Mark and Mike were making good progress with the dogs by September, and one evening were discussing plans for the next evening when Mark shook his head. “Oh, nuts,” he said. “We can’t go out tomorrow night. I’ve got to go to the expedition meeting. I can’t believe it’s been a month, already.”

“Steve and Binky’s, again?” Mike knew their home had more or less become the regular meeting place for the Toivo expedition meetings the last few years. One of the things that made it convenient was Binky had taken to serving Vietnamese food at the meetings. She really wasn’t very good at it – she’d never had a lot of practice at the actual cooking – and much of her knowledge of the subject came from her friends down in Camden, rather than from her heritage.

“Yeah, undoubtedly for something unidentifiable and inedible,” Mark said. “I can eat almost anything, but I never could stomach that shit when I was in Vietnam, and I can’t do much better on her cooking, even now. Everything tastes rotten. Maybe she’s forgetting how to cook some of it, she’s so used to cooking American.”

Mark had learned the hard way to load up on Bromo even before he left the house for one of the Toivo Expedition meetings. He really didn’t care much for Vietnamese food, and it didn’t set well with him, but it was part of the planning. For his own part, if the expedition ever came off, he didn’t intend to eat Vietnamese any more than he could help it. In the permanently-packed baggage he kept ready for the trip, there was a good two weeks supply of backpacker’s freeze-dried meals. That, and a willingness to lose a few pounds, and he thought he could survive. Several other expedition members felt the same way, he knew; they’d come to him for information on backpacker’s meals, and he’d put in a bulk order on two or three occasions.

In spite of not caring much for Vietnamese food, Mark did enjoy getting together with the expedition team once a month. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, there wasn’t much new to report, but they’d kept at being ready, in case they should ever get the permission to search for traces of Toivo. It could have easily degenerated into a monthly poker game, but the handful of veterans hung in there, and all of the expedition staff, except for Rod Matson, who could rarely attend, were present in Steve and Binky’s living room once they were through with dinner.

“No progress on getting permission,” Gil reported. “Our last contact with the embassy at the U.N. got nowhere, but our inquiries to the one in Ottawa at least got a polite response. I was sort of told it would be easier to get permission for just one of us to go, and I’m wondering if we ought to pursue that route.”

“One of us would be more than we’ve got now,” Bud said. “The heck of it is, if it’s just one person, who do we send? Gil, it just about comes down to you or Steve.”

“Yeah,” Gil said. “I know that. If we could even get permission for three, I think I’d be a lot more comfortable, but there’s going to be a limit to what I could do by myself. I figure with three, I go, I’ve been in the area, got a good idea of what I’m looking for. Steve goes, so we’re not dependent on interpreters. Rod goes, because I’m about ninety-nine point nine percent sure it’s going to involve excavating a dig, if we get that far.”

“All I can say is try for one, try for three, try for all of us,” Bud said. “Take what we can get.”

“It gets damn frustrating,” Gil said. “We’ve been around that block so many times before there’s nothing new to be said; but, for once, I do have something new to show you. It’s kind of interesting.”

“What might this be?” Steve asked. “Something good, I hope.”

“Pretty good,” Gil said, getting onto his knees. “Afraid I’m going to have to lay this out on the floor.” He opened a briefcase, and took out a thick pad of large photos, and started laying them, one overlapping another, across the floor.

“Came up with some overheads, huh?” Mark asked, getting up to look them over. They were remarkably detailed; you could make out individual people in the photos, working in the rice paddies and whatnot. As a pilot, Mark spent a lot of time looking down, and he was familiar with the view. “Looks like they were taken down pretty low,” he said. “Couple of thousand feet, maybe?”

“I doubt it,” Gil said. “These ain’t real new, but they ain’t that old, either.”

Mark took a closer look at one of the photos. There was a notch cut out of the corner of each of them, apparently with a pair of scissors – obviously to remove identifying marks. “Where’d you get these, Gil?” Mark asked.

