Porter and Kiera rechecked the position.
“Move to your left,” Porter said. “Should be over where that rise is.”
Porter looked around, and then turned to Kiera. “They picked a hell of a place to come down. It looks like they were trying to get over and almost made it. Had the plane gone another couple hundred yards they might have glided down to the valley.”
The location was a spot on the highest ground. From the shoulder of the ridge they could see the surrounding mountains, irregular, thick-humped, and some flat-topped, and all quilted with thick jungle. There were rock formations, a thin, quick waterfall, and a break in the canopy to the southeast that would allow them to see the chimney-like mountains across the valley from a small knoll.
Phommasanh’s men worked in a grid fashion, bushwhacking through the thick jungle growth with machetes.
Kiera looked at the map notes that pointed out the grave landmarks. She showed Porter where it should be. “The grave itself will be covered with rocks. According to the notes, directly east and twenty yards from the pointed sandstone that had a line cut into it. That—”
She was interrupted by an excited shout.
“They have something,” Porter said. They hurried across the rocky ground.
When they came up to the man they saw what he, and now the others, were looking at.
A piece of the plane’s tail.
Kiera felt her heart rate increase as she made her way down the slight incline to where the men were gathered.
She spotted a piece of what appeared to be wing twenty feet up in the tree where it had been ripped off.
She was amazed at her reaction, the intensity of it in the power of the moment.
The Hmong whacked away with gleaming machete blades at the tangled growth, grunting and talking.
Porter looked skyward at the layered canopy. “How the hell they got down through that and anyone survived is pretty amazing. But then maybe, as he said, it’s why he survived. The plane came down through all those branches more or less in slow motion after the first impact. Still it’s pretty incredible.”
Kiera stared at what might have been the angle of their descent, trying to imagine the moment. It had happened on one of the most momentous days, the day many Vietnamese refer to as Black Friday.
She saw in her mind her grandfather in the plane and dropping out of the sky, bracing for impact. Saw the plane plummeting into the trees and ripping apart.
“It had to have happened very fast,” she said.
“They weren’t hit by ground fire?”
“He says they weren’t that he knew of. But it might have been a fuel leak and that could have been from a bullet. They were fired at as they left the airfield by sappers on the ground.”
They found more pieces. The small plane was in three sections.
The cabin and main part of the fuselage, now nearly buried in floor growth, was barely visible. The tail lay on the rise of the shallow gully. The first things found were military boxes with locks on them. These were pulled out and up to more flat ground.
The Hmong were also looking up, pointing, jabbering among themselves, also seemingly astounded that the fuselage of the plane had reached the ground at all.
Beneath one of the boxes a monk found a gold locket. He gave it to Kiera.
“No rust. Solid gold,” Porter said.
She fiddled with it and finally got it open. Inside was a picture of a young woman. “My grandmother,” Kiera said. The clasp was a little bent, but otherwise it was in excellent shape. He told me he’d tried to find it after the crash but couldn’t. She was a beautiful girl.”
“Looks like you,” Porter said. “She still alive?”
“Yes. They divorced a long time ago and she moved to South America and remarried. I’ve only seen her a few times over the years.”
Kiera put the chain around her neck and Porter secured the clasp.
She turned her attention to the plane, her mind flooding with new, turbulent feelings. Peeking inside the pilot’s cockpit she saw that it was smashed from behind, as if the entire load of the plane had broken free and crashed into the co-pilot’s seat. Life and death could be so random.
The men were tearing open the boxes they pulled out along with army duffel bags full of packs of American money. Two snakes came out of one bag and one got its head removed by a swift strike from one of Phommasanh’s men. The other snake slithered off into the brush.
“This is one of Air America’s Pilatus PC-6s,” Porter said, running his fingers over a piece of fuselage.
“That the kind they used for the secret war?”
“Yep. STOL. Short-take-off-and-landing for the CIA airstrips they had scattered around the tops of mountains and in the narrow valleys. Quick in, quick out.”
