by Jeff Long
“It worked. It took a while. But we found our man,” Duncan said. “Molly did.”
“Who?”
“The young lady,” said Duncan.
The stranger didn’t waste a glance at her. “What man?” he said.
Kleat lifted his chin. It showed his scar like a second smile. “A pilot. He’s found. It’s done.”
The stranger stretched his fist to the middle of the table and opened his fingers. Molly looked for track marks on his forearm, but there were none. Then she remembered that the poppy was so cheap here, people just toked it. A clot of hard black dirt, as hard as cement, fell from his hand onto the tablecloth.
“Quit pretending,” the man said.
The thing looked worthless, an animal turd, nothing. A chain protruded from one end.
Kleat lifted the chain with his dinner knife. “Jewelry?”
“You could say that.”
It was a fistful of mud grabbed from the earth and dried in the sun. Molly saw his finger imprints. Then she saw an edge of flat metal at one corner. With that and the chain she could guess what it was. She took it from Kleat and scratched at the crust with her fingernail, but it was baked on hard.
“Here,” said Duncan. Without ceremony, he sank it in his water glass. He stirred with his spoon and the water clouded dark gray, then black.
While the clot dissolved, Molly spoke. “We left food for you. You never ate it.”
The man didn’t say a word to her. He just stood waiting, infinitely tolerant. Flying on junk, she thought. But his eyes were too bright, too present in the shadow face.
“We know what it is,” said Kleat, “if it’s even real.”
“Real as you or me,” the man answered. “Real as anything.”
“Three possibilities then.” Kleat issued a thick stream of smoke. “You bought it. It’s your own. Or you looted it. Is that what you did?”
Duncan scooped out what was left of the clot and crumbled it over his dish. What emerged was a small, flat metal plate, a dog tag, just as she’d suspected. Her heartbeat quickened.
If this really had been stolen from the well, then it was a possible proof of identity, perhaps their only one. She’d learned that the forensic labs wanted teeth, preferably an entire mandible, to match to dental charts. In addition, DNA testing could work, though only if a maternal relative had stepped forward over the past thirty years to offer blood. Without the benefit of primary, organic identifiers, the agencies had to rely on circumstantial evidence: a wedding band, a class ring, an engraved pocketknife. Or a dog tag.
“It’s a message,” the gypsy said. Deep gone, that face. Lost in the arms of Asia, thought Molly.
“Excellent,” said Kleat. “What’s it say?”
“Quit your pissing around.”
Kleat, the searcher, flushed. “That’s the message?”
“I’m still waiting,” the boy spoke.
“What it says,” said Duncan, washing the tag in his water and wiping the embossed letters, “is Samuels, Jefferson S. There’s a birth date. His blood type. Protestant. And a serial number.”
Molly knew everything about the pilot RE-1 had been searching for, from the date of his shoot down to the root canal in his left molar. And his name had not been Jefferson Samuels.
“Nothing,” Kleat said to the man. “You have nothing.”
The man dropped two more clots on the white tablecloth, two more tags.
Duncan cracked them open like eggs, black dirt all over the white tablecloth. He read the second tag, and the third. “Sanchez, Thomas A. Bellwether, Edward P.”
“Who the hell are you?” Kleat demanded.
Molly tried, more gently. She pointed at his arm, at the tattoo like a ghost beneath the dust. “Is that your name? Lucas Yale?”
“Luke,” he said.
Molly looked at Duncan and Kleat, and the name meant nothing to them. It defeated her, the uselessness of the name. She had nothing more to ask.
“Where did you find these?” Kleat said.
Luke looked at Molly for the first time. “I come to show you. Let’s go.”
“Just tell us,” said Kleat.
“It’s not so easy,” the boy said. The red sky bulged behind him, a great final burst of coloration. Night was falling.
“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Kleat said, “kidnapping the dead.”
In fact, the practice was as common as despair in this fertile green country. Peasants trafficked in human bones all the time, trying to prize money from the Americans even when the bones weren’t American.
