The fireball, Lincoln was sure, could be seen for miles. Wherever the Pathet Lao were, they’d spot it and hurry to check it out. He hustled Donovan and Corbett away from the flames before they could spread too far. “We’ve got to get off this mountain,” he said. “Double-time.”
Both men were conscious now, able to walk on their own, though Donovan remained a little unsteady on his feet. He still had a holstered .45-caliber Colt, but that was the only firearm between the three of them. Lincoln had a survival knife strapped to his ankle, with jagged teeth across the top of the blade, in a leather sheath with a sharpening stone in the pouch. Corbett, in his tattered Hawaiian shirt, was unarmed. They wouldn’t be much good if a Pathet Lao division found them.
They knew the direction in which Vang Khom lay, and their best hope—their only hope, as far as Lincoln was concerned—was reaching it before the bad guys found them. No problem—it was just down from this mountaintop, across a valley that was probably heavily traveled by Pathet Lao and VC, and up the next mountain. At 150 miles per hour, it would have taken no time at all. On foot, badly banged up, through dense jungle, it would be a marathon.
Lincoln thought about the airplane’s radio, doubtless burned beyond recognition. He thought about the guns, some of them possibly still usable, but at the bottom of a superheated bonfire. They didn’t have a map or a compass or a canteen or any food.
Their situation wasn’t hopeless, but it lived right next door to that. It was, in the immortal language of American soldiers, FUBAR—fucked up beyond all repair.
Progress was slow without a blade adequate to chop their way through the brush. In a half hour, they had gone less than a mile. Probably less than a kilometer, Lincoln thought. He could still see the smoke behind them, the flames licking at treetops. The smell of burning was everywhere, as if it were traveling with them. “On the bright side,” Corbett said after a while, “the racket probably scared away all the tigers for miles around.”
“Tigers, shit,” Lincoln said. “Thanks a lot. I’ve been over here worried about the enemy and completely forgot to worry about tigers.”
“And don’t forget the snakes,” Donovan added. “Malayan pit vipers. Banded kraits. Laos is full of the bastards.”
“That’s a big help.”
“I’m just looking out for you, buddy. It’s what I do.”
“You were lookin’ out for me, you coulda found me a pilot who didn’t crash into mountains.”
“Hey, man, that wasn’t my fault!” Corbett protested. “We were too heavy for those downdrafts.”
“You couldn’t fly a little higher over the mountains?”
“And be a target for Chinese radar? We’d be fighting off MiGs right now.”
“Really?” Lincoln asked. “The Pathet Lao can scramble Russian fighters at the drop of a hat?”
“You don’t want to know,” Donovan said. “Both of you guys, knock it the fuck off. We’re alive. We’re on our way to get help.”
“We were supposed to show up at Vang Khom looking like their saviors, with an airplane full of arms,” Lincoln said. “Not crawling in, starving and injured, with one gun between us. That’s not exactly gonna be awe-inspiring.”
“They know me,” Donovan said. “I’ll explain, don’t worry.”
“I’m tired of being told not to worry. At this point, I think some worrying is called for.”
“You worry all you want,” Corbett said. “I’m saving my breath. Man, I hate walking.”
“Can’t fly everywhere,” Lincoln said.
“Why not?”
“Man, you can’t fly anywhere! You sure you only crashed five planes? I think it’s probably more like fifty.”
“Lincoln!” Donovan snapped. “Give it a goddamn rest.”
Lincoln shut up. Donovan was right. Arguing with them wasn’t going to do anybody any good. They would have to rely on one another to survive this little excursion after all.
“Sorry,” he said. Then he was silent, focused on pushing through the brush, watching for snakes and listening for tigers.
It wasn’t a tiger he heard, though.
It was a man.
He stopped suddenly, raising one fist. Donovan caught it and froze, but Corbett stumbled into him. Lincoln shushed him.
He had distinctly heard the rustle of foliage and the snap of a branch or twig on the ground. A tiger wouldn’t be so careless. A communist might be, though.
He motioned toward the ground, and all three men lowered themselves into crouches. Donovan drew his Colt, and Lincoln silently unsnapped his knife.
More rustling ahead. It didn’t sound like a group of soldiers, though. It sounded like one man—or one careless man, walking at the head of a patrol comprising more careful ones.
Lincoln waited. A shape appeared, just a shadow on the brush. Shoot him, Lincoln thought. Donovan’s gun was aimed at him, his other hand steadying his gun hand, but he didn’t pull the trigger.
The shape came closer. Shoot him! Lincoln thought. He was almost ready to scream it when the man finally broke into view.
He probably wasn’t really more than a hundred years old, but he looked like he was close. Ninety, anyway. He wore a robe belted at the waist with a length of rope and tied at his left shoulder. Lincoln couldn’t see his feet but assumed he had on sandals of some kind. In one hand, he carried a staff, which he used to delicately part the jungle ahead of him. He was completely hairless, with furrowed skin the color of the knotty pine paneling in the dining room of the orphanage Lincoln had grown up in. When he saw the three Americans, his ancient face broke into a gap-toothed grin. He babbled something that sounded like gibberish to Lincoln, but Donovan answered in the same tongue. Soon, they were conversing back and forth like old friends.
