Finding Moon

The Twentieth Day

BY THE TIME MOON HAD LOST THE BIG argument, gotten the APC in gear, and rolled it out of the gate of the Nung enclave, he had sorted out what he needed to worry about in chronological order.

Concentrate on the worries. Forget the argument. It had been lost, actually, when Mr. Lee had insisted, adamantly, that he must go along because only he could identify the ancestral bones with any certainty. The territory along the Vietnam-Cambodian border was populated with various Taoist sects. Ancestral shrines were everywhere. With the current Khmer Rouge upheaval and with the destruction of such shrines an important part of Pol Pot’s Zero Year program, bone urns might be found anywhere. Enshrining the wrong ones for his own family would cause dangers and misfortunes beyond comprehension.

This ancestral reverence and its importance to family fortunes was beyond Moon’s comprehension, but it was clear enough that Lum Lee was going along unless hell froze over or Moon prevented it by force. Which wasn’t Moon’s style.

How about Nguyen Nung, for whom Moon found himself illogically feeling responsible? After Lee had explained the situation to him, Nguyen knew he absolutely did not want to be left behind. He was certain the Vietcong would come before the time came to meet Glory of the Sea. Wherever the Americans went, Nguyen was going.

That left Osa. True, Osa had insisted she could run the river patrol boat out to the South China Sea with no help from anyone. Moon didn’t believe it. And now that she wanted to go along, she had decided she would certainly get lost. Which meant there was no way to leave Osa, even if Osa was willing to be left, which she emphatically wasn’t.

“I am going with you,” Osa had said grimly. “if you won’t take me with you, then I go alone. I walk. I came this far to get my brother. I don’t stop now.” Osa was glaring at him as she finished this statement, a trace of angry tears in her eyes. No use reminding her that just an hour ago she was assuring him that her brother certainly was already dead. No use thinking about it either. Think about the next problem, not the last one.

First came the Vietcong. They would be controlling the territory he had to cross on the first part of this journey, if they spotted a stray APC, what would they think of it? Would they assume it had been abandoned by the Yellow Tiger Battalion and was now in the friendly custody of some of their own? Possibly. if they didn’t and had only small arms, it was no problem. The APC had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour and could outrun them. But if the VC had rocket launchers, the game was over. The hardened aluminum of the APC would stop bullets and deflect shrapnel. The bigger stuff would punch right through it.

Moon had attempted to improve their odds by attaching one of Mr. Lee’s two Vietcong flags to one of the APC’s two radio ante

Moon had also gone hunting through the office and Ricky’s bedroom. The only useful thing he’d found was a drawer full of maps. Among them were U.S. Army artillery charts of Vietnam’s various military districts and just about everywhere else that the military felt might need attention. He extracted ones covering the delta provinces of Vietnam and the south end of Cambodia. Like the APC itself, such maps were familiar territory for ex-Sergeant Moon Mathias. They gave him a feeling of knowing what the hell he was doing. An illusion, he realized, but comforting.

When (and if) they neared Can Tho, worry number two kicked in. It became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as well as the VC. if the sound of battle, or anything else, suggested that the Yellow Tiger Battalion still held the town or its crucial bridge, then the flag would be tucked away. Moon intended to skirt far east of Can Tho toward the coast of the Gulf of Siam. But if the Tigers were wi

The third and worst worry would come with the Cambodian border: the Khmer Rouge.

Nguyen Nung’s foot tapped him on the shoulder.

Moon looked around and up. Nguyen stood on the pedestal seat under the machine gun mount, his upper body out the hatch, visible to Moon only from his bandaged rib cage downward. His right

hand came down, giving the old-as-the-Romans combat signal for be quiet and take cover.

Moon cut the engine.

“What?”

Nguyen was leaning down through the hatch, looking frightened and saying something Moon couldn’t understand.

“Nguyen says he sees light coming up behind us.” Mr. Lee said. “It is moving the same direction we are going. He thinks several vehicles.”

Tanks, Moon thought. ARVN Sheridans or NVA Russian models. One would be about as bad as the other.

The driver’s compartment of the APC was not designed for either comfort or visibility. Peering through the dirty bulletproof glass of the viewing slots directly in front of his face, he could see a rice paddy lit vaguely by misty moonlight. Through the slot to the left he could see a line of bamboo and brush along a feeder canal. Fifty yards to his right he could see the raised embankment of the road he’d decided to abandon in fear of mines. He saw no lights. But of course they would be blackout lights-small beams aimed down lust ahead of the tracks.

Moon pushed himself up out of the driver’s seat, tapped Nguyen on the leg, motioned him down, squeezed past the engine compartment, and stepped up on the machine gu

Out of the smell of diesel oil, burned cordite, and old fish into a faint fresh breeze moving in from the southwest. if Moon’s directions were right, it came from the Gulf of Siam. Relatively fresh, but Moon’s sensitive nostrils still detected an acrid hint of fungus, the good smell of sandalwood, and a hint of decayed flesh and tropical flowers. From where he stood now, with his body protruding from the APC’s steel roof, he could see a light. Two lights. Three. Four. And these weren’t blackout lights. They were bright. The headlights of trucks, he guessed. They were moving slowly down the road toward them.

Moon dropped from the pedestal.

“Where are those-”

He didn’t finish the question. Mr. Lee was already handing him the case that held the vehicle’s night vision binoculars.

A jeep led the procession up the road, followed by three U.S. Army trucks. The jeep was flying a flag from its radio mast. It looked like a Vietcong flag. Moon sca

The vehicle crashed through the brush into the little canal that fed Mekong water into the field.

Moon shifted into neutral, cut the ignition, climbed up into the machine gu