“How much do you want?” said Molly.
The stranger smiled at her suddenly, and he was missing significant teeth on the right side, upper and lower. What teeth still remained lay green in there. Duncan was right, the boy must have been eating grass and weeds, rifling the land. But then Molly saw that it was moss, actual moss, growing between his teeth, like something out of a movie. The tropics had taken root in this young ancient. It showed in the leather of his face. It peeked from his mouth.
“No charge,” he said, “not for you-all.”
“Show us on a map,” said Duncan. He took a map from his briefcase. He suspected the stranger even more than Kleat did, and that put Molly on alert. His instincts were telling him something.
“Never mind that,” Luke said. “It’s off the map.”
“Come on, this is the twenty-first century. There’s no such thing as off the map. They have satellites.”
“Well, if it was on a map, they wouldn’t have ended where they are,” said Luke.
“How far away is this place?” Molly asked, trying to cut through the mystery. The key was to get your source talking.
“It’s a ride. We need to leave.”
“A ride. Does that mean an hour? A day? Two days?”
“One night’s ride. Tonight.”
It sank in.
“You’re joking,” Kleat said. “Leave tonight? We’ve been on the road all day. I have a flight to reschedule. We need to rest. Prepare.”
“There’s six more,” Luke told them.
That shut Kleat up.
“Six more dog tags?” Molly was incredulous.
“Bones, weapons, whatever it is you need.” Molly could see his tongue in the gap of missing teeth. “It’s all there. All yours.”
They were quiet for a minute. Nine soldiers? Molly felt something like rapture. She was saved. Here was her Times story, minus the scolds at the Pentagon.
“And all we have to do is follow you?” said Duncan.
“I can’t make you do a thing.”
“They don’t belong to you,” Kleat said. “These tags, the bones, the relics, whatever you found.”
“What more do you want? I’m saying come on. They’re all yours.”
“Sit down,” Molly said. He could walk out as easily as he had walked in, and then where would they be? “Eat with us. We’ve ordered our supper. We can talk things through.”
Luke stayed on his feet.
“There are proper channels for this kind of thing,” Duncan said. Molly could hear his turmoil. The boy confused him. Molly had never seen this side of him. Things were moving too fast for him. “You could have told the captain at camp. You could go to the embassy. Why here? Why tonight? Why us?”
Luke said, “Because you want it so bad.”
It was true. He had them cold. Week after week, he’d been watching them. He couldn’t know their individual appetites, but he’d seen their hunger.
The possibility grew on her. An American drifter circling through his own tropical dream world, stumbling upon relics from the war, why not? And it was perfectly conceivable that a drug addict, or schizophrenic, whatever he was, would trust three civilians over the captain and his soldiers. Uniformed or not, the military would represent an authority that might take him away. An authority that had rejected her and Duncan and Kleat.
Luke pointed at the new bridge. “I’ll wait on the far side there. You have t
wo hours.”
“Two hours?” Kleat snapped.
Molly spoke to Luke. “It’s just so unexpected. There may be a serious storm coming. We can’t afford to be stranded in some godforsaken place. Is there a village nearby? How many days will we be gone?”
He was backing away from the table.
“You’ve waited this long, and there’s so much to be done,” she said. Slow him down. Keep him here. But he was leaving. “We have to arrange transportation, find food, get our gear.”
“I told you,” Luke said, “I can’t force a thing. You have to make up your own minds.” Then he turned and walked off. The doorway swallowed him.
Duncan was the first to speak after the boy left. “The poor kid belongs in an asylum,” he said. “Or in Cambodia.”
“You don’t think it’s real then?” said Molly. But we can make it real. The story held that kind of childlike potential. You just had to believe in it.
“We’ll know soon enough,” Kleat said. He stabbed his glasses tighter against the bridge of his nose and produced a small dog-eared notebook. It was his bible, an index of all the American soldiers who had never returned from Cambodia, including his brother. He had copied it from Brite Lite, the team’s database of the missing. He leaned over the first dog tag and thumbed through the pages.
