Ahead of them a vendor pushing a cart and chanting in a falsetto voice about his breakfast offerings made his way from thatched house to thatched house. Kiera thought it would be nice to have your breakfast delivered every morning. The air already wafted from the early morning food smells and awakened Kiera’s taste buds and brought a growl to her empty stomach.
Out on the riverbanks the fishermen prepared their nets.
Two monks hurried over to them. Porter spoke with them in Khmer, then said, “We’re on our way. Narith has a fast boat.”
The monks led them along the bank of the river between the stilted, thatched-roof houses.
They became the objects of much attention from the boat families, especially the children.
Porter called out to a man handling fishing nets. He waved and yelled, “Porter, my friend.”
Porter spoke to him and then another fisherman joined them. There seemed to be much excitement, even a little apprehension. Once again she wondered if Porter was known by everyone in Cambodia.
One man disappeared into a small house and moments later a monk hurried out and went to Porter and they shook hands.
She sensed that was Narith. He had an authority about him. Everyone showed him great deference.
The monk glanced at her, nodded and then came over to her.
Porter introduced her to the monk who bowed and the smiled and shook her hand with a gentle grip. The saffron-robed Narith was a smallish, self-effacing man with a bald head and brilliant, intelligent eyes. When he spoke it was in excellent English. “It is a great pleasure to meet a friend of Porter’s.”
He spoke with Porter in Khmer.
“They want us on the boat and on our way. He’s anxious to see the picture,” Porter said, “but wants to get moving.”
They were each given some rice balls and then boarded a longtail boat.
“Will they come into Laos after us?”
“They’ll go anywhere on this planet. We’ll lose them in the mountains. We just have to get there.”
They watched Narith talking to some fisherman. Then Porter took out his SAT phone and tried to call McKean, but got no answer.
Porter said as they headed down along the river front, “You’re going into Lan Xang—land of a million elephants.”
“How many are there now?”
“A few thousand at most. Same fate as the great plains buffalo.”
They were both still wet and she really wanted to get clean and dry but there was no time.
“Since we enjoyed cuddling coming out of Phnom Penh, we get to do it again,” Porter said. “The arrangements to get over without inspection have, hopefully, been successfully made.”
“Will that be considered our second date?”
“More like a shotgun marriage. This time in a really tiny hold. It’s a compartment, so it’ll be tight, hot and, hopefully, not too fishy.”
Narith asked to see the picture. She took off the backpack and removed the plastic bag as the boat headed out to the center of the still dark river.
He studied the photo intently, nodding. “Very good.”
He handed it back. She could feel the excitement in the man about the prospect of finding the real thing.
Under the roof of the long cabin the monks pulled back several wooden crates and piles of cloth and pulled up the latch of the hold. Kiera shined her penlight in.
The monks then got on another boat.
Narith urged them to hurry. Apparently the window of opportunity was short.
“Jesus, we have to get in there?” she asked.
Porter looked in. “We’re gonna have to play sardine until we’re past the checkpoint. Let me get in first.”
He lowered himself into the tiny hold. It wasn’t quite long enough for him to stretch. He had to pull his knees up and get sideways.
“Hurry, hurry,” Narith pleaded. “The border will come soon.”
Porter said, “Trust me, I usually have a better mode of transportation on my dates.”
“Somehow I’m beginning to doubt that.”
They tried to shift, changed arm positions, leg positions to get as comfortable as possible.
The heat and moisture build-up was immediate. She could feel the liquid in her body oozing out through her pores. Their body odors, accentuated by rice paddy mud, joined the dead fish smell of the hold to create an effluvium that wasn’t easy to stomach.
“If you don’t shift that hip bone,” he said. “My voice is going to go up a few octaves.”
She turned and pushed down to remove the offending hip. “How’s that?”
“Okay.”
Ten minutes into the ride the boat felt as if it was slowing to a stop. Whatever was going on out there, they couldn’t hear. After about five minutes the boat began to move again.
Porter said quietly, “It’s all good. Welcome to Laos. Land of fornication and fun. Some of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet live here in some of the worst poverty you’ll ever find.”
