“How are you going? In that little tank?”
“I put enough extra gasoline in those GI cans to get me there and back. Or close to it.”
She took a deep breath and released it. “You’ll just need enough for one way. They’ll kill you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Be reasonable. The Vietcong, maybe not.
Maybe they would just lock you up. But the Khmer Rouge? You represent everything they hate.”
How could he explain this? It would sound like dialogue out of a bad movie. But it was true, so he said it.
“There’s something worse than being killed sometimes. It’s living with too much failure. I’ve got a long list of screwups behind me. Finally you decide you can’t stand another one.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t.
She produced a wry smile. “Sometime I think you will tell me what happened to you to make you like this. If you live long enough.”
Moon returned the smile, feeling better. “Maybe so. But it’s a long story and dull. We don’t have time for it now.”
“I think we have what’s left of three days,” she said.
“No,” Moon said. “I want to get started tonight. Get out of here in the wee hours of morning. When all the bad guys are getting their sleep.”
Osa said nothing to that for a long time. She looked down at her hands, then up at him. She was facing the west, toward where the remnants of broken clouds still reflected a little of the twilight. Beyond her in the clearing skies over the skeletons of the murdered trees along the creek, the moon was rising. Almost full. The moonlight touched her hair and the twilight her face, and Moon realized for the first time just how much he liked to look at this woman. Unless he was very, very lucky, this would be the last time he’d see her.
BANGKOK, Thailand, April 29 (Agence France-Presse)-An estimated 80 South Vietnamese aircraft streamed into U Taphao airport today carrying at least 2,000 refugees fleeing their country. As night fell the landings continued.
A Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman said no permission had been granted for the landings. He said the refugees would be “deported” and that the aircraft-all provided to South Vietnam by the United States-would be “turned over to the new government of South Vietnam.”
The Twentieth Day
BY THE TIME MOON HAD LOST THE BIG argument, gotten the APC in gear, and rolled it out of the gate of the Nung enclave, he had sorted out what he needed to worry about in chronological order.
Concentrate on the worries. Forget the argument. It had been lost, actually, when Mr. Lee had insisted, adamantly, that he must go along because only he could identify the ancestral bones with any certainty. The territory along the Vietnam-Cambodian border was populated with various Taoist sects. Ancestral shrines were everywhere. With the current Khmer Rouge upheaval and with the destruction of such shrines an important part of Pol Pot’s Zero Year program, bone urns might be found anywhere. Enshrining the wrong ones for his own family would cause dangers and misfortunes beyond comprehension.
This ancestral reverence and its importance to family fortunes was beyond Moon’s comprehension, but it was clear enough that Lum Lee was going along unless hell froze over or Moon prevented it by force. Which wasn’t Moon’s style.
How about Nguyen Nung, for whom Moon found himself illogically feeling responsible? After Lee had explained the situation to him, Nguyen knew he absolutely did not want to be left behind. He was certain the Vietcong would come before the time came to meet
That left Osa. True, Osa had insisted she could run the river patrol boat out to the South China Sea with no help from anyone. Moon didn’t believe it. And now that she wanted to go along, she had decided she would certainly get lost. Which meant there was no way to leave Osa, even if Osa was willing to be left, which she emphatically wasn’t.
“I am going with you,” Osa had said grimly. “if you won’t take me with you, then I go alone. I walk. I came this far to get my brother. I don’t stop now.” Osa was glaring at him as she finished this statement, a trace of angry tears in her eyes. No use reminding her that just an hour ago she was assuring him that her brother certainly was already dead. No use thinking about it either. Think about the next problem, not the last one.
First came the Vietcong. They would be controlling the territory he had to cross on the first part of this journey, if they spotted a stray APC, what would they think of it? Would they assume it had been abandoned by the Yellow Tiger Battalion and was now in the friendly custody of some of their own? Possibly. if they didn’t and had only small arms, it was no problem. The APC had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour and could outrun them. But if the VC had rocket launchers, the game was over. The hardened aluminum of the APC would stop bullets and deflect shrapnel. The bigger stuff would punch right through it.
Moon had attempted to improve their odds by attaching one of Mr. Lee’s two Vietcong flags to one of the APC’s two radio antennas. Mr. Lee had discovered several of the flags with an assortment of other abandoned souvenirs in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He’d loaded them in, along with conical straw hats and assorted peasant attire, all far too small for Moon himself.
Moon had also gone hunting through the office and Ricky’s bedroom. The only useful thing he’d found was a drawer full of maps. Among them were U.S. Army artillery charts of Vietnam’s various military districts and just about everywhere else that the military felt might need attention. He extracted ones covering the delta provinces of Vietnam and the south end of Cambodia. Like the APC itself, such maps were familiar territory for ex-Sergeant Moon Mathias. They gave him a feeling of knowing what the hell he was doing. An illusion, he realized, but comforting.
When (and if) they neared Can Tho, worry number two kicked in. It became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as well as the VC. if the sound of battle, or anything else, suggested that the Yellow Tiger Battalion still held the town or its crucial bridge, then the flag would be tucked away. Moon intended to skirt far east of Can Tho toward the coast of the Gulf of Siam. But if the Tigers were winning, which seemed unlikely, ARTN soldiers might well be patrolling in that direction. On the other hand, if the regiment had been smashed, the territory would be aswarm with ARVN deserters. Would they be dangerous? From the radio reports they’d been picking up from transmitters in Thailand, Laos, and God knew where else, deserters from the collapsing divisions around Saigon had been causing bloody chaos. One report said panicking Vietnamese marines had seized a ship in Saigon’s harbor, forced civilian passengers off, and sailed away. Another relayed U.S. Navy reports of commandeered helicopters crashing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. In Saigon and the few other cities still under government control, there was widespread panic, looting, and shooting.
The third and worst worry would come with the Cambodian border: the Khmer Rouge.
Nguyen Nung’s foot tapped him on the shoulder.
Moon looked around and up. Nguyen stood on the pedestal seat under the machine gun mount, his upper body out the hatch, visible to Moon only from his bandaged rib cage downward. His right
hand came down, giving the old-as-the-Romans combat signal for be quiet and take cover.
Moon cut the engine.
“What?”
Nguyen was leaning down through the hatch, looking frightened and saying something Moon couldn’t understand.
“Nguyen says he sees light coming up behind us.” Mr. Lee said. “It is moving the same direction we are going. He thinks several vehicles.”
Tanks, Moon thought. ARVN Sheridans or NVA Russian models. One would be about as bad as the other.
The driver’s compartment of the APC was not designed for either comfort or visibility. Peering through the dirty bulletproof glass of the viewing slots directly in front of his face, he could see a rice paddy lit vaguely by misty
