Restless Soul

Annja watched the water. It rose noticeably in the passing of a few heartbeats.

She cursed silently. When she started out that morning, it hadn’t crossed her mind that all the rain would affect her exploration of the caves. She should have considered the possibility. She should have realized there could be flash floods. Being on vacation had made her mind numb.

She glanced at the nearest coffin, then back at the water. The river could conceivably reach the coffins or perhaps completely cover them.

No doubt this chamber had flooded in the past what with the annual rainy season and the monsoons. Perhaps the rising river was the explanation for no bodies…the water had washed them away and left behind only the heavy teak coffins and the most cumbersome pieces of pottery. Maybe the water had even rearranged where the coffins had originally been placed.

She hadn’t imagined the voice. She heard it distinctly now. It hadn’t come from the coffins, though. It was as if it had traveled through the very stone of the cave and seeped into her head. It echoed like a child calling down into a canyon.

Free me…

ROGUE ANGEL
_™

…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER. TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.
The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.

Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….

Vietnam, July 1966

At first, he hadn’t minded the sound of the place.

He was Bronx born and raised, and the constant insect chorus of the Vietnam jungle was an interesting oddity and an almost welcome change from the frequent sirens and ever-present racket of traffic back home.

The birdsong, the swish of the big acacia leaves in the breeze and the occasional chatter of monkeys…it was all a pleasant diversion from orders barked by commanding officers and the grumbles of the men in his rifle company. He even liked the smell.

But that was more months ago than he cared to count.

Now the sounds blurred into a hellish cacophony that he had to pick through to listen for branches snapping, footfalls that weren’t from his men, the metallic click of machine guns and rifles ready to fire. Now the place reeked…of mud and rotting leaves, of things his imagination wasn’t vivid or brave enough to picture, and sometimes of decomposing bodies that neither side had retrieved.

Sergeant Gary Thomsen had learned to hate summer and the jungle. He hated the trails tangled with plants that grabbed at his heavy pack and all his weapons. He hated the sweat running down his face as plentiful as rain. He hated the fear twisting in his gut that someone was hiding around the next tree ready to kill him. He hated everything about Vietnam and the goddamn war that the politicians in the States wouldn’t call a war. A police action—was that the latest term?

He hated the leeches most of all.

He knew that they were clinging to him now. They were somehow always able to find their way up his pants and under his sleeves, into his boots, so they could gorge themselves on his sweet American blood. He’d led his men through brackish ponds and across streams and along a riverbank that morning and well into the afternoon, so there would be leeches on everyone.

He wanted to strip and pull the leeches off, but that would have to wait. There was another three hours or so left of what passed for daylight…the canopy was thick and not much sun was getting through. He had his orders to reach the firebase before dark and regroup with the rest of the platoon.

“Sarge…”

Gary scowled that someone had broken the relative silence. He turned to Private Wallem, a gangly hawk-nosed Texan who was pointing to just north of the trail. A body, mostly bones and scraps of dirty cloth, lay under a big fern.

“It’s one of theirs, Sarge. See? You can tell by the boots. Wonder if we got him or the jungle did? Guess it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s one of theirs and not…”

Gary shut out the rest of Wallem’s words and fixed his eyes on the body, angry with himself that he hadn’t spotted it. Not that it was all that interesting or all that important. But nothing used to get past him.

He’d set himself as point man for the patrol. The squad leader wasn’t supposed to walk point. He was supposed to take the second position. But Gary thought he had the keenest, most experienced eyes, and he wanted to be up front.

There was just too much green. He’d spent too many days in the jungle, and there were all those leeches, attached to his flesh, distracting him.

A good point man should have seen the body and not let anything distract him. What else had he missed? he wondered.

“War is always the same,” Gary thought, quoting President Lyndon Johnson. “It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.”

The quote had stayed with him because Gary was sure he was going mad.

Johnson had said the words six months earlier, back in January, shortly before Operation Masher, a large-scale search-and-destroy operation against North Vietnamese troop encampments, began. Johnson had then changed the name to Operation White Wing, which didn’t sound quite so aggressive.

Gary and his men were a part of it, in the Bong Son Plain near the coast. A little more than two hundred American soldiers had died, but almost six times that many North Vietnamese. Gary thought maybe he’d get to go home after it ended, but his sergeant was one of those Americans killed, and he was assigned another tour, promoted to E-5 and given his rifle squad of ten to lead.