They were in the hold another ten minutes or so before Narith finally opened the hatch and said, “You can come out.”
He reached down and grabbed her hand and helped her out into the fresh dawn air.
She felt a little dizzy as she adjusted to fresh air and the light. No police. They’d made it.
“Goddamn, this stinks worse than I’d hoped,” Porter said. “But it won’t be a long ride.”
It did stink and it was hot and about as uncomfortable as it could get. But now, sitting on the tarp was like a king bed compared to the nearly coffin-sized bed they’d been in.
Narith replaced the hold’s lid and the boat began to move up the river.
She stared up the river wondering how she would feel when they found the plane, what she would find there in, as Porter had described it, the most bombed piece of real estate on earth.
Remembering what else Porter had said, she commented, “I find it hard to believe that more bombs were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trial than were dropped on Germany and Japan added together. That just seems preposterous.”
Porter said, “It is. But, mind-boggling as it is, it’s also true. Two million tons dropped between nineteen sixty-four and nineteen seventy-three. That averages to a ton per person. So far, if the stats are even remotely close, twenty thousand have died from the bombs that didn’t explode when they were dropped, but did when they were stepped on or messed with.”
They were silent for a time. She tried to process the madness but there are things that are just too fantastic to process. It was a little like trying to imagine how big the universe might be.
Porter said, “Your grandfather ever mention Arnold Cole?”
“No. Not that I can remember.”
“He’s a big player in this world. He and his business partner, a Frenchman named Luc Besson, who’s one of the wealthiest people in Cambodia. His family was once in the top echelon of colonial families. Estates in Saigon, Hue and Dalat. He could be a real problem. Man has contacts all over Indochina. He sat out the Pol Pot period in Bangkok and Paris, but then came back with a vengeance. I think he wants to reestablish his family’s power.”
They moved out now onto the open deck. The river was otherwise empty here. No villages, nothing. The morning sky had darkened, storms playing out there somewhere.
He handed her a water bottle. She took a long drink. Then another.
“We’ll hit some rough water, flooded islands, places you can easily get hung up. We need to get through that while it’s light. You look wiped out. Try and get some rest.”
Excited as she was about being in Laos, Kiera was exhausted and took his advice. She moved back under the boat cabin’s overhang, made herself comfortable, her intent to get some sleep as she listened to the monotonous background of the boat’s engine.
Her eyes closed, she heard Porter trying to reach McKean on the SAT phone and failing.
She focused on the sound of the engine and the quiet conversation between Narith and Porter. She had bad feelings about McKean’s fate.
Narith said they were on the Se Kong River and would head northwest in the direction of Vietnam.
She woke once in a while, and peeked out. All afternoon they moved past looming jungle walls deeper and deeper into Laos, deeper and deeper into the past and its darkness and violence.
20
Arnold Cole lived on antacids precisely, in his mind, because he had to deal with people like the bastard he now stared at with unbridled contempt.
The naked old soldier sat tied to a chair in the center of little concrete building that operated as a province jail, his white beard stained with blood from cuts on his mouth and nose. “Your friends can’t save you. Only I can,” Cole said.
Cole, having seen the plane in the rice paddy, was amazed that everyone had survived the crash intact.
The village leader said both the American woman and Vale were unhurt. Cole was happy she wasn’t dead. But now they had to search the villages along the river.
McKean stared back at Cole and Besson with a blank expression.
The building they were in was a yellow French Colonial style with white balustrades that had once been the police headquarters in a thriving little river town when the Khmer Rouge had come in and removed everyone to clear some jungle farm where most of them had died. Those who survived had attempted to make a comeback, but hadn’t made much progress.
“You were a soldier once. Pitiful. Look at you. A worthless drunk. A disgrace to God and country. A pitiful waste,” Cole said, shaking his head as he paced. God he hated men who couldn’t deal with the bad side of war. They hid, licking their wounds. He couldn’t understand that. You stand, you fight. If necessary, you die. And you deal with the aftermath if you survive. Cole had no sympathy for all the post trauma bullshit. It was the product of a weak civilization.
