The Reckoning

Also by Jeff Long

FICTION

Angels of Light

The Ascent

Empire of Bones

The Descent

Year Zero

NONFICTION

Outlaw: The Story of Claude Dallas

Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo

Copyright © 2004 by Jeff Long

All rights reserved

For Emma, my wild love went riding….

Prologue

CAMBODIA, 1970

They fish him from the Mekong like a long, pale dragon, shouting and prodding him with bamboo poles, full of dread. He thinks his white skin scares them, or his loincloth made from the last strips of his American uniform.

Babies cry. A dog won’t come close.

A village. He laughs at his good fortune. Home free.

“Food,” he demands. “America.”

They scatter at his voice. Their fear gives him heart.

He is mostly blind by now. His legs are too heavy to move. He can barely lift his head. He lies there like Gulliver in the gray rain.

After a while some brave soul sneaks close enough to tie his ankle with a vine. They leave him in the mud on the bank above the flood, tethered like an animal. This sobers him. He must appear very weak or they would bind him properly. But he seems to have some value or they would kill him or feed him back into the river.

As a Boy Scout, he was taught when lost to follow water downstream. And so for over a week he has been on the move, fording creeks that became muscular tributaries, climbing down around waterfalls and rapids, swimming, and finally drifting on a huge gnarled ship of a tree down the river. Evading and escaping, he’d thought.

He remembers emerging from the forest and its dark shadows, and working through seas of grass, following the water. He expected to descend into light. But as the waters mounted, so did his darkness. When it wasn’t raining, monsoon clouds covered the sun. Day by day, his eyesight has decayed. He blames the water. The river is filled with parasites. Or the rain is driving him blind.

Before losing his compass, his course was reliably west by southwest, away from the savage borderlands. Away from the lotus-eating madness infecting his comrades. Deeper into Cambodia.

But the farther he traveled, the more things seemed to melt from him. His paper map dissolved the first day. His clothing flowered with fungus and blue moss and fell apart. His web gear and rucksack vanished. Possibly animals stole his boots in his sleep. Thinking it was his rifle, he carried a tree limb for miles. The illusions nibbled him away. Now they have him.

The men sit at a distance, out of the rain, watching him. He can hear their whispers and smell their tobacco pipes. Raindrops patter on his eyeballs. He can’t shut his lids anymore. It should hurt, but it doesn’t. He stares into the rain drumming on the bones of his head.

Like every prisoner in a foreign land, he clings to his exceptional circumstances, his singularity. He is young, just nineteen. If he could stand, he would tower over his captors. He has a girlfriend waiting for him. He can throw a football, do algebra in his head, and play “House of the Rising Sun” on the guitar. His folks have the Chevy he rebuilt parked in their garage. If only he could explain. Coming here was not his doing. Somehow the currents brought him to this point in time. The war was somebody else’s idea.

At last his captors feed him. Out of caution or because of the rain, they don’t light a fire, so there is no rice or cooked food. They give him a little fruit, plus insects and water creatures. By this time, after so many weeks subsisting in the forest, he knows some of the tastes and textures. Crickets have a nutty flavor. The beetles crunch more. The shrimp still wiggle. He is so hungry.

They can’t bring enough over the coming days. As his sight fails, he grows more ravenous. He chews grass, tree buds, even clay, anything to slake the hunger. While he can still crawl, they let him forage, moving his tether when he has consumed everything in a circle.

Floating on the great tree in the river, he dreamed of being carried out to sea. Peasant fishermen would find him, or sailors or pirates who would ransom him. Or the U.S. Navy would gather him in. He would be saved.

On the third day, guerrillas arrive. With the last of his vision, he realizes that he has traded one set of shadows for another, the shapes in the forest for these gray phantoms. The world has blurred, but he can still see that they wear black. He recognizes the banana clips in their rifles. The only mystery is their red-checkered scarves. They are a whole new species of enemy to him.

They speak in whispers above him. He can’t understand a word. They seem afraid and uncertain of what to do with him. He lies among their legs, stranded in the tonnage of his body. He despises them. He despises himself. In their place, he’d waste him. But all they do is wait.

The men in black pants and red scarves are the last sight he sees. Soon after their arrival, his blindness completes itself. He can’t tell day from night anymore. Time slows. The rain comes and goes, thick and warm as piss.

Maybe two more days go by. His limbs grow heavier, heavy like the earth. He listens to the river. Occasionally someone touches his eyes with a twig. That and the rain, like flies he can’t kill. He is losing his mind.

Then one day, or night, a man speaks to him in English. “Are you awake or asleep?” he says. His voice is close to the soldier’s ear.

The soldier thinks it must be a dream. He hears men murmuring nearby. “Hello?” he calls.

“Look at you,” the voice says, clearly shocked. “How has this happened?”

The young soldier fills with hope. “Thank God,” he says. He would reach for the man’s hand, but can’t lift his arms. “I prayed. Who are you?”

“A passenger, like you. They sent for me. I came to help.” He sounds like a Frenchman. He could be a colonial, maybe a doctor or a priest.

“Can you save me?”

“I will do what is possible. But time is short. You must tell me everything.”

Like holy confession. A priest, he decides. The soldier calms himself. He has to play this right. “Whatever you want, Father. I’m blind. My arms are like stone. I’m eating dirt. What’s happening to me?”

There is a pause. “Let us talk.”

“Something’s wrong with my eyes, Father.”

“Yes, your eyes. Can you see?”

“Not really.”

“Something, surely.”

“Nothing real. Only a dream, the same one. I’m in the forest again. There are giant heads, and spires with monkeys. I need medicine, Father. Can you get me to the Americans? They’ll pay you.”

The stranger evades his plea. Not good. Whose side is he on? “Where did you come from?” the stranger asks.

“Chicago, Father. America.”

“Yes.” The man is patient with him. His voice is kind. “You mentioned a city, where this curse began.”

A curse, exactly. That’s what this was. “You mean the ruins?”

A silence, then, “You found the city?” The ruins excite him. He seems to know them, or of them.

“On a mountain, Father. Right when we needed it. An old place surrounded by walls. Wild, you know, unreal.”

“The wars have not injured it?”

“It’s untouched, like a thousand years ago. There was no sign of anybody. It was empty.”

More silence. The man asks, “Do you remember the way?”

What way? Water flowing into water? But this could be his ticket home. “Absolutely. I can show you once I’m better.”

“And the rest of your men?”

The soldier could deny their existence. He could hide them. But now he has mentioned “we,” and he is desperate. “They’re still there, all of them. I told them to come with me. But they chose a fool over me. We followed him onto the mountain. He led us wrong, then told us to stay. So he died for his sins. And the rest of them will, too.”

His interrogator is quiet a minute. He doesn’t ask how many Americans are left, nor their unit or any military information. His only interest seems to be the ruins.

“Âme damnée,” the man finally murmurs.

The American has no idea what that means. “Yeah,” he says, “like that.”

“Fallen angels,” the priest says. “And yet you escaped.”

The soldier grows wary. “I warned them. We were coming apart at the seams. Everyone was afraid. We were lost. There were voices at night. No one knew who to trust or what to do. It was every man for himself. Finally, I left to get help. They won’t last long up there. I followed the water. The water brought me here.”

“Are they fossilizing as well?”

The young soldier can’t cut through the accent. “What?”

“Your eyes,” the priest says.

The soldier grows quiet. “What about them?”

“You have not touched them?”

A hand hoists his heavy wrist and guides his fingers to his face. He feels the familiar shape of his cheekbones and forehead, but avoids his eyes. He doesn’t want to know.

“Touch them,” the voice says.

“My eyes?”

“I, too, am maimed,” the priest tells him. Mayhem-ed, it sounds. “There was a bomb. This was a year ago. For a time, I could not bear to see what was left of my body. But at last it was necessary. I had to touch the wounds. Do you understand? We must accept our fate.”

The soldier feels his dead eyes. “Oh lord, help me.” The lids are peeled back in wide round circles. His eyes are as hard as polished jade. He knows from the ruins what they look like, the green jade eyes. They don’t belong in his face.

His hand is returned to his side. It settles upon the mud, like an anchor. His fingers sink into the earth.

“Father? Don’t leave me.”

“I’m here.”

“What will happen to me?”

“The people are afraid. They want you to go away.”

“Put me on the river. I’ll go. Far away.”

“I will put you on the river,” the man promises.

Relief floods the soldier. Even blind, he has a chance. “Thank you, Father. Tell them thank you.”

“Don’t come back to their village, that’s all they want. Put this place out of your mind.”

“I swear.”

“But remember the city. It is punishing you. I think you must return to there someday.”

Not in a million years. “Yes, Father.”

Then the soldier hears a sound he knows too well, the drawing of a knife. It is done softly, but there is no mistaking the linear hiss. The murmurs stop in the distance. “What are you doing, Father?” he whispers.

“Releasing you,” the voice answers, “so that you can finish your journey.”

The soldier’s heart thunders in his chest. He waits for a tug at his ankle, for the vine tether to be cut. Instead a hand grips his forehead. His throat is bared.

From the start, he knew this was no priest. But he couldn’t help but hope. He still can’t. “Forgive me, Father,” he says. “I was only trying to go home.”

“Be brave.” The voice is kind. “The dream goes on.”

1.

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.”

2.

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.

Then, far off in the sheets of heat, Molly caught sight of the gypsy man. By now she had no sense of direction, no idea where the road was or—looking back—where the excavators were harrowing the earth. She fastened on the gypsy as if he were a magnetic north. It felt like she was traveling in circles around him.

“There he is again,” she said, pointing.

Kleat squinted across the fields. “Him,” he said.

“Who do you think he is?”

“There are always stray dogs around the bones. I told the captain it was a mistake encouraging him. This is a recovery, not a lonely-hearts club.”

“Duncan said he might be a drug addict or the son of a missing soldier.”

An expression came onto Kleat’s face, as if she were joking. “But that is Duncan,” he said quietly.

She brought her camera up and telescoped the figure through her lens. There was the mane of brown hair and the sparkle of his steel briefcase. Duncan was walking along the top of a paddy wall with a long stick in one hand, poking at random.

She lowered her camera. “I didn’t know.” She couldn’t think what else to say.

A stray dog? Kleat didn’t make any attempt to apologize. She didn’t say anything. Suddenly she didn’t know whom to trust. In this flat land that seemed incapable of hiding anything, everything seemed concealed.

3.

It was a story to sweat and bleed for, and she did both over the coming weeks, down in the trenches, under the sun, earning her way into the family of them.

She was a photographer first, a writer second. The lens was her habitat. It was her sanctuary. Prose came more slowly. It always came after the picture.

The afternoon the Times editor called to assign her the story, Molly had gone straight to Mike’s Camera and maxed out her credit card on a digital Nikon with all the bells and whistles. She had wanted it forever, but could never justify the sticker shock, over $10,000. Now that she was going national, though, she figured the camera would pay for itself.

With digital you could edit the image and change the look, even turn color into grainy black and white, as she’d contemplated, to evoke a ’60s ’Nam-scape. It would give her the ability to mimic the great war photographers, Henri Huet and Tim Page and Larry Burrows and Kyochi Sawada and Robert Capa, all without lugging blocks of Velvia and Kodak through the tropical heat.

The camera was unlike any she’d ever owned. It was more than the usual sum of lenses, filters, and film, more than a boxful of memories. Its instant recall made it both a tool and a communal event.

On a hunch, she had brought a pair of five-inch barber’s scissors. Her dad—her stepfather—had been a barber. Never underestimate the value of a free haircut. The scissors paid in aces with the recovery team. People flocked to her tent in the evenings. While she trimmed their hair, they talked about music, sports, movies, and home. She shared anything they wanted to know about photography, from the rule of thirds to underexposing one f-stop for the midday glare. Also she showed them her camera, and that was the real icebreaker.

With a flip of a switch, they could see themselves the way she saw them. She flipped the switch. The display lit up.

Here was their dig, and in the distance nut-brown children wrestling on water buffalo, National Geographic country as far as the eye could see.

Here were the faces of RE-1, black, white, and brown, all rendered one color, the color of Cambodia’s dirt, the color of blood oranges. Here they mined the earth, here they shook it through screens with quarter-inch mesh.

Here was the captain in repose, toasting her with a bottle of warm grape Gatorade while he smoked his evening Havana and read one of her Vogue magazines. He was smart and freethinking, a postmodern soldier who reveled in not carrying a weapon, and lived to raise the lost souls from the dirt.

There was Kleat, a dead end. The brother angle would have been so sweet. But after the first week of him, she knew there was no way around his hatred of the people and the land. Kleat treated Cambodia like a curse or a disease. There was no way she could turn his bile into nobility, and so Molly had dropped him from her story and started framing her shots to exclude him.

And here was Duncan, who was not part of her story either. But she could not keep her camera off him; there was something she liked. Here he stared into a dark square hole covered with grid strings, like a scout about to leap into the underworld. Here he stood among the laborers, head and shoulders above them, spinning some hilarious joke in fluent Khmer. Here he sat on his briefcase with his sketchbook on one knee, drawing faces and scenes and artifacts that no one was allowed to see because of his shyness.

She peeked into his tent one afternoon, and was startled by its austerity. It was bare except for a black Ace comb and a toothbrush tucked in the wall pocket. He slept on the ground without sheets or a sleeping pad or a mosquito net. He owned nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever he carried in that briefcase.

Here was their base camp, a hodgepodge of wall tents, pup tents, and her North Face dome. They had pitched their camp where a village once stood, not knowing that for some reason the locals thought it haunted.

They used a clothesline strung between trees for their occasional volleyball games. Barbecue ball, she called it. Roasting the weenies. Almost six feet tall, she played like a gladiator, six-packing the ball into the faces of husky trash talkers. She bloodied noses, made kills, tooled them mercilessly…and they loved her for it.

Not unnaturally, so far from home, they began to court her. It was nothing personal. After she sliced herself on a piece of the wreckage, the special forces medic who stitched her thigh proposed marriage. Another Romeo braved the mosquitoes and recited Shakespeare to the wall of her tent at night. One morning, Kleat caught her shooting him. He rose up from his washbasin, the water dripping from his salt-and-pepper chest hair, and opened his arms to her.

She felt like a hypocrite, keeping them at bay. After all, day after day, she stalked them intimately. But that was the way it was. Molly didn’t tell them about one bad night in Oklahoma long ago. She just gave them her policy: no hookups on a shoot. And went on seducing them for her camera.

Each night, she downloaded her day’s harvest into a digital wallet, a portable hard drive, and cataloged her shots and watched her story grow. While the soldiers listened to Dr. Dre or Beethoven, read paperbacks, or played Game Boys, she lay on her back in the dark of her tent and the images lit her face. The wallet became her dream box. Some nights she couldn’t tell if she was awake or dreaming with the crickets going wild outside under the Cambodian stars.

