The same trail that drew me drew Mike as well, though he didn’t know it. I filed credentials as a photojournalist and was in a government vehicle headed north by the following morning.
***
Lang Son. The Kỳ Cùng River runs north here, one of the few rivers in Vietnam that drains toward China. The road to the Friendship Pass has been a military road for as long as there have been armies.
The village was two hours past Lang Son city. Mike’s agency had arranged for an interpreter who managed the introductions. Sipping tea in the shade of the elder’s porch, we waited for our host’s lengthy descriptions to be related in suspiciously short English.
The white man in the jungle appeared at the full moon. Had been appearing, that is, for as long as the elder’s father could remember. To the west, near the stream. He carried something. His lips moved but made no sound.
Mike showed the elder a photograph, and the elder nodded in recognition.
***
The search took most of the next day. Mike’s team ran a methodical grid. I went with them for a while before diverging.
The stream was to the west. I felt a warmth in my pocket. A hum. It grew as I moved toward the water.
I found them together tangled in the roots of a tree that had been growing over them for a long time. The bones and the other thing.
I pocketed what I came for. Then I stood up and called for Mike.
***
With his team, he worked the site procedurally: photographs first, then measurements, a grid laid out in the undergrowth. The disc came up last, from the soil beside the skull. Aluminum, oval. A regiment. A year.
Mike let me read it.
Marcel Devaux. 3e Régiment Étranger d’Infanterie, 1893.
When I looked up, he was frowning, gazing towards the river. Then he pulled out his satphone.
***
The pilot is still missing, and will remain so. I doubt the DPAA will wait for the next full moon.
Mike’s case may be cold, but mine is closed. Race you to the next.
— N.
The Lang Son region has been a contested frontier for centuries. French colonial forces suffered one of their most consequential defeats there in 1885, when an ambiguous engagement triggered the fall of the Jules Ferry government in Paris and accelerated the end of French military expansion in the region.