Besson leaned back against the wall smoking a cigarette. His two security guys stood behind McKean.
“You’re of no damn value to your nation,” Cole said. “You surrendered to fear.”
The man had nothing in his eyes. His body emaciated as his mind.
Cole paced in front of the prisoner and he felt his anger rising. He kept shaking his head in frustration and anger. “You make me sick.”
Finally McKean spoke. “Fuck you,” he said, blood and spittle riding the words coming out of his mouth.
Cole folded his arms. “This is how you want to end your miserable life? A total loser? I’m offering you a chance to win yourself back and its
fuck me
. That the best you can do? You turn your back on everything. You live out here with no purpose. Or was there a purpose? What were you doing out here? What were you and Michael Vale up to?”
Cole dropped his arms and stepped closer to McKean. He knew plenty about this bastard. “I’m throwing you a life raft because I know that you once carried out critical missions when you still had balls. You were one of SOG’s best. The wire tap on that coaxial cable in Laos gave us months of NVA conversations. You conducted six ops in some of the worst places on earth. Four Bright Light rescues. Is hero-to-fool, hardcore-to-coward what you want on your stone?”
The heat, the sweat never stopped. Cole took a pull from the water bottle, wiped his brow.
He leaned into McKean’s face. “Listen to me, you Apocalypse reject. King of the Khmers. You need to wake up. You think this is a game?”
McKean actually smiled.
That enraged Cole. “You find that funny. I walk out of here, these boys will take over. You will suffer and then die an ignominious, useless death.” He yanked the man’s head back. “You won’t return to that sweet little woman who loves you. She’ll be in trouble for having harbored the likes of you. That what you want?”
Cole fell silent, staring into the man’s eyes. Then Cole said, “Things got a little rough and she broke.”
Cole hit McKean with an open hand across the side of the face. “Listen to me, you miserable bastard. You need to make this right. You help me, I’ll resurrect you. You need to come back in out of the dark. Do the right thing and stop this nonsense. You lost your team. You survived. You can’t cry about the past forever. Deal with the present, goddamn you. The two you’ve helped, Vale and the Hunter woman, I need to find them and quickly. You need to help me so I can help you.”
Cole waited for the response that didn’t come. He stepped back with a heavy sigh.
“We have your wife,” Cole said quietly, his voice threatening. “How far do you want to take this?”
“You touch her,” McKean said, “you best kill me.”
“That’s a given, you don’t cooperate. I’d rather save your ragged ass. And your woman. Put you back on the horse.”
McKean’s lips pulled back in a surly grin. He said, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
Cole shook his head in disgust. He nodded to Besson, and then walked outside to get some needed fresh air. And a cigarette. He bummed one from Besson’s chopper pilot, and then walked off to smoke, not interested in chitchat.
He stared at the mountains in the distance. Somewhere up there the secret war had been fought. Where there were still pockets of Hmong still operating a tiny resistance. Leftovers. Remnants. Diehards.
Kiera Hunter was turning out to be a real chip off the old block. His fascination with her had turned angry.
He kept his gaze on the distant landscape—Attapeu, and beyond…the beginnings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Porter Vale had his father’s connections with the underground. They get up into the mountains, they could lose them and the plane. He couldn’t let that happen.
Besson came out. Cole knew by the look on his face they hadn’t gotten anything of value out of McKean.
“He dead?”
Besson nodded.
“Let’s get moving,” Cole said. “They have no choice but the river.”
“We have fast boats heading into Laos now,” Besson said. “They won’t get far.”
Cole shook his head with disgust. “You keep saying that. I’m waiting for you to be right once.”
Besson’s security chief came out and Cole bummed another Newport from him.
21
Kiera woke to a setting sun as the boat moved up the center of a wide stretch of river, mountains in the distance rising into the evening sky.
She moved a little into the open and tried to get comfortable against two bamboo boxes just outside the front of the roofed dome of the boat, wanting to doze in the last of the day’s light.