PART FIVE
A WARRIOR’S DREAM
50
When Kiera came to, she found herself sprawled in the mud, lying partially on her side, hair matted to her face. She stared up at the massive heads of five elephants who stared back with their huge black eyes.
For a brief moment she had no idea what she was looking at, but then the daze eased. It came back. The dead mahout. Narith.
Next she wondered how long she had been lying there.
She wasn’t sure if she’d blacked out or hit her head. But when she touched the back of her head she felt sticky blood, then noticed the rocks at the edge of the waterhole that she’d landed on.
She sat up, wondering if they intended to stomp her to death.
Then she remembered that the elephant she’d ridden, Bo, had intervened with the tusker. Kiera realized she’d misunderstood the elephant’s intent.
“Thanks, Bo, thanks,” she said. And to her disbelief she thought the big female nodded. Probably just a normal elephant’s gesture, but in the context it seemed almost magical.
Then she realized the mahout was next to her in the grass. How had that happened? Who moved him?
Bo moved closer and loomed over her, nudging her gently on the arm with her truck. Kiera felt the cool ring of soft flesh and remembered how Porter had told her that elephants, with an unparalleled olfactory ability, never forget anyone they’ve smelled.
She knows me. She remembers.
Now she knew these incredible creatures weren’t there to harm her, but to protect her.
She reached up and touched the soft mouth of the elephant’s trunk and said, “Hi, friend.”
Again Bo nodded.
A strange shudder swept over Kiera.
She said something and didn’t even recognize what it was she said, and then pushed herself up on her knee, and the elephant reached with her trunk, curving in front of Kiera as a helping hand.
Using the trunk to stabilize her, Kiera stood, shakily at first. Then she placed a hand on Bo’s shoulder.
All the elephants were still as statues, staring at her, waiting.
Kiera felt the back of her head. There was swelling and some sticky blood. She looked up at the elephant and said with a grim smile, “I’m a mess, girl.”
She saw something so powerful, so meaningful in this creature’s eyes, it made her believe she was understood.
She turned to the body of the mahout, knowing now, incredibly, that the elephants had moved him out of the muddy water and then covered him with some sticks and grass.
How crazy amazing are these creatures?
“I’m going to pull him up so we can take him back,” she said, as if the elephant could understand her intentions, if not the meaning of the words.
She realized the menacing tusker was now off in the distance, standing as if protecting the rest of them.
She also noticed something on the ground. A cigarette butt. Footprints in the mud.
Kiera touched Bo the way she’d seen the mahout do in order to get her to lower herself, bend the front left leg.
Then she reached mahout’s arms and pulled him over. He’d been badly beaten and she saw at least one gunshot wound in the upper thigh. Now it became clear to her what must have happened.
He proved even thinner and smaller than Narith, but he was still dead weight.
Lifting a hundred and fifteen or twenty pounds on her shoulder in a fireman’s carry was a huge struggle, but she succeeded, if unsteadily.
Getting him up on the elephant presented a whole different challenge.
She spoke to the big female in a soft voice, explaining what she was doing each step of the way.
“We’re working together. We’re allies. I need you to help me.”
Kiera again touched the elephant’s left leg and the elephant cooperated, bending her huge foreleg down even farther to provide a step.
Grabbing the flap of ear with her left hand, her right holding the mahout on her shoulder, Kiera put her left foot on the plane of the elephant’s lowered knee and willed herself up to where she could move the man, inch by inch, up the side of the massive animal’s neck. A couple of times she wasn’t sure she could do it, but regrouped and tried again.
Once she’d succeeded in stabilizing the mahout’s body on the elephant’s neck, she was able to climb up behind him. The elephant stood up. Kiera felt a big sense of triumph.
Then she managed to maneuver the mahout back into the bamboo seat where the rails would keep him from rolling off when the ride got rough.
She moved up on the neck in a mahout position.
She tried to remember the commands. Straddling Bo’s neck with her bristled skin she touched her behind the left ear.