The men investigated gullies and the trees around the area and found more pieces, but so far no sign of the grave.
Porter went over the fuselage. “No bullet shrapnel holes in the skin that I can see.”
Now that they had the wreckage, the grave couldn’t be far away. Kiera looked again at the hand drawn map. “There’s got to be a rock formation somewhere under the ground cover. It’s to the south of here.”
She and Porter headed back to the area where the marker was. She felt Porter’s hand on her arm.
“You made it.”
She nodded. “Yes. Thanks to you and these men. Let’s find the grave.”
43
Kiera and Porter walked due south, angled up a rise to some flatter ground and stopped. They stood in the middle of dense undergrowth—rock, a copse of bamboo off to the south about twenty yards away and some clearing covered in tangle roots, vines and brush.
“It’s here somewhere,” she said, feeling a little queasy inside at how close she was. “Has to be in this general area. All the features are right.”
They walked back to where the ground flattened and ran toward some very large boulders.
She and Porter studied the diary page with the landmarks and directions.
“It should be”—she pointed to a formation of boulders—”right about there. We’re very close.”
“We could be standing on it and wouldn’t know,” Porter said, looking around. “Forty years does a lot in these jungles.”
She stared at the mass of vines, roots and growth that blanketed the ground then shifted to her left as she studied the drawings of landmarks her grandfather had drawn of the mountains across the valley, those oddly shaped chess pieces. He had drawn them exactly as they were in the background. There was a big stone with a line cut into it. That’s what she needed to find.
Porter, meanwhile, went over and talked to Phommasanh and when he came back he said, “The Hmong are getting anxious about how much time it is taking. I assured them we were in the area and we need everyone looking. We’ll find it.”
The monks alongside the Hmong organized a grid search, everyone hacking and tearing into the thick weeds and heavy fronds for a formation of stones that Kiera had described to them.
As the daylight waned a strong wind roared up through the ravines shaking and rattling the trees.
In a mossy tangle she finally found the marking carved into the stone. Her heart raced. “I think I got it,” Kiera said, excited.
She followed the marking with line of sight, then walked ten yards and found a formation of stones buried in the undergrowth.
“That’s definitely it. That’s the formation he described.”
She pointed to one of the boulder piles in a mix of bamboo and shrub growth.
They pulled back a heavy mat of vines, fallen limbs and leaves about a foot thick. Bugs and rodents scurried off during the uncovering.
“She’s got it,” Porter yelled.
The men rushed over with great excitement.
The grave itself was covered with a bed of small rocks.
Nearby lay two poles and there appeared to be leather straps connecting them. Porter suggested if her grandfather had to move something heavy, especially given he was himself banged up, he’d most likely have made a gurney of some kind.
Kiera knelt down and began moving some of the stones. Then she sat back on her haunches to let the moment settle. Again she had the feeling this was a key moment in her own history, in who she had become as a person.
Porter and the monks worked to clear the grave.
“We can still get out before it gets dark, Porter said. “Make life a lot easier getting off this mountain.”
Kiera wasn’t interested in anything at the moment but what was in the grave and the reality that she was actually here at the spot where her grandfather had buried his colleague and the golden elephant.
She watched the men rip up creepers and shrub growth and rotting limbs. Below that lay a large group of stones marking the length and breadth of the grave. She noticed it was wider than necessary for just a body.
She began to see her grandfather through the eyes of the small band of diehard holdouts. And she reflected on that time, that world. The violence, the hopelessness, and the men like her grandfather who couldn’t accept a lost cause until the bitter last day. And not even then. He was a man who’d planned on starting a counter-revolution that had never happened.
Looking back, it seemed so fantastic to her. Almost incomprehensible what had happened.
The monks and Hmong worked furiously to clear away the last of the rocks and dirt and then they came to a piece of the fuselage covering the grave. Creatures scurried off.
They pulled the piece off and now they could see what was beneath. It was a moment when it seemed no one breathed. They had come a long way to get to this moment and the tension was heavy.