Among professionals, the purists argued that digital wasn’t pure. The geeks argued that there were still bugs in the machine, and there were, in hers at any rate, some serious gremlins in some of the shots. She became aware of them gradually.

Within a week of arriving, Molly had gotten their labyrinth memorized, and made a habit of waking first each morning, before dawn, to visit the dig site. Every day the site grew longer. There was nothing much to do at this hour. Night still pooled in the holes. It was too early for the teams to work and too dark for her to shoot. But it was cooler then, and she had her best privacy. She wandered along the cut-open earth, alone with her thoughts in the gray mist. But not quite alone, she began to realize.

Ghostly figures ambled across the fields, distant and only half visible above the ground fog. She supposed they were villagers. Some wore kromas over their heads or around their necks. Some carried mute babies.

By five the sky would start to gain color. Roosters crowed far away. She could practically taste the wood smoke of breakfast fires in invisible villages. Then, just as the sun broke the horizon, a faraway temple bell would ring once, just once. Each dawn broke that way, with the bell’s single gong. The early morning wanderers would fade off and she would return to make her breakfast.

On a whim one morning, Molly lugged along her tripod and snapped a shot of the villagers in the dim light. She didn’t expect much, and when she downloaded the camera into her wallet at the end of the day, there was next to nothing. The camera had captured the fields and haze, though none of the wanderers.

But a few days later, in scrolling through the JPEG files, she discovered that her morning shot was populated. The wanderers had been buried in the pixels somehow, and the camera was finally letting them rise to the surface. Not only that, every time she turned the display on again, the image changed. Like spirits, the villagers came and went. There might be five people when she turned the device off, and ten or dozens when she turned it on again.

The photo became something of a freak show, attracting a small audience of soldiers who would drop by to see if the digital figures had moved around or vanished back into the mist. Duncan joked that her camera was possessed.

A navy explosives specialist diagnosed the ghosts as faulty software. Digital noise, he called it. In getting compressed and decompressed, the image apparently altered itself, as if peeling away layers of reality.

One morning she noticed one of the hooded figures trailing her in the muggy gloom. She stopped. He stopped. “Hello?” she said, approaching him.

It was old Samnang, wearing a blue-and-white kroma like a shawl, and under that a headset for his tape recorder. All but buried in the mist, his prosthesis had a blue sandal glued to the pink foot.

“Ah, bonjour, Molly,” he said. Maw-lee. His accent, so beautiful.

“Samnang, what a surprise,” she said without surprise. It was so clear. “Did the captain tell you to follow me?”

“The captain? Not at all.”

“This was your idea,” she said.

Samnang sniffed at the air. “The hour is so fresh, don’t you agree?”

She could have been rude and insisted on her privacy, but she liked Samnang. He was as honest as a monk, and the American recovery teams hired him year after year to run their crews. He jokingly compared himself to a chicken scratching in the dirt for a living. She had never heard him speak about his past. He never mentioned the loss of his leg, never said a word about any family. Following Duncan’s example, she made a point of calling him by his full name, not Sam like the others did.

Finally she said, “So what are you listening to?”

During the wet season, when excavation was pointless, Samnang used his U.S. dollars to go around the countryside collecting folk songs. Before the water washes them away.

He laid the kroma along his neck and handed Molly his headset. He pressed the button. Expecting folk music, she was amazed to hear Margo Timmins singing on The Trinity Sessions. “The Cowboy Junkies?” she said.

He smiled sheepishly. “An old vice of mine.”

After that there was no way she could refuse his company. They started walking together.

“Duncan told me about your photograph of the morning people,” Samnang said. “I thought to see them for myself.”

It occurred to her that he had come to protect her. Did he fear they might resent her presence? But they seemed unaware of her. For that matter, they seemed unaware of one another.

“They’re harmless,” she said. “They never look at me. They never come close.”

“Are there any out there now?”

She counted a woman with two children in the fog, and a man standing in place, looking off. “Just three,” she told him.

“But some mornings, more?”

“Many more. I wonder if they’re studying the damage. You know, figuring out how to repair the paddy walls before the rains come.”

“What are they doing now?”

She glanced at Samnang and his black eyes glistened inside the lips of his shawl. He was watching her face, not even trying to look for them. Was he testing her, or were his eyes too old? She turned her head. Several more had appeared a hundred yards to the side, motionless or nearly so. One drifted along some hidden dike path. “Nothing,” she told him. “They’re just standing out there, like they’re waiting for a train or something.”

Samnang nodded his head slowly, intent on her face.

“My other thought was that they might be foraging,” she said.

“ ‘Foraging,’ ” he repeated.

“Like a cargo cult or something. Salvaging the plane’s wire and metal. Getting a little treasure before the day starts and the Americans show up. This is their backyard, after all.”

“Have you seen them taking anything? Reaching into the ground? Digging?”

“Never. They never do anything. They don’t even talk to each other.”

He had risen early for her. He could still be sleeping. She felt responsible. “You shouldn’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“The villagers are quite frightened by them,” Samnang said.

She frowned. These were the villagers. “I don’t understand.”

“They complain to the government. They want them gone.”

She was trying to keep up with him. “So these people come from another region,” she tried. “They’re poaching the metal.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“It is a local matter.”

What a strange battle. A trespass each morning before dawn, and with babies and children, too. But never a confrontation.

“You said the villagers complained. Why don’t the soldiers make them leave then?” she asked. The Cambodian government had posted a dozen troops to guard—or contain—the American forensics expedition. They did little except lie in hammocks, or squat above the dig and gossip in the sun.

“They are just as brave as the villagers at this hour,” Samnang said. “No one comes, except you.”

“And you,” she said.

He smiled. “Anyway, it wouldn’t help. You find these morning people all through the country.”

That was the second time he had said it that way. “Morning people?”

“Now you have made me one, too,” he joked, growing even more elliptical. She decided to drop it. A local matter.

Just then the sun cracked the night. The haze lit like fire. In the sudden flare of color, it was hard to see. The figures began to dissipate. That distant bell rang across the fields. Its single note vibrated in the air.

Molly felt the heat against her face. “I have to see that bell someday,” she said.

Next morning, he was waiting for her again. It was clear. Since she was going to persist in these morning walks, he would accompany her. Their walks became for her the high point of every day.

When Kleat heard about her new friend, he advised her to dump Samnang. “Ditch him,” he said. “The old man’s KR. Or was.”

KR was a universal phrase, part of every language spoken in Cambodia. Khmer Rouge, a French label, the Red Khmers, red for Communist, red for blood. “That’s crazy,” she said. “He was a professor at the university. How could he be KR? They killed people like him.”

“Open your eyes. You haven’t seen him with the men? He never raises his voice, and he’s a cripple. But they always do what he tells them. One word and it’s done.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to work, Kleat.”

“But they’re afraid of him.”

It made no sense to a guy like Kleat how this gentlest of men was able to control the pent-up tempest of the workers. Born and raised in violent refugee camps, many of the local Khmer men were semi-wild. At night some got drunk in their villages, gambled, beat their women, and bloodied each other with knives and axes. Molly had pictures of that, too.

But even the worst toughs obeyed Samnang without question. “They respect him,” she said.

“He has a power over them,” Kleat argued.

“Like voodoo?”

“Laugh. He’s KR, I tell you.”

“The KR don’t exist anymore.”

“Tell that to the workers. They have their memories.”

“If he was KR, what’s he doing here?”

“The same thing you’re doing,” Kleat said to her. “Making a buck. Doing penance. I don’t know.”

Duncan was sitting there. He said it was none of Kleat’s business, even if Samnang had been KR. “Everyone has secrets they’d rather forget.”

“Not secrets like that,” Kleat said.

“Let up,” Duncan said. “Survival always has a price tag.”

4.

At the end of her third week, Samnang approached Molly. “I have something to show you.”

They rode in a Land Cruiser hired from three brothers who lived in Samnang’s hometown, Kampong Cham. The driver, a heavily tattooed boy, drove them to a nearby village. The village was built on stilts for the rainy season. There were even bridges between some of the huts, and a dock with canoes lying on the dirt. It seemed inconceivable the land could ever be flooded. Water was their faith, a phantom thing, nothing Molly could believe in. All she’d seen since arriving was dry, cracked earth.

On a slight hill beyond the village there was a shack with a corrugated tin roof and no walls. Inside sat a cheap cement Buddha, like a garden gnome. To one side, hanging from the rafters, was the bell.

Samnang took a small hammer and rang it for her. The pitch was perfect.

She was delighted, and went closer. “But it’s made from an old bomb shell,” she said.

“Yes.” Samnang was pleased by her surprise. “It is inescapable, don’t you think? That the rubble should be turned into order. Even into beauty.”

“No,” she answered. “I would think it was the other way around. Beauty fades. Civilizations grind to dust. I would say loss is the norm. Chaos. Noise. Not music.”

Samnang touched the bell with his fingertips. “But you see?” he said. “They have restored themselves from the horror.”

On May 29, a dog brought a human femur to the site.

Molly got a picture of the dog just before one of the Cambodian soldiers shot it, the bone still in its mouth. The Americans rushed over, excited that this might be evidence of their missing pilot. But one glance told them it was another false lead. The thighbone didn’t come close to matching a six-foot Caucasian’s. It could not belong to their pilot.

Very possibly the bone had come from a mass grave somewhere in the region. Killing fields hid everywhere, even around here. After every rainy season, bones cropped up, often no more than tiny white fragments. In the beginning, Molly had mistaken the crushed bits along the outer paths for bleached seashells. Then she’d spied checkered fragments of disintegrating scarves mixed among them and realized she was walking on the dead.

Curious to see what would happen, Molly followed the bone. The forensic anthropologist with RE-1 judged the femur to be Southeast Asian Mongoloid. He wrapped it in bubble wrap and turned it over to their Cambodian liaison officer. The liaison officer kept the bubble wrap and gave the bone to a soldier, who tossed it into a distant ditch, dog food again.

She watched it all through her telephoto lens. Then she saw Samnang go over. Looking around to make sure no one saw him, he took the bone and buried it by a tree. He lit a stick of incense, and she realized that Kleat was right.

Samnang was guilty. He probably had been KR. Finding the dead was his way of doing penance.

One of the Cambodian soldiers, or a villager, perhaps, must have seen Samnang ministering to the bone and drew the same conclusion. There were eyes everywhere, factions and subfactions and jealousies. For one reason or another, KR or not, Samnang was dismissed from the dig that evening.

The purge was swift. Molly heard about it at the last minute. She rushed to the road to say good-bye, but the truck carrying him away was already leaving. She caught his face in her camera, and he turned his eyes away from her. She figured that was the last she’d ever see of him.

As the red dust settled, Molly saw a figure watching the departure from out in the fields. At first she thought it was the gypsy kid standing in the ball of the sinking sun. But when she shaded her eyes, he turned into Kleat, and she realized who had gotten rid of old Samnang.

5.

By then the dig was nearly done. Their dead reckoning had failed. The crash site looked like a carcass—rice paddies breached, dirt piled by the sifting screens, holes collapsing, and grid strings let loose—and still the pilot eluded them. After a month of brute labor, RE-1 had pulled up hundreds of pieces of the cockpit and fuselage and wings, seemingly everything but the bones that were their quest.

As they reached the end of the crash trajectory, the Americans sensed their failure. They took it personally. Their high hopes came tumbling down. One night, at the beginning of June, two of the youngest marines got into a fistfight over a stolen Hustler magazine. They fought like jealous teenagers, and everyone was embarrassed by the display.

After the captain got the two fighters separated, it turned out that others, including Molly, had suffered petty thefts, too, mostly letters and snapshots from home. Whoever it was had snitched her barber’s scissors. The culprit, probably some desperately poor Khmer—though Kleat made sure to accuse the roaming gypsy—never was caught.

The stealing was almost beside the point. What mattered about the fight and the thefts was that it suddenly became clear their losses outweighed their gains. Their daily miseries—the spiraling heat, the snakes and bugs, the dust of dried paddy sewage that festered in their sinuses, and a hundred other small things—could no longer be sustained with hope. Whether the pilot had ejected or been cast loose of the jet or dragged away, it was plain they were not going to find him.

As if to hasten their departure, they received news that a typhoon was building to super class in the South China Sea. With winds in excess of 150 miles per hour, it already equaled a class 4 Atlantic hurricane. The navy meteorologists could not say when and where it might strike land, in four days or six or ten, in Malaysia, Thailand, or Cambodia. But it was sure to usher in the mother of all monsoons. The rains would come. The roads would turn to grease and the paddies would fill. Rivers would run backward. The villages would turn into islands.

On the evening of June 7, the captain invited Molly, Kleat, and Duncan to a private gathering inside his wall tent. He had lawn chairs for them and coffee mugs for the last of his Johnnie Walker Black.

“We’re terminating the recovery,” he told them. The search was over. He had already broken the news to his team. “I wanted to tell you separately. To thank each of you for your hard work.”

Molly sat back, stunned. Her shock was a curiosity to her. For at least a week now, she had been trying to invent a story that glossed over the fact that she was essentially writing about empty holes. “It’s over?” she said.

“Can’t you hear?” said Kleat. “It’s done.”

Duncan tried to rally the captain. “You don’t give up on the good ones,” he said.

“We’re not, Duncan,” the captain said. “But at a certain point you say, enough.”

“A few days more,” said Duncan. “Where else could he be?”

For Molly’s sake, the captain said, “I’m disappointed, too.”

“There will be other seasons, other excavations,” Kleat said. He was adamant.

Other chances, she thought, but not for her. The Times had not sent her to write about barren dirt, not after a pitch entitled “Sacred Ground.” The bottom line was that without the bones for a climax, her story was not a Times story at all.

“We start redeploying tomorrow,” the captain said. “I’ll arrange transportation for you.”

Molly went through the motions of the captain’s farewell celebration. Afterward, she meandered through camp, dealing with the let-down. She could hear soldiers through their tent walls. They were excited to be going back home.

The paper was covering her travel expenses, and she’d get a kill fee for her trouble. Maybe one of the airline magazines would take a condensed version, and she could spin off a travel piece for the Denver Post. She’d never recoup the cost of the camera, though. Ten grand. She’d gambled big, and lost.

On a whim, she took a few pickup shots of the camp. Wasting battery juice just to waste it, she paused by a hole that had once been the village well and fired her flash into the darkness, not even aiming. There was nothing to see with the naked eye. The hole was deep and the flash too quick, and when she kicked a pebble, it plunked on water so stagnant it smelled gray.

She didn’t bother looking at the image on her camera display, just turned it off and returned to her tent. She began packing some of her things, but that only made her feel worse. Lying down, she held the camera overhead and flipped on the display.

The bones were waiting for her.

She gaped at the illuminated image. How could a camera see through water? Actually it was possible with a long enough time lapse. But she’d used a flash. The light would have bounced off the water.