“
Bien,”
she said, to make her turn. And then
pai,
to make her go forward.
As soon as Bo started to move, the other elephants fell in behind her and Kiera directed them back to where she’d left Narith.
She thought it was a very miraculous thing that she, who knew so little about these creatures, could yet gain their cooperation.
I love them. What great creatures
. It was thrilling. And it was the big female who had stepped in and made this happen.
Then she thought of the poachers and a powerful anger crowded out the momentary joy.
She glanced up the mountain where Porter and the men were trapped. She urged the elephant to go faster.
Narith, at first very happy to see her and the elephants, was shocked and extremely upset to learn that the young mahout had been killed.
“Who would do this to a young boy who came here just to find a wife?” he asked rhetorically.
Kiera dismounted from Bo. She told him how the elephants had behaved. How they covered the mahout.
“Yes, they do amazing things,” he said.
“We need to get you up.”
“Yes. We must hurry.”
Kiera helped the distraught monk get up on Bo and then back to the bamboo platform, a task that hurt him and took a lot of energy and strength from her.
Kiera moved up on Bo’s neck and directed the big elephant back in the direction of the caves.
“Bo, you are my golden elephant,” Kiera said, patting the lumbering creature on the side of the neck.
“They are very sensitive, intelligent animals,” Narith said. “Unlike many humans.”
The little light from the barely visible moon soon was extinguished by the growing swell of dark clouds, a precursor to the coming monsoon rains.
Thunder in the distance sent booming echoes and splintering lightning strikes rolling over the valley.
Kiera urged Bo to move fast, but in the blackness of the jungle she found her own speed.
Narith tried to assure her that the men with Porter would be safe until daylight, that they had time to get men up there, but she wasn’t assuaged.
After an hour into the steady climb through the forest, across a ridge on the approach to the caves, Kiera saw something moving toward them.
No, dammit, this can’t happen, she thought.
She stared, unable to be sure in the darkness. Then she saw the figures clarified in the refracted light of a vicious lightning strike in the distance. It illuminated four armed men who appeared out of the gloom along the hillside, moving fast, coming in a line, rifles at port arms.
The sight jolted her out of her near somnambulistic state. In a panic she turned to Narith. “Are they friends?”
“Yes. I hope friends.”
You hope!
Kiera pulled the Glock and wondered if a fight was really even possible or smart. But what would surrender do? She was conflicted to a point of panic. Should they try and run the elephants back into the jungle?
One of the men yelled and Narith replied. Then he said to Kiera, “Friends.” This time he spoke with assurance in his voice.
Kiera let out a huge sigh of relief as one of the men came down the slope ahead of the others and mounted one of the other elephants and led it up the hill through the forest, the other men splitting apart and moving protectively on their flanks.
Narith explained what was going on. They moved the elephants at a faster pace, jogging alongside.
When they drew closer to the caves they were intercepted by two more armed Hmong who escorted them up to the ridge.
One of the men had gone ahead and as they approached dozens more men and women emerged.
There was much aggravation in the conversation between Narith and the gathering. Everybody worked up into a frenzy of apprehension and fear about what was going on, what would happen.
They helped her and Narith down and then two of the men brought down the body of the mahout.
She stayed with Narith as they carried him and the dead mahout inside the main cave.
Narith met with some of the leaders, informing them of the situation on the mountain, even as the women worked carefully to clean and bandage his leg wound.
The monk turned to Kiera. “They are very upset. They feel it is the mountain’s revenge.”
Kiera wanted to tell them it had nothing to do with the mountain, but refrained from getting involved. She was amazed they didn’t turn against her for bringing this misery upon them. “Are they going to send a relief force?”
Narith said, “They will send you with a guide who will lead you to the Mekong River where he will arrange for you will cross into Thailand. You leave maybe in an hour. You rest a little now. The journey is long and difficult. As for a relief force, they will, I think, send some men. But they’re very nervous.”