“Would you believe it if I said they showed up in the mailbox one day, with no postmark and no return address?” Gil said.

“I’m not sure whether I would or not.”

“Let’s just say I’ve still got friends, and maybe one of them took pity on us,” Gil said. In fact, he wasn’t exactly positive, but the circumstantial evidence pointed to Dennis Conant. They’d exchanged Christmas cards over the years, and Dennis knew Gil had maintained his interest in the Toivo problem. And, Gil knew Dennis had taken a job with a consulting outfit in the DC area that did a lot of work for the CIA, so it didn’t take a lot to put two and two together, although there were a couple other less likely possibilities. If the photos were what Gil thought they were, Dennis or whoever had sent the photos had taken a considerable risk with classified documents to slip them to him, so he was not going to speculate out loud.

“OK, this is Pham Dong village, and over here is Duc Vinh. This here is Target One.” He got up, and walked to the other end of the line of photos, nearly twenty feet long. “Clear down here, you can see what’s left of the fire base. It’s pretty well grown over, but you can still make out some of the bunkers.”

Mark walked down to look at that imagery. “Got a magnifying glass?” he asked, and Gil produced one. Mark studied the fire base carefully. Things grew fast in Vietnam, and there was a lot of rain, so things got obliterated quickly – and what was left of the fire base where Henry Toivo’s company had left on patrol was all but gone. If what Gil and Dennis Conant had told them years before was correct, it had to be around fifteen years since the fire base had been abandoned. That made these photos fairly recent; no wonder Gil wasn’t saying where they came from, if he did even know.

Mark looked more closely. In the magnifying glass he could pick out individual hooches in the villages, farm animals, and people. The photos were extremely sharp, but if they were as recent as he guessed, there wouldn’t have been anyone doing low level photos, so they had to have been taken from high up, with a hell of a lens. From a U-2 at a minimum, maybe an SR-71. They could even be satellite imagery, but if they were, they were better than any satellite photos Mark had ever seen. If they came from a satellite, they came from a real good satellite. A Keyhole, maybe?

“OK,” Gil said, “I know you’re just seeing these for the first time, but just look over the general route. We know Henry had a good sense of direction, and we’ve guessed he must have realized he was separated from his unit and tried to get back to the fire base. If he went on a more or less direct line, it’d be along these photos. There’s plenty of cover, and you’ve got to figure, he’d have wanted to stick to cover.”

“Unless he was moving at night,” Ryan said. “He might have tried to stay close to cover, but not in cover. If he tried to move in cover at night, well, he might not have gotten very far. I was in that general area, too, and cover in that neck of the woods was just lousy with every booby trap and punji pit known to man, so you got to figure these were, too. Hell, it still might not be too safe to go into those woods.”

“If we get there, we’ve got to be damn careful,” Gil agreed. “I mean, real damn careful, since everything will have grown up so much. But, I hope we don’t have to search the woods at all. I still think someone there in Pham Dong or Duc Vinh or Puk Me or maybe one of these other little villages knows right where to look. Steve, I know you’ve kept working with Binky, but I hope we draw a good local interpreter, and you just have to keep them honest.”

“That’s kind of the plan,” Steve said. Actually, they had backed off a lot in recent years, since they didn’t want Hunter, and later Tabitha, who came along a little over a year later, to get confused about which language was which. For the moment, Vietnamese gave them a way to talk over the toddler’s heads, and as the kids got old enough to tell that they were dealing with two different languages they planned on exposing them to Vietnamese, but that was still a ways off. As a result, Steve’s knowledge of the language had gone downhill a little since about the time Tabitha had been born, and maybe even Binky was losing it a little, too.

“In fact, Binky, I really wish you’d reconsider going,” Gil said.

Binky shook her head. “I got three words for you on that,” she said. “No way, baby.”

“Well, I can understand,” Gil said. By now, all of them had heard of Binky’s ordeal in escaping Vietnam – she was no longer quite as reticent about it as she had been earlier – and no one pushed her on the subject.

