Rat pushed himself up. He took the flashlight, muttered something, and moved down to the far end of the hootch. For privacy, the men had rigged up curtained walls around their cots, small makeshift bedrooms, and in the dark Rat went quickly from room to room, using the flashlight to pluck out the faces. Eddie Diamond slept a hard deep sleep—the others, too. To be sure, though, Rat checked once more, very carefully, then he reported back to Fossie. "All accounted for. No extras." "Eddie?" "Darvon dreams." Rat switched off the flashlight and tried to think it out. "Maybe she just—I don't know—maybe she camped out tonight. Under the stars or something. You search the compound?" "Sure I did." "Well, come on," Rat said. "One more time." Outside, a soft violet light was spreading out across the eastern hillsides. Two or three ARVN soldiers had built their breakfast fires, but the place was mostly quiet and unmoving. They tried the helipad first, then the mess hall and supply hootches, then they walked the entire six hundred meters of perimeter. "Okay," Rat finally said. "We got a problem." When he first told the story, Rat stopped there and looked at Mitchell Sanders for a time. "So what's your vote? Where was she?" "The Greenies," Sanders said. "Yeah?" Sanders smiled. "No other option. That stuff about the Special Forces—how they used the place as a base of operations, how they'd glide in and out—all that had to be there for a reason. That's how stories work, man." Rat thought about it, then shrugged. "All right, sure, the Greenies. But it's not what Fossie thought. She wasn't sleeping with any of them. At least not exactly. I mean, in a way she was sleeping with all of them, more or less, except it wasn't sex or anything. They was
"Tone?" he'd say. "I didn't know it was all that complicated. The girl joined the zoo. One more animal—end of story." "Yeah, fine. But tell it right." At daybreak the next morning, when Mark Fossie heard she was back, he stationed himself outside the fenced-off Special Forces area. All morning he waited for her, and all afternoon. Around dusk Rat brought him something to eat. "She has to come out," Fossie said. "Sooner or later, she has to." "Or else what?" Rat said. "I go get her. I bring her out." Rat shook his head. "Your decision. I was you, though, no way I'd mess around with any Greenie types, not for nothing." "It's Mary Anne in there." "Sure, I know that. All the same, I'd knock real extra super polite." Even with the cooling night air Fossie's face was slick with sweat. He looked sick. His eyes were bloodshot; his skin had a whitish, almost colorless cast. For a few minutes Rat waited with him, quietly watching the hootch, then he patted the kid's shoulder and left him alone. It was after midnight when Rat and Eddie Diamond went out to check on him. The night had gone cold and steamy, a low fog sliding down from the mountains, and somewhere out in the dark they heard music playing. Not loud but not soft either. It had a chaotic, almost unmusical sound, without rhythm or form or progression, like the noise of nature. A synthesizer, it seemed, or maybe an electric organ. In the background, just audible, a woman's voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue. They found Fossie squatting near the gate in front of the Special Forces area. Head bowed, he was swaying to the music, his face wet and shiny. As Eddie bent down beside him, the kid looked up with dull eyes, ashen and powdery, not quite in register. "Hear that?" he whispered. "You hear? It's Mary Anne."