She was taken by two of the Hmong women into a small room whose walls, once covered with beautiful, picturesque woven cloth, were now barren, readying for the Hmong’s move to a new home. Gone were the red and gold trees, the elephants and mountains. Now just granite.
Kiera put the backpack down, and then lowered herself to a mat they brought for her. She felt as if her entire body was just in total collapse mode.
Kiera drank as much water as she could, then forced herself to eat while two Hmong women removed her ripped and muddy clothes, bathed her with wet cloths then attended her wounds, cleaning the cuts, scratches and bruises all over the body.
These women were so good to her, but she was too exhausted to even praise them. All she wanted was sleep. Escape. And she knew she’d brought horror down on their existence and it was hard for her to look into their eyes.
They dressed her in black cotton pants and a black shirt.
“You take,” the young wife of Tang said, putting a cup in front of Kiera. “Good. You take.”
Kiera drank from the cup. It had a chalky taste but at this point she didn’t care. She thanked the woman who then left her alone.
It was over. Tragically over. Her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s wishes had come to a disaster for everyone up here and she knew it would end very badly.
She was angry at her grandfather for not having done this himself a long time ago, though she did understand the terrible trauma he’d suffered.
And she was angry at herself for having taken on this mission, the great adventure that had, as Porter tried to warn her, turned into a catastrophe for everyone.
Porter and the men up there had no chance. What would happen to them was simple enough and it frightened and terrified her.
They would die.
Cole and Besson would get their reward and the Hmong would meet their final fate.
The guilt was overwhelming. The disaster of her grandfather’s war had one more chapter to close and she was the author of it. She felt as if her life had been always controlled by past events and never really in her own hands. That it had all been preparation for her to bring her grandfather’s trauma to a close.
She told herself to back off, not to think about it. That proved impossible.
She tried to imagine that the tiny relief force would liberate those trapped, but couldn’t convince herself there was any chance at all. The way she figured it, they either would get there in time and die at the site, or would get ambushed and slaughtered on the way.
And there it was to her mind. The inevitable conclusion.
Abandoning Porter and the other men on that mountain depressed her almost beyond tolerance, and now she had to leave without knowing their fate, or being able to help. And if she made it out, how could she live the rest of her life with that in the back of her mind? It would be worse than what her grandfather had suffered.
She lay in the near darkness, a tiny oil lamp in the corner. Whatever was in the drink seemed to be easing her mind and relaxing her.
Kiera didn’t fall asleep right away. Her mind, with far more energy than her body, lingered awhile as it slipped slowly toward sleep.
No marathon, no climb, no trek had ever taken so much out of her. The violence of the day, the combat, the fall down the side of the mountain, the dead mahout—it had drained her reserves and shattered her equilibrium in every way. But she was drifting now. It was over. Then, mercifully, whatever was in the drink helped her relax enough that she sank into a deep, dream-filled sleep…
51
Kiera awakened from a dream with her heart pounding and her mind spinning in violent turmoil. The dream stayed powerfully in her mind:
The Chinese, brandishing swords and bows, suddenly stopped as the elephants emerged from the jungle ahead of them.
They turned and ran in panic.
On the gold-draped lead elephant, the She-King led the charge. On her flanks the Vietnamese battalions, each led by female captains, rushed forward, flags waving, horns blowing. Victory seemed certain.
But then a plane appeared out of the clouds and began firing rockets at them…until something hit the plane and, trailing smoke, it crashed into the paddies…
Then the Chinese forces reemerged from the jungle and now, instead of ancient warriors, they were modern, carrying guns and flanked by tanks that fired at the elephants and defeat seemed imminent until the tanks sank in the paddies and the Chinese troops again panicked at the fury of a renewed attack…
Lying perfectly still in the cave, she waited for calm to come. The pains in her body still very much in her awareness.
At first she attempted to replay the guilt and the sense of inevitable disaster she’d brought upon the Hmong and upon Porter and everyone. She’d done what the Communist government had been unable to do.