The Reckoning (2 page)

CAMBODIA, 2000

She arrived on the remains of a big American deuce-and-a-half left over from the Vietnam War, its black and olive camouflage peeling. Rust gored its flanks. The beast had no brakes, or if it did, the driver—plastered with burn scars and missing three fingers—had some superstition against touching them. They began their halt a mile out, a matter of patient downshifting and calculation.

“Here?” Molly had to shout her disbelief over the engine noise.

The driver shook his head, not here. He gestured farther ahead.

Through the cracked windshield, the land lay flat and checkered with rice paddies. The mop-topped sugar palms bent at wacky angles and the far-off villages perched on tall, skinny stilts reminded her of the illustrations in a Dr. Seuss book. In every direction, the horizon melted into haze and heat mirages.

Molly thought there must be some mistake. There was no sign of a dig or a camp. And it was so hot. The heat drove at her. It disowned her. She shoved back at it, trying to belong.

The New American West was her gig, not Asia, especially not the part with dead souls from the baby boomers' war. Her writer friends were baffled. They already thought she was made in the shade. She was the get-girl for photo features about ski country plutocrats, gang bangers on the rez in Navajo country, crop circles in Nebraska, and psychotherapy for brain-damaged Everesters who would be king. She had a regional following and a cute Victorian town house in Boulder. Why risk her place in the universe? To them, Cambodia was like some weird fit of hubris. Molly could barely explain it to herself.

She had first learned of the existence of an official grail quest for soldiers' bones at a gallery opening in Taos. The artist's brother was a navy kid full of tales. Something in his mention of a circular, never-ending bone hunt funded by taxpayer dollars had triggered her instincts. The
New York Times
had gone for it. Now she was here.

A white rag hung from a bamboo pole, and she decided that was their landmark. Her sense of relief as well as her misgivings welled up all over again. She wanted the forensics team to see in her a kindred spirit. Like them, her job was to lay bare old secrets. And she was jet-lagged and Cambodia's furnace heat had sapped her pluck.

Let them be kind,
she thought,
or at least not hostile. Let me get a foothold.
They were U.S. military. They were their tribe. She was hers, a professional outsider forever working her way in. She knew better than to count on the kindness of strangers, yet found herself praying for it anyway.

It shouldn't have mattered. The story was her mission. She'd moved heaven and earth to land this assignment with the
Times
Sunday magazine, and she meant to make it work. She could freelance for the Rocky Mountain region until doomsday. Or she could make her grab at the brass ring. The same week she turned thirty, Molly had cropped her black hair and gotten the last of her hep-A shots and flown off to the dark side of the moon.

The truck finished its long drift, coming to rest precisely beside the white rag. They sat idling. The driver stared ahead with both hands on the wheel. Molly squinted into the white light, searching for some sign of Recovery Element 1, or RE-1, as this particular recovery team was designated. Their concealment aggravated her. She did not want to take them on blind faith.

Finally, she reached for the rope that served as a door handle. Climbing down, she hurried to the back to drag her big black mule bag from between stacks of wooden Coca-Cola boxes. The truck departed with an intricate clattering of gears.

She was a week late, a matter of finishing other assignments, and of course no one was waiting to greet her. By now they had probably given up on her. Molly turned in a slow circle, one hand shading her eyes. The sun was high and her shadow was barely a splash underfoot.

She felt tiny and vulnerable standing there in her mountain-biker T-shirt. “Vicious Cycles,” the slogan said. She'd saved it for this very moment, to make a macho debut with the GI Joes, to show she had some pedigree.
Some pedigree,
she thought, panting for air. Heat rash bubbled on her bare arms.

She unlocked her mule bag and rummaged for a loose white shirt with long sleeves. She had Irish skin that instantly freckled and burned. Vampire skin, a boyfriend had once called it, the ruin of a body built for the thong. Naturally, she'd forgotten a hat. But she was sure the soldiers would swap or sell her something, if she could only find them.

She walked to the far side of the road, hoping to find them toiling away in a large hidden pit. Instead, to her dismay, she looked out upon a labyrinth of emptied paddies, and heaps of dirt, and footpaths branching off this way and that into mirages.

She refused to call out. She couldn't possibly be lost. It was broad daylight and the immense floodplain lay flat in every direction. An orange pin flag marked one of the paths. The flies flocked to her sun-screen, and they had a bite like bees. Cursing in whispers, she set off along the path with her camera bag swinging.