There was a hint of poorly focused white sticks beneath the water. Garbage, she decided. Twigs tossed in by children or the wind. More digital noise. She turned the camera off, then on, to see if the image corrected itself. This time, there was a rib cage and a long tail-like spine.

An animal, she thought. Then saw the skull.

6.

First thing the next morning, filled with excitement and disbelief, they lowered one of the marines on a rope, by his ankles, headfirst. He took a deep breath. They dunked him into the water, gave him sixty seconds, and then hauled him, soaking wet, back up the shaft and into the sunlight. He held a handful of human vertebrae. There was more, he said, much more.

Things got noisy fast. They snaked hoses down the well shaft and the pumps roared. They rigged a klieg light over the hole, and fired up another generator. As the water drained off and small glittering shrimp writhed in the mud and water weeds, the brown tips of bones jutted up like driftwood.

They lowered a man again. This time he brought up two skulls.

“What in God’s name,” a soldier muttered.

Their forensic anthropologist examined the skulls. Neither was Caucasian. One belonged to a child. The nuchal crest at the base of the skull was rounded, the forehead smooth, the wisdom teeth not yet descended, the whole aspect gracile. Probably female, he said, probably eight to ten years old. He laid it on the ground and went to join the others peering into the hole.

“The fucking KR,” Kleat said.

It was a mass grave, not fifty feet from their camp.

Duncan knelt down and took the skull. “Look at you, poor bug,” he whispered.

“What?” said Molly, not sure she’d heard.

He looked up at her, and there was a streak down his mask of red dust. Through her lens, at first she thought it was sweat. But it was a tear for the nameless girl. She got the picture.

The find staggered them, the enormity of the murders. They were familiar with the killing fields. All had seen the displays of bones in places like Phnom Penh. But this was slick and shiny. The event of death seemed unfiltered, unprocessed. It could have been yesterday.

Just the same, it was not their pilot. They switched off the pumps and cut the light. Their eleventh-hour hope went as dark as midnight.

The captain turned away. “That’s that,” he said. “Let the Cambodians have it. This isn’t ours.”

But Duncan would not give up. “He’s down there,” he told them. “I’d stake my life on it.”

The captain turned to him. “Duncan,” he said softly, “the cockpit is two miles away.”

“The well was used for burial once, why not before?” Duncan said. “Think about it, the morning after the plane crashed. There’s metal and wire lying everywhere, a windfall of riches. But also there’s this body of a stranger, and not just a body. A ghost.”

“Ghosts,” Kleat scoffed.

“A serious liability in these parts,” said Duncan. “These are peasants straight out of the tenth century. I’ve spent time among them. They see spirits everywhere. Tiger spirits. Forest spirits. Witches flying in the night, drinking people’s blood. They’ve already got their hands full with ancestors. Now suddenly a body falls from the sky. What would you do? Conduct a respectful Buddhist cremation? For a stranger? Waste a week going off to find the authorities? Authorities, by the way, who might try to lay claim to your plane parts. The body was a nuisance. A pollution. So they dumped him here.”

“Into their drinking water?” said the captain.

“It’s an old well in an abandoned village. And the tradition could have carried over. Years later, when the Khmer Rouge needed a dumping ground, some villager might have led them to the same well.”

“There’s no way to be sure the pilot is underneath the rest of them.”

“There’s only one way to be sure he’s not,” Duncan answered.

“We’ve never encountered a situation like this,” said the captain. “Never.”

And yet Duncan had planted the possibility among them. Suddenly it seemed that week after week, they might have been digging farther away from what they were looking for. And now the dead from one era could be hiding the dead from another.

But they could not simply dredge up the bones to see what lay at the bottom. The Cambodian liaisons suddenly became officious and prickly. There were problems, it developed, diplomatic, jurisdictional, archaeological, and cultural. Molly loved it. With a single, giant twist, her story had not only been saved, but was taking on dimensions she’d never dreamed of.

Among other things, as a matter of policy, American bones were supposed to be separated from Southeast Asian Mongoloid remains at the site of excavation rather than at the central lab in Hawaii. The Department of Defense had learned the hard way how difficult it was to repatriate Asiatic remains. The Vietnamese government, especially, regarded any bones found in the proximity of American remains as those of ling nguy, or South Vietnamese puppet soldiers.

There were also issues of territorial authority. This might be a shared underworld, but it happened to lie within Cambodian soil. Who owned the dead? Should the Cambodian authorities be the ones to oversee the excavation of the well? Did that place American soldiers in the role of undertakers for Cambodian citizens? What if there was no American pilot beneath the layer of Khmer Rouge victims? Did the Cambodians even want the mass grave to be exhumed? The competing interests created a tension that made her story at once international, delicate, and highly emotional.

The captain ordered the area around the well ringed off. There was a process to be observed, channels to go through. Cambodian soldiers were posted around the camp to keep away the locals. The men on the labor crew were told to return to their villages. The captain, the forensic anthropologist, and their Cambodian counterparts all retired to a tent and began placing satellite calls to their headquarters. Instructed to stay away from the site, Molly and the others waited in whatever shade they could find. Hours went by.

The team members couldn’t get over it. They treated Molly like a seer, as if she had a gift for this. “How did you know to look down there?” one asked.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“But you went right to it.”

“Yeah, after four weeks, right to it.”

As the day dragged on and they still sat idle, Kleat stewed. “What are they doing in there? We could be down clearing the hole.”

“It’s not that easy,” Duncan said. “They’re on to us by now.”

“Who?” said Molly.

“The locals. These are the dead they inherited their earth from, literally, the original owners of the land they’re farming. The villagers could demand to cover the bones over or burn them to ash. One way or another, they’ll have to exorcise the spirits.”

“Screw their boogeymen,” Kleat said.

Molly began to worry. The captain emerged from the tent with a frown on his face, took a long breath, and returned inside. Plainly, he was getting nowhere fast. Once more she felt her story slipping away. They needed proof.

While the rest of the team nodded off in the heat or waved away flies, she got to her feet, ducked under the tape, and stood beside the well. It was darker than ever down there. Expecting nothing, she snapped another blind shot of the depths, then pulled up the image on her display.

“What you got this time, Molly?” someone called to her.

She looked up from her camera display. “You need to see this,” she said.

They stirred and came out into the high sun and crowded around. The display was full of muddled bones…and something else. They all saw it. Mixed among the skulls was a flight helmet. “You’ve done it again,” Duncan whispered.

At 1700 hours—Molly had acquired military time—an American helicopter landed on the road, bearing a colonel and two Cambodian government officials wearing sunglasses. Molly went out with the others to photograph them, and was surprised to see how many villagers had flocked to the area. The Cambodian soldiers were keeping them at a distance from the camp.

The colonel was not pleased. “Quite the circus,” he shouted to the captain as the rotors wound down. Dust flew everywhere. He gestured at Molly. “Who’s this?”

“She’s the Times journalist I told you about,” the captain said.

The colonel did not shake her hand or thank her. “You were shooting the bones,” he said.

“I didn’t know what was down there,” Molly told him. His unfriendliness confused her. Hadn’t she just provided them with proof?

The colonel looked away from her. He noticed Duncan and his long hair and Che shirt. “And him?”

Molly saw the captain’s throat tighten. “A local archaeologist,” he said.

“All right,” the colonel declared, “let’s get this thing under control.” The captain led him and the officials to the mess tent. An hour later the colonel and the officials departed on the helicopter.

The captain announced that the excavation would resume in the morning. They had been granted a week—seven days—no more. After that the site would be returned to the kingdom of Cambodia. “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” he said. “If he’s down there, we’ll find him.”

There were high fives, and Duncan whistled through his fingers. The captain did not smile. He asked Molly and Duncan and Kleat to join him.

There was no Johnnie Walker Black this evening. The meeting was brief. He was grim. “Due to the sensitive nature of the mission,” he informed them, “your presence is no longer expedient.”

Molly’s mouth fell open.

“ ‘Expedient,’ ” said Kleat. “What the hell does that mean?”

The captain’s lips pressed thin. Clearly he had argued. Clearly he had lost. “I have been advised to compress the operation to essential personnel only. We’re letting go of the work crew.” He added, “And you.”

“You can’t do that to us,” Kleat said. “I’ve paid my dues. Year after year—”

“Be ready to leave at 0700 tomorrow morning,” the captain said.

Duncan appealed, not for himself, but for Molly. “Without her, you’d have nothing,” he said.

The captain looked ill. He lowered his eyes. “That will be all,” he said.

7.

“Like outcasts.”

The words poured with smoke from Kleat’s mouth.

Molly was sitting with him and Duncan at a window table overlooking the Mekong River. It was a brand-new restaurant to go with the brand-new Japanese bridge leading east. Sunset lit the water red. Fans spun overhead, politely, enough to eddy Kleat’s cigar smoke but not rustle the pages of Duncan’s World Tribune. The starched white tablecloth was immaculate.

None of it seemed real.

“We find their pilot for them,” Kleat said, “and like that, adios, pendejos.”

“For the record, he’s not found yet, only his helmet,” said Duncan. “And one other thing, it was Molly who found him. Not us.” He raised a toast to her.

Molly gamely lifted her glass. Kleat passed.

The ice-cold Heineken was like culture shock. She sat there. Her farmer tan torpedoed the dandelion-yellow sundress she had been saving for just such an evening. It jumped up at her, the sunburn and freckles to her upper arms, then the shoulders as white as moons. She looked half naked to herself. And her hair, like something chopped to Goth with surgical scissors, which was what she’d resorted to. She lifted her chin. Nothing to do about it tonight. Beauty, skin deep, all that.

The sun went on sinking. Only this morning, the sun had seemed like a peasant disease, breaking them down all day, leaving them sore and weary by night. Now, with a drink in hand and the fans cooling the air, she did her best to see the sunset as a thing of great beauty. She tried to savor her postexpedition daze, to relinquish the heat and dust and insects. She put off thoughts of whatever came next. The day was ending. The month. A full month she had spent grubbing after the dead.

Kleat started in on her. This last supper was his idea. Molly had actually hoped they could part friends. Dumb.

“You were told,” he said. “Day one. Their first commandment. I heard the captain tell you. No shooting the dead. Anything but them. So what do you do?”

The scar at his throat turned purple. He never talked about the scar. He seemed to think it spoke for him. Most of the people on the dig thought it came from a sloppy thyroid surgery.

“We’ve been through this,” Duncan said quietly. “The camera was just their excuse.” He was still holding his World Tribune, five days out of date, devouring every word.

“We got pulled down with her,” Kleat said.

Molly sighed. He couldn’t help himself. She only wished he could have waited until after dessert. The waiters hadn’t even arrived with her salad. The restaurant was known for its salad Niçoise. For a month, she had been waiting for it.

“A deal was struck,” said Duncan. “They were given a week to recover the pilot. However they’re getting through those bones, it’s not for public consumption, American or Cambodian. They don’t want outsiders to see it.”

“Get this straight,” Kleat said. “I’m not one of you.”

“I don’t mean this harshly, John,” Duncan said, “but that’s all you are. One of us.”

The veins stood out on Kleat’s burnished skull. He leaned in. “I belonged.”

“I’ll say it again,” Molly said. “I thought the well was empty.”

“You knew. Somehow you knew.”

“She has a gift,” Duncan said. “Leave it at that.”

It was useless talking about it. The captain had been ordered to make a clean sweep. His three guests had been loaded into a Land Cruiser and sent away.

She looked from one man to the other, each freshly showered, their whiskers scraped off. The dig had thinned them. Their clean shirts hung on their shoulders like stolen laundry. They looked like sticks of hard driftwood among the last of the Europeans at the tables around them. The package tours had all but shut down. The monsoon season was almost here, and the typhoon was circling in the South China Sea.

“It was never your brother down there anyway,” said Duncan. “We knew that from the start. You said he went missing along the border. That’s a hundred miles to the east. And this was a crash site. We were looking for a pilot, not a soldier on foot.”

“You don’t get it.” Kleat was plaintive. “They’ll never have me back again.”

The sunset trembled. Thunder, too low to hear, vibrated the window in the frame. The glass buzzed like locusts.

The typhoon qualified for a name, an Asian name for a change, Mekkhala, Thai for Angel of Thunder. It was only the coming monsoon’s daily grumble, but everyone tied to it the angel’s thunder. The restaurant owner had sheets of wood ready to protect his expensive windows. The glass vibrated again. It would come soon.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said.

Kleat wasn’t prepared for that. His eyes seemed to crouch. “Tell it to the captain.”

“I mean about your brother,” she said.

The stub of cigar flared.

“I hope you find him someday.”

“Because you know how it feels?”

“Yes.”

“Not your orphan story,” he said. “Again.”

This was a mistake. “Forget it,” she said.

“No, really. Sharing losses while you gave them haircuts? You think that made you part of the team? We came to locate soldiers.”

“I know.”

“Molly,” he said. “Your mother was just some hippie chick.”

“Enough,” Duncan muttered.

“Why?” said Kleat. “I’m curious. You make me wonder, both of you. We didn’t come together by accident. We draw up the dead for a reason. It was a rough, dirty, hot toilet of a month. You suffered for this.”

“We all suffered,” said Duncan.

“But the thing is, you didn’t have to. I need to be here. And the captain and his team, we have a duty to perform. Not you, though.”

Duncan shrugged. “Just lending a hand.”

“The boys have waited long enough.”

“Something like that.”

“You talk like it was your war.”

“Wrong address, friend.” Duncan flashed a peace sign.

“Tell me, sitting on your campus back then, were they all just fools to you?”

“Not a single one of them. I’m only saying that it wasn’t my war. I wasn’t here.”

“And yet here you are,” said Kleat.

“In the flesh.”

“Of all places.”

Duncan gestured at the glorious river. He took a deep lungful of the air, and Molly smelled it, too, the scent of bougainvillea as thick as hash smoke. “It grows on you,” he said.

“I didn’t mean the territory in general. I was talking about our little dig. Where you had no real business. Professionally speaking.”

“Professionally speaking,” Duncan agreed, “no business at all.”

“Getting right with God? The old pacifist burying old warriors?”

“That must be it,” said Duncan.

“And you?” Kleat said, turning to Molly. Duncan wouldn’t fight him, maybe she would. “Do you mind me asking?”

How could she mind? She was an inquisitor herself. “Go ahead.”

“Just to connect the dots, you know. We’ve got a soldier, my brother,” he opened one hand, then the other, “and your mother. A suicide.”

She blinked at his malice. “I never used that word.”

Kleat considered his cigar, one of the captain’s Havanas. “She parks her baby with a friend, leaves twelve bucks and a week’s worth of cat food. Then takes a hit of LSD and wanders off into a blizzard. That is what you told us.”

“Not like that, I didn’t.”

