The Reckoning by Jeff Long Read Free Book Online Page A

a body falls from the sky. What would you do? Conduct a respectful Buddhist cremation? For a stranger? Waste a week going off to find the authorities? Authorities, by the way, who might try to lay claim to your plane parts. The body was a nuisance. A pollution. So they dumped him here.”
    â€œInto their drinking water?” said the captain.
    â€œIt’s an old well in an abandoned village. And the tradition could have carried over. Years later, when the Khmer Rouge needed a dumping ground, some villager might have led them to the same well.”
    â€œThere’s no way to be sure the pilot is underneath the rest of them.”
    â€œThere’s only one way to be sure he’s not,” Duncan answered.
    â€œWe’ve never encountered a situation like this,” said the captain. “Never.”
    And yet Duncan had planted the possibility among them. Suddenly it seemed that week after week, they might have been digging farther away from what they were looking for. And now the dead from one era could be hiding the dead from another.
    But they could not simply dredge up the bones to see what lay at the bottom. The Cambodian liaisons suddenly became officious and prickly. There were problems, it developed, diplomatic, jurisdictional, archaeological, and cultural. Molly loved it. With a single, giant twist, her story had not only been saved, but was taking on dimensions she’d never dreamed of.
    Among other things, as a matter of policy, American bones were supposed to be separated from Southeast Asian Mongoloid remains at the site of excavation rather than at the central lab in Hawaii. The Department of Defense had learned the hard way how difficult it was to repatriate Asiatic remains. The Vietnamese government, especially, regarded any bones found in the proximity of American remains as those of ling nguy, or South Vietnamese puppet soldiers.
    There were also issues of territorial authority. This might be a shared underworld, but it happened to lie within Cambodian soil. Who owned the dead? Should the Cambodian authorities be the ones to oversee the excavation of the well? Did that place American soldiers in the role of undertakers for Cambodian citizens? What if there was no American pilot beneath the layer of Khmer Rouge victims? Did the Cambodians even want the mass grave to be exhumed? The competing interests created a tension that made her story at once international, delicate, and highly emotional.
    The captain ordered the area around the well ringed off. There was a process to be observed, channels to go through. Cambodian soldiers were posted around the camp to keep away the locals. The men on the labor crew were told to return to their villages. The captain, the forensic anthropologist, and their Cambodian counterparts all retired to a tent and began placing satellite calls to their headquarters. Instructed to stay away from the site, Molly and the others waited in whatever shade they could find. Hours went by.
    The team members couldn’t get over it. They treated Molly like a seer, as if she had a gift for this. “How did you know to look down there?” one asked.
    â€œI didn’t,” she said.
    â€œBut you went right to it.”
    â€œYeah, after four weeks, right to it.”
    As the day dragged on and they still sat idle, Kleat stewed. “What are they doing in there? We could be down clearing the hole.”
    â€œIt’s not that easy,” Duncan said. “They’re on to us by now.”
    â€œWho?” said Molly.
    â€œThe locals. These are the dead they inherited their earth from, literally, the original owners of the land they’re farming. The villagers could demand to cover the bones over or burn them to ash. One way or another, they’ll have to exorcise the spirits.”
    â€œScrew their boogeymen,” Kleat said.
    Molly began to worry. The captain emerged from the tent with a frown on his face, took a long breath, and