Finding Moon

The Twentieth Day

BY THE TIME MOON HAD LOST THE BIG argument, gotten the APC in gear, and rolled it out of the gate of the Nung enclave, he had sorted out what he needed to worry about in chronological order.

Concentrate on the worries. Forget the argument. It had been lost, actually, when Mr. Lee had insisted, adamantly, that he must go along because only he could identify the ancestral bones with any certainty. The territory along the Vietnam-Cambodian border was populated with various Taoist sects. Ancestral shrines were everywhere. With the current Khmer Rouge upheaval and with the destruction of such shrines an important part of Pol Pot’s Zero Year program, bone urns might be found anywhere. Enshrining the wrong ones for his own family would cause dangers and misfortunes beyond comprehension.

This ancestral reverence and its importance to family fortunes was beyond Moon’s comprehension, but it was clear enough that Lum Lee was going along unless hell froze over or Moon prevented it by force. Which wasn’t Moon’s style.

How about Nguyen Nung, for whom Moon found himself illogically feeling responsible? After Lee had explained the situation to him, Nguyen knew he absolutely did not want to be left behind. He was certain the Vietcong would come before the time came to meet Glory of the Sea. Wherever the Americans went, Nguyen was going.

That left Osa. True, Osa had insisted she could run the river patrol boat out to the South China Sea with no help from anyone. Moon didn’t believe it. And now that she wanted to go along, she had decided she would certainly get lost. Which meant there was no way to leave Osa, even if Osa was willing to be left, which she emphatically wasn’t.

“I am going with you,” Osa had said grimly. “if you won’t take me with you, then I go alone. I walk. I came this far to get my brother. I don’t stop now.” Osa was glaring at him as she finished this statement, a trace of angry tears in her eyes. No use reminding her that just an hour ago she was assuring him that her brother certainly was already dead. No use thinking about it either. Think about the next problem, not the last one.

First came the Vietcong. They would be controlling the territory he had to cross on the first part of this journey, if they spotted a stray APC, what would they think of it? Would they assume it had been abandoned by the Yellow Tiger Battalion and was now in the friendly custody of some of their own? Possibly. if they didn’t and had only small arms, it was no problem. The APC had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour and could outrun them. But if the VC had rocket launchers, the game was over. The hardened aluminum of the APC would stop bullets and deflect shrapnel. The bigger stuff would punch right through it.

Moon had attempted to improve their odds by attaching one of Mr. Lee’s two Vietcong flags to one of the APC’s two radio antennas. Mr. Lee had discovered several of the flags with an assortment of other abandoned souvenirs in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He’d loaded them in, along with conical straw hats and assorted peasant attire, all far too small for Moon himself.

Moon had also gone hunting through the office and Ricky’s bedroom. The only useful thing he’d found was a drawer full of maps. Among them were U.S. Army artillery charts of Vietnam’s various military districts and just about everywhere else that the military felt might need attention. He extracted ones covering the delta provinces of Vietnam and the south end of Cambodia. Like the APC itself, such maps were familiar territory for ex-Sergeant Moon Mathias. They gave him a feeling of knowing what the hell he was doing. An illusion, he realized, but comforting.

When (and if) they neared Can Tho, worry number two kicked in. It became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as well as the VC. if the sound of battle, or anything else, suggested that the Yellow Tiger Battalion still held the town or its crucial bridge, then the flag would be tucked away. Moon intended to skirt far east of Can Tho toward the coast of the Gulf of Siam. But if the Tigers were winning, which seemed unlikely, AR\TN soldiers might well be patrolling in that direction. On the other hand, if the regiment had been smashed, the territory would be aswarm with ARVN deserters. Would they be dangerous? From the radio reports they’d been picking up from transmitters in Thailand, Laos, and God knew where else, deserters from the collapsing divisions around Saigon had been causing bloody chaos. One report said panicking Vietnamese marines had seized a ship in Saigon’s harbor, forced civilian passengers off, and sailed away. Another relayed U.S. Navy reports of commandeered helicopters crashing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. In Saigon and the few other cities still under government control, there was widespread panic, looting, and shooting.

The third and worst worry would come with the Cambodian border: the Khmer Rouge.

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.