by Greg Dragon
“Amazing.” Tim bounced the object in his hand and smiled. “I have a neighbor who’s about ninety years old. He’s told me stories about how his grandfather was a gunner on helicopters during the war here. This will mean a lot to him.”
Happy and inspired by Tim’s’ find, Minh drove on to a site an hour farther north. Jungle now surrounded the road instead of rice paddies. At times, the trees met over the road and formed a green canopy.
Minh engaged the Jungle Cruiser’s 6-wheel drive after she turned onto a dirt road with ruts and holes, three feet deep at times. After four kilometers of inching along in first and second gears, they came to a small clearing hacked into the jungle by machetes.
A solitary figure worked under a tent, its walls raised to allow enough circulation so he did not faint in the ninety-five degree air saturated with moisture so thick Tim thought he waded through it.
“Mr. Jorgenson, this is Tim Beheard. I believe he has some questions for you.” Introductions made, Minh returned to her jeep for a nap.
“Minh said you are recovering remains of soldiers who died last century?”
Jorgenson wiped part of the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “Yeah.” He pointed at the piles of bone fragments and teeth on his makeshift table. Two skulls grinned at the visitor. “I started out thinking I’d just find remains of Americans. But so far there’s been a lot more remains of South Vietnamese Army, Vietcong, and NVA soldiers.”
The rest of Tim’s afternoon consisted of the anthropologist describing his hopes and methods of bringing at least partial closure to the descendants of those who had been classified as Missing in Action, or Killed in Action but no body recovered.
“If the immediate family could not get closure, at least their descendants can. Better late than never,” Jorgenson said.
In three years, he had discovered 12,839 sets of remains, some in the jungle, and others in watery graves of rice paddies, rivers, or streams. Students from Vietnamese universities examined them and used computer programs to match DNA samples. Then the carefully boxed remains were delivered to descendants.
“I’d get nowhere without this.” Jorgenson patted the device that resembled a metal detector. He described how it searched for the calcium and other telltale elements of deceased humans. Its range was six feet through loose soil, twenty feet through water, and two feet through dense clay.
* * *
Dusk had thinned the mass of humanity from Ho Chi Minh City’s streets when Tim and Minh returned to meet Bud at a restaurant. More tired and dehydrated than hungry and in no mood to listen to Bud’s sales pitch about his father’s company, Tim returned to his hotel room.
Miffed because Ms. Asia did not recognize him, Bud waited until he had embellished the benefits of his father’s company to Minh before he pulled out his ring computer to jog her memory of The Club.
“By any chance have you ever met this man?” He showed her a photo of Ramon Zappista taken while visiting him at the Rosario Detention Center in Baja California.
“No. Who is he?”
“Ramon Zappista. Does his name sound familiar at all?”
“No. Should it?”
“How about him?” Bud replaced Ramon’s image with one of Ahomana.
“Oh, that’s Ahomana.”
“You know him?” Bud’s eyes widened.
“I’ve only read about his work with the Island Nation Federation. Are these two customers of your father’s company? Do you want them to give me testimonies about how happy they are doing business with him?”
“No.” While Minh finished her simple meal of rice and vegetables, he wondered what direction to take his inquiry. But the beauty Minh radiated kept distracting him. She possessed poise and calmness, even peace, a virtue he had sought for years but failed to achieve. The longer his soul absorbed her peace, the more he craved it.
“You seem to be studying me like your friend Tim did this afternoon.” Minh broke the silence. “Are we Vietnamese women that mysterious to you Americans? Or are you just trying to persuade me into having my government do business with your father?”
Bud blushed and then stammered. “I…I hope you…I…think…”
When she reached over and touched his hand, Bud wondered if the sensation of electricity traveling up his arm betrayed her as a short-circuiting android. The feeling reminded him of the small scanner he carried. He decided to gamble. Whether she became a customer for his father no longer mattered to him. Exposing Dr. Graves’ evil plot did.
“Tim told me about how he found a piece of helicopter in a rice paddy.”
“Yes.”
“I’m concerned that some fragments might have penetrated your skin, maybe as a child when you walked barefoot. Or perhaps some bully threw something at you and part of it lodged in you.” He stared at the small scar on her upper arm. “That scar might be from such an incident.”
She pulled back from him and reflected for a moment before laughing. “You are even stranger than Tim. You Americans are so funny and mysterious, like you are always hiding something or other. Go ahead and scan me, Dr. Bud Lee.”
He rose and moved next to her chair. After running the scanner across every inch of her body twice, he grumbled and sat back down.
“Will I live?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. It showed nothing. I thought that …” He bit his lip to keep from asking her about The Club and Dr. Graves.
* * *
Tim was working on the conclusion to his story when his smart watch buzzed. The blurry features of a miniature Chan Lee staring up at him straightened Tim’s slouch.
“Is Bud there? I can’t reach him and have been trying to get him for hours.”
“He’s having dinner with someone who runs the farming co-ops that grow rice for export to China. Bud said he thinks she might be willing to get the government to send rice to America in exchange for boatloads of your recyclables.”
“I’m happy to hear that. But what about his first in person meeting with Ling?”
