It made no sense to a guy like Kleat how this gentlest of men was able to control the pent-up tempest of the workers. Born and raised in violent refugee camps, many of the local Khmer men were semi-wild. At night some got drunk in their villages, gambled, beat their women, and bloodied each other with knives and axes. Molly had pictures of that, too.
But even the worst toughs obeyed Samnang without question. “They respect him,” she said.
“He has a power over them,” Kleat argued.
“Like voodoo?”
“Laugh. He’s KR, I tell you.”
“The KR don’t exist anymore.”
“Tell that to the workers. They have their memories.”
“If he was KR, what’s he doing here?”
“The same thing you’re doing,” Kleat said to her. “Making a buck. Doing penance. I don’t know.”
Duncan was sitting there. He said it was none of Kleat’s business, even if Samnang had been KR. “Everyone has secrets they’d rather forget.”
“Not secrets like that,” Kleat said.
“Let up,” Duncan said. “Survival always has a price tag.”
4.
At the end of her third week, Samnang approached Molly. “I have something to show you.”
They rode in a Land Cruiser hired from three brothers who lived in Samnang’s hometown, Kampong Cham. The driver, a heavily tattooed boy, drove them to a nearby village. The village was built on stilts for the rainy season. There were even bridges between some of the huts, and a dock with canoes lying on the dirt. It seemed inconceivable the land could ever be flooded. Water was their faith, a phantom thing, nothing Molly could believe in. All she’d seen since arriving was dry, cracked earth.
On a slight hill beyond the village there was a shack with a corrugated tin roof and no walls. Inside sat a cheap cement Buddha, like a garden gnome. To one side, hanging from the rafters, was the bell.
Samnang took a small hammer and rang it for her. The pitch was perfect.
She was delighted, and went closer. “But it’s made from an old bomb shell,” she said.
“Yes.” Samnang was pleased by her surprise. “It is inescapable, don’t you think? That the rubble should be turned into order. Even into beauty.”
“No,” she answered. “I would think it was the other way around. Beauty fades. Civilizations grind to dust. I would say loss is the norm. Chaos. Noise. Not music.”
Samnang touched the bell with his fingertips. “But you see?” he said. “They have restored themselves from the horror.”
On May 29, a dog brought a human femur to the site.
Molly got a picture of the dog just before one of the Cambodian soldiers shot it, the bone still in its mouth. The Americans rushed over, excited that this might be evidence of their missing pilot. But one glance told them it was another false lead. The thighbone didn’t come close to matching a six-foot Caucasian’s. It could not belong to their pilot.
Very possibly the bone had come from a mass grave somewhere in the region. Killing fields hid everywhere, even around here. After every rainy season, bones cropped up, often no more than tiny white fragments. In the beginning, Molly had mistaken the crushed bits along the outer paths for bleached seashells. Then she’d spied checkered fragments of disintegrating scarves mixed among them and realized she was walking on the dead.
Curious to see what would happen, Molly followed the bone. The forensic anthropologist with RE-1 judged the femur to be Southeast Asian Mongoloid. He wrapped it in bubble wrap and turned it over to their Cambodian liaison officer. The liaison officer kept the bubble wrap and gave the bone to a soldier, who tossed it into a distant ditch, dog food again.
She watched it all through her telephoto lens. Then she saw Samnang go over. Looking around to make sure no one saw him, he took the bone and buried it by a tree. He lit a stick of incense, and she realized that Kleat was right.
Samnang was guilty. He probably had been KR. Finding the dead was his way of doing penance.
One of the Cambodian soldiers, or a villager, perhaps, must have seen Samnang ministering to the bone and drew the same conclusion. There were eyes everywhere, factions and subfactions and jealousies. For one reason or another, KR or not, Samnang was dismissed from the dig that evening.
The purge was swift. Molly heard about it at the last minute. She rushed to the road to say good-bye, but the truck carrying him away was already leaving. She caught his face in her camera, and he turned his eyes away from her. She figured that was the last she’d ever see of him.
As the red dust settled, Molly saw a figure watching the departure from out in the fields. At first she thought it was the gypsy kid standing in the ball of the sinking sun. But when she shaded her eyes, he turned into Kleat, and she realized who had gotten rid of old Samnang.
5.
By then the dig was nearly done. Their dead reckoning had failed. The crash site looked like a carcass—rice paddies breached, dirt piled by the sifting screens, holes collapsing, and grid strings let loose—and still the pilot eluded them. After a month of brute labor, RE-1 had pulled up hundreds of pieces of the cockpit and fuselage and wings, seemingly everything but the bones that were their quest.
As they reached the end of the crash trajectory, the Americans sensed their failure. They took it personally. Their high hopes came tumbling down. One night, at the beginning of June, two of the youngest marines got into a fistfight over a stolen
After the captain got the two fighters separated, it turned out that others, including Molly, had suffered petty thefts, too, mostly letters and snapshots from home. Whoever it was had snitched her barber’s scissors. The culprit, probably some desperately poor Khmer—though Kleat made sure to accuse the roaming gypsy—never was caught.
The stealing was almost beside the point. What mattered about the fight and the thefts was that it suddenly became clear their losses outweighed their gains. Their daily miseries—the spiraling heat, the snakes and bugs, the dust of dried paddy sewage that festered in their sinuses, and a hundred other small things—could no longer be sustained with hope. Whether the pilot had ejected or been cast loose of the jet or dragged away, it was plain they were not going to find him.
As if to hasten their departure, they received news that a typhoon was building to super class in the South China Sea. With winds in excess of 150 miles per hour, it already equaled a class 4 Atlantic hurricane. The navy meteorologists could not say when and where it might strike land, in four days or six or ten, in Malaysia, Thailand, or Cambodia. But it was sure to usher in the mother of all monsoons. The rains would come. The roads would turn to grease and the paddies would fill. Rivers would run backward. The villages would turn into islands.
On the evening of June 7, the captain invited Molly, Kleat, and Duncan to a private gathering inside his wall tent. He had lawn chairs for them and coffee mugs for the last of his Johnnie Walker Black.
“We’re terminating the recovery,” he told them. The search was over. He had already broken the news to his team. “I wanted to tell you separately. To thank each of you for your hard work.”
Molly sat back, stunned. Her shock was a curiosity to her. For at least a week now, she had been trying to invent a story that glossed over the fact that she was essentially writing about empty holes. “It’s over?” she said.
“Can’t you hear?” said Kleat. “It’s done.”
Duncan tried to rally the captain. “You don’t give up on the good ones,” he said.