Not until it came time to fill out her college application forms had Molly learned that she was adopted. She had taken it hard. She’d actually made her parents—her stepparents—apologize. Then she’d run off to hunt for her birth mother. Over the coming years, she had changed to her mother’s maiden name, and her sleuthing skills led to journalism. That was her point in telling the soldiers on the recovery team, to identify where she came from, not to infiltrate them with a sob story.

“So you found her, and it made you whole,” Kleat said. He wanted blood.

“It took me three years to find a picture of her,” Molly said. She had it now, in her passport wallet, a Texas driver’s license issued in 1967. But no way was she going to share that with them, at least not with Kleat. “It took another two years to find her grave.” She did not describe the miner’s cemetery in Breckenridge, altitude 9,600 feet, wildflowers everywhere.

“At least she got a grave.”

Molly stared at him. From the start, he had treated her like treason waiting to happen. She’d thought it had to do with her occupation, but it was both more and less personal than that. He was one of those troubled souls in constant need of a scapegoat, and for some reason, she’d been filling the role for a month. Going along to get along, maybe. Not anymore. The story was stone cold. Let the bastard go find another punching bag.

Molly looked out the window. The river was on fire with red. Small boats ferried back and forth, the far shore going dark.

The cocktail hour was dying. Soon the waiters would bring their dinner. The evening could end.

A tiny desperation crept in. Tomorrow was almost here, and her future was in tatters. She’d banked everything on the Times. From this piece others would flow, then book deals, and film options. But the world was no longer her oyster.

Kleat was making a quick escape, back to his twelve-cent beers and five-dollar wives. He’d already booked a flight out of Phnom Penh, two hours to the south, for tomorrow afternoon.

Duncan had decided his restoration work in the north could wait until the rainy season passed. He was going to the big city. Though he must have resupplied in Phnom Penh countless times over the years, he acted like Marco Polo about to enter the marvels of Xanadu. He couldn’t wait to investigate its streets and markets and temples.

In short, one of them was going, one was staying, and Molly was torn. Nothing waited for her at home, no obligations, no cat, no boyfriend, and no deadline. It had been too early to plant her herb garden on her little deck before leaving, and it would be too late by the time she returned. There was a friend’s wedding in July, a half marathon for breast cancer in August, her yoga classes at the Y, and an astronomy class up at the university. And bills to pay and work to scare up.

But she was here. Asia no longer intimidated her. After a month in the field, she was toughened and road ready, and Duncan had caught her eye. He was an islander, of sorts, solitary and curious and uncomplicated.

She was going to ask him to guide her through Angkor Wat. Not tonight, but once Kleat left, she meant to propose a short adventure before the storm. It was a whim, one that hadn’t occurred to her before an hour ago. She suspected it might lead to other things between them, other cities, maybe another life, a bend in the road.

She wasn’t quite sure how to handle their age gap. Kent State was ancient history, though Duncan didn’t seem old enough for it by a decade. She had tried to imagine him thirty years ago. He would have had a little more meat on him, and fewer creases around the eyes. But he would have had the same sweet calm. A keeper. Thirty years ago.

She’d never tried a winter-summer relationship, never even thought about it. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly winter and she wasn’t exactly summer. She told herself it shouldn’t matter. If things didn’t work out, the typhoon was all the excuse she’d need to flee.

The glass trembled again.

8.

The restaurant grew quiet.

Kleat looked at his watch. “Six sharp,” he said. “Send in the clowns.”

Molly turned as the entrance lit with the color of tangerines. Three old monks filed in, led by a child. Bits of the sunset seemed caught in their saffron robes.

She had heard of them. They were blind. The owner let them in each evening.

All around, tourists hushed reverently, even the Germans at the bar. Chairs creaked as people twisted to see. A woman started to applaud, and stopped herself. This was not like on the sidewalks where the amputees and widows leaped out at you. The monks were well washed and stately, a taste of Cambodia to go with your umbrella drinks. The waiters backed against the wall and bowed, theatrical with their white gloves pressed together at their foreheads.

“Tanto quiso el diablo a sus hijos que les sacó los ojos.” Duncan said.

“What?” said Molly.

“It’s an old saying. ‘The devil loved his children so much that he poked out their eyes.’ ”

“Only it was the KR, not the devil,” said Kleat. “And they used spoons.”

She was reminded of Brueghel’s painting, the blind leading the blind, stumbling among the rabble. No rabble here, though. Nor stumbling. The young boy’s head was shaved to the skin, a novitiate. They wove among the tables with serpent grace, gathering their alms, American dollars mostly. Molly saw one couple sign over a traveler’s check. The man and woman pressed their palms together in an awkward sampeah, but of course the monks could not see them.

“The waiters will be taking a cut,” Kleat observed.

As the monks approached, Molly saw old scars glistening at the center of their wrinkled foreheads. Their third eyes had been ritually mutilated. They held their heads high, each connected by a few fingertips to the shoulder ahead of him.

“What, no sins to pay for?” Duncan asked Kleat. He was opening his steel briefcase to get his wallet.

“At these prices, I’d say it’s already built into the menu,” Kleat said.

Molly stood to get a dollar bill from her pocket.

That was when she noticed the gypsy from their dig. He was standing in the doorway staring straight at them. She jerked with surprise.

“What’s he doing here?” she said. The two men looked up at her. “There,” she pointed.

Just then the line of monks passed in front of the doorway, blocking her view. When they had moved on to the next table, the opening stood empty.

“Never mind,” she said.

He’d never come within two hundred yards of them, so why would he be here? His place was in the mirages, along the horizon, in the ball of the rising or setting sun.

She started to sit down, but he had moved, and was watching them.

“There,” she said, startled all over again.

He had maneuvered across the room and was standing by a table with a French couple. He had gray peasant pants and a green and black camouflage T-shirt with ragged holes. He was barefoot. The French pair was not pleased by his presence.

They all saw him now. It was as if he’d stepped out of her camera.

“Incredible,” said Kleat.

The baggy gray pants had once been black. The cuffs stood at his knees, shredded by dogs. His shins were crisscrossed with bite wounds.

Some of the soldiers back at the dig had thought he might be a freelance journalist down on his luck, way down. Or, as Kleat had suggested, a heroin addict lost in inner space. Duncan wondered if he might be the son of an MIA, shipwrecked by a lifetime of hope. There was even the possibility that he could be an actual, living MIA, though no one on the dig really believed that. It was a powerful piece of MIA mythology, the POW who was still out there, or the defector who’d decided to stay into infinity. One such man, a marine named Garwood, had in fact surfaced in Vietnam years after the war. Ever since, Molly learned, the Garwood factor had become red meat for the MIA movement. They fed on it endlessly. The official military forensics teams viewed themselves as an antidote to such wishful thinking. Their only prey was the bones, though they tipped their hat to the MIA movement.

The stranger didn’t nod at them. He was gaunt. A hundred twenty pounds, Molly guessed, no more. Duncan had said he must eat weeds and insects, like John the Baptist. “He must have followed us from the dig,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Kleat. “It took us five hours by car to get down here. We would have seen him behind us.”

“One way or another, here he is.”

“He’s stalking us,” Kleat said.

It did feel like that. But which of them was he after?

The man began walking toward them. The boy. He was much younger than she’d thought. His blond hair was almost white from the undiluted sun. He had a cowlick and reminded her of Dennis the Menace, on smack. All he lacked was a slingshot in his back pocket.

Kleat placed one hand on the table. Molly looked twice. His hand was covering his dinner knife.

“Relax,” said Duncan. “He probably just wants some of our peanuts and beer.”

The fans loosened the countryside from creases in his clothing and his hair. The sunset lit the fine dust into a fiery nimbus. The French couple covered their food.

Molly expected bad smells, the reek of old urine and feces and sweat, but he only smelled like dust. He came to a halt behind the fourth chair at their table, with the window—and the sunset—behind him. It was hard to see his eyes. A thin corona of red dust wafted from his shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” Kleat demanded.

“I see you out there,” the man said. “Going through the motions. Wasting away.”

“Is that so?”

“Like starved hogs. All that dust for nothing, Jesus.”

For all his raw bearing, he had a voice like the breeze. Molly had to strain for it. He was American, no faking the West Texas accent. Twenty years old probably, going on a thousand, one of those kids. He’d seen it all.

“It don’t work,” he said. “You can’t hide.”

“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 two 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.

For a moment, a terrible moment, Molly saw her mother in him, crazy as hell, ricocheting from the kindness and torment of strangers, lost to the world, surrounded by dogs. A chill shot through her. For all the smothering wet heat, goose bumps flared along her arms and legs.

The sight of him made Molly fear for herself as she had been long ago, for the half-forgotten infant in her mother’s arms. How many animals had circled them, too, waiting for a meal? How many lamplights had her mother sheltered beneath? The miracle of that baby’s survival flooded Molly, not with awe, but with terror.

Had flies billowed around the smell of breast milk on her mother’s blouse? Had truckers ejected the roadside Madonna and child when they caught a whiff of unchanged diapers? Molly had floated through a gauntlet of loathing and dangers that she could never precisely know. But the sight of this stranger, this walking suicide, threw her into a panic.

Molly’s hands went to her stomach, her womb, as it were, and felt the passport wallet hidden under her sundress. Inside it were her passport and money and one other thing, perhaps her most valuable possession, the driver’s license issued in 1967 to a teenage girl named Jane Drake. The image came to her, Molly’s same black hair, Molly’s same green eyes. Molly had three inches on her, and outweighed her by ten pounds, but they were still the same woman. She closed her eyes and drew up the sweet optimism on that face, and it was nothing like the harrowed madman in their headlights. Her alarm subsided.

She snapped a picture of Luke through the cracked windshield, mostly to return to herself. The big Mercedes pulled alongside. Kleat looked down from the cab. “What are we waiting for?” he said.

Molly was sitting in the front seat of the Land Cruiser. Luke took the backseat, next to Duncan. He was thin as a willow wand, but when he climbed in, the vehicle sagged under his weight. She thought the shocks must be worn out.

“Please fasten your seat belts and place your trays in an upright position,” Molly said to him. She was excited. A great discovery was about to unfold. Then she glanced back, and Luke’s face was joyless.

10.

Highway 7 lunged at them. No neat white lines. No mile markers. No speed limit. No warning signs. Speed was their only safe conduct, or so she gathered from the way their driver drove. They didn’t slow even when they passed through darkened villages or swerved for potholes Molly could not see.

She had never ridden at night in Cambodia, and so help her God never would again. To conserve their headlights, everyone drove with their lights off. Trucks, cars, buses, all hurtled at them from the darkness. Only at the very last instant would their lights spring on, then off, blowing her night vision, leaving her—and presumably their driver—more sightless than before.

The boy hunched in the darkness, like a reptile, his chest to the steering wheel, his forehead pressed to the glass. He was the youngest of the brothers, maybe nineteen or twenty, with wrists little thicker than the plastic steering wheel. Born and raised in refugee camps, they had come up through misery she could only imagine. He was wearing a blue-checkered kroma, and his arms and neck were cross-hatched with tattoos. He kept humming Smashing Pumpkins tunes learned from the RE-1 soldiers.

She wished Duncan would tell some of his jokes and stories, but he was mostly silent beside the stone lump of their guide. The boys weren’t having fun. It was a road trip, not a funeral. She tried to prime the pump. She handed out little Jolly Rancher cinnamon candies from her bag, offering one to the driver.

“His name is Vin,” said Duncan.

“Vin,” she said. The boy smiled.

“Heng Putheathvin,” Duncan amplified. “Among Khmers, the surname goes first, though it varies from child to child depending on the parents’ whim. It can get confusing. They might use the mother’s surname for one child, and the father’s for another. It’s like a gift they decide upon at birth. Sometimes the father will give his surname to a favorite child. Sometimes he gives it to a bad luck child just in order to protect him. Or her.”

“A bad luck child?”

“It’s a curious custom, a kind of fetal scapegoat. While the baby is still in the womb, he or she bears responsibility for any bad luck that lands on the family. Say a mother goes into labor and sends her son for the midwife, and along the way a dog bites the boy. The infant is held responsible. From then on, you’re marked. Everyone around knows you brought bad luck from the womb. But the father can help deflect it by giving you his family name.”

“That’s so unfair,” said Molly. “To blame an unborn child.”

“It’s that destiny thing,” Duncan said. He spoke to Vin in Khmer. The boy responded shyly. Duncan laughed. “I asked him, and Heng is their father’s name. He said he and his brothers are all bad luck children.”

“Ask him about his tattoos.”

Duncan and Vin went back and forth. Vin seemed quite proud.

“They’re called sak,” said Duncan. “It’s warrior magic. The tattoos protect him from knives and bullets. He has them on his arms, legs, and chest, even a little one in the part of his hair. He got them because his brothers have them. His oldest brother has the most elaborate ones. That’s because he was actually a soldier with the government. His brother has killed men. Rebels. Vin wants to get a tiger done on his legs, the tail down one leg, the head down the other. That way he’ll be safe from the land mines.”

“Jesus, man.” It was Luke, staring at Duncan in dismay. “You talk like a believer.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Duncan said to him.

“And what’s this?” Molly asked, pointing at the most unusual marking. She’d seen it earlier. Duncan shined his light on Vin’s neck. At the upper tip of a series of welts lay a reddish image of George Washington.

“That,” said Duncan, “is an American quarter. In reverse.”

“He had a quarter tattooed on his neck?”

“Not tattooed. It’s folk medicine. Koh khchal, ‘coining,’ in English. It’s not so different from medical philosophy in medieval Europe, the idea of ridding yourself of bad humors. A healer, or it can be a parent or a friend, dips a coin in kerosene to get a good grip, then they rub like hell, usually on your back or chest or arms.”

Duncan asked Vin a question. “He has a headache. One of his brothers gave him a good, hard session. The coin can get pretty hot. His brother pressed it on his neck, like a signature. George Washington was here.”

“Tell him I have a tattoo,” Molly said, “a butterfly.”

Duncan told Vin. “He said he’d like to see it someday.”

“Oh, it’s in kind of a private place.”

“In that case, I’d like to see it someday.”

Molly’s eyes flicked up at the mirror, but she could see only Luke’s dark face. Duncan laughed and told the boy. Vin tucked his head, mortified.

“You didn’t have to embarrass him,” said Molly.

“He’ll survive.”

“Listen to you.” It was Luke, his voice hard.

“Yeah?” asked Duncan.

“You’re losing yourself.”

“No harm in connecting with the culture. It is their country.”

“Maybe,” Luke said, “you should stick with your own kind.”

“And why is that?” said Duncan.

“It’s all tricks, you know,” Luke said. “You’re only fooling yourself.”

Duncan’s smile faded.

Molly turned to Luke. Talk about bad luck children. “What about you?” she tried. “Where do you come from?”

