Trung Si shouldered his ancient rifle. The flute marched them through the long shadows as they walked up the sandy track to the van. Without speaking, Trin guided the van through the dunes keeping to a faint trail. He stopped twice to consult the map. The third time he stopped for good by the skeletons of abandoned houses, foundations, and one wall that framed a solitary window. “Trung Si waits here. Now we walk,” he said. “It should be up there, in the willows.”
Silently, Trung Si hobbled over to a block of cement sticking from an old foundation and sat down with his rifle. With their tools and loaded buckets Trin and Broker headed toward the slosh of breakers rolling on the beach. Except for the bang of tin on steel and the rhythm of the sea it was perfectly still.
“Are we walking on bombs?” asked Broker.
“Iron elephants,” grinned Trin. “A whole herd of them sleeping below us.”
Broker stopped and stared. Just ahead. Hundreds of raised rectangular stone markers slept in the wind- rippled dunes. The low walls of the military cemetery were irregular, slurred in the sand. The central monument was shorter, squatter than the others he’d seen. The sand and salt wind had eaten the color from the pitted stone star. It sparkled, a gritty molten ocher, in the rays of the dying sun.
He picked his way carefully through the field of stone and sand, and suddenly he stopped and cocked an ear at the vast silence. It occurred to him. He hadn’t heard a single helicopter since he’d arrived in Vietnam.
They left the boneyard behind and walked up a slight rise, ankle deep in sand. Trin stopped, studied Jimmy Tuna’s map and pointed. “There are your graves.”
Just like Jimmy said. Three old graves. Gray and embroidered with moss and big around as wrestling rings. A masonry screen blocked the entry to each tomb. Inside the walls, a simple circular cairn of rock.
“Jimmy chose well,” said Trin. Below the graves the beach tucked in a gentle sloped ravine for two hundred yards down to the waterline. The sea in front of them was quiet, shielded on either side by natural breakwaters.
You could see how it happened. The encircling arms of the cove would catch the eye from a helicopter, the inviting fold of the ravine, probably with higher walls twenty years ago. Drop the sling into the ravine, set the charges and drop several tons of sand over the load.
Pirate cove.
Broker walked around the screen and entered the center grave. Trin tossed him the compass. Broker shot his azimuth and extended his arm down the beach. “Eighty-two paces,” he said. Trin took the long-handled shovel and Broker called out adjustments as he walked it off.
Trin stopped and thrust the shovel into the sand about fifty yards from the water’s edge. He trudged back up the slope. “Now we wait for dark,” said Trin.
They sat down in the shadow of the tombs and waited. Broker opened the Thermos from his bucket and poured a cup of coffee. Trin opened his Thermos. Broker steered it under his nose. Sniffed it.
“Hot tea,” said Trin.
The desolation was deceptive. The surf breaking on either side of the cove sounded like a Superbowl crowd. He said, “Ray’s down there.”
“His bones are. They should be returned to his family.” Trin rubbed his chin and looked around. “Do you think she’ll talk?”
“She’d die first.”
“Do you love her?”
“I came here with her. And that’s crazy-”
“Love is yes or no,” said Trin.
“I’m afraid to be in love with her,” admitted Broker.
“I know what you mean. Once I bit into a chili pepper that was really hot. My wife said, ‘But not as hot as me.’”
“I thought you were divorced?”
“We are used to long struggles in Vietnam,” said Trin dramatically. “She has been very arrogant the last twenty years. But things are changing and I will come back into fashion.”
Trin’s grandiose words sounded like more folly. Broker leaned into the warm sand and sifted it through his fingers; dry damn featherbed where hundreds of unknown North Vietnamese soldiers slept with the iron elephants and stood sentinel over a cache of buried gold. Nina’s life…trickling away through his fingers.
Sunset bronzed the sand dunes one last time and boiled the blue out of the sea. Dark soon. Broker cashed in his single chip of hope.
“We have one chance,” he said. “Cyrus’s wife.”
Trin squinted. “Something you didn’t tell me?”
“She may help us. She’d like to be a rich widow.”
Trin grinned. “You have an agent in their camp.”
“Maybe. She’ll swing to whoever wins.”
“God, this is so crazy.” Trin’s face glowed in the last sputter of sunset. “I’ve wanted to do something like this all my life.”
He pulled the gold tiger tooth from his pocket and held it in both hands. Shoulders touching, they laughed and leaned forward. Down below, the long shadow of the shovel planted in the sand crept slowly toward the sea.
63
When it was dark they rubbed on mosquito repellent, picked up their tools, and walked down to the beach. Like the flute player’s march, the night was older here, blacker. Looking up, Broker did not know the stars. A steady breeze came off the sea.
Trin stamped a circle around the shovel and pulled it from the sand. A lopsided moon delineated their faces. Trin drove the shovel into the sand.
Broker hefted the mattock and gauged the ache in his taped thumb. He swung into the packed sand and grunted. He’d be all right.
Besides the sea, the only sounds were the thud of the mattock loosening the sand and the sigh of sand on steel as Trin’s shovel moved it aside. When they had made a hole six feet in diameter they both worked on their knees with the short shovels. Sweat and sand made a sodden paste of Broker’s T-shirt and their breath came in short, regular bursts. Giddy, Broker imagined a grown elephant frozen, tusks extended, in full rampant charge just below his feet. He calculated the circumference of a B-52 crater, about thirty-feet across.
“Remember how Jimmy loved booby traps?” said Broker.
“Dig,” said Trin.
After a while they passed a slippery water bottle and fell back, resting their dripping backs against the damp sand. Shoulder deep in the pit and bugs had started to find them. Trin reached up into his bucket and jammed a bundle of incense sticks into a shelf of sand. Lit them. The smoke sought them out and curled, tickling their drenched bodies, and seeped into the dark.
Broker wondered if Mama Pryce was really down there, below his feet, and if he could read smoke after twenty years.
It was getting impossible for both of them to work in the pit. Trin stayed in the hole. Broker lowered a bucket on a rope and hauled out loads of sand. The hole was now six feet deep, narrower at the bottom. Trin had hacked a place for the lantern and looked like a copper cave dweller toiling in the weak light.
Exhausted, they took a break and staggered down to the sea and fell in. Back on the beach, they sat, gobbling the rice balls Trung Si had prepared for them as they dried off. Washed them down with bottled water.
“Beach could have shifted,” said Broker. “It could be anywhere.”
“Start another hole,” said Trin.
They were getting slap-happy. But they started a second pit. It was close to midnight. They had been digging for almost four hours. An hour into the second site Trin decided to return to the first pit. Broker resumed hauling up