Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

Nguyen Nung became more or less awake about four P.M., about thirty minutes after the rain slackened into a drizzle and gradually faded away. When Moon came in from the hangar, the clouds were breaking, there were signs of watery sunlight here and there, and Nung was sitting stiffly in Ricky’s office being cross-examined by Mr. Lee.

“He says the boat is about an hour’s walk down the river,” Mr. Lee said. “It was run up a creek and into heavy brush in a growth of mangroves. He estimates it’s about two or three hundred yards down the creek from this road we’re on.”

“What happened to the crew?” Moon asked.

Mr. Lee spoke to Nguyen. Nguyen shrugged, then produced a lengthy response.

“He doesn’t know,” Mr. Lee said. “But they came ashore in his boat, the boat he was a gunner on. He knew them. The boat commander was from Hanoi. Two of the other crewmen were also anti-Communist refugees from the north, another was from Hue, and another from near Da Nang. He guesses they would know the war is over and try to go home. The dead man was a local man. Nguyen’s family had a rice paddy in the delta. His father had been one of the headmen in the village just downstream before the Vietcong killed him and the family. And then one morning the United States napalmed the village, and the people who survived moved away.”

“What we need to know is whether the crew will come back for the boat. It doesn’t sound likely, unless they need it to get across the river.”

Lum Lee nodded. “We need to know that. And we need to know if the boat is in condition to take us out to the mouth of the Mekong. Mr. Nung remembers there was water in the bottom. They are made of fiberglass and it was hit by bullets.”

“Probably could be patched up,” Moon said.

“We also need to understand how to survive three days until it is time to go out and meet the Glory of the Sea.”

“That’s the problem,” Moon said. “We’re living on borrowed time staying here.”

“I think of Mr. Nung’s village,” Mr. Lee said. “He said he and some friends raised chickens there. Not all the buildings were burned.”

Since he had watched George Rice fly away, Moon had been kidding himself about their prospects, avoiding despair by not thinking about it. Now he felt a sudden rush of hope.

“Let’s go find out,” he said. “Can Mr. Nung travel?”

“Sure,” Nguyen Nung said, grinning a goofy morphine withdrawal grin. “‘Way we go.”

Special to the New York Times

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 28-More than 150 Communist rockets slammed into Tan Son Nhut air base in Saigon today, destroying a C-130 transport plane, killing at least two U.S. Marines and forcing suspension of evacuation flights.

IT HAD SOUNDED SIMPLE ENOUGH. “If it’s pulled up on the south side of the creek, which is where what’s-his-name said they left it, then we can’t possibly miss it,” Moon declared.

But they did miss it. The boat had been run partly up the muddy bank in a snarled tangle of dead mangroves and palms. The trees had been killed many years past by Agent Orange. The fertilizer used to make the defoliant, diluted by monsoon rains and river flooding, had soaked into the soggy earth and fed a fierce undergrowth of deformed and distorted rain-forest brush. Moon and Lum Lee had skirted this almost impenetrable maze and found nothing downstream in the area

Nguyen Nung had described. Rechecking on the way back, Moon had waded hip-deep along the stream bank. He had spotted the stern of the craft just about three seconds before he spotted a leech feeding on his flank.

The leech was less of a shock than the boat. Mr. Lee disposed of the insect by heating it with a match, causing it to withdraw from Moon’s flesh. The boat contained the corpse of one of Nguyen’s former companions. Worse, it was also half full of dirty water. Worse yet, the water seemed to have entered through a multitude of bullet holes.

“Well, shit,” Moon said. “So much for that.”

As he said it, the sound of explosions reached him. Artillery, or perhaps rockets, or perhaps tank fire. But from where? At the creek bank, engulfed in vegetation, the noise of the explosions seemed to be coming from all around them. But it was probably another attack in the battle upriver at Can Tho. Wherever it was, it reminded Moon that when one needs a boat as badly as he needed a boat, a leaky one is better than none. The APC could get him into Cambodia, providing he had a huge amount of good luck. But even though the army called it amphibious and it could splash its way across a canal or a rice paddy, it was going to take something that really floated to get this bunch back out into the South China Sea. And he wanted it ready to go now, before he left, just in case the huge amount of good luck he needed didn’t happen.

He checked. Five of the bullets had punched through the fiberglass hull well above what normally would have been the water line. Three were lower, where they really mattered. Except for one, the holes were neat, round, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter-probably made by a light machine gun or an AK-47 rifle. The exception seemed to be an exit hole, made by a bullet that had struck something hard and deflected through the bottom, leaving a tear longer than Moon’s hand.

Lum Lee stood looking at the holes. He was wet despite his conical hat. His shoulders slumped. He looked gaunt, exhausted, and discouraged.

“Well,” Moon said, “let’s see what else we can see. And what we can do about this.”

Almost immediately he saw that being shot at was nothing new for this particular PBR. In the tradition of river boatmen, a set of large staring eyes had been painted on the bow of the craft to scare away demons. The paint partly obscured round fiberglass patches used to cover a cluster of three earlier bullet holes. Moon pointed them out to Mr. Lee.

Mr. Lee merely raised his eyebrows.

“If the navy is like the army, it put stuff in this boat to fix its problems,” Moon said. It had. In a compartment beside the engine they found a flare gun, pliers, two hammers, assorted other tools, wires, bolts, a box full of first aid kits with the morphine missing, and a plastic box marked REPAIR KIT, HULL.

The body of the VNN sailor was small, light, and already stiff with rigor mortis. Moon moved it from the boat and laid it out of sight among the mangrove roots. He jammed cloth from the dead man’s shirt into the subsurface holes, bailed out the boat, and shifted enough of its heavier contents so that he could tilt the damaged section out of the water.

Then he went to work with the epoxy glue and fiberglass patching.

The sun was just setting below the breaking clouds when Moon and Mr. Lee reached the place they’d left the APC, parked out of sight in a bamboo thicket well off the road.

“You found it?” Osa said. She was standing in the hatch, slender, dark hair pulled back into some sort of bun, looking neat and tidy as if protected from the terrible humidity by some sort of invisible screen with which nature guards its few classy women from the troubles that beset usual folks.

“We did,” Moon said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Now let’s see if Nguyen Nung can show us how to find his picnicking place.”

It was no more than two or three miles away, but getting there involved turning the APC off the relatively compact surface of the road, down into the roadside ditch, and then across a series of soggy rice paddies. The U.S. Army specifications for the APC declared it to be amphibious. If Moon remembered what he’d read about it in the maintenance manual, this particular model had been designed specifically with Vietnamese marsh country and the canals of lowland Europe in mind. Therefore it should float a bit better than the one his battalion used in training. But Moon had never quite brought himself to believe it. It was just too much heavy metal, too many tons. Not that they had any choice. if it sank, it sank.