It was like talking into an empty pipe. He said nothing more. The Jolly Rancher candy sat in his hand. After that the talk died. The miles went by.

A small light flipped on and off as Duncan periodically marked their position on a map spread across his legs. She guessed they must have covered two hundred miles, though it was impossible to know with the gauges broken or unhooked and the dash light dead.

For years the American embassy had been warning against travel into the distant provinces, especially at night. Rogue soldiers and war cripples were epidemic, with a nasty habit of highway robbery. The wars were over, she told herself. Those days were done. But she knew they were not really. Violence lay just beneath the skin here. Rebels still came together for various causes, and the countryside held more land mines per square mile than even Afghanistan or Bosnia.

But mile after mile there were no roadblocks, no highwaymen, and Molly tried to relax. Apparently the bandits had exploited the road too efficiently. It seemed they’d driven themselves right out of business.

During one stop to put more oil in the smoking truck, Kleat came up to them.

Molly made some remark about the wild night driving.

“You’re afraid? Good,” said Kleat. “Fear is a gift. It purifies us. Listen to it and you can see right through the night.” He was exultant. “And how’s our guide? How are you doing, Slick?” he said to Luke.

Luke looked at him. “Johnny Hollywood,” he said, like he knew him.

It startled Kleat. He flinched, almost as if it meant something. He spit on the road. “Do we have some problem?”

“Are you really sure you want to be here?” Luke asked him.

Kleat glanced suspiciously at Molly and Duncan to see if they’d been talking among themselves. Molly shook her head at him and frowned. She didn’t know what this was about.

“I’m helping pay for your ride, aren’t I?” Kleat said to Luke.

“That don’t make it your party. Slick.”

“How’s that?” Kleat said.

But Luke only trained his eyes back on the road. He had nothing more to add. Molly couldn’t make sense of it. Neither one of them played well with others. But hell if she was going to be the mommy. Let them sort it out.

Kleat let loose his grip on. He returned to the truck and climbed up into the cab. The convoy started off again, back into the flash of metal giants roaring by in the night.

The moon broke from the clouds, and the paddies bracketing the road jumped to life. The highway became a dark strip sandwiched between hundreds of reflected moons. The land turned dreamlike, a world of harbored water arranged in honeycombs. The clouds sailed over, returning them to darkness.

Molly checked her watch. Barely eleven. A long night of the soul still ahead. Thankfully, whether because of the deepening night or their growing remoteness, the traffic grew sparse. They passed more villages, more paddy fields with their thousand moons.

“Mamot,” Duncan noted. The map rustled. A little later, he said, “Snuol, is that where we’re going?”

Molly could see Luke in the rearview mirror, his face yellow in the penlight. He tapped his dusty head. “I haven’t forgot. It’s all up here.”

“Up there,” said Duncan. “Is that like a state of mind or something?”

Molly listened. It wasn’t like Duncan to taunt.

“What’s to worry?” said Luke.

“It’s just that you seem to be making it up as we go along.”

“And you’re not?”

Molly wanted Duncan to leave it alone. If the night was a bust, it was their own fault. Luke wasn’t duping them. They were duping themselves. He had whispered to their expectations, and they had run with it. The man wasn’t about to give up his secret, and that was that. Their destination, real or not, was the only currency he had. She wished Duncan would quit worrying with the maps and turn off his light. It glared on the windshield and made the road that much harder to read.

“Run it past me again,” Duncan said, “how you found this place.”

“It seemed like the place to go,” said Luke.

Duncan persisted. “You were just out knocking around? Slumming in the provinces?”

“Like that.”

“Except you don’t have the look of a tourist. More like a runaway.”

That had been another conjecture among RE-1, that the gypsy had escaped from some Asian jail. It would explain why he stayed at a distance, but always stayed. According to the theory, he was scared and homesick and needed their proximity. He didn’t sound scared or homesick tonight.

“There’s things you can’t run from,” Luke said. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Not really. You can thank Mr. Kleat for our presence. He’s the one so hungry for it.” Duncan didn’t mention Molly, even though she was his real reason for coming along.

“The big appetite.” Luke seemed amused. “What’s he think is up there?”

Up where? Along the road or higher? Molly was listening intently.

For a month, Kleat had been slandering Duncan behind his back, calling him a liar, a sad sack, a fraud, laboring to get him tossed from the dig. Duncan wasn’t stupid. Molly knew he knew. Now was his chance to strike back.

Instead, Duncan said only, “Redemption.”

It was gracefully said, and Molly was glad for it. Somewhere in the complicated knot that was John Kleat was a human thread. It would take a good heart to see it so cleanly, and Duncan was saying he’d seen it. She was glad, not because she cared about Kleat, but because Duncan was a rock. Maybe she could trust him.

“Redemption?” said Luke.

“He’s been looking for his brother for years.”

A noise came from the backseat, startling Molly. It sounded like an animal—a monkey, a jackal, something with sharp teeth—a single, feral bark. A hoot. Vin jerked his head to see in the mirror.

It was a laugh, but not like anything Molly had ever heard. “He says that?” said Luke. “He says his brother?”

“I’m missing the joke,” said Molly.

“What brother?” said Luke.

“He went missing in the war. It’s unfinished business.”

“You sure you want to be sticking up for him?”

“I’m just telling you.”

“He wants back in,” Luke told her. “That’s how come he tracked you down. He thinks he found a ride. He thinks he’s going home.”

Molly had no idea what he was talking about. “He didn’t track me down. He was there at the dig when I arrived.”

“Waiting for you,” Luke said. “We knew you were coming.”

We?

“Sometimes there’s no second chances,” Luke said. “He wants to belong so bad. He won’t ever belong.”

“Belong to what?” Duncan said. “Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?”

“The boys,” Luke interrupted. Molly frowned. That was Duncan’s term. Had the man sneaked up one night and overheard them? It wasn’t impossible.

“Whatever,” said Duncan. “I take it you belong.”

“Same as you.”

“And me?” said Molly. He was like Job, this raving prophet, but without a god to blame for his misery and ugliness. She wanted to hear what he would say.

He looked at her. “Who else do you think we come for?”

A huge dark shape—a truck—thundered past, lights out. The Land Cruiser rocked in its wake. Her thoughts scattered. It was a relief, she decided, to quit the conversation.

11.

They came to a town, or what was left of it. The moon made a brief appearance, and the destruction leaped out at Molly, the dirt as red as Mars. Here and there lone walls stood scored by thousands of bullet holes, the rest of the houses chopped away. Otherwise the place was a shantytown floating on stilts between the rubble.

“Snuol,” Duncan read from his map.

“What happened here?” Molly asked.

“I’d say the United States Army paid a visit,” Duncan said. He had taken the red and white kroma from around his neck and draped it over his head, like blinders almost.

“Birth is death, brother,” Luke said. “Somebody has to feed the machine. This was their turn.”

The destruction fascinated Molly. The war had erected an architecture so grotesque, it verged on beauty. And the people let it stand, that was the strangest thing. They chose to live among the ruins.

“We’re getting there now,” said Luke.

“North to Kratie,” Duncan guessed. “From there, it’s not so far to Sambor.”

“You know the country?” Luke was amused.

“I came this way years ago,” Duncan said. “I was retracing the footsteps of the great Dutch explorer Van Wusthoff. He was making his way to Vientiane. This was back in 1642. He was the first Westerner to set eyes on the supposed ruins of Sambupura, the capital of a pre-Angkor civilization in the sixth century. Sambor, it’s called now. The locals stripped it clean centuries ago. They took away the building stones to make dikes. There are a few foundation stones left in the ground. Some scholars doubt the Sambor stones mark the real Sambupura. They think the stones are just traces of a satellite city, that the capital must have been somewhere else. Skeptics say Sambupura never existed, it’s just the local version of Shangri-la.”

“More tricks,” Luke said. “You and your folklore and history.”

Duncan was quiet for a moment. “It’s what I do. Temple restorations. My specialty is the pre-Angkor period.”

“Let’s say that’s so,” said Luke. “What’s that change?”

Duncan looked stricken. His little light hovered above the map. Molly didn’t know why he let the crazy gypsy get to him.

The road forked ahead. “Tell the boy to go right here,” Luke said.

They exited Highway 7 onto a side road that actually improved. The ripped asphalt of Snuol smoothed into compacted dirt. Duncan’s map rustled. “East to Mondulkiri,” he said. “This is an old logging road. The Ho Chi Minh Trail branched all through these parts.”

“History,” Luke said.

Night spilled over the windshield. Molly felt vaguely seasick. Since leaving the dig site at seven that morning, she had been on one road or another for over sixteen hours. She was tired. Her head ached. She was thirsty from the lobster, and her mouth tasted sour. She prayed Kleat had grabbed her toiletries kit when he’d gone to the hotel. She was going to want a toothbrush, a T-shirt, and a tent, in that order.

The moon came and went. Molly found herself nodding off in short bursts.

A hand slapped the top of her seat. Molly started.

“It’s coming,” Luke said. “Tell him.”

“We’re there?” She peered out the window. “How can you see anything?”

“Are you going to tell him or not?” Luke reached over the front seat and stabbed at Vin’s ribs. It hurt, Molly could tell. Vin bared his gold teeth and stepped on the brakes. A swirl of dust enveloped them.

“Did I say stop?” said Luke. “Go off up there.”

“Sit back,” Duncan said to him.

Luke’s arm withdrew. The backseat creaked under his weight. Vin gripped the steering wheel, angry at being prodded. At last he flipped on his one good headlight.

There was only the red dirt of the highway and high, green grasses. The grass enclosed them. Slowly Molly made out a dark mass in the distance, the sloping hip of a mountain, or an upward march of trees. In either case, nothing but wilderness.

“We keep going,” said Luke.

“Going where?” said Duncan.

The truck arrived behind them in the moonlight. It approached with the immensity of a shipwreck, its tattered canopy flailing like a torn sail. Bald car tires wired to the prow served as a bumper.

Vin went on sucking his golden front teeth, making up his own mind.

A fingernail tapped at her window. Molly cranked the handle, and her reflection became Kleat. “Lost?” he said.

Samnang’s round face appeared behind Kleat, a creased brown melon with white hair.

“There’s a road,” said Luke. “It goes through the grass.”

“An invisible road,” scoffed Duncan.

“What are you saying?” Kleat asked.

“Turn around now,” said Duncan, “we can be back in Phnom Penh for breakfast.”

“Turn around?” said Molly.

“Look for yourself, there’s nothing out there.” He wiped his hand across the map.

Luke didn’t argue. He had switched off, tuned out. It was their decision.

Kleat fumed. “If it was in plain sight, they would have been found already. Sometimes you have to dig a little further, that’s all.”

Molly didn’t see Samnang slide away. He simply appeared in the light beam, moving up the road, hitching his false leg ahead. One by one they all quit talking.

His shadow reached in front of him, long black lines like puppet strings tied to each limb. He followed the edge of the highway, peering into the overgrown ditch. Fifty yards ahead he stopped and began parting the grasses.

Everyone got out and went up the road, all except Luke. He sat in the car, knowing whatever he knew.

Samnang was working deeper into the tall grasses, feeling along with his one good foot. “A track for oxcarts,” he announced to them. “It hasn’t been used for many years.”

The three brothers descended from the highway and joined Samnang, chattering away, eager to continue. They wanted a week of wages, not taxi fare for a night ride. They churned through the grass, trampling it flat and tying bunches at their tops as landmarks.

Abruptly the night detonated around them. A clamor filled the air. It sizzled and crackled like wild voltage, loud, almost tangible.

The suddenness and volume startled Molly. She whirled around, searching for a source, but the noise pressed in from every direction. Cicadas, she realized, thousands of them.

She’d never heard such a massed voice of insects. She registered it as anger, but that was only because it was so alien to her. She stepped back from the grass.

That suddenly the noise stopped.

The silence had a slight sucking vacuum to it. Molly felt pulled by it. “What was that?” she said.

The men had frozen. They were staring at the grass on all sides of them.

Then Kleat waved at the night. “Bugs. Nothing.”

The clouds opened to the moon, and the distant mountain revealed itself as a pile of low hills crowned with dense forest.

“Okay?” Kleat said. “It’s there. The man said it was there. There it is.”

Molly gazed up at the mountain.

“An oxcart path,” Duncan said, dismissing it. “A mountain.”

Kleat was having none of it. He grabbed a handful of grass and gave a fierce yank. It was a foolish gesture. The roots were deep and this was saw grass, with firm, sharp blades. His fist slid up and came away empty. Kleat snapped his teeth in pain and opened his cut palm. When he shook his hand, drops of his blood spattered into the dust like petite explosions.

They followed the oxcart path. The convoy climbed through grass growing higher than the doors. The grass stroked the windows like fingers of seaweed. Behind them, the truck’s headlights swam through an ocean of brilliant green lines.

Their pell-mell highway dash slowed to a crawl. The path was rutted and winding and hard to see, but it rose gently. The shovels and jerry cans piled in the rear quit clattering. They merely rustled at the curves. Molly could practically feel the grass slithering along the undercarriage.

She relaxed, grateful for the quiet and the sinuous path. With each looping turn, the moon shifted in the sky. It seemed to have grown to twice its normal size, as if they were rising off the planet.

“We’re farther north than I thought,” said Duncan. “We’re reaching into the Annamite range. The mountains run all the way to China. It’s wild country. The lowlanders stay clear of it. The hill tribes live up here pretty much the way they have for ten thousand years, taking animals, throwing down a little corn between the trees.”

“History,” whispered Luke.

At three-thirty they crested a ridgetop and stopped. Ahead stood all that remained of a bridge, a single stone pillar rising from the wide riverbed. Beyond that, higher up, a tall forest took over the grassland.

“Now where?” said Duncan.

They got out, except for Luke, who once again left them to their own conclusions. Molly faced back the way they had come, expecting their path to be flattened by the tires. But the grass had folded shut behind them. They would have to hunt their way down just as carefully.

To her surprise, the logging road lay far below them. Winding back and forth, they’d ascended hundreds of vertical feet. From this height, you could see moonlit paddy fields far to the west, and curious rows of ponds. They were not ponds, she realized, but bomb craters.

Kleat paced along the riverbed rim like a trapped tiger. “We’re close,” he said. “It’s right there in front of us.”

“It’s just a forest,” said Duncan.

“It’s cover,” said Kleat. “It makes sense. We’re looking for the remains of an armored cavalry unit.”

“How do you know that?” asked Molly.

“Who do you think the Blackhorse Regiment was? The Eleventh Armored Cavalry. They were famous, George Patton’s men. ‘Find the bastards and pile on,’ his orders. Nine men, Luke said. That would have been enough to crew two tanks or armored personnel carriers. That’s what we’re looking for. Anything that large, left in the open, would have been spotted by plane or satellite years ago. I don’t know how these guys got lost. But those trees are where they went.”

“Not across that bridge, they didn’t,” Duncan said.

