seem to take a whole breath. It felt like slow suffocation.
“Just point the way,” she said. “I’ll find it.”
“You’re new to the territory. I’ll get someone to run you through mine awareness tonight, and assign you an escort.”
It was exactly what she didn’t want, a keeper hemming her in. But she smiled gracefully. “I’ll learn my way around,” she told him.
“Until then,” the captain said, “I think Mr. Kleat was on his way back to camp.” He waved at the big American.
“I’ll see you later,” Duncan said.
“Your scarf,” she said.
“My gift, Molly.” He touched his trowel to his forehead and walked off into the dust.
Kleat came down the slope of the dike in big, clod-busting strides. Molly took in his details. Here might be her centerpiece, this brother of a missing soldier searching through the years. He was not so tall as he had seemed up there. His head was large and his neck surprisingly thick, as if it carried a great weight of ideas. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the white sun. He did not cover his baldness. He looked ambitious.
“We were starting to think you’d given up on us,” he said to her.
“You said you were heading back to camp,” the captain said to Kleat.
“Sure,” Kleat said, taking his cue. “I’ll show her in.”
The captain started back up the dike, then turned to Molly. “One other thing,” he said. “When we find him, no photographs. Don’t shoot the remains.”
They’d told her already. “Absolutely,” she said.
Kleat led the way. Molly followed him away from the noise. After a few minutes’ walking, he said, “Boulder.”
She heard the scorn. You got it all the time. “The People’s Republic,” she confessed. “What about you?”
“Angeles City.”
“L.A.?”
“Christ, no. The Philippines. There’s a nice colony of vets live there. We live like princes. Beers cost twelve cents. Like that.”
“What do you do?”
“When I’m not here? I’m a contractor.” He didn’t volunteer what kind of contractor.
“They say you come to Cambodia every year.”
He didn’t answer. “I thought there’d be more of you,” he said. “A crew of assistants. Helpers.”
“I like working alone.”
“I’ve read some of your articles on the internet. That fisherman who cut off his own leg. The Columbine murders. Those peace-scam artists. And your piece on the Super Max inmates, ‘A Season in Stainless-Steel Hell.’ ”
Molly didn’t know if he was trying to flatter or control her. They knew her better than she knew them—where she lived, what she wrote, her photos. She noted that he didn’t say if he approved of her work or not. “It’s a job,” she said.
“Why give them personalities, though?” he asked.
“The inmates?”
“Just kill them, I say.”
“It’s a matter of what we do with evil,” she said. “That was my point.”
“And now you’re working for the big dog. The
He gave a small grunt, but still had reservations. “Cambodia, though. Why chase the dead?” He gestured at the trenches and square holes along the trail. “Why come after these guys?”
“Memory,” she said. “Memory is flesh. As long as we remember, they’re still alive, don’t you think?”
He didn’t answer. She followed the sleek, gleaming prow of his head as they zigzagged along the maze of footpaths above paddies and between heaps of red dirt. Finally Kleat began to open up.
“It looks like a jumble,” he said of the dig. “But this is how it’s done. There’s a method to the madness. Our metal detectors have found pieces of the plane scattered to kingdom come. But you can see the general east-west line of our digging.” He showed her his topo map with colored-pencil markings. “Here’s the crash trajectory.”
The site was vast and complicated. He described how the dying warplane had ricocheted across two linear miles of rice fields, disintegrating in leaps and bounds. Afterward, local peasants had patiently rebuilt their paddies over the gouged earth. Then the Khmer Rouge had come, erasing whole villages, and, along with them, all memory of the buried plane. Later the Vietnamese army swept through on their “liberation” of Cambodia. Then the United Nations entered, determined to jump-start the devastation known as year zero. Not far behind them came the men and women of U.S. military forensics teams. Ever since, they had been resurrecting American warriors from the Cambodian hinterlands.
“Sometimes the locals show up with a bone that has no story. In this case, we have a story but no bone, not yet,” Kleat said. “We know exactly who we’re searching for and when he disappeared. All we need to do is find him.”
The “we” jarred her. According to Duncan, he and Kleat were outsiders. But to hear Kleat, he was a full- fledged member of the recovery team. She glanced at him. Was he out to steal the captain’s thunder?
He stopped by a trench surrounded by torn sheets of metal lying across the mounded earth. Some had been fitted together in puzzle pieces. Red and black and green cable and wire stretched like bunches of fried snakes. A collection of digging tools was stacked in the trench below.
“It’s weird in a way,” he said. “When the refugees got relocated to this area twelve years ago, they inherited the tools left behind by dead villagers. Talk about memory, there was no memory here, just the land and a bunch of strangers. But then it turns out the tools had a memory of what happened in this place.”
He bent and pulled up several of the shovels and examined them. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Molly. The head was wider and blunter than on an American shovel, and the metal was brighter and silvery. The edges looked crudely cut and you could see where a local blacksmith had hammered it to fit the wooden shaft.
Kleat scratched away some of the dirt. “Can you see it?”
There was a number stamped in the metal, and beneath that the inscription “Made in the USA.” She took out her camera and started getting shots.
“It comes from a section of the stabilizer flap of a Cessna O2 Sky-master,” Kleat said. “It was a slow, twin- prop airplane used for forward air control. The pilot would mark targets with white phosphorous rockets, then the bombers would come. This one left from Ubon Airfield in Thailand on January 3, 1969, to scout the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but he never came home. After the plane crashed, the peasants beat the sword into the plowshare, literally.”
He explained how military investigators had found plow blades made of cut-up propellers, wooden ox bells with bullet shells for clappers, and handmade sickles and pots and pans still bearing telltale serial numbers. The recovery teams always deployed with a database called Brite Lite.
“The pilot and his plane just vanished into the abyss. All signs of the plane, even the crash scar, disappeared. Thirty years of farming devoured every trace. Even the satellite photos showed nothing. We knew the plane was out here somewhere. We’ve known for years. We just didn’t know enough.”
“So you’ve got farm tools left by ghosts, and a plane without a pilot,” she said.
Kleat cut a look at her full of suspicion. “There’s nothing supernatural about this,” he snapped.
Molly was taken off guard. “Of course not,” she said.
“I’ve done this before,” he declared. “An air crash isn’t rocket science. The physics are simple. The path of impact is known. We have his trajectory. We’re unearthing his wings. It’s a matter of time. He’ll answer to us.”
That was a curious way to put it, even imperious, as if the dead pilot were a fugitive or a truant. Molly gently slid the shovel back among its brothers.
They continued along the path. It was past noon, but the sun only seemed to reach higher in the sky. The