Tim described how he and Bud had endured “the cold shoulder treatment from beginning to end.”
“Did the chaperone look like this?” Chan focused his vision phone’s lens on a photo of a sour faced woman dressed in the traditional embroidered silk gown worn by China’s elite.
“Yeah. That’s her. She looks even meaner in person.”
Chan sighed. “That is her Aunt Bai Lu. She has a very close friend with a son whom she is convinced is the right one for Ling.” He shrugged. “I suppose Bud wasted his time on the Marshall Islands talking to the one he calls Mr. Island Nations or Ahomana.”
“Afraid so.”
“I have a feeling he might turn my intended trip for him into an around the world hunt for his alleged members from The Club. If that happens, I think the results will be the same as they were for the first two that you both visited. But at least maybe Bud can then grow up and work for me full time instead of trying to write a book.”
* * *
When Bud stumbled around their hotel room shortly before 2 a.m., he woke Tim.
“Your dad called and wants you to call back.”
“It can wait.” Bud’s dreamy far off gaze caused Tim to prop himself up on an elbow in his bed.
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. Just talking to the most beautiful woman in Vietnam. No, the most beautiful one in the whole world.” Bud slipped beneath the covers of his bed and stared at the ceiling.
“Huh?”
“Isn’t Minh wonderful? Aren’t you glad you got to meet her, too?”
Oh oh, he’s found someone on the rebound, Tim thought.
“Listen, Bud. Breaking up like you did with Ling can be hard. Even if you didn’t have any feelings for her, getting rejected like that is never easy. When I first separated from Bethany, women everywhere started to look fantastic and lust replaced logic for me. You need to watch your step for a while until your emotions settle back down to normal, okay?”
&nbs
p; “What?”
“Forget it.” Tim turned off the light on the nightstand between the two beds as he remembered acting even more foolishly after his first date with Bethany, on a night that seemed like a lifetime ago.
Four hours of no sleep and nonstop memories later, Tim stumbled to the bathroom.
22
Tim finished his rewrite while sitting at the airport. He reworked the statistics and moved them up to his lead paragraph to impress his editor, a no nonsense woman with a master’s degree in English. He hoped his opening would hook her:
Hidden in all of the glitz and motion of Vietnam’s larger cities are university labs where mysteries from long ago are being solved. Here, dozens of students sift through remains of warriors from battles fought at least 120 years ago. And one by one, the mostly forgotten soldiers are reunited with their descendants.
The figures are staggering. The number of those missing in action (MIA) or killed in action, no body recovered (KIA, NBR) are a grim reminder of a war most Americans have forgotten. While we helped win WW II in the 1940s and fought to a stalemate in Korea in the 1950s, many believe we lost the war fought in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. There are about 300,000 communist North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong, 185,000 South Vietnamese Army, and 2,000 American troops classified as MIA or KIA, NBR.
The article detailed Jorgenson’s work and profiled some of the descendants who had received the remains of their ancestors. Tim concluded his story with his new beliefs:
Vietnam was perhaps our most painful war. My research uncovered cases of returning American soldiers from that conflict who were spat on, cursed at, shunned, and despised. Many of them would later suffer debilitating illnesses and premature deaths from exposure to defoliants such as Agent Orange, which were sprayed from aircraft to remove the jungle growth that hid the enemy so well.
So was it worth it?
Ask the descendants of the over one million Vietnamese that fled their homeland after the war ended in 1975 and settled in the United States. They benefited the most from the deaths of almost 60,000 American men and women in Vietnam. If you can, go read some of their names on their memorial in Washington, D.C.
I plan to.
Tim sighed and pressed the send command. Once again, he asked that payment for the article be sent to Bethany.
“You sure we’re doing the right thing?” Tim asked Bud.
“If we travel cheaply, what we would spend flying from here back to SLD will take us as far to either Cairo or Rome, depending on how it goes,” Bud said. “I’ve run the figures twice.” He patted his ring computer. It displayed an image of Minh Pham every time he turned it on, which was now four times as often.
“You really think it’s worth chasing down those other people?”
“Look who’s being the pessimist now. Just because the first three claimed they don’t remember Dr. Graves and The Club doesn’t mean the other three won’t.”
“First three? We’ve only talked to Ahomana and Ramon so far. Why did you say three just now?”
Bud looked away and shuffled his feet. “Ah…”
“You’re holding out on me. If I’m going to be your ghostwriter I have to know. Who’s the third one?”
“Minh.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me until now?” Tim leaned from his seat until Bud could no longer avoid eye contact. “You sure fooled me into thinking she was just a potential customer for your old man’s company.”
“It didn’t seem necessary to tell you because she doesn’t remember anything about joining The Club either.”
“Did you scan her for the implant you think Dr. Graves put inside her?”
“Yeah. There was nothing there.”
“Nothing? Listen, kid. Even if the remaining three all agree with you, that means only half of your story is verifiable.”
“It’s not your book. It’s my book. You are just the ghostwriter. Don’t forget it.”