“Why not? Bombs were falling like rain all through this area. Our pilot was returning from a run along this very borderland. Sometime after the Blackhorse soldiers crossed over, the bridge must have caught a bomb. That would explain why they never got out.”

“Except the bridge is too primitive,” Duncan said. “See these stones? It was a cantilever design. That dates it to a thousand years ago, or earlier. A bridge like that couldn’t have taken the weight of a tank. And look at how the building stones have been shoved down-river over time. Some of them are huge. No, this fell to pieces centuries ago.”

“The closer we get, the less you care,” Kleat said. “Or are you afraid of something?”

Molly stood away from them. The night air was a joy to breathe. She actually felt cold in her sundress.

“Even if they got across thirty years ago, it doesn’t mean we should follow them,” Duncan said. “Look at the width of that riverbed. It carries some major water. Once the rains begin, we’ll never be able to cross back. We’d be stuck over there for the next six months. And that, not a bombed bridge, would explain why they were never seen again.”

“I don’t see any rain.”

“It’s coming.”

“June 23, 1970,” Kleat said to him. “That’s the day they went missing. They were part of the Cambodian incursion. Nixon sent them. That’s what Kent State was all about.”

“I remember.”

“Somehow these nine soldiers got separated from the main body. Maybe night was coming on. The enemy was out there. They couldn’t stay in the open.”

“And you think they drove this far north? We’re halfway to Laos.”

“Maybe they were going for the high ground. Maybe they saw the trees. Maybe they were being pursued.”

Molly left them arguing. The night, the dark morning, was too fine to spoil. Venus stood bright. The constellations beckoned. For a month, swamped by haze on the plains, she had missed the stars. Down there, in another couple of hours, the dawn people would be plundering the site, dodging through the mist. Up here, she felt free. She clutched her arms across her chest and meandered along the broad rim.

At first she didn’t notice the strange ribbing under her shoes. It rose out of the ground only gradually. At last the notches threatened to trip her. She bent to run her fingers across the imprints and they were as hard as ceramic.

“Duncan,” she called. “Kleat.”

They were arguing. She called louder.

“What?” said Kleat.

She showed them the marks on the ground.

Kleat had a six-battery bludgeon of a flashlight. He shined it on the rows of corrugated imprints, each the same fourteen or fifteen inches wide, leading off like dinosaur footprints. The track marks ran a hundred yards before sinking back into the earth. The clay had captured the passage of vehicles. The sun had baked it and made it impervious to three decades of weather.

“Blackhorse,” Kleat said. He identified the prints as the marks of two armored cavalry assault vehicles, ACAVs, both the same size, one following the other.

“They came this way, up the hill, along the river, chasing a way to cross without the bridge. What more do you need?” he said to Duncan. “They’re over there. They’re waiting.”

12.

They came to the pass where the stream spread across the wide riverbed, and the Eleventh Cavalry strays had left more prints in the clay. The water, at the deepest point, came axle high to the Land Cruiser, though it built against Molly’s door on the upstream side, slapping and gurgling. The moon made a skin of silver on it. Dangling her hand out the window, she found the water had the temperature of blood or bathwater.

“It’s got to be one of these drainages,” Duncan muttered at his map. She could hear him back there, twisting the paper to try to fit it to the terrain. Couldn’t he see the handle of the Big Dipper, the stars skipping up to the North Star? They weren’t lost, only in motion.

She closed her eyes and, midstream, they seemed adrift on a raft. Her feet were wet, and she saw an inch of water on the floor. She laughed.

“You’re happy,” said Duncan.

She didn’t turn. “Yes,” she said.

It pleased him. That pleased her.

She didn’t try to explain her joy. After all these weeks, she felt released. The tension of searching for the pilot, the pushing and pulling of tool against earth, of man against man, civilian against soldier, of Kleat against Duncan, all of it seemed left behind. Her trespass upon the pilot, with her camera, was a thing of the past. The highway and its dark menace were forgotten.

The sun would find them somewhere. That was the heart of it. The farther they got from the main road, the more it felt like she was finally reaching a center. When the time came, one way or another they could always retrace their journey, and eventually she could return to writing her words, publishing her photos, and promoting her name, the maiden name—the only name she knew—of a woman who had forsaken her. For now, she just wanted to keep going.

The river—or her happiness—changed Duncan, too. His anxieties fell away. He put aside his map, and she thought that now they could cast themselves into the journey. They had made their crossing. Their hell-bent midnight ride could slow. She could start to know Duncan without the background noise and her urgency to catch the recovery team’s story. They were on their own now, threading up a path across a river that was just a stream upon a mountain that was just a hill, wandering off the maps. Two searchers, that’s who they were.

The bones were an excuse. That divorced her and him from Kleat, who was so bound to his dead and his duty. She hadn’t come to resurrect soldiers any more than Duncan had. The missing pilot had drawn them as a novelty, an opportunity, nothing more. Now they could enter a territory of the heart.

They had never talked about what preceded Cambodia for him. For a month, they had worked and lived within inches of each other, but she still didn’t have a real handle on him. For all his tales of high school football and a dog named Bandit and his summer-long Harley solo to Anchorage and special barbecue recipes and favorite old movies, she had no idea why he’d landed here, or even when. The one time she’d asked, he’d dodged. Sometimes it feels like I was born here, he’d said. Like I’m like some dusty thing out of a Kipling novel, just one more relic of the empire.

Not Kipling, she thought. Conrad. And not Kurtz, not Heart of Darkness, but Lord Jim. Duncan had secrets, maybe dark secrets or sad secrets or old guilt. One does not go to the jungle out of innocence. He never talked about a wife or children or another woman, never crouched over snapshots of a lost family or a lover who had chosen a different man or died a tragic death. He never mentioned where that part of his life had gone. Survivor guilt, she guessed. Maybe that was what attracted her to him. He seemed to carry her same sense of a past best unrepeated, of a voyage without anchors. Like an orphan, he acted never quite worthy of love. They were perfect fodder for a grail quest, the two of them.

They passed worn blocks of stone in the river wall, evidence of ancient channels. That perked him up.

“Incredible,” he said. “We’re looking at water control that predates the Angkor kingdom by centuries, and on the opposite side of the country. A massive hydraulics system in the mountains, for Pete’s sake. You need to understand, water is everything here. There’s not another country like this on earth. For the Khmers, the world is water. When the monsoon comes, almost half the country vanishes under water. The Tonle Sap River reverses course. Great battles were fought on inland boats. Their civilization was founded on wet rice cultivation. The Angkor empire rose and fell based on their ability to control water. The Angkor kings captured the rain in huge pools and would dole it out in drought years or choke their enemies with thirst. But where did the Angkor genius come from? What sparked their greatness? Who passed to them the divine mandate? Who came before them?”

Luke would have muttered “history” had he been conscious. But he had gone to sleep or was traveling in his head. His eyes were shut. Perhaps his delirium had cycles, or the loss of his secret had emptied him. Hibernation suited him, Molly decided. He looked younger without the junkie eyes. Asleep, he looked resigned to himself.

Trailed by the hulking Mercedes, they wound higher along the contour lines. The moon spun left to right across the windshield, a moving target. Molly let go of the urge to orient herself. There was no longer any question of where they were headed.

The prow of the forest seemed to descend to them. White mist leaked from the throat of the trees. Early morning fog was part of the Cambodian clockwork. But tonight it looked to Molly like a word exhaled, like a syllable spilling downhill to greet her.

To the right and left, creeper vines stitched shut the forest wall. The only possible entry was directly through a break in the screen of trees. She wanted to ask Vin to stop for a picture. But that would have meant setting up a tripod for a time-lapse shot, and it would have been more an emotion than a picture anyway.

“It will be a whole other world in there,” Duncan said. “An ecosystem writing its own rules. You’ll see. There are species in these mountains that no one knows exist. The khiting vor, practically a unicorn, like a myth, part gazelle with curlicue horns. They say it stands on its rear legs to feed, that it eats deadly snakes. There are herds of white elephants, like ghosts. Peacocks. Langur monkeys with two stomachs. Hundreds of species of moths. And the flowers.”

Teak and gum trees soared. He knew them by shape, and by their Khmer names, too. They reached the outskirts of the fog, and it turned to brilliant milky smoke in their beams. Vin slowed, feeling his way forward. But they had their bearings now, that gaping hole in the forest.

Something tapped against the rooftop. A leaf. A twig.

“What about tigers?”

“These days you see more pelts than paw marks,” Duncan said. “The hill tribes and ex-soldiers are trapping them out. It’s obscenely easy. They take an old land mine, hide it under a dead monkey for bait, and boom, jackpot. Skin, meat, claws, and penis…you can make enough money for a Honda Dream. That’s the bike of choice here. The tiger parts go to China for folk medicine.”

Another story, another time, she idly thought.

“I wouldn’t worry about the big cats. Not this deep. They’ve never bothered me. This far from people, they don’t have a taste for us.”

There was another soft pat on the roof, a light rap, an ounce of pebble, less. Then another. Molly glanced at the ceiling. Another. Tiptoes on the metal.

She frowned, wishing the noises away, guessing what they were.

“It can’t be,” she stated firmly. “Tell me it’s not starting.”

But it was. Duncan had his fingers against the roof, feeling the minute landings. “The luck,” he said.

The season had beat them.

“I don’t believe it,” she groaned. “We’re so close.”

They had a deal, though. First rain, turn home. It was all the more imperative now with the river between them and the world.

More soft pats on the roof, little metallic kisses.

“I’m sorry,” said Duncan.

A raindrop slapped the windshield. Molly leaned closer to see it. “That’s not rain.” She put her fingertip on the inside of the glass.

It was blood. Gore. With little webbed feet. Molly lifted her finger away.

“Is that a frog?” said Duncan.

He was right. It was a storm of frogs, little tree frogs. They were falling from the sky. She cranked her window shut.

You read of tadpoles being sucked into the heights and growing into young frogs among the clouds. Was this that, she wondered? Did the monsoon have that power?

Then she saw that they weren’t falling. They were leaping out from the forest’s high branches. Another struck the windshield. Another, and this one didn’t splash to bits like the others.

Dead or stunned, the frog stuck in place. Its red and black bands glistened, backlit by the white mist.

Another hit, this one alive. It took position on the glass, head high. The tiny thing looked majestic, like a creature mounting their world, claiming it. Its miniature lungs pulsed.

“What are they doing?” she said.

“They must be drawn by the headlights,” said Duncan. “Or it could be some territorial imperative.”

“They’re trying to drive us away?”

“I wouldn’t make it too personal,” Duncan said. But his voice was sober.

They began to patter, like small hail, on the hood and roof and windshield. Now that she knew what they were, Molly could see them in the lighted mist with their tiny legs and arms stretched wide.

“Or it could be the typhoon affecting them,” Duncan went on. “Animals are sensitive to change. With the low-pressure cell building, their rhythms go haywire. Lemming behavior. One dives, they all dive.”

“This is awful,” she said.

The pat of bodies became a rattling, a squall of miniature carnage.

“But at least it’s not the rain.”

“It’s unnatural.”

“It’s just a few frogs.”

“A few?”

The windshield was layered with bits of tissue. They were casting themselves down by the scores, catapulting from the trees. She saw a mother, her back swarming with tiny young. The wiper blades went to work and mangled them. The hood looked like a butcher block. Molly hated it. The death and mutilation were senseless.

Plainly, Vin had never witnessed such a thing. He gripped the wheel, and the tattoos on his skinny forearms—crude lines and circles and suns, his magic symbols—rippled. He believed in other worlds. And here was this, this curse, a hailstorm of frogs.

Vin drifted to a halt. He craned his head up to see inside the strange torrent. The banging grew louder. He was staring at her. She saw his fear. It made her more afraid.

She put her hands against the roof, as if it might collapse. The metal throbbed. “We can’t stay here.” She had to shout over the noise.

Like vomit against the windshield, the forest puked its creatures at them. It sickened her. She glanced around.

Luke’s eyes were closed. How could he sleep through this? And he was smiling.

Duncan said something in Khmer, his tone calm. He said it again. Vin nodded. They lurched into motion.

Duncan spoke into her ear. “It’s okay, we’re going inside now. They’ll stop, Molly.” His hand was on her shoulder.

She could barely see through the plastered glass. Up ahead, like the mouth of a cave, the forest parted its lips. “Faster,” she whispered.

The forest yawned open.

13.

Roots and stones rose up from underneath the fog. Vin picked up speed. The Land Cruiser hopped and bounded, tools rattling in the back.

They entered.

Instantly the darkness changed. The moonlight vanished. It was like mercy. The hailstone beating quit. The frogs stopped.

The wiper blades were squealing on dry glass.

Their battle was over, but Vin didn’t slow a bit.

Molly hunched over and peered through her side window like it was a porthole. Dark shapes reeled past, trees as thick as bridge pillars. The Land Cruiser lunged over roots like big swells, throwing her against the door.

Duncan barked something at Vin. The boy ignored him, still racing from the animal assault, driving blind. In a way, Molly was relieved by his dread. It validated her own. His fear gave her a fear to settle. She placed one hand on his arm and found he was quivering.

The wiper blades scratched at the crust of frogs. Forward vision returned in streaks. The mist flared in sudden white eruptions. Blackness and light.

Abruptly a huge face jumped up in front of them. Vin braked and swerved. Even so, they banged against it, not ruinously, but with a jolt.

“My God,” Duncan whispered.

Molly unclenched her hands from her camera.

The stone head was as large as the car.

The wipers clawed at the rusty glass. Duncan patted Vin’s shoulder. The wipers stopped. They stared at the head’s tilted eyes.

Molly lifted her camera. Fog edged through the dark trees, sliding in slow, soundless white bunches between the strings of vines brewing up around the stone head.

Time had partially melted its demonic rage. The head had rolled onto one rounded jaw, part human, part animal. Its angry, bulging eyes had eroded over the ages. All around lay more pieces of toppled giant statuary.

“What on earth?” said Molly.

“A warrior icon,” said Duncan. “A holy warrior.”

“With fangs?”

“A wrathful deity,” Duncan said. “A guardian.”

“Guarding what, though?”

“That’s the question. I don’t know. They usually don’t appear singly. There must be more like him around here, sentinels to warn the enemy away. But away from what? And look at the style, crude by Angkor standards. Primitive. Old. Molly, this goes back.” His mind was churning.

She wasted a shot through the crappy windshield.

“Something’s out there, Molly. This is big.” His voice grew larger. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he said to Luke.

But their guide was deep in REM sleep. Molly could see Luke’s eyes darting beneath the closed lids, stormed by dreams.

Duncan rolled down his window for a better look, and Molly braced for the amphibious stink. But the air carried a rich, potent scent full of flowers and fertile soil and, for all she knew, tigers and old rain.