“He’s the chief of a village somewhere nearby,” Donovan said after the exchange. “He wants us to go with him.”
“He’s Laotian?” Lincoln asked.
“He’s Hmong.”
“From Vang Khom?”
“No, we’re still too far from there. But he’s Hmong. And considering he’s not exactly a fan of the Pathet Lao, he likes us.”
“How do we know he’s not going to lead us into a trap?”
“Why would he do that? He’s on our side.”
“I’m with Clay,” Corbett said. “For all we know, he’s some kind of cannibal. Maybe he’s got a nice big cook pot simmering, just waiting for us.”
“The Hmong aren’t cannibals,” Donovan said. “He hates the fucking commies. And he says he has a radio.”
“A radio?”
“Yes!” Donovan said something else in Hmong, and the old man laughed, then made a cranking motion with one hand and held his other up to his head, as if speaking into a radio headset.
“I’ll be damned,” Corbett said. “Maybe he really does have a radio.”
“If he does, it’s left over from the French,” Donovan said. “God knows if the fucking thing works. But we have to go with him. At the very least, we can get some food. And maybe we can get help.”
Donovan and the old man exchanged a few more sentences, and then the man gestured for them to follow. Donovan holstered his gun, and Lincoln slipped his knife back into its sheath.
• • •
The village was picturesque, in its way. Carved from the jungle in a saddle just below the highest peak, it sat on the bank of a narrow river. Water buffalo cooled themselves in the river—Lincoln thought they were boulders, until one lifted its massive, horned head to shake off water—and some of the women knelt by the banks, washing clothes. Good-size huts were raised off the ground on stilts, which meant that during the wet season, the river probably overran its banks. The roofs of most overhung the walls enough to form shaded areas for cooking and other chores. Some huts had smaller, secondary ones standing nearby, which Donovan said were basically pantries or larders, for storing goods and foodstuffs.
At the sight of the old man, accompanied by the three Americans, the village’s children went berserk. Naked or nearly so, they ran in circles, around and around the newcomers, many of them holding out their hands, almost all of them jabbering something Lincoln couldn’t begin to understand.
“They’re hoping for treats or coins,” Donovan said. “They’ve heard stories of French troops coming through with their pockets full of candies and coins for the children.”
“Tell them our pockets are empty,” Lincoln said. “And if we had any coins, they’d be American money and useless here.”
Donovan tried to wave the kids away, but he kept a smile on his face and a lightness in his tone. Finally, the furor died down. Now Lincoln realized the village’s men were lined up, watching them carefully. Many carried spears, some bows and arrows. There were only a couple of rifles in evidence, and they were ancient. The women, likewise, watched from their doorways or their shaded work areas. They weren’t smiling, but they weren’t attacking, either, so that was something.
The old man spoke to a few of the younger ones. Once they had gone back and forth a couple of times, two of the younger ones ran to a hut near the edge of the village. They dashed inside and came out quickly, bearing a radio. It looked older than the rifles. Lincoln doubted that even Nilsson, the radio genius from Lang Vei, could have raised anyone on it.
The men set it down in the dirt, connected a hand-cranked, tripod-mounted generator to it, and the old man sat down beside it. One of the younger ones started to crank the generator, and as he did, the old man keyed it, trying to raise someone. Eventually, most of the other villagers wandered off to do whatever it was they did, and Lincoln, Donovan, and Corbett sat down in the shade to wait.
Finally, someone responded. Lincoln hoped it wasn’t the VC. The old man spoke in rapid-fire Hmong as he keyed the message, and Donovan translated what he could catch. “He’s in touch with someone in Vientiane, apparently. They’ll let the government know that we’re out here, and they’ll inform the American embassy.”
“So, what, we’ll be here two weeks? Three?” Lincoln asked.
Donovan shrugged. “Best we can do is the best we can do.”
“We could start walkin’ again, head for Vang Khom.”
“Makes sense to me,” Corbett added.
“Look at it this way,” Donovan said. “If he really was talking to someone in Vientiane and that person really does go to the government, and whoever he talks to goes to the embassy, then at least someone will know where we are. When Corbett doesn’t get back, they’ll know we’re missing—that’ll light a fire under their asses. They might already be looking for us. This way, just maybe they’ll find us quicker. If we take off by ourselves and try to walk to goddamn Vang Khom, the chances of running into a fucking Pathet Lao division are greater than the chances that Americans doing a flyover search will spot us. And even if we do make it to Vang Khom, we’re in the same boat as we are here, except they don’t have a fifty-year-old French radio.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Lincoln said, “I guess we could stick around for a little while.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“Did I mention I hate walking?” Corbett asked.
“Three or four hundred times is all,” Lincoln said.
“Well, it’s true.” He considered for a moment, then added, “You suppose any of these people know how to make a pie?”