Finding Moon Part 23

"Why not? Because I'm a woman?"

"Because you don't know how," Moon said. "There's the ignition," she said, pointing past him at the switch just left of the driver's seat. "There's the fuel control. The right post controls the right tread, doesn't it? The left post the left tread. And there's the thing to s.h.i.+ft the gears."

"I better drive," Moon said.

"Why? You'll go to sleep. We'll run off the road."

"Things might happen," Moon said. To his dismay, he had to stifle a yawn. Being sick on that s.h.i.+p had taken something out of him.

"If something happens you should be up there in the hatch. Nguyen must lie down. He lost blood. I think he is all used up for a while."

"Mr. Lee can be lookout in the hatch," Moon said.

"Mr. Lee lost his gla.s.ses."

"Oh," Moon said, lost for words. The other alternative was to have Osa stand in the machine gun hatch. He rejected that. Someone might shoot her.

"You be in the hatch," she said. "Away from the engine fumes. The fresh air would be good for you."

He made sure Osa understood the gearing system, and how to handle the tread control steering if they needed to go into reverse, and how to take directions by a foot tap on a shoulder. Then he climbed onto the pedestal seat, heard the engine start below him, and felt the APC begin to lumber forward.

The moon was lower now but they were driving westward, almost directly toward it, and it made the track they were following a ribbon of light between the dark brush of the ditches alongside. Nguyen had jammed one of the rice sacks between the hatch rim and the machine gun mount, either for padding or protection. Something had torn the sack, allowing rice to dribble out on the APC's steel roof. But it was soft. Moon rested his arms on it and thought.

First he completed the fuel computation, dividing his estimate of round trip miles remaining by the gallons remaining. He came out short of fuel. Nothing to do about that. He thought about Victoria Mathias. if his mother hadn't survived the operation, who would arrange the funeral? if she had, who would be there to take care of her? He should know more about her friends. He should have taken more interest in her life. Too late for that now. And if he didn't make it back, how would she ever know what had happened to him? Would she ever know that he had tried, that he had not simply absconded with her tickets and her eight thousand dollars?

That led him to think about the long odds against getting back to his house in Durance, and about what he'd have to say to get Shakeshaft to rehire him, and about what to do about getting Rooney back on the wagon and reemployed.

He left thinking about Debbie for the last. Nothing had changed in that department. Only that now he knew he didn't really want to marry her. He would, if that was the only way to save her. But now he hoped for some other salvation-just as in Manila he had longed for something to save him from this hopeless duty.

He remembered the subtle way Osa had pushed him to keep him on the hunt for Ricky's friends. Ah, Osa! If only things had somehow been different a long time ago. If only he had been the man Ricky's tall tales made him out to be. And thinking about that, with his nostrils full of the smell of gunny sacking and rice, Malcolm Mathias drifted Off into an exhausted sleep-into a dream dark with sorrow and loss.

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 29 (UPI)-A helicopter shuttle service began evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Emba.s.sy today while marine guards kept thousands of desperate Vietnamese from breaking through the gates.

The evacuation began as North Vietnamese tanks and infantry units began fighting their way into the city.

SOMETHING WAS JERKING AT HIS PANTS leg. Someone was saying, "Moon, Moon. Wake up. There's a tank!"

Tank! Moon jerked wide awake. It was dawn. Silent. The APC was motionless in the brush at the very edge of a road, the engine not running. He saw no tank.

Nguyen Nung's bandaged head and torso were within touching distance-in the other roof hatch of the APC. Nguyen had the binoculars to his face, aimed down the road and to the left. Moon saw trees, saw that they were among low hills now, out of the delta's flatness. He saw that the road curved away to the left. And then he saw a flutter of motion. A thin black line extended upward, a green pennant flying from it moving in the breeze. And at the base of the line a gray-green shape that could only be the top of a turret.

Osa was tugging at his pants leg again. He looked down.

"Mr. Lee has gone to take a look," she said.

d.a.m.n! "Why didn't you wake me? Where are we?" "Why didn't you wake me? Where are we?"

