The next morning as Bud cooked breakfast – oatmeal and coffee, with a little tropical chocolate – they got themselves organized.

“I think for the moment, we need two contact teams,” Steve said. “As long as we have two good interpreters, I don’t want to trust my marginal Vietnamese any farther than I have to. The people up here use the language a little different than I’m used to, anyway, and I know I have a horrible accent.”

“It is a little different up here,” Cai Cung said. “And yes, your accent is bad, and will make you harder to understand here. Binh Ky, you have some of that accent, too, but not as bad. You should have no problem.”

“Well, that answers that question,” Steve smiled. “Cai Cung, I’m impressed. Your English is quite good, much better than I expected.”

“I worked with the Americans at Tan Son Nhut for ten years,” Cai Cung told him. “I tried hard to learn the language, because the Americans paid more.”

“You did well,” Steve said; feeling there were a number of questions he’d like to ask Cai Cung; the guy obviously had field knowledge. But now wasn’t the time. “All right, what I think we want to do is to have two Vietnamese in each party, and either two or three Americans. Binky, I’m counting you as Vietnamese in this; at least you look the part. Cai Cung, since you don’t know that much about what we’re looking for, I’ll take you, and I guess Nhu Lap in one team, and I don’t know. Mike, you like to come with us?”

“Sure,”

“Why don’t you bring your camera, but don’t use it unless I say you can. We’ll take the Renault, and go get started in Pham Dong. Binky, you and Kien Thanh are the other team, take, oh, Harold and Mark in the Toyota with you, I guess, and go work Duc Vinh some more.”

“How about the rest of us?” Gil said. He was more or less the acknowledged leader, but knew it was better to defer to Steve on working with the Vietnamese.

“Except for leaving Bud here as a camp guard, go look at Target One. You and Rod are going to have to be the basic field search team, since he knows how to look and you know what to look for. I shouldn’t have to tell you to be real damn careful about going into the woods. Rod may be good at seeing stuff, but if there are any old mines, they’ll be pretty buried and invisible. If you run into one, well, Ryan almost got his EMT card back. In the future, if we don’t have something to search, we’ll switch around contact team duties a little.”

“At some point, I want to get over to the old fire base and look it over,” Rod offered.

“Why?” Steve said. “We know Henry never made it back there.”

“Yeah, but we know when it was abandoned. That’ll give me a feel for how fast stuff gets covered up.”

“Good point,” Steve said. “But, we’re going to have the drivers with the contact teams. Maybe, if we get back early, you can run over there. Be damn careful if you go over there, too. They may have spread some mines around just in case anyone ever decided to come back. That’s why I didn’t go in the place when Nhu Lap and I were here in July.”

“I think we’ll take a metal detector with us,” Gil said. “We better not trust it too damn far, though. A lot of that stuff won’t get picked up by a metal detector. While I’m thinking about it, everybody take plenty of water. The Vietnamese should be used to the heat, but the Americans, and that includes Binky now, well, we aren’t. We all might as well take enough rations that we can snack our way through lunch.”

A few minutes later, the three teams fanned out. Steve was already a little doubtful about working in the villages in the day, since a lot of the people who were likely to have seen something would be out in the fields, but he intended to talk to as many of them as he could, and warned Binky to do the same.

Pham Dong proved to be much like Duc Vinh, although objectively, Steve thought the view from Pham Dong was a little nicer. Relieved that he had Cai Cung with him to help with the language, they started out talking with the villagers, working their way around to the American’s body. It was interesting to watch Cai Cung work with the villagers; although Steve made no secret of the fact that he could talk Vietnamese, it was Cai Cung who did the talking, and he was much more indirect than Steve would have been, and probably more effective. He certainly wasn’t pulling the punches that Hong would have, he thought.

There were a number of times that day that Cai Cung used a term that was vaguely military, and Steve was sure he must have been in the war, although there was no telling which side. If he’d been working with the Americans at Tan Son Nhut, he must have been fairly trusted, but that meant nothing and he knew it. Besides, he could have been an ARVN before he was wounded and acquired his limp, but then, he might not have been, either. Either way, Steve found he didn’t mind too much.

At the same time the two contact teams were working in the two villages, Gil, Ryan and Rod were out at Target One, having followed the same path out there that Steve had followed months before. They soon found out Steve had been right; the woods were more open than they imagined, and there was considerable evidence of animal grazing. They walked around the woods a couple of times, looking into it, but saw nothing.

Actually, going to Target One was a forlorn hope, and they knew it. It had been searched intensively at least three times after Henry’s disappearance, twice by berets who Gil trusted, and no one had ever found a sign of him. Yet, right from the beginning of the idea for the expedition, everybody had it in their head that Target One deserved one more search, if for no more reason than it was the last place Henry Toivo had been seen. It was why it had been named Target One in the first place.

Yet, from what they could see, Target One was barren of evidence, barren of any traces of Henry. After a while, their curiosity overcame their doubts, and they decided to try going through the woods. Gil warned the other two to stay in animal tracks or animal paths, and not step outside unless they really, really thought they had to, and they started working their way back and forth across the woods.

But, despite several slow and careful trips through the woods, nothing caught their eyes, and especially, nothing caught Rod’s eye. Finally, after several hours, they found a shady patch at the edge of Target One, and sat down to work on their lunches.

They were actually a little on the thin side – granola bars, tropical chocolate, dried fruit, raisins and peanuts.

“We’re not finding anything,” Ryan said.

