'You have other children?' I asked Khay. 'Daughters?'
He turned his head. 'No.'
'Still have a wife?'
He looked away. 'She is missing. She is missing since fifteen years.'
I shifted in my seat, getting more control of the camera, pressing the button, shooting a few frames, watching the counter running, shutting down again.
'You have children?' I heard Khay asking.
'No.'
'Wife?'
'No.'
His eyes were on me again. 'You are lone wolf.'
'Not quite. Stray cat.'
He looked at his instruments again. 'Five minutes. Do you mind if I smoke?'
'Go ahead.' I hadn't expected him to have held out this long.
He lit up, using his blue Bic lighter.
Below us the jungle flowed in the night; we could tell it was there only by the faint sheen on the leaves cast by the moon. Occasionally there was a clearing, and I saw one with a dark line crossing it, some kind of track.
'Four minutes,' Khay said, and drew on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes in the smoke as he let it curl from his mouth; then he dropped the stub and put his boot on it. 'We will make our turn now, and go in from the east.'
The ocean of leaves swung beneath us, the horizon tilting, flattening out again as the compass spun and settled. At three minutes to zero Khay turned his head again. 'We will be moving into earshot quite soon now.'
I gave him a nod and shot another dozen frames, watched the counter, released the button.
'It is okay?'
'Perfect.'
'Two minutes.' He checked his bearings again and changed course by a degree, brought the Sikorsky back, dropped it a hundred feet, two hundred, until the heads of the palms showed up in clusters with a gap here and there where some of them had died off, their trunks leaning.
'We have one minute to go,' Khay said, raising his voice now, wanting to make sure I heard and understood.
'Roger.' I watched the jungle ahead. 'Give me thirty seconds, will you?'
He nodded, and I was aware of the environment suddenly, sharply aware as the senses became fine-tuned, aware of the vibration of the seat under me, of the floor under my feet, of the steady beat of the rotor and its deep and incessant throbbing, aware of the dry mouth and the adrenalin flush and the need to breathe slowly, keep still, keep patient as we settled again by fifty feet, settled again until the leaves were streaming below us, dark,rushing -
'Thirty seconds.'
I hit the button and swung the camera down a degree at a time as we moved into the target area, seeing gaps in the trees, a small lake, but nothing that looked like -
'Zero.'
Felt the slight vibration in the body of the Hartmann-Zeiss, swung it lower, lower again by another degree, keeping my eyes on the leaves below in case there were anything I could pick out, a truck, a half-track, huts, whatever was there, moving the camera to the base end of its travel and then up again as Khay banked the Sikorsky and brought it round in a tight turn and dropped and levelled out and began a second run in and a faint rattling began and I hunched into myself and concentrated on the camera as something hit the Sikorsky, nothing big yet, they needed time to roll out of their sleeping bags and lurch to the guns and swing them into the aim and fire, the Sikorsky lifting now, my knees pressing into the floor as a longer burst came this time, heavier, the flash of its detonation flickering among the leaves.
Khay jerked a look at my face. 'We go in again?'
'Yes.'
There wasn't any choice: with only a twenty-five degree angle on the camera there was no point in circling the target; all we'd get on film would be the camp's perimeter.
Medium turn this time at the end of the lift, then we dropped again and Khay brought the speed up and I tilted the Hartmann-Zeiss to maximum high and pressed the button and started bringing it down by degrees as we ran in and fetched a barrage and the cabin roof took on a glare and the fuselage felt the shock and Khay half-turned his head to listen and then dismissed it, concentrating on the controls as another barrage crackled from the trees and I released the button and looked at him.
'We cannot go in again,' he called above the noise. 'But I will turn and stand off for a moment in maybe a mile, for you to take more pictures. Do you agree?'
'Sure, let's do that.'
The jungle was booming behind us as they brought their tank guns into the barrage and I saw tracers reflected in the Perspex panel, then the horizon swung again with the moon curving across the darkness as Khay made his turn and vibration came in under the g-load and I started the camera running, the sky threaded with tracers now and the sound of the guns slapping at the cabin and the surface of the jungle down there boiling as the shells ripped through the leaves.
'We go now,' Khay called, then there was something else I couldn't catch because a shell hit the tail of the Sikorsky with a lot of noise and he was nursing the controls as we went into a slow horizontal spin and the horizon began tilting and vibration came in very badly now, shaking the whole cabin as Khay shifted the controls and shouted something in Khmer and I hit the flap on the camera and started taking out the cassette, but the cabin was shuddering now and we were losing height, the Sikorsky spinning faster all the time until the centrifugal force dragged me against the instrument panel and Khay's hands were wrenched away from the controls and his eyes made contact with mine just once as he was flung against the bulkhead with his boots flying up and we went into the trees with the rotor whipping and slashing, the sound volume exploding into a roar as the deceleration forces hurled me away from the instrument panel and across the cabin, saw Khay's face again for an instant as he was flung head-first between the seats towards the storage section, saw just his feet now, his boots, as the roaring blocked out all other sounds and I was aware of the final impact but couldn't analyze it, see or feel details, only knew that we'd crashed and that I was going under.
19: SMOKE
I looked at Khay's boots.
They didn't move. The feet in them didn't move.
We hadn't been here long: I could hear the gyro still winding down behind the instrument panel. They would look for us.
On this thought I moved, though carefully. It had been a head blow, knocked me out for a minute. Moonlight was in the cabin, but I couldn't see any blood blackening the bulkhead where I was lying. The Sikorsky was on its side, and I could smell fuel, but there was no flame-light anywhere that I could see.
I went on moving, because they would look for us, be here soon; we were within a mile, two miles of the camp.
'Khay?'
Bruise on my shoulder, felt it when I got up, just as far as a crouch, testing for anything broken that might be still blacked-out under the endorphins. Everything articulated well enough, hands, feet, hips, neck.
'Khay?'
The boots didn't move. The feet in the boots didn't move. There wasn't enough space between the two rear seats to let me through, because the Hartmann-Zeiss had come unshipped and was wedged there. I had to climb over it to talk to Khay, find out if he was all right.
'Khay?'
The loading flap at the side of the camera was still hanging open, just as I'd left it. The cassette would have to be salvaged but that didn't have priority.
'Khay?'
I could see his shoulders now, and his head. He was face-down, and his head was at a bad angle from his shoulders, a very bad angle; there wasn't, for instance, any point in calling his name again. I felt for the pulse in his throat and found it still there, but weak, rapid but weak. Blood was caking his skull in the occipital area: that was where his head had smashed into the storage door and broken his neck.
A night bird called, disturbed by the noise the Sikorsky had made coming down through the leaves, its rotor threshing among them; I could hear monkeys, also awakened and alarmed. There were no more shots from the Khmer Rouge camp; they would have seen us going down, heard the impact, would have sent out a search party immediately. It was on its way here now.