The Kaisho (29 page)

“You’re misinformed,” Do Duc said. “They’re not barbarians.”

“The hell they aren’t. Just look at them!”

“Their civilization’s a lot older than yours or even mine.”

Rock snorted. “What civilization? All these shits’ve been doing for centuries is killing each other.”

“And what’ve your civilized countries been doing?”

Rock gave him hard look. “You’re a good one to talk. You were brought up where? In the middle of this fucking jungle, right? Sort of a Stone Age kind of thing, huh? Maybe that’s why you can relate to them real well.”

Do Duc had bared his teeth at Rock.

Rock grinned. “Shit! Look at you! You’re a fuckin’ tribesman just like them! Hell, you even speak their dialect.” He laughed. “So, okay, maybe you understand these shits better than I do.”

“Do you good to figure that out, ace.”

Behind them, in the far distance, beyond even the southern horizon, the continuing flush of war could be seen if not, at this distance, heard. Man-made lightning in the form of aerial bombardment lit the underside of the clouds with the bitter rain of napalm, and in the fuliginous aftermath, dawn came unnaturally early in the kingdom of the damned.

Before the real dawn arrived they had pitched camp.

Rock did the work of three men, but he had a haunted look in his eye. As they took their horse pills to stave off malaria and ate their Charlie rats, what they called C rations, he said to Do Duc, “Where the fuck is Mr. Charles?” He patted his LAW rocket launcher, slung at his hip like a six-gun of the gods. “I can’t wait to blow him away.”

“Patience,” Do Duc said. “I got a nasty feeling we’re going right down his throat. You’ll get your chance.”

“Yeah, when? It’s quiet enough to hear a lung collapse.” Rock spat, shook his head. “There’s a weird kind of isolation here, like we’re dead and don’t yet realize it.”

In a way, Do Duc thought he was right. “Jin says we’re in a hot zone, but I don’t understand it and there’s just so much he’s willing to say. Is Charlie really this far north in Cambodia?” He shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough. At dusk we’ll begin to move.”

“I’ll tell you it won’t come fast enough to suit me,” Rock said, spewing out a mouthful of his Charlie rats. “Christ, I’d rather eat my enemy’s arm.”

They slept the first day beneath a clump of dank foliage set on a knoll just above the water level of the paddies. Rock, who took the first watch, did not sleep well. There was not a dry spot on his body, and he had begun to itch in the most unfortunate places.
Where are you, Mr. Charles?

They broke camp at dusk. At this point, a visual sense of distance had to be abandoned. Jin advised them not to look at the horizon, but to concentrate on the immediate environment, which had become so monotonous that Rock found himself dozing off as he slogged on through the unending morass.

Toward midnight they stopped to eat a light meal. The sky was completely clear; starlight and the watery illumination from a half-moon fell upon them like fistfuls of diamonds. Rock went to relieve himself and, crouching down, stared into the muddy water. Slowly, the patchwork of light and dark ceased to swirl from the movement of his approach and a pattern began to coalesce.

Good Christ!

“Would you look at this!”

Do Duc and Jin, who were closest, came over. They stared down into the water.

Skulls.

Rock waded around in a circle, crunching human skulls as he went. Thousands upon thousands of skulls made up the floor of this flooded paddy. And here were bones: femurs, ulnae, sacra, ribs, scapulae—he was standing in a veritable graveyard.

Now Do Duc knew that Jin hadn’t lied: they were in a hot zone.

“Ask the Nungs what the fuck happened here,” Rock said as he danced a jig on a rib cage and a shattered pelvis. The proximity to so much death was like being shot up with adrenaline.

“You should learn to speak their language,” Do Duc told him bluntly before turning to speak to Jin.

Jin’s face was unreadable. “The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are massacring the Cambodians in the same way they are killing my people,” he said in his peculiar dialect. His voice was very controlled so that it took Do Duc a moment to discern the choler hidden there. “Here is our history. This is what will be left for our children—the ones who survive this war. And I ask myself whether they will be the lucky ones.”

Do Duc translated for Rock, who, for once, was silent, his little jig at an abrupt end.

“Then Mr. Charles is here and he must be close,” Rock said, fingering the firing mechanism of his LAW.