Just then the waiters arrived with dinner. Seeing the dirt and mud, they wanted to change the tablecloth and bring clean napkins and silverware. Duncan instructed them to set the various plates wherever there was room. Determined to have their ceremony, the waiters lifted the lids from the dishes with a flourish. Molly’s Australian lobster steamed. Kleat’s steak ran bloody, the way he’d ordered it. A hamburger sat in a croissant—a makeshift bun—for Duncan. No salads.
Kleat grunted at his index and picked up the second tag.
“Even if he was telling the truth,” said Duncan, “he’s withholding information. And if he isn’t telling the truth, we’d be fools to rush off into the night with him. They have gangs out there. He could be part of them. This is a desolate country.”
“You think he might be bait?” said Molly.
“I don’t know. There’s something about him. He’s too much in love with his own mystery.”
“How’s that make him different from any of us?” said Kleat. “We’re creatures of our fictions, every one of us.”
His mood had shifted. He was suddenly in high spirits. And Molly noticed that he was speaking once again in the plural, “us,” not “me.” It was no accident. He was, she realized, team building. He needed them. Not an hour before, he’d been ready to damn them for spoiling his place with the captain. Now he was trying to recruit them.
“I’ve had enough make-believe in my life,” Molly said. “I agree with Duncan. The boy is up to something. But what if he’s also telling the truth?”
“It would be a coup,” said Kleat. “The search-and-recovery agencies average twenty finds per year, at a cost of close to a hundred million dollars. Per year. Here’s our chance to take home nine sets of remains, paid for with the spare change in our pockets. Imagine that, three civilians, on their own.”
His excitement verged on lust, and Molly felt it, too. For Kleat it would mean sweet revenge for his eviction from the dig. It wasn’t in her nature to live for payback. The story was its own reward. This could translate into a book deal, maybe even Hollywood.
She started constructing it in her mind, a brief history of the mis-begotten war and then the tale of discovering nine of its lost children. She would keep herself out of the story, but at the same time make it deeply personal. Once she had names for the whole bunch of them, she would dive into the soldiers’ pasts and weave the story of their nexus in the jungle.
The sunset died. Its vast light winked out. Kleat finished by candlelight, grinning, knowing.
“What?” said Molly.
“Private First Class Edward Bellwether,” he read to them. “Master Sergeant Jefferson Samuels. Private First Class Thomas Anthony Sanchez. They’re real, or were. All three of them are listed as unaccounted for. And get this. They were part of the same platoon, an armored cavalry unit with the Blackhorse Regiment. All three were last seen embarking on a reconnaissance along the Ho Chi Minh Trail inside Cambodia on June 23, 1970.” He paused. “I’d say we have ourselves a mission.”
Molly drew in a breath, all the aromas mingling, firing her hunger. She looked out the window, but darkness had turned it into a mirror and she saw only herself. Her world felt reversed. On the verge of leaving, they were returning. Instead of being driven out, they could go back in, deeper, to greater reward, all on their own terms.
“What about the other six men?” asked Duncan. “What does it say about them?”
“There’s no way to cross-reference names and events. We could try calling the Department of Defense; it’s seven in the morning in Washington. But that might only tip off the captain, and we already know what he thinks of us. No, we have to go with what we have.”
“I still don’t like it,” Duncan said.
“We’re talking about just a few days more.”
“You don’t know that. And if the typhoon makes landfall…”
Kleat bent to his steak. “We can do this thing.”
“In the middle of the night, though,” Duncan pondered. “What’s his game?”
“The kid’s full of demons. A psycho. So what. He’s found something.”
“He wants a sense of control,” said Molly. “I say let him have it. Let him run the show his way. Soon enough we’ll have what we want.”
“And then he can go back to prowling around the moon,” said Kleat.
“I was going to say, then maybe we can take him home, where he belongs.”