"At the border. On maybe just inside it. Mr. Lee said he thinks this must be a Cambodian checkpoint."

Moon took another look. Beyond the pennant, the hills rose into the morning mist, green and forested. That would be right, he thought. The map had showed the land rising sharply where Vietnam and its rice delta ended. It showed the Cambodian highlands rising abruptly there, forming a barrier between the Mekong and the Gulf of Siam.

Osa guessed what he was thinking.

"We're right where we are supposed to be," she said. "The map was accurate."

"But there wasn't supposed to be a border control point here," Moon said. "That was supposed to be down on Route Eighty where the traffic is. Down on the coast."

"There's probably one there too," Osa said. "Probably a big one. Here there seems to be just a tank."

"Yeah," Moon said. "Just a tank." He lowered himself stiffly from the machine gunner's pedestal "I'd better go and help Mr. Lee scout things out."

"Two," said Nguyen Nung from his perch. He held his hand down, two fingers extended.

"Two tanks?"

"Two tanks," Nguyen agreed, sounding pleased by this linguistic advance, if not by the news.

"I wouldn't go," Osa said. She was twisted in the driver's seat looking back at him. "Mr. Lee is wearing peasant clothing. And he's small. if they see him, he will just look like a local farmer. If they see you-" She left that hanging, unfinished.

"I'll be careful," he said. The rear ramp had been lowered. He ducked and walked out of it. Osa said something loud-probably Dutch, and probably an expletive.

He kept to the roadside brush, angling toward where he'd seen the tank. Ahead of him among the trees, something rustled. Moon crouched behind a growth of young bamboo. It was Mr. Lee. He squatted beside Moon.

"A tank is parked on each side of the road," Mr. Lee said. "And then there is a small bamboo building in the middle of the road." He described it with his hands. "You know. The road goes on each side of it. It is open on the front and both sides. To collect duties, I think."

"Is it empty now?"

"No one is in it unless they are sleeping on the floor. Empty, I think. But there is one other house, made of planks with a palm roof. Is anyone in it? I don't know. One cannot see the inside."

"What kind of tanks?"

"What kind?" The question came as a surprise. Mr. Lee seemed not to have been aware that tanks came in varieties.

"Are they both alike? Do both have round turrets on top?"

"Yes. Just alike."

"Do they have tractor treads, like ours? Or do they roll on big wheels? How big? Try to describe them."

"Treads," Mr. Lee said. He described what sounded to Moon like an M48 tank, mainstay of the U.S. Army and the model it provided its allies. It was what Moon had hoped to hear. if Mr. Lee had described the rounded shape of a Russian-made T54 it would almost certainly have meant the Khmer Rouge were there.

"Did you see any sign of the crew?"

Mr. Lee shook his head. "But maybe they're inside. There was no way to tell that, of course."

"They're not inside," Moon said. "We can bet on that." No sane person would sleep in a tank if there was another place to bed down. Certainly not in this awful climate. "Now we need to find out if anyone is in the house."

Mr. Lee looked at him thoughtfully. "They did not hear our engine when we came up," he said. "I think we could back slowly away. Then turn around. Then we can find another way to cross the border."

"We didn't find another way when we studied the map. No track we could use without gong miles back toward the Mekong."

"True," Mr. Lee said. "But that was the map. Just lines on paper. Now we are here. We try, and try again, and try again. And we finally find a way."

"No," Moon said. "We finally run out of diesel fuel."

"Oh," Mr. Lee said. He made a wry face, shrugged. "There is not enough extra oil in those cans you brought along?"

"We have enough to get there. If the roads aren't too steep, I think we'll have a little bit left."

Mr. Lee considered this. He'd pushed the conical hat to the back of his head, and the slanting early morning light emphasized the lines age had left around his eyes. Moon had thought from that first night in Los Angeles that this man's face was unusually expressive. Now it registered something between despair and sorrow as realization sank in and hope drained away. Then he shrugged and managed a small laugh.