At the end of ten minutes, she spotted a figure quivering in and out of sight on the far side of a drained lake. Molly wiped the sweat from her eyes. Through her longest lens she decided that with his blond hair and long jaw he had to be one of the American soldiers. He seemed to be looking right at her, but didn't return her wave.

Take the bull by the horns,
she thought, descending from the footpath. By the time she unraveled their trail system, he might be long gone. She was about to start directly across the dried lake bed when a man spoke behind her. “I wouldn't go out there,” he said, “not if it was me.”

Molly turned. The man was tall and thin and tidy, with a red-and-white-checkered Khmer scarf hooded over his head. Dirt smudged the knees of his baggy Levi's. He was clean shaven and wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the movie-star face of Che Guevara. A mason's trowel hung from one hand. On the ground behind him, a dented and scratched steel briefcase sat neatly upright on top of two sticks, obviously his work kit. And something else, she noticed. He was not sweating. In every way, he seemed to govern himself, even in this climate.

“I didn't see you,” she said.

“The place is littered with leftovers. War junk. Nightmares,” he said.

UXO, he meant. Unexploded ordnance from thirty years of killing. Ordinarily she would have rolled with the sermon; it was gentle enough. She was new to the territory, and as a journalist she valued the early guide. But she was tired and pissed off by the heat and this strange flat maze, and was in no mood for wisdom.

“I've had the lecture,” she said. “The orange flags mean the area's cleared. Red means stop. But the lake bed is empty.” It was a silly thing to say. Just because you couldn't see the danger didn't mean it wasn't there.

“Ever seen them fish?” he said. “Take one grenade, any vintage. Remove pin. Throw in water. It's easier than a net. The problem is, the stuff is old. Half the time it just sinks into the mud and waits.” He paused. “What I'm saying is, Molly, let it not be you. You're much too pretty.”

He knew her name. And he was hitting on her?
In this heat?
She fanned furiously at the flies.

He leaned down to offer his hand, and reading her race, affected a brogue. “Duncan,” he said, “Duncan O'Brian, descended from kings. As for you, Miss Drake, there's no mystery. Everyone's known you were coming.”

She thought he only meant to shake, but he took a good grip and lifted her from the lake bed. He was simply not going to allow her to be stupid. She desperately wanted to sit, but it was too soon to show weakness. It showed just the same.

Before she knew what he was doing, his scarf was draped over her head like a veil. “There, that should help,” he said. “It gets brutal out here.”

The scarf was a marvel. Immediately the air felt cooler. The blinding sun became bearable. The flies disappeared, and with them the feeling of assault. To her surprise, the cloth smelled clean, like rain, not sweat. The small bit of shade heartened her. She had a place to hide. All of that in a stranger's gift.

“I'm fine, thanks.” She started to lift away the scarf.

He brushed aside her pride. His hair came to his shoulders, streaked with gray at the temples. She could not tell his age. A very weathered mid-thirties, or a young fifty.

“It's called a
kroma,
” he said. “The Khmers use it for everything you can imagine, a hat, a shawl, a fashion statement, an umbrella, handcuffs, a basket for fruit, a sling to carry their babies. The checkered pattern represents the cosmic tension between life and death. Or knowledge and ignorance. Your pick.” There was a touch of the hermit to him. He loved to talk.

The strength was coming back into her. “I only wanted directions,” she said. She pointed at the man across the lake bed.

“From our gypsy child?” He had a farm-boy smile. “Not a chance. He never comes close, and you can't get within two hundred yards of him. We've put food out for him, in case he's American. But he leaves it for the dogs. We're not sure who he is or why he's like that. He just showed up one day. The first time I saw him I thought, Ah, boy, you've reached the end of your magical mystery tour. Look at him, all borrowed together. Peasant pants and Vietcong sandals made of old tires. We know the sandals, we've found his tracks, tire tracks. Probably Michelin rubber, from the old Michelin plantations to the east. And no hat, you notice?”

It took Molly a moment to catch his teasing, the “no hat.” “I thought he was one of you.”

“One of us?”

“A soldier.”

Duncan smiled. “In that case, I'm not one of us either.”

“Come again?”

“I'm just a visitor like you. One more civilian.”

“You're not a soldier?” Her eyes flicked down at the Che shirt.

He flashed her a peace sign. “Ever heard of Kent State?”

She connected the dots. He was talking about the event, not the place. “You were there?” she said. It dated him, though she couldn't remember the date. Before her time.