Kleat’s jaw muscles bunched. He was ravenous. “That’s your business.”
“Your mind is made up then,” Duncan said to Molly. It was a question.
She looked at him. “I want this,” she said.
He looked at the window turned to mirror. “Then I’ll go, too,” he said.
9.
The idea of the journey hijacked them. This was a quest of their own making. It had the effect of making the last month with RE-1 nothing more than preparation for a much larger voyage.
Mindful of Luke’s petulant deadline, driven by it, they nevertheless forced themselves to stay at the table for fifteen precious minutes. They devoured their meal with the haste of thieves stealing someone else’s dinner, knifing the meat to pieces, tearing open the lobster, going for protein. Between bites, they made lists, compiled a budget, created a treasury of $458 American, and assigned each other tasks. Then they cast off through the town.
It was simple, really. Having just come off one expedition, they knew exactly what was needed for their next. Also, they didn’t require so very much. They agreed that the search would last no more than one week, round-trip. The remains were either real or they were not. A quick look, a quick retrieval, then they would race back to the city. At the first raindrop, whether it fell from the monsoon winds or was driven by the typhoon Mekkhala, they would all obey reason.
Kleat was sent back to their hotel to collect their clothes and other possessions, while Duncan took a taxi with Molly to try and find old Samnang.
Kampong Cham was not a large city. A few inquiries led them to Samnang, getting ready for bed in his cement-floored apartment. He graciously invited them in. His plastic leg was propped to one side. Incense was inking up from a little shrine in the corner.
Like Duncan, Samnang questioned the midnight ride. But like Duncan, when he saw Molly’s resolve, he agreed to join them. They were doing this, she understood, to protect her.
With Samnang’s involvement, the expedition metamorphosed from an idea into reality. He immediately knew where to obtain everything they required. He gravely fitted on his leg, then locked his door, leaving the incense to burn itself out.
By taxi they drove along the river to a small, walled compound, the home of the
three Heng brothers. Molly knew them, or at least their faces, from the dig. One had driven her, Duncan, and Kleat from the dig that very morning, which gave a promising symmetry to tonight’s venture. It was almost as if she were being delivered to her proper destination.
The brothers owned a white Land Cruiser from the UN days, along with an antique Mercedes truck dating back to the French colonial period. Once the expedition was presented to them, they pounced at the chance for more work. Driving into the night didn’t bother them at all.
It now unfolded that the Heng brothers owed their relative wealth to the black market. Molly marveled at their hoard of military rations, fuel, tents, medicines, weapons, and digging tools stolen from various UN armies, USAID, the Red Cross, and, she recognized, the RE-1 dig. There were enough provisions here for five expeditions.
With Samnang’s help, Duncan bargained the brothers down to what he called their “all-inclusive rate.” With fuel, the week of driving, supplies, and “equipment rental,” their fee came to four hundred and twenty dollars. Shouting back and forth, the brothers dashed around the courtyard with boxes and bags and jerry cans of fuel, loading the truck and wiping the dust from the seats for their passengers.
It was not quite eight-thirty as their little convoy crossed the bridge leading north.
Luke was waiting for them where he’d said, sitting on his haunches at the far side of the bridge in a globe of yellowing electric light. The bats were rampant here. Molly had seen them before, hanging from the highest branches like leathery fruit, but now they dove from the shadows, cutting swaths through the clouds of huge moths drawn to the lamp.
As they approached, he stood in their headlights and Molly noticed the dogs. There were twenty or thirty of them, skeletal orange and tan things, circling Luke, keeping their distance. Until Cambodia, she had never given two thoughts to the expression “dog eat dog.” Hungry enough, they really did. She had pictures of puppies being carried away in the jaws of mongrels, of a dog gnawing at a dog skull. Her shock had amused Kleat.
He stood without a wave or a greeting, holding not one thing in his hands, not even a cigarette. Under the road dirt, his skin gleamed in the headlights. The dog bites and thorn cuts on his shins had the plastic gloss of old scars.