"Ah, then," he said. "I think you could carry your brother's little baby out." He thought again. "And Mrs. van Winjgaarden could lead out her brother-although I really think she no longer has any hope that he's alive. But how can I carry out the kam taap kam taap that holds my ancestor's bones?" He smiled weakly at Moon. "I think Mr. Nung would be happy to help me, but with those injuries it would not be possible." that holds my ancestor's bones?" He smiled weakly at Moon. "I think Mr. Nung would be happy to help me, but with those injuries it would not be possible."

"Nguyen couldn't carry much," Moon agreed. "I could help."

"Then we go on?"

"There must be fuel in those tanks," Moon said. "Almost certainly they'll have fuel in them. Why would they park them there empty?"

"Yes," Mr. Lee said. "Of course. Do you know how to get it out?"

Moon laughed. "That's within the range of my talents," he said.

"I would think that when the Cambodian government broadcast the surrender order and Pol Pot took over the government in Phnom Penh, these soldiers just went away," Mr. Lee said.

"Just climbed out and went home," Moon agreed. And hoped fervently that he was right.

It proved to be a good guess. The proud green pennant of the Royal Cambodian Second Division flew from their antennas, but the two M48s had been left to rust.

By sunrise, Moon had drained enough diesel oil from one of them to refill the tank of their M-l 13 and had them rolling down the track into the Cambodian hills. Within thirty minutes they'd seen the first evidence of Pol Pot's Zero Year campaign. The track had become a narrow dirt road, winding upward into the forest toward, they hoped, Via Ba. It pa.s.sed a cl.u.s.ter of a dozen shacks, all apparently deserted. One seemed to have been a store, and on its porch three bodies were hanging by their necks, their hands tied behind them, two men and a woman. One man wore brown trousers, a white s.h.i.+rt, and a vest, the other the saffron robe of a monk. The woman was naked.

A mile beyond that, the track they were following intersected with another. Moon pulled the APC across the roadside ditch and parked it out of sight among the trees. Mr. Lee spread the artillery map on the rice sacks, with the map Rice had marked for them beside it. Their little intersection was on the military chart, but only one track showed on the commercial version. It seemed to be the one they had been following from the checkpoint through the empty village.

Moon was disappointed but not surprised. "I think this other road must be newer. It wasn't there when the commercial map was made."

"So you think we find Vin Ba up the other road?" Mr. Lee said.

"Well," Moon said, "the army screws things up when it can, but this map must have been drawn from aerial photographs. A computer scans them and redraws the photos on paper. The army hadn't even heard of Cambodia until about ten years ago, so the photos have to be fairly new."

"I wish I could say it looks familiar," Osa said. "I must have flown right over this when I went in to see Damon. But, you know, I just remember hills and trees."

"Things look different from the air anyway," Moon said.

"I do remember Ricky pointing down to a little village in a narrow valley and saying that's where his Lila had been born and where her mother lived. Then we flew over terraced fields, and mountain ridges, and we landed at Damon's place."

"This must be Vin Ba then," Mr. Lee said, with his finger on the map. "Very close to here."

It proved to be less than two miles: a long fuel-draining climb uphill, a sudden ridgeline, and then, as the APC tilted downward, they saw cleared fields and terraced paddies. A village was almost directly below them. Moon stopped, got the binoculars from Nguyen, and examined the place.

He saw no sign of life. Three of the houses were roofless, apparently burned out. The Khmer Rouge seemed to have been there. Were they still here? Why would they be?

"Burned," Nguyen said. "Hooches burned." He was standing in the machine gunner's hatch, pointing, looking at Moon. "Too late, you think?"

"Let's go see," Moon said, and squeezed back into the driver's seat.

"'Way we go!" Nguyen said, and Moon heard him slamming a new round into the breach of the .50. The belt rattled as Nguyen adjusted it.

But there was nothing for Nguyen to shoot at. The road dropped off the hill, emerged from the trees, and became an even narrower track following an irrigation ca.n.a.l. Some of the paddies had been newly planted with shoots of rice, but no one was working the fields. The village seemed empty, the only sound the throbbing of the diesel.

