Free Shadows of War by Larry Bond Page B

through the trees into a small meadow about twenty yards from the path. He followed, thinking the animal was part of a grazing flock, maybe a small oxen or goat. Josh stepped warily, slipping among the trees as he got close to the field. There were three animals, about the size of deer though fatter, and with straight horns like goats might have— saolas , or Vu Quang oxen, native to northern Vietnam.

    They looked at him warily, certainly aware that he was there, but apparently not afraid of him. When at last he rose and took a step from the woods, they darted away.
    Back on the trail, Josh began thinking of the others on the expedition. He hadn’t known any of them for very long, but now they seemed like close friends. He thought of Ross, and Millie, the girl who was helping Dr. Renaldo. Fleming, the Belgian with the loud laugh. Phillip, a Chinese-American who preferred Scotch to beer and had taught him several Chinese curse words during a long night at a bar while trying to prove his point.
    Dr. Renaldo himself, slightly cantankerous, especially in the morning before his third coffee—he always had four—yet generous to a fault.
    All dead.
    Grief rose in his chest, a physical thing, pain that eroded his bones and pricked at the underside of his skin.
    How can I go on without them?
    It was his parents he thought of, not the other scientists. He was a child again, afraid without his mother and father, alone.
    No time for grief. Time for action. Move.
    The pain was so intense Josh had to stop for a moment. He forced himself to move again, stopped, felt tears streaming down his cheeks.
    I’ve gone through this already , he told himself. I will survive.
    He tried to distract himself by repeating the facts he knew about Vietnam’s weather. He recounted, by rote, the average rainfall, and high and low temperatures of each month. He considered what the consequences of these were, as if he were delivering a lecture or discussing the matter with his doctoral advisers.
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    Sometime in late afternoon, with the sun sinking below the hills, Josh heard a helicopter. The sound shoved his thoughts about science away. His first reaction was to hide: he plunged into the jungle beyond the road, taking cover between the trees.
    As he crouched against a trunk, he realized that hiding was not the thing to do. On the contrary, whoever was in the helicopter would probably help him, perhaps even fly him to safety. But he stayed back.
    His sense of danger increased as the rotor of the chopper pounded heavier and heavier toward him. Finally it appeared, streaking down from
the north, a long, dark machine, with a black cockpit and a thick tail. Missiles were stacked beneath the stubby wings, and a large round disk sat atop the rotor. To Josh, the aircraft looked like an American Apache, with a gun hanging beneath its pointed nose. But a star was painted in dull red on the side of the fuselage, faint but still visible to the naked eye.
    The chopper skimmed so close to the trees that Josh thought it was going to crash. It thundered past, shaking the ground for more than a minute.
    The path looped out of the trees onto a ridge. As he walked along it, Josh could see across to the hills on the other side. He continued a little farther and saw the road below— the same road I was on earlier , he thought, though of course now he was several miles farther north.
    He could also see a faint glow in the distance where the road curved into the hills.
    A village.
    He wanted to run, but the glow was too far away to make that worthwhile. Instead, Josh picked up his pace, moving quickly, trying not to get too anxious.
    His pants began to sag at his waist. He put his hands in the loops and held them as he went.
    The path looped back into the jungle. The sun had gone below the ridge, and the ground before him was gray, filled with shadows. Josh kept moving, bending forward a bit and rehearsing his small store of Vietnamese.
    The