“On the grassy hill, on the very day,” he said. “May 4, 1970. I heard the bullets cut the air. I saw the blood on the lawn. It took me all the rest of the spring and summer to come out of hiding.”

Some other time.
“But I thought they only used their own people for recoveries,” she said.

According to the information officer, Joint Task Force-Full Accounting and the Central Identification Lab based in Hawaii deployed their own military investigators, linguists, anthropologists, and assorted other experts. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars per year, JTF-FA and CILHI were the official forensic archangels of Vietnam and other foreign wars. They were very territorial about it, she had come to learn. The bones were holy relics. “Sacred Ground” was her working title for the piece.

“They have their rules,” Duncan said. “They make their exceptions. I'm not the only one. You'll meet the other soon enough, John Kleat. The captain took us in. We like to think we're of some small use.”

“You came together?”

“Kleat and me? Nope. I just happened to be in the neighborhood, an archaeologist down from the jungles. My specialty is temple restorations. But I know my way around grid strings and a hole. I help where I can. And I try to keep my place.”

“And Mr. Kleat?”

“Kleat,” said Duncan, “has come searching for his brother.”

Molly pricked her ears up at that. “His brother was the pilot?”

“No, we know that much. But Kleat, he's philosophical about it. The digging season is like an annual pilgrimage for him. He believes one of these years his brother's bones are bound to surface.”

“Have you done this before, gone digging for them…the others?” She fumbled, unsure of what to call them. The dead? The fallen heroes? They would have their own lingo.

“The boys, you mean?”

“The boys,” she repeated.

“Oh, I keep my eyes open when I'm out with my temples. Sort of a professional courtesy, don't you think?” Duncan looked off across the labyrinth, then back at her. “And what about you, miss?”

“Me?”

“Camp is on the far side of the road. I can take you there. Or if you like, we can go on to the dig site.”

She told him the dig site. They started walking. He carried his steel briefcase in one hand, the trowel in his other.

“They're all waiting for their fifteen minutes, you know,” he said. “They think you're going to make them immortal.”

Duncan led her along a succession of paths toward a surf roar of men's voices and clattering tools and the drumbeat of earth being chopped and a generator snarling to pump away water. They arrived at a small army of locals pick-and-shoveling through more paddy walls, raising a cloud of orange dust. Molly curbed the impulse to reach for her camera, waiting to meet the head honcho and get the inevitable ground rules.

Duncan called “Captain” at two Americans on a dike above the toil, but neither heard. They were busy consulting a map with a wiry village elder, or a Cambodian liaison officer. The old man had a dark brown moon of a face with burr-cut white hair and one pink plastic leg. Somehow he heard Duncan over the din. He lifted his head abruptly and looked at Molly as if he'd been waiting for her.

“Old Samnang,” Duncan told her, walking closer. “He's the work boss. In the old days, before Pol Pot, before Nixon, he studied at the Sorbonne and taught music and math at the Royal Academy in Phnom Penh. That was then.”

The two Americans noticed her now. Molly figured the taller one to be the mission leader. He looked commanding with his sun-bronzed skull, photogenic as hell, a seamed scar looping across his throat. He wore black cargo pants bloused in his boot tops, a close second to the American uniforms that were forbidden on these military excavations.

But it was the squat younger man dressed in a Hawaiian-print shirt, Gargoyle sunglasses, and a baseball cap who descended to them. Molly took in the cap, the veins, and the wedding band. The captain was an Orioles fan, a gym rat, and married. And a hopeless legs man. Even the Gargoyles could not disguise his stare.

“Welcome to the kingdom, Ms. Drake.” The young captain didn't mention that she was badly overdue. He didn't try to own her. She liked that. His eyes flickered at Duncan's
kroma
on her head, and he did not begrudge Duncan's first contact with his guest of honor. “You plunge right in,” he said to her. “Already out meeting the natives.”

“Mr. O'Brian saved me. I was about to go off chasing phantoms.”

“The gypsy kid,” said Duncan.

“Some poor mother's son,” the captain said.

She had not meant to apologize, but since all seemed forgiven she saw only merit to be gained by it. “The week got away from me,” she offered.

“No problem.”

She looked around at the mounds of dirt. “I was praying I wouldn't be too late.”

“If you mean have we found the pilot, we have not.”

