As Steve had predicted, it was disgustingly easy to get wheels for the ride up to Phuoc Lot, proving once again that Hong was full of it.

It did take a little bit of protest for Steve to break away from Hong and the group at the national museum along in the afternoon of the next day, but not a great deal. He flagged down one of the blue and white Renault taxis that infested the city, and got in. “Caravelle Hotel,” he told the driver.

“OK,” the driver said in English as he pulled away from the curb. “You want pussy?”

“No,” Steve said in Vietnamese as he pulled out an American twenty dollar bill. “I want to rent a jeep tomorrow and go up to Phuoc Lot and back. You know anyone?”

“It’ll cost a lot,” the driver said, a little surprised to see a round-eye speaking fairly decent Vietnamese. “Three hundred American?”

That was really a pretty reasonable price, and Steve was willing to pay for service, but he knew well that a little bargaining was expected. Americans didn’t bargain like that, except maybe over used cars and real estate. All of a sudden, an insight about his wife struck him, but he kept it to himself. “How about two fifty?” he asked.

“It’ll be wet in a jeep,” the driver said. “How about a Toyota Land Cruiser?”

“That’ll work,” Steve said, handing him the twenty. The official currency may have been the dong, and it was highly inflated, and especially in the city formerly known as Saigon, the greenback was still the best currency and that was true a lot of other places, Steve knew. “Is this Land Cruiser yours?”

“My wife’s brother’s,” the driver said. “I’d better drive. I was up past Phuoc Lot about six months ago, but I don’t think he’s ever been there.”

“How long should it take to get there?”

“Five, maybe six hours,” the driver told him. “The road’s pretty good most of the way, but there are a few bad spots. Nothing that should stop us, though.”

“How about in the rain? Bridges out, maybe flooded?”

“No problem, especially in the Land Cruiser. It’s good road. We don’t really need it.”

“When we get there, there’ll be some back roads, and we’ll want it then,” Steve told him. “How about checkpoints, roadblocks, police?”

“Maybe some police, and we might have to pay some little fine, but no problem if we pay. There used to be some roadblocks past there, but now that the business in Cambodia is over with, there may not be.”

“We’ve got a deal,” Steve told him, sticking out his hand. “My name is Augs Berg Steve. What’s yours?”

“Xom Nhu Lap,” the driver smiled.

“All right, Nhu Lap,” Steve told him. “I want to meet you at eight tomorrow morning, but not at the hotel. We need to work out some place a couple blocks away.”

“I’ll take you there,” Nhu Lap told him.

The place that Nhu Lap worked out for the meeting was a little Vietnamese restaurant, only a couple blocks away from the Caravelle. It was a little hard for Gil and Harold to get Hong out with them early enough, but everything went like clockwork after that, and Steve had enough time for a pastry and a cup of coffee. Once again, it was a bright, sunny morning, but the air lay heavy and it was pretty clear it was going to get wet before the day was over with.

He was just finishing the coffee when a white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up outside the restaurant and beeped its horn; Steve saw it was Nhu Lap, picked up a small bag and got in the right seat. The bag contained a few useful items, like a small, cheap camera, some maps in plastic bags, a poncho. Steve had a notepad in his pocket.

The drive through the north side of the city formerly known as Saigon proved to be almost familiar to Steve. He’d been there before, over those same crowded streets, out to Bien Hoa and the big freedom bird he’d counted the days over; in those days, Tan Son Nhut was mostly used for in-country traffic. Steve took a few snapshots along the way, mostly since he knew it was somewhere in this part of the city that Binky had been brought up, and he thought she might be curious to see them – at least he’d have them if she was. Once again, he wondered if perhaps he’d seen a schoolgirl Nguyen Binh Ky walking those streets many years before, but figured he really shouldn’t brood about it.

They got out of the city, on the half-remembered road out to Long Binh and Bien Hoa, and there, on the four-lane Steve discovered the only real downside to the trip: Nhu Lap might have been a nice guy, but his name should have been Hot Lap. It had been a little hard to pick up in the crowded city streets, but out on the open road Nhu Lap acted like he wanted to be the next Emerson Fittipaldi. Steve looked around for a seat belt, and discovered there was no such thing in the Toyota; all he could do was hang on grimly. Back when he’d been in Vietnam before, he hadn’t driven at all, but some of the truck drivers he’d talked with had said all the Vietnamese drove like they were nuts, and now Steve was ready to believe it. He found himself toying with the notion that it had to be genetic, rather than cultural; even Binky had a heavy foot and a few speeding tickets to prove it, but then she’d learned to drive in Albany River, and maybe that accounted for something – he didn’t know.

