The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand—the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.

“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.

“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”

“Your car stolen?”

“No, my car isn’t stolen.”

“A friend took your car?”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.

When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.

That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.

“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.

“But—”

“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”

“I—”

“Come, come. Not far.”

The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.

It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come—a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.

“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”

“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”

“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”

“Like brothers.”

“And brothers with America.”

“I hope so, yes.”

“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”

“Allies, brothers—whatever words.”

The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.

“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”

The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.

“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently—my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”

“I see.”

“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”

“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.

“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon—it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think there were any survivors.”

“Would you know where they were taken?”

“The bodies? Buried.”

“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”

“One was. But the others stayed.”

“Why?” asked Danny.

The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry—at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s—and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.

“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”

“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”

It was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.

He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.

The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.

According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years—the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.

“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.

Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.

Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees. The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot—the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.

If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.

Would that make it survivable?

He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.

“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.

The police chief described the process—they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.

“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”

“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”

There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.

“Then what happened?” asked Danny.

“To the cemetery.”

Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”

“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”

The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.