She tried to read his tone. Was he optimistic? Discouraged? They had been here for nearly three weeks. Generally their digs didn't go longer than a month, which was a blink of the eye compared to other digs she'd covered. At Canyon de Chelly, Yellowjacket, Little Big Horn, and elsewhere, it took years and even decades to lay bare the past. Coming over on the plane, she had worried about their quickness. She had sold her editor on a find, not a hit-or-miss process. She needed bones for her story. But she could not say so, not to these bone hunters.

Duncan seemed to read her mind. “We'll find him,” he said.

“If he's here,” the captain qualified, “we'll find him.”

“He's waited long enough,” Duncan said. She sensed a subtle tug of war between the captain, under deadline, and this long-haired middle-aged archaeologist who did not even wear a wristwatch.

The captain didn't take it personally. He clapped Duncan on the shoulder. “A true believer,” he said.

“They're talking about the July Fourth issue,” Molly said. She offered it as information, but also motivation. The captain needed to understand she was under deadline, too. She didn't volunteer that the next big patriot slot wouldn't come until Thanksgiving, and no one at the magazine wanted to wait that long. This was just another Vietnam rehash with a short shelf life, less a war story than a nostalgic nod to the Rolling Stone generation. And she needed bones. It came down to that.

The captain said, “We'll be long gone by July. Once the wet season starts, we close shop.”

“When does the monsoon come?”

“Every year's different. Sometimes May, usually mid to late June. The meteorologists are forecasting a late arrival this year. That gives us a little more wiggle room if we need it. But there's time for all that later. First let's see to you. We've got another three hours left to the workday here, but let me suggest you get squared away at camp. Rest up this afternoon. Drink lots of water. Wash the dust off. I should warn you, the shower sees a lot of action around seventeen hundred hours. I'll make the introductions at dinner.”

She was more grateful than she allowed herself to show. Her body was still operating on mountain standard time, as in 2:00
A.M.
And this heat. Three mornings ago, she'd scraped frost off her windshield. Now she couldn't seem to take a whole breath. It felt like slow suffocation.

“Just point the way,” she said. “I'll find it.”

“You're new to the territory. I'll get someone to run you through mine awareness tonight, and assign you an escort.”

It was exactly what she didn't want, a keeper hemming her in. But she smiled gracefully. “I'll learn my way around,” she told him.

“Until then,” the captain said, “I think Mr. Kleat was on his way back to camp.” He waved at the big American.

“I'll see you later,” Duncan said.

“Your scarf,” she said.

“My gift, Molly.” He touched his trowel to his forehead and walked off into the dust.

Kleat came down the slope of the dike in big, clod-busting strides. Molly took in his details. Here might be her centerpiece, this brother of a missing soldier searching through the years. He was not so tall as he had seemed up there. His head was large and his neck surprisingly thick, as if it carried a great weight of ideas. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the white sun. He did not cover his baldness. He looked ambitious.

“We were starting to think you'd given up on us,” he said to her.

“You said you were heading back to camp,” the captain said to Kleat.

“Sure,” Kleat said, taking his cue. “I'll show her in.”

The captain started back up the dike, then turned to Molly. “One other thing,” he said. “When we find him, no photographs. Don't shoot the remains.”

They'd told her already. “Absolutely,” she said.

Kleat led the way. Molly followed him away from the noise. After a few minutes' walking, he said, “Boulder.”

She heard the scorn. You got it all the time. “The People's Republic,” she confessed. “What about you?”

“Angeles City.”

“L.A.?”

“Christ, no. The Philippines. There's a nice colony of vets live there. We live like princes. Beers cost twelve cents. Like that.”

“What do you do?”

“When I'm not here? I'm a contractor.” He didn't volunteer what kind of contractor.

“They say you come to Cambodia every year.”

He didn't answer. “I thought there'd be more of you,” he said. “A crew of assistants. Helpers.”

“I like working alone.”

“I've read some of your articles on the internet. That fisherman who cut off his own leg. The Columbine murders. Those peace-scam artists. And your piece on the Super Max inmates, ‘A Season in Stainless-Steel Hell.' ”

Molly didn't know if he was trying to flatter or control her. They knew her better than she knew them—where she lived, what she wrote, her photos. She noted that he didn't say if he approved of her work or not. “It's a job,” she said.

“Why give them personalities, though?” he asked.

“The inmates?”

“Just kill them, I say.”

“It's a matter of what we do with evil,” she said. “That was my point.”

