“Koob,” Donovan said. “Have you seen VC around here? Or Pathet?”
“No Pathet here,” Koob answered. “VC, yes. Some.”
“Do they have a camp around here?”
“No camp. They just pass by.”
“Okay. Everybody stay sharp.”
He resumed his conversation with Lincoln. “It’s worse in the bush, but even here, it’s dangerous. The VC are so good at camouflage, even if you’re looking for the fuckers—even if you know they’re there—you can be standing two goddamn feet from them, looking right at them, and not even see them. They blend in, and they can stand so still they’re just part of the scenery. Like I said, it’s harder here, where there aren’t as many trees and the grass is shorter. But even so, they could be down in a hole or trench, and unless you fell in, you wouldn’t even see it.”
“Or unless they shot you,” Lincoln suggested.
“Or that. Still, I’d rather go up against a hundred VC than thirty NVA. Those guys are real soldiers. They’ve got fire discipline. They know their tactics. They follow orders. And they don’t mind dying if they have to, but you can be damn sure they’ll take some folks to hell with ’em when they go. I wouldn’t count out the Pathet Lao, either—they’ve got some tough motherfuckers in that army.”
Lincoln didn’t really understand what the agent was driving at. He’d been exposed to NVA tactics before he even left the States, and again after he’d arrived in Vietnam. He’d seen plenty of combat. At Special Warfare School, he’d been trained in guerilla tactics, which included comprehensive analysis of North Vietnamese and VC combat styles.
“I’ve been in-country for a while now,” Lincoln reminded him. “I’ve seen my share of action.”
“I’m just saying, it’ll be different here. You won’t have a squad with you, much less a platoon. It’ll be you and some half-naked tribesmen, and they’re going to be looking to you for leadership.”
There it is, Lincoln thought. That’s the difference. In Vietnam, he had been a grunt, a soldier taking orders from officers—some of whom had more experience—or NCOs, all of whom did. He’d had to make decisions under fire, and some of those decisions had paid off. He hadn’t been killed yet, so that was something.
But he hadn’t had the responsibility for large numbers of men. And he certainly hadn’t been responsible for taking and holding huge swaths of territory. The Agency didn’t expect him and the men of Vang Khom to secure the entire Plain of Jars, but they did want this sector of it, including a crucial crossroads, to be won.
“You wouldn’t have put me here if you didn’t think I could do it,” he said.
Donovan tossed him a quick grin. “That’s right. I’m just reminding you that it’s not gonna be a goddamn picnic. You’ll earn your keep, Lincoln. And then some.”
Cautiously, they climbed up a hill. Nearing the top, they crouched, then flattened themselves at the summit to look out over the territory below without being silhouetted against the sky.
And there were the jars.
Lincoln hadn’t been sure what to expect, but the sight exceeded any expectations he could have had. There were hundreds of them, it seemed. It was hard to get a sense of scale from here, but they looked huge. He had thought they would be knee-high, maybe, but these clearly dwarfed that. They were thick-walled, formed from some dark stone. Most were open at the top, but some had discs over them that could only be lids.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said.
“I know,” Donovan said. “I’ve seen them half a dozen times. It never fails to blow my mind.”
“All clear,” Koob announced. “No Pathet, no VC.”
“You want a closer look?” Donovan asked.
“Hell yes. I’m not even sure what I’m lookin’ at.”
Donovan stood and motioned the others up. The agent lit another cigarette as he started down the slope toward the jars. “Nobody is,” he said. “Scholars aren’t certain who made them. They’re estimated to be a couple thousand years old, maybe made by some indigenous people who lived here for a while, then moved on. I’ve poked around in a few, found bones and teeth—”
“Human ones?” Lincoln asked.
“Yeah. Some nonhuman, too. A rat falls inside one, it might have a hard time getting out. Sometimes birds fall in and die. Mostly there’s rank water and spider webs, but every now and then you’ll find most of a human skeleton. Others have human figurines inside, mostly shattered now, but some are whole.”