Binky had brought several changes to the meetings, if for no more reason than the profanity that used to be frequent was much toned down, although not cleaned up entirely – but words like “slope,” “gook,” “dink,” and “zip,” at least describing Vietnamese, totally disappeared from their vocabulary from their first meeting with her, and had stayed gone ever since, even when she wasn’t present.

While the discussion was going on, Mark looked at the maps some more. The direct line of the route from the patch of jungle to the abandoned fire base ran straight down the middle of the photos. It would have been easy for a plane to fly right down that line, but the astronomer in Mark realized the direction of the route was perfectly feasible for a satellite in high-inclination orbits, as most recon satellites were. But that was just sheer woolgathering, and the photos were new information, the first really new information they’d had since Dennis Conant had spent a weekend with them – and that hadn’t involved much they didn’t already know. And there was new information there. Though Mark had never been within fifty miles of the site, he’d studied the old maps so much that sometimes he felt like he knew that corridor, that area, better than he knew the woods in back of his house. Now, the photos were showing his technician’s eye, his pilot’s eye, things that weren’t on their maps.

“Anybody bring a map?” he asked finally. Someone handed him one of the old maps that dated from the late sixties, and was almost worn out from study for lack of anything better to do. “Thought so,” he said finally. “This little village isn’t on the map.”

“Well, they weren’t all that good,” Harold shrugged. “Sometimes, the maps could be way off. We always tried to go over aerials before we went into an area.”

“We hardly ever did,” Ryan commented. “But then, you were an officer, and I was just a grunt.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to figure that even a little village like this might have some dogs around,” Mark commented, just to get the discussion back on track. “Pigs for sure, and pigs can set up an alarm at night just about as well as dogs can.”

Steve shook his head. “Mark, you’re getting at something.”

“Well, if Henry came close to this village at night, and was able to know it was there, he’d have probably gone a ways away from it.”

“Yeah, so?” Steve asked

Gil was getting the point. “We’ve always sort of assumed he’d have stayed close to the direct route if he decided to get away from the return route the patrol took earlier in the day,” he said a little glumly. “And, we’ve always sort of assumed he’d have detoured around Puk Me. Here’s another detour.”

“But, it’s a ways off the direct route,” Ryan commented.

“I sometimes wonder how close to the direct route he would have been,” Mark said slowly. “I’ve thought about it off and on over the years, and it might not have been real close.”

“I thought you said he could navigate by the stars at night,” Bud pointed out. “Remember, we got out of the battalion log that it was clear that night.”

“There’s clear, and there’s clear,” Mark said with a frown. “I remember a lot of nights, especially that time of the year, when it was clear but pretty murky, with haze and fog and whatnot. Like I said, Henry may have thought he could follow a more or less direct route, and maybe he could get fairly close, but I think there’s a chance it would be only fairly close.”

“How would he have navigated at night?” Harold asked. “Use the North Star?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Mark nodded. “Steve, you remember me telling you and him how to use stars in the other part of the sky?”

“Yeah, like pick out one of the rising constellations and take a bearing from that, remembering that it moves. That’s not as accurate, but gives you a general track. But, he was going north, well, north-northeast. He probably would have tried to just take a bearing from the North Star. That worked pretty good when we did that night hike, I remember, even not heading particularly close to north.”

“Right,” Mark said. “I got to thinking about the problem out in the observatory one night here a while back, and finally I dug out a planisphere and worked with it a bit. Guys, I don’t think it was as easy as maybe we’ve thought, or as easy as maybe I’ve led you to believe. I could do it, but I know my way around the sky a lot better than Steve or Henry ever did. If he tried to do it that way, well, he might have been able to be pretty close to a direct course, if you consider ten, or even twenty degrees pretty close.”

“I’m not quite following you,” Gil said.

