“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 passed a cluster 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 shirt, 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 canal. 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 pushing.
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, “Nobody?”
“Nobody,” Moon agreed. “Just two orphaned pigs.”
Osa appeared from around the APC, her face and hair wet. Washing 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 hell out of here. Finish this. Be done with this. End it. Forget it.
Osa was smiling a rueful smile. “Too bad. I guess nobody 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.