True, there’d been no dot labeled Neap on the artillery map. But such maps tend to be more interested in terrain and less in homesites. Moon had expected to find Neap. Had counted on it. It would be proof he hadn’t taken a wrong turn. It would have been his final landmark. Beyond it, he would angle the APC to the left up the slope and reach the top. There they would find the village of Phum Kampong waiting, and the Reverend Damon van Winjgaarden-perhaps-alive. Without Neap, Moon was thoroughly lost.
With much pointing Nguyen showed them that the footpath they’d been following faded out on this stonier ground. Which way now? Nguyen had no idea. Then he was pointing eastward and repeating something that sounded like “Mekong.”
Indeed it was. The next ridgeline was lower. Over it and through the blue haze beyond was a ribbon of silver. Sunlight was reflecting off the river. Good. At least they were on the proper ridge.
Moon ate a cupful of boiled rice and some of the crackers they’d brought from the R. M. Air base and thought about it. The route they’d planned on the map had taken them away from the Mekong toward the Gulf to cross the border and then circled back in the hills. At least the Mekong was where it should be. At least that had gone right.
But not quite. Moon explained the problem to Osa. Nguyen listened, a mixture of comprehension and bafflement.
“In other words, there should be a little bitty village down there. There isn’t and apparently never was. So I must have either gone too far one way or the other. Which means we are looking down into the wrong little valley and now we have some guessing to do.”
“Village?” Nguyen asked.
“Yes,” Moon said. “I thought there would be a village down there.”
“We’ll find it,” Osa said. “We’ll find paths down there, and they’ll lead us.”
Nguyen was shaking his head in vigorous denial. “No,” he said. “No more.” He pointed to the irregular line of broken stones. But that turned out to be a reference to the Ho Chi Minh trail, which snaked through the mountains along the border to feed supplies to the Vietcong in the delta. That finally understood, Nguyen made the sound of an airplane. He created one with two hands and flew it very slowly, very laboriously across his waist. That done, he said, “Very big.”
“Ah, yes,” Moon said. “The B-Fifty-twos.” He turned to Osa, still looking puzzled. “That’s why Kissinger started them bombing Cambodia. To cut off supplies to the VC.”
Osa was smiling at him. “I think you’re finally getting tired,” she said. “That’s interesting, but how does it help us?”
A good question. Nguyen seemed to understand the thrust of it. He trotted up the rear ramp and emerged with the Langenscheidt map in one hand, the artillery chart in the other. He held the commercial map against the side of the APC, indicated Neap, then created B-52 sounds and walked his fingers across Neap. “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,” Nguyen said. He held up his hand and flashed his fingers again and again. “I think fifty,” he said. He replaced the commercial with the artillery chart, put his finger where Neap should have been, said, “No.” He looked at Moon, then at Osa, seeking understanding.
They stood beside the APC looking down at the long strip of ruin below them where two hundred Cambodians had once lived in a village called Neap.
“Why bomb there?” Osa said. “There couldn’t be any kind of road down there.”
“Dark of night,” Moon said. “They would have been flying very high, probably above thirty-five thousand feet. And they’d be coming all the way from Guam. It would be easy to miss by just one ridgeline.”
Osa was looking down at where Neap had been, saying nothing.
“Or maybe one of the planes had mechanical trouble. The pilot had to jettison his load.”
“One plane? Just one airplane could do all that?”
“I think they carry fifty bombs. Isn’t that what Nguyen was trying to tell us? Five hundred pounds of TNT per bomb. Or was it a thousand? Then multiply that by fifty.”
Osa was silent again, looking into the valley. “So maybe we’re not lost. Maybe the village was down there once.”
“Let’s say it was,” Moon said, thinking they could be on the other ridge in an hour, maybe less. They’d either find Phum Kampong and Reverend Damon or they wouldn’t. Either way, they’d be done with this. “Let’s get going.”
It wasn’t necessary. A man emerged from the trees behind the APC and stood watching them, a small thin man, slightly stooped, with gray hair cut short. Then he shouted, “Mrs. van Wing Garden.”
Osa remembered him. He was one of her brother’s converts from Phum Kampong whom she’d met on her last visit-one of the men Damon had been training to help him spread Christianity in the hills. He squatted beside the APC, small, thin, slightly stooped, his mustache gray, his eating rice with him, very glad to see Osa. In halting English he told them how he had heard their vehicle coming up the mountainside, thought it must be the Khmer Rouge returning, had hidden, had seen Osa standing in the hatch, had recognized her as the sister of Brother Damon, and had hurried along to try to catch them.
“You have come to replace your brother,” he said. “We all will thank you for that.”
Osa looked down at her feet. “Replace him? Is Damon not with you now?”
“Oh,” the man said. “You didn’t know about it.” He looked at Osa, then at Moon, expression rueful.
“Is he all right?” Moon asked.
“I was not at the village when the Khmer Rouge came. I live here, where I cut my wood and make my charcoal.” He motioned toward Via Ba. “I sell it over in Via Ba. But not now because nobody is left in Via Ba. But-”
Moon cut him off. “Where is Damon now? Will we find him at Phum Kampong?”
“They took him away. They took him and some of the Christians, and some of them they killed in the village.”
“But they didn’t kill Damon? He was still alive?”
“Down there,” the man said, pointing into the valley where Neap had once existed. “There we found his body.”
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 30 (UPI)- President Duong Van Minh announced today the unconditional surrender of the Saigon government and its military forces to the Vietcong.
Afternoon, the Twentieth Day
RETRACING ONE’S STEPS IS EASY. Moon simply spun the APC around and headed it down the mountainside following the tracks the treads had made coming up. No problem. He peered downward through the driver’s viewing slot: a little pressure on the right steering bar when needed, then a little pressure on the left. Just think about that. No reason to think about strike three and you’re out. No niece, no bones, no brother.
Nguyen was perched in the hatch above. Osa slumped on the troopers’ bench. When he turned to glance at her, he’d see only the top of her head, looking at the rice sacks. What was she seeing in the burlap? What was she thinking of? He hoped she had been conscious of the probable time of Damon’s execution. From what the man had told them, his body had been found and buried about the day they’d slipped out of Puerto Princesa. Even if he had been the super-Moon that Ricky had fantasized, he couldn’t have kept that from happening. Or perhaps Osa would be remembering Damon had realized his dream to be a martyr. He hoped that would give her some comfort.
The man had described it as he had heard it from survivors at the village. He told it proudly, with a fair command of English vocabulary but a pronunciation that Moon guessed must be a mixture of Montagnard inflections and Damon’s own Dutch-based distortions. The Khmer Rouge had come at dawn, about twenty of them: two young men, a young woman, and the rest just boys. Some barely in their teens, barely big enough to carry their assault rifles. Everyone had been ordered out into the clearing where the villagers prepared their charcoal and joss sticks to be sold.