Mr. Lee's hand was on his shoulder. "I think they heard our engine far away. It made them afraid the Khmers were returning."

"We'll see," Moon said. Rice had told them that the Vinhs and their neighbors in this village were not ethnic Khmers. It seemed more likely to him that Pol Pot's troops had followed the pattern of atrocities they'd been hearing described on the radio. They'd left no one behind. They would find the bodies of the old and the sick, with the young people swept away to work camps to be taught the Zero Year philosophy.

Moon cut the ignition and climbed up into the hatch, into the sunlight and the silence.

Where now would he look for Ricky's baby?

Nguyen was looking at him, making a wry face and the empty palms-up gesture of failure. Moon nodded. He climbed out of the hatch and dropped to the ground.

From somewhere behind the house just ahead of them came grunting. A pig? Then a rooster crowed. The door of this house Moon faced had been made of bamboo canes wired together hung on leather hinges. It stood open now. Moon looked in at a dirt floor partly covered with a mat, at a cabinet turned on its side with its contents of dishes and pots scattered around it. But the grunting was coming from behind the next house-fifty yards down the community's irrigation ditch.

Two pigs, both lean and mean by American pig standards, were tethered by long leg chains to one of the posts that supported the back porch of the small bamboo-and-thatch hut. The sight of Moon provoked a chorus of frantic grunts and squeals. They had water in a rusty metal trough. They wanted food, expected it, demanded it, competed for it, snapping and pus.h.i.+ng.

The pigs suggested that some villager had been there after the Khmer Rouge left. Pol Pot's troops might fail to catch a rooster, but they would hardly have missed two tethered pigs. But swine devoid of their owner could tell him nothing, least of all where to find the swineherd. And these unfed swine might be as abandoned as the empty houses, the trail that had turned itself into a street, the rice paddies, the ditch that irrigated them, the whole little valley and the hills that closed it in. He would find something back at the APC to cut the chains and free them. That should be a job in the range of his competence.

Nguyen the warrior was still standing behind the .50 caliber, conditioned by his dangerous years in the Brown Water Navy to expect ambushes. His expression, as much of it as was visible around the now-grimy bandages, suggested he wouldn't mind a fight. Nguyen had expressed his distaste for Cambodians in general and Khmer Communists in particular when he first understood they were heading for a village across the border. He had provided a half dozen anecdotal examples of Cambodian rudeness, barbarity, dishonesty, laziness, and otherwise slovenly conduct. Mr. Lee, in translating this, added that the feeling was common among Vietnamese, North and South, and was matched by a Cambodian contempt for Vietnamese, and exceeded by the distaste felt by Laotians for Thais, and vice versa.

Nguyen waved and said, "n.o.body?"

"n.o.body," Moon agreed. "Just two orphaned pigs."

Osa appeared from around the APC, her face and hair wet. Was.h.i.+ng in the irrigation ditch, Moon guessed. He'd try it himself. It seemed to be fresh water diverted from the stream they'd crossed on the way in. He would wash, and collect Mr. Lee from wherever he'd wandered, and get to h.e.l.l out of here. Finish this. Be done with this. End it. Forget it.

Osa was smiling a rueful smile. "Too bad. I guess n.o.body is left," she said. "I know you had hopes. I did too. It is a terrible disappointment for you."

"Que sera sera," Moon said, thinking of Halsey's standard formula for dealing with hostile fate. Thinking of Sergeant Gene Halsey dead under the jeep. Of course. What would be would be. And for Malcolm Mathias, despite grandiose intentions, this empty village was what would be at the end of the road for him. Moon said, thinking of Halsey's standard formula for dealing with hostile fate. Thinking of Sergeant Gene Halsey dead under the jeep. Of course. What would be would be. And for Malcolm Mathias, despite grandiose intentions, this empty village was what would be at the end of the road for him.

Osa was studying him, looking worried. "Maybe-" she began, but could think of no way to finish it.

"Let's find Mr. Lee," Moon said, "and make sure we haven't missed anyone-or anything. And get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"He said he would be back very quickly," Osa said. "He said he wanted to find his kam taap." kam taap."