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their failure. They took it personally. Their high hopes came tumbling down. One night, at the beginning of June, two of the youngest marines got into a fistfight over a stolen Hustler magazine. They fought like jealous teenagers, and everyone was embarrassed by the display.
    After the captain got the two fighters separated, it turned out that others, including Molly, had suffered petty thefts, too, mostly letters and snapshots from home. Whoever it was had snitched her barber’s scissors. The culprit, probably some desperately poor Khmer—though Kleat made sure to accuse the roaming gypsy—never was caught.
    The stealing was almost beside the point. What mattered about the fight and the thefts was that it suddenly became clear their losses outweighed their gains. Their daily miseries—the spiraling heat, the snakes and bugs, the dust of dried paddy sewage that festered in their sinuses, and a hundred other small things—could no longer be sustained with hope. Whether the pilot had ejected or been cast loose of the jet or dragged away, it was plain they were not going to find him.
    As if to hasten their departure, they received news that a typhoon was building to super class in the South China Sea. With winds in excess of 150 miles per hour, it already equaled a class 4 Atlantic hurricane. The navy meteorologists could not say when and where it might strike land, in four days or six or ten, in Malaysia, Thailand, or Cambodia. But it was sure to usher in the mother of all monsoons. The rains would come. The roads would turn to grease and the paddies would fill. Rivers would run backward. The villages would turn into islands.
    On the evening of June 7, the captain invited Molly, Kleat, and Duncan to a private gathering inside his wall tent. He had lawn chairs for them and coffee mugs for the last of his Johnnie Walker Black.
    â€œWe’re terminating the recovery,” he told them. The search was over. He had already broken the news to his team. “I wanted to tell you separately. To thank each of you for your hard work.”
    Molly sat back, stunned. Her shock was a curiosity to her. For at least a week now, she had been trying to invent a story that glossed over the fact that she was essentially writing about empty holes. “It’s over?” she said.
    â€œCan’t you hear?” said Kleat. “It’s done.”
    Duncan tried to rally the captain. “You don’t give up on the good ones,” he said.
    â€œWe’re not, Duncan,” the captain said. “But at a certain point you say, enough.”
    â€œA few days more,” said Duncan. “Where else could he be?”
    For Molly’s sake, the captain said, “I’m disappointed, too.”
    â€œThere will be other seasons, other excavations,” Kleat said. He was adamant.
    Other chances, she thought, but not for her. The Times had not sent her to write about barren dirt, not after a pitch entitled “Sacred Ground.” The bottom line was that without the bones for a climax, her story was not a Times story at all.
    â€œWe start redeploying tomorrow,” the captain said. “I’ll arrange transportation for you.”
    Molly went through the motions of the captain’s farewell celebration. Afterward, she meandered through camp, dealing with the let-down. She could hear soldiers through their tent walls. They were excited to be going back home.
    The paper was covering her travel expenses, and she’d get a kill fee for her trouble. Maybe one of the airline magazines would take a condensed version, and she could spin off a travel piece for the Denver Post. She’d never recoup the cost of the camera, though. Ten grand. She’d gambled big, and lost.
    On a whim, she took a few pickup shots of the camp. Wasting battery juice just to waste it, she paused by a hole that had once been the village well and fired her flash into the darkness, not even aiming. There was