The driver in the car behind them began beeping his horn, little staccato blasts, again and again. Ngoc slowed, allowing the second car to pass them. After that they followed the second car along steadily worsening roads as it headed up into the mountains. An hour passed. Asphalt gave way to gravel. Gravel gave way to mud. Ngoc cursed and muttered to himself as he fishtailed and slid through vast puddles, ugly craters, and endless washboard gullies. The mountains closed around them and still they climbed. Finally, on a ridgeline two thousand feet above Que Son, the lead car halted. Ngoc pulled up just behind it and turned off the engine.

The narrow road was cutting through a saddle in the mountains. To their right and left, huge crags rose steeply, their peaks lost in the insistent mist. Straight ahead, the road fell down the mountains into a wide, waterous valley. It was so quiet they could hear one another breathe. And stepping out of the car into the silence, Condley fell like a rock into the past.

Hanson Muir had walked around the car to join him. The professor stretched mightily, trying to shake the kinks from the long ride. “Do you have your map, Brandon? The old one from the war?”

“I don’t need it.” Condley pointed knowingly down into the valley. “That’s Antenna Valley. Ninh Phuoc is about five miles from here.”

“Amazing,” said Muir, straining to see that far. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ve never breathed air so clean. And it’s just . . . right there! It seems like another lifetime that we were in Ninh Phuoc, doesn’t it?”

Condley did not hear him. Nor did he merely see the mountains. At that moment he was inside them, almost a part of them. He stared coolly up both steep slopes, measuring their crags and the tangled jungle foliage, wondering where the trails might open up to reinforced caves or ambush-ready clearings, trying to decide how he would either attack or bypass them and along which rock-strewn ridge he might place his defensive perimeter for the night. It was happening again, the brain trick that he neither desired nor understood. The war was all over him, more real than the thought of pressing into the mountains with three former enemies and this well-meaning but permanently naive scientist who believed the world’s answers turned on the riddles found in bones.

“Ninh Phuoc’s an easy hike from here. The Marine base at An Hoa isn’t far away either.” He pointed expertly. “Right over there, see the bend in the far river? And Que Son is just down the mountain behind us. Great place for an NVA base camp, huh, Professor?”

“If you say so,” said Muir. “Personally, I find it unbearably primitive.”

In front of the other car, Colonel Pham and the two district officials were arguing again. Muir watched them quizzically. “They’re not happy with this, are they?”