As they drew closer, the ground dipped, then rose again, so they were walking up a gentle incline toward the first of the jars. Some were as tall as Lincoln, others shorter, but still four or five feet tall. Stone discs had fallen off many and lay crumbling on the ground, returning to the earth.
“So they’d toss someone in and cover them up?” he asked.
“Basically,” Donovan replied. “Some people in Southeast Asia believe that after death, the soul moves through stages on its way to the afterlife. If those people were related to the ones who did this, it’s thought that they might have put a body in one jar, let it decompose a bit, then moved it to another one for the next stage, and so on.”
“That would mean a lot of lifting those lids off and putting them back on.”
“Yeah. And they weigh a couple hundred pounds each. Whoever did this—and however they pulled it off—it wasn’t something they did on the spur of the moment. It took hundreds of years, probably, and a lot of effort. Not something your present-day Laotian pansies could pull off.”
Lincoln walked among the massive urns, speechless. He couldn’t imagine the thinking that had gone into building them. And then, having done all that work, just walking away from it.
“There are other patches around the plain just like this,” Donovan said. “Some have a few more jars, others less, but basically the same.”
Koob said something in Hmong, and the other men broke into laughter. “What was that, Koob?” Donovan asked.
“These were not for the dead,” Koob replied. “These were made to brew rice wine, for giants. Some people got drunk and fell inside.”
“That’s another theory,” Donovan admitted. “I’m not so sure I buy that one.”
Lincoln pressed his palms against the rough upper edge of one jar and hoisted himself up. In the late-morning sun, he could see nearly all the way to the bottom. Mostly it looked carpeted with wet leaves and the spider webs Donovan had mentioned.
But underneath that layer of leaves? Who knew? He could go in, dig around, but it would take years to check every jar, so why start?
The world was full of mysteries that would never be explained. New Bordeaux had its share, with its heritage of voodoo and piracy, its depthless swamps, its narrow alleys and old buildings.
This place, though, was unworldly on a whole different level. In New Bordeaux, at least, the history was mostly known, even if the bodies were never found. The Plain of Jars, with its origins lost in the mists of time, was something else entirely.
He was creeped out and fascinated at the same time.
As he lowered himself from the jar, he heard one of the Hmong men make a clicking sound with his tongue. An instant later, Donovan said, “Lincoln! Pathet!”
Lincoln dropped to the ground and scooped up his AR-30.
Donovan scrambled to his side. Crouching behind the jar, he jerked a thumb toward the northeast. “There’s a road over there. Not much of one, but it stays drier than the main road during the rainy season. Sometimes it gets used when people want to avoid the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
Lincoln moved around the jar until he could see the road Donovan described. Sure enough, a couple dozen men in khaki uniforms and soft Mao hats walked up the road in a loose line, keeping enough distance from one another to make them hard targets. Most of them wore rubber sandals on their feet; Lincoln had heard that they made them from old tires.
He scooted back to Donovan. “Should we engage?”
“And get our asses handed to us?” Donovan
asked. “We’ve got seven guys, four of whom have bows and arrows or spears. Two guns—”
“Three,” Lincoln corrected. “Thong has his Enfield or whatever that is.”
“His name’s Thoj,” Donovan said. “And it’s a Lebel, from 1890 or some damn time. Ten-round magazine, but we’d be lucky if he has five rounds in it. It’s not useless, but it’s damn close. Look, Lincoln, you’ll get your chance to take these guys on, but today’s not that day. Unless they see us, we’re not engaging.”
“So we just hide up here and hope they pass us by?”
“We could hide inside the jars, but they’d see us getting in. You’ve heard about shooting fish in a barrel?”
Lincoln could see that the agent was right. He took another peek and determined that the Pathet men were much better armed, in addition to outnumbering them by more than four to one.
