The Reckoning

“We’re not, Duncan,” the captain said. “But at a certain point you say, enough.”

“A few days more,” said Duncan. “Where else could he be?”

For Molly’s sake, the captain said, “I’m disappointed, too.”

“There will be other seasons, other excavations,” Kleat said. He was adamant.

Other chances, she thought, but not for her. The Times had not sent her to write about barren dirt, not after a pitch entitled “Sacred Ground.” The bottom line was that without the bones for a climax, her story was not a Times story at all.

“We start redeploying tomorrow,” the captain said. “I’ll arrange transportation for you.”

Molly went through the motions of the captain’s farewell celebration. Afterward, she meandered through camp, dealing with the let-down. She could hear soldiers through their tent walls. They were excited to be going back home.

The paper was covering her travel expenses, and she’d get a kill fee for her trouble. Maybe one of the airline magazines would take a condensed version, and she could spin off a travel piece for the Denver Post. She’d never recoup the cost of the camera, though. Ten grand. She’d gambled big, and lost.

On a whim, she took a few pickup shots of the camp. Wasting battery juice just to waste it, she paused by a hole that had once been the village well and fired her flash into the darkness, not even aiming. There was nothing to see with the naked eye. The hole was deep and the flash too quick, and when she kicked a pebble, it plunked on water so stagnant it smelled gray.

She didn’t bother looking at the image on her camera display, just turned it off and returned to her tent. She began packing some of her things, but that only made her feel worse. Lying down, she held the camera overhead and flipped on the display.

The bones were waiting for her.

She gaped at the illuminated image. How could a camera see through water? Actually it was possible with a long enough time lapse. But she’d used a flash. The light would have bounced off the water.

There was a hint of poorly focused white sticks beneath the water. Garbage, she decided. Twigs tossed in by children or the wind. More digital noise. She turned the camera off, then on, to see if the image corrected itself. This time, there was a rib cage and a long tail-like spine.

An animal, she thought. Then saw the skull.

6.

First thing the next morning, filled with excitement and disbelief, they lowered one of the marines on a rope, by his ankles, headfirst. He took a deep breath. They dunked him into the water, gave him sixty seconds, and then hauled him, soaking wet, back up the shaft and into the sunlight. He held a handful of human vertebrae. There was more, he said, much more.

Things got noisy fast. They snaked hoses down the well shaft and the pumps roared. They rigged a klieg light over the hole, and fired up another generator. As the water drained off and small glittering shrimp writhed in the mud and water weeds, the brown tips of bones jutted up like driftwood.

They lowered a man again. This time he brought up two skulls.

“What in God’s name,” a soldier muttered.

Their forensic anthropologist examined the skulls. Neither was Caucasian. One belonged to a child. The nuchal crest at the base of the skull was rounded, the forehead smooth, the wisdom teeth not yet descended, the whole aspect gracile. Probably female, he said, probably eight to ten years old. He laid it on the ground and went to join the others peering into the hole.

“The fucking KR,” Kleat said.

It was a mass grave, not fifty feet from their camp.

Duncan knelt down and took the skull. “Look at you, poor bug,” he whispered.

“What?” said Molly, not sure she’d heard.

He looked up at her, and there was a streak down his mask of red dust. Through her lens, at first she thought it was sweat. But it was a tear for the nameless girl. She got the picture.

The find staggered them, the enormity of the murders. They were familiar with the killing fields. All had seen the displays of bones in places like Phnom Penh. But this was slick and shiny. The event of death seemed unfiltered, unprocessed. It could have been yesterday.

Just the same, it was not their pilot. They switched off the pumps and cut the light. Their eleventh-hour hope went as dark as midnight.

The captain turned away. “That’s that,” he said. “Let the Cambodians have it. This isn’t ours.”

But Duncan would not give up. “He’s down there,” he told them. “I’d stake my life on it.”

The captain turned to him. “Duncan,” he said softly, “the cockpit is two miles away.”

“The well was used for burial once, why not before?” Duncan said. “Think about it, the morning after the plane crashed. There’s metal and wire lying everywhere, a windfall of riches. But also there’s this body of a stranger, and not just a body. A ghost.”

“Ghosts,” Kleat scoffed.

“A serious liability in these parts,” said Duncan. “These are peasants straight out of the tenth century. I’ve spent time among them. They see spirits everywhere. Tiger spirits. Forest spirits. Witches flying in the night, drinking people’s blood. They’ve already got their hands full with ancestors. Now suddenly a body falls from the sky. What would you do? Conduct a respectful Buddhist cremation? For a stranger? Waste a week going off to find the authorities? Authorities, by the way, who might try to lay claim to your plane parts. The body was a nuisance. A pollution. So they dumped him here.”

“Into their drinking water?” said the captain.

“It’s an old well in an abandoned village. And the tradition could have carried over. Years later, when the Khmer Rouge needed a dumping ground, some villager might have led them to the same well.”

“There’s no way to be sure the pilot is underneath the rest of them.”

“There’s only one way to be sure he’s not,” Duncan answered.

“We’ve never encountered a situation like this,” said the captain. “Never.”

And yet Duncan had planted the possibility among them. Suddenly it seemed that week after week, they might have been digging farther away from what they were looking for. And now the dead from one era could be hiding the dead from another.

But they could not simply dredge up the bones to see what lay at the bottom. The Cambodian liaisons suddenly became officious and prickly. There were problems, it developed, diplomatic, jurisdictional, archaeological, and cultural. Molly loved it. With a single, giant twist, her story had not only been saved, but was taking on dimensions she’d never dreamed of.

Among other things, as a matter of policy, American bones were supposed to be separated from Southeast Asian Mongoloid remains at the site of excavation rather than at the central lab in Hawaii. The Department of Defense had learned the hard way how difficult it was to repatriate Asiatic remains. The Vietnamese government, especially, regarded any bones found in the proximity of American remains as those of ling nguy, or South Vietnamese puppet soldiers.

There were also issues of territorial authority. This might be a shared underworld, but it happened to lie within Cambodian soil. Who owned the dead? Should the Cambodian authorities be the ones to oversee the excavation of the well? Did that place American soldiers in the role of undertakers for Cambodian citizens? What if there was no American pilot beneath the layer of Khmer Rouge victims? Did the Cambodians even want the mass grave to be exhumed? The competing interests created a tension that made her story at once international, delicate, and highly emotional.

The captain ordered the area around the well ringed off. There was a process to be observed, channels to go through. Cambodian soldiers were posted around the camp to keep away the locals. The men on the labor crew were told to return to their villages. The captain, the forensic anthropologist, and their Cambodian counterparts all retired to a tent and began placing satellite calls to their headquarters. Instructed to stay away from the site, Molly and the others waited in whatever shade they could find. Hours went by.