“How can this be?” he murmured to himself. His excitement infected her.

“I need pictures,” she said suddenly, and fumbled in the camera bag between her feet, feeling for her wide-angle lens and the strobe flash.

She opened her door. The story quickened in her, morphing, branching off into a completely different narrative. They had set out to find one thing, a few bones from a war, only to discover something monumental. Punt the war, this was Indiana Jones territory.

The story would begin here, she determined, fog swirling, with the blood-encrusted Land Cruiser held at bay by this ferocious head. She backed off to shoot the vehicle, its fender bent around the head. Pieces of hundreds of frogs smeared the grille and hood and rooftop.

She angled right to get Duncan’s stunned expression as he approached the beast. Her flash made small explosions. He touched the carved face. He ran his palms over its blind eyes. He peeled off rug sheets of lime- and rose-colored moss.

Vin stayed inside his getaway car, engine idling, as spooked as a thoroughbred.

Light from the headlight beam played up the great flat nose, a ridiculous shot. They’d discovered a nose? She compensated with her own light, prowling for more shots.

“I know him,” Duncan said. “Ganas, they’re called. He’s a kind of Buddhist/Hindi hero, like a Superman for the faithful.”

“A fetish,” she said, prompting him, capturing his moment of discovery.

“Much more than that,” he said, “a destroyer of ignorance, a protector of the Way. A guardian, not just of a people, but of a whole cosmology.”

“A hill tribe?”

“Something this large? It’s the tip of an iceberg.”

She liked that, a tropical iceberg. “A city?” she said. Molly wanted this for him, whatever it was. All his years of humble, anonymous, lonely searching were coming together here tonight.

The truck arrived, adding more light to the display.

Doors opened behind the rank of headlights. She heard a curse, Kleat tripping on a root. Samnang materialized from the rags of fog. She snapped him pressing his hands together in a sampeah to the demon head. Then he kept on walking into the darkness.

Kleat joined them, wiping the humidity from his glasses. The circles under his eyes were discolored pouches. Molly had never seen him like this, his bluff vigor drained, that muscular face betraying frailty. He fit the steel rims back onto his face.

Molly lowered her camera. Edit. Delete. Kleat wasn’t going to be part of this story.

“Were you trying to have a wreck?” he said. “You took off like a bolt. Now look. You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“The frogs,” she said. Now that the danger was past, she tried to make light of it. “We thought it might be a spring shower.”

Kleat peered at her from beneath his thick bone of a brow, then turned to the stone head. “It would be a lot easier to go around the rocks, not through them,” he said.

“Rocks?” Duncan said. “This could go back to the Funan empire, a thousand years before the Angkor regime. The time of Christ, of Rome. It’s practically a myth, like Atlantis or Babylon. Funan wasn’t even its real name. That’s the Chinese transliteration for “phnom,” or hill. It was mentioned in early Chinese travel accounts, lost fragments referenced in later accounts. And look, here we are on a hill.”

“Save it for the lecture circuit,” said Kleat.

Molly held her hand against the bright lights. Vin’s older brothers were scolding him for damaging the bumper. Luke lay piled asleep against his door.

“We didn’t come for this,” said Kleat.

“But this is what we’ve come to,” Duncan marveled.

“Irrelevant.” Kleat snapped it like a whip. “They’re waiting for us.” His dead.

She no longer thought of them as hers. In the holes, working the screens, gathering the facts, shedding blood on the airplane metal, she had felt a contract with the bones. Not anymore. The captain had not confiscated her camera, his way of protesting what his superiors were making him do. But the exile had stolen her pride of place. The bones were meaningless to her now.

There was a movement in the darkness, and Kleat aimed his big flashlight cop-style. Samnang appeared among the trees in his neat white shirt. He blinked at the lights.

“The boulevard goes on,” he announced.

Intent on the stone head, they had failed to notice the road beneath their feet. Even with roots and rocks shrugging up through its surface, it did resemble a Paris boulevard. Paved with stones, it stretched thirty feet from side to side, and extended off into the pit of the forest.

“Where does it lead?” said Duncan.

“Who knows? It goes on,” said Samnang.

“Then let’s keep going,” Kleat said. He clapped his hands. They returned to their vehicles.

“It could be nothing,” Duncan cautioned as they drove on. Molly could hear his hope. First the channel stones lining parts of the river, now the carved head and this decaying road.

She reached back and laid a fist on his knee. “But also it could just be something,” she said.

He closed his hands around her fist. His palms were wet. He looked dazed and childlike.

Chastened by his accident, Vin took it slowly, steering around big stone tiles tipped up by time. Fog curdled in pools. Enormous trees bracketed the road. Their seeds had taken root with time, and younger trees grew in the middle of the avenue, rupturing more tiles.

“Look how big around these monsters are,” Duncan said. “Things grow fast here. But this is old growth. Very old. I can’t believe the loggers haven’t plundered it.”

No spindly, fibrous sugar palms in here. No fields of grass. No paddies. No sky. The trunks were like columns of skycrapers, red and gray and black and tan. Their massiveness had the look of a great cosmic weight being held aloft. As they crawled over and around the roots and rocks, it was like sliding over immense tendons and slippery bone. She could imagine the ribs of Jonah’s whale.

The fog puddled in recesses as dark as side canyons. It hung like linen rags among the branches.

“Look,” said Duncan, his window wide open. His wobbling light picked out another carved face watching them. There were more. Half buried among the trees, big stone ganas—some with the heads of monkeys and hook-beaked birds of prey—loomed among the branches. Gods appeared, their eyes half shut, their mouths half smiling. The statues kept pace with their advance. They seemed aware. The smiles seemed too serene.

Molly struggled to get a feel for their welcome. Even the times she’d visited Super Max in southern Colorado to shoot portraits of mass murderers, there had been a sense of control. This was different. They’d landed among giants. Giants wearing the masks of good and evil.

“The city wall,” said Duncan.

It appeared ahead of them among the complex of vegetation. The closer they drove, the more it took shape, a long, high barrier of mineral colors in the night. It seemed to be forming from their presence, taking on detail out of their expectation of its details. The stone blocks were cabled with vines. The vines had fingers. Ferns grew from the joints.

“It must be twenty feet tall.” His breathing had tripped into high gear, Molly could hear it. Then she realized it was her own breathing.

She bent to see through the windshield mottled with gruel, trying to make out the parapets or battlements, whatever you called them. Gaps plunged like missing teeth, muscled open by fat towers of trees with bark as smooth as pigskin. There was no way to tell which was winning, the forest or the dead architect.

“Here we go,” Duncan said. “The gateway.”

A broad, crumbling tower straddled the wall, a tunnel running through its base. Faces crowned the tower, each staring sightlessly in a different direction. The tunnel lay at the center of their collective chest. One entered through the heart of gods. Vin flipped his light beams from low to high to low. The eyes stared down at them and then away.

Vin inched in.

“It’s the perfect traffic control,” Duncan remarked. “You could stop any invaders with a few rocks piled inside. In fact, I wonder if this tower’s rigged to drop its guts.” He cast around with his flashlight.

Molly had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the moment they entered, the walls seemed to close in on her. A sort of nausea gripped her. She felt physically sick. It went beyond that. She felt trapped, as if she were calcifying inside her skin.

They emerged on the far side and the feeling lifted. She cranked at her window handle for fresh air.

“You’re sweating,” Duncan said.

“No, I’m cold,” she said. But her face was dripping. Duncan laid his kroma around her bare neck, and it carried his body heat.

She had expected to drive into a city in ruins, but there was more road. Elevated upon a spine of solid, squared stone, a causeway ran in a straight line, bound on either side by vast pools of water that had degraded into swamps fouled with mangrove trees. Their serpentine roots breached and looped back into the water.

“You’re looking at the wealth of kings,” said Duncan. “Barays—reservoirs—with enough water to feed a whole people. This could be the prototype for Angkor. It could be the genesis for the very idea of Cambodia.”

They came to a gauntlet of stone cobras carved along the roadside. “Nagas,” Duncan said, identifying them. “Water snakes that figure in all kinds of Asian creation myths. From naga you get nagara, Khmer for ‘The City.’ ”

There were at least two dozen of the fantastic creatures arranged along the roadway. Some had snapped off at the neck and fallen into the pools. Most were intact, rising higher than the Land Cruiser, their hoods spread open to expose multiple heads with fangs bared.

As they motored slowly through the dangling moss, the water stirred. Molly could hear it down there. On an impulse, she held her camera to the open window and fired blindly, triggering the flash. Her light ricocheted off the black water. The sound stopped. She looked at the LCD to see what her camera had seen.

“Anything?” asked Duncan.

It showed a bulge in the surface, less than that, a shadow, not even a shape. “Not a thing,” she said. “It reminds me of the bayous along the Gulf Coast.” Just the same, she rolled her window shut.

The causeway came to an end. The broad, flat vein of solid limestone fed back into the earth. Their sculpted road top turned to dirt, and they drove on.

“There are the others,” said Molly. The truck was parked at a crooked angle in a clearing between toppled pillars and scraps of fog. The men were busy unloading the vehicles.

She was glad to see them, for a minute. Then she caught sight of their guns. One of the brothers had a rifle slung over his back. Kleat had brought a pistol of his own. He wore it boldly on one hip.

Duncan whispered, looking around. “Where do we begin?”

She made herself part of it. “We’ll take baby steps. A little bit at a time.”

They had arrived at a terminus. There were no buildings or arches, only the end of the road. From here one climbed on foot. Behind them lay the pools. Before them, rising above their lights on three sides, squared stone terraces formed an arena of sorts. The sheer mass of stone, quarried and hauled into place, promised a kingdom. A set of stairs led into the darkness above. If there was a city, it would be up there.

They parked and dismounted, and, first thing, Vin received a rifle, too.

Kleat was stacking axes and shovels against a fallen tree. Molly stood five-eleven in her bare feet, taller than Kleat, to say nothing of the Khmers. But for a moment, faced with that gun strapped to his hip and all the other firepower floating around, she felt like a child among strangers.

“We thought you’d turned around,” he said. She saw him look at the scarf Duncan had placed around her neck. He made his assumptions.

“We’ll make camp here,” Duncan announced. He had a tent sack in his hands.

“Sleep?” said Kleat. “The sun comes up in two hours.”

“But the light will lag behind in here. That’s triple canopy above us. For now, we need to rest.”

“I will instruct the men,” said Samnang. He had no weapons Molly noted.

He held out his hand for the tent. It was an important moment. The old man with one leg was anointing Duncan, not Kleat, as their leader. He issued an order to the brothers, who took the tents and hurried toward the ledges.

Kleat carefully laid aside a shovel. Nodding his head, he measured the alliances. His eyes flickered at the brothers moving in and out of the headlights. He studied Molly. “By all means,” he said, “sleep.”

Molly went to the back of the truck for her mule bag, a huge black duffle made of ripstop nylon, to root for her warmest clothes. For a month, she’d smothered in heat so thick men fell over in it. Now the slight mountain chill had her trembling, even as sweat trickled down her neck. She wished her body would make up its mind, hot or cold. A mountain girl, she knew to layer clothing and find the equilibrium.

There had been no time to sort her laundry at the hotel before their farewell dinner. Unzipping the bag was like opening a dead animal. Bad smells rushed from the interior, and when she thrust her arm inside, the contents were still warm and clammy from the dig. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the Vicious Cycles T-shirt, and pulled it over her sundress. It smelled like a hunter’s buckskin with her body odor and weeks of soil and Off! Deep Woods cooked into the threads. Deodorant and regular mosquito spray only attracted the bugs, and she’d quickly gone native with the soldiers.

She pulled on a second shirt, then found her Gramicci climbing pants still bloodstained from her encounter with the cockpit metal. The canvas thigh was sewn back together with bright pink thread, prettier than the scar on her leg.

She wasted another minute rummaging for her toilet kit, but it was too dark to find it or, more likely, Kleat had not bothered to pack it for her. She’d have to brush her teeth with a twig. Maybe Duncan would loan her some toothpaste to use with her finger.

The Heng brothers were bustling along the terrace ledges above, farther away than she would have liked. Their lights looked small and moved rapidly up there as they assembled tents for the Americans. Molly guessed they would sleep in the back of the truck, and that would have suited her fine. But Duncan had won his showdown with Kleat, and she wasn’t about to scramble the outcome with any complaints.

She returned to the crisscross of headlights looking like a bag lady, the sundress half buried by shirts on top, toting her camera bag, pants, and a neoprene sleeping pad. Heading into the tropics, she hadn’t thought to bring a sleeping bag, and her final act before leaving the dig site had been to give her sheets to a Khmer family. She could manage with her own body heat for the next couple of hours. In the morning, she’d see what covering the brothers might spare.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Kleat had already started up the staircase to the tent ledges.

“In the morning,” Duncan promised, “it will all look different.”

14.

The birds woke her.

Her eyes came open.

She found herself curled in a fetal ball on the sleeping pad. In her sleep sometimes, her knees would pull up and she would roll onto her right side like this. It was an old arrangement of her limbs, an occasional habit. It happened in times of stress and signified surrender.

Not moving a muscle, she wondered, Surrender to what? What had her ears heard while she lay sleeping?

With her higher shoulder draped with Duncan’s red and white kroma and her head pillowed on the camera bag, she listened to the birds. She listened closely, but could not connect to their alien song. The whistling and clatters and caws were more like a secret code.

She went on hugging her knees, sifting for a clue. The long ride had pummeled her, that and the hard ground and scant sleep. She ached. Even the image of those ancient stairs rising up through the night could not budge her.

Her plastic Timex said 0730, military time. Kleat was right. Maybe they should have stayed awake. Three hours of sleep felt worse than no sleep at all.

She lay there, assembling the world. At this hour yesterday, they’d been starting into exile from the crash site. Last night they’d eaten dinner in a restaurant. The colors were vivid, the red lobster, the black dirt on the white tablecloth, the sunset. The details crowded in like eager children. The moonlit highway, the green grass, the silver stream, the frogs, the fortress walls.

But none of that explained why her body was afraid. Had she heard something in her sleep? Was there danger out there?

Her fetal curl was like an early warning device. She knew it all too well. There was no controlling it; she’d tried. The trauma posture would seize her in her sleep, a dream signal that something threatened. It stemmed from tension sometimes, or simply vague bad vibes. Usually it was just echo behavior, residue from Oklahoma. Boyfriends complained that they could not hold her at night. She would clench into an animal ball at the edge of the bed, as far from them as possible. It’s not you, she would explain in the morning, but then would explain no more. It freaked them out. They felt like monsters. One by one, they always left her.

Lying on her tent floor, Molly did everything in her power to stay in the moment and feel for any real menace. Recycling the past was a dead end. She’d been through it so many times with therapists. But memory has a mind of its own. This morning, spent and dull, with her bones arranged just so, she was too weak to stop it. From deep inside, it rose to the surface. Oklahoma mounted her all over again.