Before long Nhu Lap turned off onto a side road. It was two lanes, and fairly busy, but the road was in good shape, about like a good paved county road back home, but he was still driving like he had Dale Earnhardt on his tail in the last lap of the Daytona 500. “Hey,” he said finally, “I don’t mind if we crash and burn, but I’d really rather not have to deal with the cops, if we can help it.”

“No problem,” Nhu Lap said. “Only a few hundred dong, two or three dollars American.” After a while, Steve got to realizing it really wasn’t that fast, and it was just the mix of traffic on the road that made it a little more nerve-wracking.

As the miles rolled on, and they had to slow for villages and small towns, Steve and Nhu Lap got to talking. Nhu Lap didn’t have much English, only a few words that a taxi driver would have picked up, but Steve’s Vietnamese, learned patiently from Binky, though far from perfect, was more than enough to carry on a conversation.

Nhu Lap had been too young to be in the war when Steve was there, but he had been in the army when they were fighting those crazy people in Cambodia. He’d spent three years there, not doing a lot of fighting, but the two quickly agreed some things didn’t change, no matter what the army was, and that most sergeants were assholes and all lieutenants were. Nhu Lap told a couple of stories, and Steve did too, funny things rather than war things, mostly about Americans and the funny things they did when they didn’t understand Vietnamese ways, and of course, that led to another story and another.

Steve did refer to his wife a couple times, without mentioning the fact that she was Vietnamese, and Nhu Lap proved to have a wife too, with a couple kids about the age of Hunter and Tabitha.

Now, Steve told Nhu Lap part of why he was making the trip – his best friend from school had died out there, they thought, and he wanted to at least see where it had been, with the thought that some time they might come back and look for his body. Steve thought to himself that after the hassles with Hong the last few days, they might have lost sight of that goal, but now, after all these years, he was actually headed for Target One.

For the first part of the journey, the road was vaguely familiar, and Steve thought he’d been down it sometime in the past. The land was certainly similar, not the rice paddies that Steve had seen farther to the south years before. The land was too high and rolling for that, if nothing like mountainous, partly wooded, but mostly farmed fields. There were several villages, even small towns there, and Nhu Lap slowed for them. Occasionally Steve pulled out the map he’d brought, not really to navigate, but to get a feeling for how far they’d come, and they made good time.

After about an hour and a half, they turned off the road onto a smaller one. Although paved, it wasn’t in nearly as good shape, and was only about a lane and a half wide; several times Nhu Lap had to stop and pull partway off the pavement to make room for an oncoming truck. Steve had heard stories about how the bigger vehicles in Vietnam always had the right of way, and it was obvious that Nhu Lap was not about to tangle with a big truck. Their progress slowed, maybe to only twenty or thirty miles an hour, but study of the map showed they were getting closer to Phuoc Lot.

It was along in the afternoon when they got close to the area they’d been studying on maps and aerial photos for nearly ten years. There was a road that ran back in the general direction of the old fire base, and after consulting the map a little, Nhu Lap put the Toyota into four-wheel drive, and they headed down it. It proved to be passable, a bit on the soft side, but there was no danger of getting stuck with the big knobbys chewing at it. There was virtually no traffic, now, and not many people around, although there were a few out working in the fields. The land was actually flatter here than it had been earlier, with a few gently rolling hills. They crossed a river on a rickety bridge, and there were a few rice paddies in the area, but rice clearly wasn’t a big crop here.

Steve had Nhu Lap stop there, and he walked up what was left of the old road to the fire base. This was pretty soft, and there would have been a risk of getting stuck, but Steve only went a short distance, far enough to get a couple photos, then went back and got in with Nhu Lap again. They had to drive a fair distance before they reached an intersection of dirt roads, and took the road that led to Puk Me, which proved to be a small cluster of huts, some thatched, some with tin roofs, with pigs and chickens running about between the buildings.

Steve would desperately liked to have stopped and talked with some of the village elders to find out if they’d ever found a lone American’s body out in the woods sometime around the time the Americans had left, but in a penciled, notepapered exchange with Gil and Harold the night before, they’d decided they’d better not this time. There wouldn’t be any time to do anything about it, and there was no point in giving people the idea they were looking for something without being ready to look for it. So, Steve contented himself with a couple of snapshots, knowing he was in the heart of the mystery now, but unable to do anything about it.

The road from Puk Me to Pham Dong wasn’t any better than the other road, but again, all Steve could do again was to take a couple snapshots. The afternoon was wearing on, and the skies were starting to look threatening, and it was clear more rain was on the way. They drove on; it was just a short drive to Duc Vinh, and between them there was a short track to one side that would take them to Target One, not far off now, but Steve figured they’d better go to Duc Vinh first. Some of the things that Gil wanted Steve to look for were possible places to set up a base camp, and there was a good one, in a thin patch of trees, not far from the corner of the faint track that lead in the general direction of Target One.