Mark leaned back, gathering his thoughts. “I should take you outside and show you,” he said, “And maybe we can if we have to. But, just for the moment, suppose you want to go straight north. Well, the North Star is pretty much in front of you, and you can hook up on it pretty good. But, he didn’t want to go straight north, he wanted to go, what, about 22 degrees to the right of north, if I remember correctly. There’s no way he could have measured that, and about all he could have done was think he needed to head a little to the right of the North Star. He could have been ten degrees off, right there. And, it’s not as easy to hold an angle like that at night, while you’re travelling. I could take you out on the airstrip and prove it, but there’s no point in it.”

“You’re saying the best he could have done was to head in the general direction of the fire base, not right to it?”

“That’s it exactly,” Mark said. “Plus, there’s another problem. He maybe couldn’t have seen the North Star, anyway. It’s only up about 12 degrees there, anyway, so it would be down on the horizon in the haze, unless it was a damn clear night, not just a cloudless night. He probably would have been able to guess where it was, but it might not be a real accurate guess.”

“You mean, like following the pointer stars in the Big Dipper?” Harold asked.

“Right,” Mark said. “The problem is that at that time of the year, the Big Dipper is higher up than the North Star, but off in the north-northwest, at least right after sunset. But, it sinks as the night goes on, and the pointer stars get lost first. If he couldn’t see lower than about fifteen degrees, he would only have a little time right after sunset where he could make them out at all. From knowing where they are in respect to the rest of the Big Dipper, he probably could have been able to interpolate their position, and from there the North Star, but as the evening went on the whole constellation would sink lower into the soup and get lost.”

“And he’d be screwed,” Gil said flatly.

“Not entirely,” Mark said. “There are other cues out there. I taught him about them, and he could well have remembered some of them. The Little Dipper is a little higher, but it’s fainter, and he might have been able to pick up some of that, but it starts to sink into the soup as the night goes on. But, about that time Cassiopeia is rising, and there’s a couple cues there that give the general direction of the North Star. And, there’s some other cues that would be fairly low in the north, like Vega and Deneb for part of the night that could give him some general guidance, but only general. Add to that trying to stay near cover, and trying to avoid little villages, and he might have been as much as twenty or thirty degrees off course either way. Remember, he didn’t have a map, and had no way to cross-check himself. Look, I could run an exercise to show you what I mean.”

“We’ll take your word for it, I think,” Gil said. “What you’re saying is the direct line is at best an average course, and he could have been a long way off it.”

“I’m just guessing,” Mark said. “But he might have been pretty close to it the first mile or two, while the pointer stars were still up. After that, he could have gone a long way off course, or his errors could cancel each other out, either a little or a lot. Especially as the night went on, he’d only be able to get a general idea as to his course. And, now that I think about it, I suspect he’d have a tendency to drift off course to the left, especially if he was using higher stars to guide on.”

“Why’s that?” Bud asked.

“Well, the guide stars he would have been using would be slowly moving from right to left across in front of him, just from the normal sky rotation. It’d be easy to follow one guide star for too long as it moves. Under the same circumstances, I’d probably have trouble compensating for that myself, and it’s likely I’d be more aware of it than he would have been.”

“So, it’s likely he was off course,” Steve conceded. “And, depending on how he moved, he could have gone a long way.”

“Rod taught us a long time ago that there wasn’t much chance of finding anything just by going out and walking through the woods,” Gil stated, thoroughly convinced of Steve’s summary. “I think the odds just got a hell of a lot worse. We’re just about going to have to find some local villager who knows something if we expect to find anything. They might be able to point to a patch of woods that we’d have to search through, but a broad, general search – well, there’s just no way.”

“Yeah,” Bud said glumly. “That’s about the only hope, any more.”

“That just got worse, too,” Mark said. “Take a map, and draw a line, oh, thirty degrees either side of the direct line, and extend them out past the fire base. There’s a lot of little villages on the map, and these photos show us there’s lots more that aren’t on the map. We need to spend some time with these photos, go over them real carefully, and mark any little villages we find on the map. We’ve got a lot more than just Pham Dong, Duc Vinh and Puk Me.”