It was April, thirteen years past, the morning after.

I don’t want you, she thought. But the memory pinned her.

The playground grass was brittle and yellow and rimed with frost. Like this, exactly like this, on her right side, eyes open, she had watched the town come awake. The cold sun climbed. A man stocked the newspaper box. After a time, a school bus had passed. No one noticed the bundle of rags in the park. It was mid-morning before the lady who owned the stationery store saw her and called the police.

They never did find the guy. They never really looked. He was just another nomad like her. Like her, he’d given up trying to thumb a ride the night before and had walked to the town park to find a little shelter. That’s where they’d met.

She didn’t have to be bumming rides. Her parents would have given her the money if they’d known how serious she was. But part of the exercise in running away was to hurt them the way they’d hurt her. It was stupid. They loved her more than their own lives. They said that over and over. And yet they had confined her in a fiction for all her conscious life, and how loving was that? In running off to search for her birth mother, she had invited suffering for them all.

They treated her like one more case of the suburban blues. The ER nurses were kind. They swabbed her with Q-tips and cleaned her cuts. One of the cops said that it wasn’t what you would call an actual rape. She’d overheard him outside the ER room. These kids, he said, they couple up on the road and then something goes sour and all of a sudden it’s a 911. She just doesn’t like how it turned out.

His words had made her wonder. After the first few minutes, it was true that she’d just let the attack happen. She had quit fighting and stood off to one side and watched him go at her underneath the swing set. She’d heard of out-of-body experiences. It was true. She’d quit smelling his breath and tasting the canned spaghetti on his teeth.

When he was done, she’d gone back into herself. Her knees had drawn up into her chest like rawhide constricting. She’d hugged herself through the dawn.

She heard her name. “Molly.”

She thought it was part of the memory. He’d asked her name. He’d shared his SpaghettiOs before doing it.

When the cop had come in to take a description, he’d asked her for her parents’ phone number. In that instant, Molly had realized that her search could end right there. She could return to their sunny fiction, defeated by reality. Or she could accept the ugliness and get on with her journey.

He’d fucked her so hard she could barely stand. But she somehow got to her feet and took the cop’s report and crumpled it into a ball to drop at his feet. With blood leaking down her thighs and one eye swollen shut, she told him, sure, she’d made it up. They released her that afternoon.

Only later, years later, did it occur to her that the animal who’d mounted her that night might have been her own father. Not her very father, of course, but a man like him. Because who could say what violence her poor mother had accepted in the name of love? Who could say where she’d come from?

“Molly.”

This time the birds fell silent.

She listened. Men were calling her from far away. She clung to the sound of her name. “Moll-lee.”

She stirred.

She felt earthbound. It took an act of will to get her hands to let go and her legs to straighten. Oklahoma faded. She sat up in the center of the tent.

It was her home away from home, the same dome tent she’d used to grand-slam Colorado’s fourteeners and photograph the Pleiades meteor shower and sleep by high lakes and wake to vistas of light. Only this morning, she noticed, it had leeches.

Their silhouettes showed through the fabric. They were as graceful as dancers waving their bodies out there. She passed her hand underneath them and they bent to her chemical signature or whatever leeches go for. At the recovery site, she’d never seen more than a few at a time. The forest was more abundant. Here they waited for her by the dozens.

Unconcerned, Molly put herself together, what little there was to put together. She pulled off the layers of shirts and quickly shed the sundress and pulled the shirts back on and tightened the belt on her canvas pants. She folded the yellow dress and laid it in one corner. If all else failed, it could serve as her blanket tonight.

Shedding the night, warming up, she rolled her shoulders and tried a simple yoga position. But the voices called her again, dragging the syllables out, like grappling hooks. Did they think she was lost?

“Moll-lee.”

They wanted to start their morning, though the day was still dim, with no hint of eastern light. “Coming,” she said under her breath.

She tried rattling the tent to shake the leeches loose, but that only agitated them. She reminded herself that they were slow, blind and mindless. A little haste on the exit was all that was needed.

She scooted to the door, arranged her camera bag, and wrapped Duncan’s scarf around her head. On three, she pulled down the zipper. Feet first, she slipped out through the opening and, that quickly, her African Queen moment was over.

Now that she was standing outside, there were even more leeches than she’d thought. The tent wall was covered with them, glistening and stretching for her, maybe not so mindless or blind after all. She zipped the door as tight as a drum to prevent any bedtime surprises, and made a note to get her hands on a flashlight.

Blue mist had replaced last night’s patchy fog. Her tent stood on a wide stone ledge, and below that she could just make out another ledge. The men were invisible down by the trucks, but she could smell their cook fire and coffee and cigarettes wafting up. Oddly, their voices were coming from above. Could they have started exploring without her? Kleat wouldn’t care, but surely Duncan would have come to wake her. They were in this thing together.

The stone terrace was cool and slippery under her bare feet. Her shoes were somewhere in the mule bag, a first order of business once she got down. Her flip-flops were set at the entrance to the tent, or at least one of them was. The other had been tipped upside down during the night.

Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but local custom had seeped into her habits. It wasn’t just a matter of taking off your shoes or sandals when entering a temple or someone’s house. Footwear was always positioned neatly, side by side, and always upright. Even Samnang was superstitious about such things. And so she’d very exactly placed her sandals with the soles flat to the ground before climbing into the tent last night.

The culprit was a thin green shoot of bamboo that had grown up through a joint between the stones. It was three inches high, and she definitely hadn’t seen it there last night. There was only one explanation. The bamboo had sprouted through the crack while she was sleeping, tipping her sandal out of its way. She pressed at the sharp nub, charmed in a way. Duncan was right. Things grew fast in the rain forest.

“Moll-lee.” They were up there all right, and it was more than one voice calling her to join them. Possibly there hadn’t been time to wake her. Duncan could be trying just to keep abreast of Kleat’s predation. What were they finding?

15.

Slipping her sandals on, Molly shouldered her camera bag and hustled along the ledge toward the stairs. A red tent materialized on the lower shelf, then atomized in the mist. Giant airborne faces floated off to her right, their tonnage elevated by dharma smiles. Invisible animals shifted in the brush. Dewdrops hung like jewels.

She glanced up the steps, tempted by the pale brightening in the upper forest. Instead she started down into the thick of the mist where coffee was brewing and her socks and shoes waited in the truck. A quick cup of St. Joseph, then the proper footgear, and she’d double-time the staircase. With her long legs and jogger’s lungs, she’d overtake the men before the amazement died from their eyes. The mist would bead her lenses, but this green light was gorgeous. You couldn’t get more saturated color. She wanted to sprint down the steps, but they were steep and greasy with moss, forcing her to pick her way carefully.

She passed two more ledges, expecting the white Land Cruiser or the truck and the fire to appear, but the mist concealed them. Reaching the ground, she worked across her memory of the clearing. The floor had a slight tilt to it, to drain off the rain no doubt.

Trees bulged up, sudden immense pillars that evaporated overhead. Molly looked up and stopped, not trusting her eyes. Twenty feet above the ground, the remains of a name seemed to hover in the mist. She went closer and it disappeared. She backed away and it reappeared, letters carved into the skin of the tree. Years of growth had lifted them high, and their once neat incisions were stretched apart and rutted and ribbed. The scars were only slightly lighter than the smooth bark, and the wood had absorbed whole sections.

She circled around the base of the tree. “Helen,” the letters said. She went a little farther, and found a final a. Helena.

The Blackhorse soldiers had been here.

She turned to another tree, and the name Barbara hung in the mist. There was an Ada and an Emma and a Rosita, each upon its own tree. She was in a forest of lovers. The men had taken their knives to the trees and left this much of themselves. It was magical. How much more was hidden in here?

She would have gone on wandering, but after another few minutes, she saw the fire’s orange glow. Its heat had melted an opening in the mist.

Vin and his two brothers were squatting on a ledge above the bright orange flames, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep or from the wood smoke. They did not look like happy campers. Propped within easy reach against a fallen tree, their rifles gave them the air of bounty hunters.

“Ah-roon soo-ah-s’dai,” she tried. But none flashed his golden teeth for her this good morning, not even Vin. She blamed her awful accent. She was a total linguistic cripple. Some days, faced with her blank screen and a couple of thousand words to crank out, she could barely manage the King’s English.

A little distance off, Kleat and Duncan were leaning over a squared foundation stone strewn with rolled maps, and that was strange. She’d heard them calling her from above. Samnang was here, too, hunkered inside the pall of smoke like a gnome, his plastic leg stowed away from the fire. She shrugged. So the forest had wiggy acoustics.

Kleat was stabbing at the forest and the sky and the map. By this point, she would have been surprised if they weren’t arguing. Whatever the concern, Duncan appeared to find it pressing, too. He glanced at Molly, then returned his attention to Kleat.

That left Samnang as her official greeter. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said, welcoming her. “I have for you a coffee.”

“Is that how you keep all your wives so happy?” she said.

Samnang smiled. He had no wife or family. He had no one. The wars had eaten them all, and she knew it. But they could—and did—pretend. She played his saucy American daughter. The light would come on in his brown face.

He reached through the fire for the covered pot and poured the coffee into a white teacup on a white saucer. Probably he’d brought it from his own kitchen, probably just for her. He knew she liked it black, but went through his daily ritual of offering her sugar.

For all its noisy crackling and the billowing white smoke, the fire was a small thing. The wood was green. It was a miracle the stuff had lit at all. Then she saw the jerry can of fuel, their miracle, parked behind a stump.

“Ar kun,” she said, thanking him, and sat underneath the plume of smoke by his side. The fire was warm. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”

“No matter,” Samnang said. “You see this mist. Duncan said to let you sleep.”

Then why, she wondered, call her name? “Will the mist lift soon?”

“The forest decides these things.” He looked more closely at her. “Be still a moment, please.” He reached over.

She knew without asking what it was. The leech clung to the skin of her throat before coming away. She touched the spot, and her finger came away bloody. She looped the kroma around her neck to hide the tiny wound.

Samnang held the leech for her to see. It must have fallen on her as she was exiting the tent. The wisp of a worm had bloated to a slug the length of her little finger. What surprised her more than its size and stealth was the speed of its gorging. In ten minutes, such hunger.

She watched to see what came next. Would Samnang throw it against a rock or squeeze it in his fingers? He was contemplative. “She humbles me,” he said.

“That?”

“If only I could obey God with such faith.” He juggled it on his palm to keep the suckers from getting hold.

“What faith is that?”

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed to be preaching.

“No, go on, tell me.”

“To exist in the forest with no questions, no doubt. Imagine.” He smiled. “Someday, this lowly worm, a Buddha.” He gently tossed it to a bed of leaves.

One of Vin’s brothers went over and picked it up. He was the one named So, the middle one. He laid the leech on a twig and held it over the fire. The leech began writhing. The man grinned at Molly with yellow hepatitis eyes. She frowned, not so much distressed by the leech’s fate—the thing had sucked her blood—as by the man’s vandalism. It was pointed, his ruining Samnang’s little act of compassion. Something was going on between them.

The oldest brother, Doc, with wisps of mustache hair and geometric suns tattooed on each shoulder, made a joke. It had to do with throwing Samnang’s artificial leg into the fire. Vin glanced at Molly and did not join in the laughter. She had no idea what the problem was, but disliked seeing the old man mocked.

Samnang went back to tending the fire. He rested the pot on three neat stones above a nest of embers. The flames were trim, the heat no more or less than the morning called for.

Molly went on sitting by Samnang for another minute, mostly to show her solidarity. Then she stood casually. “Let me see what the lords of the jungle are up to,” she said.

“Of course,” said Samnang.

She walked to Duncan and Kleat and placed her white saucer and cup at the farthest corner of their makeshift bench, away from the maps. Like a skin drying, one map was pegged open with chunks of rock and food packets. Small pebbles on a U.S. military topo marked last night’s passage. From Snuol, the logging road ran east and north, and the pebbles became bits of twigs—hypotheticals—leading off to nowhere. You could conjure up a hundred phantom rivers and streams from the wrinkles and curves, all of them descending to the Mekong.

“Got us figured out?” she said.

“Not a clue,” Duncan said. He seemed frayed. He gestured at a big, boxy GPS receiver that looked almost as obsolete as his colonial-scientist compass in its brown wooden case with oiled hinges. What antiques stores had these come from? The lighted panel read “SEARCHING.”

“It’s like all the satellites fell from the sky,” said Duncan. “We’re not getting a single reading.”

“Our location can wait,” Kleat said. “No more fussing around.”

“You don’t understand. These hills may not seem like much. You can’t properly call them mountains. But they can eat you alive, especially—”

“I know,” said Kleat. “I know.”

“We’re lost,” said Duncan. “It matters. We don’t even know if they came in here.”

“We know they crossed the river. We saw their tracks. Where else could they have gone?”

“They were here,” said Molly. The two men stopped. “You didn’t see the names?”

“What’s this?” Kleat said.

She led them into the mist. After the fire, it seemed colder and darker out here.

Head craned back, she searched for the names. “They were carved on the trees,” she said. “The names of their women. Up high.”

The names had disappeared, though. There were so many trees, and she must have come in differently from the stairs. “They were here somewhere,” she insisted.

“I believe you,” Kleat said, though he didn’t really. It was simply convenient to his argument. “Once this fucking mist thins out, we’ll find them.”

They went back to the fire and their maps on the stone.

“The names don’t change anything,” Duncan said. He didn’t question that she had seen them. He took it on faith. “I still say we should backtrack, take a second look from the outside. Get a handle on the risks.”

“Leave?” said Molly.

She said it with more censure than she meant. The caffeine was kicking in. But also, his apprehension confused her. He was the archaeologist. His job was to pry open the earth and raise cities from the dead. Forget the Blackhorse bones. Forget Kleat. Even forget the typhoon and the rains. In the back of her mind, they were already trapped—held under house arrest—by the river. Something stood at the top of those stairs. This was their chance to raise Atlantis.

“While we still can,” Duncan said to her.

“I keep telling you,” said Kleat, “he’s halfway to China by now. Burma, Afghanistan, wherever the dope grows wild.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Luke?” said Molly, jolted by the sudden awareness. “He’s gone?”

“Unless he spent the night with you,” Kleat said. “No one’s seen him since we arrived.”

Molly looked at the mist. Had he been the one calling her? “He must be here.”

“That’s what I keep saying,” said Duncan.

“Sam took a try looking for him,” Kleat said. “If anybody can track a man, it’s him.”

“We don’t need to go through that again,” Molly said.

“It’s not irrelevant. Your gentle musicologist was also KR.”

The brothers were all watching now. They heard the KR and began murmuring among themselves.

“We’ve been through this,” Molly said quietly.

“And you didn’t believe me.”

“I agreed with Duncan. It’s not our business.”