, she thought. What did anthropologists call it? The midden. She was walking across the cannibals' scattered garbage.

The monkeys suddenly bolted away.

“What are you doing here, Molly?” It was Kleat's voice at the doorway. “Sam said you'd wait.”

She exhaled softly. “I knew you were coming. I heard your voices.”

“Our voices? I don't think so. The old cripple had us running to save you. We were too busy catching our breath to talk.”

Then she'd heard birdsong, or trees creaking. Or monkeys discussing. No matter.

“We located another gateway,” Kleat said. “With clay warriors, and rooms with pottery and jars. And a tunnel blocked with barbed wire. That makes three entrances, including the one Samnang said you found.”

He stood in the doorway. Something about the room troubled him. It disrupted his bravado. He wouldn't come in.

“Where's Duncan?” she asked.

“Halfway up the stairs. Crawling. I've never seen such a fear of heights.” Kleat would not cross the threshold. “You shouldn't have come here alone. You could have destroyed evidence.”

Duncan appeared, and there was indeed dirt on his knees. The two men stood there, blocking the light. Did they need an invitation?

“They were here,” she said.

Samnang arrived last. Edging between the two Americans, he caught sight of the ruined Buddhas, and his palms clapped together like magnets. He bowed his head solemnly.

Samnang's entrance seemed to break the spell. The other two stepped inside. Molly imagined Kleat would set upon the room like a wolf, but he moved tentatively, scarcely nibbling at the relics.

She watched what drew them. Kleat went for the rifle with the broken stock. Samnang gravitated to the wall holding the statues. Duncan vacillated. He moved along the edges. He lifted the web gear and dropped it, and ran his fingers along the foot of one damaged Buddha, and shook his head sadly. Then he found the husk of a radio set propped against one wall, and that occupied him.

Molly remained near the center, surrounded by their motion, shooting them making their discoveries, waiting.

The radio was partially disassembled. Duncan flipped switches on and off and the thing was dead, of course.

“There are two hands,” she said, pointing at the fire ring.

“Hands?” said Kleat. He took the pieces of rifle with him to the corner. He nudged aside the sticks of firewood and laid one of the dried hands along his outstretched palm. It was small. Too small, she realized.

“Monkeys,” Kleat said.

“Monkeys?”

“The men ran out of food.”

Kleat glanced from the hand to her. “Did you think they were human? Don't tell me. Ghouls in camouflage.”

“No.”

Duncan returned to his tinkering. “Huh,” he said and pulled out a transistor tube. He held it up to the light. “Look at that.”

Duncan brought it over to Molly, and Kleat joined them. He heard the crunching sound underfoot. “What's that?” He pressed at the leaves with his boot.

Duncan held out his find. “It's a condom,” he said. “And there's something inside.”

It was in fact a condom stretched long over a short tube and knotted at the end. He tore off the knot and peeled down the sheath, baring a roll of papers torn from a pocket-size notebook. The pages were brittle, and he didn't try to force them open.

“It must have been a journal. Or a will.” He studied the outside of the roll. “But the rain got in. The ink's run. It's spoiled.”

“There are still some words,” said Molly. “Maybe with better light—”

“What
is
this?” Kleat said again, rocking his weight over the leaves.

Bones breaking, she thought. Monkey or squirrel or parrot bones, whatever hungry men might take from the forest. Kleat worked his fingers under the carpet of leaves.

He lifted a long fragment to expose the red stone of the floor. They weren't bones, but cartridge shells. Duncan pocketed the papers, and Molly helped clear more of the floor. Brass shells littered the floor.

“Now we know where the side guns on the ACAV went,” Kleat said. “These are shells from an M-60. They must have pulled the big guns out of the tracks and brought them up here. Look at it all, like Armageddon in here.”

Molly picked one of the cartridges from the floor, and a beetle crawled out. She dropped it.

“There's something more here,” Duncan said. He ran his fingers along a wide black stripe.

The three of them rolled back more of the thick mat. A big serpentine line emerged, painted onto the floor with engine grease. To its side, another line appeared.

“It's an SOS,” Duncan said. They didn't need to unpeel the whole thing. Stretching thirty-feet from end to end, it lay directly beneath the skylight. They looked up at the forest ceiling.

“They must have chopped a hole in the canopy, or burned it open with fuel,” Kleat said. “They were trying to signal for help.”

“But who would see it?” said Molly.

“A passing helicopter. Spotter planes. Our pilot.”

Like a child's prayer,
Molly thought. The soldiers had died making wishes to the sky.

“It's coming together,” said Kleat. “They made their last stand in the tower. You couldn't ask for a better field of fire. The enemy would have had to come up the stairs one at a time. But how long could nine men hold out? It must have been hand-to-hand combat in the end.”

“I thought of that, too,” said Duncan. “But then there should be bones all over the place.”

“This is quite odd,” Samnang said behind them. He had moved from the Buddhas to the doorway and was running his hands along the back wall. He walked over to them.