“And now you're working for the big dog. The
Times,
right? Moving up in the world.” He was testing her, she realized. Deciding if she was good enough.

Humility.
“They're trying me out. I'm a very little fish in a very big pond.”

He gave a small grunt, but still had reservations. “Cambodia, though. Why chase the dead?” He gestured at the trenches and square holes along the trail. “Why come after these guys?”

“Memory,” she said. “Memory is flesh. As long as we remember, they're still alive, don't you think?”

He didn't answer. She followed the sleek, gleaming prow of his head as they zigzagged along the maze of footpaths above paddies and between heaps of red dirt. Finally Kleat began to open up.

“It looks like a jumble,” he said of the dig. “But this is how it's done. There's a method to the madness. Our metal detectors have found pieces of the plane scattered to kingdom come. But you can see the general east-west line of our digging.” He showed her his topo map with colored-pencil markings. “Here's the crash trajectory.”

The site was vast and complicated. He described how the dying warplane had ricocheted across two linear miles of rice fields, disintegrating in leaps and bounds. Afterward, local peasants had patiently rebuilt their paddies over the gouged earth. Then the Khmer Rouge had come, erasing whole villages, and, along with them, all memory of the buried plane. Later the Vietnamese army swept through on their “liberation” of Cambodia. Then the United Nations entered, determined to jump-start the devastation known as year zero. Not far behind them came the men and women of U.S. military forensics teams. Ever since, they had been resurrecting American warriors from the Cambodian hinterlands.

“Sometimes the locals show up with a bone that has no story. In this case, we have a story but no bone, not yet,” Kleat said. “We know exactly who we're searching for and when he disappeared. All we need to do is find him.”

The “we” jarred her. According to Duncan, he and Kleat were outsiders. But to hear Kleat, he was a full-fledged member of the recovery team. She glanced at him. Was he out to steal the captain's thunder?

He stopped by a trench surrounded by torn sheets of metal lying across the mounded earth. Some had been fitted together in puzzle pieces. Red and black and green cable and wire stretched like bunches of fried snakes. A collection of digging tools was stacked in the trench below.

“It's weird in a way,” he said. “When the refugees got relocated to this area twelve years ago, they inherited the tools left behind by dead villagers. Talk about memory, there was no memory here, just the land and a bunch of strangers. But then it turns out the tools had a memory of what happened in this place.”

He bent and pulled up several of the shovels and examined them. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Molly. The head was wider and blunter than on an American shovel, and the metal was brighter and silvery. The edges looked crudely cut and you could see where a local blacksmith had hammered it to fit the wooden shaft.

Kleat scratched away some of the dirt. “Can you see it?”

There was a number stamped in the metal, and beneath that the inscription “Made in the USA.” She took out her camera and started getting shots.

“It comes from a section of the stabilizer flap of a Cessna O2 Sky-master,” Kleat said. “It was a slow, twin-prop airplane used for forward air control. The pilot would mark targets with white phosphorous rockets, then the bombers would come. This one left from Ubon Airfield in Thailand on January 3, 1969, to scout the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but he never came home. After the plane crashed, the peasants beat the sword into the plowshare, literally.”

He explained how military investigators had found plow blades made of cut-up propellers, wooden ox bells with bullet shells for clappers, and handmade sickles and pots and pans still bearing telltale serial numbers. The recovery teams always deployed with a database called Brite Lite.

“The pilot and his plane just vanished into the abyss. All signs of the plane, even the crash scar, disappeared. Thirty years of farming devoured every trace. Even the satellite photos showed nothing. We knew the plane was out here somewhere. We've known for years. We just didn't know enough.”
We.

“So you've got farm tools left by ghosts, and a plane without a pilot,” she said.

Kleat cut a look at her full of suspicion. “There's nothing supernatural about this,” he snapped.

Molly was taken off guard. “Of course not,” she said.

“I've done this before,” he declared. “An air crash isn't rocket science. The physics are simple. The path of impact is known. We have his trajectory. We're unearthing his wings. It's a matter of time. He'll answer to us.”

That was a curious way to put it, even imperious, as if the dead pilot were a fugitive or a truant. Molly gently slid the shovel back among its brothers.

They continued along the path. It was past noon, but the sun only seemed to reach higher in the sky. The light would have been painful if not for the checkered shawl draped across her head and shoulders. They walked in silence for another half mile or so, the straps of her camera bag creaking. The air smelled of water and sewage. The trail seemed to go on forever.