Gil shrugged. “We didn’t expect to find much. I don’t know why we ever did think we would. Maybe, if we’d been able to get out here in the summer of 1970, we might have found something, but after twenty years, well, we’re just covering a base. It does make me feel good about one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, back in ’71, Heikki asked me to come out here and look. I turned him down, since it was all Indian Country then, but I did think about it. Shit, I know now all I could have accomplished was to probably find nothing, and get my ass in a sling, besides. Things were different, then. We may not find anything, but if we do, searching is probably going to be a small part of it.”

“You’re probably right,” Rod said. “However, we should probably have a look at some of the other patches of woods around here, just in case Henry started somewhere and didn’t get very far.”

“That was always part of the plan,” Ryan said. “I don’t think we’re going to find much, but we need to look.”

“It’s probably going to pretty much fall to the three of us,” Gil said. “Steve is right, we’re the best three to do it, for the reasons he pointed out.”

“He sort of took charge this morning,” Rod said.

“So long as we have to work with the Vietnamese, that’s fine,” Gil said. “He may be the youngest one of the vets, but with his language skills, he’s the obvious one. I’m just glad we have him along. If we didn’t, we’d be back in Tan Son Nhut, arguing with someone like Hong, and we might never have even gotten out here. Realistically, we don’t have much chance of finding out what happened to Henry, but without him and Binky, it’d be a hell of a lot worse. I’m not arguing.”

“Well, all right,” Ryan said. “I think we’ve worked this place out about as well as we can. Where do you want to go from here?”

“East, I guess,” Gil replied. “That was the direction the patrol took. If he tried to catch up, that’d have been the direction he’d go. I don’t know how well Dennis and Bob and the battalion searched the other woods around here, although Dennis told me they looked in most of them at least a little. It’s probably the same story there as here, but we’d better go look. How about that one over there to the east, maybe two hundred meters?”

“Since when have you used meters?” Rod asked with a grin.

“Since I’ve been back in-country,” Gil grinned back.

It was hot in the middle of the afternoon when their water was getting low, and the search team decided to head back to camp. “We need to take more water tomorrow,” Gil said. “That way we can stay out longer.”

“Yeah,” Rod said. “This makes Montana on a hot day look cool.”

When they got back to camp, they found the two contact teams waiting. “We pretty well worked out the people in the villages,” Steve reported. “What I’m thinking is we sit around here, have an early dinner, and then the contact teams can go back out to the villages again, and try and see if we can catch anybody who was working in the fields when we were there earlier. We can get back here, oh, just after dark, and maybe have a fire and debrief. But, I can give a simple debrief right now: nothing.”

“Well, we didn’t find anything either,” Gil told him. “But, considering what we know, it doesn’t surprise us. I got to thinking, though. What if he came out of Target One and went the wrong way?”

“In essence, we’re screwed,” Mark said. “Our whole search strategy, our whole understanding, is based on the guess he tried to get back to the fire base. If he went any other way, well, we don’t have any idea.”

“Well, what I’m thinking is we might as well do a little contact team work to the south,” Gil suggested. “I agree, the wedge of probability from Target One is the highest likelihood, but we shouldn’t ignore the alternative.”

“I don’t know,” Mark said. “We’re guessing, and it’s a pretty good guess, that he had at least a general idea of the direction of the fire base. I think we’d better work the wedge, first. If we don’t find anything when the contact teams have worked the wedge out, well, then, I guess ask to the south a little.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Gil conceded. “It’s just so damn frustrating to come out here and find nothing.”

“You will find nothing, and nothing, and more nothing, unless you should happen to find something,” Cai Cung told him. “If you find something, it will be the last place you have to look.”

That evening, while most of the group gathered with a few of the villagers from Duc Vinh around a campfire, Steve and Binky took the time to walk up the road toward Pham Dong a couple hundred yards. With the group close together all the time, it was hard to get a few minutes to be alone.

“How’s it going with you?” Steve asked when they were out of earshot of the camp.

“OK,” she said. “I actually let Kien Thanh do most of the talking. He seems to have a little bit better grasp of the local accent than Nhu Lap. The men will listen to a man better than they will listen to a woman, anyway. I just added something when I thought I needed to. I guess my Vietnamese has gotten a little rusty.”

“I don’t mean about that,” Steve said. “I mean, how are you bearing up?”

“Not too bad, now that we’re out of the city,” she said. “That was hard. I was really, really scared at customs.”

“I thought that was a little funny,” he smiled.

“What? Watching me almost have a heart attack?”

“No, not that. Remember this morning, when Cai Cung said you had a funny accent, like mine, but as not as bad?”

“What are you getting at?”

“No wonder they didn’t bat an eye at customs. You’ve been listening to my accent for so long you’ve picked up some of it. No wonder they didn’t think you were a local. The guy at the terminal heard your American accent, with a touch of Finnish, probably.”

“I didn’t realize that,” she said, genuinely surprised.

“Well, neither did I until Cai Cung pointed it out,” he smiled. “Look at it this way. You must really be an American, since you sound like one.”

“You don’t think we’re going to have any trouble leaving?”

“No, it should go pretty easy. The only trouble I can imagine is if we find Henry’s remains. We’re going to have to hassle with officials about that, and that may cause some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Official bullshit, probably. But, honestly, Binky, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure we’re going to do all we can, but the chances are pretty slim. In fact, they’re slim enough that we’ve never even planned much about that. And, now that we’re finally here, I don’t think the odds have improved.”