There was a body wrapped in a poncho and beside it a crate.
Porter knelt beside the body and carefully pulled the poncho away to reveal the skeleton.
The next thing to be removed was a shroud of rotted cloth. “Probably was a parachute,” Porter said. It disintegrated at his touch.
The skeleton had pants, shirt and boots, but they were mostly gone to dust.
She knelt and took hold of a corner of the material and began to pull it back, a cold feeling in the bottom of her stomach, her pulse ratcheting up.
The skeleton itself appeared at first to be pretty much intact.
“Porter said, “Usually, all people get is a fragment, osseous tissue that gets sent to a lab in Hawaii for tests. And guys on the Lao Alpha List, which your grandfather and this guy were, were officially
not
searched for because they didn’t officially exist because there was no official war in Laos.”
Phommasanh removed from his pack a poncho and some cloth for her to wrap the bones in.
Porter squatted down and touched one of the bones. “Over the years the weight of a skeleton becomes about thirteen percent of healthy previous body weight, to about half that. Maybe less than fifteen pounds left of a man who once weighed two hundred.”
Kiera watched how he worked, the care and precision as he pulled away some remnants of what looked like leather. Bone fragments fell off.
He carefully retrieved the larger pieces. “Ribs broken. Pelvis crushed. If he survived for any time he would have been in some serious pain.”
Kiera spread out the tight woven cloth the monks had brought with them. The remains were to be removed first.
Next to the body was a two-foot-wide crate and beside it there was a green metal container the size of a small suitcase.
“Every family of every MIA has the same hope,” Porter said. “They’d much rather walk into some bar in Bangkok and see some long haired, greybeard knocking down shots. It’s happened, but not very often.”
“You mean a Charles McKean.”
“Yeah, a Charles McKean.”
The clothing that had survived fell apart the moment anything was moved. Leather and canvas boots, belt buckle, ball cap that had been placed beside the head were the pieces that had survived the best.
Now, the larger portions of the skeleton. They put the leg bones and then the hip bones up on the poncho. Two of the monks wrapped them carefully in cloth.
Every move was in slow motion as Porter removed the skeleton. Each piece removed with the care of an archeologist. Each piece placed on the cloth.
Kiera began to figure out how to put the pieces together tightly to fit in her backpack.
Porter put the fragments into a plastic bag from his backpack that had been emptied of supplies.
Attempts to preserve the integrity of the rib cage failed. Finally they had everything out but the skull. Porter lifted it out last. He was about to hand it to her when he paused to look at something.
As he was about to wrap the skull he stopped.
Kiera glanced at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
Porter finished wrapping the skull.
She grabbed his arm. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
He hesitated. “Could mean anything.”
“Porter, what do you think that hole is? A bullet hole?” She knew, but hoped it wasn’t
“Yes, could be.”
She knew instantly that she was looking at something that might answer the big question why her grandfather never came back here to find the plane. Something he’d done, maybe had to do, but couldn’t face later, and it had prevented him from coming back.
44
Kiera didn’t know how to react. Her mind seemed to stumble as she sought some other explanation than the obvious and its implications.
After unwrapping it, Kiera held the skull in her hands and stared at what logic told her was a bullet hole. “Maybe there was a fight with some communists.”
Porter nodded, but she saw that he didn’t really believe that for a moment.
We can’t really know what happened, she thought defensively.
Porter moved the skull around and pointed to the inside. “My educated guess is the bullet hole indicates it entered high on the back of the cranium and exited through an eye, and probably very close range, killing instantly.”
“You can know that?”
“Blast force leaves a specific impact print depending on caliber and range. I’ve seen bullet holes in skulls. Piles of them, actually.”
“Then the only explanation is that my grandfather shot him.”
“I’m not a forensics expert…but yes, that’s a possibility given the circumstances. Injured bad enough, no way out, the man may have requested to be put out of his misery. If, that is, we’re looking at a bullet hole.”