“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Before she could say anything he left her there, hidden among a cluster of small, elegant trees. It was strangely quiet, an oasis of tranquility after the craziness of the chase.
She stood in the quiet night, the pagoda-like structure dark, and the buildings around it also dark. Well, she thought, this is either the beginning or the end of my mission.
Kiera felt like she’d fallen through the rabbit hole into a very bad place. And she’d pulled Porter Vale right in with her.
He came back moments later, followed by a monk clutching his saffron robe across his chest.
They stopped and talked for a moment, the monk nodding and glancing from time to time at her.
Then the monk retreated and Porter came over and said, “Soon as the night rains come, we go.”
“Up river?”
“There’ll be a boat to take us out of here.”
“He’s taking a big risk helping us, isn’t he?”
“He’s used to risk.” He turned away from her and studied the night sky. “About ten minutes. It comes a little later every night. You can smell it just before the deluge arrives. The monsoons are about the most punctual thing in this town.”
He led her around the side of the pagoda and into an alley. There they waited a few minutes in another small plot of banyan trees.
“This vet we’re going to see. You’ve worked with him?”
“Yes. He knows the part of Laos you want to go to as well as anyone who wasn’t born there.”
“Special Forces soldier?”
“Yeah. Charles McKean. He’s about the only person who would take this on. He was leader of a team that got inserted a bunch of times into Laos. Choppers dropped them off, extracted them. Charles was what they called back then a One-Zero. First in, last out. They did things like set up observation posts, sabotage, hunt lost men, call in air strikes on the Ho Chi Minh trail.”
“Special Forces was the precursor to Special Ops, right?”
“Yeah. They had the highest rate of casualties of any unit in any of our wars. He was the only survivor of his team. He hid from the massive NVA searches for nine days. Finally one of the searchlight operations—they’re rescue operations—found him. He didn’t want to come out. He thought one of his guys had survived and was a prisoner. They had to physically pull him out of there and had a hell of a time trying to keep him from going back. He never got over losing his team. He’s stuck back in time. But in Laos, he’s the man. He’s been up there many times. Still looking.”
“That’s sad that he’s still looking for his men.”
“Yeah, we’ll he’s got some issues with that, for sure.”
Just as predicted, the rain came and it came fast and hard.
“That’s our cue and our curtain. Stay close.”
They hustled through streets, the torrent booming on the roofs and car tops. She couldn’t see two feet in front of her.
Nothing much else seemed to be moving. Just a few people with umbrellas, some traffic creeping along. Otherwise the downpour seemed to have momentarily shut the city down.
He kept off the main streets, making their way up and down narrow sidewalks until they reached the quay at the far end of town.
He took her hand as they went down the slippery bank. She felt a strength in him that surged into her like a drug, thankful.
When they reached the flat area where the boats were moored, a Khmer appeared like a ghost in the rain. He had one leg, the other a crutch.
Porter, talking loud against the roar of the rain on the river, said, “The police will be stopping everything on the river soon and we need to get out fast.”
She followed him into the longboat’s open-ended cabin.
“He might have to pay off river police if we run into any. You have any cash?”
The boat was already moving out into the rain.
“Yes. Five hundred.”
“American?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Give me three twenties. Bills that aren’t torn. They don’t like torn bills. Bad luck.”
“I know.”
She took a small pen light from her pack and the bills, then counted out three twenties as Porter held an umbrella the boatman gave him. She checked to see the bills had no tears in them.
Their ride was a little different than most of the other long-tail boats. This one looked more powerful, the roof low and the wheel in front. A hybrid speed boat of some kind.
Porter motioned for her to go under the boat’s low slung roof into the man’s living quarters, as he went forward to the bow.
She looked for room to settle. The engine kicked over and the boat began to move faster. The river was so thick with fog and rain she didn’t see how the boatman could see much of anything.
Inside the cramped quarters, the boat was so narrow she had to squeeze between two bags of rice, her back against one wall, and her feet against the other.
