Chapter 11 — Forest Keeper

The opportunity came on a Saturday afternoon, when Ma Van Loc announced that he would go to a briefing in the district all day, and most of the brothers in the station were sent to patrol according to the reinforcement plan proposed after the encounter. Khue made an excuse to stay on duty with May to take care of Nau and Mun, but in reality, she had secretly planned this a few days ago.

"Are you sure it's okay?" May asked, standing watch outside the door while Khue walked towards the small room behind the main building, where the station's archives were kept. "If Mr. Loc knew that you entered the file room without him present..."

"I just looked up official information, there's nothing wrong," Khue replied, although in her heart she also clearly saw that this justification was quite forced. "Besides, these are station records, you have the right to access them."

The storage room was small and damp, the only light coming in from a small, dusty window. Along two walls are old iron shelves filled with cardboard boxes and wooden filing cabinets, each labeled with the year and month in faded marker. The smell of old paper and the typical musty smell of old documents that were not properly preserved filled Khue's nose as soon as she entered.

She followed the stickers and found the file storage area from eight or nine years ago — the period when her father was still working and the months before his death. It wasn't difficult to find, because as she remembered, these files had never been transferred anywhere like Loc had said.

Khue pulled out a stack of thick, dusty folders, placed them on a small table in the middle of the room, and began to carefully flip through each file. Most of them are records of handling common administrative violations - small cases of animal trapping, cases of illegal firewood exploitation in insignificant quantities, and periodic patrol reports. But when she turned to a folder with a dark brown cover, dated just weeks before her father's death, Khue paused.

Inside the folder was a preliminary report, handwritten in her father's familiar handwriting, with the title reading: "Report detecting signs of large-scale illegal exploitation of forest products, western border area". The content describes how he discovered traces of organized wood transportation, suspected it was related to a number of individuals with ties to the local government, and proposed establishing a special working group to coordinate with the provincial police to conduct a closed investigation, avoiding information disclosure through the district's regular channels.

Khue's heart pounded as she read each line. This was exactly what she had suspected for the past eight years—evidence in black and white that her father had discovered something serious, had intended to report it to the next level to avoid information leaks. But when she continued to flip to find the appendix, the specific evidence, the names he suspected, she only saw a blank page with a note from another person, not her father's: "The original file has been transferred to the Department as requested, the backup copy here is incomplete."

There are no appendices. There is no list of suspects. There aren't any other specifics beyond this preliminary report.

"Who took the rest?" Khue muttered, her hands trembling as she flipped through the entire folder again, hoping to find some clue that had been missed. But the folder only left that preliminary report, like a lonely fragment of a larger story that had been deliberately torn apart.

She took a photo of the entire report page with her phone, carefully placing the folder back in its original position so that no one would discover that someone had rummaged through it. While reorganizing, she noticed that a station briefing notebook, the type used to record important daily meetings and decisions, was also in the same storage area.

She quickly opened the notebook, flipped to the corresponding time period, and found a brief note, dated just three days before her father's death: "Commander Thai reported important findings, requested a secret meeting with the station chief. Arranged a private meeting." Below is the initials, scribbled and difficult to read, but Khue immediately recognized its familiar shape - a signature she had seen countless times on station documents during the past years working here. That is the signature of Ma Van Loc, who was then serving as deputy station chief, before becoming station chief after his predecessor retired.

Khue sat down on an old wooden chair, feeling as if the ground beneath her feet had just shaken. If this record is accurate, her father had a private meeting with Loc just a few days before his death, to report on the "important discovery" — most likely an illegal logging site and suspicions of local officials' involvement. And if so, Loc - the person who is now the station chief, the person she still reports to every day, the person she once trusted like a brother in the profession - knew about that "big story" from the beginning, knew maybe even before her father died.

Before turning the next pages of the briefing book, Khue stopped and tried to remember what he knew about Ma Van Loc at that time. Eight years ago, he was just a deputy station chief, under another station chief who had long since retired and now lived in a far away province, rarely having the opportunity to contact him. If her father chose to report privately to Loc instead of the station chief at that time, there must have been a reason — maybe he trusted Loc more, or maybe he suspected that the station chief at that time was also involved. That thought opened up a new direction of investigation that Khue had never thought of before: not only Loc, but also other people who had left the station long ago, also held part of this secret.

She quickly flipped through a few more pages before and after that record date, looking for any other details that might be relevant, but most of them were just routine notes about duty schedules and briefings, nothing special. There was only one line, written the day after her father passed away, that made Khue read it twice: "The station temporarily stopped working for one day to take care of Comrade Thai's funeral. Comrade Loc was in charge of temporary operations." There was nothing unusual in those words, but placed in the context of what she had just discovered, it made Khue shudder - in less than a week, the person who had just heard her father's secret report became the station's operator, and eight years later, was still the person sitting in that position.

The door to the storage room opened suddenly, causing Khue to jump and quickly close the briefing book. It's May, with a cheerful look on her face.

"Sister, Mr. Loc's car has arrived, earlier than expected!" Cloud whispered urgently. "Go out quickly, let me clean this place up."

Khue hastily took a few more photos of the briefing book page, put the book back in its correct position, and then left the storage room a split second before Loc entered the station yard. She tried to keep a calm face, walking straight to the rescue barn as if she had just finished her daily work, her heart still pounding because she had just experienced a dangerous moment and because of the weight of what she had just discovered.

In the evening, when she was alone in her room, Khue spread the photos in front of her, looked at them over and over again, trying to piece them together with what she knew from her father's notebook, from Mr. Chinh's story, and from information about Kim Phat Company. A picture is gradually taking shape, each time clearer, but also more and more terrifying.

She thought of Ma Van Loc - the man who often told her to be careful when on patrol, who expressed sincere concern when he heard the news about the cable trap killing the mother langur. Was he an accomplice who knew everything in advance and chose to stay silent for the past eight years? Or was he just another victim, threatened or taken advantage of in some way she couldn't fully understand?

She had no answers, only new questions, more complicated, more heartbreaking than the ones she had carried before. But there was one thing she was sure of: the secret meeting between her father and Loc, just a few days before his death, could not have been a coincidence. It had to be an important link, maybe the most important link, in the whole story she had been trying to piece together for the past eight years.

That night, Khue texted Nguyen, who was staying at the Provincial Branch overnight after a business trip, briefly telling what she had just discovered, not going into specific details for fear that the message might be read by someone, just writing briefly: "Found something important. Need to talk when you get home. Be careful." A few minutes later, her phone vibrated with a text response from Nguyen, short but firm: "I'll be home as soon as possible. Stay safe." Khue looked at that line for a long time in the dark, feeling a warmth creeping in amidst the enveloping insecurity, like a small lamp still persistently burning amid the storm that was gradually forming ahead.