They did not speak any more during the ninety-minute flight to Mumbai, India. Because a computer controlled this flight from take-off to landing, with a human co-pilot on board in case of computer malfunction, Tim rejoined the White Knuckle Club as he clutched his armrests.
* * *
Tim thought nothing could surprise him after roaming some of the back alleys and seeing the underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City. But India proved to be more of a culture shock for him. Open space seemed limited to the waters of the Arabian Sea to the west of Mumbai.
The driver of the petrol powered cab noticed his anxiety while he ferried them from the airport to a downtown hotel. Bud nodded off on the back seat. “Your very first time in my country, sahib?”
“Yeah. You have some kind of festival going on that brought a lot of pilgrims here? Is that why it’s so crowded?” Tim pointed at crowds four times denser than those he saw in Ho Chi Minh City.
“No, no festival going on here now. These are my fellow citizens of Mumbai going off to work, school, or the market.”
When the taxi stopped at an intersection, Tim noticed a line of beggars sitting on mats next to what appeared to be a factory. “What’s their problem?”
“They are from the lower castes. My country outlawed the caste system but it still continues, unofficially. They are the poorest of the poor.”
At the hotel, Tim climbed under the bed covers and ignored Bud’s invitation to meet The Club’s Ms. India, Surjet Raahi. When Bud persisted, Tim groaned.
“I have a headache. Tell her I need a story about this God-forsaken place. If she has one, I’ll talk to her tomorrow. You slept on the pane and in the cab. Let me get some sleep now.”
* * *
Surjet Raahi shook her head when Bud showed her photos of Ramon Zappista, Ahomana, and Minh Pham. Businesslike, she cut their meeting short before Bud could ask her about The Club. Her history lesson perplexed him.
“I appreciate some of what you foreigners have done for my nation, Mr. Lee, like eliminating the practice of widows being burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres. And thanks to foreign organizations, slavery as practiced here in India is almost a thing of the past. But I’m afraid you have chosen a poor time to visit me. I must get back to my work now.”
As he shook her hand farewell, Bud recalled Tim’s request.
“I’m travelling with a friend who is a writer. He is very curious about your Arabian Sea Reclamation Project.”
Surjet did not look up from the construction report requiring her review by 8 a.m. tomorrow, less than twelve hours away. “Have him call this number tonight to speak to the chief engineer on that project. As you can plainly see, I am much too occupied to meet him in person.” She slid a business card across her desk and eyed the door.
* * *
As the sun rose next morning, Tim stood in front of his hotel. Slow to adjust to the constant shift in time zones, he yawned and slumped onto a bench. He awoke as someone shook him fifteen minutes later.
“Mr. Beheard? Are you Mr. Timothy Beheard?”
“What?” He squinted at a young girl whose face seemed to morph from elfin to angelic and back to elfin. Her bright blue eyes and long braided blonde hair were the first Tim had seen in India.
“Let’s be going. Papa is waiting.” She tugged on his shirt sleeve and led him to a taxi with windows rolled down because the sticky air’s temperature had only dropped by eleven degrees overnight.
Papa was Hans Guenther; the angelic elf his eleven-year-old daughter Corrie.
A trace of their native Dutch accented their English. Both cordial, their introductions to Tim lasted the entire eight-mile cab ride. By the time they boarded a freight train at Mumbai’s main station, Tim believed he had heard most of their life stories, especially Corrie’s. They settled into the long train’s lone passenger car, which was hitched to the last of the diesel powered engines.
“Seventeen engine cars to the front of us, 417 freight cars to the rear.” Hans long ago had learned of writers’ demands for details. “It is a very old t
rain and breaks down more often than our modern trains in Holland.”
“When I talked to you last night, you didn’t mention anything about a train ride.” Tim watched the city roll by his window. “How far are we going?”
“To the highlands north of here to drop off our load and pick up a load for the return trip.”
“Load of what?”
“Did you see the dikes being built out in the sea when your plane landed?”
“Yes.”
“We are reclaiming the land there. After the dikes go into place, we pump the sea water to plants and separate out the salt from the nutrients that can be used for fertilizer. Northern India is still by far the most populated region of India. They need all the fertilizer we can deliver.”
“What do you haul back on the return trip?”
“Rock and gravel to build the dikes. I have to inspect it to ensure it’s the right size and composition. Inferior materials equal eventual dike failure, flooding, and God only knows how many deaths.”
Tim’s innate skepticism did not surface until his third cup of coffee, imported from Holland, the most delicious he had ever tasted. His doubts came to full bloom when the train broke down. He and Corrie watched through open windows as Hans took charge.
“Uncouple it,” Hans ordered the train’s crew as he pointed at a freight car with a broken front axle. Once severed from the train, the crew inserted inflatable air bags under the damaged car. A rubber air line from one of the train’s engines filled the bags in five minutes, which toppled the damaged car off of the tracks. The delay lasted twenty-three minutes.
“Isn’t that an expensive mess to clean up?” Tim pointed at the upended car after Hans rejoined them, most of its contents spilled on the ground.
“By the time the train with the crane comes to retrieve the damaged car, the fertilizer will be gone. The locals will have hauled it off by then to sell or use on their farms.”