“I know you don’t know these people,” Steve asked Nhu Lap, “But do you think they would be willing to let us set up camp here for a few days, if we paid them?”

“We could ask,” Nhu Lap offered. “If you pay, they probably would be grateful.”

“Would American dollars or Vietnamese dong be better?”

“Dong, here, I would think,” Nhu Lap said.

“Could you ask them for me, without letting them know I speak Vietnamese?” Steve asked.

“No problem,” the driver replied. They drove into the village and got out of the Toyota – it was good to stretch their legs – and Nhu Lap sought out a village elder. It took a little bit to find him; once they did, Steve really had to restrain himself from asking the question he really wanted asked, but it proved that yes, the elders would be grateful for the money, and dong probably would be better. It wasn’t totally a fair test of what Steve – and Gil – wanted to find out, but they wanted to get an idea of what the reaction to a group of Americans throwing around money would be to the villagers. Hostile, sullen ones would make the December trip worthless, or at least considerably more difficult.

But, the result had been pretty positive, and with it, Steve had accomplished about what he’d set out on the trip to accomplish. He’d seen there was no physical problem and little official problem in reaching the target area, gotten some ground feel for the countryside, found the villagers friendly, at least in Duc Vinh, and had gotten a general feel for the area. It was, of course, the first time any of the Spearfish Lake veterans except Gil had been within fifty miles of the place – well, Ryan Clark might have been within thirty miles, but he wasn’t sure – and they knew there are always some things you don’t know till you’ve been on the ground.

There was only one thing left to do. Steve knew that since he had gotten this far, there could be no leaving without a visit to Target One.

It was exactly twenty years to the day since Henry’s battalion had sent a patrol right through Target One looking for him, and didn’t find a trace. Steve knew there was no chance that he could find anything in a brief look, but they had worked and schemed and planned for so long to reach the place that he knew he had to at least stand there.

Steve had Nhu Lap drive back out to the spot he’d eyeballed as a possible campsite. There was a small track that led back in the general direction – Steve had seen it on the overheads that had turned up mysteriously in Gil’s mailbox a few years before. Both of them looked at it, and could see it was very muddy.

Nhu Lap shook his head. “I don’t think we want to drive back there,” he said.

“Me, either,” Steve said. “You stay here with the Toyota. I won’t be long.”

It was starting to rain now. Steve had on his poncho and a set of jungle boots – not the ones he’d worn in Vietnam, which were now too small, but a set he’d purchased a few years ago. Slowly he began to trudge up the faint track, carefully watching his step, as he’d learned to do so long before. He knew – and the group had reminded themselves repeatedly – that it was safest to stay in tracks, where humans or animals had preceded them. There could be anything out there, but in farmed fields, this long after the war, it didn’t seem likely. It was slow going, first trying to watch his step, but mostly because of the ankle-deep mud, mud that was sometimes deeper than that.

The rain continued to fall, not heavily, but with the promise of more to come. It may have taken him twenty minutes to get out to the vaguely flat-ironed shaped patch of woods that they’d dubbed “Target One” so long before, but they were slow minutes. Twenty years and two days before, Henry Toivo’s patrol had come this way, actually crossing the path, moving from left to right, spread out in a broad line. Toivo had been out at the end of the platoon line, although there was another platoon farther out, several hundred yards away and not in contact. Steve neared the path, crossed over the route Taylor must have taken, and finally reached the edge of the woods, where Henry had once stood.

Steve looked into the woods. It was fairly open, less so than the place where he thought there would be a good campsite. He could see it had been grazed since; there were large animal tracks around, even fresh since the most recent rain, pig tracks, it looked like to him. He pulled the camera from his pocket and shielding it from the rain with his hand, snapped a few shots, more to prove to himself that he’d really gotten here.

He looked around. No one was in sight. Twenty years ago, Taylor had watched Henry step into these woods, and his boyhood friend never had been seen again. Even now, Steve was reluctant to follow. A mystery lurked here in these woods, one that he didn’t have the time to unravel, now.

Over the years, the vets had thrown around three theories of what had happened next – that Henry had tried to return to the fire base by the route that he’d come, that he’d tried to return by a different route, or that he’d gotten caught by a booby trap right there. Though the last seemed the least likely – if it had been a mine, Taylor must have heard it, even if he had been spaced out on dope. But, he hadn’t. A patrol from Henry’s battalion had been through these woods a few days later, reporting a few punji sticks, nothing serious, and no trace of Henry, the same that the Special Forces patrol that Dennis Conant had led found a few days less than twenty years ago. Even so, Target One was a touchstone, and a good, serious look through this small patch of woods was high on everyone’s list.

It was right here that the mystery they’d picked at for so long had started, and all he could do was stand there and wonder. And wonder. And wonder some more, as the monsoon rains poured from the sky.