They pushed on, spurred now, Do Duc was sure, by the thought of the skeletons over which they were traversing, though no one spoke of the sea of horror they cracked beneath their boot soles with every step they took.

It was almost dawn by the time they could see an ending to the paddies. It had begun to pour again, as it had done off and on during the last part of their trek. The wind drove the warm rain into their faces, cutting visibility to several hundred feet.

The water level had lowered considerably. They trudged through the miserable rainswept landscape. Do Duc, on point, could make out a dark smudge on the bank of the last paddy. Beyond it should be the Mekong River, up which they had to make their way. They had been heading steadily east, and the river would take them almost due north, straight for the border of Laos. Laos lay like a concubine curled up against the back of Vietnam, arching from the southern end where they were headed in a northwesterly direction until it hit the borders of Yunnan in southern China and the Shan States in Burma, the area known as the Golden Triangle because of its production from the vast poppy fields covering its rugged mountain plateaus.

Do Duc thought about Pentagon East flying into a panic when Michael Leonforte went MIA in this hot sector. He thought about the first rescue party that had gone MIA, too. He thought about Bowel’s directive to extract Leonforte and
bring him back to Bowel.
Not to his handlers at Pentagon East. Now, Do Duc thought, it was going to get interesting.

He picked up his pace, nearing the dark smudge. It was a makeshift pier: three rotting wood boards on creaking pilings that jutted out into a wide muddy river that snaked its way into the mist.

“This must be it,” Do Duc said, and Jin, plodding near him, nodded mutely.

They broke out the black rubber Zodiac boat, pulled a pair of rip cords. The boat inflated quickly, and they pushed it off the end of the pier.

“Keep your hands inside the boat,” Jin warned. “There are plenty of crocodiles in the water. In this low light they’ll look like drifting logs.”

They spent four nights navigating the river. As had been their MO, they slept during the day, pulling the boat up across a muddy bank beneath the deep shade of the trees while they huddled in sleep. Once, the watch reported the passing of a Khmer boat, but its complement of soldiers did not see them and did not stop. Otherwise, they appeared to be alone.

“Where’s Charlie?” Rock asked, eager as ever to draw blood.

No one answered him because they didn’t know.

They ate fish hooked from the opaque water by Jin and his companion CIDG. More than once the Nungs pointed out the ziggurat-studded backs of crocs, gliding silently through the currents and eddies. Do Duc watched the creatures with an expression that Rock could not define.

The river looked familiar to Do Duc, not because he had ever been there before but because he had memorized the map that had been in the sealed envelope Bowel had given him. He had since eaten all the directives and attendant intelligence typed on the edible paper.

Near dawn of the fourth night, he directed them to pull into the left bank. The light was a glistening pearl, just lustrous enough to etch and limn but not yet bright enough to produce color.

“We’re close now,” he said to Rock as they pulled the Zodiac into deep cover. “Charlie must be here somewhere.” They were less than a klick from the border to Laos, and this was where their intelligence ended. Somewhere up ahead was where Michael Leonforte and eight other men went MIA.

Do Duc and Jin went on a perimeter patrol while the rest of the unit prepared camp beneath the trees. When Rock was finished, they still hadn’t returned. He pulled out his LAW and went looking for them. It didn’t take long. They were on the other side of the stand of trees.

“What’s the problem?” Rock asked them.

Do Duc pointed. “Crispie critter,” he said.

It was like being in a car, coming out of a fog at sixty miles an hour to find a semi coming straight at you. They stood before the naked body of a girl whom Do Duc judged to be perhaps ten years old. The corpse lay twisted, back arched as if she were pinned to the rotted-out bole of a tree. The skin over two-thirds of her body was scorched to a crisp; her legs were broken, the bones poking through the ripped flesh almost as if in a deliberate composition. She was missing the lower half of both arms.

“Fuck,” Rock said. “What the hell hit her?”

Do Duc continued to stare at the girl.

It had begun to rain again, fat drops like the sweat off Buddha’s brow. The air was as heavy as chain mail. It took an effort just to breathe it in and out.

“She was smoked with jelly, for sure,” Riggs said as he came up behind them. He shifted his M6O machine gun restlessly from one arm to another. “But as for the rest of it…”

“Never seen anything like that,” Donaldson said, holding on to his M16A1 with white knuckles. “Kinda makes your hair stand on end.”

