“Is this some kind of joke?” Kleat said.
The brothers, watching from the fire, saw that the head was safely inhuman. They came over from the fire. Hunkered down by his water pot, Samnang saw it, too. He approached more slowly, his expression incredulous. “Those eyes,” he said.
“You’ve seen them before?” Molly asked. He couldn’t quit staring at them.
“Once,” he said. “I can never forget.”
“The soldiers must have brought the head down from the gate,” Duncan said. “Like Molly said, a souvenir to show they’d been here. It means they were getting ready to leave. But for some reason, they never left.”
“That’s all you found?” Kleat said to Molly.
“No bones,” she said. “It was mostly empty. There’s a big machine gun, rusted solid. And these.” She gave him a handful of rotted currency.
“GI scrip,” said Kleat. “They didn’t use dollars in the field.”
“And these.” She pulled out a set of maps in plastic.
Duncan took those. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice. These could tell us where they were going and why they came here. And where we are.”
“Do you think that’s the end of it?” Kleat said. He tossed the currency away. “Funny money and a piece of pottery and some maps?”
“No.” She had wanted the city for herself and Duncan. But for a little longer they were going to have to put up with Kleat’s hunger and the brothers’ ransacking. Somehow she and Duncan could turn this to their advantage, but it would come at a cost. The question was, how much of a cost? “We’ll keep looking for the soldiers. That comes first.” His departure came second.
Kleat held out his hand. “My gun.” He hadn’t forgotten.
She reached behind her. She planted her feet. She’d rehearsed it in her mind. He would go ballistic when she confessed, would maybe even hit her, but not if she could help it.
Without a word, she brought her fist around in a long arc. It wasn’t a graceful boxer’s roundhouse, and it wasn’t very fast. His surprise was almost sad. His face turned slightly away. She landed against his ear. The shock of it ran up her arm bones.
Kleat dropped to the ground with a bellow. The terra-cotta head fell from his hands and rolled across the leaves.
The brothers fell silent, astonished. First she’d slapped him, now she’d brought him to his knees. It was so strange to them, the alpha-femme twist. It was strange to her.
“I didn’t bring it down.” She was breathing hard, wondering how it could have come to this.
Kleat looked at her. His blank expression was changing, the rage getting traction.
“I left it,” she announced loudly. “Before someone got killed.”
The worm veins surfaced. “Do you know what you’ve done to us?” he shouted at her.
Duncan came alive, thankfully. He stepped between them, pressing his back against Molly, forcing her back. He faced Kleat. “There,” he said, “it’s done. Not finished, just changed. I’m with Molly.”
“You two.” He spat at Duncan’s feet. A drop of blood trickled from his ear. She hadn’t meant to draw blood. She hoped his ear was okay.
“The gun was a crutch,” Duncan said. “You were a threat to us all.”
Off to one side, Doc picked up the head and was gawking at the jade eyes. His brothers gathered around him.
“You’re going back up that rope,” Kleat said.
“No, she’s not,” said Duncan. “There’s nothing more in the ACAV for us. The soldiers went someplace else. We’ll do what Molly said. We’ll keep searching.” He paused, with a glance at Doc. “And plundering.”
He offered his hand to help Kleat stand, and of course Kleat pushed it away.
They ate a hurried lunch while the brothers rooted through their truck for sacks to carry relics. Molly could see the terra-cotta head resting on the front seat, a baleful passenger. Duncan studied the map she had brought down.
“You can still see traces of grease pencil,” he said. “They went east at Snuol and kept on going. Who knows why? The fog of war. But the interesting thing isn’t the map itself or where they thought they were or weren’t. It’s this little bit of marginalia.”
He turned the map for Molly to see, and the old, creased plastic reflected the light. She had to separate one layer of reality from the other, the underlying contour lines and typeset names on the map from the red smudge marks on the plastic. There were four numbers beside a circle on a road.
“ ‘Oh-six, twenty-four,’ ” she read out loud. “Map coordinates?”
“It’s a date, as good as an entry in a logbook. June twenty-four.” She gave the map back to Duncan to give to Kleat. He was brooding over his meal, convinced they were now the Khmers’ prisoners.
Duncan tried to bring Kleat into it. “You said they went missing on June twenty-third. This means that a day later they were still trying to find their way.”
“But to where?” she asked.
“Not here,” said Kleat. “That’s certain. They were under deadline.”
“How do you know that?” asked Duncan.
“Because six days later the U.S. forces pulled out of Cambodia. Nixon was under siege at home. The traitors at Kent State had started a firestorm.”
She had wondered how he might get back at them.
“Those were American children who got shot there,” Duncan said.
“Pawns,” Kleat said.
“It’s old history,” she said. “You keep going backward.”
“I’m dissecting an event. Establishing connections. And deceptions,” said Kleat. “History is our clue. Kent State is the reason the Eleventh Cavalry men died here. While our troops were getting slaughtered in these jungles, the college spawn in their bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts were tying the hands of our president.”
Duncan didn’t rise to it. He let Kleat vent.
“Invading Cambodia was a masterstroke,” Kleat said. “Then Kent State blew up and we had to give the hiding places and sanctuaries back to our enemy. June twenty-nine was the fallback date. That was the day the last American troops pulled out of Cambodia. All except for these men.”
“I thought the motto was ‘Never leave a man behind,’ ” Molly ventured.
“Within reason,” Kleat said. “But the clock was ticking. This whole borderland was about to return to enemy control. These guys had two options. Keep driving around the countryside. Or hole up and pray. Their commanding officer chose to hole up. He made the choice. Whoever the bastard was, he as good as pulled the trigger on them.”
23.
It was high noon, as best as she could tell inside the green bell jar of the canopy, when the expedition split into three teams. Kleat still seethed over the loss of his gun, but the Heng brothers treated Molly like a champion.
“Rambo,” they said, still awed that a woman could hit like a man. For her reward, they paired her with Samnang and allowed her to keep her camera. Duncan was sent with the middle brother, So. Kleat went up the stairs watched over by Doc and Vin.
Doc made clear that their first priority was to locate the terra-cotta guardians at the back gate. But if they happened to find American bones along the way, that was fine, too. There was no more strike talk. For now, the issue of leaving was moot, and a few extra dollars paled beside the prospect of priceless relics.
Carrying burlap sacks and Molly’s emptied-out mule bag, and even bunches of little blue plastic bags like the kind in a deli, the searchers climbed toward the city. Molly and Samnang were quickly left behind. They had the most freedom, she realized. The brothers expected little or nothing from an old man with one leg.
Every so often, she sat down “to enjoy the view” or “rest my knees.”