“Yeah, crap, we’d be a long time just covering them with one interpreter.”

“Maybe we need to get more than one, and split up into teams,” Harold suggested. “Of course, that runs into the problem of Steve being able to keep them honest.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I could rotate between teams, but something might still slip by us when I’m in the wrong place.”

“We need someone else who speaks Vietnamese, someone we can trust,” Ryan said flatly. “Binky, I know you don’t want to go back, and I can understand why. But do you think maybe one of your friends in Camden would be willing to go with us?”

“Maybe,” Binky frowned. “I can ask. But, the people I know down there don’t speak English anywhere near as well as I do. And most of them aren’t any more anxious to go back to Vietnam than I am. Several of them are just on green cards, not citizens like I am. They might not be able to come back, or maybe the communists wouldn’t let them come back. Even being a citizen, I’d be worried about it myself, since the communists may not have the same respect for American citizenship as other countries do. I’ll ask around, but don’t get your hopes up.”

“Well, find out what you can,” Gil said. “My contact with the old Special Forces people is pretty limited any more, but there were a few who spoke pretty good Vietnamese, and maybe there might be someone who still could do the job. I’ll see if I can tap some contacts and see what I can come up with.”

“I might be able to find a former missionary or someone through the church,” Mark offered. “I suspect it’d be a long shot, though.”

“And, if we do find someone, we’re going to have to spend some time teaching them about what we’re looking for, too,” Harold commented. “If it turns into a quick trip, we might not have a lot of time.”

“There’s that, too,” Gil said. “It’s nothing we can solve tonight. But let’s each take some maps, right now, and go over them inch by inch and see if we can find any more of those little villages that we’re going to have to go investigate.”

“Yeah, we need to know that, and pretty quick, in case visas were to show up tomorrow,” Mark said. “And, I think, just on general principles, we’d better not plan on taking these photos with us.”

“Yeah,” Gil agreed. “In fact, they’re going to go in a safe deposit box. I suspect these are some photos that not just anyone should see.”

“I’d hate to not have some of the information on them,” Harold protested.

“Well,” Mark shrugged. “The old topos aren’t real good, anyway. Let me work on drawing a new map of the area, integrating the topos and the information from here. It might take a while, but we’d have something better to work with.”

Over the course of the next hour or so, they were able to identify fourteen more little villages that needed investigation within Mark’s wedge of probability that spread wide from Target One, and more small groups of buildings that barely qualified as villages. Gil entered each of them on a master map, and since there was no idea of what the names might be, designated them Village Alfa, Village Bravo, and so on down the phonetic alphabet.

After a while, even the interest in the photos started to pall. “Well, I got to get out of here,” Bud Ellsberg said finally. “I got a run real early tomorrow morning.”

“You know, Bud,” Gil said, “You ought to hire yourself an engineer or two, so you could stay in the office more.”

“That’s the point,” Bud said. “Gives me the best excuse in the world to get out of the office.”

“Guess I won’t see you for coffee, then,” Gil said. “You going to the game?”

“The way they’re playing this year?” Bud smiled. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Well, maybe we’ll see you there,” Gil replied.

“I suppose I ought to get going, too,” Mark said.

“Oh, stick around and have a cup of coffee,” Binky offered. “I promise you, it’ll be Columbian, not Vietnamese.”

Mark smiled; he hadn’t put anything over on Binky. “Since you put it that way,” he said, “I guess I will.”

They picked up the photos and maps and put them away, while Binky served coffee. They talked about Mark’s dogsledding with Mike for a bit, and some more about the football team. They didn’t talk about the expedition any more, but each of them reflected quietly, realizing the hope of finding Henry Toivo’s remains was a lot thinner than it had ever been, but none of them was willing to give up hope without a try.