“Fuckin’ Charlie,” Rock said.

“Wasn’t VC did this,” Jin said in decent English.

Rock’s eyes widened and Do Duc smiled.

“You knew all along he spoke English, didn’t you?”

“I told you to learn his language,” Do Duc said. “He’s learned yours.”

“Sonuvab—!”

Do Duc waved him to silence, said to Jin, “Who then, if it wasn’t Charlie?”

Jin touched the dead girl with the end of his Soviet-designed AK-47 as he stepped over her, and Do Duc thought he saw his lips move in silent prayer.

Do Duc waved the others to stay behind as he went after Jin. He paused, stood for a moment on a small knoll, watching the Nung squat on his haunches, his machine gun between his knees.

Do Duc crouched beside him, shook out a cigarette. They smoked for some time in silence. At last, Do Duc buried his butt in the mud, said softly, “What is it about the situation back there I should know?”

For a long time, Jin did not answer him. He continued to stare out across the glade in a triple-canopied jungle as the rain began to hammer down full force.

“When I was growing up, I used to play for hours in my grandmother’s flower garden. How the sunlight lit up its delicate colors! How I loved to run between its precise rows and circular beds!” He took a long drag on the cigarette, let out the smoke with a harsh hiss. “Less than a year after she was killed by the Viet Cong, my duties led me back to the area of my youth and I took a short detour. The house was still intact, but the garden was overgrown, choked with vigorous weeds and thorny vines. It was ugly now.”

His mahogany-colored hand opened, palm upward, like a flower. “I would like to think that one day I can come back home without needing one of these.” He slapped the side of his AK-47. “But the longer I am a soldier the less conviction I have that this will happen. Every day a new atrocity springs up like a weed or thorny vine.”

“Jin, I grieve with you,” Do Duc said, “but I must know what happened to that girl.”

“Ask the Gwai.”

Do Duc swung his head around. “The Gwai?” The word meant “demon” in the Nung dialect.

“The Gwai are Nungs, just like me, but not like me at all. They did this.” Despite his Buddhist upbringing Jin was unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“I’ve never heard of the Gwai.”

“It’s not what they call themselves, but what others in secret have named them.”

Jin seemed very uncomfortable. Do Duc wondered at this. Jin showed more emotion now over the death of this one child than he had over the thousands of Khmer whose bones they had cracked as they marched like ants across the riverbed of skeletons.

A sect of Nungs—the Gwai—had tortured this child? Do Duc again heard the warning bell that had gone off in his head during his final briefing with Bowel. Laos. The southern route from the Golden Triangle. All of a sudden, the rat he had caught a whiff of before seemed a whole lot closer.

“Do the Nungs—-the Gwai—know where our objective is?” Do Duc asked. “Are they keeping him for ransom?” That would explain some of the hysteria that had seemed to grip Pentagon East at Michael Leonforte’s MIA report.

“I don’t know,” Jin said, getting up and walking back into the canopied forest.

Daylight and the scent of fear. The sense of isolation had vanished. Rain thundered down, drowning all other sound in the maelstrom of its fury. They slept as best they could, which was to say, not well.

Do Duc found that he could not close his eyes without seeing the image of the girl, lying like a sacrificial lamb against the drum of the rotted tree. He was not disturbed by her death—what did one more matter? There would be plenty more—but by the manner in which it had been carried out. He was remembering.

He got up, went back to where she lay. He hunkered down, staring at her, his mind turning over like an engine. It was like a picture, perfect in its own calculated way. The composition. The phrase
sacrificial lamb
repeated itself in his mind like the tolling of a bell. Had she been a sacrifice? Is that what had gotten under Jin’s skin?

Though he had carried out a score of missions where he had been no more than a heartbeat from death and had become as familiar with the grip of fear as he was with his own body, he knew he had stumbled upon something utterly new. He didn’t know whether to be terrified or excited.

He stayed where he was, his consciousness mesmerized by the sight, his unconscious stirred perhaps by the ethereal scoria of some strange alchemy. He passed the day in a semiconscious dream state, in which visions, memories, and fantasies combined to form the constructs of a new reality: an eternal war from which he wished never to return.