"What do you see?" Khon whispered from behind.
"Things. Terrible things."
Khon came crawling up with his own binocs. He stared for a long time, in silence.
While they watched, one of the miners carrying ore staggered and fell, the basket spilling to the ground. He was small and slight, and, Ford guessed, no more than a teenager. A soldier dragged the boy out of the line and kicked him, trying to get him to rise. The boy struggled but was too weak. Finally the soldier placed a pistol against the boy's head and fired. Nobody even so much as turned a head. The soldier waved over a donkey cart, the corpse was swung in, and Ford watched as the donkey was driven to the edge of the valley. There the body was dumped into a trench cut like a raw wound into the red soil of the rainforest--a mass grave.
"You see that?" Khon said quietly.
"Yes."
Ford glassed the soldiers on patrol and was shocked to see that most of them, too, looked like teenagers and some were clearly children.
"Take a look up the valley," murmured Khon, "where those big trees are still standing."
Ford swung the glasses up and immediately spied a wooden house tucked in amongst the trees at the head of the valley. Built in classic French colonial style, with a pitched tin roof, dormer windows, and walls of whitewashed boards and batten. The roof sloped down to a broad verandah, shaded by tall flowering heliconias in vivid orange and red. As he watched, he could see an old, birdlike man moving around the verandah, pacing back and forth, holding a drink in his fist. His hair was snow white, his back bowed almost to a hunchback position, but his face appeared unlined and alert. As the man paced, he was talking to two other men, making chopping gestures with his free hand. Teen soldiers with AK-47s guarded both sides of the house.
"You see him?"
Ford nodded.
"I'm pretty sure that man is Brother Number Six."
"Brother Number Six?"
"Pol Pot's right-hand man. Rumors had it the bastard was controlling an area somewhere along the Thai-Cambodian border. Looks like we just found his little fiefdom." Khon slipped his binoculars back into his pack. "Well, I guess that wraps it up."
Ford said nothing. He could feel Khon's eyes on him.
"Let's take some pictures, roll videotape, get a GPS reading, and get the damn out of here."
Ford lowered his binoculars and did not respond.
Suddenly, Khon frowned. He spied something in the weeds at his feet; reaching out, he plucked it up and showed it to Ford. It was a hand-rolled cigarette butt, fresh and dry.
"Uh oh," said Ford.
"We must get off this hill."
They crept back from the edge and scurried at a crouch past the gun emplacements. Ford spied a movement in the forest below and pitched himself to the ground, Khon following.
He gestured to Khon. "Patrol."
"They're surely coming up this way."
"Then we go down the other side."
Ford crawled on his belly toward the encircling wall and crouched below it, Khon following.
"Can't stay here. Got to get over that wall."
Khon nodded.
Ford found a good handhold, hauled himself up to just below the broken edge, then threw himself over and down. He lay there, breathing hard. He hadn't been seen. A moment later Khon appeared at the top. A deafening burst of automatic weapons fire ripped out of the jungle to their left, spraying across the wall, sending chips of stone flying like shrapnel.
"Hon chun gnay!" Khon cried, launching himself from the top and landing heavily next to Ford and rolling. The gunfire swung around and tore into the vegetation over their heads, spraying them with shredded leaves and twigs.
The firing stopped as abruptly as it had started and Ford could hear shouts as hidden soldiers ran through the trees below them. Trying to keep himself as flat as possible, he aimed his Walther in the direction of the voices and fired a single shot. The response was a torrent of more gunfire, still coming in high. A second spray of rounds snicked off the upper stones of the wall.
"Let's get out of here," said Ford.
Khon pulled out his 9mm Beretta. "No shit, Yanqui."
An RPG overshot their position and detonated on the hilltop above them, the concussion bucking Ford over. His ears ringing, he struggled to clear his head. "Run down that draw while I cover you. Then take cover and do the same for me."
"Right."
Ford fired the .32 in the general direction of the soldiers, and a moment later Khon leapt up and tore down the hill. Ford kept up a slow, irregular suppressing fire as Khon dodged down the hill and disappeared.
A minute later Ford heard the pop pop of Khon's covering fire for him. He scrambled to his feet and tore downhill, into the draw. An RPG went off behind him, throwing him forward--and a good thing, as the vegetation where he had just been was chopped into bits by a discharge of automatic weapons fire.
He crawled down the draw as twigs and wet flecks of vegetation rained down on him. They were still firing high, raking the understory, unable to get the right angle from their position. A moment later he saw Khon ahead.
"Run!"
They both pounded downhill, crashing their way through bushes and vines. Bursts of fire ripped through the vegetation around them, but gradually it became more distant and sporadic.
Ten minutes later they hit the upper part of the ravine, and paused at the banks of the stream to catch their breaths. Ford knelt and threw water into his face and neck, trying to cool himself off.
"They're tracking us," said Khon. "We've got to keep moving."
Ford nodded. "Upstream. They won't expect it."
Wading in the water, stepping from pool to rushing pool, Ford climbed up the loose boulders of the steep streambed. A half hour of grueling climbing brought them to a spring, where water poured from a fissure. A ridgeline lay a hundred yards above and a dry gully went off to the right.
They crossed the gully and climbed the ridge, down the other side, and up the next one, bulling through dense thickets of brush. A couple of hours passed and twilight began to fall. The forest sank into green gloaming.
Khon threw himself down on a bed of small ferns, rolled on his back, tucked his hands behind his head. A big smile spread over his placid features. "Lovely. Let's make camp."
Ford sank onto a fallen log, breathing hard. He took out his canteen, handed it to Khon, who drank deeply. He then drank himself, the water warm and fetid.
"You verified the mine," said Khon, sitting up and examining his fingernails. He took out a nail file and began to clean and sand them. "You have the location. We can go back now."
Ford said nothing.
"Right, Mr. Mandrake? We go back now?"
Still no answer.
"No more saving the world, please!"
Ford rubbed his neck. "Khon, you know we've got a problem."
"Which is?"
"Why did they send me here?"
"To locate the mine. You said so yourself."
"You saw it. Are you trying to tell me the CIA didn't already know exactly where it was? No way could our spy satellites have missed that place."
"Hmmm," mumbled Khon. "You have a fucking point."
"So why the charade of sending me in?"
Khon shrugged. "The CIA moves in mysterious ways."
Ford rubbed his face, smoothed back his hair, breathed out. "There's another problem."
"Which is?"
"Are we going to leave those people to die?"
"Those people are already dead. And you told me you were ordered to do nothing. No touchee mine. Right, Mr. Mandrake?"
"There were children there, kids." Ford raised his head. "Did you see them blow that teenager away, just like that? And the mass grave? There must be a couple of hundred bodies in there already and the trench wasn't even a quarter full. This is genocide."