The leeches would get some more of his sweet American blood.

“Leave it alone,” he said of the corpse. Sometimes the enemy rigged trip wires and explosives around bodies. “Keep moving,” he ordered.

He checked his compass. West, definitely. They were humping due west on an established trail. It took too much effort to hack straight through the jungle; everything grew too tight.

He’d look at the map again in another few minutes. They were hard to read, the maps. He navigated mostly by gut instinct and the compass.

He heard the steady tromp of the men behind him, the annoying but comforting buzz of insects. The insects rarely quieted. They didn’t seem to mind the presence of soldiers from either side. When they did go quiet, that was when fear seriously twisted in his gut.

God, but he wanted to go home.

A sound like thunder, muted and distant, rumbled. It was a bomb, he knew, from a B-52. The planes carried up to a hundred, dropping them from as high as six miles up. The U.S. regularly bombed North Vietnam and lately had been hitting oil depots around Hanoi and Haiphong.

Gary had read somewhere that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had criticized the president for the bombing, saying the country was heading down “a road from which there is no turning back, a road that leads to catastrophe for all mankind.”

As far as Gary was concerned, there’d been no turning back since the U.S. brought the first planeload of soldiers. He wished they’d bomb the whole damn country into oblivion so he could go home.

There was the thunder of another bomb, coming from even farther away.

Wallem started to speak again, but Gary cut him off with a quick chopping motion of his hand.

Between the sounds of marching and insects buzzing, he’d heard something else, a spitting sound, a sustained whisper that he recognized as machine-gun fire. It wasn’t terribly close, but he prayed it didn’t come closer.

He held his breath and sensed that his men were doing the same, and he gripped the stock of his rifle tighter. He didn’t want to engage any Vietcong, but those were part of his orders—dispatch any VC patrols on the way to the firebase.

The sound came again. Four or five machine guns, he guessed from the bursts. He couldn’t tell which side was doing the shooting. Didn’t matter, did it? The enemy was involved, to be sure.

It suddenly became quiet again…quiet except for the insects.

“Move out.” His voice was so soft the men directly behind him had to strain to hear.

Gary picked up the pace. His legs ached with the punishment of too many miles, but he forced the pain to the back of his mind. Just another hour, two at the outside, to reach the firebase.

Maybe he should call for a five-minute rest, get rid of some of the leeches. Then it would be easier to press on to the base so they could regroup with the others, get rid of more of the leeches, sleep before falling out the next day on some new asinine mission the higher-ups had concocted.

He cut through a particularly tight weave of trees where the trail narrowed, led them through a stretch of marsh and was just about ready to call for that blessed five-minute rest when he spotted something that hadn’t been marked on his map.

“Sarge, what is it?” Private Wallem said. “Sorry!” he added when he realized he’d spoken above a whisper.

Gary glared at Wallem, then turned back to what he’d seen.

Right in front of them was a building of some sort, definitely an old one. The jungle had practically swallowed it. Vines were thick on the columns and what was left of the walls. Most of the stone was stained green, but there were patches of white here and there, and he could see worn symbols that he suspected had once stood out quite prominently.

“Maybe a shrine,” Gary said. The country certainly had enough of them. They were Buddhist, right? They worshipped the smiling fat guy with the bald head, he thought.

Almost half of the building looked intact, and there was an opening midway down the greenish stone. The door, if there had been one, had been eaten away by time and the jungle, and the opening that was left looked like the yawning mouth of a serpent.

They probably had an hour or so left to get to the firebase, if he wasn’t off course. Maybe a little more than that, maybe two at the very outside he was sure.

He knew he shouldn’t take the time to investigate the place, but God, his feet and legs ached from all the walking. And the wide-open stone mouth beckoned.

He edged forward, straight toward the opening, gesturing for Wallem to come behind him. His curiosity tugged him, but it was also his responsibility to make sure no enemy soldiers were hiding inside. Checking would just be following orders.

He held up his fist for his men to stop and wait, then he stepped through the serpent’s mouth. His mouth dropped open.

“Holy spit!” Wallem said when he poked his head inside. He stretched to see over Gary’s shoulder. “Sweet Mary, mother of…”

Gary was so surprised that he didn’t even frown at Wallem for speaking.

