nocturnal encounters. He still wore his white stone talisman on a string of plaited hair around his neck but it was starting to feel more like an ornament than a force field against the malevolent
He abandoned his search for relics he knew for certain they’d never find, and went in search of Inspector Phosy. After a brief consultation they walked together over the ridge to Ban Hoong where everyone seemed to be going about their business. Rice huskers husked, grain pounders pounded, and chicken pluckers plucked in their time-frozen warp. The headman’s son was still sitting in the middle of the central square with his collection of insects. He currently had three in active service buzzing around his hat at the end of their tethers. The peak of the cap provided a perfect landing platform. While Siri and Ugly stood watching him with the same fascinated expressions on their weathered faces, Phosy gathered together the village elders for an impromptu meeting.
“We’re working at the place you led us to,” Phosy told them. “We were wondering whether anyone in the village has ever come across wreckage from the crash there.”
The elders huddled and Phosy sat on the bench provided for them. The answer was no.
“Then, apart from the tailplane falling through your roof, you have no other physical evidence that the craft came down where your sorceress said it did,” Phosy continued.
The answer was no.
“How old was your sorceress?”
“Ninety-two,” came the reply.
“And she was in control of her faculties?”
“No, she was as mad as a loon,” came the reply.
“And what did this mad old woman say when everyone awoke in the morning?”
“Nothing,” came the reply. “She was unconscious after hitting her head on a branch. She didn’t wake up for three days.”
“And when she came round, what did she say then?”
“She said the sky dragon had crashed into the moon and sent it bursting into the jungle to the east.”
“And she was certain of the location?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice the charred jungle and the smell of smoke when you passed in that direction?”
“No,” they said.
“And you didn’t think that was odd?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t question her word?”
“She’d been our sorceress for sixty years. She’d birthed many of us. It would have been disrespectful to doubt her word. She’d never once lied to us.”
Siri wandered into the meeting hut. He and Phosy consulted.
“Did she develop any peculiar conditions in her later life?” Phosy asked them. “Anything you noticed that was unlike her?”
They huddled again.
“There was one thing,” they said.
The teams were gathering their equipment and preparing for the hike back to the trucks when Siri and Phosy marched jauntily out of the jungle.
“Of course you can both afford to be smiling,” said Judge Haeng. “We’re all here digging and scratching like peasants while you two run off into the woods together. Don’t think we didn’t notice. If you don’t want your per diem docked you’d better have a good excuse.”
“Would it help that we’ve found the real helicopter crash site?” Siri asked.
“Where?” said Madame Daeng.
“How?” asked Civilai.
Peach passed on the news to the Americans and they gathered around. Phosy told of the ninety-two-year-old sorceress who’d pointed to the crash site and the fact that in her twilight years she’d started to confuse words, particularly opposites. She would say no but mean yes. Say left but mean right.
“It’s a condition called Gerstmann syndrome,” Siri told them. “It’s particularly pronounced when talking about directions. The speaker isn’t confused. She honestly sees a mirror image of an event taking place in a different location. In this case it appears she saw the moon explode in the east. She’d watched the helicopter crash and seen the trees burst into flames. When she came out of her coma she was convinced the event took place right here but in fact it all happened to the west of the village. We went to look in the opposite direction and found the site just two kilometers away.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” said Haeng. “Two kilometers from the village and nobody there noticed it?”
“What the villagers found there was a large area burned to a crisp. They assumed it was set alight by one of the fleeing Hmong groups to prepare the land for planting. That wouldn’t have been at all surprising in this region, given the number of villages that have been forcibly re located. There are burnt out areas all through these hills. And this doesn’t look like a crash site. There was no obvious debris-just a black, treeless patch of earth. The villagers are afraid of the place. It’s been ten years since the crash but nothing grows there. They call it the dead man’s field.”
After the translation Sergeant Johnson spoke excitedly to the interpreter.
“That would suggest the explosion was fierce and the resulting fire gave off excessive heat,” said Peach. “If that was so, the helicopter must have been carrying something volatile, probably a high explosive. A normal helicopter crash wouldn’t have caused so much devastation. The sergeant wants to know if there was a crater.”
“There’s a pond,” said Siri. “A large pond with no pond life at all. We wondered whether it could have been a crater. The odd thing is that it’s right at the front edge of the clearing. You’d expect a crater to be at the center.”
“But how can you be so certain it was the helicopter crash site?” Judge Haeng asked.
“Something went down there,” said Siri, upending his cloth shoulder bag and emptying a small mound of objects onto the ground. Everyone gathered around. “We were only there for half an hour but we found these.”
In the pile they recognized a petrol cap, melted but in one piece, various bolts and screws all slightly deformed, and what could have once been the trigger of a pistol. The largest sliver of metal was no bigger than a thumb. There was nothing to identify helicopter H32 but the discovery certainly buoyed the mood of the searchers. Were it not for the thickening of the air and the murkiness of the late afternoon, they would gladly have headed to the dead man’s field right then. But as they walked back to the trucks they talked excitedly of plans for the following day.
The porter who had been caught in the morning blast was bruised but had made a remarkable recovery. He told them it wasn’t the first time he’d been blown up and probably wouldn’t be the last. Judge Haeng had insisted Madame Daeng apologize for her practical joke and assure all the porters that there was no such thing as a drop adder. Even so, they walked with their eyes pointed heavenward for the entire journey and were relieved to reach the trucks. The drivers were woken up and the convoy headed back to Phonsavan along the rough dirt tracks.
Siri and Phosy had arranged to sit on the flat bed of one of the vehicles with Major Potter. He had been uncharacteristically quiet for much of the day. Auntie Bpoo served as translator. To the major’s surprise, and subsequent delight, the transvestite not only translated his words using a fair impersonation of his voice, but also mimicked his mannerisms. The show obviously improved the old soldier’s mood. Siri and Phosy asked what exactly had caused the explosion that morning.
“I’ve been trying to work that out all day,” said Bpoo as Potter. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is there any way you might have accidently armed the dynamite when you were … tired last night?” Siri asked.
“I’d have to be more than tired to do a damned fool thing like that,” the major said. “I could be knock-down drunk and still I’d have respect for the tools of my trade. Any of you guys work with dynamite before?”
Phosy had. He knew that unarmed dynamite was unlikely to explode from a small knock unless it was old and
