in from every direction. Cicadas, she realized, thousands of them.
She’d never heard such a massed voice of insects. She registered it as anger, but that was only because it was so alien to her. She stepped back from the grass.
That suddenly the noise stopped.
The silence had a slight sucking vacuum to it. Molly felt pulled by it. “What was that?” she said.
The men had frozen. They were staring at the grass on all sides of them.
Then Kleat waved at the night. “Bugs. Nothing.”
The clouds opened to the moon, and the distant mountain revealed itself as a pile of low hills crowned with dense forest.
“Okay?” Kleat said. “It’s there. The man said it was there. There it is.”
Molly gazed up at the mountain.
“An oxcart path,” Duncan said, dismissing it. “A mountain.”
Kleat was having none of it. He grabbed a handful of grass and gave a fierce yank. It was a foolish gesture. The roots were deep and this was saw grass, with firm, sharp blades. His fist slid up and came away empty. Kleat snapped his teeth in pain and opened his cut palm. When he shook his hand, drops of his blood spattered into the dust like petite explosions.
They followed the oxcart path. The convoy climbed through grass growing higher than the doors. The grass stroked the windows like fingers of seaweed. Behind them, the truck’s headlights swam through an ocean of brilliant green lines.
Their pell-mell highway dash slowed to a crawl. The path was rutted and winding and hard to see, but it rose gently. The shovels and jerry cans piled in the rear quit clattering. They merely rustled at the curves. Molly could practically feel the grass slithering along the undercarriage.
She relaxed, grateful for the quiet and the sinuous path. With each looping turn, the moon shifted in the sky. It seemed to have grown to twice its normal size, as if they were rising off the planet.
“We’re farther north than I thought,” said Duncan. “We’re reaching into the Annamite range. The mountains run all the way to China. It’s wild country. The lowlanders stay clear of it. The hill tribes live up here pretty much the way they have for ten thousand years, taking animals, throwing down a little corn between the trees.”
“History,” whispered Luke.
At three-thirty they crested a ridgetop and stopped. Ahead stood all that remained of a bridge, a single stone pillar rising from the wide riverbed. Beyond that, higher up, a tall forest took over the grassland.
“Now where?” said Duncan.
They got out, except for Luke, who once again left them to their own conclusions. Molly faced back the way they had come, expecting their path to be flattened by the tires. But the grass had folded shut behind them. They would have to hunt their way down just as carefully.
To her surprise, the logging road lay far below them. Winding back and forth, they’d ascended hundreds of vertical feet. From this height, you could see moonlit paddy fields far to the west, and curious rows of ponds. They were not ponds, she realized, but bomb craters.
Kleat paced along the riverbed rim like a trapped tiger. “We’re close,” he said. “It’s right there in front of us.”
“It’s just a forest,” said Duncan.
“It’s cover,” said Kleat. “It makes sense. We’re looking for the remains of an armored cavalry unit.”
“How do you know that?” asked Molly.
“Who do you think the Blackhorse Regiment was? The Eleventh Armored Cavalry. They were famous, George Patton’s men. ‘Find the bastards and pile on,’ his orders. Nine men, Luke said. That would have been enough to crew two tanks or armored personnel carriers. That’s what we’re looking for. Anything that large, left in the open, would have been spotted by plane or satellite years ago. I don’t know how these guys got lost. But those trees are where they went.”
“Not across that bridge, they didn’t,” Duncan said.
“Why not? Bombs were falling like rain all through this area. Our pilot was returning from a run along this very borderland. Sometime after the Blackhorse soldiers crossed over, the bridge must have caught a bomb. That would explain why they never got out.”
“Except the bridge is too primitive,” Duncan said. “See these stones? It was a cantilever design. That dates it to a thousand years ago, or earlier. A bridge like that couldn’t have taken the weight of a tank. And look at how the building stones have been shoved down-river over time. Some of them are huge. No, this fell to pieces centuries ago.”
“The closer we get, the less you care,” Kleat said. “Or are you afraid of something?”
Molly stood away from them. The night air was a joy to breathe. She actually felt cold in her sundress.
“Even if they got across thirty years ago, it doesn’t mean we should follow them,” Duncan said. “Look at the width of that riverbed. It carries some major water. Once the rains begin, we’ll never be able to cross back. We’d be stuck over there for the next six months. And that, not a bombed bridge, would explain why they were never seen again.”
“I don’t see any rain.”
“It’s coming.”
“June 23, 1970,” Kleat said to him. “That’s the day they went missing. They were part of the Cambodian incursion. Nixon sent them. That’s what Kent State was all about.”
“I remember.”
“Somehow these nine soldiers got separated from the main body. Maybe night was coming on. The enemy was out there. They couldn’t stay in the open.”
“And you think they drove this far north? We’re halfway to Laos.”
“Maybe they were going for the high ground. Maybe they saw the trees. Maybe they were being pursued.”
Molly left them arguing. The night, the dark morning, was too fine to spoil. Venus stood bright. The constellations beckoned. For a month, swamped by haze on the plains, she had missed the stars. Down there, in another couple of hours, the dawn people would be plundering the site, dodging through the mist. Up here, she felt free. She clutched her arms across her chest and meandered along the broad rim.
At first she didn’t notice the strange ribbing under her shoes. It rose out of the ground only gradually. At last the notches threatened to trip her. She bent to run her fingers across the imprints and they were as hard as ceramic.
“Duncan,” she called. “Kleat.”
They were arguing. She called louder.
“What?” said Kleat.
She showed them the marks on the ground.
Kleat had a six-battery bludgeon of a flashlight. He shined it on the rows of corrugated imprints, each the same fourteen or fifteen inches wide, leading off like dinosaur footprints. The track marks ran a hundred yards before sinking back into the earth. The clay had captured the passage of vehicles. The sun had baked it and made it impervious to three decades of weather.
“Blackhorse,” Kleat said. He identified the prints as the marks of two armored cavalry assault vehicles, ACAVs, both the same size, one following the other.
“They came this way, up the hill, along the river, chasing a way to cross without the bridge. What more do you need?” he said to Duncan. “They’re over there. They’re waiting.”
12.
They came to the pass where the stream spread across the wide riverbed, and the Eleventh Cavalry strays had left more prints in the clay. The water, at the deepest point, came axle high to the Land Cruiser, though it built against Molly’s door on the upstream side, slapping and gurgling. The moon made a skin of silver on it. Dangling her hand out the window, she found the water had the temperature of blood or bathwater.
