Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

“Agent Orange,” Osa said. “I think that’s what killed everything.”

“Only We Can Prevent a Forest,” Rice said, spacing the words. “That was the slogan of the C-One-thirty guys who dropped the stuff. They’d zap the jungle so we could see, then we’d come along and zap the Cong.”

The smell of the sea was gone now. Moon’s nostrils picked up the aroma of flowers, of decayed vegetation, of rancid mud, the perfume of sandalwood and smoke. Sweat ran down from his eyebrows into the corners of his eyes.

Rice throttled down the engine. “Better be quiet now,” he said. “This one we’re in they call Cu’a Cung Loi, I think it is. Probably means ninth mouth, or something like that. Anyway, it’s the mouth furthest from Saigon. Full of Vietcong before we got ’em-”

Mr. Suhuannaphum was whispering something.

“Something’s coming,” Osa said in a low, low voice. “Can you hear It?”

Moon heard it. The sound of someone crying. A child’s wail. A tinny rattling. Hushed voices. The creak of wood on wood. The steady thumping of a heavy engine.

Rice cut the motor.

It was off somewhere to their right. Coming toward them but farther out in the channel.

“There,” Osa whispered, pointing.

A dark shape, looming above the water. And then it came out of the shadows into the moon path: a sampan, Moon guessed. It had a high round bow and a roof from which the light reflected. Probably tin, Moon thought. It moved steadily past them, loaded with whispers, with someone sobbing and someone scolding, the sounds of sorrow and despair. And then they could see only its stern, quickly disappearing again into the shadows of the mangrove trees.

“Well,” Rice said, “I wish them luck.” He restarted the motor.

“Refugees from that dreadful war,” Osa said. “Probably no place to go. They must be frightened.”

“Scared to death,” Rice said. “Ghosts are out in the dark at night. They call ’em kwei, the Hungry Ones. They’re the spirits of folks who die without any children to take care of their bones. They get out of the underworld after dark and go around causing bad luck, making people sick.”

“And us,” Osa said. “I think you should also wish us to be lucky.”

“I think we’re already being lucky,” Moon said.

About dawn they saw a flare arc into the sky, across the river and maybe a mile to the east. Two more flares rose and died away, and then there was the sudden sound of a machine gun. Moon reached out his hand, touched Osa’s arm, and she rewarded him with a strained smile. But the gunfire lasted only a few seconds. It aroused frogs and night birds and provoked challenging calls from the same sort of lizards he’d heard on Palawan Island. That, too, quickly died away.

Silence then. Only the purr of the motor, the hiss of the hull sliding through the brown water, the small clatter when Mr. Suhuannaphum shifted his feet. Moon noticed the night was fading fast. He could make out the shape of mangrove trunks, see the pattern of the current on the water surface, discern flotsam moving with the stream. Beside the bank ahead, a man-made shape loomed. It seemed to be a platform raised above the riverbank on stilts with an odd shape built on it.

Rice noticed him staring at it.

“Used to be a house,” Rice said. “The VC used it, and we flushed them out and burned it.”

The sky was reddening now in the east. A rooster crowed somewhere nearby, exuberant. And awoke another rooster. A dog barked. Something bulky was floating past, a hundred yards out in the current. Cloth. A human body too far out in the river to determine gender. And beyond it something else that looked like a floating bundle. Another body? Too far away to be sure. He glanced at Osa. She was looking inland. So was Rice.

“There’s a few rice paddies back there behind the mangroves,” Rice said. “Eight or nine hooches, best I remember. The ARVN boys thought they might be Vietcong, but then they thought everybody might be Vietcong. It’s the way they stayed alive.”

“Do you think the army will still be here?” Osa said. “They must know they’ve lost the war.”

“I don’t know,” Rice said. “They had this Yellow Tiger Battalion stationed here. Part of an airborne regiment. If they were normal ARVN, I think they’d just shoot some civilians and steal their clothes and pretend to be just plain folks. But these Tigers were tough cookies. Had a colonel named Ngo Diem. Supposed to be mean as a snake.” He chuckled. “Even the marines liked ’em, and the marines didn’t like nobody.”

From far across the river came another sound. It sounded to Moon like a truck engine starting.

“We got to stick close to the bank now,” Rice said. “Around that bend behind that bunch of palms there’s an old LST anchored. LST,” he repeated. “Landing Ship Tank. The U.S.S. Pott County. They anchored it out there and used it as a base for our river patrol boats. Then in ‘seventy-three they turned it over to the Vietnam navy.”

He looked at Moon.

“What do you think? Should we check in with the good gooks, tell ’em what we’re doing here?”

“Maybe we should,” Moon said, doubtfully. “We’re in here illegally, of course. But maybe they’d be too busy this morning to think about that. What do you think?”

“I think first we should sort of take a look and see what we can see,” Rice said. “Could be Charley’s taken the place over by now.”

They took the first look from almost a mile away. Mr. Suhuannaphum extracted a set of very large, very heavy binoculars from somewhere, steadied them against the gunwale of the shore boat, and spent a long time looking. Moon could make out nothing in the dim light except flat dark shapes far out from the distant shore. Mr. Suhuannaphum, however, occasionally muttered under his breath, or sighed, or made disapproving sounds. Finally he handed the binoculars to Rice.

“What did you see?” Moon asked him.

Mr. Suhuannaphum grinned, struggled for words, shrugged, said: “I think bang.” He threw up his hands to demonstrate. “Some fire. Nobody home.” He shrugged again and added, “Maybe so.”

Rice was more expressive but less informative. “Well, shit,” he said. He put down the glasses. “Let’s get a little closer.”

He maneuvered their boat out into the rougher current, angling upstream. Moon picked up the binoculars. First he noticed the smoke. Not much of it, but it rose from the midsection of the Pott County, and the Pott County seemed to have tilted sharply toward them. He could see the flat deck of a helicopter pad and a half dozen little boats lined against a system of docks tied to the ship. There was no sign of life.

“Sons of bitches,” Rice said. “You gotta protect those things from shore attacks. Got to have outposts out there to keep people with rocket launchers from doing that to you.”

“Is that what happened?” Moon said. “Hit with a rocket?”

“Probably half a dozen rockets, which set the sucker on fire, so the PBR crews got in their boats and headed for safety.”

Moon said, “But they’re still there.”

“Four or five,” Rice said. “Usually there’d be about thirty tied up at the docks. Probably they had a bunch of people killed in the attack. I guess they took as many as they needed.” He sighed. “Well, hell,” he said. “Let’s get a little safer,” and he turned their boat back toward the shore.

It was almost full light now, the eastern horizon bright. Upstream, Moon saw a little boat sailing along the far bank, tall mast in front, short one behind. Behind it, farther out in the current, two other boats moved downriver. Rice accelerated the engine to full speed.

“Well, here we are,” he said, and pointed to the left bank ahead. A large concrete building stood there, tile-roofed and raised on the stilts that the rise and fall of the Mekong made necessary. A wharf extended from the building into the river, and behind the building stood a row of bamboo structures roofed with tin and surrounded by a high fence surmounted with barbed wire.