He was heartened, though, that they were just walking down the road, in plain sight, instead of somehow melting into the background. They were alert, and their column was tactically sound, but they could be easily seen. That meant they considered this area safe territory.
“Not safe for long,” Lincoln promised in a whisper. “Not for too damn long.”
20
* * *
The trek back to Vang Khom, uphill in the afternoon heat, was much more wearying than the downhill morning stroll. As they hiked, Lincoln tried to talk to Koob, to get his take on the villagers, their needs, and their capabilities.
“How many of you speak English?” Lincoln asked.
“Six, maybe seven,” Koob replied. “More speak French. Eleven or twelve.” He laughed and added, “We are not all barbarians, you know.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Lincoln lied. From everything Donovan had told him, he had expected to find a tribe not far removed from the days of the cavemen. His first impressions hadn’t done much to change that expectation. “Donovan said the village’s most important need was plumbing, to control the water supply for health reasons, and to provide irrigation for your crops. Maybe he’s right, but the way I see it, you’re the ones who live here. What do you think you need the most?”
Koob was silent for a while, but Lincoln could see that his lips were pressed together, his brow wrinkled. Either he was thinking it over, or he was trying to understand what the hell Lincoln was saying. He wasn’t used to speaking English to non–English speakers, and he wasn’t sure how clear he had been.
For that matter, he wasn’t used to thinking like a social worker. For most of his life, he would have been trying to figure out a score, a way he could make some money off these people. But they didn’t have any of that, so racking his brain in that direction was pointless.
“A school,” Koob said after a while.
Lincoln wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. “School?”
“Yes, school. Teach the young ones about the world. We are not barbarians, but we are not educated.”
“Look, I might not know much about plumbing, but I can put a couple of pipes together. I don’t know the first thing about runnin’ a school. My best subject was playin’ hooky.”
Koob gave him a blank face. That one had gone completely over the man’s head, and it wasn’t worth trying to explain, so Lincoln let it go.
Then Donovan ambled up beside them. “Did I hear something about a school?”
“Koob thinks the village needs one,” Lincoln said.
“Yes,” Koob agreed. “We need a school.”
“That’s a great idea,” Donovan said.
Lincoln shot him a glare. He was trying to think of ways to talk Koob out of it, and now the agent was encouraging the man. “Like I was saying, I don’t know anything about how to start a school, how to run one. We got no buildings, no bells, no hot lunches—”
“You’re talking about a school system,” Donovan said, cutting him off midstream. “They don’t need any of that shit. They can meet anywhere. What they need is a teacher.”
“Oh, great,” Lincoln said, guessing Donovan would try to volunteer him for that role.
Donovan ignored him. “Koob, who’s the smartest person in the village? The most educated?”
“My father is smart,” Koob said. “But not educated.”
“And he’s a grumpy old fart,” Donovan said. “Someone the kids would listen to, not be scared away by.”
“Ahh,” Koob said. “Shoua Na!”
“What’s that mean?” Lincoln asked.
“Shoua Na is a person?” Donovan said. “I don’t think I know him.”
“She is a girl,” Koob replied. “Her mother worked at a French plantation. Shoua Na was born there, went to school with French children.”
“A girl?” Lincoln repeated. “How old is she?”
“Maybe eighteen, maybe twenty years.”
“That sounds perfect,” Donovan said. “How long has she been back in the village?”
“Two years. No, three. Three monsoons.”
“Does she speak English?” Lincoln asked.
“English and French,” Koob said.
“I guess we’ll have to talk to her when we get back.” Lincoln looked up the mountain. They’d made it only halfway to the top, and the day was getting hotter as they climbed. “If we get back.”
• • •
Shoua Na was stunning.
They found her at the creek, skinning a feral pig. She had one hand inside the thing with a knife, slashing the tendons that held the skin to muscle. Both slender arms were slicked with blood up to the elbows, and there were splashes on her forehead, cheeks, and chest. She wore a short, pleated skirt and a wraparound bodice on top.
