‘Faster,’ said Chemda. Her hand gripped Jake’s momentarily, unconsciously maybe. ‘Faster. Quicker. Please.’ Then she spoke in French, and then Khmer. Urging on the driver.
Jake doubted Yeng knew any of these languages. He spoke Hmong. But the meaning was plain.
Faster. Quicker. Please.
But no matter how fast they went, the noises behind them proved how swiftly they were losing. The roar of the big police Toyotas was drowning the growl of their own wheezing vehicle.
‘Faster!’ said Jake, helplessly. He saw images of the blood-drained Cambodian man in his mind: did the cops really do that? Why not? Who else? Perhaps it was that thin unsmiling Ponsavanh officer. Jake could easily envisage him: briskly slashing a neck, like severing the arteries of a suspended hog, watching the blood drain and belch. Nodding. Job done.
The jeep accelerated into a desperate turn.
They had no choice but to escape. Even if they surrendered to the Ponsavanh police and Chemda used her grandfather’s high profile, again, to save them – and there was no guarantee that this technique would work a second time, indeed Jake was sure it wouldn’t – that still meant surrendering Tou, who would certainly be beaten and imprisoned and convicted and possibly executed. And what would those clumsy and brutal police do to old man Yeng? The openly rebellious Hmong?
But their vehicle was old, asthmatic and rusty; the police SUVs, however dirty, were fast and new.
Yeng spun the wheel, racing them along the soft earthen banks of rice paddies, ducking the car under the slapping branches of oak, bamboo and glossy evergreens; the jeep slid and groaned in the mud – then sped on, grinding, desperate, and churning – but the cars were overtaking them. It was happening. They were being overtaken.
Jake swore; Tou shouted; Yeng accelerated. Jake thought of the thin police officer, his repressed anger and hatred, maybe he would happily hoist them by their ankles, cut a throat -
An explosion blossomed in gold.
A huge and sudden explosion flayed the windscreen with mud and water and leaves; the jeep toppled left and further left, nearly flipping over; but then the driverside tyres found some purchase and surged forward and they crashed back onto level ground, and somehow they sped onwards.
Unharmed?
Smoke. There was smoke behind them. And wild flames of black and orange and billowing grey. Jake guessed at once: it must have been a bombie: an unexploded shell. The cars behind had surely hit some UXO. Jake stared, quite stunned, watching men falling out of one flaming vehicle, men on fire, screams. Muffled screams.
Tou was whooping.
Jake gazed in horror.
‘We have to stop.’ He grasped Tou’s shoulder. ‘We must stop, they could be hurt -’
‘No!’ Tou said. ‘Crazy! They kill us. They kill Samnang they kill you and Chemda we go -’
Chemda looked Jake’s way:
‘We have to. He’s right -’
‘But – But Jesus -’
‘No. No no no! We escape!’ said Tou. ‘We escape now! See they are stopping!’
It was true. All the police cars had been halted by the lead vehicle’s disaster. The cops were stuck in the smoke and the mud. They had all been saved by the American ordnance hiding under the softly unpetalling magnolia trees.
‘Escape. We escape.’
We escape.
Jake stared. Quite dumbed. Their old jeep rattled over the paddyfield bumps, screeching uphill and away. They were indeed going to escape – and maybe this was no accident, maybe this wasn’t just outrageous fortune. Jake had forgotten that Yeng the Driver knew what he was doing. Yeng knew the bush, the forest, the paddies. He was striped Hmong. Hmong Bai. Perhaps he knew all along where he was going, and where to lead their pursuers: into the bombs.
Whatever the answer – luck or skill – the smoke and fire were a long way behind them now. The policemen, mobbing the wreck of their burned-out car, were visible but tiny. The jeep was already climbing into the mountains, quitting the Plain of Jars. And so their fate was boxed and mailed. They were really on the run. If Jake really wanted adventure and danger and risk: this was it.
The Plain stretched into the blueness of the distance, as they ascended. The scenery was queerly serene, untroubled, as if this place had seen so much worse. And the serenity was paradoxically beautiful, too. Jake clutched his camera in his perspiring hands, and took a shot. The way the mosaic of rice paddies shone out so blue in the reflected sun: it was like the tesselated pieces of a stained glass window.
Where had that image come from? His childhood. The stained glass window, the blue robes of the Virgin. It was a visual echo of himself, as a little boy, with his mother in a Catholic church: holding her hand, staring up: there’s Saint Veronica, Jacob, and there’s Saint Francis, and that’s the blue of Saint Lucy, Saint Lucy blue.
Jake took another photo, to mediate the sadness away. The spire of smoke became a wistful line, and then it was gone. All was blue, the blue of the sky and the blue of the reflecting paddies and the blue of the horizon. Anxiously smudged with faint cloud.
No one spoke for many minutes as they made a lonely ascent through tiny hamlets and empty woodland. The return to the tranquillity of deep rural Laos was a small welcome death. They passed villages where girls threw tennis balls at young men, all of the men in suits, the girls in splendid dresses. The jeep sped on, urgent and noisy in the quiet of the woods.
‘A mating ritual,’ said Chemda. ‘They sing to each other and throw tennis balls, at New Year. That way they can find husbands… and wives… This damn phone.’
Chemda was again frustratedly checking her cellphone. But she shook her head. Agitated. Frightened. Determined. No signal. She leaned and asked Tou:
‘Tou! Where are we going? How can we get out of Laos – we need to find a way out!’
The lad turned.
‘Yes yes big danger. But Yeng say he have friends. We go. But we drive long-time long-time. Road dirty.’
Jake guessed immediately who these friends must be: Hmong fighters, tribal renegades, hiding out in the rugged hills. They were surely beyond government jurisdiction: this was surely rebel territory. He had been in just enough lawless regions to recognize the sensation: that liminal frisson as you passed into a no-man’s-land, the interzone, where the laws of the city do not apply.
That’s where they were now. There were no police here. No civilian laws. Just endless thick forest and orchids and fungi and wild camellias astir in the sunny breeze; and in the distance, thin strings of waterfall tasseling in the wind as they dropped from the misty peaks of the high Cordillera.
The journey was lengthy and anxious. Every so often they passed clearings in the forest where Hmong children, carrying wicker baskets full of freshly chopped hardwood, stopped dead and pointed, evidently stunned, astounded: wholly gobsmacked by what they saw in the jeep.
One boy gazed Jake’s way, his mouth hanging wide open, goggling and laughing. The child’s mother came behind, pushing a long-handled wooden wheelbarrow.
She also paused and stared at Jake; her expression was so shocked it was beyond alarm, it was pure incomprehension: like she was seeing an extraterrestrial.
Tou laughed, unhappily.
‘They have never seen a white man before, ever. You are like a god. Or a demon.’
A cloud of grey dust showed a vehicle approaching: coming the other way. It was an army vehicle. Troops in khaki were hanging on the back of the truck. The fear was congealing. No one spoke in the jeep. What troops were these? But the soldiers just gazed vacantly at them, half curious, half bored. Tired maybe. The apathetic gaze of conscripts across the world.
Nothing further happened. The army truck disappeared. The trail ran its ragged way through the hills, sidling around mountains. Getting higher, giddily high. The first hints of mist and cloud appeared; bashful centaurs and unicorns of cloud that fled as they approached.