She put her head back and listened to the rumble of the engine and the pounding of the rain. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to use the time to rest. She had a feeling she was going to need it.
Like it or not, Porter Vale was her guide. She figured there was no chance he’d hand her over to some old vet. Not now that he knew the golden elephant was probably the original. She had him. That made her relax a little.
***
Porter studied the river ahead. He had the boatman cross closer to the far bank in case they had to make a run to shore.
At one point he glanced back at the narrow, open boat cabin. The mystery female. She was smart, a war correspondent brought up by a master of Intel operations. So she wasn’t naive by any stretch.
Yet she’d taken this on right from the start with a kind of naiveté that had to be a result of the shock of Neil Hunter’s death. This was a woman who’d lost both parents when she was a little girl. That made her a woman who’d maybe seen way too many bad things in this world already, as he had.
But here she was and here he was, like it or not. He shook his head. What the hell was he doing? Still, he couldn’t ignore the excitement of finding that damn plane if they could actually get up there without getting killed en route. He and his father had done some searches in western Laos, but the particular place where that plane went down was nothing but jagged mountains, steep valleys and bad things. No roads, no waterways.
The one thing he knew was that he needed McKean. No way he was going up there without that old soldier. He took out his SAT phone to give the old soldier another call. Things had tightened up. They weren’t going to have much time to reminisce.
PART TWO
THE SWEET SERPENT
12
When Porter came inside the boat’s cabin he settled into the cramped space next to Kiera, both of them soaking wet.
“Everything look okay?” she asked him.
“So far, so good.”
“You have any idea who’s chasing us?”
“I’ve got an idea. Right now McKean’s checking on things. He’ll know a lot more when we get there. Man lives out in the middle of nowhere, but he’s got contacts everywhere.”
“Your father and Charles McKean worked together?”
“From time to time.”
He went silent, looking out the opening of the cabin.
“Hunting lost planes?”
“Yeah. And other things.”
He didn’t seem to want a conversation but she was hungry to know who she was going to be dealing with. Blindly trusting another person was not her habit. Her journalist instincts never stopped and she was determined to get more information from Porter, though she had a feeling she needed to tread carefully. “How’d they hook up?”
“My father was transferred with an Intel unit to Phnom Penh after the initial pullout of American forces. Charles McKean was sent to help with the evacuation here weeks before Saigon fell.”
“The fall of Phnom Penh came first?”
“Yes. Operation Eagle Pull. Much smaller then Saigon’s evacuation. A couple of runs by CH-53 choppers took everyone who was going to go to carriers out in the Gulf—the Hancock and Okinawa. They became friends.”
“They worked together after?”
“Dad went home for a few years. North Carolina. Then came back after he and my mother divorced. McKean, on the other hand, never went any further than Bangkok. When the Pol Pot era was over, and the Vietnamese finally left, he came back to Cambodia. He would have moved to Laos, but the Communist regime wasn’t tolerant of someone like him.”
They were silent for a moment, the only sound the soporific drone of the boat’s motor as they headed up river. Kiera finally felt she was getting him to open up and wanted to continue finding out who this guy really was beneath the hardcore exterior.
She said, “You pretty much grew up here?”
“Since I was about ten.”
“You’re leaving your home.”
“You might say that.”
“That can’t be easy.”
“It’s time.”
She sat between bags of rice, the boat smelling of fish and oils and herbs she couldn’t recognize, pressed against a man who undoubted wished he were in a bar with his friends, or just about anywhere other than here with her.
The boat slowed. Lights stabbed through the fog.
“Could be trouble.” Porter grabbed a tarp, pushed her down and pulled it over them.
“Police?” she whispered.
“Maybe. Maybe worse. Just relax and be quiet.”
She felt him move around and realized he had a gun out. Christ, she thought, quiet I can do, relaxing isn’t going to happen.
She could feel the sweat building in her armpits and inner thighs as the heat built under the tarp.
To break the tension building in her she whispered, “You take all your girls here on your first date?”