Somehow, none of that mattered to Lincoln.
There was something about her that separated her from the other village girls. He had noticed her earlier, but she’d been just one of the crowd, and he had been too busy trying to figure out who was who, and what his place in all this would be, to do more than that. Now, looking down at her working, he realized what the differences were.
Her skin tone was a little lighter than the average Hmong’s and her hair maybe a shade lighter, with reddish highlights accentuated by the sun. Her cheekbones were higher and more pronounced; her figure more voluptuous; and her eyes were brown like theirs, but just the tiniest bit rounder. He guessed her mother had done more than work at a French plantation. If not through her mother, then there was some non-Hmong influence elsewhere in her lineage.
At a glance, she looked like the other young women of the tribe. Up close, though, she was just unique enough to stand out. Lincoln realized he was staring and quickly shifted his gaze to the pig.
As he usually did, Donovan took the conversational lead. “You’re Shoua Na?” he asked in English.
She glanced down at the animal, then back at him, a little shyly. “Yes.”
“And you speak English and French?”
“A little,” she said.
“You’ve been to school? At a plantation, Koob said?”
“Yes.”
“Can you read and write?”
“A little, in French. Not so much English. As Hmong we write our stories on fabric, with”—she paused as she grasped for the word, then brightened when she remembered it—“with embroidery.”
“Shoua Na is a lovely name. What does it mean?”
She scrunched up her forehead and considered. “In English, it is ‘sound of rain.’ ”
“I’m John Donovan. In English, that means ‘sound of gunfire.’ And this is Lincoln Clay.”
“I know,” she said. She flashed a smile then, and it changed her whole face. Lincoln thought she actually sparkled a little. “Everyone talks about you.”
“I guess it is noteworthy for us to be here. You know Kaus invited us, right?”
“Yes.” She finished what she was doing under the pig’s skin and brought out her bloody hand and knife, then started to peel the flesh away. “You will help us fight the Pathet Lao.”
“And the VC.”
“They fucking abandoned you,” Donovan said. “Americans don’t do that. When someone helps us, we help them.”
“Good.”
“Shoua Na, Koob said the village needs a school. We can help with that—I can get books sent here, pencils and paper to teach writing, whatever you need. But a school needs a teacher, and that’s something we can’t provide. Koob said you were the best choice for that.”
She looked down at her work again, and Lincoln saw a flush around her neck and collarbone. “No, I cannot,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I am just a girl.”
“You’re a lovely, intelligent, educated woman,” Donovan countered. “You have more education than most of the people in the village, especially the children. Surely you could share what you’ve learned.”
“Well . . . ,” she began, then trailed off.
“Say you’ll do it,” Lincoln urged. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“You will?”
“I’m only here for a few days,” Donovan told her. “But Lincoln’s here to stay.”
“For a while,” Lincoln amended.
“Until the job is done,” Donovan said.
“If you will help, Lincoln, then I will be the teacher.”
“That would be great, Shoua Na.” Lincoln garbled her name, and it came out sounding more like “Sho Nuff.” With a chuckle, he said, “Maybe I can just call you Sho?”
“Sho,” she repeated slowly, as if trying it on for size. “Sho. Yes, I like that. I will be Sho, the teacher.”
Lincoln put a hand on the CIA agent’s shoulder. “Okay, I got that part done, John,” he said. “Now it’s your turn. You better get busy diggin’ some wells.”
21
* * *
The next few days passed quicker than Lincoln had expected.
He and some of the men—under Donovan’s supervision, if not with much of his participation—dug a well at the northern end of the village. They had to go deeper than either of them guessed, but Donovan insisted that because there was a spring feeding the little creek, there must be a water table somewhere. Eventually, they found it. They would need a pump to raise it to the surface and a network of pipes to bring it into the village and to the fields outside it, but it was progress just the same. Donovan radioed in a requisition for the necessary parts but could get no confirmation of when they might arrive.
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