Sunlight was shining through a sizable hole in the roof, illuminating gold figurines, several of Buddha with emeralds set in his earlobes and where his belly button would be. There were pieces of ivory, bowls that he figured might have some sort of religious significance because they were so delicate and beautifully painted, jade and coral carvings, and more. It was too much for him to take in.

His gaze flitted from one piece to the next, pausing on a pair of jade koi with intertwined tails before settling on a small Buddha with jewels draped around its neck. The light dimmed, as if the sun was behind a cloud, plunging everything into shadows.

Still, he could see well enough. There was a bird the size of his hand, probably carved from ivory, perched on a shiny black pedestal. It made Gary think of Operation White Wing.

“This is creepy,” Wallem said. He held a covered bowl with dark symbols etched everywhere. He put it down and picked up a fist-size jade turtle. “This is better.”

The treasure didn’t belong there. It didn’t have the mossy green film of the jungle, nor any vines growing on it. And it was polished as if it had just come from a temple or museum. It had to have been put there fairly recently. Maybe by thieves, maybe by monks who, fearing the invading Americans might destroy their precious antiquities, moved them to the middle of nowhere.

Would it hurt to take some of the smaller pieces? There were things that would easily fit in pockets and packs. The jewels draped around the Buddha alone would buy him a Mustang when he got back home. Hell, with that, he could buy a house. Maybe get his mother one, too.

“Sarge?”

Gary didn’t answer. He reached behind his back and eased his pack off, flipped it open and started filling the crannies with pendants and thumb-size jade carvings, taking the small things that looked the most valuable.

There was a ring with a diamond in the shape of a sunflower seed. He’d give it to his girl as an engagement ring when he popped the question after he got back home.

He looped a string of gold beads around his neck. They felt heavy and cold, but they quickly warmed against his skin.

After only a moment’s hesitation, Wallem joined in the looting, snatching the ivory bird first and discovering the wings detached, which made it easier to fit in his pack.

“What about the rest of the men? Should they come in, Sarge? There’s enough for everybody.”

Gary didn’t reply. He was filling his pockets with anything that fit, shoving jade and silver rings on his fingers as he went. His mind raced to figure out how to take one of the golden Buddhas.

He heard muted thunder, and at first thought it was another distant bomb. But it was followed by the patter of rain, some of which found its way inside.

Real thunder. That explained the light slipping away on him. Storms sprang up quickly in Vietnam. The frequent rains were proverbial mixed blessings—they cooled the men off, but they added time to any mission. And worse, the rain smeared all the greens together and made it more difficult to see the enemy.

He muttered a string of soft curses. It would take them longer to reach the firebase now, slogging along a muddy trail through a wet jungle, probably slowed a little bit more by the weight of the treasure. A good weight, he thought. The only good thing about this god-forsaken country was this room full of treasure.

“Get Sanduski and Moore,” Gary said. “Mitchell and Everett and Seger, too, for starters. Those guys go first. Tell ’em all to load up whatever they can. Everybody can take a turn.”

Some part of Gary knew he shouldn’t be doing this, and he knew he’d have a hell of a time trying to get the stuff back home. But he just couldn’t get past all the gold.

“I’ll take it home,” he whispered. “I’ll find a way.” He was nothing if not resourceful.

Besides, his orders never said he couldn’t pick up abandoned treasure. In fact, his orders never mentioned treasure at all.

“This ain’t stealing, Sarge,” Wallem said, as if reading Gary’s mind. “This stuff is just—”

“Lying around,” Gary finished as thunder shook the small building.

“Sanduski and Moore for starters,” he reminded Wallem. They were on their second tour, too, and deserved something for it. Moore, the radio man, had twin boys who’d just turned three. “Then the rest. There’s enough for everybody.”

Wallem managed to stuff the tail-touching koi into his pack after taking out some probably necessary supplies. “We’ll take it all, Sarge. The slope heads just left this unattended. Maybe the owners are dead. It’s all ours and—”

“We can’t take it all. There’s too much,” Gary said sharply as he tried to heft one of the small Buddha statues and discovered it was made of solid gold. “We’ll only get out of here with some of it.”

“A king’s ransom,” Wallem gushed.

Gary heard some of the men talking outside, and then felt a faint vibration through the stones when thunder sounded again.