some of the birds are left behind, we’ll fuel one up and get on with it. Or, if they didn’t get the birds moved down there then”-Rice moved his fingertip an inch up the river-“we sail on up the Mekong to the R. M. Air hangars at the airstrip outside Can Tho and take a copter from there.”
Rice paused, studying the map. Far out, near the horizon, Moon saw a red light reflecting from a sail. Then two more. Small craft, six or seven miles away, he guessed, and apparently outward bound.
“I’d guess Bob Yager will still be there,” he said. “Wherever the copters are. Yager would stick around until the last dog died.”
“Yeah,” Moon said.
“Sure,” Rice said. “Yager will be there.
“You make it sound so easy,” Osa said. “Can you find anything in the darkness?”
Rice shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Moon was going to say, Because maybe the Vietcong will be shooting at us, but Osa answered the question.
“I remember flying up the river that day you took me to my brother’s mission,” she said. “It was like flying over green wilderness. Everywhere you looked you could see light reflecting off the water. All tangled up with streams and irrigation canals. Like a maze. I’d think you would get lost. Easy enough, maybe, in a helicopter where you can see the sea behind you and the mountains up ahead. But down on the water in a little boat how could anybody tell? Not in the dark.”
“Anybody couldn’t,” Rice said. “I can. I used to live on that goddamn river. Three hitches in the Brown Water Navy. With the Game Warden project.”
Rice looked from Osa to Moon and back, waiting for the question.
“Game Warden?” Moon said.
“The navy called the whole operation Market Garden,” Rice said. “And the river patrol part down here was Game Warden. The idea being to keep the VC from running their sampans up and down the rivers, hauling troops, ammunition, all that. The navy bought a bunch of little fiberglass boats. Shallow draft, hold four or five crewmen, and do maybe twenty-five knots, and we’d run up and down the rivers and the creeks and canals and raise hell with the VC.”
Rice became aware that his pride was showing and stopped. “Shows you how crazy I was,” he added.
“When was that?” Moon asked.
“I started with the project in ‘sixty-seven. Transferred in. Did two hitches in the little PBRs- anybody but the navy would call ’ em River Patrol Boats but the navy made ’ em Patrol Boats River. Then I shifted over to the
“How’d you learn to fly?”
“Went along as crew,” Rice said. “I was a chief petty officer, a regular navy lifer. You can do pretty much what you want to do after you learn the system. I got friendly with the pilots. Watched how they did it. Took over when the pilot wanted to eat his lunch or take a break. That’s how I met your brother.”
“He hired you out of the navy?”
“I was quitting anyway,” Rice said. “Had in my twenty, and the navy was phasing out to go home. I’d met Ricky when we were transferring our Hueys over to the Vietnam navy and he was doing their maintenance. I told him I didn’t want to go back to the States-nothing for me there, and he said stick around, he could use me. Yager was already part of Ricky’s team by then, and he sort of gave me the finishing touches.” Rice laughed. “Like how to put one down without bouncing it.”
Captain Teele was standing by the mast now, studying the sails through binoculars.
“Okay,” Moon said. “We get in. We get a copter. Now where do we go to get the child?”
“Here’s where we go look,” Rice said. He moved his finger westward from Can Tho, across the Cambodian border, into a range of hills the mapmaker had identified as the Elephant Mountains.
“See this little road here along the coast? Little dot there called Kampot. Stream runs through it and dumps into the Gulf of Siam. Well, we fly five miles up the coast beyond that, then turn right and head due north, right up the ridge. Seventeen miles, you come to a series of clearings. Four of ’em. And in the fourth one, a little village. Ten, maybe twelve buildings, cluster of little terraced rice paddies.”
Rice looked up at Moon. “You got anything to write with?”
“Afraid not,” Moon said. Back in the prison, on the other side of the moat, Rice hadn’t been able to remember how to reach this village. He’d said it was something he’d have to sort of find somehow.
He’d only remembered the name was Vin Ba and it was near the Vietnam border.
“Here,” Osa said, and handed Rice a pen.
Rice made a tiny X on the map. And out in the Gulf wrote
Osa was looking over his shoulder. “I think that’s not too far from the village where my brother-”
“Right about here,” Rice said. “On this next ridge. There’s a little village down in the valley- maybe a couple of hundred people with some terraced rice paddies. And up on the ridge in the forest there’s a Montagnard settlement where Osa’s brother has his little clinic. Osa will remember it.” He made a second X, folded the map, and handed it to Moon.
Lum Lee was standing beside Teele now, looking through the binoculars. Without them, Moon could now make out five craft, all small, three with sails.
Rice was looking at Moon, expression curious. “What are you thinking about this business?”
Moon shrugged.
“Scared?”
“Yeah. Matter of fact, I am.”
Rice laughed. “But you’ll go on in,” he said. “Ricky told me about you.”
From behind them came the voice of Mr. Lee. “On the radio just a minute ago they were saying that Pol Pot has made a broadcast. They will cleanse Cambodia of oppression and corruption by returning their country to Zero Year. They will go back to the simple, clean ways. No more parasite predators living in the filth of the cities. The cities will be emptied. People will go back to the land.”
“My God,” Osa said. “What will that mean?”
“Maybe it is political rhetoric,” Mr. Lee said. “But we were listening to Radio Jakarta earlier. They said Pol Pot’s army was evacuating Phnom Penh. The soldiers were forcing everybody out of their houses and marching them out into the country.”
Rice was grinning, the sunset red on his face. “We’re just in time,” he said. “Everybody is going to be too busy with their own worries to pay attention to us.”
“Yes,” Mr. Lee said, “maybe so.” And he made a sweeping gesture to take the seven little craft now visible in the dying light. “Just in time. In a few hours we are going in. Everybody else is coming out.”
RED FORCES WITHIN MILE OF SAIGON
AS TANKS AND ARTILLERY CLOSE IN
–
The Nineteenth Day
AFTER SUNDOWN THE RAIN HAD begun. It was warm, soft, and steady, with a mild breeze behind it. But now, maybe an hour before dawn, the clouds broke up again. The full monsoon would be here a little later, Mr. Lee told them. In maybe a week. Then the rain would be steady. But tonight the first third of the moon hung high in the
