“It does me no good,” Duncan said. “They’ve got us.”
“How much?” said Molly.
“Another five hundred for the ride out. Five thousand to stay through tomorrow. They’re not stupid. They keep talking about the typhoon and the river.”
“I only have two hundred,” Molly said.
“I’m out,” said Duncan. What had they been thinking, supplies for six months?
“The statues,” said Kleat.
“What?”
“Show them on your camera. The terra-cotta warriors.”
“No,” said Duncan. “Don’t.”
Samnang squatted by the fire and blew on it with pursed lips. He had breath like kerosene. The fire leaped.
“They’re worth hundreds of thousands,” Kleat said. “Tell them you’ll show them the location. They’ll deal.”
“We can walk out of here on foot,” Duncan said. The mist was drawing away. Trees appeared around them.
“Show them,” Kleat told Molly.
She noticed Samnang watching her through the fire. Was there a right and a wrong to this? She was scared. They were in the middle of nowhere. “No,” she decided.
Kleat turned to the brothers. “Statues,” he said in English. He pointed up at the city. “Understand? Big money. Statues.” They frowned at him.
Tails of fog flickered off through the branches. The truck stood over there, and the Land Cruiser. Molly glanced up. Her mouth fell open.
There seemed no way they could have missed such a thing yesterday.
Eyes fixed to the canopy that was their false sky, she backed away from it.
“Molly?” said Duncan. Then he saw it, too, hidden in plain sight. Kleat swore with surprise. The brothers crouched and raised their rifles.
The rusting hulk of a vehicle hung in a spur of limbs, like a Lost Dutchman, beached in the air. One long metal tread had broken and dangled from its belly. She lifted her camera and, on the flank, in plain view, a faint insignia still showed: a black horse rearing.
20.
The revelation—the relic of the Blackhorse patrol—unplugged them from their wrangling. You could not call what followed a peace. They did not reconcile so much as disengage. It was spontaneous. No one willed it. They simply forgot one another, at least for a time.
They drifted apart, staring up at the trapped war machine, struggling to make sense of it. Sixty feet up, the vehicle looked stranded by some mythical flood, but it was the forest that had lifted it.
“Impossible,” Kleat said. “That’s eleven tons or more.”
Yet there it hung in the crook of massive branches. The helmet and cartridges had fallen from it. No one had bothered to look up. Who would have thought such a thing could happen?
Kleat paced beneath like a starving man eyeing an apple, alternately quiet and then stringing out thoughts for anyone to hear. “The first time the Vietnamese saw an APC, they called it a green dragon,” he told anyone who cared to listen. “The army used them for amphibious taxis. M-113s. Armored personnel carriers. The cavalry turned them into gunships on tracks. ACAVs. ‘Tracks,’ the troops called them. They were fast and mean. There was usually a crew of five. They’d load them full of ammunition and go hunting in columns.”
He went on about its armament, travel range, and the thickness—or thinness—of its armored skin. “They were death traps if you hit a mine or caught a rocket.” Molly quit listening. She could not get over the power of the trees. Sixty feet, six stories high, in thirty years. Eleven tons.
Duncan, the dedicated scientist, went to one of the terraces and opened his steel briefcase to take notes and sketch on his pad.
The three brothers retired to the staircase in a smudge of cigarette smoke, stricken with superstition or just discussing the possible profit to be made. The market in American bones from the Vietnam era was not something the DOD talked about, Molly had learned, but they paid well for the real thing.
Samnang alone did not seem awestruck. He had unwittingly made their fire under the dead vehicle and now began shifting it to a more suitable place. A few at a time, he carried the logs with their smoldering tips to the base of a broad, flat terrace and blew the flames back to life.
Molly noticed him. His simple act declared acceptance. Everything was changed, and yet nothing. For all their differences, they were staying. He had grasped that fact. They needed a center. The fire was that, an anchor for their camp.
“This is only one of them,” Kleat said. “We’re looking for nine men, though. There has to be a second track somewhere.”
The canopy didn’t seem to be hiding any more of them. Molly looked up among the ganglia of limbs and vines, and this appeared to be the forest’s sole catch.
She stood back and faced it as if facing the Sphinx. That’s how it seemed, like a beast in the middle of the desert. A riddle in metal skin. They had come for bones and found a fortress. They had looked in the treetops and found a chariot. What did one have to do with the other? Some hidden hand had sewn them together, but why?
She drew out her camera and telephoto lens and sighted through the long barrel. The ACAV leaped at her. Tipped slightly downward and canting to its right, it hung up there with its machine gun aimed straight at her. She took the shot and stepped to the side, out of the line of fire.
Meandering, angling for the best shots, she ransacked the track with her high-tech spyglass. The details bounded out at her. A ramp at the rear flapped open like a drawbridge. Beside the neatly stenciled U.S. ARMY, graffiti vowed maximum savagery. There was another gun shield behind the main turret, but this one lacked a barrel in the slot.
A man was watching her from the roof of the vehicle.
It didn’t register in the first instant.
She saw him, but didn’t see him.
Her mind rationalized the face as a knot of wood, or a distant statue. His eyes were right on her, and she accepted them as bulbs on a limb, or openings in the leaves.
But then his nostrils moved, nothing else, just the center of his watching face, and she realized he was taking her scent.
“Christ,” she said.
Her hand jerked. The camera moved, but not before she hit the shutter release. In or out of focus, she didn’t know. She lifted the camera back to her eye, searching, zooming, not certain she wanted to see him again.
Duncan was at her side in moments.
Gone, he was gone. Her hands were shaking, next to worthless for holding the telephoto steady.
Kleat came over.
“A man,” she said. “I saw him, his face, up there.”
“Bullshit.” But Kleat’s gun appeared. He held it in a two-handed grip, half raised.
“See for yourself.” She fiddled with the display. There was the face, or almost a face.
“You got one,” Duncan congratulated her. “Too bad he moved.”
“One what?”
“A gibbon, it looks like. A pileated gibbon. They’re all but extinct east of the Mekong. The hill tribes loved them to death. Good meat, I hear.”
Kleat holstered his gun. “A monkey,” he said.
She stared at the lighted image. The focus was ragged. The turret details were perfectly sharp, but the face
