Koko

shoulder here, a vast thigh there.

Then he knew that he and the killer too were a part of the river’s great rushing body, and a terrible mingling of pain and joy, deep deep joy and pain, spread through him and spoke in their loud joined voice, and he cried out and woke up with the river in his eyes.

The river was gone. “Hey, Mikey,” Conor said, smiling almost shyly at him.

And then he only knew that he knew Koko’s identity. Then the feeling of knowing went too, and he remembered only that he had dreamed of looking at a great river and driving a car past Robbie, named Babar, who held up a lantern.

Into the darkness.

“You okay, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole nodded.

“You made a noise.”

“Noise, nothing,” Underhill said. “You practically sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

Poole rubbed the stubble on his face. The screen had been folded back up into the bulkhead, and most of the cabin was dark. “I thought I understood something about Koko, but it went away as soon as I woke up.”

Conor uttered a wordless exclamation full of recognition.

“Those things happen to you?” Underhill asked Conor.

“I can’t really talk about it—I thought I understood something too,” Conor half-mumbled. “It was real strange.” He tilted his head and looked at Underhill. “You were at that place, weren’t you? Where they shot the girl?”

“Sometimes I think I must have an evil twin,” Underhill said. “Like the man in the iron mask.”

They fell silent, and the lost understanding stirred within Michael once again. It was as if his son’s lantern shone its light on the events in that village fifteen years ago: he saw a long hillside leading down to a circle of hootches, a woman carrying water downhill, oxen grazing. Smoke rose in a narrow grey column. Into the darkness, there it is.

1

Dengler’s arm was wrapped in gauze and tape, and his face was white and his eyes blurry. He said he didn’t feel anything, and he refused to lie down and wait for them to come back for him. Ia Thuc was supposed to be where Elvis the sniper came from, it was supposed to be the village that sheltered and fed him, and Dengler wanted to be with the platoon when they got there. Lieutenant Beevers had been leading search-and-avoid missions since Dragon Valley, playing it very cool, and Ia Thuc was his chance to shine. Intelligence said that it was a stockpile for food and weapons, and the Tin Man was eager to make a good haul, boost the body count, move himself a little further up along the way to full colonel. The Tin Man was always eager to make a good body count, because only half the lieutenant colonels in Nam ever got promoted, and after making every cut along the way he did not intend to flunk this one. The Tin Man saw himself as a future division commander, two stars. He was desperate to move out of middle management before the war dried up on him.

Did Lieutenant Beevers know this? You bet your ass the lieutenant knew it.

The woman was running down the hillside as they came out of the trees. The water splashed out of the pails at the ends of her yoke each time her feet hit the ground, but she had made a computation—the pails would still be better than half full when she got to the village. Poole did not know why she was running. Running was a serious error.

“Waste her before she gets to the village,” Beevers said.

“Lieutenant—” Poole said.

“Waste her,” Beevers said.

Spitalny was already aiming, and Poole saw him smile against the stock of his rifle. Behind them, just coming out of the trees, a few men watched it happen: the woman racing downhill, Spitalny with his weapon to his shoulder.

“Don’t lead her much, Spit,” someone said. It was a joke. Spitalny was a joke.

He fired, and the girl lifted up and skimmed along for a yard or two before collapsing and rolling down the hill.

When Poole walked past the girl’s body he remembered the card called “Nine Rule,” which he had been given along with another called “The Enemy in Your Hands” when he had been processed into his unit. “Nine Rule” said of the VC: You can defeat them at every turn by the strength, understanding, and generosity you display with the people.

The third of the nine rules was: Treat women with politeness and respect.

And the fourth was: Make personal friends among the soldiers and the common people.

Oh, it got funnier and funnier. Rule five was: Always give the Vietnamese the right of way.

Down in that village, he thought, they were going to make some personal friends. Dengler stumbled along, making a visible effort to look as if he were not exhausted and in pain. Peters had given him a shot, “a cool one,” he said, enough to keep him moving since he refused to be left behind. The sniper was still back in the jungle behind them, and the platoon was strung out, checking both directions, ready to blast at anything they saw move back in the jungle.

“Peters, are you sure that Dengler is gonna make this?” Poole asked.

“M.O. Dengler could walk from here to Hanoi,” Peters said.

“But could he walk back?” Poole asked.

“I’m okay,” Dengler said. “Let’s check out this village. Let’s grab those maps. Let’s raid that rice. Let’s orient those armaments. Let’s put the whole damn place in an evidential killing box.”

Beevers’ platoon had successfully taken part in a killing box the week before, when one of the Tin Man’s reports of North Vietnamese troop movements had turned out to be accurate. A company-sized detachment was reported to be moving down a trail called Striker Tiger, and the captain sent out platoons Alpha and Bravo to position themselves on Striker Tiger in advance of the detachment to eliminate it. They had arranged themselves above Striker Tiger, which was a trail about a yard wide through thick wooded jungle, so that all in all they had a mostly unobstructed view of maybe thirty feet of the trail. They held their weapons sighted down on the open stretch of Striker Tiger and waited.

For once, a prearranged concept worked the way it was supposed to. One lone NVR soldier, a lean, worn- looking man who appeared to be in his early thirties, strolled into the killing box. Poole nearly fell out of the tree. The NVR simply kept mooching along. Behind him, loosely bunched, followed what looked to Poole like fifty or sixty men. They too were not boy soldiers—they were real ones. They made about as much noise as a pack of grazing deer. Poole wanted very much to kill them all. For an instant, every soldier on the road was visible to Poole. A bird yammered above them in a harsh feminine voice, and the lead man looked upward with an expression for a moment almost wistful. Then everybody in the trees and up above the trail on the slope began firing at once, and the air was obliterated, rent to shreds, destroyed, and the men on Striker Tiger flopped and jittered and spun and shuddered. Then there was a total silence. The trail glistened with a bright, brilliant red.

When they had counted the bodies, they learned that they had killed thirty-two men. By counting separate arms, legs, heads, and weapons, they were able to report a total body count of one hundred and five.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers loved the killing box.

“What that boy say?” asked Spanky Burrage.

Beevers looked at Dengler as if he expected mockery. Evidential, he would have thought, was more his vocabulary than any grunt’s. Beevers was tensed up, and Poole saw how close to the edge he was already. Poole saw only trouble in the new Beevers. Triumph had made him lose his grip—a few days ago he had said something about his days at Harvard, a college Poole was certain Beevers had never seen, much less attended.