“Only the ones I’m trying to get rid of.”
She smiled. “I bet it usually works.”
“It always works, now shut up, I need to hear what’s going on.”
Kiera listened to the boatman talking to men from another boat. She expected that they’d be boarded and it would all be over, ending in some sort of bloody shootout. An appropriate ending, given what her life had been like over the past couple of years.
But they weren’t boarded. Instead the other boat’s engine came alive and they were moving again.
She waited there under the tarp with Porter, listening, wondering if they were being led back somewhere, or were free.
After a few minutes of silence, their boatman said something in Khmer.
Porter reached over and pulled the tarp back. “I think we made it. You can breathe.”
She took deep droughts of cooler, fresh air as they untangled from each other.
He got up and moved out on the deck, then turned to look at her. “You can come out.”
Out on the narrow deck Kiera glanced back down the river. No sign of any boats. The storm had cleared enough that the lights of Phnom Penh were momentarily visible, but they quickly faded into the night, like a sparkling pendent dropped into a dark pool.
The river rolled solemnly on beneath the boat, so swollen it smothered the banks. It looked and felt like it must have thousands of years ago.
Porter and the one-legged boatman talked and laughed lightly.
“We got through without an inspection for a measly forty dollars,” Porter said, turning to Kiera. “Pretty cheap.”
“Yes. Thankfully. I take it that was a police boat.”
“River cops.”
“We’re now on the Mekong?”
“Yeah. Where we got on the boat we were at the crossroads of the Tonle Sap, Bassac and Mekong. They call it the
chat o muk
, the four faces of the city where the rivers cross like an X. Here the Mekong is called the Sweet Serpent. In Vietnam it’s the Nine Dragons. The river of many names, depending on where you are on it. It’s the carotid artery of Indochina, but for some time it’s carried fifty percent less water because of the dams being built in China. That’s coming back some.”
They leaned on the gunwale and looked at the river flowing under them. She finally had this guy talking to her which helped her feel as good as the fresh air she pulled into her lungs. “That can’t be good,” Kiera said. “Less water must have a huge effect on everything.”
“Everything China does has an exaggerated impact. As one of the local sayings goes: China farts, the buffalo run.”
“I’d run too,” Kiera said.
“When the Chinese finished the sixty-six story Xiaowan Dam, that basically gave them effective control over the entire twenty-seven hundred mile-long river. Hopefully, when their reservoirs are filled and they’ve taken what they want, it’ll ease up. There are nearly seventy million people in Indochina who need this river.”
They rode upriver against the current, the flow of the river heavy beneath the boat.
For a time the rumble of the boat’s engine was the only sound. Kiera felt the scary thrill of heading toward Laos, toward her grandfather’s secret.
She confessed to Porter how, ever since finding the journals and diary and discovering he knew the whereabouts of the plane all along, she’d become fascinated and then obsessed with finding it. Her grandfather’s goal to return the statue of the golden elephant to the Buddhist sect that had given it to him had become hers. “But,” she added, “there’s something else up there. A reason he never went back.”
After a few minutes of silence, Kiera turned to Porter. “You’ve been up in the Laotian mountains where we’re going?”
Porter nodded. “Close to there.”
“Doing?”
“We were looking for a former NVA camp. Might have been a burial ground nearby. Ran into a nasty fight with some tiger poachers who mistook us for competition. They get ten thousand a head so they take competition seriously.”
“They can’t be stopped?”
“The Lao government troops stay well out of there. It’s too costly and dangerous for them so that’s one thing we have going for us. We can maybe fly in to one of the old Special Forces landing strips your grandfather used when supplying the soldiers and the Hmong.”
“McKean’s plane?”
“Yep. Flies all over. Knows how to cross borders without being detected. He can get us in and out fast. He’s in contact with a Buddhist monk who lives in a village near the border. If the statue is there, and is the real thing, he’s the one who will handle getting it back to its mountain home. Then, with any luck, I can be in Bangkok in a day or two.”